It slunk up on Petrov with the same slyness, in spite of his watchfulness. Blaming himself for his insensitive antennae, he was drawn out, further and further, to probe painfully. He knew of the famines of his own country, Russia, one of which had taken place when he was a near adult. Yet he had never been able to visualize the reality. Humans foraging in dustbins, their sores infested with maggots. Live skeletons eating from drains, anything they could find. Children sacrificed by mothers. Little girls bartered to whorehouses. Rice mixed with gravel, and a pitiless trade in gravel to augment that rice. At times he felt he was looking down the shithole of some epochal slum where the unspeakable remnants of hundreds of years festooned the squatting room, the walls, the floors and the clogged hole itself through which one could see below. He forced himself to examine it, look closely, face on, breathe in that stench, and it was so nauseating and tormenting, that his defenses did their best to obliterate it. He had to fight this tendency, and then he would find himself grappling with another depthless frustration, the frustration of his complete helplessness, though he wandered the streets like a mad man with his car full of provisions, handing out gruel, bread, fruit, milk, water. The first to accept his offerings, an emaciated man lying next to his dead wife and children, oozing a glutinous jelly from his eyes, swallowed once, gurgled, and died, as if Petrov had fed him poison. He imagined the man’s intestines, dehydrated, collapsed, with the walls sticking together, refusing the passage of food. That fatal swallow had ruptured the brittle noodles of his intestines and stopped his weak breath. The creatures, that is what Petrov called them, so far removed were they from the human state, confused him with their reactions. Sometimes watching him listlessly with the desirelessness presaging death, at others mobbing his car and blindly hitting out in the scramble to grab and cram their mouths. At a friend’s free kitchen, he saw a mother rushing in before the gates were closed, after thrusting her children out of the way. He saw his friends fighting with the mother to get the children in and feed them. And yet, he had already seen mothers dying while feeding their children before themselves . . . People were trying to help, one and two, twenty and thirty, perhaps a hundred starving humans brought back from the brink. Kitchens were opened in well-to-do homes for one, two hours. “After all,” thought Petrov when he helped at these places, “who would allow one’s own plump wife or child to want, even for a grain? Would it not be shameful then to let others beat on the gates with skeletal fists, and refuse to fill out the stark ribs which have just slid down those gates, even with a little gruel?” So some gates were opened and the gentlefolk gave to the fortunate minority who stumbled against them. The very black marketeers who had fanned the famine, and were given indifference-based immunity by the authorities, also helped in this small effort, but with different motives. They did it to divert the wrath of the gods. And to buy legitimacy.
Petrov almost lost all feeling, but he could see that Reema Devi was incapable of accepting this abdication of human dignity. And he saw her abhorrence burst out one day when they came on a group of press photographers busy at work.
She went at the photographers like a tigress, snatching the nearest camera and crashing it to the ground. “How dare you! Are they creatures in a zoo?” Petrov, struggling with the panting, resisting Reema Devi, waited for the photographers to strike back. But they were saying with awe, “Look! It’s Reema Devi. It’s Reema Devi herself!”
Ignoring their awe, filling her lungs to the full and throwing out her voice from its base, Reema Devi’s words attained a thrilling resonance. “Pustules! Arrant swine! Is this the time for photography? Tell me! Have you no shame?” One of the photographers rashly raised his camera and clicked and Reema Devi furiously snatched it from his hold. Petrov was only just able to save it and hand it over before further damage was done. She breathed fire in Petrov’s constricting grip and her voice rose to greater resonances, “Oh so now it’s me you want, is it? What a drama for you! What a scoop! Animals! Degraded, filthy animals!” Trying to break from Petrov’s hold, she kept crying, “Let go, Petro! Let me go!”
