Montreal Serai

[Short listed by the CBC-Quebec Writers Federation Literary Competition and first published in In Other Words. New English Writing from Quebec, Edited by Claude Lalumière, Véhicule Press, 2008]

 A huge black crow was doing a balancing act on the metal railing enclosing the terrace. It held a shiny object in its beak. Usha chose that moment to make an appearance with a basket of laundry on her hip, obstructing Mummy’s view. Her silver anklet hit the edge of a patio chair and startled the crow. The bird opened its beak, cawed, and flew away. The spoon clattered to the floor. Usha bent down to pick it.

            –Memsahib, memsahib, here it is, Baba’s silver spoon! I told you I hadn’t stolen it.

            Mangala released the cuff imprisoning her mother’s flaccid arm and let out a subliminal hiss. It was no use. With such a ruckus the sphygmometer would give a false reading again.

            Quoth the raven, nevermore!

             Mangala turned to stare at her mother. The old woman’s pupils were dilated and her lips quivered. Could it be possible? Had her mother tried to say something after so many months of silence? Spittle drooled from her mother’s lips. Mangala patted her hand, hoisted herself from the chair, and made her way to the kitchen to deal with the matter of the purloined spoon. She then busied herself with lunch.

            A shrill sound startled her. Muttering something, she pinched her left thumb and sucked the small drop of blood that oozed from it before it could hit the chopped onions. Usha’s bare feet glided to the front door.

            –Memsahib kaha hai?

            Mangala wished her husband would stop referring to her as memsahib to the help. The real memsahib was her mother, who after a lifetime in India would not let anyone forget that she was European. Not that it mattered now.

            –I’m here darling! Lunch is ready.

            They sat down to eat. The fan blades moved lazily over the dining table cooling the lamb korma but not driving the flies away from the food. Lt. Col. K.K. Mehta

swatted a fly and scraped it over the edge of the table till it fell on the floor. He then tore off a piece of chapatti and scooped a juicy piece of lamb and stuffed it in his mouth. Some brown sauce got embedded in his moustache.

            –General Kapur wants to send me back to the border.

            Mangala’s lemonade glass hit the table with a thud.

            –What about Mummy? I can’t look after her alone. And Anjani is expecting and Kabir will finally return to Delhi.

            –It will only be for a few months, darling, till the war is over. Besides, you are a doctor and you have the servants to help you.

            –Yes, but what about my practice? I will lose my patients to the other doctors at the clinic.

            –Manni, please be reasonable. There is nothing much I can do for Mummy. Besides, my country, our country, needs me and I’m in line for a promotion.

            Mangala pushed her plate away and called Usha to clear the table.

            Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

            –Did you hear that, Kaykay?

            –Get a grip on yourself, Mangala. You have to accept that your mother had a major stroke and will never speak again. Ever!

            –But the literature is full of examples of partial, even full recovery after a few months.

            –K.K. Mehta got up and stormed out. The brass mobile hanging near the entrance tinkled.

            The buzzer rang again. It was Sumitra.

            The large swarthy woman walked straight into the memsahib’s room and looked at her charge. The afternoon sun highlighted her greying hair, making it look golden again. She lifted the thin cotton bedspread and removed the old woman’s clothing. Pouring some coconut oil on her back she rubbed her body vigorously. First she turned her on one side and then her stomach and then the other side. She wiped off the excess oil with a clean towel and combed her hair. She then propped her up with some pillows and sat herself on the floor. Reaching for one of her limp hands she started crooning a lullaby that her own mother used to sing to her as a child back in Kochi. A few tears trickled down from the memsahib’s green eyes and landed on their locked hands.

            Mon père, j’ai pas besoin de me confesser. Le péché n’est plus ce qu’il était.

            Mangala pulled the door curtain open, poked her face in, and carefully closed it again.

