A Time Outside This Time
Page 12
THE NATURE OF LOVE
Love is a girl with dark hair.
I am about a hundred pages into 1984. Winston Smith has been catching sight of the girl with dark hair and has suspicions that she is a spy. He feels guilty because, among other things, he is keeping a diary. Once he found the girl with dark hair looking at him intently and wondered if she worked for the Thought Police. His guilt is mixed with desire. One night, when he was dreaming in his sleep, he saw her coming toward him across a field. “With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside.” Orwell, for reasons that puzzle me, is at pains to give Smith traits that are misogynistic, but Smith also wants love. The reader has suspected that these tense passing encounters with the girl with dark hair will lead to something meaningful. And, on p. 108, it happened. The girl, still nameless, surreptitiously passed a note into Smith’s hand. “I love you.” When I came to that line, I was filled with excitement. Love calling out to love.
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VAANI LEFT DELHI for her graduate studies at Johns Hopkins a week before the attacks of September 11. She was trying to get away from a bad marriage. Her husband was a rising star in television and, so many years later, is now one of India’s most famous news anchors. Vaani jokes that the reason I have been writing about fake news is that I want to take revenge on the man who tormented her. I’m sure there is some truth in that, but I also believe that her ex, Gautam Sikdar, is a vomitous colostomy bag bursting with the fecal fluid of bad faith. If I had the expertise, I would make him the subject of a psychological case study. What I’ve never said to Vaani is that, of course, her own work is also an assault on what her despicable ex represents.
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A WRITER-FRIEND OF mine once described Gautam Sikdar’s channel as “TV with rabies.” Sikdar is familiar to people all over India as the news anchor who harangues his guests on TV. Every evening at nine, for years now, he has been following an identical routine: he shouts at the panel of guests on his show, throwing at them accusations of deficient nationalism and other sins that might be broad and varied in nature but always returning to the fatal flaw, which in Sikdar’s mind is the absence of an adequate patriotic zeal. (Shrill electronic music and short blasts of trumpets amid the wheezings of an accordion make way for the anchor’s name on the screen before being replaced by the flashing words master debater. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t pronounced those words in a way that makes you think of Sikdar as TV’s Masturbator.) If you haven’t watched him on your screen till now, then don’t—spare yourself the spectacle. I say this because rational, well-balanced adults have confessed to being reduced to the figure in Edvard Munch’s The Scream after only ten minutes of Sikdar. He is a schoolyard bully with a microphone turned up high, dressed in a cheap suit, eyes full of reproach under black-framed glasses, black hair swept back, nostrils distended, curled lips hurling abuse. Did the god of television, before letting out his last breath and dying in front of the cameras, whisper in this man’s ear that anger, dispute, the stoking of sectarian fires in homes each night, is the only way to keep the medium alive? In living rooms across the nation, his rabid rhetoric threatens to crack the walls and wreck the furniture. Each unhinged tirade of this grotesque monster-child is punctuated by, and always concludes with, a threat repeated in a loud, theatrical baritone: “You can run but you cannot hide! You can run but you cannot hide!”
When Vaani first met him in Delhi, Sikdar, still an undergraduate like her at Hindu College, attracted her because he was also from Jharkhand. He had grown up in Dhanbad, close to her own hometown. Dhanbad was where Vaani’s uncles worked in the transport business and she had gone there during the holidays. Sikdar was from a Bengali family and he tried to impress Vaani by saying that his ancestor was the first man to measure the height of Mt. Everest.
Vaani said, “Oh, he was a mountaineer.”
“No, a mathematician.”
Vaani looked at the skinny man with shiny black hair and oversize glasses and it made sense: he himself looked more like a mathematician than like a mountaineer.
Sikdar explained that his ancestor worked for the Great Trignometrical Survey; his official title was that of Computer. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the British still ruled India, Radhanath Sikdar had used his mathematical skills to compute the height of the world’s tallest peak, which he named after his first boss, the surveyor general of India, George Everest. When Gautam Sikdar told this story, shrugging modestly to admit that he himself wasn’t much of either a mathematician or a mountaineer, one of his friends said unkindly, “No, but you are calculating.”
Ever since then, the name for the computer’s descendant (unverified: not fact-checked) in his circle of friends became the Calculator.
