Incendiary Circumstances

by Amitav Ghosh

  "And your mother and sister?" the Director had asked.

  "Baba, they just disappeared..." And now for the first time the boy began to cry, and the Director's heart broke, for he knew his son was crying because he thought he would be scolded and blamed for what had happened.

  "I was strict with him, sir," the Director told me, his voice trailing off. "I am a strict man—that is my nature. But I must say he is a brave boy, a very brave boy."

  Having spent thirteen years on the island, the Director was well acquainted with the local administration and the officers on the air base. Through their intervention he was able to get on a flight the very next day. He spent the day searching through the rubble; he found many possessions, but no trace of his daughter or his wife. He returned to Port Blair with his son the same evening, and the two of them moved in with some friends. Every day since then he'd been trying to go back, to find out what had become of his wife and daughter, but the flights had been closed—until this one.

  "Tell me," he said, his voice becoming uncharacteristically soft. "What do you think—is there any hope?"

  It took me a moment to collect my wits. "Of course there is hope," I said. "There is always hope. They could have been swept ashore on another part of the island."

  He nodded. "We will see. I hope I will find out today, in Malacca."

  With some hesitation I asked if it would be all right if I came with him. He answered with a prompt nod. "You can come."

  I had the impression that he had been dreading the lonely search that lay ahead and would be glad of some company. "All right then," I said. "I will."

  At the airfield in Car Nicobar, the Director arranged a ride for us on a yellow construction truck that had been set to the task of distributing relief supplies. The truck went bouncing down the runway before turning off into a narrow road that led into a forest. Once the airstrip was behind us, it was as though we had been transported to some long-ago land, unspoiled and untouched. The road wound through a dense tropical jungle, dotted at intervals with groves of slender areca palms and huts mounted on stilts. Some of these had metamorphosed into makeshift camps, sprouting awnings of plastic and tarpaulin. It was clear that the island's interior was sparsely inhabited, with the population being concentrated along the seafront.

  Earlier, while the plane was making its descent, I had had a panoramic, if blurred, view of the island in the crisp morning sunlight. No more than a few miles across, it was flat and low, and its interior was covered by a dense canopy of greenery. A turquoise halo surrounded its shores, where a fringe of sand had once formed an almost continuous length of beach; this was now still mainly underwater. I saw to my surprise that many coconut palms were still standing, even on the edge of the water. Relatively few palms had been flattened; most remained upright and in full possession of their greenery. As for the forest, the canopy seemed almost undisturbed. All trace of habitation, in contrast, had been obliterated. The foundations of many buildings could be clearly seen on the ground, but of the structures they had once supported, nothing remained.

  It was evident from above that the tsunami had been peculiarly selective in the manner of its destruction. Had the island been hit by a major cyclone, not a frond would have survived on the coconut palms and the forest canopy would have been denuded. Most human dwellings, on the other hand, would have retained their walls, even if they lost their roofs. Not so in this instance. The villages along the shore were not merely damaged; they were erased. It was as if the island had been hit by a weapon devised to cause the maximum possible damage to life and property while leaving nature largely unharmed.

  We came to an intersection that was flanked by low whitewashed buildings. This was the administrative center of the island, the Director explained; the settlement of Malacca lay a good distance away, and we would have to walk. After getting off the truck, we came to the district library, a building of surprising size and solidity. Like the surrounding offices, it was unharmed, but a medical camp, manned by the Indo-Tibetan Border Force, had sprung up on its grounds, under the shade of a spreading, moss-twined padauk tree.

  The Director spotted a doctor sitting in a tent. He darted away and slipped under the tent's blue flap. "Doctor, have you heard anything about my family?" he said. "I've come because I heard some survivors had been found..."

  The doctor's face froze, and after a moment's silence he said, in a tone that was noncommittal and yet not discouraging, "No news has reached me—I've not heard anything."

  We continued on our way, walking past the airy bungalows of the island's top officials, with their well-tended gardens. Soon we came upon two men who were sitting by the road, beside an odd assortment of salvaged goods. "That's mine," said the Director, pointing to a lampstand of turned wood. "I paid a lot for it—it's made of padauk wood." There was no rancor in his voice, and nor did he seem to want to reclaim the object. We walked on.

  A few steps ahead the road dipped toward a large clearing fringed by thick stands of coconut palm. It was a maidan, a space for people to promenade and forgather, and as with many small town maidans, there was a plaster bust of Mahatma Gandhi standing in its center. So far on our journey from the airport we had seen no outward sign of the damage caused by the tsunami, but now we had arrived at the periphery of the band of destruction. Mounds of splintered planks and other building materials lay scattered across the clearing, and the red, white, and green fence that surrounded the bust of Mahatma Gandhi was swathed in refuse and dead coconut fronds. Everywhere, evidence of the tsunami's incursion could be seen in pools of water that had turned rank over the past few days.

  At the far end of the maidan, a fire was blazing among the coconut palms. The warehouse that supplied the island with cooking gas had stood at that spot. The tsunami had swept the warehouse away, leaving the canisters exposed to the sun, and a fire had ensued. Every few minutes the ground shook with the blast of exploding canisters.

