To get to the room where Irom Sharmila has spent a majority of her protest life one can pass the corridor of the main block of Imphal’s Jawaharlal Nehru hospital, turn around a flight of stairs and another long corridor. Or one can hope to enter directly from a separate block where she stays. It has its own entrance. The grill gates are always locked. Sometimes the wooden door is shut as well. Waiting visitors dare not even peep. The doors open for those cleared by the Manipur government. Often, many sit outside on the green granite steps, their heads leaning on the light blue distempered wall. There is nothing else you can do. No window, no crevice opens into Sharmila’s world.
Once inside permissions are verified, gifts are checked. The air is mildly sweet and vaguely antiseptic. Entry to the room is possible only when the Jailor arrives. A nurse station is just outside. On the table are scattered sheets with readings of her latest parameters. Opposite, a blackboard lists the names of patients occupying various rooms. Occupant, I Sharmila hasn’t changed for years.
When the faded curtain on the doorway is pushed aside, it takes a few seconds for the eyes to adjust. Sharmila is sitting on a single bed, a blanket, books and soft toys, egg yolk in colour with exaggerated red beaks, that have only recently become a part of her life encircle her. Sharmila is slightly possessive about them. Many who come to meet her aren’t sure of what to expect, certainly not a forty plus human rights activist who has soft toys sharing space with Ingrid Betancourt’s ‘Even Silence has an end’. By any hospital standard this is a spacious room. Red plastic chairs are brought in for visitors, but nearly all dwarf as Sharmila sits on her legs in a yoga posture. She makes them uncomfortable, she can tell. Their eyes zoom to the bandage on her nose, the point from where the Ryles tube enters the nostril. Most are curious of how far down it goes or how it feels. She wants to assure them, she is just like them, but all she says, “this is not normal, how can it be”, holding up the tube in her hand, the thin PVC pipe, 16mm in diameter that goes down about 15 inches and has been an extension of her body, forever.
When she was first arrested and shifted to the hospital, Sharmila often shared the room with arrested injured women cadre of insurgent groups. Ideologies are immaterial in these four walls. So are the methods people choose to express them. They knew a great deal about war and she a little about peace.
“I was vaguely waiting for something to happen, when I was first taken in. I didn’t know what, but something.” Sharmila told me years later in 2008 when released in what has been an annual ritual (Those charged under Section 309 of IPC for attempt to suicide can be held for maximum of a year).
Every day Sharmila gets up at 430AM, like most in Manipur where sunrise is early, takes a bath, washes her clothes. She uses cotton and spirit to clean her teeth, this so that the mildest rinse of water does not touch her lips. Every water slips through her hands, touches her pores, yet she hasn’t sipped a drop for almost fifteen years now.
“I don’t feel thirst anymore, I don’t know what it’s like,” she would say to me nudging me over the elbow.
What she craves for or warms up to is the soft hum of a friendly conversation or a song. There haven’t been many. Between visitors, doctors, human rights activists and family talk has mostly been about fast and funds.
Like women in her family Sharmila was born with raven black hair, unlike others she keeps it open, uncombed, parted in the middle. From time to time her eyes brown, filled with fiery intelligence, squint into one line of untainted indifference reserved for a few: the ones who claim to be her biggest supporters and those who say they’ll keep in touch. It’s hard to spot this indifference but years in isolation have made her an icon, unreal, untouchable. A heroic long distance runner on whom hinges the entire burden of the anti AFSPA agitation, allowing everyone else to be content simply rallying behind her or offering moral support. After nearly a decade and a half even the request that she had done enough and no longer needed to continue this hunger strike has been a half-hearted one.
Not everyone wants the AFSPA to go, I mentioned to her once.
“People get used to anything,” she said, talking of the draconian law, though I have often wondered if she was talking about herself.
Descriptions of Sharmila rarely dare to venture beyond her fast, her unique feeding form and a resilient spirit. To describe her solely like this is to leave the most important parts, and not get her at all, gawky but infinitely comfortable in her own skin. Her hands with inches of long, chipped nails are lovely and supple. Beneath her physical confidence are layers of timid shyness and a childish despair. The urge to grow and live intensely is powerful.
It could be love. That prickly thorn that caused trepidation and fear that the anti-AFSPA campaign would lose its steam if a woman fell in love with a man. The names Irom Sharmila and Desmond Coutinho, together are met with silence or disdain. But Sharmila has kept in touch, neither abandoning her protest, nor her love and Desmond has remained persuasive. Love has changed her, guiding her most private thoughts and her simplest intentions. She talks of conviction, of an ordinary life, a child and satyagraha all in the same breath.
Time changes its nature in prisons and hospitals. In this cosmogony it both runs out and drags itself. There is no way to imagine what evenings are in hospitals, or prisons for that matter. Sharmila would often lie on her bed and mull over things, endlessly. Years later the words of Aung Suu Kyi, given to her by a visitor came to her rescue. At the 2012 Jawaharal Lal Nehru Memorial lecture Su Kyyi spoke of “mulling over a word…pastimes in which prisoners, particularly prisoners of conscience, engage, not just to fill empty hours but from a need to understand better, and perhaps to justify, the actions and decisions that have led them away from the normal society of other human beings”.
“Eche (elder sister) went through this”, Sharmila said. The passage had been underlined.
As children, Sharmila and her siblings were not sent to the government school. Their father insisted they study at a private school. Dressed in white and red uniforms the children would walk about two kilometers and participate in all things Indian, 15th August, Republic Day. Sharmila may tell you this story if asked about why she opposes AFSPA and therefore the Indian Army. If you have the patience for her pauses, she may be able to articulate that this is how the debate has been subverted, opposing AFSPA does not mean opposing the military or supporting underground groups.
“We want democratic government in our state, by our leaders, not democracy of armed soldiers,” she said.
Anubha Bhonsle is working on a book on Manipur and Irom Sharmila. She can be contacted at abhonsle123@gmail.com