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VAANI WAS BORN in Ranchi, her father a pilot in the air force and her mother an amateur musician fond of playing the sitar at cultural festivals. All through her childhood, she attended government schools in different parts of India. Then Vaani came to Delhi for her undergraduate studies. Her first teacher was a young PhD named Supriya Nair, a student of E. O. Wilson’s at Harvard and interested in “biopoetics.” Nair was running psychological studies on children at an orphanage in Kalkaji. Her specific interest was in understanding the ways in which classical Indian music affected the brains of children. The head of that department was a different kind of psychologist. He had studied two decades earlier in Chicago, conducting experiments about stressors and dietary changes among rhesus monkeys that happened to be imported from India. The head’s name was Rajinder Bhatia. In Professor Bhatia’s lab in Delhi, Vaani first learned to kill rats. Bhatia’s psychological experiment involved studying aspects of fasting and feeding: he wanted a scientific explanation for overeating and its relation to the availability of food. Did a rat that had not eaten any food for a day eat more and for longer than a rat that had been fed only six hours ago? Did a rat that was given food irregularly develop a desire to store food in its body? Did that rat in any other way demonstrate a new anxiety about food if subjected to such a regimen? What happened if a rat was turned into a diabetic? Bhatia was working on a theory about the poor in India and their eating habits. (He was dead five years later, from a heart attack, while he was walking with his wife from a restaurant. This was a sad event—he was only forty-three years old—but it didn’t stop some students from cruelly remarking that Bhatia should have been studying his own habits of feasting on butter chicken and beer.)
Vaani was on a roster of students who learned to observe and take notes for Bhatia. They monitored the rodents and cleaned their cages. After a group of rats had been used in one set of experiments, Bhatia insisted on using a new group of rats because one of his biggest fears was contamination of data. He didn’t want rats learning from any experience in the lab and acting differently. This meant that Vaani and another student, named Bhushan, were tasked with killing the rats during that whole year. Wearing oversize goggles and masks, the students sedated the animals with a dab of chloroform and then snipped the heads with medical scissors. It was horrible, this exercise, in particular because when the drugged rats felt the scissors closing over their necks, they opened their eyes and turned their bodies rigid. More than once, the poor rat’s blood would spurt onto Vaani’s plastic goggles.
When Vaani shared her woes with Professor Nair, tears falling precariously close to the cup of chai in her hand, her teacher told her to conduct research instead on the kids at the orphanage where she had herself been working. The academic year was coming to an end. The May heat in Delhi was unbearable. Vaani wanted release from the heat, she wanted the rains to come. The monsoons were still weeks away, but she now had an escape route from Bhatia’s lab. Professor Nair’s research was on music; Vaani settled on literature and learned to devise tests involving psychological responses to fictional stories.
These tests laid the groundwork for the research that Vaani conducted over the next year, demonstrating in her master’s thesis that imaginative literature, as opposed to dry journalistic accounts or detached summaries, promoted engagement among readers. Her further claim was that the complex exploration of emotional conflict ought to be an essential part of any child’s education. But the real result of this research, in my humble opinion, was that it allowed the principal researcher, Vaani, to develop an empathy for a stranger she had just met; namely, me. She had till then been married to Sikdar for three years, and I came into her life when I reported a story about her husband.
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GAUTAM SIKDAR WAS only a TV reporter at that time. He hadn’t become the loudmouthed, bullying anchor or the human megaphone that he is now. But you could see the signs. Vajpayee was the prime minister. If the recent history of India is a downward plunge into violent, mad, essentially diabolical right-wing delusion, then let’s just say the descent had begun. We were picking up speed at that time. I’m talking now of the year 1999. Sikdar was on the margins—the cheering spectator on the road—heckling anyone he saw as a critic of the government. He was the kind of presence in the crowd that knew the camera was looking for him, and he did everything to draw its attention.
A girl named Seema had killed herself in a women’s college on Delhi’s August Kranti Marg. She was found hanging from the ceiling fan in her room in the hostel. Seema had been alone because her roommate had gone to Ludhiana to celebrate a birth in the family. The dead girl left no note. And the answer to the question that everyone asks, was she pregnant, also came back negative. Then a small news item appeared in Dainik Bhaskar saying that two other students in the hostel had said that Seema had been having an affair with a legislator from Uttar Pradesh. For the past several months, whenever this man visited Delhi from Gorakhpur, a car would come for Seema. The journalist, who remained anonymous, had done his job with care. He pointed out that these were only allegations. That the girls had mentioned the name of the man but it would not be right to make it public. He had added that he stood behind his story because both girls had independently offered details about the three or four visits this politician from the ruling party had made to the college campus recently, and he, the journalist, had fact-checked some of these details and found them to be true.
The police did not take note of the story—or, if they did, this fact wasn’t made public—but a Hindi TV news channel featured the report on air. A small, curly-haired commentator named Ashish Ahuja—his serious face and glasses conveying the air of a man who was part professor, part poet—asked the viewers to consider a simple question: Were there any learned sociologists or anthropologists among his audience who would know why politicians preyed on young women across this country’s campuses? And why, among all the different occupations that men took up to earn their living, why was it that politicians developed a taste for vulnerable female flesh? Was it written somewhere in the Constitution of India, the document by which any politician swore when assuming office, that you must turn girls’ hostels and even orphanages into brothels?
