Notes from the Cage on Freedom and Solidarity

Notes from the Cage on Freedom and Solidarity

 

“it is the very nature of life to strive to continue in being”
- John Dewey

 

I have frequented many conflicted parts all over my country documenting atrocities and injustices across regions and peoples. Human beings should spend their lives perfecting the world of their origins. Circumstances shape people, and sometimes, people shape circumstances because of who they are.

Empathy of a dishonest man is immediately followed by self-critical cynicism, if ever they are made to confront their own ignorance. The uncertainty of their reaction to this didactic act is the biggest mysterious and tragic story of our time.

A cage has made me who I am. This cage has powerful hands with which it grabs the collars of clean men, uneducated mobs for legs with which it treads itself into poverty-stricken slums, violence in place of a reasoning brain, with which it instills the fear of death in people, and real corruption for a voice with which it confuses the many generations yet to come.

My words alone cannot convince people to change the way they think. My ideas often leave them with questions most of them don’t want answers to. All I ask from them is to give my ideas a chance. With my pen I have captured a world which wants radical solutions. I’ve conceived of a people’s circumstances where their hands are empty and all they’ve got to hold on to is hope. People think I am a revolutionary, but the truth is that revolution was only the subject of my ideas, perhaps never the objective of my writing. I favor ink over bullets because it sparks the imagination. But I sympathize with the child born into an armed militia, hard-wired into defending his rights and his land and his life.

I have been outcasted from most social systems because I’ve been misunderstood. I am at the spearhead in this battle of ideologies. Losing is not an option. I am rattling inside such a cage. Freedom is the only option, but the long wait before this great escape is nothing short of suffering. Buddha had himself claimed that the truth of life is nothing but sickness, suffering and death.

20^th century French philosopher, Foucault, who was also a teacher, spearheaded an emerging political and philosophical movement guiding many youngsters as they participated in protest opposing the misuse of power. He made some accurate remarks on the systems of power and how they subjugate certain kinds of people, jail them and punish the rest of humanity for the challenges put before them by the prisoners living inside their jails. Their crime is simple, guilty of having a difference of ideology.

Foucault aimed to reveal the connection between power and history from a philosophical point of view. In revolt to accumulation of power, the Frenchman wasn’t afraid to step out of comfort and lead the masses by example either. As people today enjoy privileges and ignore the devastation beyond the point their eyes can see, truth remains hidden. There exists a real world as a direct consequence of their being.

I wish it were that simple to convey the problem in disunity. One remarkable discovery made by him was about a doctor’s tendency to look at his patient with only a sort of medical gaze and not a human one. The sickness defined in these patients were undoubtedly those symptomatic of a kind of madness which then forced the doctor to institutionalize the patient instead of redefining his own discipline to suit the abnormality. In this way accumulated power, for him, was corruptible power, which institutionalizes people, thinking of them as unnecessary.

***

A colleague of mine pleaded me to help her report the story of a charismatic leader, a professor, who is attempting to overthrow the university chancellor, because he thinks corruption has infiltrated the system under the guise of a positive change. It was from her I learnt that a demonstration was to take place. I have always been of the opinion that education in the hands of the oppressed can unite them and this unity can overthrow any power of the world. Of course, I was interested.

As I reached the university ground with my camera hanging from my shoulder and a few notebooks in my bag pack, I noticed the university was peaceful yet eerie. Passing through the lush greenery, scarce otherwise in the city, I felt many a strange curiosity I hadn’t felt in a long time flood my mind. I couldn’t slow my thoughts down anymore. Soon I caught up with the crowd headed towards the demonstration. All alone through a diverse young group of students, I felt separated from them, yet somehow united. After I asked for directions, I was told I was on the right path and should continue to follow the students dawning the red and white.

I kept going and it led me to an army of red and white. I couldn’t have imagined the sheer size of this sea of people. Was this the hidden world outside the cage, I wondered. What had brought them together? Who were these people and where they coming from?

A series of speeches were being made by young students and all of them I found beautiful. But the talisman I was meant to see was a tough man to find. The chanting and the singing were to go on galloping over this red and white sea for hours. I was overjoyed photographing this festival being celebrated by the people. Over the phone, the lead I had been given by my colleague asked me to meet someone behind the stage. The movement, for me, did not yet have a face, only inspiration and dedicated passion, which I actively photographed. I got the sense that the story I’d been looking for was here for sure. From behind the stage, I was guided through the buildings to the man I had phoned. Professor Iqbal was his name and I was to realize that I couldn’t afford to miss meeting him. I didn’t get an opportunity to thank the guy who had took me till there. He introduced me to Professor Iqbal like a child would to his father and then the rushed off in the field to play once again.

