The little piece of life

Aisha Sarwari debut is a patterned, protean narrative that is tragic, painful and yet inspiring. It astonishes and overwhelms.

Heart Tantrums, an exceptional memoir, is both a story of lived reality and a meditation on grief, isolation, and consolation, evoking the profundities of human endurance amidst adversities. The degree of difficulty in writing a book of this sort – with its characters still fluttering in the open – must have been hugely challenging and disruptive. But a life that continuously oscillates between being a good girl and a bad woman, disruption has been at the core of the life lived. Deliriously inventive and viscerally moving, Aisha Sarwari debut is a patterned, protean narrative that is tragic, painful and yet inspiring. It is a beautiful, worded memoir that astonishes and overwhelms.

This is the memoir of an immigrant girl who considers her teen years to be the worst in the universe, as she didn’t get the desired emotional protection of her ami (mother) when she deserved it the most. The twists and travails of her momentous journey transformed a socially and physically battered young woman into a formidable feminist voice in Pakistan. The protagonist endured systematic family oppression all through, her husband’s contribution being a broken tooth, broken jaw, and broken hip. Confused and anguished at her condition, she instead steers away to stay sane, stay employed, and stay a mom to two beautiful girls. Forgiveness remains her stellar character. 

Heart Tantrums is a moving, immersive and nuanced portrait of a tight-knit social world whose ill-perceived values promote oppressive behavior from its dominant constituents. Such behaviors are gendered from an early age, young girls are made to clench their urethral sphincter so that their pee doesn’t generate loud noise; taught to walk noiselessly without dragging their feet, told to avoid loud gulp when drinking water; and farts were wholly taboo. Forced to settle into strict a gender role, women are made to play performance monkeys. The book rejects the idea that gendered role and domestic servitude can save the day. 

In this multilayered memoir, Aisha reconstructs her world piece by piece to showcase its glaring cracks and deep crevices. ‘I was deeply unsafe in my own home, away from my family and very coercively controlled in my day-to-day life’. Much of what she experienced in life not only settled in her milk teeth but revealed in her permanent teeth as well.  Pain ought to be fought through with more teeth, she declares, else victimhood becomes a dwelling. All she wanted was to be wanted without being needed, being happy in her own terms and because of herself as an individual. One might wonder if a perceptive and aspiring person is seeking more than her genuine share of identity from the society? 

Aisha comes out as a writer who uses power of words to narrate vicissitudes of her life – on losing her father at an early age in Uganda; compromising freedom under an extended household in Kenya; and. trying to fit into a completely different culture in Pakistan. On top, the trauma of losing a man she loved to a personality-altering brain tumor was overwhelming. It is an honest, but haunting memoir for the immediate family members. But all that the writer is asking of them is to try again because life isn’t as perfect as a movie. 

Heart Tantrums is a beautifully crafted memoir, worth reading for the manner in which it is narrated with honesty, clarity, and purpose. Such is the power of the narrative that somewhere in her world of hits and misses, there remains a small opening for everyone to reflect upon. At the end of the day, there are more questions in real life than shinily packaged answers. Struggle is supposed to build character.

Heart Tantrums
by Aisha Sarwari
Penguin, New Delhi
Extent: 479, Price: Rs. 699.

First published in Deccan Herald on Oct 29, 2023.

Cracking a quicksilver crime

Corporate claims are often beyond public scrutiny as the regulatory regime is known to give them the convenience of safe passage.

Back in 1888, the Glass Thermometer Company was set up in Watertown - a US town which owes both its birth and its name to the Black River. Its proximity to the cities of New York and Washington, and with the emerging Canadian market just across Lake Ontario, there was no better choice than Watertown for the factory. Easy availability of water to run its operations, and the convenience of discharging mercury waste in the Black River offered a win-win situation. Following the tightening of environmental regulations in the US, however, the company relocated its operations to Kodaikanal in 1983, and by 1988 it had become part of Unilever. 

Pollution control laws were in its infancy during the 80’s in India which had helped Hindustan Lever register itself as a ‘glass manufacturing unit’ rather than one dealing in hazardous metal like mercury. Two decades later, the procedural omissions proved fatal for the workers and costly for the company. An independent public hearing conducted a year after the closure of the factory in 2002 had documented at least two dozen cases of acute illnesses and deaths among the ex-workers of the factory. Corporate crime was indeed committed, resulting in an out-of-court settlement of undisclosed amount for some 600 of its ex-workers.

Heavy Metal is an in-depth account of how a multinational company disregarded human and natural welfare at the cost of making profit which led to fatalities of its workers and irreversible poisoning of the pristine ecosystem. The Minamata Bay episode of mercury poisoning of the 50’s in Japan had indeed repeated itself. No lessons seemed to have been learnt as the horrible dangers of mercury remained systematically underestimated and ignored in the developing world. On top, the company had claimed its ‘highest standards of corporate behavior towards employees, consumers and the societies'.

Corporate claims are often beyond public scrutiny as the regulatory regime is known to give them the convenience of safe passage. It continues to perpetuate itself in the name of progress and growth, eco-disasters of the kind being one-off aberration in the scheme of things. With public memory short-lived and the court proceedings ever-lasting, corporate crimes end-up being a tiny blotch in the environmental history as curious cases of avoidable tragedies.         

The Kodaikanal tragedy could have been avoided had due diligence been in vogue at all stages – from citing the industry to administering workers safety, and from adhering to waste-disposal guidelines to adoption of environmental norms. Instead, the company had violated all acceptable guidelines for toxic waste disposal measures, causing grievous harm to all life forms. Ameer Shahul, a journalist turned public policy crusader, has weaved a tragic story of greed, deceit and deception for which a heavy price has been paid by nature and local communities. Had there not been environment watchdogs, both alert individuals and committed organizations, the disaster would have gone unreported. Heavy Metal is an absorbing narrative on how collective endeavor by civil society actors had forced the corporate bull to bite the dust.   

