A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

  Did a Chinese Intelligence Officer Reveal the “Truth About the Coronavirus Outbreak”? [False]

  Did Health Experts “Predict” New Coronavirus Could Kill 65 Million People? [False]

  Did Italy Confirm Almost 200 Deaths in 24 Hours? [True]

  Did Chinese Doctors Confirm African People Are Genetically Resistant to Coronavirus? [False]

  Was COVID-19 Found in Packages of Toilet Paper? [False]

  Please read the next chapter for more.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE VELOCITY OF LIES

  Literature is news that stays news. This Ezra Pound quote is routinely invoked at literary festivals—if only by those who denounce novels dealing with the news. For such critics, the real news, the human heart in conflict with itself et cetera, is eternal. But these people are missing the point. I have news for Pound. The frame has shifted. We are surrounded by fake news. Or, to put it more formally, we are living in a world of accelerated and often false media. Literature, in its battle to find out what is real, has to lock horns with how news educates and misleads. Literature can become news by making news. This is because truth doesn’t just exist by itself. It takes effort; it is produced. It is an effect of practice.

  The villa suddenly feels empty and our lives hollow. Even the lake looks barren. I’m not writing fiction about the past anymore. I feel this urgency about the present, and what to do with the news. Am I right in thinking that by bringing news into literature we make sure that daily news doesn’t die a daily death? During these days, it doesn’t seem hyperbolic in the least to say that by keeping the news alive, or the truth alive, we also keep ourselves alive. Pound doesn’t matter. We are closer here to what William Carlos Williams wrote about poetry and death. Please Google “It is difficult to get the news from poems…”

  Here are collected fragments on the construction of facts—and fiction. They are excerpted from the journal entries in my notebooks. Those readers more interested in the story than in news should skip this chapter and go directly to the next one.

  1.

  Simon, my English friend at the villa, said that what was really frightening about the new disease was the amount of misinformation coming to us.

  I thought it was all as expected. For some time now, Walmart has been selling a party game called Fake News. Twenty-four bucks.

  I was able to tell Simon this because I been looking at my journals the previous night. I had noted the preceding fact in my journal on October 22, 2019. On the same day, I had also recorded the following entry: In response to Trump’s tweet that the impeachment inquiry against him was a “lynching,” Merriam-Webster posted the following tweet: “ ‘Lynch’ is our top search today. Even in a metaphorical context, it still evokes a long and painful history of racist violence.”

  Also re: lynching.

  I had cut out this section from The New York Times in late July 2019. The report was about villagers in India killing a tiger with sticks. A detail made me pause. What made the story unusual, and even extraordinary, was that the reporter had made a connection between the animal’s killing and what was being done to human beings on India’s streets.

  2.

  Mahatma Gandhi spent more than two decades in South Africa before returning to India to lead the fight against the British empire. While in South Africa, developing his early ideas about satyagraha and nonviolent resistance, Gandhi invested his finances and his energy in a printing press. At that time, publishing was a young business and very much an expression of rapid industrialization. The emphasis was on speed. Gandhi was interested in slow news.

  Slow news, said Sue Wallace, a fellow here at the residency. She teaches history at the university in Amherst, Massachusetts, and is writing a book on the politics of print culture. Sue offered that phrase after I told her about this novel. She suggested I read about Gandhi’s printing press. At the breakfast table, everyone’s ears had pricked up. One could tell without being told that everyone was dealing with the same problem.

  In his first ashram, in Phoenix, fourteen miles north of Durban, Gandhi and his satyagrahis (and four Zulu women, whose labor goes somewhat unremarked in the great man’s papers) used a hand-operated iron press. The work was demanding and painful. Gandhi: “There came a time when we deliberately gave up the use of the engine and worked with hand-power only. Those were, to my mind, the days of highest moral uplift.” This sense of engaged labor extended to the reader too. Gandhi didn’t want reading to become an indiscriminate, incoherent, or addictive act. He advocated patience. The form of the periodicals and pamphlets printed at the ashram was essentially discontinuous, pages made up of news clippings and short ethical extracts or condensed summaries of writers like Thoreau, Ruskin, and Tolstoy. The readership that the press catered to was diasporic and spread across the empire: here again, the emphasis wasn’t on telegraph-driven or dateline-dominated reporting but, instead, on an undated, more leisurely tempo of reading. News became more like a stream of opinion, idea, and belief, rather than a report on a flow of events. In fact, it was clear that even the idea of an event had come under revision, dissolving into a kaleidoscope of cuttings. Gandhi didn’t put faith in copyright. Several of his pamphlets, and his translations into Gujarati of other writers like Tolstoy, he published with the accompanying legend: “No Rights Reserved.”

