Incendiary Circumstances (15 page)

I was hearing a strange echo of voices from India.

"We are not for nuclear weapons," Ahmed told me. "We are ourselves in favor of disarmament. But we don't accept that five nations should have nuclear weapons and others shouldn't. We say, 'Let the five also disarm.'"

On one issue, however, his views were very different: the probability of a nuclear war. "When you have two nations," he said, "between whom there is so much ill will, so much enmity, and they both have nuclear weapons, then there is always the danger that these weapons will be used if war breaks out. Certainly. And in war people become mad. And when a nation fears that it is about to be defeated, it will do anything to spare itself the shame."

Almost without exception, the people I spoke to in Pakistan—hawks and doves alike—were of the opinion that the probability of nuclear war was high.

I spent my last afternoon in Lahore with Pakistan's leading human rights lawyer, Asma Jahangir. Asma is forty-eight, the daughter of an opposition politician who was one of the most vocal critics of the Pakistani Army's operations in what is now Bangladesh. She spent her teenage years briefing lawyers on behalf of her frequently imprisoned father. Today she cannot go outside without an armed bodyguard.

"Is nuclear war possible?" I asked.

"Anything is possible," she said, "because our policies are irrational. Our decision-making is ad hoc. We are surrounded by disinformation. We have a historical enmity and the emotionalism of jihad against each other. And we are fatalistic nations who believe that whatever happens—a famine, a drought, an accident—it is the will of God. Our decision-making is done by a few people on both sides. It's not the ordinary woman living in a village in Bihar whose voice is going to be heard, who's going to say, 'For God's sake, I don't want a nuclear bomb—I want my cow and I want milk for my children.'"

 

I often think back to the morning of May 12. I was in New York at the time. I remember my astonishment both at the news of the tests and also at the response to them: the tone of chastisement, the finger-wagging by countries that still possessed tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. Had they imagined that the technology to make a bomb had wound its way back into a genie's lamp because the cold war had ended? Did they think that it had escaped the world's attention that the five peacekeepers of the United Nations Security Council all had nuclear arms? If so, then perhaps India's nuclear tests served a worthwhile purpose by waking the world from this willed slumber.

So strong was my response to the West's hypocrisy that I discovered an unusual willingness in myself to put my own beliefs on nuclear matters aside. If there were good arguments to be made in defense of the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests, then I wanted to know what they were: I wanted to hear them for myself.

I didn't hear them. What I heard instead was a strange mix of psychologizing, grandiose fantasy, and cynicism. The motivation behind India's nuclear program is summed up neatly in this formula: it is status-driven, not threat-driven. The intention is to push India into an imagined circle of twice-born nations—"the great powers." In Pakistan, the motivation is similar. Status here means parity with India. That the leaders of these two countries should be willing to risk economic breakdown, nuclear accidents, and nuclear war in order to indulge these confused ambitions is itself a sign that some essential element in the social compact has broken down; the desires of the rulers and the well-being of the ruled could not be further apart.

I think of something that George Fernandes said to me: "Our country has already fallen to the bottom. Very soon we will reach a point where there is no hope at all. I believe that we have reached that point now." I think also of the words of I. A. Rehman, of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan: "This is the worst it's ever been. Everything is discredited. Everything is lost, broken into pieces."

I have never had so many utterly depressing conversations, so many talks that ended with the phrase "We have hit rock bottom." There was the college student who said, "Now even Bill Gates will take us seriously." There was the research scientist who believed that now his papers would get more international attention. And there were the diplomats looking forward to a seat on the Security Council. Has the gap between the realities of the subcontinent and the aspirations of its middle classes ever been wider? Talking to nuclear enthusiasts, I had the sense that what they were really saying was, "The country has tried everything else to get ahead. Nothing worked. This is our last card, and this is the time to play it." I am convinced that support for India's nuclear program is occasioned by a fear of the future. The bomb has become the weapon with which the rulers of the subcontinent wish to avert whatever is ahead.

A
S A CHILD
I spent my holidays in my grandfather's house in Calcutta, and it was there that I began to read. My grandfather's house was a chaotic and noisy place, populated by a large number of uncles, aunts, cousins, and dependants, some of them bizarre, some merely eccentric, but almost all excitable in the extreme. Yet I learned much more about reading in this house than I ever did in school.

The walls of my grandfather's house were lined with rows of books, neatly stacked in glass-fronted bookcases. The bookcases were prominently displayed in a large hall that served, among innumerable other functions, as playground, sitting room, and hallway. The bookcases towered above us, looking down, eavesdropping on every conversation, keeping track of family gossip, glowering at quarreling children. Very rarely were the bookcases stirred out of their silent vigil. I was perhaps the only person in the house who raided them regularly, and I was in Calcutta for no more than a couple of months every year. When the bookcases were disturbed in my absence, it was usually not for their contents but because some special occasion required their cleaning. If the impending event happened to concern a weighty matter like a delicate marital negotiation, the bookcases got a very thorough scrubbing indeed. And well they deserved it, for at such times they were important props in the little plays that were enacted in their presence. They let the visitor know that this was a house in which books were valued; in other words, that we were cultivated people. This is always important in Calcutta, for Calcutta is an oddly bookish city.

Were we indeed cultivated people? I wonder. On the whole I don't think so. In my memory my grandfather's house is always full—of aunts, uncles, cousins. I am astonished sometimes when I think of how many people it housed, fed, entertained, educated. But my uncles were busy, practical, and, in general, successful professionals, with little time to spend on books.

