In writer and journalist Uddipana Goswami’s latest book, The Women Who Would Not Die: Stories, there’s one sentence that encapsulates everything that Goswami wants her readers to know, understand, and absorb.
Blurring the lines between fiction and reality in the story This Is How We Lived, she writes, “(…) everywhere in Assam bombs were exploding, planted either by the insurgents or by the security forces posing as insurgents; and people were being killed, arrested and maimed for the crimes they had committed against the system or to cover up the crimes the system had committed against them; and politicians and activists were shouting hoarse about real or inflated injustices against our community; while we just lived on from day to day.”
A collection of 12 stories from conflict-ridden Assam, Goswami’s book takes you on a ride, at the end of which there is rage, pity, a little hope… but mostly tears.
Through her many characters, the writer puts across a simple hypothesis for her reader: The intergenerational trauma of growing up in a conflict zone is such that you’ll suffer knowingly or unknowingly, longing for a home that you can’t go back to, or a home that never was.
While the different stories put focus on the tussles of power between the insurgents and the Indian army, the police inaction, the mass scale of killings, disappearances, violence, the infighting between communities, and the distrust, otherness, and discrimination against everyone who isn’t Axomiya, there is also an insight into the lives of those who just are torn between the two ends—having lost most of their living through a movement that had started to seem futile.
Amid all that and more, what stands out is the intense power play when it comes to gender minorities in the region. In Never Got Written, the last story in the collection, Goswami’s protagonist says out loud to herself, “At his (her son’s) age, I was walking to school alone, keeping my eyes on the ground as Ma said to, so I didn’t get raped by some soldier from the Indian Army.”
In another story, the writer talks of how it was common that women would go missing for a night or two, and upon returning, wash themselves compulsively in the river. Everyone would know what had happened, but no one would bat an eyelid because they wanted to live, and this is the price they had to pay.
And in the other stories, the tales of women who, if spared by the insurgents and the army, would suffer at the hands of their husbands and fathers. It’s to an extent where the women justify the rapes saying that the men have a hard life. One of them says, “We do not want to be killed, so we make excuses for them,” even if that means stiffening at the sight of men, having nightmares, and never being able to lead a ‘normal’ life.
What Goswami does brilliantly is that she spells out most things as they are. There’s no subtlety even when it comes to gruesome gender and state crimes — this then becomes a good primary reading for people who might not be aware of what it means to “grow up in a militarised hinterland, made peripheral and expendable,” as the writer puts it.
In conflict, there’s no winning. It’s as Goswami had written earlier this year for Scroll.in, “The necessity of this violence is far outweighed by its tragic futility because it turns victims into perpetrators, dehumanising and brutalising both victims and perpetrators, and habituating war-torn societies to conflict. Everybody loses.”