  A text made up of clippings could possibly also advance a hasty reading practice instead of a strategy where the reader was forced to connect and make the pieces cohere. In order to make the reader pause and become more self-aware, the periodicals carried didactic quotes like this one from Thoreau: “Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.” Gandhi’s advice to readers who were bored by his columns was that they try to read the articles again. This advice is appreciated, I suspect, by writers everywhere who are mindful, as I am, of boring their readers because they have failed to provide a feverish plot, a tale full of twists and amazing coincidences, or even something more basic like a tight, continuous structure. Do your duty, Gandhi said. Which reminds me, he wanted readers to be “Thoreaus in miniature,” and I haven’t, despite our shared love for walking, read a word that Thoreau wrote.

  I guess the real question is: How to slow-jam the news?

  3.

  The following afternoon, I wandered into the dining room with one of my journals. I was looking for fruit. Just the previous day, I had eaten my first quince. The world can be falling apart, people dying in large numbers, and monsters in office only staging photo-ops, you could be getting choked from clichés filling the passageways in your lungs, but you can still taste the sweetness of a fruit for the first time.

  Outside the window, seated under a tree, I could see the enormous profile of Jimi Adeola, the doctor from Nigeria. A large quiet man, immensely courteous and thoughtful. Knowledgeable too. I picked up a pear and went out to join Jimi.

  “Sah, what is the news?”

  “Sah,” Jimi said, “in your country, they are ready to call it a pandemic. But not yet.”

  I thought he meant India, but no, he meant the United States. The CDC had just declared that COVID-19, which is what the disease caused by the new virus was being called, was headed toward becoming a full-on pandemic. The disease needed to meet three conditions. It had already met two: illness resulting in death and sustained person-to-person spread. The third condition was worldwide spread. Jimi said, “That is the report from yesterday, February twenty-fifth. All three criteria will be met by next week. Or the week thereafter.”

  And then, out of his profound courtesy, he asked for my news.

  I said, “Have you seen Sue?”

  He hadn’t.

  I was seeking Sue because I wanted to show her a page from my journal. The previous summer, I had made a small painting from a photograph that had appeared in an Indian newspaper. The photograph showed a man kneeling in the dirt, begging for his lif
e. Half of his white vest—and his face—is soaked in blood. He is surrounded by onlookers—we see their legs, not their faces. The man on the ground, who has not been lynched yet but will be soon, is Mohammed Naeem. He is suspected of being a kidnapper. He is asserting his innocence, because that is the truth, but it is already too late for the truth.

  In making a painting from a photograph in the newspaper, I was trying to look at the scene more closely. And perhaps make others do the same. That is also the work that words can do. A caption can change the meaning of what one is looking at. (Think of the clipping I used in the first entry in this chapter. The words that serve as a kind of caption for the video of the tiger being killed also change its meaning.)

  The day I had made the painting, my journal revealed, a match between India and New Zealand in the cricket World Cup had been delayed because of rain. Some days earlier, Prime Minister Modi had tweeted his concern for an Indian player who had injured his finger. The prime minister did not have any words, however, about the Muslim victim of a lynch mob near Jamshedpur. Tabrez Ansari, a newly married welder, home for Eid celebrations, was made to chant “Jai Shri Ram” while being tied to a pole and beaten for six hours. He later died in police custody. Mohammed Naeem, whose photograph had moved me to paint him, had also been lynched near Jamshedpur, in Jharkhand. Even earlier than Mohammed Naeem’s death, in the same state, Alimuddin Ansari, a Muslim meat trader, had been pulled out of his van and beaten. His van was set on fire. Ansari died on the way to the hospital. One of the main accused in Ansari’s killing was the man in charge of the ruling party’s media operations. When the eight men arrested for Ansari’s killing were released from jail, in July 2018, the Harvard-educated politician who was the local representative of the ruling party put marigold garlands around their necks and fed them sweets. I received a WhatsApp message about this from Vaani’s sister, Shikha. She was mocking me because when I was in high school in Patna, I was on a tennis team with that politician. He was my classmate at school. At these moments, when this novel takes an autobiographical turn, it is because in this direct way I can comment on the banality of the banality of evil.

  The New York Times in its report on Ansari’s murder called 2018 “the year of the lynch mob in India.” I mentioned this fact to Jimi Adeola. He said he had a great fear of mobs in his country too. The most perplexing phenomenon, Jimi said, was the situation when suddenly a man in a crowd would come to believe that his penis had vanished. And this man accused any other man standing nearby of having stolen his penis.

