And she waits for Umar Khalid

As her soulmate was wrenched away from her and into the jail, she is enduring with grace the pain of separation, which is sublime in itself

Tonight I can write the saddest lines,” wrote Pablo Neruda in his poem on love and separation. Banojyotsna Lahiri could have written the saddest lines on the night of September 13, 2020, when Umar Khalid, the student leader and her soulmate, was arrested for allegedly conspiring to foment the Northeast Delhi riots early that year. Most people thought the charge was absurd. That did not matter, for Umar was wrenched away from her—and dumped into Delhi’s Tihar Jail.

Umar applied for bail in a Delhi Sessions Court. In early February, after eight months of arguments, the judgment was reserved. Would Umar get bail? Hope argued with anxiety, as she tossed and turned in the bed. The nights would feel immense. A fortnight ago, Umar was denied his freedom.

But Banojyotsna did not write the saddest lines even then. 

“I cannot survive without being strong,” Banojyotsna says, as we talk over coffee. Across from where we are seated, in a garden going to seed, a young couple is necking.

Whenever Banojyotsna tucks into a mutton or chicken or fish dish, she is overtaken by guilt, for Tihar Jail serves only vegetarian fare. Umar loves his meat, and in his days of freedom gorged on junk food—pizzas, for instance. In late August 2020, when he was summoned for interrogation, Umar was so sure he would be arrested that he decided to order “chicken pasta with white sauce” as his last meal in freedom.

I am reminded of French President François Mitterrand’s last meal. Dying of cancer, with a few days left to live, Mitterrand hosted a feast for his friends and family. On the menu were oysters, foie gras (liver of a goose or duck), capon (a castrated domestic rooster), and roasted ortolans—two-ounce songbirds that are illegal to eat in France. “The only interesting thing is to live,” Mitterrand said.

Umar does the “only interesting thing” spiritedly, without the meat delicacies to savour, within the circumscribed circle of freedom. She meets him twice a month in Tihar. On every occasion, from behind the glass pane, she sees him saunter in and speak to Tamil Nadu police personnel in their language. She first thought he spoke gibberish to them to preen before her. “But they replied to him,” she says. Umar has been learning Tamil from them.

Banojyotsna has a 15-minute video call with Umar once a week and a five-minute telephonic chat daily. It is hard to talk with the clock ticking. He never whines about the injustice meted out to him. He asks for gossip, the social media trends, and cracks jokes. They discuss books. The phone connection snaps at the end of five minutes—a sentence remains incomplete, an anecdote ends before the climax, words about to be spoken are left for another day, and a laugh turns into a cold sigh. 

These are just the moments when Banojyotsna could write the saddest lines.

But she finds no reason to let iron creep into her soul, for he retains his intellectual vim. Umar, from September 2020, has read 102 books. He completes a set of books, hands them over to Banojyotsna, who then replaces them with a new list. She bought a new bookshelf to store books returned from Tihar.

I see the photo of Umar’s collection—there are books by Romila Thapar, Ramachandra Guha, Mushirul Hasan, Eric Hobsbawm, a few on Mahatma Gandhi, Aakar Patel’s Our Hindu Rashtra, Arundhati Roy’s Freedom, etc. There are novels as well, by Margaret Atwood, Amitav Ghosh, Orhan Pamuk, Perumal Murugan, Annie Zaidi, Virginia Woolf…

Then I spot Devil on the Cross by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who wrote the novel on toilet paper during the year he spent in prison. Would Umar write a prison diary? Publishers want him to; they have already contacted Banojyotsna. And because I have seen Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera among Umar’s books, I wonder whether his memoir should be titled Love in the Time of Hindutva.

He has befriended those whom he likely never would have outside Tihar. For instance, Olympic medallist Sushil Kumar supervises Umar’s gym workouts. He exchanges books and discusses them with the 82-year-old Unitech’s founder, Ramesh Chandra. Umar writes applications for the poor among jail inmates, whose lawyers are indifferent to their fate. 

Umar also has his blues. He was upset when Hindi newspapers featured the public prosecutor’s submissions under a Page 1 headline, “Spark riot to make the nation bend: Umar”. This remark Umar allegedly made to the police under Section 161, which has no evidentiary validity. His jail-friends asked, “Hey Umar, you started the riots?” He was upset over the recent hijab judgment, linking the injustice done to Karnataka’s women to his own plight.

Yet Banojyotsna refused to write the saddest lines.

As we leave, a friend, serendipitously, sends Richard Howard’s poem, On Arrival, to me. Although written in a different context, these lines are pertinent to Banojyotsna: “By tomorrow this waiting/will be over and done with, it will/ be my best poem ever,/and it will never have been written.” Enduring with grace the pain of separation, plotted by a callous state, is poetry without words, sublime and inspiring.

The writer is a senior journalist.
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