This was something he had never been able to tell anybody. Every time he visited her, he fell out of love a little more. 

She must have figured that out — it’s still a mystery how — because, one night, she sent the black fairy to him to make peace. And the black fairy woke him up, led him out of the window into the night, flew him on her wings over the sleeping city, above the ochre streetlights and through the lion gate, to where the Empress sat.

The Empress beckoned the little boy close. “Why have you stopped loving me?” she asked him.

She looked huge, almost amorphous in the darkness, imperiously benignant.

The boy hesitated, then decided to get it off his chest. “I get bored coming here,” he replied. 

“They take so long to look at the pictures, the statues, at everything….” His voice trailed off.

He looked down at his feet. They were bare. In his hurry, he had forgotten to put his slippers on.

After a brief pause the Empress spoke again. She was smiling now. “Who are ‘they’?” she asked.

“My parents, my uncle, everyone who brings me here with them. And then they forget that I am with them,” the boy said.

“Oh, the grown-ups,” she laughed. “You too will grow up one day.

She was looking different. Kind of melting away. Her voice too was changing, as if hollowing out in the dark. It had become cold. He looked around for the fairy. She wasn’t there. 

The fairy had gone back to her place above the dome — just as the boy would go back to his dreams. But the words of the Empress stayed with him. Even when he grew older. Like her marble home has got older. 

Victoria Memorial turned 100 this year, quietly, inevitably, as all historical monuments do when they mark a milestone, its white imposing structure one of the most recognizable landmarks in the city. People still come, at least they did before the pandemic changed everything, pulled more perhaps by the magnificent edifice than the history it holds inside its chambers.

Some constants don’t change, they remain immaculately immobile, like a point of reference, as a reminder and remembrance. So it is with Victoria Memorial.

Here’s a brief history before we go further. Victoria Memorial was formally opened to the public in the year 1921, more than a decade after work on the monument started. Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of India, had died in January 1901, after a long reign that saw Britain’s possessions on the Indian subcontinent come under the direct control of the British Empire.

Lord Curzon, then Viceroy of India, proposed a memorial to the late monarch. It was to be built in Calcutta (Kolkata now), then capital of the Jewel in the Empire’s Crown. Five years later, the then Prince of Wales, the future King George V, laid the foundation stone for the building. The Memorial, set in sprawling gardens, was to be more like a museum, with portrait galleries, statues, sculptures and exhibits of war; a multi-floor, multi-chamber vault with “the lessons of history” that would draw both “European and Native”.

Had Curzon spoken today, he would have been called out mercilessly for his choice of words — a Google search reveals the exact quote for those who are interested — but there were no social media then. In any case, political correctness would catch on much later. Anyway, coming back to the “lessons” bit, they implied, naturally, the dominant history of the British empire, then still in its high noon. That high noon would be extended with victory in the Second Boer War a year later, though the tide of the Empire’s military fortune would eventually turn.

More balanced appraisal has come of late. “As the Victoria Memorial turns 100 this year, I renew my call to convert it into a Museum of Colonialism, revising its exhibits to show a fuller picture of the Raj, including its exactions & atrocities too,” writer-politician Shashi Tharoor would say in a tweet early this year.

It was necessary, if belated, assertion on behalf of a once subjugated people but, back then, to a boy growing up in the city in the Seventies, the Memorial was hardly history and almost totally playground; cricket bat and wickets in the car boot. Even better if you made a few friends for a game on the Maidan greens. And lunch in a wicker basket. That was the attraction of Victoria Memorial. Had the elders understood that, they wouldn’t have dawdled so long inside.

And then there was the black bronze fairy — the figure of the Angel of Victory — the mysterious revolving shape at the top. “Does it really fly away at night and sing little children to sleep?” the boy had asked his mother one day, as a million other boys of his age must have asked their mothers.

“Only obedient children,” his mother had replied, leaving him a bit worried.

Anyway, that doubt had been settled. The Empress had herself sent the fairy to him. It would be years later that he learnt that the fairy was really a weather vane and lightning arrestor. But how on earth the Empress knew that he felt bored visiting the Memorial, he never found out.

