Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  Why does someone get caught up in such killing? As with so many people drawn to fascist movements, Sunil remembers a childhood of humiliation. At one point both his parents were in the hospital and he would try to bring them hot food. But, after racing home from school, if he didn’t make it to the hospital by 2:00 p.m., when daytime visiting hours were cut off, he would have to wait until evening visiting hours, vainly pleading. Those who had money to bribe the guard got let in. “I didn’t have ten or twenty rupees, so I sat there thinking . . . If one has to live, one should live in a proper way.” All is now different. “Now I can cross the door of any hospital. . . . I can talk to Balasaheb Thackeray, and he will phone the hospital, and they will fear him.” Sunil’s daughter goes to a top school, her admission arranged by a Shiv Sena minister in the state government. In return, Sunil is always ready to turn out his men for the minister when, he says, “they are needed to burn a train or break a car.”

  Sunil has risen in the movement and prospered from a cable TV franchise it arranged for him. But his very success may be loosening his ties to the Shiv Sena. When the government at one point barred Indian cable systems from broadcasting the programming of the country’s archenemy, Pakistan, Sunil objected, saying, “The thing that someone pays for, you should give them.” His business instincts are winning over his malice towards Muslims,” Mehta writes. The city “is seducing him away from hate, through the even more powerful attraction of greed.”

  Hate, however, is still the key tool for the Shiv Sena leader, Thackeray, who himself opens up to Mehta with amazing candor about how he gets mobs to do his bidding: “Young blood, young men, youngsters without jobs are like dry gunpowder. It will explode any day.” Part of the art of manipulating them is to convince them that their unemployment or any other problem of life in this city, where sewage leaks into freshwater lines and some two million people are without access to private or public toilets, is all the fault of Muslims. Thackeray would like to have visas required for anyone coming to Mumbai to live. He admires the strict border controls of the United States.

  Mehta’s quest to plumb every depth in Mumbai leads to an equally disturbing portrait of someone ostensibly upholding the law, a senior police officer whom he calls Ajay Lal. Lal is startlingly frank about his means of interrogation: bullets fired past an ear, electrodes to the genitals, a trip to a creek where cops tie a heavy stone to a prisoner and repeatedly bring him close to drowning. For Muslim militants, Lal says, other methods are necessary, because “those who have no fear of death also have no fear of physical pain. For them we threaten their family. . . . That usually works.”

  Hearing this, that lesser writer might have thought: I’ve got the incriminating quote; that’s all I need. Mehta, however, asks Lal if he can sit in on a few interrogation sessions. Lal lets him do so. In one, Lal and his officers question two men just arrested with a stash of counterfeit money. “Both speak English and are well dressed. They are uncomfortably familiar. A little more money, a little more education, and they would be People Like Us.” Lal’s constables go at them with fists and “a thick leather strap, about six inches wide, attached to a wooden handle. One of the cops takes it and brings it savagely down across the fat man’s face. The sound of leather hitting bare human flesh is impossible to describe.”

  Yet in the midst of watching this beating, Mehta still manages to notice that, just as the Hindu and Muslim gangsters he has interviewed don’t let go of their religion, neither do these counterfeiters let go of India’s deep respect for rank. “As they are being beaten, they address their tormentors as ‘sir.’ Thus we addressed our teachers in school. . . . Not once do they fly out; not once do they scream an obscenity.” One man finally yields the name of a mistress, a dancer; she is quickly arrested and leads Lal to the rest of the counterfeiters’ ring. (Such questioning is routine; when Mehta visits another police station, he hears agonized screaming coming from behind a closed door.)

  One feels a guilty, voyeuristic horror at even reading such a scene on the page. But then that horror becomes slowly, uncomfortably tempered as we learn more about Lal and see that this picture is far more complicated than merely a brutal man at work. Lal takes no bribes. He plans arrests in secret to prevent corrupt superiors from tipping off gangsters in advance. He knows exactly which senior police official has received what—women, money, a free apartment—from which gang chief. He suspects that one junior officer working for him is a gang mole. If he doesn’t threaten or beat information out of a suspect as soon as he’s been arrested, a gang boss will bribe someone to get him out of jail, or stand by and let him take the fall for those higher up. In court, appeals can take twenty years or more; each judge has more than three thousand cases pending, and, thanks to payoffs, the conviction rate for criminal offenses is a mere 4 percent.