  Oblivious of the fire, the Director stepped away to accost a passerby who was wheeling a loaded bicycle. Over his shoulder, he said to me, "This is Michael. He worked in my office." Michael was a sturdy, grizzled Nicobarese dressed in green shorts and a gray shirt. Laying his hands on the bicycle's handlebars, the Director said in Hindi, "Michael, listen—has there been any news of madam? You know what she looks like. Have you seen any trace of her?"

  Michael dropped his eyes, as if in embarrassment, and answered with a tiny shake of his head.

  Lowering his voice, the Director continued: "And have you heard anyone speak of a girl roaming in the jungle?" When this too failed to elicit an answer, he went on. "Michael, I need your help. Bring some men and come. I need to dig through the rubble to see if I can find anything." Even as he was speaking, his attention shifted to the contents of the plastic bags that were hanging from Michael's handlebars. Flinching, he let go of the handlebar. "Michael!" he cried. "What is all this stuff you've picked up? You should know better than to take things from over there—they may be contaminated."

  Michael hung his head and wheeled his bicycle silently away.

  "They're all looting," said the Director, shaking his head. "I've heard the bazaar in Port Blair has received three sackfuls of gold from the islands..."

  In the clump of burning palm trees, yet another gas canister exploded. It was close enough that we could feel the rattle of the blast in the debris under our feet; a shard of metal struck an onlooker, fortunately without injury. Oblivious of the flames, the Director hurried toward a spot where a mound of mangled household objects lay piled, having been pushed through the screen of coconut palms like dough through a sieve.

  "Look, that's mine," he said, pointing to a blue Aristocrat suitcase made of molded plastic. It had been hacked open with a sharp-bladed instrument and its contents were gone. The Director picked it up and shook it. "I saw it the last time I was here," he said. "It was already empty. Everything had been looted." His eyes moved over to a steel trunk lying nearby. "That's mine too. Go and look." St
epping over, I saw that the trunk's lock had been forced open. On the side, written in large black letters, was the Director's name and designation. "You see," the Director said, as if in vindication. "Everything I've been telling you is true. These things were all mine."

  A short distance away a wooden cabinet lay overturned, and heaps of paper could be seen spilling out of its belly. The Director beckoned to me. "See—there are all the records from my office. Thirteen years of research, all gone." We went to kneel beside the cabinet, and I saw that the papers were mimeographed data sheets, with the letterhead of the Malaria Research Centre printed on top.

  Somewhere among the papers I spotted a few old photographs. Somehow it was a matter of great relief to me to come upon a retrievable memento, and I was quick to draw the Director's attention to the pictures. On examination it turned out that most of them had been defaced by the water, but I found one where he, the Director, could be seen standing among a group of people. I held it out to him, and he took it with an indifferent shrug. "That photo was taken at the air base, I remember." He let go, and it fluttered into a puddle of stinking water.

  "Don't you want to keep it?" I said in astonishment.

  "No," he said simply. "It means nothing. These are just work pictures."

  Then suddenly his eyes lit up. "Look," he said, "my slides..." A drawer had come open, shaking loose several decks of white-rimmed photographic slides. Most were sodden, but some were dry and had preserved their images. To my untrained eyes, the pictures appeared to be of bacteria, hugely magnified by the lens of a microscope. The Director sorted quickly through the slides and chose a dozen or so. Close at hand there lay a roll of unused plastic bags that had been washed out of a drowned shop and dried by the sun. Peeling off one of these bags, he placed the slides carefully inside before fastening his fingers on them.

  "Your home must have been nearby?" I said.

  "No," came the answer. "The wave carried these things right out of the town. My house is still a half a mile away, over there."

  I had imagined that his possessions were bunched together because his house had stood nearby. This was an indication of how little I understood of the power of the surge. Its strength was such that it had tossed the Director's house aside, picked up his belongings, and punched them through a half-mile-wide expanse of dense habitation.

  The place the Director had pointed to was on the far side of the burning coconut palms, and it was evident that to get there we would have to pass quite close to the fire, which was now spreading rapidly. We set off almost at a run and soon came to a point where our path was blocked by a fallen tree. He clambered over, hanging on to his slides, and I followed. The fire was now about a hundred yards to our right, and as I was climbing over, there was another detonation, followed by a crackling, whooshing sound. I fell quickly to the ground and shut my eyes. When I looked up, the Director was still standing, gazing down at me with puzzled impatience. "Come on, come on—that's where we have to go, over there."

