Missing Animosity Poem by gershon hepner

In exile you may miss far more
the animosity of those you’ve left behind
than praises of the people who adore
you for your beauty and the brilliance of your mind.
It is very hard to find
the sort of inspiration from the people who
are unfamiliar and kind,
as from the people who are never kind to you,
but understand where you are coming from and why
you’ve moved away from them, inclined
to see the universe in other ways than they.
They understand your exiled mind.

Inspired by an article by Semini Sengupta in the NYT, November 9,2008 (“An Artist in Exile Tests India’s Democrratic Ideals”) on the Mulsim artist Maqbool Fida Husain:
Maqbool Fida Husain, India’s most famous painter, is afraid to go home. Mr. Husain is a Muslim who is fond of painting Hindu goddesses, sometimes portraying them nude. That obsession has earned him the ire of a small but organized cadre of Hindu nationalists. They have attacked galleries that exhibit his work, accused him in court of “promoting enmity” among faiths and, on one occasion, offered an $11 million reward for his head. In September, the country’s highest court offered him an unexpected reprieve, dismissing one of the cases against him with the blunt reminder that Hindu iconography, including ancient temples, is replete with nudity. Still, the artist,93 and increasingly frail, is not taking any chances. For two years, he has lived here in self-imposed exile, amid opulently sterile skyscrapers. He intends to remain, at least for now. “They can put me in a jungle, ” Mr. Husain said gamely. “Still, I can create.” Freedom of expression has frequently, and by some accounts, increasingly, come under fire in India, as the country tries to balance the dictates of its secular democracy with the easily inflamed religious and ethnic passions of its multitudes. The result is a strange anomaly in a nation known for its vibrant, freewheeling political culture. The government is compelled to ensure respect for India’s diversity and at the same time prevent one group from pouncing on another for a perceived offense. Ramachandra Guha, a historian, calls it “perhaps the fundamental challenge of governance in India.”…Mr. Husain calls the current Congress Party-led government too weak-kneed to offer him protection from those who might harm him. Mostly, though, he cautions against making too much of his case. India, he insists, is fundamentally “tolerant.” Not least, he said, he has always been a vagabond, sleeping on the Mumbai streets during his impoverished youth, wandering through Europe to study Rembrandt, or bouncing, as he does now, among several lavish apartments and villas here in Dubai — or rather, cruising among them, in one of his five costly thrill machines, including a lipstick-red Ferrari, his current favorite. Mr. Husain is India’s best-paid artist. Last March, at a Christie’s auction, his “Battle of Ganga and Jamuna, ” part of a 27-canvas series on the Mahabharata, the Hindu epic, fetched $1.6 million. “I am working, it’s O.K., ” he said. “If things get all right, I’ll go. If they don’t, so be it. What can I do? ” And then he quoted the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a Pakistani who went into exile in the late 1970s during President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq’s regime and who wrote about missing the animosity of his enemies as much as the affection of friends. “Of course, ” he conceded, “the heart is there.” On the morning of Id al-Fitr, Islam’s holiest day, Mr. Husain sat in the back seat of his Bentley as it whizzed past a row of construction sites, taking calls from Mumbai on his new iPhone. Back home on the same day, his granddaughter Rakshanda was getting engaged. It was the first major family function he had missed since his exile. “Such an auspicious day, ” he murmured. “Anyway, we will have a ceremony here again.”

11/9/08