A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

  I took these notes to my editor, who then asked me to catch the next train to Gorakhpur. The next day, I met Seema’s parents. The story I had been told by the girls was more or less correct. Seema’s brother and the legislator had been named together in several criminal cases; they had been partners and then there had been a falling-out. Do you have any idea why Seema would have taken her own life? The mother sat paralyzed and didn’t seem to have heard my unfair question. The father, in his dirty white vest and dhoti, met my gaze and then studied his feet. After he had shaken his head a few times, I thanked them for their time and left. My report made the front page, and in the days that followed both Sikdar and I, for good or for bad, I think mostly for bad, became the news instead of the dead girl and her rapist. We were both interviewed by half a dozen media outlets, and during one of these interviews I noticed that Sikdar had a beautiful woman with him. She introduced herself as Vaani and said very simply that she had liked my story.

  A pause.

  “You made us think about the girl, and the terrible situation she had been put in. Thank you.”

  “No, thank you. Thank you for reading it with an open heart.”

  When this exchange took place, I couldn’t see Sikdar because, although he was barely four feet away from me in the small greenroom, the makeup man was standing between us and busily applying powder on the fool’s face.

  Does Sikdar know that he is a fool?

  Allow me a brief digression.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE EARLY weeks of the Trump administration, I saw the following hashtag on Twitter: #DunningKruger. As in “One difference is when Obama was wrong he knew it. Trump never has, in his mind, been wrong. #DunningKruger”

  David Dunning, a psychology professor at Cornell, and Justin Kruger, his graduate student at that time, conducted a series of experiments and published a study in 1999 which concluded that those most lacking in knowledge and skills are least able to appreciate that lack. This observation would come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. To read the Dunning-Kruger 1999 study, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” is a therapeutic, nearly cathartic exercise today. This is perhaps because the Dunning-Kruger effect has become a meme. You and I read lines like the following and we have the satisfaction of understanding the limitations of Donald Trump’s mind: “People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.”

  The emergence of Donald Trump on the world stage has brought to light many psychological insights that we can use to explain the actions of fools worldwide.

  But Orwell is useful here too. Early in 1984, this is what we learn about doublethink: To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, “to repudiate morality while laying claim to it,” et cetera, et cetera (emphasis mine). Later in the novel, Orwell writes: “to tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink” (emphasis in original). Has Sikdar read 1984? I doubt it. If he were to read it he would find evidence there of his own behavior, but he would also tell himself that Orwell’s book is really only about Stalinism.

  End of digression.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN VAANI’S FATHER was in the air force, he went on bombing raids across the border. But Vaani’s father, instead of being a jerk about Pakistan, regarded that country as a competitor, as if they were playing cricket with guns. It was still a game with rules and a code of sportsmanship. This was one reason that the father hated his daughter’s first husband. Sikdar was never anything more than a spectator in this game of war and yet kept insisting from our television screens every night that we ought to destroy Pakistan. If you were not spewing hate, you were anti-Indian. What the squadron leader could never forgive was how Sikdar had used the bogeyman of Pakistan to create this idea of the enemy even within India. After Vaani and I came together and visited him, her father never spoke to me about Sikdar, but once, when we were drinking late into the night, he said cryptically, “When Vaani told me about you, I said to her that before she found out about your parents or even your friends, she should find out who you regarded as your enemies. No better introduction to a man.”

  Vaani’s father had moved from one base to another in different towns and cities in India. Having had friends from many parts of the country, kids of all faiths and classes attending the government schools she found herself in, Vaani had enjoyed a childhood that was in many ways open and liberal. That happiness lasted for several years before her mother’s illness blighted the family’s sense of time and the world. Vaani’s mother died of cancer when Vaani’s little sister, Shikha, was only five. But, even then, there had been the great consolation for Vaani of discovering that her surviving parent was equal to the task of providing love. He was a caregiver and a good cook, but he was also an adventurer and a bit of a daredevil. Vaani herself had more of the sobriety and seriousness of her mother; the father’s traits were inherited by Shikha, who grew into an athlete and was often caught in little dramas of rebellion against the authority of her teachers. One story I heard early about Shikha was of an incident during her last year of high school. Just outside the metal gates of the school, a young man a little older than she brought his motorcycle, its engine revving, up to a foot or two in front of her. She stopped, stepped aside, and, after looking him straight in the eye for a second, proceeded to the school gate. This happened a second time a day or two later, the young fellow (a good-looking guy, clean shaven, with a grin on his face that spoke of a cockiness born of privilege or power) pretended to topple onto her. This time too, wordlessly, Shikha moved away. But, when this happened again the following day, she pulled him down swiftly. As soon as he was down, a part of his leg still caught under his machine, she stomped several times on his hands, taking care not to spoil his carefully combed hair.