But, as the Empress had foretold, he did figure out something as he grew older: what took the elders so long inside the Victoria Memorial Hall. It was the hypnotic appeal of history as art, he would realise. Somewhat like John Keats’s Grecian urn. If the urn was like a “Sylvan historian”, a link between the poet’s present and the long-dead artist who had fashioned the urn, a tour of the Memorial hall provided a proxy journey into the past. Proxy yes, but one that could be retraced again and again, as both reflection and review, because art, invulnerable to history’s Hamelin, transcends human time and the vainglory of all those who fancied themselves as Pied Pipers of destiny. 

In its one hundred years of existence, Victoria Memorial has also been a silent observer — of a changing landscape and skyline dominated by towering skyscrapers; imposing landmarks of modernity and newly gained affluence.

What the new structures have sought to attain in the skies, Victoria Memorial dominates closer to the ground. The collective psyche of a city.

If only the black fairy had not limited her visit to little boys.

AND we thought it was enough to just remember the dead.

Sometimes they demand more — you are welcome to disagree, by all means — but they do. From time to time, here and there. In unexpected ways, singularly plural. One of the few luxuries they permit themselves from the world of the living.

All right, let’s go back two hundred years; two dates to be exact. The first, February 23, 1821. That’s the day John Keats moved on; bullied by disease, hastened towards death by impatient time. Less than two months later, April 9, 1821, enter Charles Baudelaire, on the other side of the English Channel.

Big deal. People die and people are born; what’s new?

True, yet consider this. Keats, one of romanticism’s greatest, died early — just 25 he was — but left behind his six great odes. And, of course, Endymion. Bright Star. And The Eve of St. Agnes. And La Belle Dame sans Merci.

By the time he too bowed out, only 46, after a life lived to its detritus, Baudelaire had left behind his Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). And page after page of disturbingly incandescent lines.

This year marks the bicentennial of both — a death and a birth — so a tribute is in order. One of the unwritten contracts of existence is that the onus of remembrance will always be on the living. But how do you go about such homage? In the end, the heart’s response settled the matter. The world might be more random than we think but Keats’s exit and Baudelaire’s development as a poet straddled a fascinating changeover.

With Keats, romanticism was an excursion into a higher world that was eternal, even magical — “She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint” (Eve of St. Agnes). Baudelaire’s was more a sigh, no less romantic but of despair, at a new realism of emerging decadence. A world that had thrust before his “eyes full of bewilderment… all the bloody instruments of Destruction!” That was from his eponymous poem, Destruction. Baudelaire mirrored, and lived through, that transition; from the effervescence of romanticism to the terse, broken rhythm of modernism. Got the drift?

An intimation of what lay in store for the reader had come early, in Bénédiction, the first poem in Spleen et idéal (Spleen and the Ideal), the first of the six sections of Baudelaire’s poetic masterpiece, where the poet writes about his mother’s fury at the “night of ephemeral joy” when her “belly conceived this… expiation!”

Yet there’s a hint of redemption, too, when an “unseen angel” appears as protector of the unwanted infant and the “outcast child is enrapt by the sun”. It is a dazzlingly visual imagery, impossibly romantic, but refracted in the schisms of approaching modernity. No wonder the Symbolists who came later would embrace Baudelaire as their own.

It is easy to get carried away. So for the sake of convenience, this write-up would limit itself to a few poems that reflect the continuity in the transition. Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, for instance, one of the greatest poems ever written, and Baudelaire’s Le Cygne (The Swan), one of his most famous.

One centres on an invisible songbird; the other a very visible bird that has enchanted poets down the ages. Even the king of gods, if myths are not merely mythical, had been tempted into taking its shape to indulge his illegitimate fancies. For Baudelaire, though, the swan is a swansong for a changing world, but more of that later.

Both the poems touch upon the existential themes of alienation and the heavy weight of personal loss, either through death or physical exile. In Nightingale (written in 1819), the bird that has nested unseen in Keats’s garden lifts the despondent poet into a comfort zone of imaginative flight, temporarily away from a world of grief and illness that he wants to forget. Remember, Keats had lost his brother Tom the previous year to tuberculosis, the disease that would claim him too.

“Away! away! for I will fly to thee,” the poet writes, as he longs to join existence with the “immortal Bird” that has sung to emperors of old and “Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”

The poet’s world, in contrast, is one where “youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”; only the world of the nightingale holds a promise of solace, though it’s a tenuous oblivion. In the end, it is a futile wish, because the music fades.

The poem ends with the words “Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep?” It is a crushing realisation but, as long as the music held, the world was a symphony.