  Lal has devoted his life to the vain struggle to break the power of the gangs, too often getting home after his children have gone to sleep. Gang leaders have threatened to kill him, to kill his wife, to blow up his sons’ school. He needs bodyguards even to come to Mehta’s apartment for dinner. His boys need them to go to school. He can relax only when he travels abroad. He is fearless about raiding the houses of Shiv Sena officials, including Bal Thackeray’s son, and his career has suffered as a result. He has turned down offers of jobs outside the police department at far higher pay. Despite everything, this torturer is one of the few honest high officials in the book.

  • • •

  It is exhilarating to plunge so deeply with Mehta into the lives of his characters, but at times you have the uneasy feeling that his lust to know everything about them is so intense, it’s reckless. The currency of power he wields is the writer’s coin: the knowledge of secrets. Only once does he openly flaunt this wealth, when he talks about a bar dancer and prostitute who shares with him stories of her childhood, her hopes, her struggles with her family, her attempt to end her life, her clients, and how she lures them. “I know what color and type of underwear she wears. I know how she likes to make love. I know when she is sad, when she is suicidal, when she is exuberant.” Mehta’s relationship with the dancer is only platonic, he claims, but, he exults, “What is sex after such vast intimate knowledge?”

  Just for that reason I wonder how this woman, and the other people who so readily confide their stories to him, feel when these are read by family and friends. Mehta is disturbingly foggy about when he has changed names and identifying details and when he has not. And even the changes he does make seem to be minor: the brutal, incorruptible, and supposedly pseudonymous Ajay Lal, for example, is transparently recognizable to any reader of Indian newspapers as Rakesh Maria, a longtime Mumbai police official. A senior cop is surely experienced in the dangers and rewards of talking to journalists, including those careless about protecting sources, but most of the others who so opened their souls to Mehta probably have never spoken to a writer before. Are their identities any better hidden? I hope so.

  Part of Mehta’s ambitiousness—and here is where his characters remind me of Balzac’s provincial immigrants to Paris—is that he knows that today every great city in the global South is simultaneously a destination and a jumping-off point. Village Indians crave a foothold in the vast metropolis. Those living on the sidewalk want a shack. Shack dwellers dream of a proper apartment. The upper classes want to emigrate to London, Toronto, New York. Maximum City abounds with long, vivid sketches from this entire array: a teenage runaway who sleeps on planks in the open air; the bar dancer who fled a violent mother and whose great dream is to win the Miss India contest; a slum family who finally scrape together enough money to buy their first apartment; a group of professionals planning to move together to Vancouver.

  The entire city is packed with people trying to claw their way up. Mehta glues himself to them, never content just to interview and go away. He rushes to the scene when the runaway’s father comes to find his son; he follows the bar dancer back to a reunion with her family; he’s there when the slum famil
y move into their first apartment building—where a shady contractor has put in an elevator shaft but no elevator.

  Some people open up to Mehta because he’s from America, the land of dreams; even just speaking to him raises their status. Sunil, the Shiv Sena thug, talks more readily when Mehta brings him to a friend’s high-rise flat, a great luxury for someone who grew up in a slum; he notices Sunil’s “sense of well-being whenever I take him to a high floor.” And some of the gangsters tell him their stories because they know he writes movie scripts, and they imagine making the greatest migration of all: having their lives on the screen, to be seen the world over.

