Incendiary Circumstances (29 page)

Within a few months I started my novel, which I eventually called
The Shadow Lines
—a book that led me backward in time to earlier memories of riots, ones witnessed in childhood. It became a book not about any one event but about the meaning of such events and their effects on the individuals who live through them.

And until now I have never really written about what I saw in November of 1984. I am not alone; several others who took part in that march went on to publish books, yet nobody, so far as I know, has ever written about it except in passing.

There are good reasons for this, not least the politics of the situation, which leave so little room for the writer. The riots were generated by a cycle of violence, involving the terrorists in the Punjab, on the one hand, and the Indian government, on the other. To write carelessly, in such a way as to appear to endorse terrorism or repression, can add easily to the problem, and in such incendiary circumstances, words cost lives, and it is only appropriate that those who deal in words should pay scrupulous attention to what they say. It is only appropriate that they should find themselves inhibited.

But there is also a simpler explanation. Before I could set down
a word, I had to resolve a dilemma, between being a writer and being a citizen. As a writer, I had only one obvious subject: the violence. From the news report, or the latest film or novel, we have come to expect the bloody detail or the elegantly staged conflagration that closes a chapter or effects a climax. But it is worth asking if the very obviousness of this subject arises out of our modern conventions of representation; within the dominant aesthetic of our time—the aesthetic of what Karahasan calls "indifference"—it is all too easy to present violence as an apocalyptic spectacle, while the resistance to it can easily figure as mere sentimentality or, worse, as pathetic and absurd.

Writers don't join crowds—Naipaul and so many others teach us that. But what do you do when the constitutional authority fails to act? You join and in joining bear all the responsibilities and obligations and guilt that joining represents. My experience of the violence was overwhelmingly and memorably of the resistance to it. When I think of the women staring down the mob, I am not filled with a writerly wonder. I am reminded of my gratitude for being saved from injury. What I saw at first hand—and not merely on that march but on the bus, in Hari's house, in the huge compound that filled with essential goods—was not the horror of violence but the affirmation of humanity: in each case, I witnessed the risks that perfectly ordinary people are willing to take for one another.

When I now read descriptions of troubled parts of the world, in which violence appears primordial and inevitable, a fate to which masses of people are largely resigned, I find myself asking, Is that all there was to it? Or is it possible that the authors of these descriptions failed to find a form—or a style or a voice or a plot—that could accommodate both violence
and
the civilized willed response to it?

The truth is that the commonest response to violence is one of repugnance and that a significant number of people try to oppose it in whatever ways they can. That these efforts rarely appear in accounts of violence is not surprising: they are too undramatic. For those who participate in them, they are often hard to write about for the same reasons that so long delayed my own account of 1984.

"Let us not fool ourselves," Karahasan writes. "The world is written first—the holy books say that it was created in words—and all that happens in it, happens in language first."

It is when we think of the world the aesthetic of indifference might bring into being that we recognize the urgency of remembering the stories we have not written.

T
HE LAST TIME
I spoke to Nabeel was over a year ago. He was in Baghdad. I was in New York. It wasn't easy getting through. The directory listed a code for Baghdad, but after days of trying, all I'd got was a recorded message telling me that the number I'd dialed didn't exist.

In the end I had to book a call with the operator. She took a while, but eventually there was a voice at the other end, speaking in the blunt, rounded Arabic of Iraq: "Yes? Who is it?"

Nabeel's family had told me that he was working as an assistant in a photographer's shop. The owner was an Iraqi, and Nabeel had been working for him since 1986, when he left his village in Egypt and went to Iraq. There was a telephone in the shop and the owner was relatively kind, a relatively kind Iraqi, and he allowed Nabeel to receive calls.

