A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

  That day, prior to cocktail hour, I looked at entries in journal number four from earlier in the year. On the first page is the following:

  The most popular stories on Snopes.com:

  Did Eleven U.S. Marines Give Their Lives This Week? [False]

  Did a Principal Ban Candy Canes Because They Are Shaped Like Js for Jesus? [True]

  Did a Brain-Eating Amoeba Kill a Woman Who Rinsed Her Sinuses with Tap Water? [True]

  Did Miley Cyrus Tell Fans to Worship Satan if They Want to Be Rich and Famous? [False]

  Did Jon Voight Urge Americans to “Fight for Donald Trump”? [True]

  The list is fairly ridiculous. It reveals the low stakes in the battle for truth in our culture. In journal number four, I also found a story titled “Is Trump’s Face Hidden in Baboon Feces?” Scientific Reports had published (on January 31, 2018) a paper entitled “Methylation-Based Enrichment Facilitates Low-Cost Noninvasive Genomic Scale Sequencing of Population from Feces.” It appeared that the accompanying illustration had been tweaked by hackers to resemble Forty-Five. A statement had later been appended to the article in Scientific Reports: “The editors have become aware of unusual aspects to the ‘Extract Fecal DNA’ illustration in Figure 1. We are investigating and appropriate action will be taken once the matter is resolved.” If there was anything mildly uplifting about the nature of things, it was seeing how other ordinary citizens employed themselves in the same zealous quest for something like truth. My notes reveal that a young man in Los Angeles named Sam Morrison sold ten thousand pairs of flip-flops with Trump’s contradictory tweets emblazoned on each pair. To wit: on the right foot, a Trump tweet from 2018 saying “Remember, don’t believe ‘sources said’ by the VERY dishonest media. If they don’t name the sources, the sources don’t exist”; and, on the left, an earlier Trump tweet, this one from 2012, “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud.”

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  TALKING OF TRUMP’S tweets: On February 17, 2019, the president tweeted, in all CAPS: “THE RIGGED AND CORRUPT MEDIA IS THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.” Sarah Silverman, playing Trump’s White House press secretary in the Hulu series I Love You, America, said: “Don’t be enemies of the people.” Journalists have pointed out that Trump’s unhinged rants make their jobs not just difficult but also risky; an irrational part of me also thinks that if we all repeated Silverman’s injunction, the charge would lose its sting and parody would win over propaganda. I go to sleep thinking about this and I wake up with a definite thought: this book that I’m writing, about fake news and journalistic excavation of truth, will be cheekily titled Enemies of the People. Also, I like Sarah Silverman. And Kate McKinnon. And, last but most, Tina Fey. Oh, Tina Fey. (Tina Fey, in a cameo on Saturday Night Live during the pandemic, invoked Dunning-Kruger! She hadn’t taken his name but everyone knew who she was talking about—if you were to make a public statement like “He’s so stupid” or “He’s so full of bullshit,” is there any danger that in any town or city in America people wouldn’t know who you were talking about? In any case, I felt Tina Fey was talking to me because of what I had already written in my manuscript on Dunning-Kruger. For more on that subject, see p. 133.)

  I listened to a podcast once where a writer was discussing his short story about a refugee crisis. He was saying that the Trump administration had hijacked his genre and he resented this fact. “I used to freely traffic in untruths, mostly with a clear conscience, because there were long-established places one could go to find truth.” The current regime has muddied the waters. I heard the writer saying that his home turf—that of fiction—had been usurped. With the rise of “alternative facts,” what did “fiction” even mean? I had been asking myself the same question. How to insist on facts or on truth, if so many around us invest their beliefs in fictions spun by Fox News? I was lying on my bed in the dark telling myself that I wanted to write my own fiction that felt as real as the weight of my head on the pillow. But who was I kidding? What I was writing seemed fake to me, not least because nothing I wrote would go viral the way that fake story did about Trump in the White House, watching the gorilla channel each night in his bathrobe. The prankster who dreamed up this story, do I remember this right, wrote that Trump had complained to his staff that “the gorilla channel was broken.” And that the staff had rigged a twenty-four-hour feed from right outside his bedroom. The story described Trump in the early hours of the morning, his face close to the screen. I had enjoyed that detail. False, but funny.

