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(Un)settled: Notes From a Shifting Life SO what does it take to be a refugee, to be unsettled, to be an immigrant in a new land, far away from home? More significantly what does it mean to be the one whose verdict can be a deciding factor in whether the refugees will stay on in the foreign land that they have chosen as their home? Kamini Karlekar working as a United Nations Volunteer with United Nations High Commission for Refugees recounts her experiences in strife-torn countries of Sudan and Liberia in her debut book. Her account effectively criss-crosses her own life and those of the people she worked for and with.
Her tone, though easy read with a breezing quality, is never flippant, even when she discuses personal trivia. From her boyfriend to her face off with camp manager at a refugee camp to her manner of dressing up to her womanly urge for a decent pedicure and manicure, personal details dovetail the larger canvass of refugees with consummate ease. Thus Kamini who, at
sprightly 28, found herself caught in throes of transition in Sudan,
with Central government at Khartoum ready to sign a peace treaty with
south, is taken aback by the contradictions all around her. From being
bemused at realising that in this Islamic nation, men are not allowed in
unrelated women’s hotel rooms, are not supposed to hug them in She sums up Sudan as "with all the parties and fun people seem to forget that they are in Sudan and when you do that you make a serious mistake." So, as she leaps from fancy malls and "sub culture of drunken pools parties" of Khartoum to the hard-hitting reality of refugee camps at Showak, she not only builds up the contrast but also the acute unenviable plight and desperation of refugees. What is amazing is that amidst her gruelling work of interviewing refugees, absorbing their sad stories in the cloistered environment of Showak camp and in Liberia where part of her job ensures "return and reintegration of Liberian refugees living abroad," she seeks and finds home, which in itself conveys the underlying import of her book. Indeed, her deliberations are not linear. These rather straddle many realities of her own existence, of nations as complex as Sharia Sudan "where the small things act as reminders of where I am", and Liberia which flaunts its battle scars, where violence is a norm, where "ritual killing" has macabre dimensions. Her tryst with Liberia is not as detailed as that with Sudan, but the paradigm of paradox wouldn’t have been complete had she not included Liberia too. For if Sudan is third world, as one would expect it to be, Liberia is a land where there are no streetlights, no running water and yet its capital Monrovia has the best of five-star coffee shops. And if women at Showak in Sudan are covered from head to toe, in Liberia some ooze sensuality and sexuality in every move. Expectedly Kamini’s perspective — sharp and introspective — is womanly. After all, she is a woman in the middle of an impersonal landscape where both her single status and gender engender a subtext. So, she is sensitive and compassionate especially when she recounts her interface with refugees throwing open pointers like "how are people to explain they are refugees, what is it like when where we come from is a place we never want to revisit". She, however, isn’t overtly emotional or dramatically tragic. Rather in her laudable maiden foray, Kamini brings you that home away from home, the sense of belongingness as well as of isolation in alien nations.
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This
is a unique memoir, both in terms of content and style in which she
interweaves travelogue, politics, culture, geography, history, people
and above all her own feelings. Actually, her astute enquiry as well as
the delectable manner in which she puts it across makes her account
engaging and informative at the same time. She, certainly, has a way
with words.