In Le Cygne, one of the poems in the section Tableaux Parisiens (Parisian Scenes), the memory of a swan that had escaped from its cage becomes a symbol of loss and exile as it stands lonely near the Louvre, trailing “white plumage” on the stony street, bathing in the dust of a city being reshaped into a modern metropolis, and hoping for the “roll” of thunder, as it remembers its “fair native lake”.

“I see that hapless bird…,” Baudelaire writes, as he captures the swan’s long-necked look at the sky, its “crazy motions/ Ridiculous, sublime, like a man in exile”.

“Toward the ironic, cruelly blue sky”, the swan looks, stretches its “avid head” upon its “quivering neck”, as if it were “reproaching God!”

Keats had gone excruciatingly young but the poetic soul, aborted early, had found a new vehicle; a new form of expression, yet hung on to its essence — the truth of the imagination, perhaps more disconcerting than luminous, but indisputably lyrical.

Baudelaire also brings in several other characters into the poem, among them Hector’s widow Andromache, a trophy from the Trojan war at the mercy of other men; and a wasted “negress”, a slave uprooted from the “coco-palms of splendid Africa”, possibly a reference to Jeanne Duval, a woman of mixed race and one of the several in the poet’s life. All three — the swan, Andromache and the “negress” — symbolise a situation of exile and alienation from a world irretrievably lost.

Like the swan and the others, Baudelaire too feels like an alien in the changing city: “Paris changes… New palaces, scaffolding, blocks of stone,/Old quarters, all become for me an allegory,/And my dear memories are heavier than rocks.”

This was a time Emperor Napoléon III had commissioned the reconstruction of Paris, a public works drive that involved the demolition of medieval neighbourhoods so that wide avenues, parks and squares could be built. The reconstruction also cleared the way for better surveillance and easier movement of troops in a city where seven armed uprisings and revolts had broken out between 1830 and 1848.

For Baudelaire, though, the fatal blow had been struck. “Old Paris is no more”, he would write in the poem, the romance of asymmetry bulldozed by the heavy horsepower of modernity.

Yet the city wasn’t the only thing that was changing. Poetry too was in progression. In imagery. In expression. And in content.

Harken back a little, nearabout half a century or so to 1819, to La Belle Dame sans Merci, Keats’s haunting ballad on deceptive, illusory love, and the ultimately fatal allure of seduction. “I saw pale kings, and princes too,/ Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;/Who cried — ‘La belle Dame sans merci/ Hath thee in thrall!’”

Here was a tale told in a way reminiscent of chivalry, the medieval idea of courtly romance, but with an inversion.

Now return to Baudelaire again and thumb through the pages till you come upon the section Fleurs du Mal and the poem Les Deux Bonnes Soeurs (The Two Good Sisters) — “Debauchery and Death” — whose “ever-virgin loins, draped with tattered clothes and/Burdened with constant work, have never given birth”.

“I’ve also sought forgetfulness in lust,” he would write in the succeeding poem, La Fontaine de Sang (The Fountain of Blood), “But love’s a bed of needles, and they thrust/To give more drink to each rapacious whore.”

Death and Debauch then reappear in Allégorie (Allegory), the next poem, but are powerless to harm the “virgin” and “sterile” prostitute whose “granite skin” blunts the “scraping” claws of lust.

The idiom of articulating sterile love had altered inexorably — from a lady without mercy to a woman whose “essential… beautiful body is a sublime gift”.

If Keats’s La Belle draws the reader into a hellish theatre of loveless horror, Baudelaire’s poems on the darker side of love go beyond. They not only hold out the promise of redemption, they also question the traditional notions of feminine beauty and liberate a woman from the cultural construct of “The Second Sex”. Mind you, Baudelaire was writing long before feminism as a movement had really got under way.

When the dead aren’t memory yet, they foreshadow us.

—
Ananda Kamal Sen

Damned, he was.

No question about that. Completely damned. Couldn’t even kill himself. The gods had taken away that option too.

Nobody knew it better than this fabled Greek what absurd meant. So furious were the gods with him for cheating death twice — and generally not being deferential enough — that they punished him with hard, futile labour for ever.

Imagine the scene. A sinewy man, bare of body save for a strip of cloth around his taut, staggering hips, carrying an immense boulder up a hill. He bears it to near the summit; then watches as the boulder hurtles down the slope. Again and again he wrestles the rock up. Again and again it rolls down.

