A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

  The first man said, “You all go to college here? You too?” He pointed now at Ishaan.

  The students nodded. Ishaan said that the men were keeping a safe distance, but barely.

  The man said, “It is an expensive college. It is, isn’t it? Tell me any one thing they taught you right. Any one thing.”

  Now the students felt this was turning out to be a conversation they would later enjoy recounting on Snapchat or under the tents outside their dorms.

  Jasmyn said, “Well, last semester, before the college closed, I learned that ninety-five percent of climate researchers say that humans are causing global warming but there are apparently others who think otherwise. What do you think?”

  The men thought what Jasmyn had said was funny. I was told they laughed.

  The second man had less of the openness than the first. His face turned into a scowl when he addressed Jasmyn.

  “Don’t you think Americans”—and a slight pause here—“you are an American, right? Don’t you think Americans have more reason to fear being killed by drug dealers than by a stupid sunburn?” (When I was told this, I didn’t need to wonder where such arguments come from.)

  Jasmyn, her face reddening, said something like “Dude, when the waters rise, and the levels are already rising, or don’t they report this on Fox News, it will affect the whole damned planet. Just because you’re American won’t keep you safe from heat waves or hurricanes. What do you think is happening right now with the coronavirus?”

  In response to which, both men said in one voice, “Chinese virus.”

  My students just looked at each other instead of at the men. But they were not done yet.

  The first fellow, who still retained his smile, now addressed Jasmyn. “Okay, so you are a science major or something, right? Tell me, do they teach you real science at your school? I’m guessing there’s some Black in you. You are here for some bullshit protest for a Black guy who had pot in his pocket. Did you know that the reason why Blacks commit more crime is that they have a higher testosterone level than the average human being? I’m right now talking of Black males. Our prisons are full of them.”

  My students were stunned by this man’s bigotry, and his ignorance, and their faces must have given away this feeling of shock. And where had this detail about Akwasi having pot in his pocket emerged from?

  The guy smirked and said, “You didn’t know that, did you?”

  Sarah asked the man, “Does your brand of science also say that God created dark people for life in the tropics while white people were created for living in the temperate zones?”

  “Well, that’s just common sense, isn’t it?” the man asked. He was wrong about the science, but my students also now knew that their complacency about being right wasn’t going to save the world.

  Jasmyn hadn’t let go of the image of Akwasi’s father, a tall, dignified man who looked a bit like Patrick Ewing, speaking at the protest of his immense pain. The sorrow that had now engulfed the family. His wife and daughter had stood next to him, tears coursing down the young girl’s face. The father said he had worked two jobs, as a line cook and a janitor at a computer firm, for two decades. He had put Akwasi through school and was delighted when his son was awarded a scholarship at our college. The previous day, he said, a reporter had asked him whether he regretted sending his son to college. What kind of question was that? Akwasi’s father had a hurt but also amused tone in his voice. He repeated that line and waited. He said that he had told the white reporter that what he regretted was that the police, with complete disregard for his son’s life, had nearly murdered him.

  The argument went on for a bit longer while around them people at their socially distanced tables ordered their drinks or talked or ate their chicken wings. No one was hurt. When the story was being narrated to me, I quite easily imagined an assault in an alley outside. However, nothing of that sort happened.

  As he told me this story, Ishaan’s face on my screen would grow light and then darken again as the curtain in his dorm room lifted in the breeze. He leaned closer and said that he had learned more from that conversation at the bar than he had done from many of the classes he had attended at our college. I felt somewhat insulted when he said this. Hadn’t my classes—with readings from Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Bessie Head, Nawal El Saadawi, Anita Desai, all the way down to Zadie Smith—taught him more? Ishaan had his reasons. He felt he had stepped out of the bubble. He had encountered opposition in the real world. More important, he realized that he could not rely on reason alone. Reason was a dumb mule that could carry the load of any ideology or any fool with his eye on power. In the past, and perhaps even now, scientific discourse had also served as that dumb beast of burden. The man outside the bar was appealing to science, a false science, to make a dubious and dangerous claim. After saying all this, Ishaan stopped for a moment. He then said, “I kept quiet at the bar. I wondered whether my friends thought I was a coward for not speaking up. But I knew that if I didn’t get killed that night, I’d write about what was happening. Not as science, but as a report on our times.”

