MITRA PHUKAN

1. Have you ever felt ‘terrorized’ by something? Have you ever told / described it to someone? Has it found an expression in your work?

Living in Assam, I have felt terrorized very often by events and situations. We have talked about it endlessly for years, decades. It has found expression in my novel “The Collector’s Wife”, my novel for teenagers “The Terrorist Camp” and also in some short stories.

2. At a psychological / aesthetic / philosophical level, can terror be ‘represented’ in art? Would you like to name certain works (art/writing) in which it has been done effectively?

Writing about terror is a kind of cathartic experience for me. Many incidents in my novel are based on real life. But I do not think just reading about/looking at/art can give much more than a small fraction of an idea about the terror one feels in real life when a bomb goes off in the exact place which a loved one was due to have visited at that specific time – for instance. When a friend is injured, another is kidnapped, a third is killed, the experience is raw. I have not come across any piece of art, or writing that comes even near to describing or portraying that feeling. Even the greatest works of art are nothing but shadows.

3. Which would you consider to be the most terrorizing moment / event / ideology you have known?

When a very good friend of my children’s was kidnapped by a terrorist organization at the age of fifteen. His mother was my friend, too. The boy was rescued, because his father had contacts. But I know there are many whose folks do not have those kinds of contacts. I will always remember the look in my children’s eyes when they came to know that their friend was kidnapped.

The most terrorizing event was probably the bomb blast a few years ago in a school in Dhemaji, where many schoolchildren died.

ULFA’s is an ideology that is terrifying.

4. How do you respond to the rhetoric of terror(ism) in mainstream media and politics?

It’s just empty rhetoric, isn’t it? Nothing will come of it, till we manage to get this all pervasive corruption and inefficiency out of the system.

5. Have the (serial) blasts around made you feel insecure?

I have felt insecure in my own land for the past thirty years. My children, and their generation, do not know what it is NOT to live in the shadow of terror. An entire generation has grown up with this terrible insecurity.