by Amitav Ghosh
She had gone pale with amazement. "So tell us then," she demanded, "do you have night and day like we do?"
"Shut up, woman," said Khamees. "Of course they don't. It's day all the time over there, didn't you know? They arranged it like that so that they wouldn't have to spend any money on lamps."
We all laughed, and then someone pointed to a baby lying in the shade of a tree, swaddled in a sheet of cloth. "That's Khamees's baby," I was told. "He was born last month."
"That's wonderful," I said. "Khamees must be very happy."
Khamees gave a cry of delight. "The Indian knows I'm happy because I've had a son," he said to the others. "He understands that people are happy when they have children. He's not as upside-down as we thought."
He slapped me on the knee and lit up the hookah, and from that moment we were friends.
One evening, perhaps a month or so after I first met Khamees, he and his brothers and I were walking back to the village from the fields when he spotted the old imam sitting on the steps that led to the mosque.
"Listen," he said to me, "you know the old imam, don't you? I saw you talking to him once."
"Yes," I said, "I talked to him once."
"My wife's ill," Khamees said. "I want the imam to come to my house to give her an injection. He won't come if I ask him, he doesn't like me. You go and ask."
"He doesn't like me either," I said.
"Never mind," Khamees insisted. "He'll come if you ask him—he knows you're a foreigner. He'll listen to you."
While Khamees waited on the edge of the square with his brothers, I went across to the imam. I could tell that he had seen me—and Khamees—from a long way off, that he knew I was crossing the square to talk to him. But he would not look in my direction. Instead, he pretended to be deep in conversation with a man who was sitting beside him, an elderly and pious shopkeeper whom I knew slightly.
When I reached them, I said "Good evening" very pointedly to the imam. He could not ignore me any longer then, but his response was short and curt, and he turned back at once to resume his conversation.
The old shopkeeper was embarrassed now, for he was a courteous, gracious man in the way that seemed to come so naturally to the elders of the village. "Please sit down," he said to me. "Do sit. Shall we get you a chair?"
Then he turned to the imam and said, slightly puzzled, "You know the Indian doktor, don't you? He's come all the way from India to be a student at the University of Alexandria."
"I know him," said the imam. "He came around to ask me questions. But as for this student business, I don't know. What's he going to study? He doesn't even write in Arabic."
"Well," said the shopkeeper judiciously, "that's true, but after all, he writes his own languages and he knows English."
"Oh, those," said the imam. "What's the use of those languages? They're the easiest languages in the world. Anyone can write those."
He turned to face me for the first time. His eyes were very bright, and his mouth was twitching with anger. "Tell me," he said, "why do you worship cows?"
I was so taken aback that I began to stammer. The imam ignored me. He turned to the old shopkeeper and said, "That's what they do in his country—did you know? They worship cows."
He shot me a glance from the corner of his eyes. "And shall I tell you what else they do?" he said to the shopkeeper.
He let the question hang for a moment. And then, very loudly, he hissed, "They burn their dead."
The shopkeeper recoiled as though he had been slapped. His hands flew to his mouth. "Oh God!" he muttered. "Ya Allah."
"That's what they do," said the imam. "They burn their dead."
Then suddenly he turned to me and said, very rapidly, "Why do you allow it? Can't you see that it's a primitive and backward custom? Are you savages that you permit something like that? Look at you—you've had some kind of education; you should know better. How will your country ever progress if you carry on doing these things? You've even been to the West; you've seen how advanced they are. Now tell me, have you ever seen them burning their dead?"
The imam was shouting now, and a circle of young men and boys had gathered around us. Under the pressure of their interested eyes my tongue began to trip, even on syllables I thought I had mastered. I found myself growing angry—as much with my own incompetence as with the imam.
"Yes, they do burn their dead in the West," I managed to say somehow. I raised my voice too now. "They have special electric furnaces meant just for that."
The imam could see that he had stung me. He turned away and laughed. "He's lying," he said to the crowd. "They don't burn their dead in the West. They're not an ignorant people. They're advanced, they're educated, they have science, they have guns and tanks and bombs."
"We have them too!" I shouted back at him. I was as confused now as I was angry. "In my country we have all those things too," I said to the crowd. "We have guns and tanks and bombs. And they're better than anything you have—we're way ahead of you."
