Seeing through the colour lens

Posted on by Moni Basu





Driving through picturesque Cape Town and its environs in the Western Cape, I was truly awed. If you have ever driven down the Pacific Coast Highway, especially from San Francisco to Carmel, you will have good idea of how incredibly beautiful the scenery is here.

Rugged mountains heaving upward to the sky from humble beginnings where Atlantic waves crash violently on jagged shores. Pablo Neruda’s ocean green clashing with azure skies and the lime green of Fynbos, Afrikaans for Fine Bush, the native vegetation of succulents and shrubs.

Snaking highways take you through paradise at Chapman’s Peak, Hout Bay, Camp’s Bay — idyllic fishing towns where fish and chips shops serve up freshly caught Hake. And vineyards that offer tastings of the best Pinotage, Merlot and Chardonnay.

The houses dot the hillsides, graceful and full of splendour. You think: Yes, I could live here. Spend every day in this lush, luxe setting.

But you need a non-white person with you to tell you the real story of the Western Cape.

Even now, 16 years after South Africa established democracy and passed the strongest constitution in the world, perhaps, that bars any sort of discrimination, the vestiges of apartheid are not lost on a person of color.

Yes, you can go to South Africa and go on safaris and see its National Geographic beauty, but you cannot ever forget what was here. And if you look closely, behind the hills, far away from the tourist signs, you will still see apartheid.

At Hout Bay, you can see the flats built for coloreds when you get high up on the hill. There it is. In all its ugliness.

Or what about Ocean View?

“Look there,” said my guide Gillian Schroeder, a coloured woman who grew up in the Cape Flats (pictured with me at Chapman’s Peak). “How ironic. There’s no view.”

Just rows and rows of horrific housing built inland to house coloreds evicted from Simon’s Town, a place where tourists now venture to look at African penguins and shop for antiques.

And what about the blacks? You can’t even see their townships from the main roads and highways. They are tucked away like the poor in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas.

Only here, I cannot forget that they were forced from their homes and put in segregated communities when apartheid was enforced in 1948. The Group Areas Act mandated separate communities and non-whites were plucked from the homes and throw into horrid shanties without any surrounding trees, without electricity, without anything save gray dust and misery.

My drive to the Cape of Good Hope (pictured above) was marred by conversation with Gillian of the past and present. Even though everyone is equal now in South Africa, there still is apartheid. Blacks still live in the townships. They still do the manual labor. the most menial tasks. Coloreds live in the flats. The richest neighborhoods, the nicest places are still all white.

In the United States, laws were changed but racism has taken many years to subside. It still manifests itself now, more than 40 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

In South Africa, it was different. There was brutal white rule and then a black majority democracy. But centuries of oppression don’t just go away, especially when the ruling class is still here. In my native India, the colonizers left. Here, they stayed.

How do you live side by side after all that hatred, all those tears, all that cruelty. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission can help, but it cannot erase the emotions swirling in millions of hearts.

I have to say that it is truly amazing to me how blacks, coloureds, Indians and whites live side by side now. Those who were oppressed have amazingly forgiven.

But as my friend, Stephen Moagi of Capetown said, it is hard to forget.

His name tag at work reads: Stephens. Like a last name. None of his white employers have bothered to correct it. Small, but telling, I thought.

Eunice, a black waitress at Bertha’s restaurant on the ocean in Simon’s Town (pictured, top, left), gives her name as Thabiso. That’s her name in Xhosa. That’s what she prefers. Except no one ever bothered to ask.

You don’t have to look hard to notice. Just take your eyes off the guide books and tours. And you will know the real South Africa.

In Cape Town, I cried

Posted on by Moni Basu



I will start my southern Africa journey here, at the Slave Lodge in Cape Town.

It is not where I physically began my 10-day trip to this part of the world. But it is where I choose to begin — in a place of beginnings and endings, of hate and love, of breathtaking natural landscapes and ugly scars of human cruelty.

For all the magnificence I have seen on this incredible trip — lions in the wild, one of the seven natural wonders of the world and the collision of two great oceans at the Cape of Good Hope — nowhere did I shed more tears than in this stark rectangular building that once housed thousands of human beings who were not recognized as such.

Today, the oldest slave lodge in South Africa looks beautiful in structure. (See picture.) But go back in time.

There were no windows then, just slits in the wall. People manacled and tied together in a manner worse than animals. They spent hot, suffocating nights here. During the day, they were marched out to toil.

