Life Sentence #4

A weekly series, in which I post a single sentence of more than 500 words

If you are in north India or for some reason surrounded by a statistically significant number of north Indians, then with just a little effort you may be able to find people who know a thing or two about Muzaffarnagar, who, if asked, will first speak about its high crime rate or the raw materials thereof, i.e., casteism and communalism and doltish-cultish masculinity, though when these top-of-mind items are exhausted stray mentions of Muzaffarnagar’s complex jaggery-futures market or its steel factories may be made as well, and if the conversation is in English you will note that the suffix nagar doesn’t ensure that they call the city a ‘city’ in English, that the word ‘town’ is preferred, qualified almost always with the adjective ‘small’, and in this you must not find anything dissonant, for if metropolises with as many residents as a European country are adamant about being called cities, Muzaffarnagar takes no umbrage at being called a small town, though if the words ‘small town’ bring up pre-cooked visions of an idyllic elsewhere where people bump into acquaintances in the market and milk is purchased right next to the buffalo, where all that men wear is masterji-made bush-shirts (which they call boo-shirts), where the town drunk’s addiction is everyone’s business, and where everyone is terrorised by that one terrible crotch-pinching cop, then it must be made clear, for good old perspective and a sense of scale if nothing else, that there are nearly as many people in Muzaffarnagar as there are in the main city area of Boston in the US of A—nearly sixty per cent, to be precise, which is admittedly not the same as ‘nearly as many,’ albeit enough to present the two numbers as belonging to the same order of magnitude—and, fair enough, there is no Muzaffarnagar Consulting Group, no robotics company called Muzaffarnagar Dynamics, no TV show called Muzaffarnagar Legal, and so, yes, it is true that no less-than-ridiculous comparison can be made between the two cities in terms of their cultural or economic import, but the point here is only to give you pause before you lapse into using Muzaffarnagar’s smallness in some select matters to think of it as small, to think of it as a place where it is not possible for aspirations, frustrations, conspiracies, love stories, murders, kidnappings, land grabs, communal tensions, and that mother of all continuities, the economy, to play out their full complexity and scale, or to think of it as a place where there is nothing grand, where heroism and villainy and middling morality operate only in microcosms, where antagonisms are always apparent, where backstories are boring tales sans secrets, and so now, with that pause paused at, your attention might as well be brought to the first half of the city’s name, to that Muzaffar, whose provenance only the most erudite person in your hypothetical north-Indian congregation is likely to bring up, and that person shall have to talk of the early 17th century, of the reign of Shah Jahan, when a mansabdar named Sayyid Muzaffar Khan Barha founded or enlarged or reconstructed a town (it couldn’t have been more than a town then) in the Sarvat pargana, a town to which his son, Munawwar Lashkar Khan Barha, lent his father’s name, and here there is a possibility, especially if you are someone who focuses on words, that your mind thickens around this last expression about lending a name—for who is to say that this lending was indeed intended as lending, as an arrangement for a certain duration, as if what the town owed to Muzaffar mian could one day be completely paid off and when that day arrived the town could erase his name from its own just as easily as it had acquired it—though you will, no doubt, soon unshackle yourself from useless ratiocination, simply because we are in the age of re-naming, treading a rather straight path, whereby the actors of a new history anoint themselves as the new name-lenders and go on to annul the debt to Muzaffar mian by decree, such that Muzaffarnagar becomes Laxminagar or Sanatannagar or Yoginagar or Godsenagar or whatever else suits the new mansabdars and shahs, and we lose what we lose in a mere snap, without coming to care much for the loss.