Book of Destruction

by P Sachidanandan

  Though he called me a liar and deceiver, Seshadri did not call me a thug. He did not say that his aim was to feed me the gur and convert me into a thug. The only concession he gave me was that I, unlike the thugs, had no ideology or standard methodology in my profession. How he was so sure of that, is another question. There are a number of writers who carry out their job following certain ideologies without taxing their conscience or feelings. He had decided I was a spineless, uncommitted and apolitical writer, without an ideological backing to speak of. One who lingered only on the pains and woes of the people without caring for the dialectical explanations of suffering. I have no complaints. And no time to argue. It is his methodology of jumping to conclusions and launching into action with no use of logic or application of mind that worries me. He had learnt from a nurse that I was now a writer. I am sure that must have been Sister Meera John. As sure as I am that she hasn’t read any of my works. A new view or faith, I may say, seems to be taking hold of every sphere of life—that feelings and concern for human suffering are not relevant, that firm belief in an ideology and following the methodology dictated by that ideology are all that’s needed. A strange kind of fear was permeating every cubic centimetre of space around me. Perhaps that is what the propagators of this new faith are also aiming to do: to rule by spreading fear, fear alone.

  Things were becoming more complex. Seshadri’s shadow now loomed not just over my neck but had begun to darken even my thoughts and writing. He was no longer a mere thug, but also philosopher, critic and judge. The problem had already crossed the domain of destruction and entered the realm of thoughts, truth and untruth. Now I see that even here he was not interested in finding the truth. His disagreement was on our perceptions of truth and untruth and the place we give them in our lives. His letter raised the question whether such a sharp division between what is truth and what is untruth is even necessary. Truth or untruth—for what, when and to what extent? Does this issue deserve so much discussion at all? What exactly is the thing called theft, and what is murder? Do such things need any definition? Do animals entertain such thoughts? His arguments and logic, it appeared, led every time to ‘animal nature’.

  There are certain nomadic tribes who, even today, practise theft as a traditional profession. They too ask such questions. Do you describe the acts of lions, tigers and cats who stalk their prey as immoral? Does it constitute theft when birds eat grains from farmers’ fields or when trees send out roots to seek wet areas and suck in the water and nutrients from the land?

  There is a belief among us who lead a settled life that gypsies are habitual liars. What a gypsy says today will not be the same as what he says tomorrow, so we believe. Anthropologists who have studied this behaviour hold a different view. If a gypsy tells a different story every time, it is not for the purpose of cheating you, they argue. He is embellishing an incident or fact with newer and newer coatings of imagination every time he describes it and that is the way he handles language. It might be the same as when fiction writers say there could be a number of different texts for each fact and each could be true. By building on the fact continuously, the gypsy too is perhaps striving to bring it closer and closer to the truth, if I may use the word. Instead of viewing reality as a cold and dead entity, he makes it a growing, changing, living phenomenon.

  Taking another view, can we ever be sure of what exactly is the truth? Every philosopher, every spiritualist and every scientist has been on this quest, forever. Truth is most likely different for different people. But, amazingly, a lie is not so. A lie is unanimous. Pointing at an elephant and calling it a beetle is a lie and no one will dispute it. In that sense, a lie is more concrete and transparent. One might even say, a lie is truer than the truth.

  Of course, Seshadri did not take his arguments to such levels. He stood beyond the abstractions of truth and falsehood. He admitted truthfully that he was a liar. He stated honestly that he was a deceiver. He did not quibble about the right and wrong of it. If he wanted to justify anything, it was his acts, and for that he did not need any of our laws, jurisprudence or culture. Belief alone was sufficient for him. Not that things like history, law, politics or literature were alien to him. Quite the contrary—he employed every branch of thought intelligently and ingeniously. All for the purpose of deception, to distract his prey. In fact all that we have constructed over the ages in the name of culture and civilization lies on one side of the pages. His is the book written on the other side. There is only one thing on his side, his belief. Our pages are all blank to him. He lives in our world, no doubt. He uses its thoughts and takes part in its activities. But without ever acknowledging it.

  If the nomadic tribes steal, they claim they do it as a part of their tradition, as a continuation of the ways of the animal kingdom. But they have not constructed an ideology in support of it as Seshadri has done. They view their lies as different expressions of truth. There too they have nothing in common with the arguments Seshadri advances. Yet, the irony is that these people, devoid of both past and future, endlessly wading through the present, are known in our world as the soothsayers or predictors of the future! We do not bother to ask how anyone who has never been familiar with the concept of future can predict it. But then it is the same with courtesans. We invite these women, who are fated to welcome a new man into their chambers every night, to compose and sing songs of eternal love in exquisite poetic language. Does it not indicate a vision that endorses love and future as mere poetical fantasies? Or are we turning hypocrisy itself into a beautiful poem? Look at it from another angle and we can surely find an intellectual answer to both. It is the prostitute who has nothing with which to claim a man who can best weave the dreams of love. It is not the revolutionaries who claim the sole monopoly on the future but the nomads who have no vested interests in it who are the most qualified to predict it. A wandering palm-reading kuratti does not make her predictions on the basis of any ideology but by following a simple methodology. A methodology that follows the length and direction of the lines on her client’s palm. She faithfully and objectively follows a methodology, it is a science to her, even though it has no physiological or historical backing. Thus we arrive at a situation where methodology stands on its own and becomes the truth. A situation not too far removed from that of many of our thinkers and historians. Is this the point where the faithful, the thugs, the historians and the revolutionaries finally meet?

