29 March,2011 08:51 AM IST | | Amit Bhan
Siddartha Gigoo's new book talks of feelings, emotions that grip you when you are away from your moorings and are pushed into alienation
How does it feel to lose your roots, your moorings, your home, your childhood and be pushed into deprivation and alienation? You are left with a void that you hope time will fill. As you wait for that to happen, you begin to wither away culturally, economically, socially and politically. The pain subsides, rather you get used to it. But it doesn't end. It finds expression in one form or the other.
Delhi-based Siddhartha Gigoo expresses it through the tale of a young Kashmiri Pandit boy Sridar in his short novel The Garden of Solitude. Revolving around the times when the Kashmiri Pandits were forced to migrate from the Valley due to Islamic militancy, Gigoo brings to life those painful moments when Pandits were forced to leave behind their ancestral homes, part with their old neighboursu00a0 and leave foru00a0 lands virtually little known to most of them. Escaping from the blazing guns barely with their lives and some material possession they could lay their hands on, they land in Jammu, only to find themselves dying thousand deaths with each passing day.
Journey to survival
Cramped in single rooms in schools, community centres, tents and other makeshift arrangements provided by the government, the Pandits start their long journey of survival. Gigoo depicts the physical and mental agony the community members go through -- the older ones lose the sense of time and belongings, the younger ones struggle to find means of livelihood in this new place and the student work hard to get their education back on track. His characters leave a lasting impression but at times he falters as some of the characters vanish without trace towards the end. "A lot of people related to and even identified themselves with the characters and incidents I have mentioned in the book. Yes, my characters come and go but I think that reflects in a broader way the condition of the migrants who had been and still are in the constant state of flux," says Gigoo.
Personal elements
Though he accepts that there is a lot of autobiographical element in it, the author says he preferred to stick to the 'fiction' format as it gave a lot of flexibility. "The incidents mentioned here are true and I have come across a lot of people in my real life who are similar to my characters here. Even then I have stuck to fiction as here you don't have to worry about the accuracy of facts. With fiction you can take a lot of liberty with history, dates, places. With a first person narrative, you just have to be exact. So this little deviation in the format," says he.
One thing that Gigoo seems to have majorly left out is the political context of the whole tragedy. Except for the passing references to the causes of militancy and that too through conversation of certain characters, the politics of this tragedy of migration is not elaborated. Nevertheless, Gigoo's Sridar makes an attempt to find a meaning of his life, his situation, his link to his past. He visits Ladakh for his spiritual quest and then later returns to Valley to connect with his lost friends, neighbours, memories and of course, his ancestors. The people are there but roots are gone. Life has become a mere existence.