  It is all the more striking, then, that Mehta’s final portrait from this city of people on the make is the story of a family—and here I can recall no equivalent in Balzac—that renounces every form of its currency of power. A wealthy diamond merchant, his wife, and their three children decide to follow the most honored custom in the Jain religion by giving away all their money to become wandering barefoot pilgrims, begging for their food, allowed to eat only once a day, with no possessions but the simple clothes on their backs. The husband and two sons, the wife and the daughter, must wander the roads of India separately, for man and woman must renounce not just all their worldly goods but each other.

  Fellow Jains praise the family for taking this holiest of steps. But for others, this act is deeply upsetting, a challenge to the whole basis of the city’s modern life. A critical onlooker believes the family only did it because “the Dawood gang must have been after them.” Someone else mutters that things are not as they seem, that there is a trust fund in case the family changes its mind. Mehta’s Westernized, cosmopolitan friends “shudder even more when hearing about them than when I talk about the hit men.” Mehta is there when the family gives away its wealth, throwing endless handfuls of bills and gold and silver coins into a vast crowd from carts drawn by elephants—a gesture that reminds him of a picture he has already shown us of patrons showering rupees on his bar dancer.

  Not content to let the story rest with such an extraordinary scene, months later Mehta tracks down the former merchant to see how he is doing in his life of pilgrimage. The soles of the man’s bare feet are “cracked, calloused, split, and blackened” from walking through the villages of India; his heart, he says, is at peace.

  • • •

  It is certainly hard to feel one’s heart at peace in visiting this overwhelming city. My first visit to Mumbai stands out in memory with unforgettable vividness. An afternoon sky dark with pollution, like premature dusk; streets, parks, buses, and sidewalks jammed with people—holy men, beggars, cripples, cricket players, hawkers of every conceivable item of food or clothing; shantytown huts packed together in unimaginable denseness; the smell of human waste, rotting fruit, diesel exhaust, sweat, perfume; the layer of oily dust that rapidly covered every object, even indoors. It was numbing, paralyzing, insurmountable.

  Late in the day, coming back to the university guesthouse where I was staying, I was peering out through a car window, which, like everything else, was covered with grime. We passed a flatbed cart, pulled and pushed by a dozen or so men in white knee-length kurtas, leaning far forward with the strain. Suddenly I realized it was a funeral procession. A man’s body dressed in white lay on the cart, wreathed with garland upon garland of white flowers. The moment seemed transcendent, the sorrow of the procession softened by the flowers, a touch of beauty under a dark and smoky sky. Maximum City—gritty and unsentimental, but by its breathtaking boldness and scope a paean to this impossible city—is a garland for Mumbai.

  2005

  Europe

  FIGURE 5. Republican militiawomen, Spanish Civil War.

  FIFTEEN

  Our Night with Its Stars Askew

  SOME YEARS AGO I WAS AT A CONFERENCE of writers and journalists from various countries. In a group of a dozen or so, someone suggested that we go around the circle and each of us name the political writer he or she most admired. When my turn came, I named Victor Serge. A man I did not know leapt to his feet, strode across the room, and embraced me. He turned out to be Rafael Barajas of Mexico, who under the pen name of El Fisgón (the Snooper) is one of Latin America’s leading political cartoonists.

  It is rare when a writer inspires instant brotherhood among strangers. A prolific novelist, poet, journalist, and author of one of the twentieth century’s great memoirs, Serge began and ended his life in exile and spent much of it either in prison or in flight from various governments trying to put him there. He was born Victor Kibalchich in 1890; his parents were Russian revolutionaries who had fled to Belgium. With little formal schooling, as a child he often had only bread soaked in coffee to eat. In Brussels, he recalled, “On the walls of our humble and makeshift lodgings there were always the portraits of men who had been hanged.”

  As a teenager, in a leftist political group, he was one of the tiny handful of people in Belgium who boldly criticized King Leopold II’s avaricious rule over the Congo. But he went farther than others in taking a stand against colonialism itself—a rare position in Europe at that time. He soon left home, lived in a French mining village, worked as a typesetter, and finally made his way to Paris. There he lived with beggars, read Balzac, and grew fascinated by the underworld. But soon the revolutionary in him overcame the wanderer. He became an anarchist and the editor of one of the movement’s newspapers. For refusing to testify against some comrades he was sentenced, at the age of twenty-two, to five years in a French maximum security prison. Released in 1917, he eventually managed to make his way to Russia—the ancestral homeland he had never seen.