The imam could no longer disguise his anger. "I tell you, he's lying," he said. "Our guns and bombs are much better than theirs. Ours are second only to the West's."
"It's you who's lying," I said. "You know nothing about this. Ours are much better. Why, in my country we've even had a nuclear explosion. You won't be able to match that in a hundred years."
So there we were, the imam and I, delegates from two superseded civilizations vying with each other to lay claim to the violence of the West.
At that moment, despite the vast gap that lay between us, we understood each other perfectly. We were both traveling, he and I: we were traveling in the West. The only difference was that I had actually been there, in person: I could have told him about the ancient English university I had won a scholarship to, about punk dons with safety pins in their mortarboards, about superhighways and sex shops and Picasso. But none of it would have mattered. We would have known, both of us, that all that was mere fluff: at the bottom, for him as for me and millions and millions of people on the landmasses around us, the West meant only this—science and tanks and guns and bombs.
And we recognized too the inescapability of these things, their strength, their power—evident in nothing so much as this: that even for him, a man of God, and for me, a student of the "humane" sciences, they had usurped the place of all other languages of argument. He knew, just as I did, that he could no longer say to me, as Ibn Battuta might have when he traveled to India in the fourteenth century, "You should do this or that because it is right or good, or because God wills it so." He could not have said it because that language is dead: those things are no longer sayable; they sound absurd. Instead he had had, of necessity, to use that other language, so universal that it extended equally to him, an old-fashioned village imam, and to great leaders at SALT conferences. He had had to say to me, "You ought not to do this because otherwise you will not have guns and tanks and bombs."
Since he was a man of God, his was the greater defeat.
For a moment then I was desperately envious. The imam would not have said any of those things to me had I been a Westerner. He would not have dared. Whether I wanted it or not, I would have had around me the protective aura of an inherited expertise in the technology of violence. That aura would have surrounded me, I thought, with a sheet of clear glass, like a bulletproof screen; or perhaps it would have worked as a talisman, like a press card, armed with which I could have gone off to what were said to be the most terrible places in the world that month, to gaze and wonder. And then perhaps I too would one day have had enough material for a book which would have had for its epigraph the line The horror! The horror!—for the virtue of a sheet of glass is that it does not require one to look within.
But that still leaves Khamees the Rat waiting on the edge of the square.
In the end it was he and his brothers who led me away from the imam. They took me home with them, and there, while Kha-mees's wife cooked dinner for us—she was not so ill after all—Khamee
s said to me, "Do not be upset, ya doktor. Forget about all those guns and things. I'll tell you what: I'll come to visit you in your country, even though I've never been anywhere. I'll come all the way."
He slipped a finger under his skullcap and scratched his head, thinking hard.
Then he added, "But if I die, you must bury me."
Notes
page
THE GREATEST SORROW
[>] Nessun maggior dolore: Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans R. & J. Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2000), Canto V, lines 121–23.
[>] The last Sinhala word: Michael Ondaatje, "Wells," in Handwriting (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 50.
[>] I will die, in autumn: Agha Shahid Ali, "The Last Saffron," in The Country Without a Post Office (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 27–29.
[>] We know: The lines of Dante's from which the title of this essay is taken are thought to be based on a passage from Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy: "Among fortune's many adversities the most unhappy kind is once to have been happy" (Dante, The Inferno, p. 99).
At a certain point: Agha Shahid Ali, "Farewell," in The Country Without a Post Office, pp. 22–23.
[>] At the heart of the book: I have described this event in detail in my book In an Antique Land (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 204–10.
[>] Ranajit Guha: Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), lecture III.
[>] It is for this reason: It is not without interest that the corresponding administrative term—handed down from the Raj—is "civil disturbance." "Everything is finished": "The Country Without a Post Office," in The Country Without a Post Office, pp. 49–50.
"For his first forty days": Ondaatje, "The Story," in Handwriting.
[>] "With all the swerves": Ibid.
"THE GHAT OF THE ONLY WORLD"
[>] At a certain point: Agha Shahid Ali, "Farewell," in The Country Without a Post Office (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 22–23.
[>] "Imagine me at a writer's conference": Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English, ed. Agha Shahid Ali (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), pp. 1, 3, 13.
[>] "A night of ghazals": Agha Shahid Ali, "I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World," in Rooms Are Never Finished (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 97. It was Shahid's mother: Ibid., p. 99.
