A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

  28.

  The truth is that the truth is complicated. Here’s a story, a terrible story, from the summer of 2017. Eid was around the corner. In Kashmir, in the part ruled by India, on the night the faithful observe Shab-i-Qadr, or the night the Quran is believed to have been revealed, an image of a badly beaten man clad only in his underwear began circulating on social media. His name was Mohammed Ayub Pandith. He was fifty-seven. The next day, the police released a statement that Pandith, deputy superintendent of police, had been assaulted and killed outside the Jamia Masjid in Nowhatta. Reading the news, I sensed the reporter’s frustration at being unable to parse the truth. Pandith was also a Muslim and a Kashmiri, like the men in the mob who murdered him, and in the end that is the angle that the reporter settled on. “Kashmiris are killing Kashmiris.”

  But, as I said, truth is more disturbing. According to police, Pandith was tasked with frisking worshippers as they streamed into the mosque in Nowhatta, where a prominent separatist leader was to lead the prayers. One version of events had Pandith getting involved in an altercation with the youth who were shouting anti-India slogans. Pandith was photographing them with his phone. But how would this be possible? asked Pandith’s son. His father didn’t have a smartphone, only a basic Nokia phone. When he was attacked, Pandith fired three shots from his pistol and injured his attackers. The police chief praised Pandith’s action: he had aimed at the legs and not tried to kill those who were about to lynch him. One could say that at least one Kashmiri was not killing Kashmiris.

  The incident appears to have happened close to midnight. When the images of Pandith’s bruised body were forwarded on social media, all kinds of rumors spread through the valley. There were claims the body was that of a non-Kashmiri who had come to kill the man about to lead the prayers. Another rumor described the dead man as someone from the intelligence bureau spying on the worshippers. A third, more insidious rumor, especially in the context of the Indian subcontinent, was that the man who was lynched was uncircumcised. In so many riots, so many stories, the difference between life and death is as thin as a piece of foreskin. The reporter mentions talk of Pandith being an honest and humble man. He hadn’t grown rich like some other police officers.

  Last night when I went to bed, I told myself that when I woke up in the morning I would put pen to paper and try to find a way into the report I had kept with me about Pandith’s lynching. What kept me awake for a long time was the mention that when Pandith’s son went to the police control room to identify his father’s body, he fainted. My mind kept going back to the fact that hours after the pictures of Pandith’s body first appeared on social media, another photograph was circulated on WhatsApp. It showed Pandith’s jaws with no teeth left attached.

  So, this is what the human record comes down to.

  29.

  Fake news leads to lynchings—and then what? Where is the writer to find evidence of life?

  Alwar, Rajasthan. July 2018. A twenty-eight-year-old Muslim man taking his cows to his village was beaten up by a mob on the suspicion of his being a cattle smuggler ferrying the cows to an abattoir. By the time the police came and drove the injured man to the hospital, he had already died. It later came to light that the police had first stopped to drop off the cows at a shelter and then had made a second stop for tea. As a writer seeking individual pathos, what I found most moving in the milkman’s story was a statement by the man’s father; he reportedly said that his son so loved his cows that he would go hungry if there wasn’t enough fodder for his animals.

  When I read that I thought of a story I had heard in a documentary, The Men in the Tree, made by Vaani’s friend from college Lalit Vachani. Vachani’s documentary is about the members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing Hindu group in India who are so filled with hate that they spread rumors to cause riots in which the Muslims get killed. In the film we hear a former member of the group tell the filmmaker that when he was a young man he posted incendiary pamphlets containing rumors. A riot resulted.

  When the man returned home, he found his mother in mourning. Their cowherd Gama had been killed in the riot. And here is the part that rumors relying on vicious stereotypes can never get at. Gama was a Muslim. Gama cared for the cows—cared for them more than the RSS man himself did—and he had been murdered because of the rumors that had been spread to cause the riot.

  30.

