In Search of Heer

by Manjul Bajaj

‘It is not without reason that the head and shoulders are placed above the heart in the human body. If you permit him to continue like this, mindless and irresponsible of life’s demands, who will feed him once we are gone?’

there is more to life than just the growing and eating of bread,’

The world hates those who do not conform. It is easier to forgive liars and cheaters, thieves and murderers than to tolerate someone who does not aspire to the same things as others.

To be loved and respected by his brothers a man must want what his brothers want—ample land to his name, rich food on his table and a comely wife in his bed. To be indifferent to these is to cast a slur on their lives.

What good is false humility? He who shuts his eyes to his own beauty becomes blind to the rest of the world’s magnificence too.

a stranger among strangers, I understood the fellowship of man, of how the things that separate us are lesser than the things that we share in common.

Deprive a peasant of his harvest with a flash of the sword once and it is called robbery. Do it at random intervals and it’s described as banditry. Do it systematically, year after year, backed by swordsmen in uniforms, and it is called governance.

It was my farewell song to this world of dead values and no sympathy for love. It was my requiem for a world that had let me down—a world where brother betrayed brother for land, where men of law stood false witness and obfuscated the truth on behalf of the powerful, where men of God were oblivious to the pain of God’s faithful flock, where fathers sold nubile daughters to corrupt old men and had the gall to call it marriage, where angry rivers separated lovers who were betrothed by God himself in the holy hour when the earth was born.

She is not a weight on my shoulders, she is a piece of my heart.’

‘Can’t you see that is foolish, sentimental talk? A daughter is someone else’s wealth, yours only for safekeeping. However much you may fool yourself and hold her to your heart and call her your precious diamond, she is not yours, and she never will be. Her destiny is written on her husband’s palm. Foolish are the parents who harbour too much attachment towards their daughters,’

She had no sense of fear. No recognition of the limitations of her own age, size, or gender. Her fierce spirit shone past it all, oblivious to any differences.

In the eyes of the nobles of Dilli all her wisdom and capability could not compensate for the fact that she was a woman.

The proclivity towards swords and horses, the trenchant belief that a woman could be whoever she wanted to be, the penchant for taking on cudgels on behalf of the downtrodden, the blithe defiance of convention in choosing a lover from a lower rung on the ladder of social hierarchy, the inconvenient existence of a prior suitor from childhood … so many features in common.

for the future you would do well to remember a warrior is only as respected as the justice of his cause. The difference between the hero and bandit lies not in how well each wields the sword but in the cause to which their weapon is drawn.’

There was no social or institutional dimension to my desire for her in that moment.

As long as there are men around offering to protect them, women have everything to be scared of. She was better off fighting her own battles.

‘Honour is like a tiger that men of our ilk have been riding for centuries. We think it adds to our glory but in the end it only turns its head back, tosses us down and devours us.

‘I do believe this match is made in heaven but between heaven’s wishes and earth’s acquiescence to them, lies a huge unchartered terrain along which we have to make our own way cautiously, step by careful step.’

‘Ranjha, have you ever stopped to think why a girl’s place in the world is so small, why a woman’s work is constantly belittled or why she is considered inferior to men, even though she is the one who gives birth to them and raises them? I’ll tell you why. Because if she leaves her father or husband’s house she might be physically harmed, she might be dragged into a field or an alley and raped, she might be sold to a brothel, she might be carried off by bandits or by enemy soldiers and kept as a sex slave. So she learns, like generations of women have done before her, to trade her freedom for security, her dignity for physical safety. She chooses to live with a hundred little insults to her spirit every day instead of the threat of that one big assault on her body. In the end it all boils down to not being helpless.’

From the moment a girl is born she is tutored by her mother on what she may and may not do. The list of what she is allowed to do keeps on shrinking as she grows older—cover your head, lower your neck, conceal your breasts, hide your ankles, don’t go to the river alone, don’t step out in the evening, don’t laugh loudly, don’t ask questions, don’t expect answers … Then she marries and it only gets worse. A mother-in-law takes over to enforce the rules. Wake up first, sleep last. Cook feasts, eat leftovers. Feed sons, starve daughters. And when finally she grows older and the baton passes on to her, she starts battering the next generation with it, having seen nothing else in her life!’