It would be an endless replay of toil and torment because the man, Sisyphus, Albert Camus’s “proletarian of the gods”, had been cursed to carry the rock up for eternity.

That is his destiny — like the destiny of humankind has now thrust a mask upon the living. How things have changed. Fiction’s fabled cloak of invisibility, for instance. Now an invisible virus has thrust a cloak upon us, a grotesque cloak-mask deemed essential and utterly visible. And there’s nothing fictitious about it.

When obits on the coronavirus pandemic would be written one day, some might record how Camus’s novel, The Plague, disappeared from shelves as people sought out a paradigm in their moment of peril. But it is his 1942 essay, The Myth of Sisyphus — published a few years before the novel — that offers what can be called a philosophical way out of this absurdity of affliction and physical exile, likely even in a post-Covid world.

There’s no denying that the pandemic has affected us in intangible ways — in its subterranean flow. The suspicion virus, which would probably never go away.

Camus uses the legend of Sisyphus as an existential parable of the struggle against the absurdities of life. “At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational…,” he writes. “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

The essay offers a tip to take on such silence — the inability to make meaning out of a situation. Embrace the absurdity, Camus says. Accept that the world is irrational.

The Covid-afflicted world, too, is irrational — in the pandemic’s pervasive sweep of mass mutability and destruction of familiar rhythms of life, work and relationships. It’s the lack of clarity that makes it absurd.

A possible way one could salvage meaning, according to Camus, is through lucidity, just as Sisyphus, “proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious”, acknowledges the absurd and accepts the “whole extent of his wretched condition”.

“The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory,”Camus says. “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

If defiance had ever been distilled off all elements of entreaty, this was it.

The Plague, too, is an allegory — of the Nazi occupation of France. It is also a tale of human accord as the fictional epidemic rages through the French Algerian town of Oran in a macabre, random opera of dead vermin and dying humans. What must have drawn today’s readers is the novel’s theme of “dreary struggle”between each man’s personal response to suffering and the “abstractions of the plague”.

Also, the novel’s message is one for the ages: “(I)t’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with pestilences.”

That is the social contract that some of the novel’s main characters —like Dr. Bernard Rieux and Jean Tarrou — enter into in their struggle against disease and death.

In Sisyphus, Camus’s protagonist resets his task after every descent — “His fate belongs to him” — and defeats the caprice of the gods.

Many centuries back, King Lear too had been hurled into a mind-shattering confrontation with absurdity. Lear, driven into infirm helplessness on a stormy Shakespearean stage, loses his mind and rails at the elements —“rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain”.

But Sisyphus pauses, in between yet another descent and ceaseless ascent. It’s that pause that “interests” Camus. That is the hour of consciousness, he writes. “At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”

What Camus suggests is humankind accept suffering, the first step towards acceptance of the absurdity of the universe. The next is the willing embrace of the struggle. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart,”he writes. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

It’s a message that still stands — as a counterpart to the double whammy of disease and virulent consequence.

—
Ananda Kamal Sen

Picture and frame beckon the ageing patriarch
From a kindly, obliging wall
Spring, summer and fall
To accommodate a smiling handsome man
Snapped in a momentary span.

….

What knowledge played in that pose?
Jutting elbow, a leg wrapped across
Regal bearing of a prominent nose
Images that turn a snapshot
Into a brimming thought.

….

I see a dashing groom
Hardly thirty in stallion prime
All poised to assume
Duties of a social kind
In a private expectant room.

….

Or a girl’s tender father
Whose arms slackened
As her body rounded
Before he walked her
Down the aisle one day.

….

The casket smirks, everything is mine
Memory and vision, the wall clock’s chime
Seed to cradle, altar and race
All trapped in the shudder
Of midnight’s embrace.

….

Picture and frame hold
Revived in sentient footsteps
Resonant voices of old
Till grief melts and passes
In the picture of a man in glasses.

….

The patriarch smiles from his inviolate frame
He has done his part
Son or paramour
Progeny and progenitor
Free of the wheelwright and his art.

….

Lend me your smile, O father
One that can tame a tragedy
Or a withering loss
Distilled in a living picture
Searing separation and dross.

Dates of anger throb
Upon the walls of time
Wounds that’ve never healed,
Yanked from comfortable neglect
Into a minute’s grand silence
So that public men can genuflect.
For it is but a memorable year
And sympathetic flies must buzz around the ear.