The professor invited me to walk with him, I followed. Through narrow, dusty pathways he led me to the library where intellectuals had circled the tall, heroic figure I was in pursuit of.

Sunlight was pouring in through the glass panes into the library and everyone was leaning towards this man, hinged by their ears, musing over the fiery speech he was producing. My arrival was announced and everyone turned to look at me as if they had been expecting me. I only had one inquiry: would it be okay if I took pictures. On getting the nod I urged them to go on and photographed this gathering.

This was where I was meant to belong, I felt. Here were other minds caged within the borders, curling in anguish, yet smiling innocently at the blindness caused to our society by the many blows of the dysfunctional world.

Dasrath, the leader at the heart of this gathering, spoke of a way out of this regression by taking over various positions of power all across the map, allowing young thinkers the freedom to construct a well-connected system that would be inclusive and practically equal. His words had that convincing power which mine lacked. He was an impressive orator and a visionary. Just an interview wasn’t going to be enough. If I was to write about him, I had to follow him and understand the mindset with which he operated. He was a leader.

When I was leaving, Professor Iqbal agreed to keep me informed on their movement. Back in my room, at night, with several books authored by the two professors I unknowingly began borrowing their words to fit the thinking they called not their own, but rather of everyone. Such was the power of their thoughts, visions and philosophy.

Their books gave us all a voice so that our cries would echo beyond the black rods of this cage keeping us prisoner. Caged lives manifested differently beyond the wires and helped others witness the real truth. People like us were always bound for alienation because we had everything we needed yet couldn’t continue living on if things didn’t change for the better. There were others who were not like us though. United, we live in a world of our own.

Dasrath had many supporters, but Iqbal was his one and only true friend. As they got to know me, they agreed that I was capable of writing about the movement because I understood what they stood for. I had convinced them that my audience would love to know about them. In a way they were not like me. They were part of a fraternity which had a camaraderie, something mine lacked. They worked like an army not like cut-throat competitors.

I got a call back from my colleague in office. She had learned what I had been up to and suggested it was time I visited the chancellor. We argued for a long time over the phone whether it was important I did as she told. She felt I had formed my opinion too quick and hadn’t given the chancellor of the university, the most powerful man in this setting, a fair chance.

Soon I would begin exchanging letters with the chancellor. I wanted to find out why everyone was so unhappy with what he had done to the university. Going through the letters he would send to me I got the sense that he was invested elsewhere and not really talking to me. His manner of speaking about the political affair he found himself in was rather cynical. He was seated upon a powerful designation, an influential figure among other high ranked personnel, yet he was unimpressive. What he expressed was an idea that all this movement did was forcefully rob young people of the opportunity to learn within their discipline, and use them as means to an end to rob the administrators and legislators of their livelihood. Despite many warnings from the professors about the corrupt character of the chancellor, I arranged a face-to-face with him.

***

A stout man with slick black hair, wearing a checkered shirt buttoned down to his wrists, was seated behind the assistant’s desk in front of the chancellor’s main office. The secretary greeted me and I greeted him back. I thought I was on time and wouldn’t have to wait long, but he pointed at the sofa with a professional smile. The chancellor resided right behind his office building and that was where he had first invited me for the interview. Finding it unprofessional, I had refused managed to get an appointment during office hours only after several requests.

I was passing to the sofa, from behind the door, when I heard two voices arguing.  I turned around to check if the secretary had gone back to minding his own business so that I could take note of what was being said. His eyes were pointed directly at me. That professional smile was still plastered onto his lips and he was waiting for me to take my seat. I didn’t stop for fear of appearing suspicious and took my place on the sofa. From where I sat it was impossible to identify what they were arguing about. In about fifteen minutes a man who wore a mustache left the chancellor’s office overwhelmed. Photographing people without their permission wasn’t my style. I did get a good look of his face and tried drawing it later that evening.

The slender figure of the chancellor was silhouetted against the open window. The arrows of light from that big ball of fire hovering in the sky scorched my eyes and made me nervous.

The questions were mostly ideological and went on for an hour. They disturbed the chancellor at first and he didn’t openly answer any of them. To diffuse the situation, I slid into a conversation about his house and university life. He loved the attention and came too close for comfort. His move caught me by surprise. I moved my chair back a little so that I could jump out of harm’s way. The hind leg of the chair hit his little toe because by then he had come and stood right behind me. Needless to say, the interview did not end well. He made me want to leave the room.  