But what reason do women have? Why do they fall all over themselves to tyrannise other women? Women can rescue each other. Women can refuse to starve, scare and suppress their daughters. They can be friends and comrades with their daughters-in-law. Women can look out for the safety of their house maids and farm labourers. Women can insist that other women be treated with respect and dignity. But for that they first need to stop feeling helpless and scared themselves. They need to stop needing a man to protect them. The price of that protection is just too high.’

‘Who is to say we won’t cohabit and reproduce better if we are equals?’

‘Why assume relationships based on fear and bullying would be better than relationships based on independence and respect?’

Unlike humans we carry our history inside of us and are never separate from it.

Self-awareness is a trait not common to many species. Least of all humans, who see and yet do not see, who have divested mirrors of their original purpose and made of them polished surfaces for reflecting their own vanity.

A girl who lifts her head, raises her voice, flashes her eyes, and exhibits her ankles is the undoing of society. No good can come of such corruption. For boys will naturally be boys and if they respond to the invitation who else is to be blamed but the girl who knows no containment? And the mother who failed to teach her?

A girl should always be in awe of the family she marries into. It aids submissiveness in the woman, always the bedrock of the best marriages.

‘Better a chaotic world in which people are happy than an orderly one in which love has no place,’

This world was created out of Allah’s love for his creatures. Take love out of it and life becomes like a mouthful of ashes—dry, tasteless and impossible to swallow.’

‘There are other things I am scared of, Mother. I am scared of the Day of Resurrection when I will rise not in the company of lovers and saints but of liars and charlatans who say one thing and do another. I am scared of the wrath of God when he finds I turned down true love for false comforts. I am scared of living a life contrary to what every cell in my body knows to be right for me. I am scared of carrying a dead soul in a living body for the rest of my days on earth,

woman does not live for herself she lives for the good of her family.

Why does the world always assume that running away is a solution? That there exists a mythical place called ‘away’ in which disheartened people can find refuge. The truth is our challenges are written in invisible ink inside our bellies and over our skin, in our very bone marrow and in the blood that speeds through our vessels. Everywhere we run to, they run with us. If my own brothers could not tolerate my flute playing, free-spirited ways, and plotted to take away my land from me and drove me out of my village, what kindness could I expect from strangers? Why would a world which valued wealth and power suddenly rearrange the contours of its beliefs to cherish a penniless and dispossessed man like me for no reason?

qazis who are godless sycophants, licking the boots of the rich and powerful, and women who short change their own sex to curry favour with the very men who keep them like suppressed slaves.

What good was a true, shining, brave-heart warrior woman in a world that measured a woman’s worth only in units of self-abnegation and submission?

‘One, that there is a benign God who made this world and watches over us all. And two, that this life is intrinsically structured to be unfair and cruel–it is in the nature of all things that exist. Plants are devoured by animals, animals are devoured by bigger animals and men, women and children are exploited by men and weak men by stronger men. And yet, life is beautiful and blessed.

Between these two unalienable facts you have to learn to walk on the precipice between life and death, balancing the weight of each moment as best as you can.’

Sometimes I think everything in man’s world is constructed out of the blood, sweat and tears of women. One half of our world grows louder, prouder, wealthier as the other half shrinks, swallows itself, and falls into despairing silence. The solid walls of our homes and institutions are lined, brick by brick, with the time and effort of women, in a simple exchange for giving them a place to live and food to eat. They call it marriage. It is a very advantageous system, for while servants have to be paid to do housework wives do it for free. And once the wife has been brought in, the home-fires never stop burning, the man only has to put one bun in the oven and the hearth is thereafter always kept warm and welcoming, no matter how cruelly she is treated. The compulsions of motherhood keep her committed. No iron fences or locks or armed guards are needed to keep women from escaping. No place to take a crying infant is all that it takes.

