The Haze of a Chanting Crowd and Exercises in Miniatures

by Mandira Pattnaik

Luke Porter

The world has changed since my last dispatch, and it feels cruel not to write about it. I find sights and sounds of these strange, unprecedented times for a generation and more take form on paper and keyboards around the world, yet I feel utterly numbed, like many others, as though paralyzed in shock. I remember you nodding in approval when I said that writing is like a habit, undertaken in spite of ourselves. That habit makes me try beating my frigid fingers to life, because they must flap like wings in flight to record my observations synched within narratives that have purpose and urgency. And it hurts to stop doing that.

Still debating this, I woke up to the haze of a chanting crowd in Prague a couple of days ago. I say it was a ‘haze’ because I am not sure I register the horror unfolding anymore. On TV here, they use all the spices they can. Screens erupt in balls of fire without warning, aided by VFX and interspersed with grainy-to-look-authentic images of crumbling high-rises. I can no longer distinguish the real from simulation overused in Gurgaon TV stations: the tempering of sirens, tiny tanks rolling on the studio floor, and helicopter hovering above the news reader’s clueless head included.

I’ve never written about war, I hadn’t thought it would be discussed with this regularity in my lifetime. Yet there it is and I must address it. What do I attempt to write? Will they be exercises in miniatures? Tiny fragments of rage and emptiness wrapped in a story about farmerish neighbors, akin to bitter potion in a bright pink capsule, or will they be like plumes of hope — singular, detached, but whole and beautiful? I can’t tell unless I put the words down.

Looking for answers, I read. First-person account of a woman leaving Ukraine with twenty others in a minibus, and taking refuge in an apartment in downtown Budapest belonging to a friend. Narratives of survival and grit recounted by Indian medical students stranded in Ukraine since airlifted from Poland and Romania (ordeal inexplicably exacerbated after they’d had to hide in bunkers, go without food and water, and walk and hike significant distances to reach the borders). Tales of hope and humanity are irreversibly tinged with disgust and shame about what is happening.

Swimming up for breath, I read love stories and historical books which have no relation whatsoever with the present time. Writings which are like magnificent miniatures that’ve lasted beyond their origins and context.

I read literary magazines doing wonderfully in spite of everything. Mark out work that’ll, to me at least, stand the test of time. I do believe they’ll be read years from now as a reflection of the state of our present and ourselves.

I read the poem, “Resistance,” by poet laureate Simon Armitage (published March 11, 2022):

It’s war again: the woman in black

gives sunflower seeds to the soldier, insists

his marrow will nourish

the national flower. In dreams

let bullets be birds, let cluster bombs

burst into flocks.

I uncoil all of those, disperse everything, then gather again.

I read writers around the world ploughing through, toiling, creating, despite the crisis. Art, rich like soil, abundant in newness left unexamined in the fallow period.

I finally convince myself to roam that loft of promises crammed with my own unfinished miniatures in the hope of polishing them. My exercises in miniatures includes making them shine as passionate, intimate, compressed art-forms, not a mere part of a whole, like a fetish or an excerpt, but powerful worlds-unto-themselves.