  At parties, like the ones at air bases, Shikha would take the microphone and sing with such abandon that people stopped what they were doing in order to watch her. At a Christmas party at the base—this was after Vaani and I had been married for a year or so and were visiting India during our winter break—I stepped close to Shikha to applaud her and she put her arm around me and planted the microphone close to my lips so that I had to join in, crooning. My courage rose after a couple of lines. I was also drunk. I sang with greater freedom, holding on to Shikha, my hip pressed against hers. Everyone was laughing and clapping, we had a lot of fun, but this didn’t please Vaani, who said at dinner the following night, “You should have married my sister instead.” For a moment I thought I should protest but I quickly apologized.

  I’m saying all this to explain my relationship with Vaani. Or what she could call our context. I liked spending time with her family. I was glad to have in Vaani’s father a person I could both admire and share some affection with.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN VAANI CAME to study at Johns Hopkins in September 2001, I was still working in Delhi, and, as far as I remember, I hadn’t seen her again in Delhi after our meeting in the TV studio. She claims she read my reports in
the paper. And that, when she had been in Baltimore only a few months, she read online my report about the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament. There was a strong possibility of war with Pakistan, and I even went to the border in a convoy of army trucks. Vaani read the stories I filed, prose untouched by jingoism and honest about the cost of war, and felt that mine was a voice she could trust. While reporting on the firing of the Bofors guns by the soldiers of the 8 Mountain Artillery Brigade, I had hardly imagined that one day in the future that smell of gunpowder would come back to me when I was walking with Vaani beside the Potomac River under branches laden with fragrant pink cherry blossoms.

  The attacks of September 11 had made the Americans alert to other places, other populations. In March the following year I got an email from the journalism department at Georgetown inviting an application for a fellowship given to journalists in troubled spots all over the world. I sent off a rushed proposal. And that is how it came to be that during the midst of pujo festivities organized by the Bengali Association of Maryland, I glanced up from my plate of milky sweets and saw Vaani looking at me. I didn’t remember her name, but of course I knew who she was.

  Such joy to see a face that was familiar to you from that previous life! I remembered that she was married, so I was guarded in expressing my happiness. She was so open and warm that I felt she was greeting me like an old friend. Her serious and beautiful face was lit up with joy. She was smiling, it seemed, because she had remembered a joke someone had told her about life. During that first meeting we only exchanged information about what each of us was doing in America—there was no rush to say anything more because it was clear that there would be time in this new future that had opened up.

  Before I left that party, I said, “I wasn’t sure I wanted to come here tonight. But such good luck—I met you!”

  Vaani kissed me on the cheek then, which surprised and thrilled me, and said with a smile, “I hope your luck holds and we see each other again soon.”

  How many chance encounters in the weeks that followed, how many planned meetings, first the lunches and then the home-cooked meals, how many days after my reading aloud to her, her face framed by the oval of light from her lamp, Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” how many trips to the Mondawmin Mall to buy necessary items for the new apartment when she moved again the following fall, how many conversations about her ongoing arguments with Sikdar over their divorce, how many tears (and then kisses) later, did we come to that evening at the Eisenhower Library where we watched, as a part of Vaani’s course work, a documentary called The Nature of Love? The film showed infant monkeys that were being studied in an experiment. The monkeys were bred in isolation and their only contact was with two mechanical mothers devised by the psychologist Harry Harlow. One mother was nothing but a stark figure made with wire, a plastic head with eyes, and a feeding bottle with milk in it. The other mother was nearly identical but the wire in this model was covered with a piece of cloth that provided a feeling of warmth and comfort. The purpose of the experiment was to test which mother would be the one chosen by the infant monkey, the mother that provided food or the one that provided security. In every instance, the baby monkey was moved by hunger to take nourishment from the wire mother but again, in every instance, it hurried back quickly to spend up to fifteen or even twenty-two hours each day clinging to the cloth mother. When the monkeys were frightened, they ran to the cloth mother. The wire surrogate excited no affection in the monkeys.

  I made a remark about love. Vaani was a private person but she put the documentary on pause and said about Sikdar, “You know, he never touched me except during sex.”