  Thugs too have a methodology, a very systematic one. Seshadri has found justifications to link it with an ideology. If he clings to that ideology, almost at the peril of his life, it is because he knows that the link is but weak and tenuous. All his attempts to rationalize and philosophize it, his emphasis on the positive aspects of it such as the so-called brotherhood and camaraderie among thugs, only reinforce my point. He draws my attention to the seemingly edifying codes of conduct among thugs—how one thug can always recognize another and would stand by him at all times. How thuggee transcends religious and casteist prejudices. How there are thugs among ministers, bureaucrats, doctors, architects, academicians, intellectuals, historians, writers, dancers, scientists, policemen, industrialists, traders, workers, saints and nomads, and how thuggee is equally sacred to all of them. These facts might be true, but they remain mere codes of conduct or conditions of membership in a cult. I have of course seen how the resident director Chandulal Gandhi and the gardener Seshu met like brothers. In this mythical world of brotherhood, just as in the ideological cementing among revolutionaries, every kind of moral consideration evaporates. The brotherhood he so proudly proclaims is actually a brotherhood between the members of a cult and it does not spill over into any relationship between a thug and a non-thug. The whole of mankind is divided into two sections, namely thugs and non-thugs, us and them. All thugs, burying their differences of position, profession, trade, caste and religion, unite as one against the ‘other’—the non-thugs or bunijs. No different from the way followers of one faith, ideology or political party organize again
st those outside it.

  It must be loaded with such thinking, with a conviction stronger than that of the nomad, and an authority more powerful than that of the revolutionary that Seshadri proclaims himself a keeper of the future. He claims that he is only liberating his victims in a manner a nomad would never profess and a revolutionary would always aspire to. He derides writers as the ones revelling in the past and the present. He believes he stands upon a much higher plane than them as a devotee of the future. But he distances himself from the revolutionaries on grounds of ideology and the politics of the future. He holds that all living beings are inevitably headed for destruction; in the end all will return to the basic elements and so destruction is the truth of the future. When an event takes place on this earth (in his definition, an event occurs only in the act of destruction), a page is torn off from his book and we are brought that much closer to the last page or the conclusion. He invites me to be a reader of this book, this Book of Destruction. If the chill sent by his revelation that I had been his marked victim came upon me like lightning, the chill that ran down my spine upon this invitation did not vanish like lightning. He had not designed it to vanish. As a writer, he has allotted to me the role of a masticator of the past. My status as a prey was also consigned to the past, with his death. But here he was, inviting me to the future, in the company of thugs, sharing their concerns and anxieties of today. He keeps returning to the equation of a dead thug and a living victim. The logic behind his invitation is perhaps the fact that I was the victim of a thug, if not a thug myself. Just as the victim of a vampire joins the vampire’s creed. The fact that I was not killed and buried does not seem to bother him. Perhaps that is the attraction, that instead of dead and buried, he finally has a victim with whom he can communicate, even if from the other side of death.

  I am expected to read The Book of Destruction—if it really exists and is not a metaphor—keeping his anxieties and apprehensions in mind. I am supposed to take them over and carry them forward.

  His first anxiety is that the present-day killings, though adhering to the basic principles of thuggee, exhibit certain deviations from its methodology. He takes pleasure in the fact that violence is becoming widespread in the contemporary world. It also gives him great satisfaction that the modern assassins are able to avoid emotional involvement and strike victims with whom they have no personal enmity, that innocent people are being targeted with no consideration of creed, colour or class. All these mark the purity and the sacred character of the killings. It troubles him, however, that these assassins are leaving behind the traditional methods of killing. That these modern assassins do not hesitate to spill blood. Why do they not care to bury the bodies and, worst of all, unlike the thugs, why do they come out into the open and claim responsibility for the killings? He is puzzled: can this be called thuggee, are these assassins real thugs?

  The Book of Destruction is silent on these themes. Revelations and omens of the Devi are not forthcoming. After watching the developments of the past half-century, Seshadri concludes that mankind has finally come to realize and accept the necessity of destruction, thus rendering the vow of secrecy redundant.

  I am not obliged to find answers to Seshadri’s questions. But he had raised a storm in my mind that would not die down. His confessions in the classic style, reasoning in the renaissance air, justifications using rationalist armoury, idealistic statements on brotherhood and honesty of purpose, attacks in the guise of a modernist-progressive on my dishonesties and invoking my responsibilities as a writer, and the final, sudden leap into the postmodernist environs to initiate a hunter–prey discussion on the methods of hunting plagued me. As if the ultimate role of the prey is to start a consultancy for the hunter! Hadn’t the Spanish Inquisitor General Torquemada said that if an innocent victim was wrongly sentenced to burn on the stake, he should accept his fate with resignation and rejoice in sacrificing his life in the cause of truth?