This brief piece of commentary ignited a storm, first in Hindi newspapers and then, reaching the offices and the living rooms of the elite, it became a subject of conversation in the English press. Enter Gautam Sikdar from stage right. The commentator Ashish Ahuja had not named the politician, but he had mentioned his ruling party affiliation. This was enough for Sikdar, who acted like a rabid dog whose tail has been set on fire.
He appeared on TV, microphone in hand, standing in front of the offices of his own channel. Looking directly at the camera, he said that if you were watching him you were doing so only as a bystander. He said that he was directly addressing only one person, a man whom he had never met and who worked as a journalist and commentator on a different TV channel. This report, he declaimed, was a personal testimony on the profession of journalism. Sikdar said that journalists can be sleeping at their job, they can be asleep and dreaming, and when they are woken up, because there is a deadline or they are about to be fired, they blithely and irresponsibly usher us into their nightmares. He briefly recited the facts of the case: A young woman had been found dead. No note; no incriminating evidence unearthed during a postmortem. Without checking with the police, a journalist had decided, Sikdar said, on the basis of information that had not been verified by others, that a politician from the ruling party was involved in the woman’s death. Were there any learned sociologists or anthropologists among his audience who would know why politicians from the ruling party were the chosen targets of lazy journalists? If journalism was the profession committed to bringing truth to the public, why had it fallen prey to propaganda? And why were innocent and perhaps troubled young women, their lives but also their lamentable deaths, made victims once again by so-called journalists who were perhaps getting money from rival politicians?
Within an hour of the live broadcast of Sikdar’s rant, a mob made up of supporters of the ruling party had gathered outside the New Delhi office in Greater Kailash of the rival TV channel. They were waving flags and shouting slogans. Following a time-honored tradition, a fat bundle of straw with an old shirt around it, and with Ashish Ahuja’s name written in large letters on a piece of cardboard, was produced from somewhere and with a fair amount of further shouting this effigy was burnt at the gate of the building. No stone throwing was allowed, but the temptation posed by the fire was too much for a couple of excitable youth. To protest the fact that their sensibilities had been so grievously hurt, they burnt one of the vehicles belonging to the TV station. The police arrived and dispersed the mob with what would be described in the next day’s papers as a mild lathi charge. That wasn’t the end of the story.
The same mob, or a different group of young men who had experienced the same sense of hurt and had then been similarly roused by Sikdar’s eloquent defense of a more ethical journalism, then descended outside Ahuja’s home in Siddharth Nagar. At first they only chanted slogans about the man’s mother being a whore. But then the discovery of one truth led to another. The new slogans pointed out that Ahuja was a pimp. He was paid by the politicians in the opposition. Unfortunately, Ahuja himself wasn’t home. His wife was inside the apartment, however, and she telephoned the police when her windows were broken. None of t
he neighbors stepped out to defend corrupt journalism, and that was understandable, but what this also meant was that, when the hoodlums broke down the front door, Ahuja’s wife was all alone. The police hadn’t bothered to show up yet. Ahuja’s wife begged for mercy and the boys were indeed merciful with the middle-aged woman and didn’t rape her. One snatched away the gold chain at her neck, and another devoted his careful, oddly lethargic, attention to her breasts. A third, with paan in his mouth, slapped her a few times and then they were called away by a man in a white kurta who had stopped outside in a small red car.
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I HAD BEEN working at my paper for only three months when this happened, but I was sent out to cover it. At Ahuja’s home, I saw the smashed door and the broken windows but there wasn’t anyone I could talk to. By now a policeman was seated outside on a stool and he said that no one was allowed inside. I was afraid the editor would be angry if I returned without a story. So I got back on my motorcycle and went to the college where the suicide had taken place. I was young then, and, to be honest, I liked talking to girls. I easily found both those girls who had spoken about Seema to the journalist: they were eating momos in the canteen when I was led to them. At first, they were hesitant. They were afraid and, like many others in their position, they were sitting on information they hadn’t shared before. One of them was from Uttar Pradesh, just like the suicide, and the other was from Kerala. Both girls knew Seema and often shared notes from their lectures with her. In half an hour I had learned that the legislator who would show up at the hostel was owed money by Seema’s father. There had been trouble in the dead girl’s family. Her elder brother had sunk the family fortune, and Seema’s father then sought help from the legislator, who was from the same caste. Later, through a further series of misfortunes, the elder brother had been put in jail. This brother had probably also misbehaved with the legislator’s wife—or at least said something about her in public that was offensive. The legislator felt it was his right to tell Seema that her father had put her in a very difficult position. He took Seema to the government guesthouse where he frequently stayed during his Delhi visits. Lately, these visits had increased. Seema would be taken to the guesthouse for dinner and was brought back to the college in the morning. She had called her parents when this happened the first time, and told them that the legislator had called her on her phone and asked her to meet with him. What did he want? she had asked. Her father had said only a few words. “I don’t know, my child. Go and see what he wants. I am helpless. May God save us.”