  I told Ishaan that he should write about his experience at the white supremacy rally and its aftermath. He nodded. Then he told me a story.

  In the late eighties, Ishaan’s father was a university student in Delhi and took part in street plays. On January 1, 1989, they were performing a play in an industrial township outside Delhi. A winter morning, not too cold, perfect for playing cricket but also for street theater. The performance was part of an election campaign for a communist leader. Soon after the actors had started the play, a group of men came armed with sticks and iron rods. They were shouting slogans for the ruling party candidate. Ishaan’s father was a junior member of the troupe; their leader was a talented and charming young man named Safdar. Safdar tried to talk to the men, telling them that in five minutes the performance would be over. Perhaps, he suggested to them, you too can enjoy the play. But the men hadn’t come to do anything like that. They first attacked Safdar, hitting him in the head with iron rods more than twenty times. He fell down, his blood flowing on the road. The actors, chased by the goons, ran and hid in the small quarters in which the workers lived. For a long time, walking up and down the streets, the men searched for the actors. They took out guns and fired in the air. On finding a door open, they forced themselves inside and fired at a Nepali laborer home from work. He was newly married and had a small child. The worker died, and a few hours later, in a Delhi hospital, Safdar was declared dead too.

  The play that had been interrupted is now performed all over India on Safdar’s death anniversary. That play is called Halla Bol. It asks you to “raise hell.” Ishaan said that he always thought his father told him this story because he wanted him to be careful and not expose himself to danger. The real lesson, Ishaan now said, after he had come back safe from the rally, was that he was going to talk to Sarah and Jasmyn about working on a project together. He was going to raise his voice, raise hell.

  I was looking at Ishaan’s face, thin, narrow, a somber look in his eyes. Now and then, for a tiny fraction of a second, his image froze on my screen, as if Ishaan was reaching for a kind of stillness. There is always talk of the innocence of youth and their smiles; I find their unexpected gravity more touching. Perhaps they are one and the same thing.

  Ishaan said of Sarah and Jasmyn, “They were so brave and articulate.”

  “Yes,” I said, “yes.” How could I not encourage him? The possibility of a young person opening himself up to the world, learning from the example of others. I also felt challenged as a teacher. I said that perhaps Sarah and Jasmyn and he could continue to meet with me after the pandemic was over. A reading group would be a good start, and then perhaps sessions to plot a future course of action. The young, I thought, could find allies elsewhere too.

  The breeze again lifted the curtain at the window in Ishaan’s roo
m and I saw that he had put a thick hardcover volume of War and Peace on the windowsill to keep his window from banging shut. We were coming to the end of our meeting. I told Ishaan that I had been working on a book called Enemies of the People. He asked me what it was about. I said I had started with a simple question: How many among your neighbors will look the other way when a figure of authority comes to your door and puts a boot in your face? When I began, I had imagined a near-literal boot in the face. Because don’t all the videos of lynchings testify to that fact? And you would think the same if you were looking at protesters, especially if they were Black, being beaten on the streets of America by the police in absurdly futuristic military gear. The point was to ask who among us would look the other way when they came for you with their guns or knives or warrants. What I had not considered, but what was becoming increasingly clear to me, is that the boots in the face are just the barefaced lies uttered by our leaders and believed by their followers. I saw Ishaan nodding his head when I said that in what I was writing, I was trying to record the drama of this battle between what was true and what wasn’t.

  Ishaan said that it had been nice to talk, even if it was only on Zoom, and that it would be good to chat again sometime soon. When he said that, I asked him to stick around for a bit longer. I said, “Before you leave, can you take out your notebook and write something? Write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

  He bent over and picked up a notebook. He looked up at the camera on his screen.

  “What?” I said.

  “You should write a true sentence too,” he said, so softly, so seriously, that I couldn’t refuse.

  In my small black notebook with its blank pages I began writing with a pencil that needed sharpening. Ishaan, his head bowed in the rectangle on my screen, was already writing. I felt he had a lot to say, and I too set myself to the task. I wrote quickly, without stopping, trying to get to the heart of what I was thinking at that time, and had been thinking about, in fact, for a long time.

  A lot of life is left in a man being killed.

  He does not at first foresee the end. He knows, of course, that anything can happen. When it begins, his only worry is that he will be unable to work. At the very least, he thinks, he will be unable to lift heavy loads. He has used his hands all his life. They are his tools. He had himself made the door of his room from which they dragged him.

