Trying to be Human

8220;I8217;m a hero,8221; goes Ruben Gallego8217;s opening line. 8220;It8217;s easy to be a hero. If you don8217;t have hands or feet you8217;re either a hero, or dead.8221; Starting with its title and its very first paragraph, White on Black challenges the parameters of 8220;normal8221; and goes on to throw open every definition: 8220;hero8221;, 8220;dreams8221;, 8220;holiday8221;, 8220;hands8221;, 8220;food8221;, and 8220;never8221;.

The shocking memoirs of Gallego8217;s truncated childhood, spent in numerous 8220;children8217;s homes8221; of Russia as an orphan suffering from severe cerebral palsy, hit home. For as true courage is not the absence of fear, but ability to face one8217;s fears, true heroism is the effort to surmount the odds knowing the odds can never be surmounted. For Gallego, it is coming to terms with the fact that he will never be 8220;ambulatory8221; 8212; which, in his distorted world, is essential to be counted as 8220;human8221;. His battle is as much for a right to life as a right to dignity: his tongue-in-cheek avowal of heroism followed by a description of a midnight trip to the toilet 8212; in his scale of things, a feat no less than scaling the Everest.

But if Gallego8217;s physical handicap made him a 8220;quasi corpse8221;, his situation 8212; as a handicapped orphan in the 8220;perfect world8221; of the Communist welfare system which promised to leave no citizen behind 8212; made his a 8220;quasi existence8221;.

Born in 1968, and abandoned by his grandfather, Spanish Communist Party8217;s General Secretary Ignacio Gallego 8212; who later fathered the Spanish Constitution 8212; on account of his disability, it was Gallego8217;s lot to discover the dark underbelly of the country, which, as Krushchev had declared in his infamous outburst at the 1960 UN convention, could 8220;bury8221; the West. Not surprisingly, the regime had some practice. Forget the bad food and harsh treatment, in the productivity cult of the Brezhnev era, just staying alive to reach adulthood was a challenge for the severely handicapped. At 15, they were taken to live in old age homes. Most died within a year, out of sheer neglect. Gallego8217;s own journey to the old-age homes was postponed because of a simple logistical problem. The home could not bury anyone below 18 and there was no refrigerator where his body could be kept.

The state8217;s iron grip over a citizen8217;s life is manifest through the book like a subtle skein. The rotten food is almost a metaphor of the rot within the system, where, Gallego writes, 8220;the teachers asked for only thing: that we ask them for no help.8221; Horror stories from the West, which even a 10-year-old could see through, provided the justification for all brutality. And the sham was equalled only by the self-aggrandisement through anti-capitalist propaganda.

If a handicapped child is born in America, it is killed, the teachers taught in class. 8220;In Soviet Union we do not kill our handicapped children.8221; It was immaterial to the system whether young Gallego wanted to go to America for the 8220;fatal injection8221; or some, like the handicapped Colonel, discarded the moment they could be of no use to society, actually committed suicide.

Gallego8217;s silence on how he not only survived the system but managed to visit America, is in itself significant. Only a vague reference about a letter someone wrote gave yet another indication of how things were run as late as the early nineties.

One might ask why the author took such trouble 8212; as he said himself, 8220;using the keyboard with the index finger of his left hand8221; 8212; to pen this series of rambling, free-flowing vignettes. The explanation too, is right there. 8220;A bayonet is an excellent thing. Reliable8230; I8217;m painstakingly forging my own bayonet 8212; my book. I have the right to just one blow.8221;

Did the blow connect? White on Black has already won the Russian Booker prize. In the subcontinent, only Comrades Karat and Yechury can tell.