The picture will not be erased. Young men waiting on a cold night for the train from Oslo to Stockholm, holding on desperately tight to identical bright blue kitbags stuffed with necessities provided by the Swedish government.
They were not Wajid, Hameed or Jansher anymore, with families and lives and days filled with moments. They were anonymous refugees from Afghanistan, suspicious strangers with unpronounceable names and unfamiliar customs.
We (a bunch of women from Asia, Africa and South America) had been on a visit to the IceHotel in Jukkasjarvi, 17 km from Kiruna, up in the Arctic Circle, where temperatures were mostly below -5 degrees centigrade. The train was late and that’s how we met Wajid and his friends – in the station’s waiting room. They had fled the fighting in Afghanistan and had applied for asylum in Sweden. While their papers were being processed, they had been housed in a camp in Kiruna. Today, they were moving to a camp in Stockholm.
Bollywood connect
When they discovered some of us in the group were Indian, they got excited. “We love Hindi films!” Wajid said as he spoke carefully in Hindi, with a Pran-in-Zanjeer accent. His friends smiled and nodded in agreement. And for the next half hour, all the conversation was about Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore, Amitabh Bachchan, Asha Parekh, Shashi Kapoor and all the glittering stars of the Hindi film firmament. For half an hour, the room was as warm as back home in Delhi or Chennai, maybe even Kabul and Kandahar.
Which is what prompted a member of our group to ask: “But why this place? It’s so cold here, why seek asylum here?” Wajid’s answer still rings in my ears: “When you are caught in a crossfire of bullets, never knowing every day whether you live or die today, any place is better.”
That story never ends – people being forced to leave their homes, as now in Syria, Kosovo, Albania, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, due to war and oppression. As European nations make cool-headed calculations about who can take whom, in the right proportions of course, even as Hungary builds a wall to keep them out, another image floods my memory: pictures of thousands and thousands of men, women and children fleeing the as-yet unborn Bangladesh, pouring into India.
Bright spots
No, that story never ends. Nor, surprisingly, the story of the reach that Hindi cinema has. This time, it’s a children’s centre in Kreuzberg, Berlin, crowded with perky, pesky, terribly pesky, Turkish immigrant kids. Many hands thrust into my lap scrapbooks with posters of Kareena Kapoor, Preity Zinta, Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol, Hrithik Roshan, Madhuri Dixit…. “I love Hrithik!” says one bright-eyed girl wearing a head scarf, as others pledged other loves.
“You know Shah Rukh Khan? Shah Rukh? Meet him? Meet him?” asks one particular little fellow. When I say no, I feel all the guilt of his disappointment. The only way I can make up is by dancing to ‘Chhaiyya chhaiyya’ with them – they know the words, I don’t! As for the moves…
So my question is: Are reel gods the real gods?