I imagined him as a big, paunchy man, Nabeel's boss, sitting at the end of a counter, behind a cash box, with the telephone beside him and a Kodacolor poster of a snow-clad mountain on the wall above. He was wearing a blue jallabeyya and a white lace cap; he had a carefully trimmed mustache and a pair of sunglasses in his breast pocket. The telephone beside him was of the old-fashioned kind, black and heavy, and it had a brass lock fastened in its dial. The boss kept the key, and Nabeel and the other assistants had to
ask for it when they wanted to make a call. It was late at night in New York, so it had to be morning in Baghdad. The shop must just have opened. They had probably had no customers yet.

"Is Nabeel there?" I asked.

"Who?" said the voice.

"Nabeel Idris Badawy," I said. "The Egyptian."

He grunted. "
Wa min inta?
" he said. "And who're you?"

"I'm a friend of his," I said. "Tell him it's his friend from India. He'll know."

"What's that?" he said. "From where?"

"From India,
ya raiyis,
" I said. "Could you tell him? And quickly if you please, for I'm calling from America."

"From America?" he shouted down the line. "But you said you're Indian?"

"Yes, I am—I'm just in America on a visit. Nabeel quickly, if you please,
ya raiyis
..."

I heard him shout across the room: "
Ya
Nabeel, somebody wants to talk to you, some Indian or something..."

I could tell from Nabeel's first words of greeting that my call had taken him completely by surprise. It was only natural. Eight years had passed since I'd left his village. He and his family had befriended me when I was living there in 1980 and 1981, doing research. I was then in my mid-twenties; Nabeel was a few years younger. We had become close friends, and for the first few years after I'd left, we had written letters back and forth between India and Egypt. But then he had gone to do his national service in the army, and he'd stopped writing. In time I had stopped writing too. He had no way of knowing that I would be in the United States on a visit that year. Until a few weeks ago I hadn't known that he was in Baghdad. I knew now because I had just been to Egypt and had visited his village and his family.

"Nabeel's not here,
ya
Amitab," his sister-in-law, Fawzia, had said to me, once she recovered from the shock of seeing me at the door. "He's not in the village—he's gone to Iraq."

Ushering me in, she fussed about distractedly, pumping her
kerosene stove, fetching tea and sugar. She was a pretty, good-humored woman who had always made me welcome in their house. I had been in the village when she was married to Nabeel's older brother Aly.

"Nabeel left about two years ago," she said. "He went with his cousin Ismail, do you remember him?"

I did. He was Nabeel's best friend as well as his cousin, although they could not have been more different. Ismail was lively, energetic, always ready with a joke or a pun; Nabeel, on the other hand, was thoughtful and serious, with a marked disinclination for vigorous activity of any kind. When he made his way down the lanes of the village, it was in a stately, considered kind of way, in marked contrast to the caperings of his cousin.

"They left for Iraq soon after they finished their national service," said Fawzia. "They went to make money."

They had rented a room in Baghdad with some other young men from the village, she said, and they all lived and cooked and ate together. She had taught Nabeel and Ismail to cook a few things before they left, so they managed all right. Ismail was a construction laborer. There was good money to be had in construction; Nabeel earned less as a photographer's assistant, but he liked his job. Ismail had been trying to get him to go into construction, but Nabeel wasn't interested.

"You know him," she said, laughing. "He always wanted a job where he wouldn't have to get his clothes dirty."

Later, when her husband, Aly, had come home from the fields and we had all had dinner, she gave me the number of the shop in Baghdad. Once every couple of months or so she and Nabeel's brothers would make a trip to a post office in a nearby town and telephone him in Baghdad.

"It costs a lot," she said, "but you can hear him like he was in the next house."

 

Nabeel couldn't telephone them, of course, but now and again he would speak into a cassette recorder and send them a tape. He and
his brothers had all been through high school; Nabeel himself even had a college degree. But they still found the spoken word more reassuring than the written.

"You must hear his voice on the machine," said Aly, producing a tape. He placed it carefully inside a huge cassette recorder cum radio and we gathered around to listen. Nabeel's voice was very solemn, and he was speaking like a Cairene, almost as though he'd forgotten the village dialect.

"Does he always talk like that now?" I asked Fawzia.

"Oh no." She laughed. "He's talking like that because it's a cassette. On the telephone he sounds just like he used to."