What else can they do, but remain
Numbered circles on a page
For a token anniversary homage
That the wise know can never right
Seventy-five years of a blinding light.
So quick, light the candles
And serve the mushroom pie
For men are anyway born to die.

I think of an ancient land of warriors,
Men who wore swords
And flew on horses
Their hair tied in a bun.
All undone from above
In a momentary shiver
A billowing sky and cloud
And thousands dead.

Yet none has paused since,
No mighty nation or general
Knowing perhaps or full well
That glory lies in a burnt-out tale
All forgiven in history’s selective memory
Valorous human acts of infamy.
For men would anyway die
Under an incendiary sky.

Don’t bother, if you aren’t a West Indian at heart.

No, on second thoughts, why not? If democracy is good for the rest of the world, should be good for cricket too. Why deny the modern-day game what might yet be its Gettysburg moment?

This bloke, Jason, may have just given us reason to hope.

Jason?

Holder. Jason Holder.

Captain. West Indies. And for lovers of Test cricket — long awaiting a turnaround, even the promissory of a turnaround — possibly the right man at the right moment; the belittled underdog’s imposing answer to all types of bullies, on the field of legitimate play and beyond.

This is what Holder said, according to cricket website ESPNcricinfo: “This is a pivotal moment in history for sports, for the game of cricket and for the West Indies cricket team.”

Effortlessly, with minimum fuss, he had posited the West Indies, once invincible on the five-day pitch but now fallen into a prolonged, debilitating rut, back into the centre stage of attention.

Holder spoke as his team announced their decision to sport a “Black Lives Matter” logo on their shirt collars when they take on England in a three-Test series from July 8.

“We believe we have a duty to show solidarity and also to help raise awareness,” he said in a statement this past Sunday, June 28, 2020.

It’s taken a long time to come, this day. Interminably long. So distant from those heady eighties that fact might have passed off as fiction were it not for memory. But now it’s come, at least a hint of it. A whiff of something that might restore equipoise to a cricketing order long out of balance.

Mark the words Holder uses. Cricket. West Indies. Solidarity. Awareness. It meant King Richards’s countrymen had finally stirred, which is just as well.

If cricket is a metaphor of the immutable romanticism of the universe, the West Indies were once its debonair expression. Few other teams have wrought upon the field such moments of epiphany as the field has ever known.

If they won, it was a conclusion forgone; were they to lose, even in a land not their own, they would be waved and serenaded to their port of departure. As the Australians did to Frank Worrell’s team sixty summers ago.

But, hold it. Let’s not get carried away. Too many false dawns have since come and gone. Singular brilliance, squandered in collective mediocrity. Years of desultory play, of endless defeats and rare, occasional victory. So often that it became routine, unabashedly familiar, as if that was how it was intended to be.

Off the 40-odd series the West Indies have played since the last of the greats — Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh and Brian Lara — moved on, they have won barely a handful. Most of them against the lesser powers. Anything contrary was an aberration.

So, abandon all hope ye who still dig for the Windies? (Apologies, Dante Alighieri.)

But this time it seems different. It’s possible that Jason and his Argonauts might even pull it off. If not in the near future, then sometime not too far away. Like wounded warriors touched to their pride. As the Windies had done long back under a tall, lanky man who stooped a little and wore glasses.

The odds equally are they might fail, their words turn out to be empty babble, spoken in anger and in hope, but uttered in haste; because their artillery of execution is still far from the potent arsenal of the past. Yet, the gauntlet has been picked up, ringingly, on written, inerasable record, so they could be held accountable.

Who would have thought a murderous knee would have such effect? 

For those not too deep into cricket, Holder is a young man, just 28, robust and tall — 6 foot 7 inch tall — taller than the bespectacled Clive Lloyd. What he lacks in years, he makes up in maturity.

He talks about the thought that went into the decision to wear the logo, the history of West Indies cricket, about being the “guardians of the great game” for future generations, about how people judge by colour of skin and the need for equality.

It’s not always an offending knee, sometimes abuse comes in the form of sneaky dressing-room taunt. The type that Darren Sammy, Holder’s fellow West Indian, has spoken of. 

Sammy, nice guy he is, just called for an apology from his former Premier League teammates who made fun of his complexion, behind his back. Holder has chosen to take a public stand.