            By tea time the room was bathed in fierce orange and red. Several langurs jumped up and down the peepul tree in front of the terrace. The silhouette of one of these large black-faced monkeys partially blocked the sun. Mangala walked into her mother’s room and set the ice-cream dish on the table. She sat by her mother’s bedside and spooned some softened ice cream into her mouth. A thin trickle of chocolate dripped from one side of her lips. Suddenly, the old woman shuddered.

            Why don’t you two just kill me off! I can’t take it any more. God, I don’t want to die!

            After taking her mother’s pulse, Mangala crushed a pill into her melted ice cream and spoon-fed her again.

            –Take some rest, mother.

The chattering birds in the peepul tree woke up the household. Usha came in with her morning tea and some biscuits. She set the tea tray down and fetched the bedpan, but it was too late. A dark stain had already spread around the woman’s shrivelled form. So she turned the memsahib to one side, rolled the soiled bed sheet under her, then turned her to the other side and replaced it with a clean one.

            Mangala walked in while this operation was underway.

            –I’ll take over, Usha, thanks.

            That’s a good girl, Manni. Do potty and drink your Horlicks!

            The doorbell rang again.

            –Memsahib, it is the young Baba. He’s home.

            Mangala rushed to greet her son.

            –Kabir, give your mother a hug. We weren’t expecting you until next month.

            –Mother, I just came to visit Naniji before I get sent back to sea again. They are not posting me to Delhi after all.

            Who is that dark man with you? I know him. It is my husband.

            –Hare Ram. Kaykay, Mummy is talking! Kabir is here. Come quickly!

            The whole household ran to Mummy’s room.

            –Naniji, it is me, Kabir, your grandson. Don’t you remember me?

            She paid no attention to them. Something outside the window caught her eye. The morning glories draped the terrace railing. Several sparrows, a cardinal, and a crow fought over a few chapatti crumbs. A translucent gecko zigzagged its way up the terrace wall making a dragonfly whiz off. Last night’s langur, its tail curled around the railing, stared at the old woman. She stared back. Their eyes locked.

            –What are you looking at, Naniji?

            The old woman turned to face her grandson. Her lips curled up ever so slightly.

            He has come to take me home. Your grandfather…

All militarization has environmental consequences.  All of which have little to do with democracy.

The other day, Montreal economist, writer, publisher and social ecologist, Dimitri Roussopoulos, took M/S on an amble through the four categories of militarization and environment, and its most undemocratic nature.

The four categories can go like this:

1. The production of military hardware, chemicals, biology, conventional and nuclear weaponry.
2. Military research involves testing, nearly all of which is done secretly.  All the stages of such testing have environmental consequences.  Take the Sheffield Plant in Alberta. Check out the landscape; not healthy.
3. Space exploration, most of which has a military agenda to secure the upper hand and a commanding view of planet earth, from a space station or a planet.  An estimated 10-50,000 space vehicles circulate the planet and eventually become space debris with virtually un-discussed impacts on the earth’s atmosphere.
4. Warfare: E. P. Thompson observed that the new generation of weaponry had to be shown to be operational, a factor which triggered the 80′s arms race between the US and Russia. The US installed Cruise and Pershing missiles aimed at Russia and the Russians installed SS20′s and a whole new era of cold war and geopolitical power play ensued.  However, the environmental impacts of wars prove the true testing ground, the 1^st and 2^nd Iraq wars are the cases in point, the bombardment of the oil fields inflicting incalculable environmental damage.  Treaties have failed to draw environmental connections with the four categories above so that the various powers involved can avoid accusations of ecocide.

M/S How could the environment, from the point of view of military research, production, and warfare be brought into a democracy?

Dimitri Roussopoulos replies:

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Unembedded. Two Decades of Maverick War Reporting. By Scott Taylor.  Douglass & McIntyre, 2009.

