Fireproof

The book gives an account of what raged on the streets of Gujarat during the infamous riots which gripped the helpless nation by its balls. The author leaves no distance uncovered as he describes the events by plunging the readers into three distinct stories- the readers already vulnerable by the Mr. Jay’s misfortune , take the plunge may be to share a part of the tribulation which has befallen him. These stories – the story of Tariq, the story of Abbu and the story of Shabnam, rips the hearts of the readers and slices every cross-section of the pretentious remorse that they might have shown in the hot summers of 2002. The repeated usage of words like fire (then complimented by the use of fireproof) , water, heat, charring, scald, burn makes you feel as if the whole of Gujarat lay in the ovens during those tumultuous times when the barbarism of man was unmatched. What also sets the authors illustrations apart is the unflinching non-display of emotion as Mr Jay witnesses the bombing of the city with dead bodies, dead bodies scattered on the road dividers, those piled up one on top of another covered in white sheets , those who do not even meet proper burial , those who on floor with slit uterus and amputated tongues. He goes to bizarre details of each of these settings with no regard to how the reader might assimilate these over-burdening accounts. I think this is where the author draws his courage from, after all this is his playing field, his settings.

The most striking and enchanting character of the book has to be Ithim – as no one is sure whether it is IT or HIM. This baby is mightily deformed and numerous references to his charred fore-head, funnel-like ears, lip-less mouth formed as the skin is split, no limbs forces the readers to conjure his image and shudder in pain and anguish that how could we all have let these heinous sins happen, how a nation of one billion sat back and comfortably and guiltlessly pushed the blame on others, how we find it more convenient to conjure such images rather than face the real one. The baby was after all , born through the darkest times of human civilization, the lowest point of humanity that we have seen in recent time, the Hitler month in free-India- his ugliness is only representative of the darkness and grotesques and immaturity of the human civilization, how the baby was representative of the dark ages of the civilization, of how the society is yet to come to terms with compassion, of how everyone is still identified by man-made boundaries and strong walls of religion and caste and what not, of how the new, resurgent , shining, incredible India has lost her shone and her people their righteous place. The baby has strikingly beautiful eyes and divinely marked eye-brows, so that it can see how the evil in man manifests and subsumes another man, how the darkness in him absorbs another man, how his caustic vindictive self can slit the uterus and thrash the unborn.

The details of tyranny, as portrayed by the author, seem to re-create those images from news channels in newspapers back in our mind. It gives them life. It gives those dead-bodies a voice to share their story, to share their helplessness, just like the head nurse did, like doctor 1 & 2 did. He even put life in those inanimate things like burnt towel, the book the riot victim was writing in, the watch that was snatched from the another victim. The author has not explicitly taken sides with the fundamentalists or the victims, but his choice of names like Abba, Ahmad, Tariq, Faraz instantly creates ripples in minds as to why he chose these names and who really were at the receiving end.

The author has tried to bring to account who were really responsible for this genocide, who had these implicit assent to this pogrom, who had lent hands and foot to carry out mass-deaths – yes, it was us. It was us, the Mr Jays, who stood back and saw in horror. This horror lent courage to the murderers. This horror tried to cleanse our soles of our actions, it helped in putting up an act of helplessness. This horror which elected the same government back to power for two successive terms. It seems nothing outrages us.