The tourist guide books don’t tell you much about the wretched history of South Africa. My book dedicated most of its Slave Lodge blurb to the architectural splendor of the building, not to the unimaginable pain that was borne here.

It is now a museum dedicated to those whose names will be forgotten by history. They are no Vasco de Gamas or Simon Van der Stels (for whom the now famous Stellenbosch winelands are named). Just ordinary people plucked from their homes and taken to suffer and die.

I stood before a map that showed all the places from where the Dutch brought in their human captives. My eyes went straight to India. Malabar. Cochin. And yes, Kolkata. I stared at the Bengal dot on the map of South Asia. I felt a hot drop land on my clenched fists.

I thought of my mother telling me stories about British colonial rule in India and the picture at my grandfather’s house of a water fountain in Maniktola: “Europeans,” it said on one side. “Indians and dogs,” on the other.

I sat in the dark museum, staring at images of mothers torn from sons and daughters, separated forever. I heard the clack of wooden clogs slaves were forced to wear here so that their Dutch masters could hear them if they tried to move at night.

I imagined.

And for all the death and war I have seen, I could not ever feel the sorrow of this non-life that thousands of people, including my ancestors, lived through.

Or didn’t.

I have many friends in the United States who tell me personal stories of racism. Their ancestors were slaves. Their parents lived through segregation. I recalled my conversations with the poet Natasha Tretheway. Of racism, hate, ignorance.

I grew up with stories about Bapuji, father of the nation. That’s how Indians revere Mahatma Gandhi. I read about how Gandhi, as a young lawyer, fought for rights in South Africa. We all know what he did when he returned to India.

School was filled with history lessons on the East India Company, the Dutch, the Portuguese and the British. I grew to womanhood familiar with colonialism’s fury.

Yet, I had never felt its sting in India — I was fortunate to have been born 15 years after independence. I felt it more in the Deep South but never in ways that were physically or psychologically damaging to me.

So here I stood, in lovely Cape Town, surrounded by majestic landscape, and all I saw was heartbreak and blood. It was mapped out before me, on a museum wall.

It was the first thing I saw in Cape Town. And for the next few days, I would think of nothing else.

Next: A guide with a view.

Water, oil and Iraq

Posted on by Moni Basu

Five years ago, a tropical depression formed in the Atlantic and began moving towards Florida. Later, it would become one of the worst hurricanes to hit the United States.

Katrina.

On the day that the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, my friend and colleague left Baghdad to return home. I watched her drive off into the hot, dusty Iraqi afternoon, went back inside to the tent that we had shared for a month. Her cot was empty. So was my heart.

It was tough enough being embedded with the U.S. Army. But to do it solo, in the middle of a raging war? I began to feel sorry for myself until I heard the news from Louisiana.

The next day, at the Camp Striker chow hall, I ran into Louisiana National Guard soldiers. The 256th Infantry Brigade Combat Team had been at war for a year, based at nearby Camp Liberty. They called their pad Tigerland.

They had lost about 40 men. Each day, they had smelled the acrid fumes of bombs and ammunition, seen the worst of humanity. They were exhausted and so ready to go home.

It should have been a happy few last days. Instead, it turned wretchedly bittersweet.

They could not take their eyes off the television screens. Image after image of New Orleans under a 30-foot wall of water.

One soldier recognized his block in the lower 9th ward; even thought he saw his house, just the rooftop visible in the footage.

“Look, look,” he said. “That’s where I live.”

The excitement quickly turned to dread on his face. He sat stone cold at the table, not being able to say anything for a few minutes.

Then: “Well, that’s where I used to live,” he said, running off to the AT&T phone trailer to see if he could check on his mama.

I am sure his effort was in vain.

New Orleans was dark. No lights, no phones. Nothing.

The soldiers quickly realized that a great many of them had no homes to return to. There would be no deliriously happy homecoming with firecrackers, parades and cake. Amid the joy of reunion with their wives and children, they would

Many of them wanted to get on a plane that instant so they could help their fellow Guardsmen with rescue efforts. In their last days in Iraq, a guilt gnawed at their hearts. Some felt lucky to be in Iraq.

Life seemed like a series of terrible ironies at that moment. So cruel and unfair.

I crawled back into my tent that night no longer wallowing in my loneliness. Just grateful to be have a home back in Atlanta. Grateful to be alive.

