Spain, My Spiritual Homeland

One of the many reaons why I feel a tad uneasy in the midst of people who 'love India to bits' is because I have known, since the time I was in high school, that my 'true homeland' is not India but Spain : the Spain of the great Spanish mystics, of Castille, of Alhambra, of the Moorish civilisation, of the Armada, and, mostly importantly, of the bloody Spanish civil war. Yesterday, I was in Luton visiting a cousin and when we were in a restaurant ordering a meal, I could not help overhearing an old man just behind us talking to a teenaged girl about Spain. This is how the conversation went :

Old Man (OM) : Young people these days are rather strange. They think that you need something grand to happen before you can plunge into the stream. And so they keep on waiting, waiting, waiting. Waiting until they are dead.

Teenaged Girl (TG) : How do you mean?

OM : Well, have I ever told you how I jumped into the Spanish civil war? In the late autumn of 1936, I had gone to Spain as a news reporter for the London Times. I had gone to Madrid to take some photographs of the rebels when one evening, I saw a truck-load of the anarchists sweeping along on the way to Malaga. I cheerfully clicked away at my camera. Until there came this brown sooty truck.

TG : Who were there in it?

OM : Well, lots of the anarchists wearing red bands across their foreheads and noisily shouting slogans. But in between them there was also this frail-looking young woman with a heavy gun slung across her slight shoulders. She looked at me from the truck as it passed by me, and I felt that eternity had congealed into one long moment. And then the spell was broken, and she shouted at me : 'Death to Franco!' And the truck rolled on.

TG : What happened then?

OM : That single glance from a woman whom I did not know and whom I had never met changed my entire life. The next morning, I wrote to my editor in London that I was giving up my job, and joined the anarchists within a week.

TG : Did you never see her again?

OM : Once. Yes, once I did see her again. Six months later, I got a shrapnel wound in my left leg, and was taken to a primitive hospital run by the anarchists just outside Guernica. One morning, as I was walking around it, I saw a truck bustling in. Some men went up into it and carried a woman down in a stretcher. I went up to them and saw her, her shirt and her tattered trousers soaked with blood. She saw me too and from the gleam in her shining eyes I knew that she had recognised me at once. She managed to fight back the horrible agony that she was in, and through her gritted teeth, she shouted out again : 'Death to Franco!'

TG : What did you do after the war?

OM : After the war? Did you say, after the war? You really think that the Spanish civil war has ended? No, no, no. You see, deep inside here, this old tired heart of mine that somehow still beats to its old rhythms, the war is going on. And yes, my friend, it will go on and on until every fascist has been routed from the world. Yes, Guernica, Aragon, Castellon, Teruel, Ebro and Madrid --- all that is dead now. But inside me, the war shall last as long as I am alive. Inside my heart, the Spanish civil war has finally come home.

The mozarella pizza arrived soon after, and I munched on it slowly. I looked out through the window and saw the orange sun going down over the fields. Who am I, I thought to myself, this Indian who feels this strange love for Spain, a land of ecstatic glories and of horrifying pain, a country thousands of miles away from his birthplace?