A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

  This provides Brij Bihari the opening he needs. He says, “How can you say that, Didi? The cow is our mother. We care for her with our lives, but those Muslims eat cows.”

  My mother holds her head in her hands. She says, “Oh my dear God! Why do you say such things under my roof?”

  Brij Bihari laughs. He says, “Didi! This is the plain truth. We wouldn’t have these riots if it wasn’t for the Muslims. The knives they use are the same ones—”

  Mother doesn’t let him finish.

  When Brij Bihari leaves, there is a discussion about whether the family should wait longer for Father. Mother feeds the boy while his sister eats by herself. Mother has cooked fish. She removes the bones and the boy mixes the fish with rice. When he eats his food, the boy thinks of the Muslims, who instead of eating mutton or chicken use their knives to slaughter cows.

  The phone rings. But it is not Father. It is someone from his office who wants to know if Father has come home. Mother says she has no news. Mother asks the caller what “the situation” is like in the town. She listens to the answer and sighs. Then she returns to the business of feeding the boy.

  It is hours before Father comes home. Mother has not eaten. Brij Bihari comes in first with Father’s briefcase and the Eagle thermos. When the boy runs out the front door, Father takes his hand and leads him back into the house.

  Mother is angry. She will not speak to Father. She puts a plate in front of him when he sits at the table. Father asks the boy’s sister, “The Jeep came for you at school, little one?”

  The boy’s sister nods but doesn’t say anything because she knows Mother is upset.

  Mother puts fish in the bowl for Father. He begins making balls of rice with his fingers. Mother says, “Was there not a single phone anywhere for you to tell us where you were and when you would come home?”

  Father looks up at the boy and his sister. He does not look at Mother or bother to reply. His face becomes stern and he begins to eat more quickly.

  Mother goes to the door and asks Brij Bihari, “Does Aziz want tea?”

  Now Father breaks his silence. He says, “You want to offer tea to a man whose house is burning?” His tone is not very kind. He is still not looking at Mother. He says, “It was dangerous even to keep Aziz in the car. I went and dropped him in his neighborhood. The police had to open fire. At least twenty-two people dead.”

  Mother stays silent. The boy does not understand what he is hearing Father say. He is distracted by the drama of his parents’ behavior, which he doesn’t like at all. In order to break the silence, he asks a question.

  “Father, why does Aziz kill cows?”

  A dark shadow passes over Father’s face. The boy knows immediately that he has said something wrong. Father turns in great fury toward Mother and demands loudly, “What have you been telling him?”

  This confuses the boy. He can see it also confuses Mother. There is such immense sadness on her face as she looks for a moment at Father. Standing at the doorway to the kitchen, where she had gone to get her lunch, she holds the edge of the green curtain close to her. She has turned her face slightly as if she has been slapped. The boy walks close to Mother and puts his arms around her waist. His forehead touches her cool stomach. Mother is crying, or he imagines that she is. He presses his nose against his mother’s sari and waits for her to gently place her hand on his head.

  * * *

  —

  THE POLICE JEEP has returned to take Father back for patrolling. In the rear are the police constables wearing khaki shorts and red berets. They sit like roosters crammed in a bamboo basket. The men are silent. They have dark, sweaty faces and they look at the boy without much curiosity.

  The police driver, also in khaki, has a revolver in his belt. The driver is the only one standing outside the Jeep. Father is sipping lemon tea on the patio lined with flowerpots, listening to the small transistor radio on the table. The police driver listens as the boy asks if he can hold his revolver. Then the man pats his holster and points wordlessly at Father. He shakes his head as if to say that Father will be angry.

  The boy says, “Are you a Hindu or a Muslim?”

  The driver reaches into his shirt and takes out a ragged sacred thread. He asks, “Why do you call me a Muslim?”

  “And they?” The boy points toward the constables in the Jeep.

  “Woh hamaare hee ladke hain,” he says. They are all our boys.

  The boy understands that the police are there to protect Father. He believes that Father is invincible. He looks at Father as he sits on a cane chair without his shirt, listening to the news on the radio and sipping tea. The boy asks the driver if Father also has a gun. The man says, “Why does he need a gun if we are there with him?” He uses the English word command to tell the boy that the men will use their guns when Father orders them to.

  The boy knows now that no one can harm Father. But, in case anyone dares to try, he has decided that this is how the plan will work: if the attackers are Hindu, the policemen will simply tell them that Father is also a Hindu; and if a Muslim rioter threatens my father, the policemen in the Jeep will shoot him down.

  * * *

  —

  HIS SISTER IS doing homework. Mother has asked the boy to sit down with his own picture book on the sofa. His sister is wearing in her hair the elastic band with shiny plastic stones that Auntie Rani has given her. Such bands are called Love in Tokyo. In the past the boy has asked his sister about the name but she has just shrugged her shoulders.

  When the boy goes down to the kitchen, he finds Brij Bihari standing near the front door talking to Mother. He is telling her that a few Muslim families have collected inside the walls of the radio station nearby.

  The boy asks him, “Will they attack us?”

  Brij Bihari laughs. He says, “They have their tails between their legs.”