  He arrived there in early 1919, in the midst of the Russian Civil War. This brutal conflict, which took several million lives, was between the Bolsheviks and the counterrevolutionary White forces—mostly led by former tsarist generals, and supplied by England, France, Japan, the United States, and other countries wary of revolution spreading to their own territory.

  Writing, as he did for the rest of his life, under the pen name of Victor Serge, he spent most of the next seventeen years in Russia. Among the shrill and dogmatic voices of that time, his still rings clear and true today. Although a supporter of the Russian Revolution, Serge never abandoned his sympathy for the free spirits who didn’t toe the Bolshevik line. “The telephone became my personal enemy,” he wrote. “At every hour it brought me voices of panic-stricken women who spoke of arrest, imminent executions, and injustice, and begged me to intervene at once, for the love of God!”

  Yet the White armies were attacking on several fronts; Serge felt it was no time for intellectuals, however just their criticisms, to be on the sidelines. “Even if there were only one chance in a hundred for the regeneration of the revolution and its workers’ democracy,” he later wrote, “that chance had to be taken.” He served as a militia officer fighting the Whites and then at one point was put in charge of examining the captured archives of the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police. At the same time he continued to be appalled by the growth of a new secret police regime around him, and, once the Russian Civil War was over, argued ceaselessly against the straitjacketed press, the arrests, the closed trials, and the death penalty for political prisoners.

  In a sense, Serge never resolved the tension between his ardent hope for a revolutionary new society and his passion for civil liberties. What do you do if most people are more concerned about staying alive and having enough to eat than living in a new utopia? Was that utopia still worth fighting for if there was “only one chance in a hundred” it could be achieved? And was the suppression of all opposition built in to the millenarian confidence in that utopian dream? Serge never fully sorted out the contradiction in his own soul between the revolutionary and the democrat. Despairing as he watched the Soviet bureaucracy grow ever more oppressive, he and some like-minded friends tried to build a miniature version of the society they believed in by founding a communal farm on an abandoned estate where “we would live close to the earth.” But, surr
ounded by turmoil, famine, and distrustful villagers, the experiment didn’t last.

  His protests against the regime’s actions got Serge expelled from the Communist Party. In 1928, Stalin clapped him in jail. Always alert to irony, Serge talked to one of his guards and found that he had served in the same job under the last tsar. When he was released some weeks later, the janitor at his Leningrad apartment building said that it was “the same under the old regime. The intellectuals were always arrested like this, just before the first of May.” A few days after being freed from prison, Serge wrote, “I was laid out by an unendurable abdominal pain; for twenty-four hours I was face-to-face with death. . . . And I reflected that I had labored, striven, and schooled myself titanically, without producing anything valuable or lasting. I told myself, ‘If I chance to survive, I must be quick and finish the books I have begun: I must write, write . . .’ I thought of what I would write, and mentally sketched the plan of a series of documentary novels about these unforgettable times.”

  And write he did. In all of his books, his prose has a searing, vivid, telegraphic compactness. His style comes not from endless refinement and rewriting, like Flaubert’s, but from the urgency of being a man on the run. The police are at the door; his friends are being arrested; he must get the news out; every word must tell. And he is not like the novelist in a calmer society who searches and experiments to find exactly the right subject at last; his subject—the Russian Revolution and its aftermath—almost killed him. During Stalin’s dictatorship, it is estimated today, somewhere between ten and twenty million people met unnatural deaths: from the deliberate famine brought on by the collectivization of agriculture, from firing squads, and from the vast Arctic and Siberian gulag of labor camps that devoured the victims of mass arrests. Driven by Stalin’s increasing paranoia, these arrests and executions peaked in the Great Purge of the late 1930s, when millions were seized in midnight raids, many never to be seen by their families again.