Incendiary Circumstances

by Amitav Ghosh

  Although stuttering in terror, the cook held his own. Yes, he said, yes, his employers were Sikhs, but they'd left town; there was no one in the house. No, the house didn't belong to them; they were renting from a Hindu.

  He succeeded in persuading most of the thugs, but a few eyed the surrounding houses suspiciously. Some appeared at the steel gates in front of us, rattling the bars.

  We went up and positioned ourselves at the gates. I remember a strange sense of disconnection as I walked down the driveway, as though I were watching myself from somewhere very distant.

  We took hold of the gates and shouted back: Get away! You have no business here! There's no one inside! The house is empty.

  To our surprise they began to drift away, one by one.

  Just before this, I had stepped into the house to see how Mrs. Sen and the Bawas were faring. The thugs were clearly audible in the lamplit drawing room; only a thin curtain shielded the interior from their view.

  My memory of what I saw in the drawing room is uncannily vivid. Mrs. Sen had a smile on her face as she poured a cup of tea for Mr. Bawa. Beside her, Mrs. Bawa in a firm, unwavering voice was comparing the domestic situations in New Delhi and Manila.

  The next morning I heard about a protest that was being organized at the large compound of a relief agency. When I arrived, a meeting was already under way, a gathering of seventy or eighty people.

  The mood was somber. Some of the people spoke about neighborhoods that had been taken over by vengeful mobs. They described countless murders—many by setting the victims alight—as well as terrible destruction: the burning of Sikh temples, the looting of Sikh schools, the razing of Sikh homes and shops. The violence was worse than I had imagined. It was declared at the meeting that an effective initial tactic would be to march into one of the badly affected neighborhoods and confront the rioters directly.

  The group had grown to about a hundred and fifty men and women, among them Swami Agnivesh, a Hindu ascetic; Ravi Chopra, a scientist and environmentalist; and a handful of opposition politicians, including Chandra Shekhar, who became prime minister for a brief period several years later.

  The group was pitifully small by the standards of a city where crowds of several hundred thousand were routinely mustered for political rallies. Nevertheless, the members rose to their feet and began to march.

  Years before, I had read a passage by V. S. Naipaul that has stayed with me ever since. I have never been able to find it again, so this account is from memory. In his incomparable prose, Naipaul describes a demonstration. He is in a hotel room somewhere in Africa or South America; he looks down and sees people marching past. To his surprise, the sight fills him with an obscure longing, a kind of melancholy; he is aware of a wish to go out, to join, to merge his concerns with theirs. Yet he knows he never will; it is simply not in his nature to join crowds.

  For many years I read everything of Naipaul's I could lay my hands on; I couldn't have enough of him. I read him with the intimate, appalled attention that one reserves for one's most skillful interlocutors. It was he who first made it possible for me to think of myself as a writer, working in English.

  I remembered that passage because I believed that I too was not a joiner, and in Naipaul's pitiless mirror I thought I saw an aspect of myself rendered visible. Yet as this forlorn little group marched out of the shelter of the compound, I did not hesitate for a moment: without a second thought, I joined.

  The march headed first for Lajpat Nagar, a busy commercial area a mile or so away. I knew the area. Though it was in New Delhi, its streets resembled the older parts of the city, where small, cramped shops tended to spill out onto the footpaths.

  We were shouting slogans as we marched, hoary Gandhian staples of peace and brotherhood from half a century before. Then, suddenly, we were confronted with a starkly familiar spectacle, an image of twentieth-century urban horror: burned-out cars, their ransacked interiors visible through smashed windows; debris and rubble everywhere. Blackened pots had been strewn along the street. A cinema had been gutted, and the charred faces of film stars stared out at us from half-burned posters.

  As I think back to that march, my memory breaks down, details dissolve. I recently telephoned some friends who had been there. Their memories are similar to mine in only one respect: they too clung to one scene while successfully ridding their minds of the rest.

  The scene my memory preserved is of a moment when it seemed inevitable that we would be attacked.

  Rounding a corner, we found ourselves facing a crowd that was larger and more determined-looking than any other crowds we had encountered. On each previous occasion we had prevailed by marching at the thugs and engaging them directly, in dialogues that turned quickly into extended shouting matches. In every instance we had succeeded in facing them down. But this particular mob was intent on confrontation. As its members advanced on us, brandishing knives and steel rods, we stopped. Our voices grew louder as they came toward us; a kind of rapture descended on us, exhilaration in anticipation of a climax. We braced for the attack, leaning forward as if into a wind.

  And then something happened that I have never completely understood. Nothing was said; there was no signal, nor was there any break in the rhythm of our chanting. But suddenly all the women in our group—and the women made up more than half the group's numbers—stepped out and surrounded the men; their saris and kameezes became a thin, fluttering barrier, a wall around us. They turned to face the approaching men, challenging them, daring them to attack.

  The thugs took a few more steps toward us and then faltered, confused. A moment later they were gone.