  Then it settles in as disappointment. There is so much more work to be done in the unfinished house. The iron rods striking him are raising dust from a ground sown with regret.

  He knows he can list the names of the men, whose voices he recognizes in the dark. A few from the dinner in his house only two nights ago. He will repeat the names to the police, he tells himself, before losing consciousness for a minute.

  Or more.

  He comes back to life when he hears a child’s voice asking if the man is dead. Is he? One man’s voice, and then another’s, sending the child back inside. The child is a stranger, but the man being killed would like him to know that he is alive. It has been a long time since he made a sound. He tries to speak without scaring the kid, without crying. It comes out like a moan, and immediately a boot, no, a brick, smashes into his face.

  He tries to focus elsewhere. His chest is home to an excruciating pain and he suspects broken ribs. His pain keeps him in the present. Death, or the possibility of his dying, comes to him when he notices that, despite the pain and the wild commotion, he has slipped into a dream.

  He remembers being in the classroom when he was ten. They had read a poem. The teacher was newly married. He can see her now, a fresh flower every day in her hair. The poem was about a warrior dying, dreaming of his homeland on the alien battlefield. The teacher had liked him. She stopped coming to school when she was going to have a baby.

  Unlike the warrior, he is dying in the dark lane outside his house.

  A friend of his had died five years ago from dengue. During his final hours, the friend had thought his mother was still alive, sitting with him in the shabby hospital ward. Mother, he called out, I want water.

  The reason he thinks of his friend just now is that he is thirsty. His uncle used to keep a pot of water under the neem tree. He wants a small drink. As a child, he would look up after taking a sip and see parakeets bursting out from under the canopy of green leaves.

  He thinks of a nephew, dead at thirteen, killed by a bus when on his way to school. Compared to that poor boy, he has lived a full life. Despite all the fears that parents are prone to, his children grew up into adulthood. If they survive tonight—his daughter was left cowering in the room upstairs, his son left for dead with his head split open—they will be able to fend for themselves even if he is absent from their lives.

  They have stopped hitting him, or maybe he can’t feel anything anymore. His eyes are swollen shut. Is it still night? He wants it to end.

  He has stopped telling them they are wrong. Now his tongue is like a small animal running in one direction and then another.

  A sudden new pain like a million ants crawling up his leg. He thinks the men are setting him on fire.

  Out of great weariness comes a new change. He feels he is walking away, able to cover a vast distance, without any real effort of his limbs. In the shadow of a boulder that blots out the hot sun, there is silence.

  The man being killed has never seen the sea. But he hears its wide sound now in his ear, and this would be magical if it were not so real. So real that he can taste the salt of the soft waves.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The writing of this novel spanned a four-year period which coincided with an era of chaos that a report on Donald Trump in The New York Times characterized thus: “A presidency born in a lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace.” And ended with a lie in the words of Trump himself:

  As a report partly on news, this book cites frequently from mainstream media, and acknowledgment is offered where stylistically necessary, but I would like to more explicitly thank those outlets and individuals fighting fake news, in particular, Media Matters, Democracy Now!, and, in India, Pratik Sinha’s Alt News and Ravish Kumar’s Prime Time. Where the book plunges into news from the further reaches of the human heart, the sources are more varied and untraceable.

