BATTLING THE MENACE

A Thousand Cranes for India: Reclaiming Plurality Amid Hatred

- MANDIRA NAYAR

Edited by Pallavi Aiyar

Published by Seagull Books

It was on a family holiday in Hiroshima that the morning bulletin on her phone brought Pallavi Aiyar the news of eight-year-old Asifa Bano’s gangrape.

In a benumbed world—an apt word to describe the aloofness that most people feel to the horrors in the newspaper—she found that her “body revolted’’.

“I felt winded, emptied of words, stripped of succour,’’ she writes. A Thousand Cranes for India: Reclaiming Plurality Amid Hatred, an anthology, is the result of this heaviness and despair. An anthology edited by Aiyar that aims to fight to reclaim her India.

Strangely, it was another girl, a victim in another tragedy in Hiroshima, Sadako Sasaki, that gave Aiyar the idea to fold “the depravities of the world’’ to transform it into a “weightless being of beauty’’. There is a legend in Japan that if you fold one thousand paper cranes your wishes will come true. Sadako was two when the atom bomb was dropped on her city in 1945. Sadako lived, but only to die later with leukaemia. As the cancer slowly hollowed her out, Sadako folded paper cranes in the hope for a prayer. She did not beat the cancer, but her cranes became immortal—the symbol of healing and hope. Each year school children and people fold them in solidarity.

Bringing together the best writers in India to use their words, Aiyar has chosen to fold away the assault on the idea of India into a crane—to offer resistance her way: with words.