Incendiary Circumstances (6 page)

Nicole remembers the descent as quiet and orderly. The evacuees went down in single file, leaving room for the firemen who were running in the opposite direction. On many floors, there were people to direct the evacuees, and in the lower reaches of the building there was even electricity. The descent took about half an hour, and on reaching the plaza, Nicole began to walk in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. She was within a few hundred feet of the bridge when the first tower collapsed. "It was like the onset of a nuclear winter," she said. "Suddenly everything went absolutely quiet and you were in the middle of a fog that was as blindingly bright as a snowstorm on a sunny day."

It was early evening by the time Nicole reached Fort Greene. She had received calls from several people who had seen Frank on their way down the fire escape, but he had not been heard from directly. Their children stayed with us that night while Nicole sat up with Frank's sister Nina, waiting by the telephone.

The next morning Nicole decided that her children had to be told that there was no word of their father. Both she and Nina were calm when they arrived at our door, even though they had not slept all night. Nicole's voice was grave but unwavering as she spoke to her children about what had happened the day before.

The children listened with wide-eyed interest, but soon afterward they went back to their interrupted games. A little later, my son came to me and whispered, "Guess what Dominic's doing?"

"What?" I said, steeling myself.

"He's learning to wiggle his ears."

This was, I realized, how my children—or any children, for that matter—would have responded: turning their attention elsewhere before the news could begin to gain purchase in their minds.

At about noon we took the children to the park. It was a bright, sunny day, and they were soon absorbed in riding their bicycles.
My wife, Deborah, and I sat on a shaded bench and spoke with Nicole. "Frank could easily have got out in the time that passed between the blast and the fall of the building," Nicole said. "The only thing I can think of is that he stayed back to help with the evacuation. Nobody knew the building like he did, and he must have thought he had to."

She paused. "I think it was only because Frank saw me leave that he decided he could stay," she said. "He knew that I would be safe and the kids would be looked after. That was why he felt he could go back to help the others. He loved the towers and had complete faith in them. Whatever happens, I know that what he did was his own choice."

Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del
tempo felice ne la miseria.

 

There is no greater sorrow than to recall
our times of joy in wretchedness.

 

O
N JULY
27 this year, landing in Colombo's Katunayake airport, I saw at first hand how fragile a machine an aircraft is. My plane landed on a runway that was flanked with wreckage on either side. Through the scarred glass of my window, I spotted a blackened pile of debris that ended in the intact tail section of a plane. The shape of the vanished fuselage was etched into the tarmac like the outline of a cigar that has burned itself slowly to extinction, leaving its ring standing in its ashes. Then there was another and still another, the charred remains lying scattered around the apron like a boxful of half-smoked Havanas arranged around the edges of an ebony table.

It was just four days since a small suicide squad of Tamil Tiger guerrillas had succeeded in entering Colombo's carefully guarded Katunayake airport. The strike was executed with meticulous precision, and the guerrillas had destroyed some fourteen aircraft, virtually disabling Sri Lanka's civilian and military air fleets. It was till then perhaps the single most successful attack of its kind.

Thirty-six years had passed since I first landed at that airport, in
a shuddering blunt-nosed Dakota. The aerodrome, as it was then spoken of, was a relic of an older war, in which Colombo had served as the nerve center of Lord Mountbatten's Southeast Asia Command. I was nine then, a fresh entrant into that moment of childhood when we first begin to truly inhabit the world, in the particular sense of committing it to memory. I remember Colombo's red-tiled roofs, like stacks of hardback books spread open on a desk; I remember my school, Royal College, and the stairway where I first tasted blood on my lip; I remember after-school cricket matches on Layard's Road and wickets knocked over by kabaragoyas; I remember marshmallow ice cream at Elephant House and the pearly insides of mangosteens; I remember the palm trees at Hikkaduwa leaning like dancers over the golden sands; I remember Elephant's Pass and the road to Jaffna, as narrow as the clasp between a necklace and its pendant; I remember at Pollonaruwa a cobra coiled on the floor of a rest house, looking up as though in surprise at my silhouette in the doorway; I remember a train on a slope, its smoke mingling with the mists of Nuwara Eliya.