What I took away from that encounter was confidence that the chancellor was holding disagreements with his professors because he thought they had ‘brainwashed’ young students into forming an alliance against his establishment. This was more an accusation since he had little to back it up. He had very carefully chosen his words during the interview but failed to shift my point of contention that education must extend itself to let the youth utilize politics to become the change they wish to see in democracy.

Professor Iqbal was a shy and reserved sort of an intellectual, still the idea he communicated was forceful and demanded to be taken into each and every consideration. His world was a beautiful place, where even anger could unite. He would easily excite a crowd by recounting stories of courage and tact from around world history. It was clear, he agreed to being in places where injustices originated so that his presence could change troubling circumstances. But he just couldn’t seem to do it. It had taken him a long time to come to terms with his timidity. Iqbal thought of himself as weak and would easily grow sick and desperate in closed spaces.

Dasrath wasn’t like that and didn’t mind the claustrophobic crowds, the marches, the protests.

In the days to come I found Iqbal mostly in the security of his own room, going through dozens of books daily, speaking rarely to let the world around him know of the things he was in agreement with and those he wasn’t. He insisted I include these things in my writing for they were essential to the story I was chasing. I felt he was more deeply trapped in this cage in many ways than any of us. I looked for a way I could untangle these disagreements for him. That had become the mission of my life those days.

Dasrath claimed Iqbal’s way was slow and theoretical but a hopeless incorruptible ideal. It was only much later he would tell me that Iqbal was suffering from depression and would often openly admit contemplating suicide.

***

It didn’t dawn on me till I invited them to have a mainstream discourse that they didn’t mind me showing interest in their ideas and their feelings. These were often seen through the negative lens. The composed and confident public image of the chancellor, for example, trumped the sorrow, guilt, frustration and anger shown by these men while they were at work. But that is precisely what excited my readers and so I began scratching on some old wounds of theirs. To my surprise, that often helped them open up about what they had been meaning to convey to a larger audience. Iqbal felt somewhat uplifted yet more or less remained the same.

On the other hand, I was confident I could not only cover their story but also lead it into the larger narrative.

One night the sky was dusty and spanned in red over the medieval skyline of domes and minarets, trees and skyscrapers embezzled with dying stars. I was in my room that night looking out of the window when I got the call. Two groups in the university had clashed causing the police to suspend all rights of assembling in large gatherings.

A series of violent scenes would unfold as I investigated into the fight. People now argued that blood had been boiling for long and this day was inevitable.  But I had to understand the broad complexity of things. I assumed those with their claws deep in the mainstream narrative did not identify intellectualism as an ally of hatemongering and propaganda. The chancellor, as expected, did not dive deep as he simply condemned the violence. What sort of a character would stand at such a high balcony of the castle and not see a sign of the raging drama?

I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. Dasrath called for a demonstration that midnight under the peaceful sky to disengage the tense emotions being felt from what was reality. He didn’t care that the demonstration would attract crowds in the hundreds and would become illegal. The peaceful dead stars were far, the night was almost out of reach.

At the library mutiny was being given shape, I stepped out into the open for a quick smoke. In the green shadows outside I saw the man I had seen that day exiting the chancellor’s office. He was sneakily peeking in through the window. I put the stub under the sole of my shoe in a hurry, extinguishing the ember I snapped his presence in my camera and went back inside to tell Dasrath of the spy near us. Dasrath couldn’t sway from his plan, he decided to overlook it, that was perhaps his mistake. But this spooked Iqbal out. Iqbal asked me to come with him as he confronted this man. When we ran back outside the man saw us and darted in the opposite direction. To my surprise, Iqbal went running after him.  

Police arrested Dasrath during the demonstration that night for breaking the curfew and put him in detention. Without him, I thought, everything would come to an end. I was certain of it.

I phoned Rajshri, a friend of Dasrath’s who is a lawyer. She understood my fears at once and promised she would do everything in her power and keep me posted about the advancements in his case. One wheel replaced the other.

Around four in the morning I heard someone breaking into my house. When I went outside, I noticed my camera had been stolen. Before sunrise, Dasrath was taken from a remand jail to the central jail and kept there under trail. We took longer than we should have to act on his detention.

My attempts to visit him, arrange a notebook for him, to bail him were unsuccessful. Indian prisons still run on the colonial model. I have learnt that all prisoners are first asked their caste and later given their duties accordingly. Torture is routine in return of disobedience. Criminals can sometimes function with fluidity. Prisoners are tortured into making confessions. A system of class exists dividing those accustomed to easier living and otherwise. Prisons are overcrowded and no care is given to the prisoner’s health. Needless to say, even in a system like that of prisons a high regard for humanity is yet to be established.

