Student Voice in Jalandhar, India: Adult Voice in Tehran, Iran.

In March 2019, I was in Jalandhar in Punjab, India, listening to the voices of young people. It was a tense time. India and Pakistan had come dangerously close to a wider conflict following the Pulwama attack and the subsequent military escalation in Kashmir. Amid the political statements, television coverage and competing national narratives, I heard a poem written by a young student, Simran Bhardwaj.

The poem has stayed with me ever since. It imagined the final journey of a soldier and moved between grief and pride: grief for the wife, child and parents he would leave behind, and pride in the belief that he had given his life for his country.

I wrote about that encounter at the time here because it seemed to me that the voices of young people and poets were doing something that political commentary often could not. They were bringing war back to the scale of the individual human being. Seven years later, I was reminded of Simran’s poem in a very different place and in very different circumstances.

At the UK launch of When the Sparrows Grow Anxious: Diaries from Tehran at War at the International Bomber Command Centre in Lincoln, the book’s author, Ali Asghar Seidabadi, joined us online from Tehran. Before a wide-ranging discussion with the audience, Ali read a short autobiographical piece entitled I Wanted to Be a Fighter Pilot which you can rad about here.

Ali survived the bombing. His dream did not. The connection with the poem I had heard in Jalandhar struck me forcefully. Both pieces begin in territory that is familiar in stories about war: patriotism, sacrifice, courage, duty and the idea of giving oneself for one’s country: but both gradually move somewhere else: from nation to individual. from soldier to family, from public language to private consequence.

Simran’s imagined soldier is not simply a figure in uniform. He becomes a husband, a father and a son. His sacrifice has consequences for the people who love him. Ali’s fighter pilot ceases to be an abstract heroic figure when the person beneath the falling bombs suddenly looks like his baby brother. In both pieces, family punctures abstraction.

There is also an important difference between the two pieces.

Simran’s poem ultimately holds grief and patriotic pride together. Her soldier mourns what he is leaving behind, but still takes pride in the idea that his life has been given for his country. Ali’s story travels in the opposite direction. As a teenager, he too understood death through the language of martyrdom. Yet the sight of the wounded child destroys his desire to become part of the machinery delivering that violence.

One piece moves from grief towards pride, the other moves from patriotic aspiration towards rejection. Neither cancels out the other, but placed side by side, they reveal how complicated the emotional landscape of war can be. Love of one’s country can be real; courage can be real; sacrifice can be real and the human cost can still become unbearable.

There is another connection between them which perhaps matters even more: both are shaped by young eyes. Simran was herself a young student attempting imaginatively to enter the experience of an adult soldier and Ali’s story is told by an adult, but the decisive consciousness within it belongs to the child and teenager he once was.

Decades later, amid the sounds of missiles, drones, air defences and fighter aircraft over Iran, the memory returned again and then something changed. Ali began to write and his writing eventually became When the Sparrows Grow Anxious began partly as a way of responding to friends around the world asking whether he and his family were safe. Gradually, those messages became a record of ordinary life during extraordinary circumstances.

Writing began to occupy the mental space previously filled by nightmares which seems important too. Stories, after all, do not undo violence and poems do not automatically stop bombing but they can prevent the human being from disappearing behind the event.

That was what struck me in Jalandhar in 2019 and it’s also what struck me in Lincoln this week. At both moments, the dominant narratives around conflict were enormous: states, borders, military action, international politics. And yet what stayed with me was something very small: a young Indian student imagining the family of a dying soldier and an Iranian writer remembering a bleeding child who looked like his baby brother. Sometimes it is the smallest voice in the room that tells us the most important thing.

Here is the poem of Simran Bhardwaj, from Cambridge International School in Phagwara:, गम  से  फखर  तक  का  आखिरी  सफर (The Last Trip from Gam to Fakhar.)

Shown below in Hindi and its English translation, she mourns how a day dedicated to love became a day of tragedy through the eyes of a dying soldier.  Her performance reminded me that whilst newspaper reports and academic papers explain something of our history, it takes the word of the poet and the voices of children to provide a deeper insight into our humanity and the struggles in which we find ourselves. There are no solutions to the region’s conflicts in Simran’s poetry and no objective analysis of the historical factors which have led to the current situation: just the clear, direct and plaintive voice of a young child whose past and future lives have been, and will be,  informed by that regional conflict.

गम  से  फखर  तक  का  आखिरी  सफर

मज़िल थी बड़ी दूर जनाब,

पर हमें में भी कम नहीं थे देश सेवा के जज़्बात…..

बाँध कफन सिर्फ़ पर और हाथों में लिए बंदूक,

घाटी की हसीन वादियों से निकल रहे थे हम……..

कभी घाटी की ख़ूबसूरती को निहारते,

तो कभी बीते हुए वक़्त से अपने परिवार की यादों को……

पर हुआ ही ना एहसास हमें कि वक़्त बदल रहा है अपनी करवट,

दिल में मेरे मची थी एक अजीब सी हरकत…….