Such was the paradise from which I was abruptly torn when I arrived upon the threshold of adolescence. In the summer of 1967, when I had reached the age of eleven, I was sent away to be educated at the other end of the subcontinent, in Dehradun, which was said to be one of the most picturesque places in India. But for me this sub-Himalayan valley proved to be anything but Arcadia: I found myself imprisoned in a walled city of woe, with five hundred adolescents who had been herded together to be instructed in the dark arts of harrowing their peers. That it was my parents who were the agents of my expulsion from paradise was not the least part of the bewildering pain of my banishment. It was in that sub-Himalayan purgatory that I learned what it was to recall a time of joy in wretchedness. Now, in the recollection of that emotion, I have come to recognize a commonality with many, perhaps most, Sri Lankans—indeed, with everyone who remembers what it was to live in Serendib before the Fall.

Michael Ondaatje writes:

 

The last Sinhala word I lost
was
vatura.
The word for water.
Forest water. The water in a kiss. The tears
I gave to my ayah Rosalin on leaving
the first home of my life.

 

More water for her than any other
that fled my eyes again
this year, remembering her,
a lost almost-mother in those years
of thirsty love

 

No photograph of her, no meeting
since the age of eleven,
not even knowledge of her grave.

 

Who abandoned who, I wonder now.

 

These lines look back—as do I when I think of Sri Lanka—to a childhood long past. But the poem was published recently, in New York, and I doubt that it would have sounded this exact note had it been written at any other time and in any other circumstances. This is not merely a eulogy for Rosalin; it is an elegy of homecoming spoken in a voice that has been orphaned not just by the loss of an almost-mother but by history itself. It is a lament that mourns the passing of the paradise that made Rosalin possible.

At the other end of the subcontinent lies another land devastated by the twin terrors of armed insurgency and state repression: Kashmir, of which an emperor famously said:

 

If there is a paradise on earth,
It is this, it is this, it is this.

 

In the mid-1990s, at about the same time that Michael Ondaatje was writing his elegy to Rosalin, the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali was writing his great poem "The Last Saffron." The poem begins:

 

I will die, in autumn, in Kashmir,
and the shadowed routine of each vein
will almost be news, the blood censored,
for the
Saffron Sun
and the
Times of Rain

 

The poem ends with these verses:

 

      Yes, I remember it,
the day I'll die, I broadcast the crimson,

 

so long ago of that sky, its spread air,
its rushing dyes, and a piece of earth

 

bleeding, apart from the shore, as we went
on the day I'll die, past the guards, and he,

 

keeper of the world's last saffron, rowed me
on an island the size of a grave. On

 

two yards he rowed me into the sunset,
past all pain. On everyone's lips was news

 

of my death but only that beloved couplet,
broken, on his:

 

"If there is a paradise on earth,
It is this, it is this, it is this."

 

If the twin terrors of insurgency and repression could be said to have engendered any single literary leitmotif, it is surely the narrative of the loss of paradise. Nowhere is this story more precisely chronicled than in Shyam Selvadurai's 1994 novel,
Funny Boy.
The novel is set in Colombo, in the turmoil of the early 1980s, when long-simmering tensions between Sri Lanka's Sinhala-dominated government and the minority Tamil population exploded into a savagely violent conflict. The narrator is a teenage boy from a wealthy Tamil family, and the novel's final chapter recounts the events of July 1983, when a terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan army triggered massive reprisals against the Tamils of Colombo.

In
Funny Boy
the destruction of paradise is assigned precise
dates and an exact span of time: it starts at 9:30
A.M.
on July 25, 1983. It is only a few hours since the novel's teenage narrator and his family have learned that "there [is] trouble in Colombo": the night before, a mob has gone wild after a funeral for thirteen slain soldiers and many Tamil houses have been burned. At 9:30
A.M.
the family begins to ready itself for a hasty departure from its own house. "We are supposed to bring a few clothes and one other thing that is important to us. I can't decide which thing to take." But the boy's mother has already decided; not the least of her provisions for the uncertainties of the future is the preparation for the coming age of sorrow: "Amma is taking all the family albums. She says that if anything happens they will remind us of happier days."