***

These events forced Iqbal to spending most of his time trying to convince people that Dasrath was dragged into something nasty so that someone could play their politics dirty. The chancellor was the usual suspect but Iqbal was habitual of giving everybody a fair chance. Iqbal went on live news to speak to the people directly about why his friend ought to one day have his freedom again.

Professor Iqbal wasn’t doing great himself. He requested me to visit him once a week, else he would surely go mad. “What makes a government good? Is it law, is it ethics of government, is it the very existence of a state by will of government? Are merely autonomous institutions enough, or does wealth of industry matter? Isn’t acknowledging fresh pain and trauma an obligation?”, he would ask.

Surrounded in a mess of books and notebooks he would stare at the world blankly for several minutes before speaking. He had a sad and troubled trajectory in his eyes. I learnt to separate myself from the world, for it was his subject, and befriended him. He was unhappy, confusion had cuffed his hands together making him timid and weak.

One night I saw a man act suspicious outside my house and left to see Professor Iqbal. Even a distant memory of this spy brought back to my mind that haunting sound of footsteps fading into the dark near the library.

I was sure it was the same man. Suffocated with fear, hidden behind a trail of circling smoke in the shadows the professor walked into the bright warm light of the study where I was sitting. The sight of me repulsed him I noticed, but I had nowhere else to go. The professor had been preparing for a conference that was going to be held out of town in the coming days. Feeling distracted by me, he went straight into a book written by Dasrath and began reading passages from it. His voice fit right into the words printed onto those pages. The brief passage he read demanded the reader to have courage in the time of war. When he kept the book down, he was angry. Seated quietly next to the lamp by the window he dozed off as if I wasn’t there.  I got out of there and left the door open.

In the morning he must have gotten off that uncomfortable chair, reaching his pocket for a pack of cigarettes he must have found nothing there because he had smoked them all the night before. Looking back at his preparation for the conference he must have wanted to go outside to the cigarette shop and his feet would have unknowingly made their way to my doorstep.

It was always an uneasy feeling coming across his timid greyness. I don’t know why he entered my house in a hurry as though he was hiding from someone. I locked the door and went after him into the living room. With a lump in his throat, he told me that the man he had chased after the night Dasrath was arrested was following him. Iqbal had caught a glimpse of the stalker on his way here and felt his presence follow him all the way to my doorstep. I went close to the window and looked out in search of this man. He was standing outside, hidden in plain view as if he had no fear of anything.

I gave Rajshri a call and told her that Professor Iqbal and I were being followed. She was out of town and asked me to avoid doing anything rash while she spoke to the authorities. We couldn’t have just sat there. The magistrate had been blocking her every move. She had been particularly frustrated about it. We decided to go to the magistrate’s office ourselves. The yellow barricades were waiting to greet us there like unbreakable walls.

Iqbal was trembling with fear and felt disgusted with himself for being this way. Caged within this fabricated world, he had tried time and again to live a life of ignorance but the call of duty only got him so far, to a police station, to report on a villainous spy out to destroy everything he had worked towards while his closest friend was rotting in a prison cell.

At the magistrate’s office, I did most of the talking. The officer seated across the desk in a darkly setup room seemed utterly disinterested in answering any of my questions. From the cupboards his workers would produce many papers at short intervals, he would read them, and they would place them back inside. Papers floating from one dead surface to the other seemed surreal at the moment, but I was dazed and all this was really happening at lightning speed. I kept asking the officer what might make them take interest in finding out who this man was, what was it he wanted. We were told to talk to our lawyer and even threatened with arrests. The way this man conducted himself I sensed he was perhaps a student of the chancellor of the university.

No point asking if we could get any protection by the police. After trying to scream through the ruckus in that office soon my lungs grew tired and I found it difficult to breathe. We were told to sit in the corridor, we moved and were there till late evening watching people go in and out. The trees moved with the wind and the light was bright.

We hoped that maybe they might call us back inside and give us another chance. All this while Iqbal stared at the ceiling fan above us like he would hang himself from it.

When the officer came out into the corridor he was leaving for home, he didn’t want to hear the voice of an exhausted woman pleading him for favors and sympathies. He boldly announced that Dasrath had confessed to have been conspiring against the nation state and that made him a traitor. I was outraged and yelled as loud as I still could with these lungs. They simply swept us aside like we were flies in their coffee cups. They must have forced a false statement out of him.