It was indeed more than just the story of a company closing its shop for violating all acceptable norms. Never before a developing country had sent back a consignment of waste material to a developed country. The case of ‘reverse dumping’, a term coined to express the new phenomenon, was not easy to execute. Greenpeace, a global environment watchdog, had facilitated shipping of 1416 drums filled with 290 tons of hazardous mercury waste from the Kodaikanal thermometer factory to its final destination in Pennsylvania. As a Greenpeace campaigner, Shahul was in the thick of all the actions that had made lighter the task of dealing with a heavy metal. Unprecedented victory notwithstanding, the turn of events in recent times have forced leading environment watchdog(s) to close shop. 

Heavy Metal reads like a biography of mercury, the only liquid metal that exists at room temperature. It is extensively used in electronic and medical applications, but safe disposal of mercury waste has yet to be satisfactorily resolved. As a result, in recent times the US and many European countries have phased out the use of mercury. As non-mercury alternatives are expensive, dependence on devices using mercury continue to be produced and marketed in many Asian countries. Though mercury has a short half-life (the time required for one-half of the substance to decay), its exposure and impact on the flora and fauna has not be extensively studied. In the absence of scientific evidence, the full impact of Kodaikanal disaster on the entire ecological system may remain speculative.  

Written with passion and clarity, the book raises many compelling questions. Has the disaster made environmental regulatory process more potent and effective? Has corporate negligence been made accountable under law? Have enough measures adopted to help avoid such future disasters? Have protocols for research to gather scientific evidence been any better today?  Have remediation measures been developed to detoxify the contaminated sites? Each of these and related questions are begging for credible answers. 

Heavy Metal recounts the struggle for environmental justice in India and how elusive it is despite decades of social activism. With activism having been throttled in recent times, corporate negligence of environmental regulations may remain lax. Through compelling storytelling of an environmental disaster, Shahul invokes the reader to be vigilant in capturing corporate maneuvering of the system to escape from its environmental obligations.

Without doubt, this terrifying cautionary tale of corporate negligence is essential reading. However, deft editing could have sustained readers uninterrupted engagement no less.    

Heavy Metal 
by Ameer Shahul
Pan MacMillan, New Delhi 
Extent: 396, Price: Rs. 799.

First published in the Hindustan Times on Oct 7, 2023. 

Don't take it for granted.

With nature coming full throttle to assert its immense power in recent times, there is an urgent need to return to the spiritual traditions of treating nature with reverence.

The impact of mindless development has come knocking on our doors. Floods, heat waves, and wildfires have made the summer 2023 with some of the most extreme events on record. Nature has shown to be fierce and awe-inspiring, mysterium tremendum et fascinans (a mystery that both repels and attracts). What is clear now is that given the fearful reality of the climate crisis, homo sapiens alone have to change not only their lifestyle but the entire belief system too. 

Once a nun, and now an accomplished commentator on transcultural understanding, Karen Armstrong has written a timely treatise, Sacred Nature, on reconnecting with nature to rekindle our sense of the sacred. As a child we do have a silent receptiveness of the natural world but with age a sense of superiority takes over. “Our all-absorbing technological living has alienated us from nature,” laments Armstrong. “Even in a place of extreme natural beauty we talk on our mobiles or scroll through social media: we are present, yet fundamentally absent.” Unless nature finds an intimate place in our minds and hearts, humans will continue to remain isolated from it.

Through the reading of ancient texts and scriptures, Armstrong reminds us that myths introduced our forebearers to deeper truths by directing their attention to the eternal and universal. It is, however, another matter that with the astonishing success in science and technology during the 18th century, myths were discounted as false and primitive.

Sacred Nature explores religious practices and philosophical ideas that were fundamental to the way people experienced nature in the past, and how myths, rituals, poetry, and music had a profound effect on their mental life. With nature coming full throttle to assert its immense power in recent times, there is an urgent need to return to the spiritual traditions of treating nature with reverence which gave birth to Confucianism and Taoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, as well as rationalism in Greece. The classic expression of the Greeks called kenosis, personified by Mahatma Gandhi as 'emptying of the self,' helps liberate us from the destructive strictures and egotism. It opens up a new understanding of ourselves and a fresh perception of the world around us. Needless to say, application of such thoughts, perceptions and practices have much to offer.

Even for those who may not like hymns of devotion, Armstrong’s subtle exploration of the sacredness of nature can push them into thinking about reconnecting with nature. In a world where nature is rapidly receding from everyday life, there is a need to bring nature back into our collective consciousness.

Armstrong suggests a completely new worldview, a belief in nature’s innate power to redeem itself. Unless we develop an aesthetic appreciation of nature and devise an ethical program to guide our thoughts and behavior, we will soon run out of time for ourselves. The threats are indeed looming large and are quite often irreversible. There is a need to evoke the romanticism of Wordsworth and Keats to incorporate into human lives insights and practices that will help in meeting today’s serious challenges because nature’s processes are dynamic, ephemeral, and their origins are hidden from view.

Pulling central themes from the world’s religious traditions – from gratitude to compassion, and from non-violence to sacrifice – Armstrong offers practical steps to develop a new mindset to rekindle the sense of the sacred. Reflective and insightful, the book is a primer on how environmental science need to be redesigned as a subject. In such times of climate change when icecaps are melting, wildfires are raging and floods are rampant, there is no time for partying anymore.

Sacred Nature
by Karen Armstrong
Bodley Head, London
Extent: 239, Price: Rs. 999.

First published in The Hindu on Oct 1, 2023.