Notes on Evil and Tenderness
“I am so tired of waiting, aren’t you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?" -Langston Hughes
Image via Serpil Umit | Saatchi Art
1
I recall a muddled memory from when I was a little girl. On a vacation with my family, we had stopped at one of those highway havelis. An old man sat at the potter’s wheel, taking runny clay and turning it gently with his hands — as if the earth were a fragile thing. “This is how pots are made”, my father said. He has always had a knack for making me see the world as more marvellous than it really is. “It’s called pottery!”, my mother added. Her first instinct is to always remind me that marvels can be sculpted into shape. When my eyes light up, we walk towards the wheel.
As my mother rolls my sleeves up and I sit with my palms folded around the lump of clay, the wheel turns rapidly. My hands are too tiny to forge, so my parents take turns — each wrapping their own palms around mine. Mother’s grip is strict, her hands guide me towards firmness. Now, it reminds me of how she is always shouting, always raising her voice, not mincing her words. My father is too gentle, he tells me if I press too hard, the pot will crumble. Sometime last summer, he was scolding my cousins for disturbing a bird’s nest hidden deep within a tree. He hides too much tenderness.
When the clay pot finally comes about, it doesn’t look well-formed like the potter’s, but it doesn’t matter. It’s only a clay pot, and at least, it’s ours. I don’t remember if we took the pot home, but in carving it, we kneaded the feeling of home. Sometimes, the earth really is a fragile thing.
2
From a distance, pottery appears rather physical. You take mud, you throw it onto the wheel, and you instruct your hands with motions articulate enough to cast a shape. It’s like building a house. If you have ever been to a construction site, you inevitably notice how much a house is rooted in material. It takes bricks, cement, gravel, paint — all sorts of rough labor. However, when you get closer, and climb the steps to the entrance, the house changes into an address. From a number, it becomes a place where a family lives. A family that goes on vacations sometimes, and maybe makes clay pots. The material turns softer.
Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher of space, in his book, The Poetics of Space thought about houses. He wrote, “Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams.”
If you have lived in India, I am sure you must have come across houses that are ripped open. In every day vocabulary, they are referred to as houses that were constructed illegally on the road, as if the road belongs to the government and not its people. Every time I cross a row of those houses, it leaves me horrified — to be privy to someone’s arrangements, the way they daydreamed. They are left there as it is, abandoned on the road, with half of them ripped apart, spliced open for everyone to see.
3
The news last week made me queasy. Of late, this has been happening often.
For those unfamiliar, and for the ugly sake of record keeping, I will reiterate what conspired. Two officially appointed spokespeople of the ruling political party of India – the Bharatiya Janata Party, made blasphemous comments against the Prophet. As strong reactions poured in from numerous countries, the party suspended the two members – Nupur Sharma and Naveen Jindal. In a ridiculous turn of events, the party called its own members, “fringe elements.”
A number of cities in India also saw widespread protests following the comments. After protests erupted, Allahabad Police picked up Javed Mohammad and his family members. Mohammad is a leader of the Welfare party of India. The Allahabad Police stated that Javed Mohammad was a “key conspirator” in the protests that erupted in the city. His daughter, Afreen Fatima, a renowned student activist released a video message informing her family members had been missing for hours and were picked up without a warrant. On Saturday night, the civic body of Prayagraj put a notice on her house asking her family to vacate the house for demolition on Sunday morning. In details that emerged, several legal irregularities were found with respect to the notice. While the Police claimed that the family had been issued a notice on May 10, Afreen said no such notice was served in the past. She said it was a part of the BJP’s infamous “bulldozer politics.”
Almost a month ago, in New Delhi’s Jahangirpuri, the BJP led North Delhi Municipal Corporation carried out an anti-encroachment drive. In a Muslim dominated area, bulldozers razed homes and shops, including a part of a mosque. This happened despite the Supreme Court’s orders that the status quo be maintained.
On Sunday afternoon, Afreen’s house stood surrounded by police, camera and bulldozers. In a spectacle of violence, it was brought down to rubble.
“Most valuable is our home”, Afreen had said.
4
A poem on my Instagram feed —
“I am so tired of waiting,
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world into two —
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.”
-Langston Hughes, Tired
5
I think often about the place of evil in the world. And what we see of evil when it sits deep in the heart of those who we elect to power. Or is evil too generic a word — does it lighten the burden of those who are sitting and ruling us? Does it stop us from holding systems of power accountable? I don’t have a definite answer, but I cannot think of a better word either. Even though political scientists and commentators have time and again attempted to explain why we vote for hatred, and how we vote for it, no explanation ever seems enough. Theories appear vague in the face of brutal violence. Some acts are plain evil.
Rollo Romig, a writer for The New Yorker, in his piece, “What Do We Mean by Evil” studies how the notion of evil has evolved. Referring to a philosopher Neiman, he writes, “Neiman herself is understandably reluctant to offer a single, narrow definition of her own for what “evil” means today, but what she does suggest is a useful description of what effect evil has: calling something “evil,” she writes, “is a way of marking the fact that it shatters our trust in the world.” Evil is both harmful and inexplicable, but not just that; what defines an evil act is that it is permanently disorienting for all those touched by it.”
It was evil to bulldoze Afreen’s home. Bulldozers are evil.
He later goes on to conclude, “ “Evil” has become the word we apply to perpetrators who we’re both unable and unwilling to do anything to repair, and for whom all of our mechanisms of justice seem unequal: it describes the limits of what malevolence we’re able to bear. In the end, it’s a word that says more about the helplessness of the accuser than it does the transgressor. As Dews writes, “Basic notions of offence and punishment, of transgression and forgiveness, seem to lose their grip in the face of profound, far reaching desecrations of the human.” For those kinds of crimes, “evil” is still the only word we’ve got.”
It was evil to bulldoze Afreen’s home. Bulldozers are evil.
6
On the internet last week, Twitter users were hooked on to another problem. Chi Nguyen, an artist based in New York, posted a photo of two ceramic bowls. As she piled a small bowl inside a larger bowl while doing the dishes, the smaller bowl got stuck inside the larger bowl. For three days, Twitter users, sometimes even NASA scientists came together to solve the problem. The question was simple — how to separate the bowls without breaking them?
The fragility of the problem made me think of tenderness. If the world wanted to save two bowls from cracking, does it not want to save itself from shattering?
7
A poem Kahlil Gibran wrote on pain —
“Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.”
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Well written!