Only one of my uncles was a real reader. He was a shy and rather retiring man, not the kind of person who takes it upon himself to educate his siblings or improve his relatives' taste. The books in the bookcases were almost all his. He was too quiet a man to carry much weight in family matters, and his views never counted for much when the elders sought each other's counsel. Yet despite the fullness of the house and the fierce competition for space, it was taken for granted that his bookcases would occupy the place of honor in the hall. Eventually tiring of his noisy relatives, my book-loving uncle decided to move to a house of his own in a distant and uncharacteristically quiet part of the city. But oddly enough the bookcases stayed; by this time the family was so attached to them that they were less dispensable than my uncle.

In the years that followed, the house passed into the hands of a branch of the family that was definitely very far from bookish. Yet their attachment to the bookcases seemed to increase inversely to their love of reading. I had been engaged in a secret pillaging of the bookcases for a very long time. Under the new regime my depredations came to a sudden halt; at the slightest squeak of a hinge, hordes of cousins would materialize suddenly around my ankles, snapping dire threats.

It served no purpose to tell them that the books were being consumed by maggots and mildew, that books rotted when they
were not read. Arguments such as these interested them not at all: as far as they were concerned, the bookcases and their contents were a species of property and were subject to the usual laws.

This attitude made me impatient, even contemptuous at the time. Books were meant to be read, I thought, by people who valued and understood them. I felt not the slightest remorse for my long years of thievery. It seemed to me a terrible waste that nonreaders should succeed in appropriating my uncle's library. Today I am not so sure. Perhaps those cousins were teaching me a lesson that was important on its own terms: they were teaching me to value the printed word. Would anyone who had not learned this lesson well be foolhardy enough to imagine that a living could be made from words? I doubt it.

In another way they were also teaching me what a book is, a proper book, that is, not just printed paper gathered between covers. However much I may have chafed against the regime that stood between me and the bookcases, I have not forgotten those lessons. For me, to this day, a book, a proper book, is and always will be the kind of book that was on the bookshelves.

And what exactly was this kind of book?

Although so far as I know no one had ever articulated any guidelines about them, there were in fact some fairly strict rules about the books that were allowed onto those shelves. Textbooks and schoolbooks were never allowed; nor were books of a technical or professional nature—nothing to do with engineering, or medicine, or law, or indeed any of the callings that afforded my uncles their livings. In fact, the great majority of the books were of a single kind; they were novels. There were a few works of anthropology and psychology, books that had in some way filtered into the literary consciousness of the time:
The Golden Bough,
for example, as well as the
Collected Works of Sigmund Freud,
Marx and Engels's
Manifesto,
Havelock Ellis and Malinowski on sexual behavior, and so on.

But without a doubt it was the novel that weighed most heavily on the floors of my grandfather's house. To this day I am unable to
place a textbook or a computer manual upon a bookshelf without a twinge of embarrassment.

This is how Nirad Chaudhuri, that erstwhile Calcuttan, accounts for the position that novels occupy in Bengali cultural life:

 

It has to be pointed out that in the latter half of the nineteenth century Bengali life and Bengali literature had become very closely connected and literature was bringing into the life of educated Bengalis something which they could not get from any other source. Whether in the cities and towns or in the villages, where the Bengali gentry still had the permanent base of their life, it was the mainstay of their life of feeling, sentiment and passion ... Both emotional capacity and idealism were sustained by it ... When my sister was married in 1916, a college friend of mine presented her with fifteen of the latest novels by the foremost writers and my sister certainly did not prize them less than her far more costly clothes and jewellery. In fact, sales of fiction and poetry as wedding presents were a sure standby of their publishers.

 

About a quarter of the novels in my uncle's bookcases were in Bengali—a representative selection of the mainstream tradition of Bengali fiction in the twentieth century. Prominent among these were the works of Bankim Chandra, Sarat Chandra, Tagore, Bibhuti Bhushan, and so on. The rest were in English. But of these only a small proportion consisted of books that had been originally written in English. The others were translations from a number of other languages, most of them European: Russian had pride of place, followed by French, Italian, German, and Danish. The great masterpieces of the nineteenth century were dutifully represented: the novels of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev, of Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Stendhal, Maupassant, and others. But these were the dustiest books of all, placed on shelves that were lofty but remote.

The books that were prominently displayed were an oddly disparate lot—or so they seem today. Some of those titles can still be seen on bookshelves everywhere: Joyce, Faulkner, and so on. But
many others have long since been forgotten: Marie Corelli and Grazia Deledda, for instance, names that are so little known today, even in Italy, that they have become a kind of secret incantation for me, a password that allows entry into the brotherhood of remembered bookcases. Knut Hamsun too was once a part of this incantation, but unlike the others his reputation has since had an immense revival—and with good reason.

Other names from those shelves have become, in this age of resurgent capitalism, symbols of a certain kind of embarrassment or unease—the social realists, for example. But on my uncle's shelves they stood tall and proud, Russians and Americans alike: Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Sholokhov, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair. There were many others too whose places next to each other seem hard to account for at first glance: Sienkiewicz (of
Quo Vadis?
), Maurice Maeterlinck, Bergson. Recently, looking through the mildewed remnants of those shelves, I came upon what must have been the last addition to that collection. It was Ivo Andrić's
Bridge on the Drina,
published in the sixties.

For a long time I was at a loss to account for my uncle's odd assortment of books. I knew their eclecticism couldn't really be ascribed to personal idiosyncrasies of taste. My uncle was a keen reader, but he was not, I suspect, the kind of person who allows his own taste to steer him through libraries and bookshops. On the contrary, he was a reader of the kind whose taste is guided largely by prevalent opinion. This uncle, I might add, was a writer himself, in a modest way. He wrote plays in an epic vein with characters borrowed from the Sanskrit classics. He never left India and indeed rarely ventured out of his home state of West Bengal.