Paying a big price for small talk

By Chithrangada Nanda
Only a few weeks ago I was charmed by the energy and ethereal love of a couple from Istanbul. Well, the Lakshman Rekha around me does not let me stray into too many alien terrains. I traveled through Turkey and Istanbul while feverishly flipping through the pages of Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence.
That museum of innocence now lies disfigured and defiled in my mind when I read the news report from the same Pamuk’s Turkey just the other day. In what is described as an enlightened Turkey, eager to join European Union, a 16-year-old girl was buried alive by her folks.
Her crime--- talking to boys.
The report, published in The Guardian and elsewhere in the English media, says it was an incident of honour killing. Whose honour were they defending by torturing and killing a girl who was yet to know about the ways of the world?
Can such a thing happen in Turkey which lost its virginity of morality way back in 1970s by imbibing wholeheartedly the western culture of nightclubs, opulent parties and dating?
The girl was found in a sitting position with large amount of mud in her lungs and stomach indicating that she was
alive and conscious when buried. The cruelty of the deed is intensified by the fact that it is the same people
who are supposed to protect her from any danger are responsible for this.
What is beyond the fathom of my reasoning power is that how can the father and mother live (eat, mate and sleep) knowing that their daughter is eating mud to death.
This is a sheer violation of human rights and one of the most atrocious things a man can do to a fellow human being. And I think if we measure the incident on a scale of human suffering it will put to shame the notorious Nazi concentration camps. (May be this is a woman's, or more of a mother's wounded sensibility reacting strongly).
And what is most ironic about the whole situation is that while the girl is being punished, her counterpart in this 'crime', the boy, is spared from the sword of moral police which consists of, mostly, and is partial to the male egoists.
For a 16-year-old girl, 'mingling and mumbling' with boys is the 'coolest' and most 'awesome' thing to do.
This is the part of growing up phase which contribute greatly to the grooming of her personality.
Well, as a mother of a teenage girl, I’m worried about the freedom of choices offered in this world of 'Unwanted seventy two and I-Pills’. We, however, cannot bind and suffocate the minds of young girls and boys and shrink them like the tiny Japanese feet. Instead, we can let them be free individuals capable of making right decisions by inculcating in them a sense of duty, right and responsibility ---responsible to themselves and also to the society.
The incident in Turkey drags me down memory lane. It compels me to introspect about the confusion I had faced as a 17-year-old living in a village in Kerala. Talking to boys was considered an outrageous thing which was condemned publicly and admired and even envied privately by the giggling bunch of girls studying in a convent run by scorn-faced nuns who considered even uttering the name of a boy an unpardonable sin.
And then going to a co-ed college where you are forced (amiably and charmingly) to talk, tease and flirt with boys. After reluctantly persuaded into these sessions by eager classmates, I would go home with a vague feeling of guilt of having committed a crime unintentionally. And let out a big sigh of relief when in the second year I returned to the familiar and assuring chants of prayers and the ever enfolding warmth typical of an all-women territory.
There were and still are some questions left unanswered in my mind -- will talking to a man make a woman wanton and characterless?
Can’t a man and a woman share a purely platonic relationship and still be soul mates?
As a friend tells me, may be, all answers are within us.

The Museum of Innocence: A Review

By Chithrangada Nanda
Love is something to which one devoted one's entire being
at the risk of everything. But this happens only once in a
lifetime.—Kemal

What is love?
Some people mistake lust for love.
But, then, is there love without lust?
When love happens between a man and a woman in their prime of youth, and if the woman is as beautiful and enchanting as Fusun, lust is bound to be there, shaking the person's entire being, penetrating into his very soul and capturing his world, making him a slave of his passion.
With alluring descriptions about the minute details of the setting and milieu, the writer invites us to embark upon the love story of the protagonist, Kemal, heir to one of the wealthiest families of Istanbul in 1975, who is about to become engaged to Sibel from another aristocratic
family. Then, he encounters Fusun, a shopgirl and a distant relation, and felt “his heart in his throat with the force of an immense wave about to crash against the shore.”
From then onwards his life changes into a turbulent 'motorboat' caught in the ebb and flow of stormy waves of passion and grief.
In this intricately woven romantic saga, Pamuk depicts explicit scenes of the world of westernised families of Istanbul with their opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, dining room rituals, picnics, their mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
There are two elements in this book which make it exemplary and unique in its approach. One is the suspense and intrigue as to whether Kemal would be able to win his sweetheart, which acts as a catalyst to keep the interest of the reader going through, sometimes dragging but the otherwise touching narrative of the mental agony and physical torture felt by the protagonist.
There are moments when we merge and become one with him and experience his agony with nerve-racking intensity which leaves us drained and shattered.
Second is the relentless pursuit of the protagonist which will make him an obsessive compulsive collector of objects which manifests his love story and the nine-year journey of patience and perseverance.
It is endearing but at the same time alarming to witness how 'love', the most powerful emotion transforms a normal, healthy and exuberant young man into a drunkard and an ailing psycho with delusions and hallucinations.
In the end all that will remain to him is the museum he creates which exhibits rituals of the half modern and half traditional Istanbul and of his broken heart redolent with Fusun's lipstick.
”The museum of innocence will be forever open to lovers who can’t find another place to kiss in Istanbul.”
And we should keep our hearts open to the arrow of light which will strike us any day, any moment.
Indeed, it is better to have loved and lost than never to love!