"The Home - Coming" - Arun Joshi
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- The Eternal silence of These Infinite Crowds - N.C.Chaudhari
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The Author:-
Arun Joshi (born 1939) is the author of four novels, "The Foreigner", "The Strange Case of Billy Biswas", "The Apprentice" and "The Labyrinth". A few years back he received the Sahitya Academy Award for his works of fiction. He lives in Delhi and he is in business.
Introduction to the story "The Home-Coming":-
This story refers to the horrible life and experiences of a man who joins the army to go on the eastern front of Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. He fought in Dinajpur. He had been commissioned only a year ago. In the battle field, half his men were killed during two weeks. Nine died the very first night.
He returns home and he is welcomed warmly by his fiancée and others His fiancée was gaily dressed. She asks him if the war had been bad. He says that it was all-right but half of his men were unfortunately killed. His fiancée had been anxiously waiting for him ever since.
They talked of events in the war - of air raids and of things they had seen on the T.V. She also said that because of her being confined to the four walls of the house and because of her eating too much, she had grown fat and she wanted to diet but that his mother and others were not in favour of her dieting as that caused anaemia which was bad for child-bearing.
Then the man talked of hunger. Every person at the war-front had been hungry and always hungry. After the ceasefire he supervised a relief station and found people waiting for their rations and when they got provisions of food they consumed them in no time and they were hungry as before and were waiting for the next meal. The old people starved and died. He, therefore, desired his fiancée not to talk of dieting.
Before going on the war-front, there was the talk of his marriage with his fiancée, but now, his ideas were changed. He had seen deaths and deaths all around in the fields of battles. What was the meaning of one man's marriage and one man's life. He had been wondering what life was all about. So he wanted to tell someone about his own thoughts. He had no brother and his father, being too busy with his business had no time for his son. He had sister but she, too, had changed and she was busy with her own ways of life. She, too, was not interested in talking to him.
That all his friends had changed and none shared his thoughts. He wanted to talk to someone about his thoughts regarding life but he found none to talk to. He could not smoke with his friends as he had taken a lot of sulphur dioxide in an artillery barrage and he had been told to keep off smoking. But he did drink.
Then, the man talks of a boy who had been once his classmate. Now, he was a poet. The poet was very keen to define genocide. He said it was important to define genocide because how else would one know whether genocide had taken place. He said that many things happened but they did not meet the definition of genocide. Every one was impressed by the poets talk. They talked of war, simply listened to them. He did not know what they had read in the newspapers but a lot of things they said were incorrect. They had their own how a war was fought.
Then, after dinner everyone was a little dizzy. The poet recited something but his face was death-pale. Every one became very serious. He talked of the Golden Bengal bleeding under a violet sky. But the man himself had actually seen different things in the war fields. He had seen the ghastly drama of carnage, of charred bodies of children stuck on bayonets in front of huts. There was the school of girls that had been the brothel for a battalion and a battalion was a thousand men. So the man told the poet that if one were to write poems one would have to get it all in.
Further, the man talked of the Vir Chakra. That had been given to him for his bravery in the battle field where nine of his own men had been killed and he had often thought of that night of carnage. Also he talked of attacking an outpost when there was a lot of shelling and machine-gun fire. Some of them were killed. There was a bayonets charge which was very ghastly and which kept him troubling
So while he was on leave, things kept swirling about his head. He lay wake most nights trying to make sense out of things. What he would do if there were other wars and other bayonets charges. Sometimes he thought of leaving the army. But in the morning there were parties and movies and dancing and the flowers in their garden. There was the mother insisting that he should marry straightaway and, of-course, his father was awfully busy in his business earning a lot. He did not know how to fit it all together or whether it all could be fitted together.
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