The causes of this drama lay prone, their shriveled, wrinkled skin shining on their skeletons, their eyes oozing that mysterious white jelly, creatures. But their continuous moaning had reached a crescendo and become a euphony from hell, “Ma, duto phan, duto phan dao.” “That’s all they want after all,” thought Petrov, still grappling with Reema Devi. “It’s so simple. Just a little gruel after all!” And that chorus throbbed inside Petrov, throbbed through the city and filled it with the heartthrob of despair. “Ma, duto phan, duto phan dao.” “Mother, give me gruel, just a little gruel . . . ” Reema Devi had stopped ranting but her harsh sobs added to this euphony, to the power of her scene, and the photographers looked on with awe. Petrov let go of her and they went through the motions like automatons, handing out gruel and packets of food, helped by the contrite photographers. When Reema Devi turned to leave, staggering with emotion and supported by Petrov, the photographers at last dared to lift up their endangered cameras, to click respectfully and guiltily when she was safely back in the car.
When Petrov picked up the next morning’s papers, he saw the expected picture of Reema Devi on the front page, looking like Goddess Durga, and he thought, “They, and I, understand completely why she behaved as she did. Each of us is as helpless as the best or the worst of us . . . ” He knew there was no real will, no means, to combat the immensity of the famine.
The last time Petrov drove out with his supplies, he experienced the culmination of that surreal calamity. Young dying men were setting fire to the bodies of their wives, mothers, children, beating away the dogs and vultures. Then, as the flames grew fierce and engulfed the grotesque heaps, billowing out black smoke, he saw those very men gathering up their last strength to hang themselves from the drooping trees. He did nothing to stop them, just sat shuddering in his car, shuddering as much from despair as from the pervasive stench, with his arms on the steering wheel and his head on his arms.
Petrov’s extreme slimness started from this time. Anorexia, an unrecognized condition for the age. He was able to eat only by acts of will power. Not eating was almost a compulsion which he had to fight with that will power. He watched in a state of detached depression as Reema Devi ate normally through her anguish, as if the availability of food to them had no connection to the famine. She, who was so passionately acting in plays about the famine and taking them on tours to other parts of the country. He didn’t blame her or any of the others or himself for being able to sustain themselves, even through a conscious application of the will, against the prickings of conscience, while the millions starved just outside their doorstep.
Petrov’s Diary: How do politicians and controllers allow a tragedy like famine? What about the silent majority who simply stand and watch, steeped in inertia? And the rest, are they active or passive? Do they change anything? Let us categorize.
Passive no-changers—Local inhabitants who either accept the disaster as the known pattern, the most common, or who are indifferent. Helpless, pained observers. A food minister who says there is no shortage of grain, a British governor who throws up his hands . . .
Active no-changers—Reporters, documentarians. Ineffective, disorganized conscience-salvers, handing out gruel from temporary kitchens. Organized humanitarians, desperately picking up, salvaging, saving.
Passive Changers—Analysts, Theorists.
Active Changers—Doers, who may succeed, only against some categories of disaster, but after a prolonged struggle, sometimes posthumously. Like those fighting apartheid in South Africa, or Freedom Fighters in India. But starvation does not allow for long term solutions; starvation strikes too swiftly.
Or take the apparently noble motive of “national interest.” In this case it was Britain’s national interest, a lack of interest or concern for the other country. There are different priorities. There is an excuse to avoid facing an avoidable situation, a Top Priority excuse after all, a top-drawer
War. There is no punishment for this negligence because the sufferers lack priority. The “contempt” of His Majesty’s Government is recorded by Viceroy Wavell and other observers of the time ... “I have found H.M.G.’s (His Majesty’s Government’s) attitude to India negligent, hostile and contemptuous to a degree. I had not anticipated it, or I think I might have done more.” Poor Wavell. He tried to get Churchill to divert food to India, evoking a tardy response . . . But Churchill’s contempt for India and Indians had to be breached first! A real no-changer for the Famine . . .
Inertia of some kind applies to most people. The rare exceptions are driven by ideals, and work, sometimes passionately, for a cause. But this almost invariably leads to violence (not obviously, but in spirit and content), such as with some activists. Others, like those who kill British officials, are more obviously violent than moderate activists, or Gandhi’s peace brigades.
