Perhaps the thief just wanted to preserve his own humanity in desperation, by leaving something, while for Ryokan it was the most precious, albeit intangibly
Illustration/Uday Mohite
Last week a thief burgled a cop’s house in Madhya Pradesh and left a note— “sorry, majboori thi, to save a friend’s life.” Earlier, a thief in Jind returned a batch of stolen Covishield vials, regretting they might add harm in the pandemic. In 18th century Japan, a thief stole all the belongings of the monk Ryokan, except his meditation pillow prompting Ryokan’s most famous haiku: “the thief left it behind, the moon at my window”—moon being a metaphor for enlightenment. Perhaps the thief just wanted to preserve his own humanity in desperation, by leaving something, while for Ryokan it was the most precious, albeit intangibly.
The act of stealing compels us to confront the fact of stealing. When the object is tangible or the reason comes from desperation or need, the confrontation is straightforward. The more indirect the theft, and the more privileged the thief, the greater the pretence of innocence—like bosses casually stealing employees’ ideas to claiming them as their own.
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Consider emotional stealing. Being dishonorable is easy, especially in unconventional and ambiguous relationships. The sought-after guy who loves intimacy with the ‘interesting’ woman may one day act as if their undefined relationship did not exist. The ‘straight’ man pretends he never once had sex with his gay friend. The silence of those who are romantically marginalised in the world of heteronormative relationships can be counted on, because they know if they bring it up, they are likely to earn ridicule or pity for imagining they were wanted. People sometimes snatch side se which they don’t have the courage to own. Occasionally, they leave behind a pillow like Ryokan’s thief, of vague apology or ‘friendship’.
The intangibility of arts and ideas makes both, stealing and pretending you haven’t, easy. I once made a documentary using fictional devices drawn from pulp fiction, only to see the device replicated in a feature film. It is easy to convince yourself that documentary is simply reality lying around for the taking, rather than its own universe of creativity, like forests are simply un-owned land waiting to be exploited for ‘development’. If you take from something famous, you acknowledge the taking as homage. Otherwise, you can pretend it was an innocent coincidence making any objection sound petty or self-aggrandising. Sometimes, one might speak to journalists for an hour, because they simply do not have a perspective on the topic they are writing about, only to find entire articles shaped by that perspective, which remains unattributed. Occasionally they leave a pillow yaniki, your original insights may be passed off as their own, but you get quoted saying something generic. Pillows can come dressed as invalidating flattery—like being called “an inspiration” yaniki wise old muse now in vanaprastha ashram, or cute, yaniki not serious or ‘real’, like how cute folk songs become ‘real’ copyrighted tunes in corporate financed movies.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Bob Dylan wrote, to live outside the law you must be honest, suggesting that when honesty is not enforced by something like law, then the onus of being honourable is on us. Urdu shayars often started their poems with a line by another poet, indicating the artistic debt to ideas. The meme by its nature acknowledges the image it remixes. As they don’t say on the internet, be cute, attribute. That way, you won’t have to delete later.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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