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  AT DINNER THAT night, a woman from Colombia is sitting beside me. The villa staff, dressed in white, serves us our drinks. She says, “Are you Satya? The person who is working on fake news…” I say yes and ask her name. “Isabella,” she says, adding that she’s working on a conceptual art project about evidence. She moved from Medellín to San Diego two years ago. I want to find out more about her work, but Isabella is already saying that there’s so much information in the world today she feels overwhelmed. Even before she finished her sentence, I asked myself if she was going to say overwhelmed. Her use of the familiar wording shows that we all read the same things, she in her home in San Diego, Nikki in New Jersey, myself, wherever I happen to be at any moment, and everyone else everywhere in the world. We’re all reading and thinking and saying the same things. Then Isabella makes a comment that surprises me. A few years ago, she came across an unforgettable line in a newspaper article: “Anyone reading this essay will accumulate more knowledge today than Shakespeare did in his entire lifetime.” I’m a bit incredulous. However, Isabella is confident and says that I can Google it. (I do later in my room and see that she got the quote right. But, at the time, all I could say was that I doubted whether I knew more than Shakespeare. To begin with, language, and the huge gap between his vocabulary and mine. But Isabella was not bothered by my argument. She said that the sheer amount of information, including fake news, any person had in the Internet age couldn’t possibly be rivaled by someone living even twenty years ago. I pondered this.)

  Our pistachio ice cream is served in ornate green glass jars. We pay attention to our dessert before Isabella speaks again. She says, “For instance, I read on Twitter this morning that a lioness mates up to a hundred times a day.” She adds that she wondered all day, locked up in her studio, if that could even be true. (Of course, I Google this detail too. And a website in Africa confirms Isabella’s piece of information.) I laugh, not knowing the right answer, and Isabella says, “Who’s the genius who dreams up this nonsense?”

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  IN OUR WORLD, we are surrounded by lies. And worse, bad faith.

  Is science the answer? Not if scientists don’t recognize that they, too, are telling a story—trying to find their truths by setting up situations. The same mixture of fiction and fact.

  Which brings me to my wife, Vaani. She is a psychologist and lives in the world of experiments.

  Let me now describe a situation.

  Vaani and I have a child—her name is Piya. Last year, I grew concerned about the lies Piya was telling. She was eight at that time. I complained to Vaani about her. We were in the car, driving down to New Jersey, to the IKEA store in Paramus because we needed new lamps in our home. Piya was in the back, and, though she was asleep, I felt I needed to lower my voice.

  Vaani said, “You are needlessly worried. Lying among children is a sign of cognitive development.”

  It irritated me that she was speaking in a loud, normal voice. I glanced back at Piya.

  I wanted to say that till only recently Piya’s lies were so undisguised that I had seen them as signs of her innocence. Dad, do you have any more chocolate? I didn’t eat the chocolate that was on the table. But now I felt there was in her lies a quality of deception that involved more calculation, even manipula
tion. On the other hand, I had also observed that Piya operated in a strict moral economy. If we had planned something, say, going out for ice cream on Saturday night, and then had to change the plan and move the outing to Sunday night, she took this badly. You lied, Mom, you always lie. I kept quiet, looking at the scene outside. We were passing a row of car dealerships, shiny cars in the parking lots lining the highway, tight clusters of red, white, and blue balloons holding afloat signs announcing July 4 sales.

  Perhaps Vaani felt that she had been abrupt. She said with a smile, “Let’s play a game.”

  She said, “A psychologist was trying to find out what reduces lying among children. She read out two stories to the kids whose behavior had been studied and who were going to be questioned about how they had behaved. One story was ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf.’ The boy and the sheep get eaten because of his repeated lies? (I nodded.) The other story was ‘George Washington and the Cherry Tree.’ You know what happens in that one, right? (I nodded again.) Okay, so tell me, which story reduced lying more?”