  Maybe the Hindus will set fire to the whole radio station, the boy thinks.

  Brij Bihari tells Mother that it is because there is a police party in the radio station that the Muslims have come there.

  Mother says, “I am thinking of Aziz…I hope his family is safe.”

  And then it is morning. The boy comes down the stairs. The sun is out. He remembers the previous night and the troubles of the day only when he sees Brij Bihari once again standing outside the kitchen. Nothing appears to have changed. Mother is inside making tea. Brij Bihari is holding one of his milk cans, which he bounces lightly against the back of his leg.

  The boy asks, “Did they burn down the radio station?”

  “No, no.” Brij Bihari laughs as he says this, and takes the boy by the hand out into the garden to show him the yellow building, which is standing there with its tall aerials, unharmed.

  The boy then discovers that Father has already left with the police party. He wants to know when Father is going to come back. Mother says, “He’ll come for lunch. Things are returning to normal. But you have to behave.”

  The boy looks at his sister. She has planted a small sapling in a pot. It has a single leaf that is fresh green in color. His sister is using a small comb to dig the soil in the pot. She then takes water from the sink in her hand and pours it on the dirt around the plant.

  When Father comes for lunch, there are no discussions about the riots. When the sister asks Father when her school is going to open, he says, “Monday.”

  The boy asks them what day it is that day, and his sister says, “He doesn’t know anything at all.” When Father looks up at her from his plate, the sister says, “Friday.”

  Next week the boy’s sister will go back to school. Mother has told the boy that he will begin school in July. He will be five years old. His sister has told him that his teacher will be a Christian lady from Kerala, Mrs. Thomas.

  The boy asks Father, “When I start going to school, will a police Jeep take me there?”<
br />
  Father smiles at him. His smile shows that he loves both the boy and his sister. He says, “Do you want to go with the police? Can’t Aziz take you in our car?”

  Is Aziz still alive?

  The boy asks, “Is Aziz going to come back?”

  Father says, “He has to drive our car. Where will he go?”

  The boy’s sister speaks up now. She asks Father, “Didn’t you say to Mother yesterday that his house was burning?”

  Father says, “No…That’s not what I said. It is Friday today. He gets the afternoon off for prayers.”

  The sister says, “Did you see him today?”

  Father says, “My dear, today people are still settling down after the troubles in the town last night. I know Aziz is fine. I know the area he lives in…Eat your food.”

  Aziz doesn’t come on Monday, or on the days that follow.

  But then one morning, as Father had promised, Aziz is there, passing a cloth over the white Ambassador car. Brij Bihari is nearby, washing down his buffaloes, using a rag dripping with dirty water. The boy goes out to the gate of the house. A few feet to his left, almost within his reach, there is a lizard sitting on the hedge. He does not go any further and calls out to Aziz.

  He says, “Aziz, why did you not come all these days?”

  Aziz says, “Beta, bahut aafat tha shehar mein.” Son, there was a lot of trouble in the town.

  The boy watches Aziz working on the car. Then Mother calls out for the thermos to be taken out and the boy hurries inside. When Father steps out with a few files in his hand, Aziz opens the car door for him. They leave. It is then that Brij Bihari, leaning over the gate with a twig in his hand, tells the boy that Aziz spent these last few days at his sister’s house. The sister is an attendant in Sister Mary Family Hospital. Her husband had been killed in a riot five or six years ago, and she lives with her daughter near an old mosque in the city.

  The boy asks Brij Bihari, “Will Aziz now return to his own house?”

  He says, “How can he? The public threw kerosene on it and burnt it to the ground.”

  Brij Bihari looks serious. But he must be joking! Brij Bihari says strange things all the time. When the boy looks at him, he knows that what he is saying is true. Brij Bihari looks sad too. The boy wonders what his parents will say when they hear this.

  “What happened to his clothes? Did they get burnt also?”

  Brij Bihari says, “Ek photo tak nahin baccha paaya.” He could not even save one photograph.

  The boy wants to go inside the house now. It seems to him that it is hot outside. He tells Brij Bihari that he will tell his parents what has happened to Aziz. Brij Bihari laughs his characteristic laugh. He says, “What will you tell them that they don’t know? Mother has given him two of Saheb’s shirts.”

  “Really?”

  The boy knows he cannot feel angry with his parents for not sharing with him the news about Aziz. Father was not able to save the house of the man who works for him. The boy feels bewildered by this, and is suddenly filled with disappointment. He is sad for Aziz but he also realizes that his father is not who he thinks he is. Father is helpless, he thinks, just like me. It is even possible that he is scared of the lizards that sit on their fence. The boy is a little bit ashamed, and he now wants to cry.

  Brij Bihari looks at his khataal. He says, “Aziz has to travel a good distance to come here every morning. I am trying to sell him my bicycle. I will be like the bank. He will pay me a monthly rate.” He laughs. And adds, “You have seen how Aziz likes to wash the car every day. I think he will keep the cycle in a good condition.”

  That evening, the boy watches as Aziz takes Brij Bihari’s bicycle out from its place behind the cows. Aziz walks for nearly twenty yards with the bicycle, as if he were holding a child’s hand to help it cross a street, and then, seating himself, he slowly begins to pedal away.

