As a writer I’ve always thought myself lucky that, because of the accidents of my family life, I’ve grown up knowing something of both India and Pakistan. I have frequently found myself explaining Pakistani attitudes to Indians and vice versa, arguing against the prejudices that have grown more deeply ingrained on both sides as Pakistan has drifted further and further away across the sea. I can’t say that my efforts have been blessed with much success, or indeed that I have been an entirely impartial arbiter. I hate the way in which we, Indians and Pakistanis, have become each other’s others, each seeing the other as it were through a glass, darkly, each ascribing to the other the worst motives and the sneakiest natures. I hate it, but in the last analysis I’m on the Indian side.
One of my aunts was living in Karachi, Pakistan, at the time of Partition. She was a close friend of the famous Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–1984). Faiz was the first great writer I ever met, and through his oeuvre and his conversation he provided me with a description of the writer’s job that I accepted fully. Faiz was an exceptional lyric poet, and his many ghazals, set to music, earned him literally millions of admirers, even though these were, often, strangely unromantic, disabused serenades:
Do not ask of me, my love,
that love I once had for you . . .
How lovely you are still, my love,
but I am helpless too;
for the world has other sorrows than love,
and other pleasures, too.
Do not ask of me, my love,
that love I once had for you.
He loved his country, too, but one of his best poems about it took, with lyrical disenchantment, the point of view of the alienated exile. This poem, translated by Agha Shahid Ali, was put up on posters in the New York subway a couple of years ago, to the delight of all those who love Urdu poetry:
You ask me about that country whose details now escape me,
I don’t remember its geography, nothing of its history.
And should I visit it in memory,
It would be as I would a past lover,
After years, for a night, no longer restless with passion,
with no fear of regret.
I have reached that age when one visits the heart merely
as a courtesy.
An uncompromising poet of both romantic and patriotic love, Faiz was also a political figure and a very public writer, taking on the central issues of his time both inside and outside his poetry. This double-sided conception of the writer’s role, part-private and part-public, part-oblique and part-direct, would, thanks in large part to the influence of Faiz’s example, become mine as well. I did not share his political convictions, in particular his fondness for the Soviet Union, which gave him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1963, but I did quite naturally share his vision of what the writer’s job is, or should be.
But all this was many years later. Back in 1947, Faiz might not have survived the riots that followed Partition had it not been for my aunt.
Faiz was not only a Communist but an outspoken unbeliever as well. In the days following the birth of a Muslim state, these were dangerous things to be, even for a much-loved poet. Faiz came to my aunt’s house knowing that an angry mob was looking for him and that if they should find him, things would not go well. Under the rug in the sitting room there was a trapdoor leading down into a cellar. My aunt had the rug rolled back, Faiz descended into the cellar, the trapdoor closed, the rug rolled back. And when the mob came for the poet, they did not find him. Faiz was safe, although he went on provoking the authorities and the faithful with his ideas and his poems—draw a line in the sand and Faiz would feel intellectually obliged to step across it—and, as a result, in the early 1950s he was obliged to spend four years in Pakistani jails, which are not the most comfortable prisons in the world. Many years later I used the memory of the incident at my aunt’s house as the inspiration for a chapter in Midnight’s Children, but it’s the real-life story of the real-life poet, or at any rate the story in the form it reached me by the not entirely reliable route of family legend, that has left the deeper impression on me.
As a young boy, too young to know or love Faiz’s work, I loved the man instead: the warmth of his personality, the grave seriousness with which he paid attention to children, the twisted smile on his kindly Grandpa Munster face. It seemed to me back then, and it seems to me still, that whatever endangered him, I would emphatically oppose. If the Partition that created Pakistan had sent that mob to get him, then I was against it. Later, when I was old enough to approach the poems, I found confirmation there. In his poem “The Morning of Freedom,” written in those numinous midnight hours of mid-August 1947, Faiz began:
This stained light, this night-bitten dawn
This is not the dawn we yearned for.
The same poem ends with a warning and an exhortation:
The time for the liberation of heart and mind
Has not come as yet.
Continue your arduous journey.
Press on, the destination is still far away.
The last time I saw Faiz was at my sister’s wedding, and my final, gleeful memory of him is of the moment when, to the gasping horror of the more orthodox—and therefore puritanically teetotal—believers in the room, he proposed a toast to the newlyweds while raising high a cheery glass brimming with twelve-year-old Scotch whiskey on the rocks. When I think about Faiz and remember that good-natured, but quite deliberately transgressive incident, he looks to my mind’s eye like a bridge between the literal and metaphorical worlds, or like a Virgil, showing us poor Dantes the way through Hell. It’s as important, he seems to be saying as he knocks back his blasphemous whiskey, to cross metaphorical lines as it is to cross actual ones: not to be contained or defined by anybody else’s idea of where a line should be drawn.