  In the midst of all these absurdities, Seshadri had, in the final part of his letter, sowed seeds that now refused to die. Does the re-emergence of indiscriminate killing in a wider and more effective manner—about which he did not bother to hide his joy—also mean the addition of a new dimension to thuggee, he wondered. He observed that killing has left behind remote battlefields and entered our streets, marketplaces, offices and even our backyards. It is becoming endemic to our daily lives, unlike the infrequent battles of the past. Machine guns, bombs, mines and booby traps have cut the action time to almost zero compared even with the few seconds of struggle during strangulation. He celebrates the near mundaneness of killing, so common now in the fields of politics, cultural and ethnic conflicts, industry, trade, strikes and revolutions. He acknowledges the charge of cowardice associated with their age-old methods of lies and deception and rejoices at the new transparency of methodology and the acceptance of it by society. But while taunting us about our complacency at the pollutants being introduced into our air, water and food, he prefers to ignore the extent of cooperation, or rather the lack of cooperation, which the victims extend to the whole process. While he is vociferous about the reprehensible celebration of lies and deception in the field of literature, he fails to notice the spread of this phenomenon into our daily lives, albeit without its poetical beauty. Of writers becoming copywriters for selling wares in the market and ideas in politics. The irony of catchwords and punchlines coined by the copywriters becoming pieces of literature. The sheer mockery in advertisements acquiring the status of art.

  Whether formalized by Sleeman or someone else, the methodology of thuggee is gaining popularity. Ramaseeana, his compilation of the code words and phrases used by the thugs, is becoming a dictionary of all languages.

  I reflected on Seshadri’s dark warning that there are thugs among writers, intellectuals, artists, historians, teachers, social workers and seers biding their time with a roomal in their hands and a freshly dug grave. In fact, it was one of the first warnings he had given. There is a potential thug in everyone you meet. There is a strong and invisible network that has scaled the barriers of religion, language, caste, colour and trade—barriers we naïvely assume are insurmountable in our society. Brotherhood, a beautiful word in our lexicon, turns around and bares its fangs at us. It assumes the shape of a ghost in our imagination and awaits us around every dark corner. I have begun to flinch at every call of Jai Bajrangbali, Allahu Akbar, Sat Sri Akal, Desh ko bachao, Inqalab Zindabad, Yeh dil mange more, Kar lo duniya mutthi mein, Dhoondte rah jaoge, Let’s go or Just do it, as if it were a Hukka bhar lao, Pani pilao or Tambaku kha lo.

  Seshadri’s letter remained in my hands. I didn’t know what to do with it. I was too scared to keep it and uneasy to part with it. Once I even thought of handing it over to the police. A threat from a dead man? What weight would that carry? As a proof of thuggee, alive and active? The writer himself dead. The resident director of Mehta Company was over fifty when I knew him at Rajhara; he would have succumbed to diabetes or heart attack long back. And then … who knows if the policeman I go to wouldn’t himself be carrying a handkerchief in his hand?

  Even as I struggled with these questions, I decided to go to the hospital once again. I had no clear plan in mind. Perhaps I would meet Sister Meera John who had passed on Seshadri’s note. Ask about Seshadri’s last evening … or just simply say, ‘Thank you for handing over his letter,’ or perhaps, ‘Sister, why did you have to give this to me?’… What would be the point anyway?

  The hospital area seemed to be in chaos. Doors to the outpatient department and the clinic were closed. Handwritten posters were stuck untidily on the walls and gates. It seemed the hospital staff were on strike, starting that day. Their demands? To stop the system of contract labour and to regularize their jobs. It was not right or logical to run such a huge and reputed hospital with outsourced workers, they claimed. There seemed to be merit in their stand. The staff should have some sense of belonging to the establishment, which was not possible if it was run with temporaril
y hired workers. I could see their point. But what about the innocent patients? How can a hospital staff get away from their responsibilities to the sick and needy? Is their act any different from that of the terrorists who take innocent hostages to bargain for their demands, I wondered. The patients are like the hostages, who are neither the cause of their troubles nor have any power to solve them.

  The inpatients were being moved to other hospitals by their relatives, on stretchers, wheelchairs and on foot. The hospital management had announced an impending lockout. Relatives wanted to get their family members out before that happened. Doctors were moving about, clueless. So were a large number of non-uniformed people who could be patients or their relatives. There were a few patients in critical condition lying on the floor awaiting attention. One was on a stretcher in the lobby, obviously an accident case, with blood dripping down and pooling on the floor. Curiously, nurses seemed to be absent from the scene. I could see only a few matrons who were presumably not on contract labour. And they did not want to talk to anyone. Whenever some desperate family member approached them they would dive through a nearby door and shut themselves in.

  The hospital constituted a cluster of buildings built at various stages without any overall planning. Policemen were on duty at all the main entrances and intermittently along the corridors. As I flowed with the milling chaos I suddenly spotted a few nurses who seemed to emerge from nowhere and were rushing somewhere, avoiding the patients and the policemen. I followed them instinctively. As I got closer I realized that Meera John was among them. I called loudly, ‘Sister, Sister Meera John!’