  * * *

  —

  THAT WAS ALL there was to remember. I got up from my place under the olive tree and began the hike back to my studio up in a small tower a short distance from the villa. To my right, I could see the afternoon ferry leaving for the far shore, a growing triangle of foam joining the boat to the pier from which it had departed.

  In the studio, sitting at my desk, I returned to Orwell’s 1984, which I had just begun reading. “Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory…” Hearing this, Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, correctly surmises that such a triumphant declaration only means that some bad news is in store. And indeed, close on the heels of a bloody description of battle and the fatalities inflicted on the enemy, there is the announcement that, starting the following week, the chocolate ration will be further reduced.

  I brought the book with me to the residency because I had come across a report that it suddenly became a bestseller after Trump’s election. In Delhi, when I was in college, I had seen others reading it but never had the chance myself. Big Brother, doublethink, Newspeak—Orwell’s terms have all become a part of the common sense. I have a narrower purpose in picking up the book. I want to see if I will find in it ways to structure the state’s fictions. I have only read thirty pages. What has interested me so far in the book is that (1) Winston Smith is keeping a secret diary; and (2) A girl that he is interested in works in the state’s “Fiction Department” and probably has “some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines.”

  At night, after dinner, I resume my reading of 1984. I wonder how many at this residency know that Orwell was born in Motihari in Bihar—same town where my father was born thirty years later. Orwell’s father was an opium agent for the British rulers in India. In my reading after dinner, I come across the line “Winston was dreaming about his mother.” After reading a couple more pages, I put the book aside and return to my private memories. I want to add to what I had written in the notebook before. I know a novelist who, in addition to clamping on noise-canceling earphones and physically sealing the ethernet port in his computer, also wore a blindfold as he touch-typed on his keypad. But I don’t crave that kind of silence or even stillness. The lake and the pretty trees provide a serene setting for my thoughts. I don’t carry the burden of Winston Smith’s afflictions, and yet even in my comfort I want to follow his example. Orwell writes that while he is performing the physical exercises mandated and surveilled by the state, Smith’s thoughts return to a near-forgotten dream about his parents: “he was struggling to think his way backward into the dim period of his early childhood.” That is what I, too, have been doing. Here at the residency, in these beginning days, my greatest wish is to go back and note down how on seemingly mundane days of my childhood the armies of ordinary citizens were being readied for battle and even milkmen carried swords.

  CHAPTER 3

  BIAS STUDIES

  EAT

  SO_P

  WASH

  SO_P

  At the residency, I explained this experiment at dinner.

  What will you choose to supply as the missing letter in SO_P? Answer: It depends on how you have been primed. Vaani says that is the psychological term for this phenomenon. If you have recently seen or heard the word EAT, it is likely you will say SOUP instead of SOAP. The opposite would happen, of course, if you had just seen WASH.

  Which reminds me. Vaani leaves instructions on Post-it notes. In her angular hand, the word she scribbles at the bottom is KISS but I always first read it as KILL.

  This can be disturbing, depending on how you have been primed to regard such experiments.

  My relationship with my wife is an experiment, in the sense that I often think I’m being tested. As I said, Vaani is a psychologist. This means that what I say to her is always passed through the fiery examination, the agni pariksha, of scientific research. I say to my wife that our daughter,
she’s nine now and will likely not appear many times in this novel, is more likely to be able to order pizza on the phone than I am.

  “Why is this so?” Vaani asks.

  “Well, because I have evidence. None of the cheerful young women who answer the phone at the busy corner pizzeria ever seem to understand what I’m saying when I call and say something as simple as ‘Hello, I would like a large pizza delivered. Feta cheese, onions, peppers, maybe fine olives if you aren’t taking them out of a can. And, one other thing, please, red chili flakes on half of the pizza.’ ”

  Instead of accepting this scientific statement, my wife calmly inquires, “Satya, are you attributing a common motive to all of these individuals—and if so, what is it?”

  I say something like “Yes, of course I am. Without even realizing it, at a subconscious level”—and I understand that even as I’m appealing to her discourse I’m also running the risk of exposing my ignorance—“all those white suburban maidens are racists.”

  Vaani wants to complicate what she must find simplistic and provocative in my thinking. I can read it in her face, the slight flare of her nostrils, the seriousness that never clouds her beauty. She says, “A study done a few years ago showed that Americans distrust those who speak with an accent. But that behavior is linked to something much larger. Whatever is easy to understand is taken as more credible. This is true of humans everywhere. There’s a lot of research on this. You remember the sign we see on Indian highways? speed thrills but kills. Just because the words are rhymed, people are more likely to believe that the statement is true.”

  That is how we talk. Vaani is currently on a yearlong fellowship at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute. I, as you know, dear reader, am a writer, but I also teach literature at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. I put my faith in stories. That the young ladies at the pizzeria would hear my accent on the phone and think I was drunk or confused or annoying is only the beginning of a story. All of the experiments that interest Vaani tell stories; there’s a story, too, in what kinds of experiments are of interest to her.