  I didn’t say anything. Did I instinctively take her hand in mine? I don’t remember. I loved touching Vaani; monkey-like, I enjoyed contact. We could be sitting in public having lunch but I would put one arm around her. Often, at the risk of making her feel uncomfortable, I kissed Vaani on the street. On that night in the library, I remember putting a question to her, a question that had come to me before too. “What did you like about him, what drew you to Sikdar?”

  “His ambition,” she said. “We were young. We were both from small towns. He knew what he wanted to do in life. I didn’t.”

  After a while, she added, “When I was in high school, I knew these two girls who were good runners and one of them was also excellent at long jump. This will sound ridiculous, but I used to wonder: Who had told them that they could run or jump? How did they know? No one had told me what I could do and I was lost. But here was Gautam, a young man from a background similar to mine, and he was serious and fully confident about his success. It fascinated me. Plus, he claimed to be in love with me. I liked that. He was possessive about me too. It didn’t disturb me at the time. It only made me believe in him more.”

  Monkeys, but also little children, deprived of loving touch showed abnormal behavior: they rocked their heads back and forth. They didn’t like contact when they grew up, they were hypersensitive to touch. The impairment of their brains shared properties shown by the brains of schizophrenics.

  The film we were watching about Harry Harlow’s research went on to talk about the psychologist’s own life. At the same time that he was teaching American mothers to love their babies, thereby resisting earlier theories that infants should be allowed to grow independently without too much fuss or fondling, Harlow’s own private life was falling apart. His first marriage had failed, and the second marriage wasn’t a great success either. Harlow was a distant father. He worked long hours and he was an alcoholic and a depressive. More disturbing, as his life took a downward turn, his research also became darker.

  One of the experiments Harlow designed was called “pit of despair.” He separated baby monkeys from their mothers at birth and bred them in isolation to see what would happen. This experiment didn’t just induce depression in the infant monkeys—after thirty days, the test drove the monkeys insane. They bit themselves and pulled out their hair. After a longer period of isolation, stretching to a year, they became incapable of any social interaction, unable to move or speak. In some cases, they starved themselves to death. Harlow also built something that he called, with customary bluntness, a “rape rack,” on which female monkeys were forced to mate against their will. Why did he do it? While pondering this, Vaani said something that made me think of the monkeys in a new way and gave me a sense of intimacy with them. She said that all these monkeys, the rhesus macaques, used in such experiments by Harlow and other researchers, had been imported from India. Even as early as the 1960s, more than a million. When I heard this, it is possible that I was falling prey to self-pity. I began to think of the monkeys as our fellow immigrants, imprisoned in a lab in a foreign land.

  Vaani was especially distressed by Harlow’s experiments with the infant monkeys, pointing out that the baby monkey’s brain is similar to the brain of a five-month-old human baby. Vaani was busy at that time with her dissertation. We weren’t thinking of having a child during those years. I never said this to her, but sometimes I feared that Vaani’s research was the cause of her depression. In my own work, I often reported about terrible things, and about injustice, but I always found a sense of release, even discovered camaraderie, through my writing. Vaani had no such outlet. But maybe that was just my ignorance. Because the truth was that Vaani was always asking questions. The cloth mother provided succor to the infant monkey but it didn’t teach the infant monkey social intelligence. Vaani contemplated the conditions that produced stability and safety in the animal community. Such questions in her course work or her research were all from a human perspective; she wanted to understand how we lived with others. In the same way that I had heard Vaani talk about the lab animals and their “induced helplessness,” I heard from her about the experiments that prompted “learned optimism.” Not the optimism induced through doses of serotonin (think of Prozac, Zoloft, or Paxil injected into the monkeys) but the desig
ning of experiments that promoted social learning; for example, groups of monkeys released into areas outside their cages for playdates. The infant monkeys with surrogate cloth moms, when brought out for regular playdates, grew up socially adept and outgoing. When I received such reports from Vaani, the thought crossed my mind that she and I were monkeys in isolation, removed from our families and from our natural habitat, but that we were creatures whose friendship, as demonstrated by science, would help overcome most of life’s deficits.

  * * *

  —

  A YEAR PASSED, then three. Then, more. We had been married for five years when the phone rang one night.

  It was late September 2010. The call came around 2:00 a.m., the landline in the dining-cum-kitchen area ringing in the silence of the night. I answered. It was Vaani’s sister, Shikha. She said my name and then nothing. I had a moment of lucidity and understood, of course, that something bad had happened.