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It’s about lives being? turned upside down, and death

Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar says the Tharoor tragedy is ?too much for her to bear

Protracted silences can cause a buzz, even create an aura around the person you are trying to reach. The wait is tantalising, I must confess, My calls to Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar for an interview have gone unanswered for a month. I then resort to SMSes, requesting her for a telephonic audience. My month-long persistence pays off and the ‘third person’ in the Tharoor drama, which played out so tragically on Twitter, decides it’s time to tell her unabridged version of the story (this is what I thought it would be) but she refuses to go on record for a full-fledged interview.
‘‘To me, it’s about three lives being affected; it’s not a scoop, breaking news or a sensational headline. It’s about lives being turned upside down, and death. There is nothing to say here that would do justice to the enormity of the tragedy. No words suffice here. Tremendous damage has already been done because of the warped presentation of whatever was available to the media. I request: please stop now,’’ she says, catching me off guard.
Has she put behind the unpleasant episode and moved on with her life? Tweets do not do justice to a person who was drawn unwittingly into the eye of a marital storm for her intellectual friendship with the Indian minister. Besides, who am I to judge?
Now that the wait is over, I realise she’s the kind of woman who cares little for small talk over the phone when there are bigger issues to discuss and, hopefully, put to rest. To begin with, she seems to dislike quibbling over posers and swiftly takes charge of the conversation. I am relieved that her erudite interruption has put me out of my misery; grateful that the lady has thwarted my safe approach when I fumble with my opening lines about oh-so-boring India-Pakistan ties that are headed nowhere. She deftly brushes it aside as if she doesn’t hear it and I sense she understands my discomfiture about broaching a deeply sensitive and personal topic.
The answer to the niggling question that I so want to ask but do not for fear of having the chat snapped is thrown at me as if she doesn’t mean it. She sounds coy, reluctant even and says she doesn’t want to talk, but spills it all out without further effort. I tell her I am not keen on publishing the interview (while deep inside I do) and for some inexplicable reason turn off the recorder on the glass table before me as I bring the phone closer to my ear, my journalist’s instincts taking a backseat as she holds court from afar.
I mumble that I respect her sentiments and the difficult situation she’s in — small consolation for the fact that I’m not recording a word of what she’s saying! That sets it up. An interesting conversation on the Tharoor-Sunanda saga follows where death, being the great leveller, stole life so rudely away to end what many in the media called a fairytale romance.
I think up the right word and meekly ‘thank’ her for her time and say why she deserves to be heard. Her husky voice comes alive. She wishes ‘‘it was for something else” and I dare not ask what she means. “I have been completely silent. I don’t intend to talk to any one; the tragedy is too huge for me,” she says.
I am beginning to think she’s the kind of woman who can make a man go weak in the knees while he latches on to her every word for dear life.
Mehr brooks no interruption when she traverses into her angst, the far reaches of her emotions without sounding let down. “I don’t want to be known, I don’t care for a second of fame. This (Sunanda’s death) has been a bad dream, a nightmare, something that won’t go away.”
The emotional and mental distress is hard to overcome, but she won’t succumb to a situation which is “not of her making”. “Why should I care if someone vents marital differences on Twitter.”
In hindsight, would she have done things differently? She hesitates and says ‘yes’, and I know she means it. “I should have avoided tweeting when the controversy was brewing and raging — but my name was there,” she explains.
“It’s one of those tragically freakish thing that the two things got connected: the twitter fight, and the death. The timing. A person battling illness, and taking medication for all sorts of stuff dies. The craziness of linking the two things is just the public and media’s insane need to find a scapegoat for something that is not in any human’s control: death. Do they realise the enormity of blaming a woman in another country for playing a role in the death of a 50-year-old woman she had never even met?” she asks.
A single mother to a 14-year-old son, Mehr, a newspaper columnist, says she thinks many times now before she writes something on social media or on paper. Even signing her name for credit card purchases gives her the jitters. “I never wanted to be known. I’m just happy with the small things in life, like being with my son and my family,” she says.
Earlier this month, her tweets criticised the radical clergy and jingoistic leaders in her country for ignoring Pakistan’s core issues. She went on to raise human rights violations in Kashmir, which flared tempers on both sides of the border.
She sounds pained and her voice now betrays the anguish that her name figures every time people talk of the couple. “Every word I now say is dissected and interpreted and I can’t help it,” she says. Guilt-tripping? I hold my tongue, amazed at this woman’s fortitude and her ability to hold her life together.
And the guilt thing? “Yes, I feel guilt that I let a crazy tweeting session make my usual response to such an event take a backseat: ignore and stay silent. Just because we post pictures, and tweet about superficial stuff in our lives doesn’t imply in the least that it’s the forum to air very personal stuff, and that too stuff that is based on a truly convoluted, twisted version of the real story. If I had not been called a hacker and an ISI agent, I would have never gone on record in the electronic media to express my incredulity, anger and even downright dismay. My guilt is simply about becoming a part of a very ugly fight, although in my defence, all the ugliness came from the other side.”
Most Pakistanis have backed her through her travails and she’s thankful to her compatriots, friends and people across the border in India. The grieving Indian minister, whom she admires for his “innate decency and moral compass” will emerge stronger, she says.
Before we end, I ask if she’s been in touch with Shashi Tharoor. “Yes. I sent him a mail. He didn’t reply,” she says. — allan@khaleejtimes.com

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