The tide had receded, moving back to the middle of the ocean. The roar
of the monsoon waves had lapsed into a lullaby of soft sounds of the waters.
The sun was setting on the horizon where the ocean meets the sky. And then in a
flash of epiphany you see a boatman casting his net and as he does so, the
setting sun filters through the mesh of his net, giving you, the moment of
perfection that cannot be man-made.
On the little sit out of his room on stilts in his resort on Odxel
beach Avirook Sen and I sat, wading through the last ten years. A vintage
friend, fellow journalist and now a very acclaimed writer, seeing Sen here was
a dejavu moment and also surreal because our adventures as journalists have
been on the less luxurious and perhaps more rewarding landscapes of coastal
Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. These were the early years, when we could easily
slip off the radar of our respective news publications for weeks, (albeit
informing them of course). Based in Bhopal, we hit the ground running spending
time in remote villages with no access to phones (this was the period before
mobile phones) tracking those who then fought against the Sardar Sarovar dam in
Gujarat spending days and nights with displaced families or those who were
about to be displaced by the dam.
Once, in 1992, trekking for miles on the banks of the Narmada, on the
MP-Gujarat border, we reached Jalsindhi, home to less than a hundred tribals.
All they had was the bounty of the river, the hillocks around the village and
some fields. We lived there for three nights, bathing in the river, singing
songs with the village folks and becoming participants in their struggle.
From 1992 to 2017, the fundamentals haven’t changed. And parts of Goa,
if you scratch the surface and dig deep isn’t all that removed from Jalsindhi.
The banks of the Narmada and the Mandovi have similar stories. We had our
moments of epiphany in Gujarat too. On the night of the full moon, the boatmen
of the Narmada, from Jalsindhi rowed into the waters to fish and as they cast
their nets, they caught the sliver of moonlight. The silhouette of the boatmen
and their nets, the moonlit river and the canvas of the sky with the full moon
stays locked till this day.
Across civilizations, cultures and time, humankind has grown and
prospered around rivers and oceans. And traditionally they have spent their
lives taking from and giving back to their lands.
And the most stringent of struggles have revolved around the loss of
land and when this happens, it is less about livelihoods also going in the
process, but more about identities that get challenged.
We spoke as the afternoon meandered to dusk. Conversation naturally
turned towards Avirook’s seminal book Arushi, perhaps the most painstaking work
of non-fiction written in India in the past decade. A reporter’s doggedness,
coupled with the writer’s ability to sustain the exhaustion that comes with
work of this nature, with a healthy and important dose of belief acquired over
attending every court hearing during the trial, got him past the finishing
line. But he’s not finished yet. As the parents of Arushi, (the little girl who
was killed at her home in Noida along with a man servant Hemraj) Rajesh and Nupur
Talwar, convicted of murdering their child serve their sentence and wait for
the verdict of their appeal in the High Court, for Sen too, these are testing
times. His belief in their innocence and his own work has unwillingly
pitch-forked him as an independent investigating agency. As the Talwars pray
for acquittal, Avirook Sen, very understandably looks for his own vindication,
surely not as a writer, but as reporter who has dug deep and believes he has dug
right.
Where does he go from here? To start with, he goes to Allahabad, where
the Uttar Pradesh High Court will deliver its verdict on the appeal of the
Talwars. And then I popped the obvious question.
A sequel to Arushi and perhaps another book on the Sheena Bora murder
trial about to commence in Mumbai, where media tycoon Indrani Mukerjea is
charged with killing her daughter? He revealed that project was very much on,
with publishers ready for another reportage based book on yet another parent
charged with killing their offspring. The boatmen at Odxel had returned to the
shore by the time we finished speaking. Dusk had settled in and the lights of
Vasco, across the expanse of the ocean from Odxel were coming on. Across time,
space and place, this was an engaging and nostalgic connect, a conversation not
just between two friends but their shared interests in people, places and
civilizations.