  For descriptions of psychological experiments, major thanks to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and John Bargh’s Before You Know It. On children lying, NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman; also, Kim B. Serota et al., “The Prevalence of Lying in America: Three Studies of Self-Reported Lies.” Elizabeth Kolbert, “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds,” The New Yorker, February 19, 2017. Susan Dominus, “When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy,” The New York Times Magazine, October 18, 2017. I made a note of Cressida Leyshon, “Callan Wink on Fiction in the Age of ‘Alternative Facts,’ ” New Yorker.com, August 13, 2018. I have quoted from Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her and Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit. A discussion about the psychologist Harry Harlow on the radio show This American Life brought me to Deborah Blum’s biography of Harlow entitled Love at Goon Park. Other sources include Lucas Mann’s “Trump Wants to Make Reality TV, But Now the Cast Is Ignoring His Directions,” The Washington Post, October 20, 2019; Graham Rayman, “The Alarming Record of the F.B.I. Informant in the Bronx Bomb Plot,” The Village Voice, July 8, 2009; Aleksandar Hemon, “Stop Making Sense, or How to Write in the Age of Trump,” The Village Voice, January 17, 2017; Luke O’Neil, “Lies, Damned Lies and Donald Trump: The Pick of the President’s Untruths,” The Guardian, April 29, 2019. Giorgio Riello, Back in Fashion: Western Fashion from the Middle Ages to the Present, for information on the production of cotton shirts. The joke about fleas is taken from Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. On the coronavirus pandemic, I have quoted from Sheera Frenkel, Davey Alba, and Raymond Zhong, “Surge of Virus Misinformation Stumps Facebook and Twitter,�
�� The New York Times, March 8, 2020, and Annie Gowen, “Coronavirus Deniers and Hoaxers Persist Despite Dire Warnings, Claiming ‘It’s Mass Hysteria,’ ” The Washington Post, March 19, 2020; Andrew Liu, “ ‘Chinese Virus,’ World Market,” n+1 Online, March 20, 2020; Richard L. Kravitz, “When Trump Pushed Hydroxychloroquine to Treat COVID-19, Hundreds of Thousands of Prescriptions Followed Despite Little Evidence That It Worked,” The Conversation, July 9, 2020; and This American Life, “The Test,” March 27, 2020. On Gandhi and the Spanish flu, I have liberally quoted from Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. Thanks to Sumita Chatterjee for recommending Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading—I’m greatly indebted to the book’s author, Isabel Hofmeyr, for the fascinating study of Gandhi and slow news. Thanks to Joanna Slater and Niha Masih for the report “In Delhi’s Worst Violence in Decades, a Man Watched His Brother Burn,” The Washington Post, March 6, 2020. Thanks to Arun Venugopal’s report “One Worker’s Experience on the Morgue Overflow Shift,” WNYC, April 16, 2020. Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, “In Torrent of Falsehoods, Trump Claims Election Is Rigged,” The New York Times, November 5, 2020. For other details from India, a testimony entitled Memories of a Father by T. V. Eachara Warrier and a journalist’s report, Shoshan, Sangharsh, aur Shahadat (Oppression, Struggle, and Martyrdom) by Anuj Sinha. Soutik Biswas, Chinki Sinha, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta are my reliable sources in matters of what could be called people’s media in India. I thank them all, on behalf of my novel’s narrator.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In a 2017 article on behavioral science in The New Yorker, I read that grocers had learned that they could sell double the amount of soup if they placed a sign above their cans reading “LIMIT OF 12 PER PERSON.” There is some cunning there, but also a certain magic. I don’t know anything about selling books but I do understand a thing or two about writing them. If there is any magic in it, it is in the discovery that one doesn’t write a book alone. Thank you to the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio, the Yaddo Corporation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Lannan Foundation for supporting my work. Thank you to David Davidar, who has been the first reader for my last four or five books. Thank you to Nicole Winstanley, who sent me unbelievable hope just when I was leaving for a residency, and then, once I had come back with a new draft, provided me the most generous, thoughtful feedback that shaped the novel you are holding in your hands. Thank you to Ravi Mirchandani for fulfilling a long-held dream of mine to publish with Picador UK. Thank you to my editor at Knopf, Timothy O’Connell, for supporting this project from the start and, gradually, with serene patience, helping find its true form and leading it into the light. Thank you to David Godwin, Susanna Lea, Lisette Verhagen, and my agent Jay Mandel at WME. Thank you to Erin Edmison, Bill Hoynes, Ian Jack, Martha Jessup, Tim Johnson, Liz Johnston, Lucas Mann, David Means, Michael Ondaatje, Jordan Pavlin, Rob Shapiro, and Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar for critical help and advice. Thank you to Sophia Florida, Faith Hill, Sumana Roy, and Elena Schultz for helping me during my research. Thank you to the following friends whose conversations with me about art and writing helped me while I was working on this book: Josh Begley, Anna Bertucci, Teju Cole, Kiran Desai, Navid Hafez, Emilie Houssart, Hua Hsu, Emmanuel Iduma, Josh Kun, Ben Lerner, Suzanne Lettieri, Yiyun Li, Stephen Miller, Leah Mirakhor, Jenny Offill, Dushko Petrovich, Mark Sarvas, Shane Slattery-Quintanilla, Linda Spalding, Pat Wallace, and Xinran Yuan. Thank you to my family for taking naps and staying woke.