Reliving the 18 secs that shook the world

MUMBAI, Jan 27: The lifeless artifacts that have arrived in Mumbai from Hiroshima and Nagasaki will speak for those who died in the nuclear ...

MUMBAI, Jan 27: The lifeless artifacts that have arrived in Mumbai from Hiroshima and Nagasaki will speak for those who died in the nuclear holocaust or lived a mutilated life thereafter. A blue highschool uniform with a missing left shoulder, glass fragments extracted from a human body and a pocket watch with the time frozen at 8.18 many such lifeless testimonies of the worst ever human tragedy to occur form part of a consignment from Japan that has arrived in India for the first time, to mark Mahatma Gandhi’s 50th death anniversary of.

An exhibition of these rare artifacts, photographs and posters will be inaugurated on January 29 by Maharashtra governor P C Alexander, followed by a light and sound show designed by Alyque Padamsee. The exhibition has been organised by the Nehru Centre, Manibhavan Gandhi Sangrahalaya, People’s Union for Civil Liberties, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation.

As the wooden boxes containing the horror that was the bombings were unpacked this afternoon at the Nehru Centre, the bystanders, including Alyque and painter M F Hussain, became restless. Hussain kept staring at a photograph of a young boy who was carrying a dead toddler on his shoulder like a back pack. “It is shuddering, ” he told a television crew of the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation (JBC), which is accompanying the consignment.

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Hussain soon set out for a walk in the lawn outside before getting back to his canvas on which he intends to capture the horror with colours and brush.

“So what will be your painting on the subject be,” Alyque asked Hussain.

“There will be no images, they were all melted in the aftermath…I would want to bring those sounds on the canvas through colours,” he replied. “I would not like my painting to be displayed permanently…It would be the depiction of a tragedy and not of aesthetics,” said Hussain, to which Alyque agreed. The painting will be displayed every 20 minutes during the show for 18 seconds: the time in which the entire city was reduced to rubble on August 6, 1945.

Each artifact at the exhibition has its own story of death and destruction, all of which are frighteningly similar, speaking of the speediest genocide the human race had ever known. There is a lunch box and a water bottle of Shigeru, a first year student at Hiroshima middle school number 2. The heat wave generated by the bomb caught him at Nakajima Shinmachi, at present the Peace Memorial Park. His mother later found his dead body with his lunch box, its contents untouched, strapped around his stomach, burnt black. There is also a rosary belonging to a parishioner of the Urakami Cathedral, who died while in prayer. A melted crucifix, a bombed doll and melted glass, the artifacts survive him. The programme director of the crew from JBC, Yoshio Shimizu, is keen to meet a Bharatiya Janata Party leader. In his opinion, the people of Japan would be very interested in knowing a party which openly supports India making a nuclear bomb.