I read a story on Slate a few days ago about the same brigade, back in Iraq, back in the chow hall glued to the TV screens. Only this time, it was oil instead of water.

Leaving Iraq

Posted on by Moni Basu


The last of the 4,000 soldiers in the 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, crossed the border from Iraq into Kuwait Thursday. There are no U.S. more combat brigade teams left in Iraq. All is going seemingly well for President Barack Obama’s plan to pull to leave just 50,000 troops there by September.

Hard to think about how it was then.

By then, I mean seven years ago, when the United States invaded Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and U.S. soldiers deployed in droves.

In 2003, I looked at the American Humvees and Abrams tanks rolling through Baghdad. The soldiers wore aviator glasses and pointed their M-16s triumphantly. I stood among crowds of Iraqis and like them, pondered the course of history.

I did not know then that more than 4,000 of those soldiers would die in Iraq, along with thousands of Iraqis, many of them caught in the middle of dirty urban warfare.

By the time I returned as an embedded reporter in 2005, Americans ruled the landscape.

Camp Liberty was a sprawling American base with air-conditioning, movie theaters, stores, restaurants and other amenities the Iraqis lacked. Even now, Iraqis say they have no electricity or other basic services. A young lieutenant who was waiting to catch a plane with me on the military side of the Baghdad airport told me that if the Americans could deliver electricity, they would win the war.

In a way, he was right. By 2008, Iraqis asked me why the world’s superpower could not give them something as basic as power.

This year, protests erupted over the lack of power. In a land where temperatures soar to 120-plus in the summer, it’s hard to live without a fan. Only two-thirds of Iraqi have their electricity needs met — in Baghdad, it averages to four hours a day.

I thought about the day when I returned to my tent at Camp Striker and the AC unit had shut off. I sat on my cot dripping buckets of sweat and and tried to imagine life for Baghdadis outside the camp.

Seven years after the war, basic services are still a problem in Iraq.

So is insecurity.

Many people like to point to the drop in violence as a marker for success in the war. But my Iraqi friends still worry about stepping out with their children.

A car bomb exploded in Ramadi Wednesday night, killing two people. That may not sound like a lot compared to the height of the war when hundreds died each month. But when it is your husband or your mother, it’s everything.

Another 48 people died Tuesday in an attack outside a military recruiting center in Baghdad.

When will the killing end in Iraq? When the Americans are gone? When the Americans are still there?

When will the government be formed? It has been almost six months since the parliamentary elections and still there are no agreements on forming a new government.

“Iraq is still at the beginning of the story of its evolution since 2003,” Ryan Crocker, the former American ambassador to Iraq, told CNN.

I cannot pretend to be an expert on Iraq and pass judgment on this day being hailed as another milestone in post-Saddam history.

Today, I am in the comfort of my Atlanta home, thinking back to all the suffering I saw in the past.

I think especially of Dahlia, a young girl I met in the barren fields of dust and scrub near Nasiriyah. She was walking testament to her name: Dahlia. A bright flower in the midst of drab.

She wore a crimson and lemon yellow printed robe, her head was covered in a black scarf – at 10, she was old enough to respect the modesty taught by her culture. She stood barefoot in front of a lone U.S. Humvee that stopped before entering the gates of Camp Cedar.

Dahlia’s father was killed by Saddam, she told me. She never went to school — there were no schools nearby. She lived in a makeshift tent with her mother and brother.

I asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up. “Nothing,” she said, as though she knew her fate was bound to the bleak sands of southern Iraq, that she would never break out of poverty.

She thought for a while longer. “I want to work at Cedar.”

That was in 2006. The U.S. military closed Cedar shortly after I met Dahlia. Now so many more of those bases are gone.

No, today, I cannot share in the optimism of all those who hail Iraq a success. I think of the hundreds of Dahlias I met in the midst of war.

You go, girl!

Posted on by Moni Basu


This Sunday, I will be watching the premiere of “Aarti Party.”

Aarti Sequeira won this season’s “The Next Food Network Star” on Sunday night. A lot of us at CNN were rooting for her — she worked as a producer in the Los Angeles bureau for a while. And, we felt, she was the most talented cook among the finalists.

But I wanted her to win for another reason.

I loved the way she infused the spices of my homeland into her cooking. I watched her week after week as she turned out dishes with roasted cumin, garam masala, cardomom. Those were the smells of my childhood, the aromas wafting out of the kitchen and into my bedroom on a warm, muggy Kolkata morning.