He has long been vocal about the virus of racism but on Sunday he went further. He linked that battle to Caribbean cricket and its long-awaited revival, inadvertently taking up the same challenge as Lloyd had nearly half a century ago after Australians Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee had wreaked mayhem.

The Windies had then crumpled to a 1-5 humiliation in that forgettable series of 1975-76 and Lloyd had returned a chastened but wiser man. If they hurled fire, he figured out fast, he would fight back with thunderbolt. So along came the likes of Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Colin Croft and Joel Garner. Malcolm Marshall, the silent assassin with the sidewinder run, would join the band soon.

But you need runs in the bank for the grenadiers to have a go. The runs came from Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes and Lloyd himself. And, of course, the undisputed “king”, Vivian Richards.

Holder, of course, does not have that firepower Lloyd had. Nor does his team come even close to those that came before Lloyd’s. Teams that had the late Frank Worrell and Clyde Walcott, the just-departed Everton Weekes. Rohan Kanhai. Garfield Sobers.

His is a team in the making; young and talented. Kraigg Brathwaite, Jermaine Blackwood, Shai Hope, Roston Chase, Shane Dowrich, Alzarri Joseph, Chemar Holder. Still a long way to go. But who knows? And they are angry and hurt.

To those not too familiar with cricket lore, Greenidge, they said, was more dangerous when he limped. Hitback has sundry forms.

A frame from the past holds. Not from cricket but from screen. And a different context. An image of a man who too had battled racism in the land where George Floyd died.

Bruce Lee, Enter the Dragon (1973). Lee, 5’8”, practising his spin-kicks in the privacy of his room when the door opens.

His leg stays poised in mid-air, paused in lethal precision at the sudden intrusion. His narrowed eyes take in the hulking intruder, a tall man with a scar on his face — the mark of his dead sister’s torment.

The leg stays where it was — foot pointed towards the opened door.

“You must attend the morning ritual in uniform,” says O’Hara, the man with the scar.

“Outside,” replies Bruce Lee. Syllables drawled out.

That one word defined what defiance meant for all the abused and bullied wannabe Davids of the world who became instant fans of the body-perfect icon with the deadly stare.

On Sunday, Holder articulated a different kind of defiance. “We did not take our decision lightly. We know what it is for people to make judgments because of the colour of our skin, so we know what it feels like, this goes beyond the boundary,” Holder said, according to ESPNcricinfo. “There must be equality and there must be unity.” Lincoln might have approved.

Would the West Indies turn around? That’s a question for the future. But the message has been sent.
—
Ananda Kamal Sen

SERIOUSLY, not a good decision to kneel.

Not because unseen viruses are floating around. Or the other type, the two-legged ones, might be prowling about thinking which limb to unleash. 

Just that it looks a little knee-jerk.

And, let’s be honest, this symbolic recycled stuff — solidarity, empathy, brotherhood, compassion, bond of humanity, We are with you, man’ — is starting to look a bit jaded.

If it’s to test if hardened human joints were still suitably flexible, fair enough. But to kneel down in public contrition?

As if kneeling down on visible daylight streets, video cameras on, would wipe off the mark of the offending knee.

As if in pillorying him, in parodying him, in making a caricature of him, lies absolution.

Poor Derek Chauvin, if only they realised that today’s knee in the neck had been predestined to cut off vital life breath. Predestined since Kunta Kinte’s white captors gave the African slave a dire choice — half a foot or his testicles.

That was sometime around the 1800s, in pre-Civil War America, and long before Jimmie Lee Jackson submitted his human body to police batons.

Kunta, caught trying to escape for the fourth time, had chosen to save his testicles from the slave catcher’s axe, thankfully, as it turned out. It left him with a lifelong limp but ensured that his powers of procreation remained unscathed. 

That was, as it turned out, good, solid thinking. What he was basically doing was investing in the future, when somebody would tell his story. Present discomfort, future returns. Not sterile, token acts like kneeling in public.

Defenders of public kneeling would say you are missing the point. This is a symbolic gesture of empathy, of protest. You kneel to stand up again.

But contrition is a private thing. And this public kneeling, however noble or sincere, is unlikely to solve anything. The impulse to stereotype would still be there. And brutal guys would still be looking to shove their monstrous knees, figurative or otherwise, down somebody’s neck. Just because they happen to be not white enough. Such things have gone on far too long and no symbolic act of public kinship is going to stop that.