  I knew the question was a trap. The first story was the one that my own mother had told me in my childhood. In fact, not too many months ago, I had found myself narrating it to little Piya too. It was a frightening story, the wolf eats you up, but I felt that this tale would scare her away from her lies.

  I suspected I was giving Vaani the wrong answer.

  I said, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

  “Well, you are not alone in thinking that. Most people make that guess. But they are wrong.”

  Vaani said that most kids lied more after listening to ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf.’ They were afraid of being caught having done any wrong, and were lying to cover up whatever they thought or knew had been a transgression.

  “ ‘George Washington and the Cherry Tree’ works differently. It cut down lying among boys by seventy-five percent and by fifty percent among girls. Do you know why?”

  “Because George Washington was the president?”

  “No. The test got the same results when the psychologist replaced Washington with a nondescript character.”

  Vaani explained that the fable about the boy and the wolf teaches the lesson that lying begets punishment. But this isn’t news for the children. They already know that. In the second story, after the boy George confesses to his father that he used his new hatchet to strike down the prized cherry tree, the father says, “Son, I’m glad that you cut down the cherry tree after all. Hearing you tell the truth is better than if I had a thousand cherry trees.”

  Telling the truth had made the parent happy. That is what the child chooses after hearing that story. She doesn’t lie because she wants to make you happy.

  I remember looking back again at Piya, asleep in the back seat. I had done her wrong by telling her the story about the boy and the wolf.

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  —

  AFTER DINNER, I return to my desk at the villa and search in my journal number three. I find what I’m looking for easily enough. A sonogram. My wife must have brought it home after a visit to the doctor when she was pregnant. In the scatter of blurry gray forms there was already skin and hair and blood and bones. The face I have missed while at this residency during my cherished sabbatical semester; the perky voice bringing me reports from the world outside our door. Even her mistakes alerting me to the magic of language. She was five when we had gone on a trip to Maine. Upon our landing at the airport, her question to me: “Dad, are we now going to get our dental car?”

  I don’t want to lie. I want to make Vaani and Piya happy.

  I want to tell you the truth too, dear reader, and make you happy.

  I offer you the stories of my experiments with truth. Truth bends like a twig standing in a glass of water. Neither our leaders nor the mobs of killers hounding protesters on the streets admit the fictionality of our existence. There is no admission of doubt or ambiguity in their judgment—no twig bending in the water.

  For good or ill, this is where things are in my head: The world has put us all in a dire situation. What can one write to save a life? And what are you to write after that life that you were trying to save is gone?

  Once I heard a human rights lawyer, a woman who has provided aid in the past to writers accused by the Indian government of sedition, say to the thousand protesters gathered in a park: “Keep a record. Don’t trust the state. Don’t expect the police to document the violence it is raining on your head. You have to do this yourself. Note it down.” She was saying that, when this time is over, the records you keep will be vital. The news cycle blindly spins each happening into quick oblivion. As a writer I felt I just needed to note down accurately what I knew so that I could remember.

  Words like tombstones? Words like hands raised in prayer? Words naked like knives, like bared teeth?

  Or maybe something entirely gentler:

  When I was a boy in my hometown and it had been raining for three days, it became so that it was no longer possible to have any consciousness of a time when it wasn’t raining. Rain soaked through the walls and slime grew on the inside, in the corners, and even on the ceiling. Phones stopped working. No newspapers came. Birds disappeared from the wet branches of trees. No question of going to school. There was no language outside of “It is raining outside.” Water stood in the distant fields. It rushed down pipes and roared in the gutters. The roads became rivers in which people waded or swam. Brij Bihari brought his cows onto the veranda at the back of our house. Mother would switch on the fans in one room to try to dry the wet clothes. It was all in vain. The snake found in the toilet was proof that the world outside had changed, and the natural order had been turned upside down. Only rain was permanent. You could do nothing but wait. I’m saying all this because that is exactly what has happened to us politically. We cannot imagine—I cannot imagine, sometimes—a time outside this time. The people who are in power must also be deluded enough to believe this. They must think that their power is eternal. That they will sit on the throne forever. And it is this thought that is their failing, because it condemns them to missteps and error. Stay alert. You will hear the rain stop and the wind shift. The powerful will not be waiting for it but that moment will come. It will mark the beginning of their doom, their end.

