HARSHAL DESAI
Every tragedy carries its own superlatives of ache. Every ongoing misery razes the heart like never before, like none before. No! No tragedy should be made the subject of any comparison or ‘objective evaluation’. No misery as it continues can be placed parallel to another so as to draw a greater or a lesser, relative emotion from our hearts. Such a thing is simply not possible for a human heart. The human heart is too small a thing for any tragedy to enter it and claim its own relative size, its own relative weeping.
It is only the silent mosaic of history's stains that produces the false, otherwise impossible, sense of comparability. Of big and small. Of much and more and less. It is only the ever- growing lexicon of dead facts, of forcefully tallied deaths - where the frozen mouths of inchoate sighs of ancient tragedies keep gathering newer dust - that produces the plurality of grief. That makes an indefinite, ambiguous, unscalable number out of an individual. Death. Deaths. Massacre. Massacres. Casualty. Casualties. This is the (unnatural) grammar of history. The strange working protocol to which each set of facts is subjected. Subject, the way a body (of facts) is subjected, is presented to a mortician's hands - to be dressed, prepared and preserved in a language. A language that must be learned if at all one is to grieve (comprehensibly) and one is to say “I have grieved. Remember this!”
Who then will dare inspect and adjudge in the face of ongoing tragedy, some bodies bloodier than the rest? This red redder than that. These gashes deeper than the others and this groan more painful than those.
Those that insist on placing a place value on tragedies in a series of others must realise that no such mathematical marker of catastrophe really exists. That it is only an affect of historical criticism whose pangs they suffer. That the necessity of preparing a tableau of history's (or ‘historical’ ?) victims stems from the need to render the subject matter of grief subservient to whatever it is that makes the learning of a lesson, a moral, possible. The overbearing emphasis on viewing history as a set of avoidable errors, as a record of survival prepared (voluntarily or not) by our predecessors as to what, in the uncharted, unventured wilderness of time, is edible and what deleterious, is outright unnecessary. History after a certain point of time fails to make us any ‘wiser’. After a certain point of time, it produces in us the irresistible urge to act out the foolishness of those acts which when we enact a second time, are no longer foolish, but culpable.
No. No tears are wetter than the others. No bloodstains less heart - rending than the others. No, no falling tear can be tallied or a bleeding wound measured out in its length. No, there is no hagiography of tears possible. Nor has there ever been. Only hagiographers of their stains.