Nabeel said almost nothing about himself and his life in Iraq, just that he was well and that his salary had gone up. He listed in detail the names of all the people he wanted them to convey his greetings to—members of his lineage, people in the village, his school friends. Then he told them about everyone from the village who was in Iraq—that so-and-so was well, that someone had moved to another city, and that someone else was about to go home. For the rest he gave his family precise instructions about what they were to do with the money he was sending them—about the additions they were to make to the house, exactly how the rooms should look, how much they should spend on the floors, the windows, the roof. His brothers listened, rapt, though they must have heard the tape through several times already.

Later Aly wrote down Nabeel's address for me. It consisted of a number on a numbered street in "New Baghdad." I pictured to myself an urban development project of the kind that flourishes in the arid hinterlands of Cairo and New Delhi—straight, treeless streets and blocks of yellow buildings divided into "Pockets," "Phases," and "Zones."

"You must telephone him," one of Nabeel's younger brothers said. "He'll be so pleased. Do you know, he's kept all your letters, wrapped in a plastic bag? He still talks of you, a lot. Tell me, didn't you once say to him..."

And then he recounted, almost word for word, a conversation I
had once had with Nabeel. It was about something trivial, about my college in Delhi, but for some reason I had written it down in my diary that very day, while it was still fresh in memory. I had read through my diaries of that time again recently. That was why I knew that Nabeel's brother had repeated that conversation, or at least a part of it, almost verbatim, in near exact detail. I was amazed. It seemed to me an impossible, deeply moving defiance of time and the laws of hearsay and memory.

"You can be sure that I will telephone him," I said to Nabeel's brother. "I'll telephone him soon, from America."

"You must tell him that we are well and that he should send another cassette."

"Won't he be surprised," said Fawzia, "when he hears Amitab's voice on the phone? He'll think someone's playing a joke on him."

"We'll write and tell him," said Aly. "We'll write tomorrow so he won't be surprised. We'll tell him that you're going to phone him from America."

 

But they hadn't written: the surprise in Nabeel's voice as he greeted me over the phone was proof of that. And I, for my part, even though I had the advantage, was almost as amazed as Nabeel, though for a different reason. When I was living in their village, in 1980 and '81, Nabeel and Ismail had had very definite plans for their immediate future: they wanted salaried jobs in the Agriculture Ministry. It would not have occurred to any of us then to think that within a few years they would both be abroad and that I would be able to speak to them on the phone from thousands of miles away.

There was only one telephone in the village then. It had never worked, as far as anyone knew. It was not meant to—it was really a badge of office, a scepter. It belonged to the government, and it resided in the house of the village headman. When a headman was voted out in the local elections, the telephone was ritually removed from his house and taken to the victor's. It was carried at the head of a procession, accompanied by drums and gunshots, as
though it were a saint's relics. "We carried the telephone that year," people would say, meaning "We swept the elections."

Nabeel's family was one of the poorest in the village—and the village was not by any means prosperous. Few families in the village had more than five
feddans
of land, but most had one or two. Nabeel's family had none at all. That was one of the reasons that he and his brothers had all got an education: schools and colleges were free, and they had no land to claim their time.

Nabeel lived with his parents in a three-room adobe hut, along with Aly and Fawzia and their three other brothers. Aly worked in the fields for a daily wage when there was work to be had; their father carried a tiny salary as a village watchman. He was a small, frail man with sunken cheeks and watery gray eyes. As a watchman he had the possession of a gun, an ancient Enfield, that was kept in a locked chest under his bed. He said that he'd last had occasion to use it some fifteen years ago, when somebody spotted a gang of thieves running through Hassan Bassiuni's cornfields. The thieves had escaped, but the gun had mowed down half the field—it was really very much like a blunderbuss. He was very proud of it. Once when a fire broke out in Shahata Hammoudah's house and everyone was busy doing what they could, I noticed Nabeel's father running in the opposite direction. When I next looked around, he was standing at attention in front of the burning house, holding his gun, smiling benignly.