Review by Maya Khankhoje

Unembedded is the mid-life autobiography of a toy-soldier-playing boy turned real soldier, of a soldier  turned journalist, of a fervent admirer of the military turned its acerbic critic, of a proud Canadian turned whistle blower on  his own  armed forces. It is a riveting book which can be read at two levels: as a personal account of a  man’s life and  as a journalistic account of  life on the other side of the trenches. When the publisher’s representative expressed the hope that I would enjoy reading this book, I cringed. After all, how can one enjoy reading about duplicity, death and desolation?  She was partially right and I was partially wrong. I enjoyed reading the story of  Taylor’s  journey through life as much as I enjoyed reading his clear and honest prose. What I did not enjoy was the insight he gives his readers  into Canadian defence policy  “what we see in them [Americans and their militaristic nationalism] we do not wish to see in ourselves; yet the Canadian government continues to largely follow in lockstep with the US State Department’s directions”.

            Scott Taylor was born into a working class family whose parents skimped so that the children could travel all over the world. They wanted their children to understand otherness. This wide-open childhood gave Scott a desire to join the military to continue seeing the world. What he saw was that the world was not black and white, but different shades of grey. After three and a half years of soldiering he and his wife became publishers (both had a background in arts and writing) and ultimately established Esprit de Corps, a military magazine originally aimed at providing entertainment and information.  It morphed into the voice of the rank and file and then into the conscience of  decision makers of  Canadian military practices and policies.

            Taylor exposed the double standard of the Canadian Armed Forces:  one for the rank and file and one for the officers. He decried the injustice of a system that denied pensions to some veterans while providing some officers all-expenses-paid golf vacations in the Caribbean. Taylor rejected the corruption of an autocratic hierarchy and the blatant racism of some soldiers who belonged to white supremacist groups. And his heart went out to all victims of war, whether victors or vanquished.

            Taylor’s journalistic career has taken him to many hot spots in the world including the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. He interviewed, or rather was  interviewed by Slobodan Milosevic as a potential witness for the defence (Taylor’s take favors Milosevic) in Milosevic’s trial for genocide. He believes that  Louise Arbour undermined the credibility of  The Hague Tribunal by  indicting  Milosevic as a war criminal without supporting forensic evidence.  He criticizes Kim Campbell’s performance as Minister of Defence in the Somalia cover-up and  holds Michael Ignatieff responsible for  the misunderstandings that led to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo.  Taylor also holds the mainstream media accountable for perpetrating myths.

            Since Scott Taylor has warned his readers that they should not believe everything  they read and hear, why should his readers believe him?   Especially since he has let them know  that he is savvy in military intelligence yet denies having been a spy.  We should believe him because he writes about what he saw with his own eyes and felt with his own heart. We should take him seriously because he writes from the perspective of a man who has hobnobbed with the powerful and shared the extreme conditions of  the man in the trenches. We should honour him because he has risked his own life to live up to his own dictum: “Knowing the truth is not enough. We must have the conviction to act upon it.”  In his quest for the truth, he was held  captive, tortured and sentenced to beheading in Iraq. Apparently it was his record as an honest journalist that  in the end saved his life.

            Regardless of our feelings about all things military,  we should  read Unembedded, because at the end of the day Taylor had the courage to trade his heavy machine gun for a light  but powerful quill.

[In 1996 Scott Taylor was awarded the Quill Award for his outstanding contribution to Canadian communications. In 2009 he received the “Unembedded Reporter” award.]

‘A Modest Proposal’ is from Norman Nawrocki’s anti-war, anti-Empire solo CD, ‘Duck Work’ released in 2004 on the Les Pages Noires label. 

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Standing on the sidelines of

the parade grounds, they are old now,

grandmothers, great-grandmothers;

women who forfeited their lovers

to the bagpipe sirens:

the tangled sheets cooled

by waving flags.

Penelope knew the secret,

the dark unraveling of the tapestry

keeping her fingers busy.

Never bury the dead.

Let them linger and take

their own time leaving.

Less anger that way. Less grief.

May you die, in a coffin buried with tears,

Buried with the youth of my years,

Buried with the breadth and depth of your fears,

May you die, in my eyes one more night,

Buried from my sight,

Buried in your fright

May I one day, forgive forgiveness

Forget memory

And tremble in bravery

May you die, in the night of my eyes,

In the passion of a fiery sunrise.