"I am not born": Agha Shahid Ali, "A Lost Memory of Delhi," in The Half-Inch Himalayas (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), p. 5. I would like to thank Daniel Hall for bringing this poem to my attention.
[>] "I always move": "I Dream I Am at the Ghat," p. 101.
"It was '89": "Summers of Translation," in Rooms Are Never Finished, p. 30.
[>] "and I, one festival": "Lenox Hill," in Rooms Are Never Finished, p. 17.
"Nothing will remain": "The Country Without a Post Office," in The Country Without a Post Office, p. 50.
"I will die, in autumn": "The Last Saffron," in The Country Without a Post Office p. 27.
[>] "Yes, I remember it": Ibid., p. 29.
[>] "Mother, they asked me": "Lenox Hill," in Rooms Are Never Finished, pp. 18, 19.
COUNTDOWN
[>] In the course of writing this piece I talked to many hundreds of people in India, Pakistan, and Nepal. The impossibility of severally listing these debts serves only to deepen my gratitude to those who took the time to meet me. The book would be incomplete, however, if I were not to acknowledge my gratitude to the following: Smt. Krishna Bose, M.P., Madiha Gauhur, Shahid Nadeem, Najam Sethi, Dr. Dursameem Ahmed, Eman Ahmed, Dr. Zia Miyan, Dr. M. V. Ramanna, Kunda Dixit, Kanak Dixit, Pritam and Meena Mansukhani, Radhika and Hari Sen, and my infinitely forbearing publisher, Ravi Dayal. Dr. Sunil Mukhi, Dr. Sumit Ranjan Das, Dr. Sourendu Gupta, and other scientists at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay were generous in giving of their time to discuss various aspects of the nuclear issue, from many different points of view: I owe them many thanks. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Ananda Bazaar Patrika, Himal, and The New Yorker. I am particularly indebted to Nandi Rodrigo, who did an astonishingly thorough job of fact-checking my New Yorker piece, and to Bill Buford, who saw it to press. Madhumita Mazumdar contributed greatly to the background research and provided invaluable logistical support: I am deeply grateful to her.
"Countdown" owes its greatest debt to my wife, Deborah Baker. But for her urging, I would never have committed myself to the many months of labor that went into the writing of this piece; nor would I be in a position to publish it today, in this form, if it were not for her editing. I owe her many, many thanks.
THE MARCH OF THE NOVEL THROUGH HISTORY
[>] "It has to be pointed out": Nirad Chaudhuri, Thy Hand, Great Anarch! (New York: Addison-Wesley 1987), p. 155.
[>] "To be up to date": Ibid., p. 156.
[>] These stories left their mark: C. E. Dimock, in The Literature of India, an Introduction, ed. C. E. Dimock et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
[>] "Those who are familiar": Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Essays and Letters, in Bankim Rachanavali (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, n.d.).
[>] "Notwithstanding all that has been written": Ibid., pp. 192–93.
"obtain some knowledge": Ibid.
[>] "The house of Mathur Ghose": Rajmohun's Wife, in Bankim Rachanavali, ed. Jogesh Chandra Bagal (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, n.d.), pp. 52–53.
"Madhav therefore immediately hurried": Ibid., p. 17.
THE FUNDAMENTALIST CHALLENGE
[>] "As far as the Vietnamese": This quotation is from an anonymously authored UNTAC document entitled "Interview with Khat Sali, Sihanoukville (9–10/1/1992)."
[>] "at present several dozen people": Amnesty International, "Pakistan: Use and Abuse of Blasphemy Laws," July 24, 1994.
"In a number of cases": Ibid.
[>] "In a refugee camp": Internet report, n.d.
THE GHOSTS OF MRS. GANDHI
[>] "began with the arrival": People's Union for Democratic Rights and People's Union for Civil Liberties, "Who Are the Guilty?: Report of a Joint Inquiry into the Causes and Impact of the Riots in Delhi from 31 October to 10 November 1984," New Delhi, 1984, p. 2.
"Some people, the neighbors": Veena Das, "Our Work to Cry, Your Work to Listen," in Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South East Asia, ed. Veena Das (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).
[>] "The decision to perceive": Dzevad Karahasan, "Literature and War," In Sarajevo, Exodus of a City (New York: Kodansha, 1994).