Aarti makes things like South of the Border Shrimp Masala. On her new hard-won show, she says, you might expect something like a Sloppy Bombay Joe made with a chicken tikka masala sauce. YUM! (as Rachael Ray would say)

Every Sunday night, I salivated. And from the very first episode, I wished for her to perform well. Her cooking reminded me of my mother’s.

I admired my ma’s improvisational skills. Leftover McDonald’s fries would show up the next day in a chicken curry. Vegetables on their way to being thrown out would star in a Bengali-style mixture of five spice — nigella, cumin, fennel, fenugreek and mustard. Pure heaven.

In a way, I thought of my mother as the first Indian fusion cook. We lived in a small town in Florida. She could not always obtain the spices or ingredients she needed. So she substituted whatever she could find at the Northwood Mall Publix in Tallahassee.

Arrti had that same spirit of infusion and innovation. I wanted to taste whatever she served up. I loved her style, especially that big smile and even bigger flower tucked in her mess of black curls.

I enjoy watching cooking shows but have always lamented the lack of South Asians on the network. Finally, we have Aarti. You go girl!

I’ll be watching.

Bangla kobita (poetry)

Posted on by Moni Basu


This poem is written by one of my favourite Bengali poets, Joy Goswami. It loses in the translation, of course. And yet…

In the evening sadness comes and stands by the door, his face
Is hidden, from the dying sun he took some colors and painted his body
The sadness comes in the evening,
I stretched my hand and he caught my wrist, in an iron-hard clasp
He caught me out from my room, his face
Is black, he is ahead of me and I follow him
I crossed from the evening to the night, from the night to the dawn, then the morning, the noon, the day, the month
Crossing water, tree, boat, city, hill
Crossing blows, stumbling, poison, suspicions, jealousy, graves, genocide, the bones and ribs of civilization, swamp and grass
Then crossing my own death, death after death, going on and on
The bony fingers holding nothing but a pen
Nothing…

Freedom and flooding

Posted on by Moni Basu

A difficult agreement created Pakistan 63 years ago. The “land of the pure” was partitioned off from India and both nations became independent — Pakistan on August 14, 1947 and India a day later.

Though it split India apart, we were finally free. No more British Empire. No more second-class citizenry.

That’s why today should have been like any other August 14. Joyful. Celebratory. Patriotic.

Instead, Pakistanis will be surrounded by the misery created by torrential monsoons. Walls of water have drowned everything. The mighty Indus flows bloated — in some areas, it has swollen to 20 kilometers in width.

“Poor Pakistan. It can’t catch a break,” said a friend of mine in Kolkata, referring to a the awful earthquake, political crisis and militancy, which mars the landscape with violence every day.

She wondered what might have happened if Pakistan had never been split off from India.

Hypothesizing on the course of history, is ultimately, useless, but I thought about how things might have been different. Or not.

Nothing would have changed the cresting of the Indus this week. Nothing would have changed the water pouring from the skies.

My thoughts this day are with the people of Pakistan, separated from me by history, but not in soul. And I hope India will temper its own celebrations on August 15 and pause to reflect the terrible suffering of its neighbor.

Kaniatarowanenneh

Posted on by Moni Basu






Kevin’s parents, Ed and Jean, have rented a summer cottage on Washington Island in Clayton. The place is perfectly situated — a watery feast for the eyes on the Saint Lawrence River.

Ahead lies Canada’s share of the Thousand Islands. Once in a while, a huge freighter floats by effortlessly, it seems, traversing deep waters toward Lake Ontario or on its way out to the Atlantic via the Saint Lawrence Seaway or as the French call it, the Fleuve Saint Laurent. The Native American tribes, of course, had their own names for the massive river. In Mohawk, the name is Kaniatarowanenneh, meaning, what else but big waterway.

Here are a few photos of this shard of paradise that my in-laws are calling home until it’s time to return to warmer climes in Sarasota. The first picture is of the only kind of traffic jam one is likely to stumble upon around these parts. On the small bridge to the island, people and cars give way to the geese.

Hybrid & City Lights

Posted on by Moni Basu


I have been pondering the purchase of a new car an have seriously been thinking about a Toyota Prius. It’s hard to give up 51 miles per gallon.

Toyota hasn’t won me over completely yet. But this shot in Toronto could make a convincing ad. The CN tower is so beautiful at night and next to the car is an art school, also cleverly designed and illuminated.

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