Is home a free country?

The world is tethered to cataclysm. Racked by virulent microorganisms, stupefied by war in Eastern Europe that may cause a global conflagration, this is an age terrible and terrifying. It will end anticlimactically, “Not with a bang but a whimper,” as predicted by T S Eliot in his 1925 poem, The Hollow Men. But for now, its aching heart heaves with questions: And what of freedom? Of democracy? Of geographies — country, city, village, homeland? Of the certitude that home is a place of safety and comfort? Of the right to cross borders and live unfettered, elsewhere?

Our notions of what it means to be free — of tyranny, disease, violence, debt, gender — reconfigure constantly to befit the laws of our land, its traditions, its societal claim upon our behaviour. In her 2015 essay, We Are Double-Plus Unfree, Margaret Atwood tussles with freedom as an idea, or as an ideal, and tells of the ways in which this ideal can be subverted, sometimes overtly, often insidiously: “Governments know our desire for safety all too well, and like to play on our fears. How often have we been told that this or that new rule or law or snooping activity on the part of officialdom is to keep us ‘safe’?”

Governments curtail our freedom by making new laws and databases and devising surveillance technologies. Our biometrics are our prisons; they are the digital equivalents of the medieval dungeons that Atwood mentions in her essay. These dismal vaults were meant for those perceived as insane, dangerous, or in one’s way to power and glory: Witches, criminals, rivals to the throne and kidnapped foreign nobles. Their modern counterpart, the prison system, is “…no longer a reformatory where criminals are to be reformed, no longer a penitentiary where they are to repent — it has become a warehouse where people are stashed.”

We are all vulnerable to being stashed and locked-up, to being evicted from home, from its dependable cocoon of warmth.  War — its arbitrariness, repercussions, victims and criminals — has turned our many metaphorical prisons into frighteningly real eventualities. Eliot’s hollow men, stumbling through “This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms,” are emblems no longer; they are the substantial ghouls of war. They are the inhabitants of prime-time news: Ukrainian refugees at the borders of Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary; truncated families fleeing from what was once their home. The poet’s “valley of dying stars” is a deserted city whose skies howl with air-raid sirens.

War usurps the homeland; its shrapnels land in living rooms and kitchens and nurseries, destroying what belongs to us and what we belong to. War maims and disfigures; it vandalises our streets, burns our skies, reduces our schools to rubble. War cracks us open, quite literally; it exposes our innards and turns us into carrion. War lays siege to our freedom; it trespasses into our homes with its battle tanks, forcing us to surrender or to take flight.

In his novel Shame, published in 1983, Salman Rushdie tells of this urge to bolt, to escape, to take flight, an act that defies gravity: “Migration, n., moving, for instance in flight, from one place to another. To fly and to flee: both are ways of seeking freedom…” This fleeing, from one home that has been wrested away from us, towards another, hazy image of what might become home, entails losses, exquisite and irrevocable. We don’t just lose a country, we lose street corners and marketplaces; we lose mountains and rivers and familiar birdsong and the branches we swung from; we lose seasons and scents of them in the wind; we lose our gods, our saints, our pilgrimages, our festivals.

In his title essay from the collection Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, Rushdie describes a photograph taken in 1946. It is the picture of an old house, his childhood home in Bombay: “The house is rather peculiar — a three-storeyed gabled affair with tiled roofs and round towers in two corners, each wearing a pointy tiled hat.” The photograph prompts him to overturn the opening sentence of L P Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” It is a monochromatic reminder that “…it’s my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time.”

The past is a lost home that nostalgists reclaim by looking back, gathering slivers of memory and reconstructing a fragmented, inaccurate version that is nonetheless shot through with lavish love. But that exercise is for later, years later, after the fleeing, if the escapee is lucky enough to make a home elsewhere, if the escapee is free to indulge in nostalgia. For now, the sirens screech.

The writer is the author of Stillborn Season, a novel set amidst the anti-Sikh riots of 1984