  The march ended at the walled compound where it had started. In the next couple of hours an organization was created, the Nagarik Ekta Manch, or Citizen's Unity Front, and its work—to bring relief to the injured and the bereft, to shelter the homeless—began the next morning. Food and clothing were needed, and camps had to be established to accommodate the thousands of people with nowhere to sleep. And by the next day we were overwhelmed—literally. The large compound was crowded with vanloads of blankets, secondhand clothing, shoes, and sacks of flour, sugar, and tea. Previously hardnosed, unsentimental businessmen sent cars and trucks. There was barely room to move.

  My own role was slight. For a few weeks I worked with a team from Delhi University, distributing supplies in the slums and working-class neighborhoods that had been worst hit by the rioting. Then I returned to my desk.

  In time, inevitably, most of the front's volunteers returned to their everyday lives. But some members—most notably the women involved in the running of refugee camps—continued to work for years afterward with Sikh women and children who had been rendered homeless. Lalita Ramdas, Veena Das, Mita Bose, Radha Kumar: these women, each one an accomplished professional, gave up years of their time to repair the enormous damage that had been done in a matter of two or three days.

  The front also formed a team to investigate the riots. I briefly considered joining but then decided that an investigation would be a waste of time, because the politicians capable of inciting violence were unlikely to heed a tiny group of concerned citizens.

  I was wrong. A document eventually produced by this team—a slim pamphlet entitled "Who Are the Guilty?"—has become a classic, a searing indictment of the politicians who incited the riots and the police who allowed the rioters to have their way.

  Over the years the Indian government has compensated some of the survivors of the 1984 violence and resettled some of the survivors. One gap remains: to this day, not one instigator of the riots has been charged. But the pressure on the government has never gone away, and it continues to grow; every year the nails hammered in by that slim document dig just a little deeper.

  The pamphlets and others that followed are testaments to the only humane possibility available to people who live in multiethnic, multireligious societies like those of the Indian subcontinent. Human rights documents such as "Who Are the Guilty?" are essential to t
he process of broadening civil institutions: they are the weapons with which society asserts itself against a state that runs criminally amok, as this one did in Delhi in November of 1984.

  It is heartening that sanity prevails today in the Punjab. But not elsewhere. In Bombay, local government officials want to stop people from painting buildings green—a color associated with the Muslim religion. And hundreds of Muslims have been deported from the city's slums—in at least one case for committing an offense no greater than reading a Bengali newspaper. It is imperative that governments ensure that those who instigate mass violence do not go unpunished.

  The Bosnian writer Dzevad Karahasan, in a remarkable essay called "Literature and War" (published last year in his collection Sarajevo, Exodus of a City), makes a startling connection between modern literary aestheticism and the contemporary world's indifference to violence: "The decision to perceive literally everything as an aesthetic phenomenon—completely sidestepping questions about goodness and truth—is an artistic decision. That decision started in the realm of art, and went on to become characteristic of the contemporary world."

  When I went back to my desk in November of 1984, I found myself confronting decisions about writing that I had never faced before. How was I to write about what I had seen without reducing it to mere spectacle? My next novel was bound to be influenced by my experiences, but I could see no way of writing directly about those events without creating them as a panorama of violence—"an aesthetic phenomenon," as Karahasan was to call it. At the time, the idea seemed obscene and futile; of much greater importance were factual reports of the testimony of the victims. But these were already being done by people who were, I knew, more competent than I could be.

  Within a few months I started my novel, which I eventually called The Shadow Lines—a book that led me backward in time to earlier memories of riots, ones witnessed in childhood. It became a book not about any one event but about the meaning of such events and their effects on the individuals who live through them.

  And until now I have never really written about what I saw in November of 1984. I am not alone; several others who took part in that march went on to publish books, yet nobody, so far as I know, has ever written about it except in passing.

  There are good reasons for this, not least the politics of the situation, which leave so little room for the writer. The riots were generated by a cycle of violence, involving the terrorists in the Punjab, on the one hand, and the Indian government, on the other. To write carelessly, in such a way as to appear to endorse terrorism or repression, can add easily to the problem, and in such incendiary circumstances, words cost lives, and it is only appropriate that those who deal in words should pay scrupulous attention to what they say. It is only appropriate that they should find themselves inhibited.

  But there is also a simpler explanation. Before I could set down a word, I had to resolve a dilemma, between being a writer and being a citizen. As a writer, I had only one obvious subject: the violence. From the news report, or the latest film or novel, we have come to expect the bloody detail or the elegantly staged conflagration that closes a chapter or effects a climax. But it is worth asking if the very obviousness of this subject arises out of our modern conventions of representation; within the dominant aesthetic of our time—the aesthetic of what Karahasan calls "indifference"—it is all too easy to present violence as an apocalyptic spectacle, while the resistance to it can easily figure as mere sentimentality or, worse, as pathetic and absurd.

  Writers don't join crowds—Naipaul and so many others teach us that. But what do you do when the constitutional authority fails to act? You join and in joining bear all the responsibilities and obligations and guilt that joining represents. My experience of the violence was overwhelmingly and memorably of the resistance to it. When I think of the women staring down the mob, I am not filled with a writerly wonder. I am reminded of my gratitude for being saved from injury. What I saw at first hand—and not merely on that march but on the bus, in Hari's house, in the huge compound that filled with essential goods—was not the horror of violence but the affirmation of humanity: in each case, I witnessed the risks that perfectly ordinary people are willing to take for one another.

