Why must I be free? Who wants freedom?
…………..When a prisoner says such things after being released from jail, one wonders: what exists in this world that makes a person want to remain in chains? What hope makes even prison feel like home, making one reluctant to leave? What enchantment makes a person willingly turn away from the light and air of a free world?
Malayalam writer Bashir was sentenced to two years for sedition. Maintaining good relations with other prisoners, guards, and jail officials, his days passed quite pleasantly. Everyone liked him for his simplicity, sense of humor, humanity, and above all, his literary talent. He easily obtained cigarettes, tea, dried fish, and writing paper from everyone. He smoked bidis, wandered from cell to cell. His days were spent tending rose gardens, writing bits and pieces, chatting. Before completing even one year in jail, the prisoners in neighboring cells were released—the government freed political prisoners under some special consideration, but his name wasn’t on the list. He became alone. Days began passing through extreme loneliness and despair. A few days before that incident, one prisoner was sentenced to death. Before dying, he wanted tea and paan. The jail guard came to Bashir for tea. While preparing tea and discussing the mental state of the prisoner awaiting death, Bashir told the guard, “Tell him to keep courage in his heart. Death can be embraced in two ways. Weeping. Laughing. Tell him to accept death with a smile.” Yet the same Bashir, when he didn’t see his own name on the list of freed prisoners, became deeply melancholy, agitated, and irritated. He spent time walking through empty corridors and the garden. He talked with flowers and plants, quarreled with squirrels. And kept planning how to escape from jail. We hear about his mental condition from his own mouth: How easy it is to give advice to others! Face it with a smile! I said it, and it was done!……..An hour later there will be hanging, one can advise such a person to face death with a smile, but when it comes to oneself, even imprisonment cannot be accepted with a smile. This is reality!
Why did the same Bashir want to remain in jail? Why was he instantly disappointed upon hearing of his release?
Consider this: two people of opposite genders chatting in Facebook inbox day after day, neither having ever seen the other, never even having heard each other’s voice, not knowing whether the profile pictures or the photos being exchanged in inbox are real or fake, sometimes the person on the other end doesn’t even have a profile picture, refuses to share any photo even when asked, they don’t know if they’ll ever meet or speak, yet why do they continue chatting as if they’ve known each other for ages, developing understanding of feelings and emotions between them, this virtual communication eventually transcending mere friendship to transform into love, sometimes they come to Facebook only to chat with each other, waiting eagerly on Messenger, anxiously anticipating when the other will come online, this yearning, love, hurt, and attraction for an ID—does it have no meaning at all? Whether it means anything to us or not, for them it might mean life itself! When, how, why the human heart becomes desperate for someone, and that desperation becomes the main part of daily existence—it’s hard to say. If the profile pictures and sent photos are real, sometimes thoughts align too, then they’ve already met in a way, it’s natural for two lonely people to feel the excitement of being close to each other. The purity and intensity of this feeling binds them together. Then they simply cannot separate from each other. The inbox wall itself keeps them alive, being imprisoned in the Facebook-jail becomes life for them. If ever it happens that Facebook becomes inaccessible for some reason, then that taste of freedom seems like death to them. The punishment of freedom becomes unbearable compared to the joy of captivity.
Next to the jail where Bashir is held, there’s another jail for female prisoners. Between the two jails stands a high boundary wall. On the other side of the wall lives Narayani. One day they happen to strike up a conversation. In the middle of their conversation lies an impenetrable wall. Yet the conversation continues. That conversation seems like the intimate expression of Bashir’s subconscious physical and spiritual longings and helplessness. They become friends. They fall in love. Begins the mutual waiting, exchange of flowers and various gifts, connection of hearts. When Narayani comes to the other side of the wall, she throws a dead branch of a tree toward the sky again and again. Seeing this, Bashir rushes over. Neither can see the other, yet they seem to see everything, understand, touch. They feel like crying constantly. Those are tears of love. Some fear brings water to their eyes. That fear is of themselves. Fear of losing themselves. Fear of drowning in the heart’s incomprehensible and disobedient language. Loving someone knowing you’ll never have them—there’s no greater pain than this. Bashir’s irresistible pull toward a voice is essentially the eternal plea for refuge by a lonely person.
One day. That day the two were supposed to meet. In the jail hospital. Just before that, Bashir is released. That very day he first experiences the agony of captivity. It becomes so difficult to walk with free feet after removing the chains of love.
The film’s name is Mathilukal (1990). In Malayalam. One of Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s finest works. The translation of Vaikom Muhammad Bashir’s novelette is available as ‘The Wall and the Voice.’ Interestingly, in the film, the protagonist is named after the writer himself. Vaikom Muhammad Bashir wrote the novelette while imprisoned in Trivandrum Central Jail in the early 1940s. Gopalakrishnan first read it almost thirty years before making the film. He read it again around 1988. He took about a year to write the screenplay. This film is such a pure love story where the audience never even sees the heroine. In this cinema, the prison environment becomes as sweet as life, and freedom from it becomes as melancholic as death. After watching the film, questions arise in our minds………..what does freedom really mean?
Robert Frost has a poem, Mending Wall. While watching ‘Mathilukal,’ some lines from that poem peek into mind:
The day we met breaking boundaries,
That very day a wall rose along the boundary itself.
The wall lives with us, in the same breath.
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When there was no wall here, it occurred to mind
Once the wall rises, what will come to this side, what will go to that side,
With this thought in mind, should I give joy or sorrow, who knew that!
Thinking what I would become when the wall came, what she would become, in that very thinking the wall moved and the wall came.