मंज़िल की दूरी जैसे-जैसे हो रही थी कम,

वैसे ही हमारे क़ाफ़िले से जा टकराए यहाँ हमारी मौत का वो आख़िरी बम…….

एक झटके में टूटी हमारी साँसों की डोरी,

फिर भी जारी थी हमारी ज़िंदगी और मौत से एक आख़िरी सीनाज़ोरी……

चाहकर भी चल ना सका बस हमारा,

आख़िर टूट ही गया जो देश से था वादा हमारा……..

ए ख़ुदा काश़ तु बख़श देता कुछ मोहलत इन कम्बख्त साँसों को,

तो इतना बता जाता कि……

ग़म ये नहीं की शहादत नसीब हुई,

पर ग़म और शिकायत तो उसके तरीक़े से है…….

ग़म ये नहीं की शहादत नसीब हुई,

पर ग़म इस बात का है कि आख़िरी बार माँ भारती की सेवा न कर सका……..

ग़म ये नहीं कि मेरी हम सफ़र का साथ छूट गया,

पर ग़म इस बात का है कि उसका मंगलसूत्र उतर गया……..

ग़म ये नहीं कि मोहब्बत के दिन फ़ना मैं हो गया,

पर ग़म ये है कि अपनी हम सफ़र से किये वो वादे मैं अधूरे छोड़ गया……

ग़म ये नहीं कि मेरे बच्चों के ऊपर से बाप का साया छिन गया,

पर ग़म ये है कि अपनी ही औलाद को पहली नज़र भी ना देख सका………

ग़म ये नहीं कि मेरे माँ-बाप के बुढ़ापे की लाठी छिन गयी,

पर ग़म ये है कि जिन बाँहों में बचपन बीता आज उन्हीं बाँहों को सुनी छोड़ आया हूँ, तड़पता छोड़ आया हूँ………

सुना है खुदा आख़िरी वक़्त पर इन्सान झूठ नहीं बोलता,

तो आज अपने इस आख़िरी वक़्त में मैं भी अपना एक आख़िरी सच बता जाता हूँ,

कि मुझे ग़म से ज़्यादा फ़ख्र है……

फ़ख्र है इस बात का कि मैं एक हिंदुस्तानी सपूत हूँ …..

फ़ख्र है इस बात का कि माँ भारती ने मुझे चुना है अपनी सेवा के लिए……

फ़ख्र है इस बात का कि मोहब्बत के दिन अपने मुल्क से मोहब्बत मैं निभा सका…..

फ़ख्र है इस बात का कि मेरे प्राणों की आहुति मेरे देश के लिए थी…….

फख़्र है इस बात का कि आख़िरी वक़्त में भी मेरे तन पर सेना की वर्दी थी और मेरी आँखें फख़्र से ऊपर थी…….

फख़्र है इस बात का कि सोने चाँदी के बदले मेरा कफन तिरंगा था, मेरा कफन तिरंगा था,मेरा कफन तिरंगा था…..

The Last Trip from Gam to Fakhar

The destination was very far away,

But we also had high enthusiasm for serving our sacred motherland……

Tying shrouds on our heads and having rifles in our hands,

Passing through the valley of Kashmir the only heaven on earth……..

Sometimes beholden with the beauty of valley,

And sometimes lost in the memories of my family from the time passed by……….

But we didn’t realised that time is transforming itself,

Though I felt a strange movement from depth of my heart……….

As the destination was coming closer and closer,

The bomb of our death on the moving vehicle approached our convoy………

Just with one jerk the string of our life was broken,

Still we were continuing our struggle between our life and death for one last time…………

Trying our best to assert our will on our pre-decided destiny of ultimate death,

But we weren’t able to do so………

At last the promise to our motherland was broken……

Oh Almighty! I wish that you had lend me with some more breathes, so that I could tell everyone that:

Grief isn’t about being martyred,

But my complaint is about the way of being martyred……

Grief isn’t about my death being so early,

But my sorrow is about being not able to render my services to my nation for last time……

Grief isn’t about leaving my better half forever,

But my pain is for that her wedding necklace has been removed and her vermilion is cleared after my death…….

Grief isn’t about that I had died on the day of love,

But my sadness is about the promises which I made to my better half that will remained incomplete……..

Grief isn’t about that my children has lost the shade of their father over their heads,

But my mourning is being for the reason that I wasn’t able to see my child’s face even for first time……….

Grief isn’t about that my parents had lost their only support of old age,

But my regret is about that I had left those arms vacant and yearning in which I had grown…….

Oh God ! I had heard that at the time of death a person never lies. So, today at my final and last stage I shall tell my final and last truth of my life to this whole world that instead of being in grief I am highly proud:

I am proud of being an Indian warrior….

I am proud that Mother Bharat has chosen me for her service…….

I am proud of being able to fulfil my love for my motherland on the day of love……

I am proud that at my last movement my eyes were open high with pride…..

I am proud that at last movement also I was wearing the uniform of army on my body…….

I am proud that my life has been laid down for my country……

I am proud that instead of gold and silver my shroud was our national flag tirangaa, our national flag tirangaa.

By Simran Bhardwaj, February 2019