Let your frigidness of snow be the death of season,

For I am the unlaw: I am passion free of reason

Because if you pass away, your soul will be born.

You are the living dead.

You have the emotions of a plastic card,

Full of the pity of capitalistic disregard,

Like a union organizer’s severed head.

May you die, in the night of my eyes,

So that from your body, a soul will arise,

You are the sea, walking in the streets,

Its waves, and shores, ebb over town as it retreats,

Washing across the doors, skipping heartbeats,

Ah, the sea, the sea, and nothing but the sea.

The reefs are bleached, the fish are dead,

The salt has reached the world instead

Ah, the sea, the sea, and nothing but the sea.

Let water burn fire, and fire drown water.

May you die, in the night of my eyes,

For one evening, and learn the explosion of musical ecstasy,

And that the nuclear blast of love is but a bridge to eternity,

And learn the beauty of kindness creates the greatest destiny,

May you die, in the night of my eyes,

And learn what is bliss,

And wake up in a full nothingness,

And find God beyond kiss

I will make your tears a tapestry of a thousand stars,

Notes to be play on the Arabic oud and Spanish guitars,

May you die in harmony!

May you die in agony!

May you die in ecstasy!

In the shadow of the night of my eyes,

May your soul become a constellation that will guide travelers of every nation to sunrise.

And may I awake in the amnesia of nectar and ambrosia divine, and rivers of holy wine.

And disappear forever in mourning of morning skies.

http://www.maria-al-masani.com/

From thickset specky windows

he eye-balls

the tough job warp and weft

of the launch pad

as it floats itself

for the copter’s sea-strip.

Then the kitchen’s remodelled

-                    Tony bumps the eggbeater

off its base

buoying the bobbish sponge-backed slab,

hosing it into the bowl

to plane a cruddy pan.

In a fumbling presto

it slips into quick-sight

blades limiting a circle,

a cascade lighting on horizon.

Landing’s right as a trivet.

Look through grandmother’s kitchen window:

a concrete airstrip, wheat fields,

red poppies, cornflowers.

Forsythia, osier willows in bomb craters.

We moved to Halle 7, in 1950,

two-story, red-brick house attached to a shed.

Windows blasted, front door, missing. Roofless hallway.

Linden tree, gooseberry, red currant shrub.

Bavarian Forest foothills ridge,

after the war, refugees settled in the ruins

of the military airfield, Neutraubling.

Pigtailed, Hungarian girl of eight.

My friend Ingrid, her family, Silesian farmers.

A two-room school. Father Böhm’s chapel.

Nuns in black habits and veils.

Saturday classes, sewing and knitting.

If the purple crabapple could speak

what would it say? Electrified barbed wire.

Apartment building whose backyard served

as a sub-camp for slave labourers and war prisoners.

These silent stalks of grass, April 1945:

inmates were herded together and marched to Dachau.

The small pond children played in,

was used as a reservoir for the fire watch.

Streets, littered with rubble.

Striped marsh frogs. Blue iris.

Yellow poplars.

Keep walking until you reach a round well.

A graveyard where prisoners were once buried.

Their remains were dug up and moved

to a mass grave at Flossenbürg.

Through grandmother’s kitchen window:

white plum tree blossoms.

In the rush of city life, it is exceptional for a large gathering of people to get together to discuss, face-to-face, concerns that affect their quality of life in their neighbourhoods and urban environment. In discussing their experiences and comparing notes as to what can be done to improve their daily lives,  such conversations can be a transformative. A subtle process of empowerment begins changing people into citizens.

There is nothing mystical about the problems of air and water pollution, heavy traffic on residential streets and public transportation, the lack of social housing, green spaces, urban poverty, gender discrimination in hiring practices, community economic development vs. mega construction projects that disrupt, the lack of public consultation and local democracy, the inadequacies of our electoral system…the list of our concerns is long.  There are solutions. But faced with our human need to balance our private lives and a public life, the challenge can be daunting.

