A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

  I was now at the end of my second week at the villa, the end of January, and there was an announcement that flights from China were to be temporarily suspended. Our villa was like an island surrounded by placid water, and it was natural that even the fictional details in the pages of 1984 seemed more pressing or real to me than the scraps of confusing reports I was receiving in a foreign language. I was deep into my journals; I was writing Farooq’s story and making notes on another story I wanted to write about a killing in India; there was enough reality to occupy me, and, to be honest, I felt I had a handle on the truth.

  On this particular afternoon, my reading was interrupted by Bev. She was an artist from South Africa, painting ghostly figures, spectral images of victims, over archival group photographs of the apartheid regime. She had come to the villa with her husband, a labor activist; I hadn’t talked to him because he had a back problem and was confined to his room. Bev came over to where I was sitting and asked if I’d mind talking to her for a few minutes. I offered to get her coffee but she said no. I saw that she had Indian-style bangles on her arm. Seeing me looking at them, she said she had visited Jaipur with her sister. Then she pointed at the book I was reading. She said, “Did you know that some years back Amazon remotely deleted thousands of copies of 1984 from readers’ Kindles?”

  I hadn’t known that and waited for her to say that the action on Amazon’s part was Orwellian. But she didn’t and then the moment for the joke had passed. I stayed silent and an awkwardness sprang up between us. What was it that she had wanted to tell me? For a moment, just for a moment, I was afraid Bev was going to say that I had offended her with some remark I had made during dinner. “Your joke, and I know you meant it as a joke, was insensitive, I think.” That is what I expected her to say, though there wasn’t anything in particular that came to mind. But, instead of that, Bev stretched her bangle-laden arm and touched my hand. A serious note in her voice, she said, “I’ve not stopped thinking about what you said the other evening while we were having drinks. You said that the question you were working on is how many among your neighbors will look the other way when a figure of authority comes to your door and puts a boot on your face. And I’ve wanted to ask you, well, what do you think?”

  “How many?”

  “Yes.”

  I laughed. And then, feeling that I needed to rise to the occasion, I said, “The answer would be a full sixty-five percent.”

  Bev widened her eyes. She said pleasantly, “Could you explain?”

  I sat up straight and inhaled deeply. “You know, of course, about the Milgram experiment?”

  In the early sixties, in the basement of a building at Yale University, a psychologist named Stanley Milgram wanted to see how far participants would go in accepting instructions from an authority figure and engage in behavior that conflicted with their own conscience. Milgram’s experiment was fake in the sense that the pain the participant was inflicting on another person was not real: the participants were administering electric shocks to other people when they gave the wrong answer in a quiz purportedly about memory, but the people in the other room sitting in electric chairs were actors—and there was no real electric machine or electric chair. The main point of the test was to determine to what extent the participant would persist in obeying commands like these:

  Please continue.

  The experiment requires that you continue.

  It is absolutely essential that you continue.

  You have no other choice, you must go on.

  Milgram had begun his project only months after the start of the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. His experiment was designed to investigate a question prompted by Eichmann’s claim that he was just following orders: Was Eichmann alone in making this claim or would his behavior have a more universal resonance? In Milgram’s own words: “I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.”

  I now told Bev that what Milgram found was that 65 percent of the participants were willing to shock their fellow citizens over and over again despite the cries of agony—and, on occasion, subsequent silence. Other participants were often willing to administer the shock in smaller doses. The 65 percent, when encouraged by the authority figure, administered “the experiment’s final, massive 450-volt shock.” The study’s findings scandalized the world and are routinely cited even today to explain human cruelty.

  “And yet, if we repeat this figure of sixty-five percent,” I informed Bev, “we would be wrong. That figure is widely cited—but it is wrong.”

  The point I began to elaborate is essentially what Vaani means when she begins talking about the richness of data. Here the richness lay in the repeated schema Milgram adopted. In other repetitions of the original experiment, he used variants, altering the scenario involving participants, places, et cetera. In one variant, where the “shocker” and “shockee” were in the same room, there was a significant drop in the percentage of people willing to administer the highest voltage. If the experimenter was no longer an authority figure but an ordinary person, the earlier figure of 65 percent fell down to 20 percent. In experiment number 17, if there were other actors who, standing next to the participants, said that they didn’t want the experiment to go on, only 10 percent of the participants indicated a desire to persist with the punishment. Also, if there were two experimenters, in other words, two authority figures, and if they started disagreeing with each other, then the percentage of participants willing to go on with the experiment dropped to zero.

  When I was reciting these details, with sufficient drama, Bev was smiling. I believe she wanted to have hope in the human race.

  I explained to her that Milgram’s baseline study, the one that achieved the high number of 65 percent of people willing to administer damaging punishment, was accepted as a fable about human depravity. But the additional figures I was quoting to her—those I grasped as a part of a fable too. A fable about redemption. Bev nodded, but I don’t think she was interested in any further commentary. She thanked me and said she would let me go back to my reading.

