Confession on my birthday

I thank all the friends who greeted me on 10 May with birthday wishes. But I have a confession. 10 May is not my date of birth.

Beg your pardon. I don’t know my actual date of birth. My mother, who is illiterate, does not know. My semi literate late father knew the cards in rummy which caused his loss but did not care to record my date of birth. No one knows. No birth certificate from hospital. I was born at home in the village.

So how did I get the date of birth? It was given arbitrarily by the village (Raramuthiraikottai) school teacher when I got admitted in the first grade.

My case was not unique. Most of my classmates were also given date of birth by the teacher.

Every year the teacher will round up the village kids around the age of five and arrange an admission ceremony on the day of Saraswati Pooja, a festival celebrated for Saraswati, the goddess of learning.

Our elementary school of about thirty students had two teachers. Our school was a single room thatched hut where all the students from class 1 to 5 sat in the same room on the floor. The classes were separated into different corners or wall sides. Everyone could hear and see what is happening in the other four classes.

None of us celebrated birthdays in the class or school or street. It was unheard of among my village friends. We never got new dress for birthdays. We had to wait for Diwali festival, when everyone got new dress.

We never sang “happy birthday to you” in the village. We learnt ABCD English in the fifth grade.

After class five, some of my friends and me joined the Higher Elementary School (grade six to eight) in the neighbouring bigger village Mariammankovil, about four kms from ours. The school got upgraded to High School when we passed out from eighth standard. So we continued for three more years and finished eleventh grade. We never had any birthday parties in the school.

Then I moved to Pushpam college in Poondi, four kms walk from my village. Even my college friends never had any birthday parties. Funny eh?

I did not celebrate on 10 May 2020. I have never celebrated in the last 67 years. I don’t feel like it. I feel shy.

I do not get a sense of joy or a celebratory feeling with the song in English “Happy birthday to you”. It feels unnatural. In Tamil culture, many things are unsaid; wishes unexpressed; greetings undeclared. But unstated feelings are understood and implicit.

I pretend to be modern, cosmopolitan and 'passionate about Latin America' but deep inside, I am still the same boy from the village, filled with insecurity, ignorance, uncertainty and the fear that some day I will be exposed for my incorrect date of birth or that others will find out my about my true self. The truth is..I don't know my date of birth nor my true self... and I ask myself as in the song of Bhaagapirivinai film of 1959,
“ ஏன் பிறந்தாய் மகனே…..ஏன் பிறந்தாயோ “ ( why were you born son.. why were you born )

For whom the bell tolls- novel by Ernest Hemingway

I just finished this novel about the Spanish civil war. Hemingway has brought out the horrors of  war in which peasants and international volunteers participate, besides the professional soldiers. A number of international volunteers join on the side of the republicans to fight against General Franco’s Fascism.  Some of the volunteers are intellectuals and poets motivated by lofty ideals of freedom and democracy; Some are hardcore communists who are loyal to Soviet Union and speak the language of Comintern; and then there are peasants who do not understand any of the ideals for which the two sides are fighting. Who they support is decided by the simple need for survival. Some of them fight for the spoils. They are quick to strip the dead enemy’s clothes, boots and firearms.

In the villages, families settle old scores using the opportunity of the war. Since they do not have proper fire arms, they use sticks and stones. There is one gruesome scene in which the villagers line up the landlords and shop owners, beat them with clubs and throw the half dead victims over a cliff. Before the execution, the victims are allowed to pray in the local church. They emerge from the church door one and pass between the two rows of the drunken peasants who tease and taunt the victims before hitting them to kill. It is said that this is based on true stories.

 The hero of the novel, Robert Jordan, is a professor of Spanish in a US university. He is one of those fired by idealism to join the Republican side. He develops a brotherhood with the others who are engaged in the Republican cause. Tasked with the job of blowing up a bridge, he goes about the job dispassionately and single mindedly. He knows that death could await him the next day but the danger does not make him flinch from the mission. While staying with the villagers who provide logistical support, he falls in love with Maria, an innocent young girl. 

Hemingway has imbued the novel with the authentic Spanish characters who are peasants, bullfighters, gypsies, and guerilla fighters. He has used typical Spanish phrases and dialogues and given a flavor of the local culture. There are two characters who make a strong impression. One is Maria, the simple and uneducated rural girl who falls in love with Jordan. Orphaned and traumatized by the brutal killing of her parents by the Fascists, she is helpless and hopeless. She presents herself to Jordan with unconditional love, complete faith, obedience and surrender. She cannot even express her love and feelings, since she does not have the vocabulary. She does not even know how to kiss. She wants to be a wife but does not know all the duties of a wife. The love is just plain, pure and primal. There is no romance or flowers or poems. There is no talk of immortal love or 'I can't live without you' dialogue. Just a few glances, gestures and getting the bodies together in the sleeping bag in the night. The second character is Pilar, the older woman who sees through the men, with her long and rough experience. She speaks the language of survival, courage and pragmatism, going beyond emotions and sentiments. But she has an inner tenderness with which she takes care of Maria like a mother and encourages Jordan's love for Maria.

Hemingway portrays vividly the emotions running inside a bullfighter while facing the bull, the time before entering the ring and the feelings afterwards. A fearless hero in front of the charging bull is so afraid of bulls outside the ring. He cannot even bear to see the image of bulls in photos and decorations. 

Hemingway wrote this novel not just on the basis of a writer’s imagination but based on his actual experience in the battlefield. This is evident in the intensity of play of emotions and the extensive minute details of the firearms. He was in the front lines as a war correspondent with sympathy and solidarity for the cause of the Republicans. It was while covering this war that he fell in love with Martha Gellhorn, another veteran American war correspondent and writer.

The only problem with the novel is that it is too long. It does not have a gripping story to sustain the length. I have read many longer novels and wished that they would not end. Not this one. One gets lost in the unending dialogues between the peasant characters and with the protagonist. Some of these conversations are meandering, meaningless and repetitive. One feels trapped too long in the forests of the Sierra de Guadarrama hills where the protagonist is staying to carry out his job of blowing up the bridge. 

One small disappointment for me. I expected to see in the novel some Spanish poems and literary references. The Spanish civil was called as a "poets' war" since so many poets and writers from Spain and around the world participated on the Republican side and even recited poems in the front lines. Octavio Paz, Cesar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda from Latin America were among the famous poets who took part in the war against Fascism. The Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca was murdered by the fascists. The Spanish poetry of this period is so intense with the sufferings from the war. But Hemingway has decided not to touch the literary part of the war in this novel.