  When Gandhi caught the Spanish flu in the autumn of 1918, he was offered cow’s milk to aid in his recovery but he refused. Gandhi was opposed to the practice of “phooka,” in which air is blown forcefully into a cow’s vagina to induce her to lactate. The sickness was serious: Gandhi was only forty-eight but he wrote that “all interest in living had ceased.” Although he felt he had served an “invitation to the angel of death,” he continued to live by his principles. He was slow-jamming not just the news but also his recovery. He was still unwell when news came that Germany had been defeated in the war. So far, despite his faith in nonviolence, Gandhi had supported the British in the war. But after the British won, and they still made no concessions to Indians, Gandhi took up the fight for freedom. Although he was still weak he gave the call for satyagraha to be unleashed across the nation. The colonial government had offered little relief when the entire population reeled under the influenza epidemic. To make matters worse, a period of drought followed. An American missionary named Adam Ebey recorded that “people begged water. They fought each other to get water; they stole water.” Another report: “In the countryside, cattle died for lack of grass, and bullocks had to be watched lest they leap into wells chasing the scent of damp.” In the vacuum created by the state and its inaction now stepped the nationalist groups. Small, reformist groups, many of them inspired by Gandhi, provided help to the masses. Medicines, milk, blankets, even help with the cremation of corpses. The slow, patient mobilization of support during the time of the epidemic had a direct result: it allowed the call for freedom to be taken seriously and spread widely. In Young India, the newspaper that Gandhi founded, an editorial appeared after the April 13, 1919, massacre of hundreds of peaceful protesters at the hands of the British. Entitled “Public Health,” it expressed the popular feeling that a government that allowed 6 million to die of influenza, “like rats without succor,” wouldn’t mind if a few more died by the bullet.

  31.

  All the news around us is of the havoc caused by the virus. We should be concerned about that, of course, and I now wash my hands incessantly. But, if I could, what I would shout from the rooftops is that much as we fear the virus, we ought to be worried about the killer inside us.

  A video from June 18, 2018: Qasim, a Muslim trader who lived in a one-room apartment with his wife and children, can be seen half-sitting in a dry canal and asking for a drink of water. On both sides of the canal, young men are standing. No one gives him water and he falls over in the dirt, as if settling for sleep in his bed, laying one folded knee neatly atop another. It was later found that Qasim’s body had been pierced with screwdrivers and scraped with sickles. In the video, he is being accused of killing cows and you can hear people baying for his blood. For their part, the police filed a report linking the assault to a motorcycle accident. Qasim’s relatives questioned the police narrative, which was further discredited when a journalist carried a hidden camera to a meeting with one of the chief accused in the crime. The man said that people greeted him with loud cheers when he was released from jail on bond. He had never experienced such pride before.

  For me, the question remains: What can you write that will make anyone reading you give a dying man a drink of water?

  32.

  A few basic definitions:

  A novel coronavirus (nCOV) is any recently discovered coronavirus of medical significance not yet permanently named. The word novel indicates a “new pathogen of a previously known type” (i.e., known family) of virus.

  Ne
ws is information about current events. The genre of news as we know it today is closely associated with the newspaper, which originated in China as a court bulletin and spread, with paper and printing press, to Europe.

  A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, normally written in prose form, and which is typically published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the Italian novella for “new,” “news,” or “short story of something new,” itself from the Latin novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning “new.”

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  IN SEPTEMBER 1665, at the time of the Great Plague, Daniel Defoe, that early proponent of the English novel, would have been a little over four years old. (By the following year, the plague had killed seventy thousand people in London.) But, trying his luck at the sleight of hand that is autofiction and writing as an eyewitness, Defoe wrote in A Journal of the Plague Year: “We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumors and reports of things, and improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practiced since. But such things as those were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now.” What would Defoe have made of our times? In a report on COVID-19 and the dissemination of fake news, a newspaper stated: “In the age of social media, misinformation spreads a thousand times faster than the virus.” The World Health Organization, taking note of the false and often malicious content being spread on social media sites, said that it was confronting an “infodemic.”

  Not only did Daniel Defoe help popularize the novel form, but he is also credited with producing one of the first examples of modern journalism. A week after his release from prison, he produced an eyewitness report on the great storm of 1703, which killed eight thousand people. If he were living in our times, Daniel Defoe, who apart from having had a career as a spy was also no stranger to the pillory and the humiliating burden of debts, might well have been curious about, and perhaps even written about, the phenomenon described in this news report about the coronavirus pandemic: “Security researchers have even found that hackers were setting up threadbare websites that claimed to have information about the coronavirus. The sites were actually digital traps, aimed at stealing personal data or breaking into the devices of people who landed on them.”

  In my notebooks I set myself a modest task. In the news reports I read or the postings on my Twitter feed, I looked for stories that wouldn’t appear in what used to be called a bourgeois novel. These stories I noted down in my notebook as a personal record of the pandemic. For instance: Leilani Jordan, a twenty-seven-year-old grocery store clerk in Maryland, died from COVID-19. Before her death, she had complained to her mother that her employer, Giant Food, didn’t provide masks or gloves. Jordan was forced to bring her own hand sanitizer to work. After the young woman’s death, Giant Food gave her mother a certificate for Jordan’s six years of service and a paycheck for $20.64.

  * * *

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  I ALSO THOUGHT of Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, on how to avoid being deceived by fake news:

  Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad). Take responsibility for what you communicate to others.