  When Bev had returned to the villa, I remembered another detail. Vaani had told me that every time the experimenter used the fourth prod—“You have no other choice, you must go on”—the participant said no. In other words, when people were told, rather, when they were ordered to go on with an act of cruelty, they refused. This could be reassuring until we realize that, minus the imperative, a mere articulation of higher purpose (science, religion, research, Mother India, sacred cow, the purity of the race) prompts people to inflict pain—on any number of others, and even on themselves.

  The lesson I had drawn from the Milgram experiment was simply this: facts can lead you in any direction, it just depends on the kind of story you want to tell. Which brings me back to Farooq.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE MORNING of the graduation ceremony, Farooq texted me to say that he had read my article online. He had liked it; he said his friends wanted to meet me that day. But I didn’t see him till after the ceremony was over. It was a bright, beautiful day. The pretty setting matched the florid descriptions customarily found in college brochures: green lawns, white tents, summer dresses, sunglasses, blue blazers, balloons, picnic tables, rows of chairs under tall elms with their sun-dappled branches, bright hopes, joy, et cetera. The ceremony started with a prayer, then the singing of the national anthem, and then a stately procession of awards from which, I had always known, Farooq would remain excluded. A graduating senior presented the student commencement speech. This was the student who had won against Farooq; he was funny, and somewhat frivolous, and at the end of his speech when I clapped, I felt that I was betraying my friend.

  The commencement speaker was Anne Fadiman, the
author of a wonderful work of nonfiction, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. Fadiman delivered a speech that was profound and even critical but without robbing the day of its sunshine. She urged the audience to honor difference and to honor commonality. “It’s hard to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes,” Fadiman said, “especially if theirs are size 6 triple-A and yours are Size 12—or vice versa. But learning to do so—in other words, learning to honor each other’s differences—is one of the most important skills you can master.” I was thinking, once again, of Farooq when Fadiman said, “Don’t assume that you—you as an individual, or you as an American—stand at the center of the universe. It isn’t true, and it never helps.”

  Later, I wrote a note to Fadiman asking for a copy of her text, from which I have now quoted for you. She thanked me for what I had to say about her speech. She added: “Thank you even more for missing the graduation at your own college in order to make sure that the student you call Khalid Farooq had someone to watch him get his diploma. I read your article with interest, immediately realizing that if you had not been there, his commencement—a time of triumph for any student, but particularly for him—would have felt like one more instance of driving the Domino’s truck while his classmates ate breakfast at Goldberg’s Bakery. He may not have had a well-dressed contingent of parents and grandparents in the audience, but he had you. That was something important.” I felt so too. After the ceremony was over, I took pictures of Farooq in his graduation robe. He wanted to send the pictures to his parents in Pakistan. At one point, he climbed onstage and asked me if I could take a picture of him at the lectern. Did he want to pretend that he had indeed delivered the graduation speech? I didn’t ask. Farooq took me to meet another student who had graduated that day. Her name was Frida. She was going to North Carolina to study philosophy. Frida was from the Dominican Republic and I found her warm. She thanked me for being there for Farooq, and then she said that she had enjoyed reading my article about her friend and hoped to see me again. Then I took Farooq in my car to a Nicaraguan restaurant in Hartford for a celebratory lunch. Even though it was a happy occasion, and we were both chatting amiably, a thought nagged at me.

  A week earlier, Farooq had asked me to lend him twelve hundred dollars. When he made the request, he explained that he had booked a flight to Pakistan for his wife and son. His boss had promised him an advance to pay for the ticket but then backed out at the last minute. Farooq’s professor, the man who had first introduced me to him, advised me not to give the money; it was a large sum and I hardly knew the man. Vaani was firm. We will soon need some money, she said. But Farooq told me that he would return the cash when I came to his town for the graduation ceremony. Also, I knew I was going to write about Farooq, and thought it was only fair that I was running the risk of losing money. So, a few days before his graduation, I stood waiting at a gas station near the highway half an hour away from my home. Farooq was driving to New York City with his family to pick up the tickets from the airline office on the way to the airport. In my hand was the envelope provided by the bank, and for Farooq’s son, who was three years old, I had brought cookies and juice. When they pulled up, Farooq got out of the car. The child seated in the back appeared exhausted and weak but accepted my small gift. His wife, Julie, whom I was seeing for the first time, a somewhat pudgy, attractive white woman in her late twenties, was seated in the front. I noticed that she was pregnant. Julie looked straight ahead and didn’t acknowledge me. I felt rebuffed, as if I was doing something wrong, but I also knew that I was helping the family. Still, I wanted my money back, and now, on the day of Farooq’s graduation, we were eating grilled skirt steak with green aji sauce and I was wondering whether it would be impolite to remind him of his promise.

  I knew Vaani would be disappointed by my reticence. A month earlier, she had wanted me to take her to see her doctor, a gynecologist named Anjali Patel. While Dr. Patel was examining Vaani, I sat out in the waiting room looking at the TV in the corner—it was April 2011, President Obama had just released his long-form birth certificate in response to conspiracy theories. Dr. Patel emerged from a door to my right, a slim woman, stylish in a leather jacket, and said that my wife wanted me to join her inside.