  When I rose to my feet, I had my first glimpse of the seafront where the town of Malacca had once stood; till now it had been largely screened from view by the coconut palms. On a stretch of land about a mile long, there were now only five structures still standing: the staring, skull-like shell of a school that had lost all its doors and windows; a single neatly whitewashed bungalow in the distance; an arched gateway that had the words "Rajiv Gandhi Memorial Park" painted on it; a small, miraculously unharmed Murugan temple, right beside the sea; and, last, the skeleton of a church, with a row of parallel arches rising from the rubble like the bleached ribs of a dead animal. This was the structure that had saved the life of the Director's son. The palms along the seafront were undamaged and upright, their fronds intact, but the other trees on the site had lost all their leaves, and a couple had buses, cars, and sheets of corrugated iron wrapped around their trunks. If not for the tree trunks and the waving palms, the first visual analogy to suggest itself would have been Hiroshima after the bomb: the resemblance lay not just in the destruction but also in the discernible directionality of the blast. But there the parallel ended, for the sky here was a cloudless blue and there were no wisps of smoke rising from the ruins.

  The Director led the way across the debris as if he were following a route imprinted in memory, a familiar map of streets and lanes. Despite a stiff breeze blowing in from the sea, an odor of death flowed over the site, not evenly, but in whirls and eddies, sometimes growing so powerful as to indicate the presence of a yet undiscovered body. Stray dogs rooting in the ruins looked up as if amazed at the sight of human beings who were still on their feet.

  We came to a point where a rectangular platform of cement shone brightly under the sun. The Director stepped up to it and placed his feet in the middle. "This was my house," he said. "Only the foundation was concrete. The rest was wood. My wife used to say that she had moved from a white house to a log cabin. You see, she was from an affluent family—she grew up in a bungalow with an air conditioner. She used to teach English in a school here, but she always wanted to leave. I applied many times, but the transfer never came." He paused, thinking back. For much of the time that we had been together his voice had carried a note of sharp but undirected annoyance; now it softened. "There was so much she could have achieved," he said. "I was never able to give her the opportunity."

  I reached out to touch his arm, but he shook my hand brusquely away; he was not the kind of man who takes kindly to expressions of sympathy. I could tell from his demeanor that he was accustomed to adversity and had invented many rules for dealing with it. The emotion he felt for his family he had rarely expressed; he had hoarded it inside himself, in the way a squirrel gathers food for the winter. Loath to spend it in his hectic middle years, he had put it away to be savored when there was a greater sense of ease in his life, at a time when his battles were past and he could give his hoarded love his full attention. He had never dreamed—and who could?—that one bright December day, soon after dawn, it would be stolen, unsavored, by the sea.

  I began to walk toward the gently lapping waves, no more than a hundred yards away. The Director took fright at this and called me back: "Don't go that way, the tide is coming in. It's time to leave."

  I turned to follow him, and we were heading back toward the blazing palms when he stopped to point to a yellow paint box peeping out of the rubble. "That belonged to Vineeta, my daughter," he said, and the flatness of his voice was harder to listen to than an outburst would have been. "She loved to paint; she was very good at it. She was even given a prize, from Hyderabad."

  I had expected that he would stoop to pick up the box, but instead he turned away and walked on, gripping his bag of slides. "Wait!" I cried. "Don't you want to take the box?"

  "No," he said vehemently, shaking his head. "What good will it do? What will it give back?" He stopped to look at me over the rim of his glasses. "Do you know what happened the last time I was here? Someone had found my daughter's schoolbag and saved it for me. It was handed to me, like a card. It was the worst thing I could have seen. It was unbearable."

  He started to walk off again. Unable to restrain myself, I called out after him, "Are you sure you don't want it—the paint box?"

  Without looking around, he said, "Yes, I am sure."

  I stood amazed as he walked toward the blazing fire with his slides still folded in his grip. How was it possible that the only memento he had chosen to retrieve was those magnified images? As a husband, a father, a human being, it was impossible not to wonder, What would I have done? What would I have felt? What would I have chosen to keep of the past? The truth is, nobody can know, except in the extremity of that moment, and then the choice is not a choice at all but an expression of the innermost sovereignty of the self, which decides because nothing now remains to cloud its vision. In the manner of the Director's choosing there was not a particle of hesitation, not the faintest glimmer of a doubt. Was it perhaps that in this moment of utter desolation, there was some com
fort in the knowledge of an impersonal effort? Could it be that he was seeking refuge in the one aspect of his existence that could not be erased by an act of nature? Or was there some consolation in the very lack of immediacy—did the value of those slides lie precisely in their exclusion from the unendurable pain of his loss? Whatever the reason, it was plain his mind had fixed on a set of objects that derived their meaning from the part of his life that was lived in thought and contemplation.

  There are times when words seem futile, and to no one more so than a writer. At these moments it seems that nothing is of value other than to act and to intervene in the course of events. To think, to reflect, to write, seems trivial and wasteful. But the life of the mind takes many forms, and after the day had passed I understood that in the manner of his choosing, the Director had mounted the most singular, the most powerful defense of it that I would ever witness.

  IMPERIAL TEMPTATIONS 2003

  THE IDEA OF EMPIRE, once so effectively used by Ronald Reagan to discredit the Soviet Union, has recently undergone a strange rehabilitation in the United States. This process, which started some years ago, has accelerated markedly since September 11. References to empire are no longer deployed ironically or in a tone of warning; the idea has become respectable enough that the New York Times ran an article describing the enthusiasm it now evokes in certain circles.