Dylan got it partly right when he sang “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, but the change stopped somewhere midway. If people have to hunker down, it should be those in authority, in chambers of decision-making, to carry through with the change, through hard, unpalatable compliance if needed. Human rights are non-negotiable.

Coming back to Kunta, his decision that day would win for Alex Haley, his purported great-great-great-great grandson, a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Roots. And for those interested in the genealogy of race and violence, a priceless template for African-American history.

The knee that white police officer Chauvin pressed into African-American George Floyd’s neck last month does go a long way back.

It was evening that day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a little after 8 on May 25, when Chauvin pulled a handcuffed Floyd out of a police car and onto the road, pressed his knee to the fallen man’s neck and held him there.

“Please, I can’t breathe…,” Floyd had gasped. But the knee stayed where it was.

The charge against the 46-year-old was he had bought cigarettes with a counterfeit note. By the time the knee came off Floyd’s neck nearly nine minutes later — 8 minutes 46 seconds to be exact — his pulse had gone.

Like Kunta’s half a foot.

It is somewhere between these two unrelated but intrinsically connected events — one unbearably recent and the other tolerably bygone — that the real import of Chauvin’s unrelenting knee lies: that the subterranean stream of racial antagonism still flows. As toxic as ever.

May 25, 2020, was a confirmation of that: in those nine minutes of breath-denying hold was unleashed the repressed collective unconscious of race-driven brutality.

To be honest, Floyd was no saint. He had been charged with robbery earlier. But that’s beside the point. No human being deserves to be subjected to indignity so savage.

It was the same savagery, fed on some distorted notions of superiority, that had hurled itself on Uncle Tom’s lacerated skin in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

What goes into making fiction is what we have lived — as protagonist or even as perceiver, but stirred enough to have kneaded the appalling dough of experience into outraged expression.

They say Stowe’s novel helped hasten the Civil War but that is probably apocryphal. What is not apocryphal is slave-owner Simon Legree’s vicious whiplash on a manacled Tom.

The knee has merely replaced the fictional — but representative — whip; the rest has barely changed: deep-rooted social animosities so strong that you deny air to a gasping, handcuffed man.

They had done something similar earlier too, one July day in 2014, in the New York City borough of Staten Island — death by deprivation of air. Not by monstrous knee but by mortal chokehold of remorseless arm.

Eric Garner, African-American, 43, father of six, grandfather of three, described by friends as sociable, had apparently resisted arrest on the charge of selling loose cigarettes.

Eleven times he is said to have repeated “I can’t breathe” as he lay face down on the sidewalk.

Breathe? What impertinence! Weren’t they trying to choke him?

As they had sought to choke off a protest march for equal rights for blacks on a February day 55 years ago.

It would be Jimmie Lee Jackson’s last march. Beaten, clubbed and shot, the 26-year-old civil rights crusader died a few days later. 

Would they have knelt today had such antagonisms still lingered?

There’s a counterpoint to that — the public demeanour of mortified mien does serve a purpose: history of the wrong kind is a difficult burden to bear. 

Unfortunately, memory does not permit us to forget. We may live with it, not bring it up, but never forget. Because there would be moments — as the one in Minneapolis that May evening — that would serve as reminder, whether we like it or not. No symbolic kneeling would stop that. 

Not a good decision. Seriously.

Good they never met in battle or for conquest.

Imagined yes, in moments of wishful fancy, but never actually fought, which is just as well. The heartbreak would have been too much to bear. 

Or is that the right way of looking at it? It’s sport after all. 

But think of what might have been had these confrontations happened. Bruce Lee versus Muhammad Ali, for instance.

Flat muscles of flexible steel versus fluid ripple of beautiful brawn.

Lithe pioneer of the intercepting fist versus big-boned artist of weave-and-punch that stung like hell.

Five-foot-eight-inch icon of long-bullied underdog versus 6ft-3-inch belated apotheosis of the historically downtrodden.

Someone would have had to lose in this duel of different body shapes, of genetic makeup, of centuries-old cultures, of civilisations, of contrapuntal forms, of whatever you call it, because there is no stalemate in physical combat.

Maybe that’s why they never got to have a go at each other. Some contests that could have happened but didn’t were perhaps never meant to happen.

Or, take for example, contests that didn’t happen because they couldn’t have, such as Bjorn Borg versus Roger Federer.

Hermit-like intensity versus passionate artistry.

Inscrutable topspin versus beguiling drop shot.