DANCING IN CAMBODIA
[>] The account of the royal dance troupe's visit to France with King Sisowath is based on reports in Le Petit Provençal, Le Petit Marseillais, and Le Figaro; on the Rapport-Général, Exposition Coloniale National de Marseille, 15 Avril–18 Novembre 1906 (1907), and its accompanying volume, La Chambre de Commerce de Marseille et l'Exposition Coloniale de 1906 (1908), published by the Chamber of Commerce, Marseille; and on the following letters and documents in the Archives d'Outre-Mer at Aix-en-Provence: Résident-Supérieur in Phnom Penh to Hanoi, May 30, 1905 (re. princes' scholarships to study in France) (GGI 2576); Governor-General to the Minister of Colonies in Paris, April 5, 1906 (GGI 5822); report, F. Gautret, July 1906 (GGI 6643); Minister of Colonies to F. Gautret, Paris, July 18, 1906 (GGI 6643); Fête du 5 Juillet, 1906, en l'honneur de SM le Roi du Cambodge...(Ministry of Colonies, 1906); F. Gautret, to the Governor-General, Hanoi, August 20, 1906, Saigon (GGI 6643); itinerary, Sejour de Sa Majesté Sisowath, Roi du Cambodge en France (GGI 6643); Résident-Supérieur to Governor-General, January 18, 1907, containing a French translation of the royal proclamation on the king's voyage, issued under the signatures of King Sisowath and five ministers (GGI 5822); Minister Thiounn to Résident-Supérieur, July 9, 1907 (GGI 2576); correspondence between the Cour des Comptes, Paris, Saigon, and Phnom Penh on expenses of the royal entourage (1901–11), including Minister Thiounn's response (August 13, 1910) (GGI 15606). The quotations in section 8 are from Rodi
n et l'Extrême Orient (Musée Rodin, Paris, 1979), and from Frederic V. Grunefeld's Rodin; A Biography (New York: Holt, 1987). Biographical and other details on Cambodian politics and history are mainly from Milton E. Osborne's The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia: Rule and Response (1859–1950) (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969); David Chandler's Brother Number One; A Political Biography of Pol Pot (Westview, Conn.: Oxford University Press, 1992); Ben Kiernan's How Pol Pot Came to Power: A History of Communism in Kampuchea, 1930–1975 (London: Verso, 1985), and Elizabeth Becker's When the War Was Over: The Voices of Cambodia's Revolution and Its People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).
The author gratefully acknowledges the help of the staff of the Archives d'Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence and of the following individuals: Christian Oppetit, conservator of the archives of the Département des Bouches-du-Rhône; Annie Terrier, Christianne Besse, Eva Mysliwiec, Chanthou Boua, Tan Sotho, Choup Sros, Kim Rath, Bill Lobban, Mr. T. P. Seetharam, Col. Suresh Nair, and Mrs. Pushpa Nair.
Credits
The following pieces have appeared previously in print, sometimes in a slightly different form, as noted. An excerpt from "The Town by the Sea" was published in the New York Times on January 14, 2005. Parts of "Imperial Temptations" were published in The Nation on May 9, 2002, and The New Yorker on April 7, 2003 (as "The Anglophone Empire"). "September 11," "Countdown," "At Large in Burma," and "The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi" were published in The New Yorker (September 24, 2001; October 26, 1998; August 12, 1996; and July 17, 1995, respectively). Excerpts from "'The Ghat of the Only World'" were published in The Nation on February 11, 2002. "The March of the Novel Through History" was published in Kunapipi: A Journal of Post-Colonial Writing (vol. 19) and in the Kenyon Review (vol. 20, no. 2, 1998). "The Fundamentalist Challenge" was published in the Wilson Quarterly in 1995. "Petrofiction" and "The Human Comedy in Cairo" were published in the New Republic (March 2, 1992, and May 7, 1990, respectively). "Dancing in Cambodia" (in shorter form), "An Egyptian in Baghdad," and "Four Corners" were published in Granta (no. 44, 1993; no. 34, 1990; no. 26, 1989, respectively). "Tibetan Dinner" was published in Granta (no. 25, 1988) and reprinted in the Utne Reader (March 1, 1992). "The Imam and the Indian" was published in Granta (no. 20, 1986) and reprinted in The Best of Granta Travel (London: Granta Books, 1991) and in Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, ed. Angelika Bammer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).