The crossing of borders, of language, geography, and culture; the examination of the permeable frontier between the universe of things and deeds and the universe of the imagination; the lowering of the intolerable frontiers created by the world’s many different kinds of Thought Policemen: these matters have been at the heart of the literary project that was given to me by the circumstances of my life, rather than chosen by me for intellectual or “artistic” reasons. Born into one language, Urdu, I’ve made my life and work in another. Anyone who has crossed a language frontier will readily understand that such a journey involves a form of shape-shifting or self-translation. The change of language changes us. All languages permit slightly varying forms of thought, imagination, and play. I find my tongue doing slightly different things with Urdu than I do “with,” to borrow the title of a story by Hanif Kureishi, “your tongue down my throat.”
The greatest writer ever to make a successful journey across the language frontier, Vladimir Nabokov, enumerated, in his “Note on Translation,” the “three grades of evil [that] can be discerned in the strange world of verbal transmigration.” *37 He was talking about the translation of books and poems, but when as a young writer I was thinking about how to “translate” the great subject of India into English, how to allow India itself to perform the act of “verbal transmigration,” the Nabokovian “grades of evil” seemed to apply.
“The first, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge,” Nabokov wrote. “This is mere human frailty and thus excusable.” Western works of art that dealt with India were riddled with such mistakes. To name just two: the scene in David Lean’s film of A Passage to India in which he makes Dr. Aziz leap onto Fielding’s bed and cross his legs while keeping his shoes on, a solecism that would make any Indian wince; and the even more unintentionally hilarious scene in which Alec Guinness, as Godbole, sits by the edge of the sacred tank in a Hindu temple and dangles his feet in the water.
“The next step to Hell,” Nabokov says, “is taken by the translator who skips words or passages that he does not bother to understand or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers.” For a long time, o
r so I felt, almost the whole of the multifarious Indian reality was “skipped” in this way by writers who were uninterested in anything except Western experiences of India—English girls falling for maharajas, or being assaulted, or not being assaulted, by non-maharajas, in nocturnal gardens, or mysteriously echoing caves—written up in a coolly classical Western manner. But of course most experiences of India are Indian experiences of it, and if there is one thing India is not, it is cool and classical. India is hot and vulgar, I thought, and it needed a literary “translation” in keeping with its true nature.
The third and worst crime of translation, in Nabokov’s opinion, was that of the translator who sought to improve on the original, “vilely beautifying” it “in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public.” The exoticization of India, its “vile beautification,” is what Indians have disliked most. Now, at last, this kind of fake glamorizing is coming to an end, and the India of elephants, tigers, peacocks, emeralds, and dancing girls is being laid to rest. A generation of gifted Indian writers in English is bringing into English their many different versions of the Indian reality, and these many versions, taken together, are beginning to add up to something that one might call the truth.
In dreams begin responsibilities. The way we see the world affects the world we see. As our ideas of female beauty change, so we see different sorts of women as beautiful. As our ideas of healthy living change, so we begin to look at the things we eat differently. Our dreams of our own and our children’s future shape the everyday judgments we make, about work, about people, about the world that either enables or obstructs those dreams. Daily life in the real world is also an imagined life. The creatures of our imagination crawl out from our heads, cross the frontier between dream and reality, between shadow and act, and become actual.
Imagination’s monsters do the same thing. The attack on the World Trade Center was essentially a monstrous act of the imagination, intended to act upon all our imaginations, to shape our own imaginings of the future. It was an iconoclastic act, in which the defining icons of the modern, the world-shrinking airplanes and those soaring secular cathedrals, the tall buildings, were rammed into each other in order to send a message: that the modern world itself was the enemy, and would be destroyed. It may seem unimaginable to us, but to those who perpetrated this crime, the deaths of many thousands of innocent people were a side issue. Murder was not the point. The creation of a meaning was the point. The terrorists of September 11, and the planners of that day’s events, behaved like perverted, but in another way brilliantly transgressive, performance artists: hideously innovative, shockingly successful, using a low-tech attack to strike at the very heart of our high-tech world. In dreams begin irresponsibilities, too.