Taciturn ice man versus one who showed it was okay for men to cry. Even in public.

Borgmania versus Federer Express.

Defeat for either in this faceoff between two eras, possible only beyond the convenient chronology of clock time, would have been terrible. Tennis, too, brooks no stalemate. Maybe that’s why they were born 25 years apart. Fate takes care of its favourites.

Chess, of course, offers the scope and the theoretical possibility of endless draws. But when Magnus Carlsen, the reigning superstar of the game, spoke the other day he would have liked to play Bobby Fischer and Mikhail Tal among players from a different era, it’s unlikely he had draw on his mind.

“There are so many fantastic players, but then it would have been interesting to play Bobby Fischer at his best,” Carlsen, in Calcutta this November for the 2019 Tata Steel Chess Tournament, told journalists.

Carlsen’s words that day brought back thoughts long forgotten, dredged up from adolescent fantasies of heroes and hero worship and of how such personal demigods would have fared in a clash with each other, possible or improbable.

Picture the scene. Carlsen, world champion, dapper and flamboyant, of square pugnacious mien, poker-faced master of positional play. A man possessed of a memory that itself is a mnemonic. 

The Norwegian leans back, hands crossed, then hunches forward again, a modern-day Alexander impatient to expand his empire; the board his willing Bucephalus.

Across the table is Fischer, sharp and angular, brooding eyes on the board, a troubled Prospero of the 64-square grid who would one day toss away his magic wand just as Shakespeare’s fictional sorcerer had done.

 If ever a man lifted chess to sublimity it was this American-born eccentric genius who ended years of Soviet domination of the game in those fraught days of the Cold War. The board was then a surrogate battlefield for nuclear warheads, the grandmasters its cerebral weapons of hubris and humiliation. 

Three years later, in 1975, Fisher would turn his back on his world title to become a recluse at 33, a brilliant but paranoid mind tormented by fear of lurking assassins and booby traps.

Who would have won? Fischer or Carlsen?

Immaterial. Victory is bauble when play itself is a metaphor of possibilities. We all play chess with time, as Bergman’s Antonius Block does in The Seventh Seal, the game merely a search for meaning in a world of contradictions, its gambits, declined or taken, the crossroads of life.

In Moscow last week, Carlsen, reigning champion in classical chess, prevailed again at the crossroads, reclaiming his world rapid crown and defending his blitz title to grab the treble. If anyone among the game’s current stalwarts can lay claim to a timeless dare at Fischer, it is this young man with Hollywood looks. 

It’s also possible that a Fischer-Carlsen match, were the past and the future ever to telescope into a perpetual present, might have turned out to be a scratchy anti-climax, far from the portents of dramatic supremacy or catastrophe. Sometimes, mystery sustains where reality might have gutted.

Carlsen, 29, also mentioned another master from the past when he spoke that day. “I would have loved to play Mikhail Tal when he was at his best. He won the World Championship, beating everybody with his swashbuckling attacks, and I would have loved to see if I could counter his attacks.”

It’s a riveting thought. Carlsen, dubbed the “Mozart of Chess”, versus Tal, the chain-smoking “Magician from Riga”.

For those not deep into chess, the wizardry lay in the incredible sacrifices the Latvia-born Tal would conjure up. He would then reap the harvest of the confusion he had sown, a blithe puppeteer of perplexity as his chagrinned opponents fell apart.

“…He is always on the lookout for some spectacular sacrifice, that one shot, that dramatic breakthrough to give him the win,” Fischer would say of Tal’s play.

Tal himself would come up with an explanation as enigmatic as his game. “There are two kinds of sacrifices; correct ones and mine,” he once said.

In 1960, at age 23, Tal wrested the crown from Russian grandmaster Mikhail Botvinnik, making him the then youngest world champion, a record later broken by Garry Kasparov.

Along the way, since bequeathed for posterity, came Game 6, one among the many that epitomised his disconcerting dare.

Tal, widely reckoned as one of the finest attacking players chess had seen, gave up his knight for seemingly nothing, before going on to win the game. Seldom had intuition found such breathtaking articulation.

Would he have prevailed over Carlsen with his apparently clairvoyant sacrifices that some of his rivals have disdained as tricks?

Such questions are best left to fancy. Carlsen was merely expressing a wish when he spoke that November day, on the way to winning the Tata Steel tournament.

Perhaps, more a tribute than wish.
—
Ananda Kamal Sen