  When I now read descriptions of troubled parts of the world, in which violence appears primordial and inevitable, a fate to which masses of people are largely resigned, I find myself asking, Is that all there was to it? Or is it possible that the authors of these descriptions failed to find a form—or a style or a voice or a plot—that could accommodate both violence and the civilized willed response to it?

  The truth is that the commonest response to violence is one of repugnance and that a significant number of people try to oppose it in whatever ways they can. That these efforts rarely appear in accounts of violence is not surprising: they are too undramatic. For those who participate in them, they are often hard to write about for the same reasons that so long delayed my own account of 1984.

  "Let us not fool ourselves," Karahasan writes. "The world is written first—the holy books say that it was created in words—and all that happens in it, happens in language first."

  It is when we think of the world the aesthetic of indifference might bring into being that we recognize the urgency of remembering the stories we have not written.

  AN EGYPTIAN IN BAGHDAD 1990

  THE LAST TIME I spoke to Nabeel was over a year ago. He was in Baghdad. I was in New York. It wasn't easy getting through. The directory listed a code for Baghdad, but after days of trying, all I'd got was a recorded message telling me that the number I'd dialed didn't exist.

  In the end I had to book a call with the operator. She took a while, but eventually there was a voice at the other end, speaking in the blunt, rounded Arabic of Iraq: "Yes? Who is it?"

  Nabeel's family had told me that he was working as an assistant in a photographer's shop. The owner was an Iraqi, and Nabeel had been working for him since 1986, when he left his village in Egypt and went to Iraq. There was a telephone in the shop and the owner was relatively kind, a relatively kind Iraqi, and he allowed Nabeel to receive calls.

  I imagined him as a big, paunchy man, Nabeel's boss, sitting at the end of a counter, behind a cash box, with the telephone beside him and a Kodacolor poster of a snow-clad mountain on the wall above. He was wearing a blue jallabeyya and a white lace cap; he had a carefully trimmed mustache and a pair of sunglasses in his breast pocket. The telephone beside him was of the old-fashioned kind, black and heavy, and it had a brass lock fastened in its dial. The boss kept the key, and Nabeel and the other assistants had to ask for it when they wanted to make a call. It was late at night in New York, so it had to be morning in Baghdad. The shop must just have opened. They had probably had no customers yet.

  "Is Nabeel there?" I asked.

  "Who?" said the voice.

  "Nabeel Idris Badawy," I said. "The Egyptian."

  He grunted. "Wa min inta?" he said. "And who're you?"

  "I'm a friend of his," I said. "Tell him it's his friend from India. He'll know."

  "What's that?" he said. "From where?"

  "From India, ya raiyis," I said. "Could you tell him? And quickly if you please, for I'm calling from America."

  "From America?" he shouted down the line. "But you said you're Indian?"

  "Yes, I am—I'm just in America on a visit. Nabeel quickly, if you please, ya raiyis..."

  I heard him shout across the room: "Ya Nabeel, somebody wants to talk to you, some Indian or something..."

  I could tell from Nabeel's first words of greeting that my call had taken him completely by surprise. It was only natural. Eight years had passed since I'd left his village. He and his family had befriended me when I was living there in 1980 and 1981, doing research. I was then in my mid-twenties; Nabeel was a few years younger. We had become close friends, and for the first few years after I'd left, we had written letters back and forth between India and Egypt. But then he had gone to do his national service in
the army, and he'd stopped writing. In time I had stopped writing too. He had no way of knowing that I would be in the United States on a visit that year. Until a few weeks ago I hadn't known that he was in Baghdad. I knew now because I had just been to Egypt and had visited his village and his family.

  "Nabeel's not here, ya Amitab," his sister-in-law, Fawzia, had said to me, once she recovered from the shock of seeing me at the door. "He's not in the village—he's gone to Iraq."

  Ushering me in, she fussed about distractedly, pumping her kerosene stove, fetching tea and sugar. She was a pretty, good-humored woman who had always made me welcome in their house. I had been in the village when she was married to Nabeel's older brother Aly.

  "Nabeel left about two years ago," she said. "He went with his cousin Ismail, do you remember him?"

  I did. He was Nabeel's best friend as well as his cousin, although they could not have been more different. Ismail was lively, energetic, always ready with a joke or a pun; Nabeel, on the other hand, was thoughtful and serious, with a marked disinclination for vigorous activity of any kind. When he made his way down the lanes of the village, it was in a stately, considered kind of way, in marked contrast to the caperings of his cousin.

  "They left for Iraq soon after they finished their national service," said Fawzia. "They went to make money."

  They had rented a room in Baghdad with some other young men from the village, she said, and they all lived and cooked and ate together. She had taught Nabeel and Ismail to cook a few things before they left, so they managed all right. Ismail was a construction laborer. There was good money to be had in construction; Nabeel earned less as a photographer's assistant, but he liked his job. Ismail had been trying to get him to go into construction, but Nabeel wasn't interested.

  "You know him," she said, laughing. "He always wanted a job where he wouldn't have to get his clothes dirty."