When I reached home that night, I saw I had seventeen missed calls from Rajshri. Iqbal had sat me down and fetched me a glass of water from the fridge. Motionless I had remained there, staring at blank spaces just the way he did, for an awkwardly long time, so utterly lost. I could tell what he was thinking. He wanted to go back to his unfinished writings but couldn’t imagine continuing articulating all the thoughts his brain was in pursuit of. He had shown immense sympathy towards me. It was then I realized that he knew. He knew I regretted ever coming into their lives because of the pain it had caused me. But he didn’t say anything. He looked at the door desolately and walked away. I was broken and when I collapsed into a bed, I found deep sleep. I forgot to call Rajshri back. I couldn’t have possibly imagined he had walked into the mouth of death. That was the last time I saw Iqbal.

Dasrath’s broken face had flashed before me in my dream that night. He was in pain. Blood was dripping from the ceiling onto his forehead, his eyes were wide open yet he couldn’t move. He was laughing about it. I couldn’t bear to see it. A forceful shove woke me up. I remembered I had to phone Rajshri and request her to somehow arrange a meeting with him. I couldn’t stop myself, there were tears in my eyes. Never had I felt that helpless. If only I could hear from him once again, I would finish writing this story. I was almost possessed by the words I had already jotted down. I would soon learn that the court has ordered a hearing at the end of the month and might allow me to meet him finally without any objection. We’d been fighting hard for our rights, at last others were now doing their part as well. This could have made all the difference. I could have met him much sooner if I hadn’t been with the press.

That very evening, Iqbal texted me saying that he was going to be out of town for a few days to present his paper at the conference. With the cawing of black ravens, the morning paper came bearing the headline ‘Professor shot dead; murderer flees’. It was true, Iqbal was dead.

Stricken with grief, I felt it was time I went back to the university. With one of his professors in jail and the other now dead, the chancellor must surely have something to say. Without raising any alarms, I would ask him about the origins of the mysterious man I had seen him quarrelling with that day, the one who had been following us around everywhere. Was it possible this man was Iqbal’s murderer?

On my arrival the man behind the secretary’s desk stood up with a shock as if he was suddenly sitting on a chair full of nails. I wanted to walk across him and straight into the chancellor’s chambers, but he spread himself in front of the door preventing me from executing my plans. Repeating several times that the chancellor wasn’t in, he began laying his hands on my body. I pushed him back and hit his chest with my fist. I knew he was lying and asked him to let me see the chancellor. He claimed that he was simply helpless and if I didn’t leave, he would have no alternative to calling the guards and throwing me out. He wasn’t lying this time. Helplessness was all over his face.

The chancellor came out of his hiding place and asked the stout man to let me through. “Do you see how the world sorts itself out?”, he asked me as he led me inside. “Those who wanted to prove me wrong and overthrow me have met their ends”, he said as he shut the door behind us. “A professor from your university has been shot dead last night and you are of the view that the world has sorted itself out?” He laughed. “Would you like to join me for tea?”, he asked. I refused. “You must join me, I insist”. He went to a side and poured it from a flask, offered me mine and lifted his to his lips.

“The view from here is truly sublime”, he said. These are all tactics to scare me. As if I’m next. How many people he had done this to, I wondered.

As I approached him, I could feel his reptilian gaze explore my body. He enjoyed that long uncomfortable silence. He wasn’t interested in what I had come to say. He didn’t care who I was or why I was there. He was interested only in how I looked. He thought himself that powerful. I could no longer bear to be in the same room as this man when he said the words, “I’ll show you a different world if you join me, write for me, write what I want people to hear, not what you think is the truth.”

I thought to myself long and hard. Should I agree, this man will feed me lies so that I could reproduce them over and over again for him, but at least I could sieve through them and take back with me his real intentions.

But, who would I speak to then, how would I go back to my own life? I’d be trapped inside this world of his. Standing there I felt I had already betrayed Dasrath, I hadn’t fought hard enough for his freedom. As I glanced towards the door, I mapped my escape. I knew I had refused espionage, for the price I’d have to pay for it would be nothing short of death.

“You have painted Dasrath for a hero, who is flawless, almost not human. Truth is he is just as afraid as anyone”, he continued. The fire I had known to be within me for so long extinguished. The chancellor laughed, “You must be praying for someone to come through that door and rescue you. You must be convinced those fools will come around chanting their stupid slogans and free you from my grip. It would be better in my opinion if you admitted that there is no escape. However, there is a possibility of a negotiation, which I am offering you. See, you are of immense value and you are aware of it too. All I am asking for is that you give my ideas a chance.”

The answer was of course always a solid ‘never’. “What if I refuse?”, I boldly asked as I took a step back towards the exit. “You are free to go”, he said. With my head sunk I hurried away from him in disgust. Though what he said last echoed in the darkest parts of my brain. He said, “My grip extends farther than you could ever run.”