“I was only a few weeks short of turning three when I lost my father,” begins Gurmehar Kaur in the introduction to her memoir, Small Acts of Freedom. What follows is a heartbreaking account of Kaur as a child seeing her father’s body brought into the house one day, wrapped in the tricolour and then placed in a wooden box. “What is this?” the child Gulgul asks, pointing to the box. “It is a dream,” says her mother. The dream is soon carried away and 21 gun shots are fired. Gulgul is told that her father died fighting in the Kargil war, and that she should be proud of him. “I understand,” she says, with the air of a world-weary woman. “But, when will he wake up?”
Gulgul struggles over the next few years to grasp the meanings of war, death and patriotism, and the import of her loss. What do people mean when they say that her papa can’t return? And why is she expected to show grief? “I know I am supposed to cry… I don’t always want to. Most of the times, I just want to talk more about him,” she says. War teaches her that the world is black and white — Pakistan and India. When she discovers by accident her Nani’s passport one day, Gulgul is stunned. “We have a Pakistani in our home,” she wails to her mother. “Is she also Muslim?”
Kaur strings together memories collected from family members to form a lucid story. This is as much about three women — her grandmother Amarjeet, her mother Raji, and Kaur herself, all of them armed with an indomitable spirit — than it is about a child longing for her father. In a narrative that goes back and forth, Kaur tells her own story and the stories of two happy marriages cruelly cut short — her grandmother’s and her mother’s — and how these women raise their children on their own.
It’s a speedy read. The language is simple and straightforward and the writing comes from the heart. Kaur has been told that she advocates a message of peace that is facile, but the messages of love in the book are so profound that they could only come from a child. The child doesn’t speak in a voice suitable for her age, though — Gulgul says or feels what Kaur imagines she would have said or felt. “I can sense my blood boiling… my mother has betrayed me,” little Gulgul says oddly, when she’s all of five. The epilogue is poignant, save an avoidable saccharine letter from Kaur to her father. Why underline what has already been spelt out?
This is a tribute from Kaur to her father Captain Mandeep Singh. But, it also hails the unsung heroes, the gritty women who deserve their own badges of honour for picking up the pieces of their lives torn apart by war.
Small Acts of Freedom ; Gurmehar Kaur, Penguin Random House, ₹399.
