CHENNAI: The forests are burning, again, and so are the bridges. In one of the most striking images that I’ve seen, a trajectory of incandescence outlines the distant black hills against the night sky, while the reflection of the blaze dapples the Ganga waters.Visually hypnotic, but terrible both in cause and consequence. The burning has gone on for a long time.
Those bridges I spoke of are only metaphorical: one way to find sense and language for this much incineration. How does one withdraw support from those who abuse it? Amputation is a question of the correct knife. Sometimes, a needle will do to loosen a knot. Sometimes, it takes the the heaviness of a guillotine. Most times, it requires pulling out the knife that was plunged into one’s back and using it to stake freedom. You built a bridge so you could share the bounty of your own land. You built a bridge so you could live more of other places, and impressions. You built a bridge because there was someone on a further bank who seemed to need it badly, and you misunderstood those who paid no heed as cruel, not cautious. You built a bridge so you could stand at its centre and marvel at how you suspended everything – doubt and mistrust and past failure – to build it anyway, and here it stands.
And still you arrive at the day when you find the balustrades breaking down, the traffic one-way, and silt weakening the foundations you lay with your own hands. And so you set a torch to it, and as the first flicker kindles, the words in your mouth and your beaten, beating heart are I’m free, I’m free, I’m free. What is not known about amputation, except by those who have successfully performed it, is this: you don’t cut anything of another person away. You only excise that which has become gangrenous within you because of your involvement with them.
I woke very early one morning this weekend with the awareness that I was carrying tight orbs of anger and unhappiness, forms of thwarted love that had outlived their circumstantial triggers. I was as surprised by them as I would have been to find mice in my mattress, and I responded in the same way. They had no place in my life, in my body, in my bed. The arsonists behind those conflagrations had long since left or been left, but this was what they had left behind.
Who set the forests on fire? Who taught you tears could douse them? I looked at those red-hot burdens and said: this is my work to do. Boundaries are just as beautiful as bridges. They keep out those who don’t deserve your bounty and benevolence. But as you draw the lines and keep vigil within them, know that everything that wound up on your riverbank still belongs to you. Some things you cannot transmute except by way of bonfire.
You’ve been an inferno for a long time, anyway. What rises from the ashes is aurelian, smoke-feathered, jewel-eyed. It takes flight by the light of broken bridges as they burn.
(The Chennai-based author writes poetry, fiction and more)