  Vaani was lying on her back on a large reclining chair. She said, “We have good news…” And then she choked, her eyes filling with tears. Dr Patel said, “I will be back in a few minutes.” Vaani held her hand out and I took it in mine, and I bent down to kiss her on the lips and then her hair, inhaling her scent. The first thing she said was that the doctor had told her the exact date in January when our baby would arrive. This precise date made the surprise all the more real. Vaani said, “I didn’t want to tell you anything till I had confirmed it with the doctor.” I kissed her again. I felt a sense of responsibility descending on me, it was almost like a weight, but I also felt a sense of elation that made me feel weightless. I felt I was flying. We held hands till Dr. Patel knocked and came back inside the room.

  And that is why when I saw that Julie was pregnant, I thought Vaani would forgive my succumbing to the request for money. I came home from the gas station where I had handed the money to Farooq and said in an exaggeratedly excited way, “Khalid Farooq’s wife is pregnant. That must be the reason they needed the money.”

  Vaani didn’t share my excitement. She simply frowned and said, “She is pregnant? Why the hell is she going to Pakistan, where she knows no one?”

  I hadn’t considered this question. My preoccupation lay elsewhere. I had sought to justify the loan on moral grounds. A man who delivers pizza is not in a strong economic position, he needs money for his family, how can we refuse? Remember, it is a loan, not a gift. I feel responsible because I’m also writing about him—his condition is clearly dire. I want to be able to help him. But what I hadn’t said to anyone, not even to Vaani, was that I had put myself in a situation. This had everything to do with the demands of my writing. A risky request had been made, and I had responded because I wanted to see how it would play out. It would give me material. This was something I was hiding from Vaani, and maybe she suspected this and that is why she was angry. And on hearing her openly question the logic behind a pregnant Julie going to Pakistan, I felt doubly guilty. I was worried about getting my money back, but I had also behaved like the FBI, which had produced some cash for Farooq and forced him to play a role in their narrative.

  During that lunch in the Nicaraguan restaurant, after Farooq’s graduation, I knew I wasn’t going to ask for the money. However, I remembered Vaani’s question very clearly and asked Farooq why Julie had gone to Pakistan when she was pregnant. There was an explanation. Of course, there was. He said that Julie had always wanted to be a doctor. She didn’t have much of an education. But it was different in Pakistan. There was a quota reserved in medical institutions, but also in government jobs and the military, for people from the tribal areas of the northwest. As Farooq’s wife, Julie would be eligible for admission to a medical college in Abbottabad. This was her best chance. She could get admitted before the baby came. If they missed this opportunity, Farooq said, things could get complicated.

  * * *

  —

  TIME PASSED. NOT too long, six or seven weeks, maybe even as long as two months. I was worried about the money. I reminded Farooq by text but nothing happened. I had stopped mentioning him to Vaani because doing so irritated her. During this time I had sent Farooq more messages and also called him once or twice at work. When I finally got hold of him on the phone, he told me that he was sorry. He hadn’t yet received money from his boss. He said he had received his salary, however, and would be able to return half the amount he had borrowed. I lied to him and said that I would be passing by his town later that week and I’d collect the money on Friday at 10:00 a.m.

  Farooq sent me his address and I arrived at his door on time. When I rang his bell there was no answer. I called him on his phone too, but it went straight to m
essages. I felt disappointed and more than a bit annoyed. Had he made me travel this distance for nothing? I sat in my car and read a Roberto Bolaño novella for class. After half an hour or maybe closer to an hour, I got a text.

  Sorry, Farooq said, he had been sleeping. I texted back that I was outside his door.

  Fifteen minutes later, his door opened. He came out to the car and we talked for a bit. I waited. He didn’t have half the money, he said, but he had four hundred dollars. When he gave me the cash, I felt relieved and happy. I had got a part of my money back and, what was more, I didn’t need to doubt Farooq anymore.

  I immediately offered to buy him lunch. But he said no, he was fasting.

  I said I was probably going to find a Starbucks close by and get some coffee; I explained that the wait in the car had given me a headache. Farooq said he could come with me so that we could talk. But first he needed to change. Would I want to come in for a few minutes so that I didn’t have to wait in the car?

  A dog was barking.

  I said, “Can I meet Simba?”

  Farooq led me toward the kitchen at the back. I heard the loud barking before I saw the dog, a large, ferocious animal who rattled the cage with his leaps. I beat a quick retreat to the room that we had first entered.

  I was left standing in a room with a broken sofa and some flowers wilting in a plastic soda bottle. Next to it was another, smaller plastic bottle that said little remedies saline spray. The curtain covered the window and gave the room a stale air. A child’s car seat leaned against a wall. I noticed that the battery-operated alarm clock on the desk was half an hour ahead. Next to it was a shabby computer. When I sat down on the sofa, it smelled of dog.