All through the day, the family waits in the once-beloved home that has now become a prison. As the hours pass, the narrator seeks consolation in his journal, recording rumors and reports. He hears that the government has distributed electoral lists to help the mobs locate Tamil homes; he is hugely relieved when he is told that a curfew has been declared, and is therefore doubly dismayed to learn that the announcement has made no difference, the mob is still on the rampage. He hears of the police and army watching in silent indifference as a Tamil family is burned alive in a car. At 11:30
P.M.
the boy writes: "The waiting is terrible. I wish the mob would come so that this dreadful waiting would end."

The next entry is written a little more than half a day later, but in that brief span of time the world has become a different place. Nothing will ever be the same again; the boy's childhood has become a place apart. This is the moment when history, the connection between time past and time ahead, has ended and memory has become an island that is severed forever from the present and the future. "July 26, 12:30
P.M.
: I have just read my last entry and it seems unbelievable that only thirteen hours ago I was sitting on my bed writing in this journal. A year seems to have passed since that time. Our lives have completely changed. I try and try to make sense of it, but it just won't work."

What has happened is this: the long wait has come to an end
soon after the writing of the penultimate journal entry. On hearing the chants of an approaching mob, the family has taken refuge in a Sinhala neighbor's house. Huddled in a storeroom, they have listened as their house is burned to the ground.

The morning after, they have looked over the remains of the house. The sight has made little impression; it is almost incomprehensible. The boy notes that his vinyl records have dissolved into black puddles, that the furniture has cracked open to reveal the whiteness of common wood. "I observed all this with not a trace of remorse, not a touch of sorrow for the loss and destruction around me. Even now I feel no sorrow. I try to remind myself that the house is destroyed, that we will never live in it again, but my heart refuses to understand this." It is only later, on being told of the destruction of his grandparents' home, that he is able to grieve: "I thought about childhood spend-the-days and all the good times we had there. These thoughts made me cry. I couldn't cry for my own house, but it was easy to grieve for my grandparents' house." A precocious prescience has led the boy to grasp the precise nature of his grief: he ascribes it not to the immediacy of his own experience but to the memory of better times—to that act of remembrance than which, as Dante's Francesca da Rimini tells us, there is "no greater sorrow": that is to say, in the recollection of better times.

This depiction of the violence of 1983—and to my mind
Funny Boy
is one of the most powerful and moving accounts of those events—was published in 1994 in Canada, where Shyam Selvadu-rai's family had settled after leaving Sri Lanka. I draw attention to this only to underscore two facts: that
Funny Boy
was written by a recent immigrant to North America and that it is an act of recollection that tells the story of a departure. These facts appear unremarkable, yet there is to my mind a puzzle here, and it lies in this: an immigrant's story is usually a narrative of arrival, not departure. And nowhere is this more true than in North America.

North America is famously peopled by immigrants, and nowhere else on earth is the experience of immigration so richly figured as it is here: in popular culture, literature, film, and indeed every aspect of public life. In photography, the emblematic image of this experience is that of a family of immigrants standing on the deck of the ship that has brought them across the Atlantic. In these pictures the immigrants' eyes are always turned in the direction of the waiting shore, toward the Statue of Liberty and the towers of the shining city ahead. Many of these immigrants have suffered terrible hardships, yet we would search in vain for similarly powerful images taken at the hour when they boarded the ship: that moment holds only passing interest in this story. This is because, classically, narratives of immigration to North America are stories of arrival, not departure, stories of suffering but not sorrow or regret; they are stories of hope, founded on a belief in the redemptive power of the land ahead. The vitality of these stories derives in no small part from the obvious parallels with the Biblical story of the Promised Land, which is, of course, equally a story of hope and of arrival. Those who followed Moses out of Egypt did not linger to cast glances of melancholy longing upon the Nile. They looked only ahead; their memory of Egypt was of unmitigated suffering; there were no times of joy there to be recalled in wretchedness. The mark of an exodus lies in the direction of these eyes, looking ahead toward the far shore, confident in the belief that the bonds of community will not perish in the process of migration. But this is not the direction in which Selvadurai's narrator has turned his gaze. Here is the novel's penultimate sentence: "When I reached the top of the road, I couldn't prevent myself from turning back to look at the house one last time." And this is how he ends his story, with the narrator looking back, through the rain, at the charred remains of a home that was once filled with happiness.