How exciting then that in Montreal, there is a current of citizens who over the years, having been laying the foundations for a multi-issued urban movement. The attempt seeks to bring individuals and various community organisations together with the view of sharing insights, experiences, networking and thus establishing a human link of solidarity with which to face together the political and economic elite of Montreal to say, yes, no, or maybe if…

            Past and Present

Since 2000 a series of citizen summits have been organised on ‘the future of Montreal’. The social forum format was adopted, which meant that these summits did not have decision-making powers like a formal assembly. Instead people as citizens have gotten together to converse, debate and determine their common concerns on a whole variety of public issues with a view towards establishing horizontal links as a means of working together on various campaigns. The citizen summits have been local gatherings in the style of the magnificent World Social Forum which in January met for the fifth time in Belem. Some 100,000 people came together from all over the planet and talked and embraced each other in hundreds of workshops and panels on a wide variety of issues. From 2000, when the first citizen summit met some 248 people came together from across the island, here in Montreal. It was such an enriching experience that participants immediately wanted another summit a year later. The second citizen summit brought together 335 people, the third summit 528, and the fourth, last year over 600.

The idea of a new urban movement has been slowly and steadily gaining ground as those with active concerns seek to break their isolation as individuals and  neighbourhood associations, to express a common desire to reach out to others across the city. Each summit has contributed to the larger public debate. From the different summits, came the idea of Montreal’s city council adopting the Kyoto protocol on climate change and starting a sustainable development plan , the idea of a Montreal Charter of Rights and Responsibilities (a local Declaration of Human Rights). This remarkable document was adopted by city council– the idea of democratizing democracy by advancing the practice of participatory democracy and most recently the idea of a participatory budget as practiced now on the Plateau and in scores of cities around the world. All of this political mulch and much more has emerged from the Montreal citizen summit process.

2009 is a municipal election year. November is when we are called upon to vote. What is our place, apart from casting a piece of paper in a box? We can set the agenda! The agenda of public debate can be influenced, but more so by drafting our common demands of what we want changed, improved, or dropped. Thus we can tell the political and economic elite what our priorities are. The political parties parade their promises during elections, we can reverse the process and oblige them to respond to our citizen’s demands.

            How

How? The fifth Montreal citizen summit will be held from June 5-7, 2009 where over 1000 citizens are expected. There will be scores of workshops and panels on such themes as: democracy; the environment, economy, social justice, and  culture all set within the urban context of our city. But most importantly as of now, a Citizen Agenda is in the process of being drafted. Hundreds of people and organisations from across the city are in the process of contributing their ideas on what Montreal’s priorities should be. By visiting the citizen summit web-site at www.5sc.ecologieurbaine.net or by picking-up a well designed postcard at the Urban Ecology Centre at 3516 av. du Parc, corner of Milton,  everyone is invited to submit their concerns. Hundreds are doing so already. The draft of the Citizen Agenda will be presented to the June summit for discussion, and the politicians are going to be called upon to make their choices accordingly. In this way, we set the parameters of what we, as citizens want in a pro-active manner. On June 7th in an assembly concluding the citizen summit, we hope to tie the ends together and launch an ongoing new urban movement of solidarity.

            Beforehand

In the meantime, all associations are invited to hold activities of their own to discuss the future of their neighbourhoods and the city, in relationship to the June summit. Resource people are available to help in whatever way is needed. The Citizen Agenda project could be discussed at all such occasions. One of the exciting pre-summit activities is the holding of the first environmental film festival on “The Environment and Montreal”. From May 22 to June 4, at Cinema du Parc. There will be a series of very interesting films shown, every evening with resource people present and all sorts of documentation. All this culminates with the opening of the 5th Citizen Summit, June 5th which happens to be U.N. World Environment Day. There will also be people from other cities and countries attending giving us their insights and experiences.

Art by David Duchow – The New Mexico Desert