In the great famine no one succeeded in averting or saving the situation. The failure was wholesale, massive, complete. All the great idealist fighters for freedom were mute and powerless in jail. It was violence of the highest, most inert, degree.
Man is really an extended animal. No better than other lower animals. He is never good, except self-consciously. Only an imbecile may, just may, be truly good. The rest act on instincts and patterns. Instincts and patterns which are overwhelming, as with the lower animals.
Those who inquire, like myself, Petrov. Are we any better?
But, at last, the ones who try over a long period may succeed. Reforms take place. If so then is there also an instinctual goodness? The antithesis to the instincts of the lower animals for self-preservation, self-propagation and self-gratification? If the goodness is in name alone, then why is everyone paying lip service to it? Why frame checking laws to support the good, when most are so cynically uninterested in that good? What causes this checking activity?
The group, government or society frames this checking activity. So, on the one hand, the group protects its members by creating checking activities for good. On the other hand it behaves in an evil (?) way, for the good of the group? Look closer: the checks are created for the good and then if the group’s self interest is threatened, the checks are subverted, never mind who or what is harmed or damaged, while the lip-service continues . . .
Seeing all this, can one continue blindly, comfortably, passively acting for one’s own interests? It seems, yes. Countries are always doing this. Such as “good” states like Britain today. The unit is embraced by the collective. So the state is more important than the individual. So the colonial power’s activities for its own gain are legitimate though colonial rule is obviously illegitimate.
An individual’s suffering, whether from hunger, starvation, injustice, deprivation or poverty is unimportant. There is so much individual suffering. A close friend, a spouse, a son, can miss it completely, or be indifferent to it. You, an individual, are suffering deeply, just like a vast number of individuals, from loss, frustration, jealousy, sickness, failure, pain, sorrow, disgrace, ridicule, ugliness, old age, disease . . . Or take the subject country rather than the ruling power. In the famine, individuals, a huge group of individuals, goes through a huge range of suffering. Hunger, deprivation, separation, helplessness, degradation, displacement, homelessness, shame . . . No means are left even to shed tears. And if tears are shed, a child might lick those tears to slake its thirst. As in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, where a woman suckles a strange man to save him from starvation!
Who is doing all this? Why is this being done? A tyrant, the colonial power, bad people? The Who (the perpetrator of suffering) may be easier to answer in part. Or take a metaphor for the partial Who, a common example as a metaphor. A lover giving pleasure yet inflicting torture. Whose presence is intense delight and whose absence intense pain. Can the “pain” be avoided?
The other part of the Who is unanswerable. For instance, who causes old age, senility? The Why too is unanswerable. It always was and always will be. It is without even a part of an answer. What if science can work out equations and formulas? The metaphysical why will always be without an answer. And all other human suffering? Nature? God? Or the Devil and God pulling from two ends in the danse macabre of vultures tearing at a carcass?
India in modern times has had a conscious many-faceted struggle for reform. The fronts are endless, and the country’s whole form is being chiseled, hacked, hammered, remolded, sandpapered, to get it into shape. Re-formed. Formed again. Pick up any important Indian biography—it will tell you of a struggle for change, reformers, fighters, Raja Ram Mohan Roys, Keshav Chandra Sens, Vidyasagars . . . and after Independence all the new reform laws, against dowry, against untouchability, etc., etc. thesis, metamorphosis, synthesis—a struggle which will never end till the country reaches the end of a trail. At least that trail which synthesizes human dignity . . . Surely! Europe, the West, has reached the end of that trail. Its people have dignity accessible to them and have mostly taken it. Yet, they keep striving for more! In the never-ending spiraling circle they want more food, more thin people, more work, more leisure, more power, less aggression, fewer aged and longer lives. Reform is never complete. I have seen drunks and old decrepit men and women in Europe, today, foraging in dustbins! What hope then does this poor country, this India, have?
Bengal in India has had a particularly intense struggle. Its three quite recent great miseries, misery of violence and partition, misery of refugees, misery of famine, creating each time, a degraded mixed new identity. One generation has seen this and ages and dies without finding a synthesis solution. Its dreams are gone, shattered!