I am trying to talk about literature and ideas, but you see that I keep being dragged back to catastrophe. Like every writer in the world, I am trying to find a way of writing after September 11, 2001, a day that has become something like a borderline. Not only because the attacks were a kind of invasion but because we all crossed a frontier that day, an invisible boundary between the imaginable and the unimaginable, and it turned out to be the unimaginable that was real. On the other side of that frontier, we find ourselves facing a moral problem: how should a civilized society—in which, as in all civilizations, there are limits, things we will not do, or allow to be done in our name, because we consider them beyond the pale, unacceptable—respond to an attack by people for whom there are no limits at all, people who will, quite literally, do anything—blow off their own feet, or tilt the wings of an airplane just before it hits a tower, so that it takes out the maximum number of floors?
The evil that men do lives after them,
the good is oft interrèd with their bones.
It is not surprising that the word “evil” has been used a great deal these past months; perhaps too often. The terrorists became “the evildoers,” their leader became “the evil one,” and now comes the discovery of that unusual phenomenon, an “axis of evil,” on which the president of the United States is threatening to make war. It’s an oddly contradictory word, “evil,” too freighted with absolute meaning to be an appropriate description of the messy relativity of actuality, too debased by over-use to mean as much as it should. Thus the comedy website SatireWire.com reveals that
bitter after being snubbed for membership in the Axis of Evil, Libya, China, and Syria today announced that they had formed the Axis of Just as Evil, which they said would be way eviler than that stupid Iran–Iraq–North Korea axis. Cuba, Sudan, and Serbia said they had formed the Axis of Somewhat Evil, forcing Somalia to join with Uganda and Myanmar in the Axis of Occasionally Evil, while Bulgaria, Indonesia, and Russia established the Axis of Not So Much Evil Really as Just Generally Disagreeable. Sierra Leone, El Salvador, and Rwanda applied to be called the Axis of Countries That Aren’t the Worst but Certainly Won’t Be Asked to Host the Olympics; Canada, Mexico, and Australia formed the Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice but Secretly Have Nasty Thoughts About America, while Spain, Scotland, and New Zealand established the Axis of Countries That Sometimes Ask Sheep to Wear Lipstick.
“That’s not a threat, really, just something we like to do,” said Scottish Executive First Minister Jack McConnell.
I wish, myself, that the president had not promised to “rid the world of evil”—that’s a big project, a war he probably can’t win. “Evil” is a term that can obscure as well as clarify. For me, the greatest difficulty with it is that it dehistoricizes these events, depoliticizes, and even depersonalizes them. If evil is the devil’s work, and in this deeply religious administration one must assume that many people in high places think it is, then that, to my unbeliever’s way of thinking, actually lets the terrorists off the hook. If evil is external to us, a force working upon us from outside ourselves, then our moral responsibility for its effects is diminished.
The most attractive thing about the Shakespearean attitude to evil is its emphasis on human, not divine, responsibility for it. “The evil that men do,” Mark Antony says, and that’s the only kind that interests Shakespeare. The conspirators in Julius Caesar are obsessed with omens and auguries. “Never till now,” says Casca,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.
And that’s not all.
Men all in fire walk up and down the streets.
And yesterday the bird of night did sit,
Even at noon-day, upon the market-place,
Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say
“These are their reasons, they are natural”;
For, I believe, they are portentous things
Unto the climate that they point upon.
The conspirators talk themselves into believing that the omens and portents, the signs from the gods, justify, even necessitate, their crime. To read the transcript of the so-called smoking-gun bin Laden videotape, the notorious “giggling” video in which he laughs about his crimes and the deaths of his own men, is to be struck by the similarities between the mind-set of Al-Qaida and that of Caesar’s murderers. The tape is full of talk about prophetic dreams and visions. Bin Laden himself says: “Abu al-Hasan al-Masri told me a year ago: ‘I saw in a dream, we were playing a soccer game against the Americans. When our team showed up in the field, they were all pilots!’ He said the game went on and we defeated them. So that was a good omen for us.” Or, again: “This brother came close and told me that he saw, in a dream, a tall building in America. . . . I was worried that maybe the secret would be revealed if everyone starts seeing it in their dream.” At this point, on the tape, another person’s voice is heard recounting yet another dream about two planes hitting a big building.
Dreams and omens are murderers’ exculpations. Shakespeare kne
w better. It is again Casca, portent-ridden Casca, who speaks: “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, / but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” He’s talking about the need for a coup. But after the assassination, we forget the final clause; it is the first part of the couplet, the part about responsibility for one’s own actions, whose truth we are made to feel. “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, / but in ourselves.” It is Shakespeare’s genius to put in the mouth of an assassin the very thought that will damn him afterward. Shakespeare doesn’t believe in the devil’s work. In the last scene of Othello, when the Moor finally learns how he has been duped by Iago, he says, “I look down towards his feet; but that’s a fable.” No cloven hoofs protrude from the villain’s hose. “If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee.” The world is real. There are no demons. Men are demonic enough.
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