  CHAPTER 2

  MY EXPERIMENTS WITH ANTS

  Today, during lunch at the villa, I complimented the chef on the excellent salad. The chef doesn’t speak much English. He turned around and picked up two pears from a basket, light green skin tinged with red. On a wooden board there was a section cut from a pale-yellow wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. He pointed to the two items and then to the wall behind him and said, “Emilia-Romagna, Emilia-Romagna,” as if he were providing an ecstatic introduction to his beautiful lover. More likely the chef was explaining that these two ingredients, from the region Emilia-Romagna, were responsible for the delight I had experienced. He held the two pears in front of his chest, so that in an unintentional pantomime it looked as if he was holding up his breasts. “Fresh, fresh,” he said in English. I opened my hand, palm up, and pointed to the pears. He gave me one. I gestured toward the door. Could I take it away with me? Yes, yes, he was saying in his language. Holding the pear in one hand, a notebook in the other, I walked down the hill to the lake.

  I sat down at the water’s edge in the shade of an olive tree. There was no one else around. The waves beat against the concrete bulwark. Several yards out in front of me, I thought I saw a water snake silhouetted in a rising wave. My pear tasted delicious. I returned to what had preoccupied me earlier that day. I was taking down notes about what I remembered of my boyhood. (In childhood, adults take care of you. You are pampered. This residency is a little bit like that. You don’t cook; you are fed meals. Your room is cleaned and your bed made by others. People are nice to you. No wonder I was beginning my investigation by writing about being a child.) The image that came to me was of
the boy absorbed in the mystery of the lives of ants. Solitary, concentrated on his object of study, the boy was carrying out an experiment. And as I sat beside the lake, looking at the endless waves, another memory surfaced: On the small bookshelf in the living room in the house in which the boy lived at that time, his parents had a slightly damaged copy of Gandhi’s My Experiments with Truth. The boy hadn’t read the book but did he wonder about it sometimes? The young can be unself-consciously literal: Does the boy see the half-naked fakir clad in a white lab coat, producing at the end of his experiments a new compound called the nation? Even at that young age, the boy knows about the Salt March. He has heard his mother telling his sister about it. Was that an experiment? Did the great man ever fail at his experiments? Or did he only record his successes?

  I grew up in India hearing about Mahatma Gandhi and when I think about myths it is his bald, bespectacled head that comes to mind. This is not to suggest that Gandhi, a bamboo staff in hand, stands at the mouth of the dark cave where all falsehood is stored. No, what I want to convey is my early sense that there are people and events that achieve a certain fictionality. Stories become attached to them. As a writer, this aspect of life is of great interest to me. Here’s a fragment from a report that I read in a magazine about the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination on January 30, 1948. It is a story that is so good I haven’t tried very hard to find out whether it is true or not; when I first read this account, fifteen or twenty years ago, I copied and pasted it in the pages of my writing journal:

  What you are reading now is a memory experiment. I’m looking back at the boy I was. In my mind, that boy doesn’t stand out clearly in outline but certain incidents in his young life do. I’m struck by his innocence. There is a confusion in the boy’s mind, and it hasn’t left me entirely. He is cruel to ants that climb up a wall near the front steps of the house in which he lives; out on the streets of his provincial town, men are being set on fire depending on the stories told by the length of their foreskin. The boy’s father works in the government bureaucracy—and the boy perhaps senses that if his father cannot protect everyone, he cannot also protect the boy. Is it this discovery of fear that has made him forget so much in his past? I cannot be certain.