The Monster-Citizens of India
Netflix India is back with another anthology of stories, but instead of Lust Stories we now have Ghost Stories. The movie looks like it is well on its way to becoming a “Mixed to Positive” reaction from critics and audience. The technical excellence of the movie is not my concern, even though I must acknowledge the brilliance of these movies. Ghost Stories spins some old tales in new ways and assures me that the Indian genre fiction scenario is moving to a better directed, written, and acted era. Perhaps we will may, in the near future, place the bid to have the names of Indian horror counted alongside enduring classics like The Shining and Shutter.
My concern is the rather perfectly-timed arrival of these stories, particularly story 3: Dibakar Banerjee’s Monster. The story begins with the arrival of an unnamed government clerk in the town of Beesghar (translated “Smalltown”) late at night. The town is empty except for two children—a boy from Beesghar and a slightly older girl from Saughar (translated “Bigtown”). Beesghar is a part of Saughar, but there have always been differences between them since Saughar seems to be economically well-off. In the present, there are no markers of these differences because, as the children ominously tell us, everyone has been eaten. There are cannibalistic zombie-like creatures on the streets of Beesghar that attack you the moment you speak or move in front of them. The only way to stay alive in this situation is staying indoors, eating raw onions, and drinking curdled milk; or, one can decide to join the zombies by eating human flesh. Towards the end, the clerk tries to make it out of Beesghar. This attempt ends with the little girl being eaten by her (former) father and the little boy bullied into eating human flesh. The clerk alone runs away from the monsters and falls into a pit in the ground where he faints. Later, he wakes up to find that the children are gone. A group of people in a Mahindra Jeep find him wildly beating his chest in anguish. They tell him that Beesghar has been abandoned for a month. Whatever happened must have been a figment of imagination. The decrepit state of Beesghar is a result of the actions of the inhabitants, actions that deserved having their home burnt down; Saughar residents did not have anything to do with it.
The a-historical town clash of Beesghar and Saughar somehow captures the complexity of present-day India. The meat-eating contention is not the Hindu-Muslim contention of beef; it is forcibly eating food that makes you a part of the mindless masses. Tanul Thakur of The Wire also noted how the conflict of Beesghar and Saughar becomes a dream for the clerk. He argues that Monster is a story about the movement towards a single culture through social media. There is certainly the suggestion that the more you speak, the more likely it is that the mindless hoards will attack you but Monster is hardly as simple as that. We never have the clerk coherently narrate the events to the outsiders. He does not even speak a word to them because he is so dumbstruck. Even as we see the woman in the car (who looks suspiciously like the behenji the clerk tried to hail in the middle of the story) feed the clerk, he starts to doubt the reality of his experience. What could he possibly tell these completely sane people from Saughar? How could he tell them that he saw people turning into monsters who went blind, who only feasted on fresh human flesh, even if it was one’s own daughter? Family ties no longer mattered in that frenzy to identify who is with us or against us. A history of peace and harmony means nothing in the face of these divisive borders.
The monsters themselves maybe stupid, but we know that the creature orchestrating these attacks is not. The furriest and ugliest of the monsters, the man who started it all by eating a citizen of Beesghar, is a shrewd creature. He easily recognises the fact that the boy and the clerk are not a part of “us”. Instead of eating both of them, the leader presents the boy with a choice: he can either eat the flesh of the girl or join the clerk that the leader intends to feast on. In this way, the leader manages to convert the last citizen of Beesghar into the indistinguishable mindlessness of Saughar. The boy accepts, and the last thinking bastion of Beesghar falls—there will no longer be voices against Saughar. The education of the boy actually comes from Saughar. He tells us that students from Beesghar went to Saughar to study because there was no opportunity to study in the small town. When the children of Beesghar make it to Saughar to study, the citizens of Saughar look on them as intruders. They do not value what the children of Beesghar bring with them—real world experience (which is perhaps why the boy survives as long as he does). The Beesghar kids, too, must become like the children of Saughar. The Big Town refuses to acknowledge that Small Town could have anything to offer, wiping out the traditions of Small Town. They are literally wiping out the only voice that could participate in the progress of Beesghar—an educated boy who can navigate the town’s traps and survive. They are wiping out the only voice that could say anything about the life in Beesghar before the disaster and tell us how the events took place that led to the downfall of Beesghar. Without the boy, the town may as well have been destroyed by ghosts and not monsters.
Uncertainty and an incommunicable terror define the lens that Monster offers us. The strength of the Saughar residents is such that they will not allow Beesghar to own its story. As soon as the clerk leaves Beesghar and steps into the vehicle of the Saughar residents, he is made to doubt the veracity of his own experience. No matter the remains of the carnage that run through Beesghar; since no one from Saughar is willing to accept the account of the clerk (or perhaps the earlier Beesghar residents), it means that it simply did not take place. After the attacks on JNU protestors on Sunday night, a Delhi Police member told us that no violent incidents had occurred. Or perhaps, the Saughar residents are right, and the Beesghar residents really did take actions that deserved fire and riots. That way, it does not matter which side ate which side first. It does not matter if it were ABVP students or JNUSU students who were beat up; it mattered that whoever said anything different should be put down. It does not matter whether the face on the TV is the face of the President of JNUSU or that of an ABVP student—even when we very well know that it is the face of Aishe Ghosh. The masked miscreants somehow entered the campus of a highly regarded educational institute and attacked several students and then left the campus like ghosts. They cannot be monsters because no one can vouch for their presence despite the several videos on the Internet. What this tells us is that our experience and our word means nothing in this world. The veracity of our experience holds no value if residents of Saughar do not verify them.
The last bastion, as I mentioned earlier, of Beesghar was the little boy, an unnamed student. He was the only one who stood between Beesghar and oblivion. Once the student is silenced from opposition, there is nothing that allows the employed adult, the clerk, to remember his own fear and trauma. Saughar is sovereign in deciding who is a part of us and who is the enemy.
Who is a monster and on what basis? Who is anti-national and on what basis? Who is a citizen and on what basis?