A myriad of freedom-fighters died before their dream came true. India became independent, but it showed tremendous cracks. India was a place to leave, escape. The thought of staying on filled many with frustration. So many from this very building, my children Boris and Meera, and an ocean of others emigrating to Canada, Australia, Great Britain, the Gulf, Germany, joining their cousins in East Africa, Hong Kong , Singapore, as if they couldn’t bear the independence of their country, as if Valhalla was elsewhere after it had come to India.
The changes brought about by those three penultimate and ultimate colonial period cataclysms, the depletion and degradation, affected the countryside deeply, shattering generations of the future. Naturally they could envisage nothing but continued deprivation if they stayed back.
Yet, that day, the biggest headlines were of Independence, and what did Independence mean? How much did it change everyday lives? It had the emotional power to instantly put an end to the riots in Calcutta at least, the killing. Bas! To cause Hindus and Muslims to embrace in public. And for all to call “Jai Hind,” “Victory to India!” with one voice, forgetting earlier quibbles.
But it had also caused the killings, because hand in hand with it went the cracking of the subcontinent into three. The mighty booming bang of the hammer of partition had become a necessity in the balance of negotiation, and the head of the hammer that had dealt that mighty booming bang was Independence! The model map of India cracked into three, and through those cracks came pouring out the flood of refugees, carrying violence, death, disease, destitution, hunger, adding to the state’s deposit of misery. So, the headlines deserved their size. They contained all this and more. Following that violence and displacement. Justifying the replacement of subjection with Independence. Of course! And echoing in macrocosm the microcosm of millions of small, little battles, swirling like twisters across the surface of the land. Between ruler and ruled, between religions and castes and peoples, between illusion and reality. And forgetting all the way, the only end to it all, Old Age and Death.
Reema Devi was now both middle-aged and neurotic. The shoe-throwing incident at the English rendering of Neel Dorpon had upset her. Petrov was aware of this as they hurried out of the theater and headed for Proshanto Mojumdar’s insistent entertainment at the 300.
“Imagine Petro!” said Reema Devi. “Planter Rogue was concussed! C
oncussed!” Petrov watched Reema Devi, the marvel on the stage, trembling and upset after this violence to her fellow actor. In his anxiety he stepped in heavily. “Martin’s a mischievous one. And that little prissy miss, Gwendolyn . . . Maybe we should have seen some other play . . . ?”
“You expect the Stracheys to sit through a Bengali play?”
Petrov laughed, diverted. Inhabiting different strata of society, he thought, was richer than sticking coyly to one’s own. But was it truer? What did “truer” mean, after all, debated the chronic philosopher? Did it mean traditional groupings were sacred and the Other profane? Or did it mean that encouraging differentness was untrue because it disturbed the comfortable certainty of the known? Couldn’t it be truer that the conventional simply couldn’t face the wider world? Did it mean they didn’t want to discover the crackle of excitement in newness? Would he change his life so far? Reverse drive in time and space to Russia, get married to a penurious closet-aristocrat or a coarse borsch-slurper . . . Ah no! he thought, quickly re-reversing from the unbearable and unthinkable, life without Reema Devi and the Eros. Never! Petrov was a multidimensional participant, but he was an outsider and could, therefore, see from the outside. He could see his wife, the genius actress deeply rooted in her profession and culture, yet moving in other dimensions with pride and ease. He could see the Stracheys in their painful displacement yet peculiarly true to that displaced culture, more lost than the Anglo-Indians. Anglo-Indians like the Normans and Maudie Jessop, the Rajmahal’s inhabitants, who too stayed, not “behind,” but just stayed without knowing if they belonged, jumping on a bed of pins and pain, for no real fault of their own. He could see the Mojumdars bumbling along in their eclectic kindliness quite comfortable in the mixed arena of Calcutta yet displaced from the undiluted Bengal. The others. All located within the historicity of the Rajmahal. And could he, Petrov, who had fled from his homeland at a tender age, could he judge them?
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