  Practical advice! Perhaps I should discreetly provide in Enemies of the People a list of fact-checking strategies. If earlier fiction helped the reader with facts, how to dress, how to shave, how to take tea, then, in our times, fiction is to help readers recognize what is fictional about all that is touted as fact. In a short chapter on language, Snyder also advocates reading books as an act of resistance. And yes, fiction too. “Any good novel enlivens our ability to think about ambiguous situations and judge the intentions of others.” The writing of novels as an essential service.

  33.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, a psychologist at Indiana University named Norman Triplett found out that when children were asked to execute a simple task (winding line on a fishing rod), they performed better when in the company of other children than when they were alone.

  How innocent are these stories about children!

  In 1951, the social psychologist Solomon Asch found that people would agree that one drawn line matched the length of another—even if it clearly did not—if others around them all agreed that it did.

  I repeat: How innocent are these stories about children. Replace them with adults and you get a mob. I’m suddenly in the scene that Jimi had described for me: the crowd that collects around the man who is shouting that his penis has been stolen.

  I fear the mob. A mob is single-minded about its claim to truth.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE DEATH OF INFORMATION

  On the flight back from the residency, I was on edge because, despite the mask on my face and the disinfectant wipes, I was sitting packed in a metal container with four hundred others. We all removed our masks when the flight attendants gave us our hot meals. For some reason, none of the flight attendants wore masks. I heard one of them tell the elderly woman seated behind me that the air inside the plane is as clean as the air inside an operating room. The previous night Vaani had texted me a screenshot from some scientific study: I was supposed to ask for a window seat near the middle of the plane. If I found such a seat, I would have the least exposure to the virus. But I wanted the comfort of easy access to the toilet during a long transatlantic flight. I took an aisle seat and I was nervous. What made me more nervous was that I was reading the last forty or fifty pages of Orwell’s 1984.

  Page after page of descriptions of acute privation and torture. All the possibility of pleasure has vanished, and certainly resistance too, except that our protagonist is alive. With a mind filled with so much fear about a barely understood disease, I found myself absorbed by the details of Winston Smith’s complete physical breakdown. When Smith is shown his image in the mirror, he finds it difficult to recognize himself. (Lost in that world, I stepped into the small airplane toilet, with my mask on, and saw a stranger in the mirror.) It is not that I was identifying myself with Winston; rather, I felt an enormous pity for him. And the future to which the entire population had been condemned by the totalitarian regime. When the lights were dimmed in the plane’s cabin and the air turned cold, then, strapped in my cramped seat, I found that I had more fully entered the novel’s bleak landscape.

  Smith’s torturer says to him: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” That line stopped me. I felt those words were addressed to me. I had written a version of this to start my own novel, only weeks earlier. Then, an unexpected turn had brought me to Orwell’s novel, even if it was written seventy years ago, which was telling me that “the espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease.” All resistance was futile. Was this what I also needed to accept? A few pages later, Smith is asked if there is a single degradation that hasn’t happened to him, if he hasn’t shed every ounce of humanity in begging for relief from pain, and he says, “I have not betrayed Julia.” Okay, I thought, so there’s that. There will be the boot in the face, there will be a world pandemic, but there will be love. That will keep us alive.

  Just before I left the villa, I had come across a post that mentioned a story about Margaret Mead. Asked what was the earliest sign of civilization, the famous anthropologist said, “A healed femur.” A healed femur? In the animal world, you cannot survive with a broken leg. You are a meal for the predators. But a healed femur suggests someone took care of you, they helped bandage
your limb, they helped you walk, they brought you food, they protected you. Compassion or caring is the first mark of civilization.

  But Orwell wasn’t going to be merciful or compassionate. A few more pages in, and Smith has betrayed Julia too. And then soon thereafter, while the map on my screen said that we were flying over Nova Scotia, the novel came to an end. Smith is no longer Smith. He doesn’t love Julia; he loves Big Brother. The novel as a cry of depthless despair.

  Except that I turned the page and there was an appendix. “The Principles of Newspeak.” Ostensibly still a part of the novel, it laid out the principles behind the official language of the imaginary imperial state where the story is set. The reader learns again and again that the diminution of meaning in language through a vast reduction in the vocabulary and nuance is all aimed at excising from the human mind a breadth of imagination and freedom. All the ugly neologisms are there not so much to express meaning as to destroy it. In effect, Orwell’s appendix is a political countermanifesto—as well as an appeal on the behalf of art. Save the language—and save the world!

  In the end it is very much a writer’s call to arms. It says that if you pay attention to words, and fight to be honest on the page, you will survive with your humanity intact. The point is not to serve as a branch of propaganda but to preserve the uncomfortable or disturbing truth against unrelenting and widespread assault.