I realised the most bitter, unpalatable truth of my life. That I had always been a prisoner of my gender. My father had created for me an illusion of freedom and independence, and like any child I had thought my father was invincible, his word was decree. Yet, as soon as he was away, I was just another girl locked inside a room being compelled to marry someone she had never seen. I and my womb were being packed off to the highest bidder to produce heirs. My father was a good man, a thinking man, a well-meaning man but that morning I realised he was not a very powerful man. He had barely left town and the age-old restrictions and society’s strictures came rushing in to clamp down on me from all sides, as if the freedom he had given me to believe was mine had never been. Even more unpalatable than the realisation of my father’s fallibility was the coming to terms with my own frailty. I was a trained warrior. I was not unarmed. I could even ask my girls to rescue me from imprisonment. But what good is physical strength when you possess no other home to go to, no land or income to keep your body and soul together? I could escape my prison chamber but I could not escape the fact of being a woman.

What can one say to someone who has never been free, never been allowed to think for themselves? How can one expect those who have sacrificed their entire lives serving a lie to stand up for the truth?

Those who should have held the word of Allah most dearly to their hearts turned out to be the least scared of committing perjury in His name.

‘Why are we such abject creatures, Sehti?’ I burst out. ‘Completely without pride, bearing whatever is thrown at us in order to survive? First, we live on the dream that our husbands will be nice to us. And if that fails, then we carry on living on the sorry hope that our sons will be kinder than our husbands? Are we nothing in ourselves? Why do we not own property? Even the children we bear out of our wombs carry their father’s names. Are women weak because they own nothing or do women own nothing because they are weak?

‘All places are equal to those who have no home.’

The air of a town, its very climate can be changed by insinuation, by sowing fear and doubt in the minds of men, by fanning dormant anxieties. Fresh fears don’t need to be created to trigger feelings of insecurity and panic—just a reminder of old traumas, buried in the collective subconscious are enough.

In any case, too much sunshine and fresh air was not good for girls as it might tan their skins, make them less fair than desirable for the delectation of their future husbands.

It intrigues us, this human notion of a ‘fairer sex’. Male pigeons can’t be told apart from female pigeons on the basis of colour. The concept of the ‘weaker sex’ is even more incomprehensible to us. Male and female pigeons equally grunt, growl, peck and flap their wings to protect their nest and their young ones against threats. And the division of labour in our species is something that humans would do well to look at. Even the hatching of eggs is done collaboratively. The female pigeon sits on the egg from mid-afternoon to the morning. In the morning, the male takes over and is on duty till mid-afternoon. Both sexes take turns in feeding their baby chicks by regurgitating food into their mouths. And no self-respecting, able-bodied male pigeon would think it was his female partner’s job to serve him food. And yet, human beings are considered the more advanced of the two species.

We sometimes debate amongst ourselves if the human is the weakest and darkest of God’s creatures. Is that what makes humans susceptible to the glint of gold, the seduction of silver, the clutter of coins? Is his own light so dim that he needs the light of shining metals to make him feel safe? Is his sense of self-worth so slight that he heaps upon it continuously the weight of more and more gold and yet fails to measure up in his own eyes no matter how much wealth he amasses? ...

Isn’t it the desire for unending supplies of cooked food that makes him chain his own other half to a life of servitude and drudgery? He wounds himself and then wonders why he bleeds. He suppresses his own mother, sisters, wife, and daughters and then rues the growing injustice in his society. He cuts himself off from the sources of goodness in life and then bemoans the evil in the world.

To enforce the irrational more irrationality is required. To be cruel on a continued basis calls for an inuring of oneself, further and further from the pain of another. To disrespect another one must move a great distance away from one’s own self so as to lose sight of the truth that all are born equally deserving of respect.

Those who had the power appropriated what they wanted and others learnt to do without.

that what separated man from other species was also what separated man from man. Man hadn’t just hijacked the planet from under the noses of the other species but carried the tendency to appropriate by force amongst his own kind too.