  “Thief, thief.”

  But is the man believed by the crowd? I wanted to know.

  “Yes,” Jimi said. “This fear, or call it hysteria, is often commonly shared by others. The accused man can easily be lynched.”

  I gazed at the lake. How would one paint the fear of the missing penis?

  Jimi was saying in his gentle, grave voice, “It is terrible. A tire can be put around a man’s neck and then set on fire.”

  4.

  “The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe and then make credible much of American reality,” wrote Philip Roth in an essay in Commentary magazine. “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.”

  Our leaders produce bewildering fiction. Trump, for example, at a rally in South Carolina referred to the coronavirus as the Democrats’ “new hoax.” The most enduring lie of his presidency has been the following claim, made in November 2016: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” During a speech at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in April 2019, he made the following egregiously false claim to denounce abortion rights: “The baby is born. The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully. And then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.” I could list twenty thousand lies uttered by Trump, but there is one that, for some odd reason, puzzles me the most. Trump has claimed more than once that his father, Fred Trump, had been born in Germany. “My father is German, right? Was German, and born in a very beautiful place in Germany.” Fred Trump was born in the Bronx in New York City.

  In the country of my birth, Prime Minister Modi in a radio address said that the ancient Sanskrit language offered resources to tackle all kinds of challenges in life. He said that the Vedas contained mantras to solve even modern problems like global warming. In 2014, Modi had also said that the worship of the elephant-headed god Ganesha meant that plastic surgery was invented in ancient India, allowing a surgeon to put an elephant’s head on the body of a human being.

  I was skipping cocktail hour. Not just because the excitement and the ease that had been there had vanished. There was some bad news from home. When I had woken up there was a message from Vaani that Piya had a fever. The email had been sent just before Vaani went to sleep. Around lunchtime I sent a text. Vaani was up now. She texted back that the fever was down by a degree, only 99.5 now, and there was a general lethargy in the child but she was otherwise okay. Nose filled with snot but not having trouble breathing otherwise. That was a relief.

  When in my journal I read about the lies uttered by our leaders, did I feel annoyance? No. I felt rage. I wanted to tear the masks of power off their faces. I wanted to humiliate them. Then I remembered that they had been voted into office. And the object of my rage shifted. Who were all those who had voted for these people? I wanted a list of the lies that they had all believed. Later, as I was trying to fall asleep, my thoughts returned to this question and kept me awake. At literary festivals, someone will raise a hand and ask, Do you write in longhand or do you use a computer? Or, Where do your ideas come from? I imagined the audience seated in rows. The silence that follows questions like this. And then the response from the podium. Mic in hand, the writer asking, Actually, sir or madam, the more important question is, Whom did you vote for? Have you done any worthwhile reading? And why was your reading of no use to you at all?

  Bitter, bitter.

  5.

  A brief and random history of rumors: In India, in 250 b.c.e., the Arthashastra gave advice about achieving military success by infiltrating the enemy to spread rumors.

  During World War II, the British Political Warfare Executive (PWE) formed a Rumour Committee, which would formulate new anti-Nazi stories every two weeks, which would in turn be propagated throughout neutral cities in the hope that they would soon reach Germany. (For example, “Nazis have unusual sexual fetishes,” “Hitler intends to flee Germany soon,” “A new weapon that can light the sea on fire recently obliterated a German army.”) Meanwhile, the Germans spread rumors too. One such false story claimed that an American woman’s head had exploded at the hairdresser due to trace amounts of explosive left over after her shift at the factory where she worked.

  Steps were taken to curb rumors. In Great Britain, posters of two women speaking, haunted by images of Hitler and Goering: “You never know who’s listening! Loose lips sink ships!” A man dressed half as a civilian, half as a German military man: “Talk less…you never know.” In America, a poster of a dog mourning his human companion’s death: “Because someone talked.” A small girl cradling her father’s picture: “Don’t kill her daddy with careless talk.” In France, “Advice to those on leave: a good soldier keeps his lips sealed.” Another poster depicting two men, one a soldier, the other a civilian, with a nearby water pitcher containing Hitler’s face. Later, during the Cold War, the KGB disseminated rumors that condoms distributed in Africa by Western organizations were responsible for the spread of AIDS.

  6.

  On September 13, 2016, Wikipedia first revie
wed a page called “Fake News.”

  On December 10, 2016, at 9:11 a.m., @realDonaldTrump tweeted, “Reports by @CNN that I will be working on The Apprentice during my Presidency, even part time, are ridiculous & untrue—FAKE NEWS!”

  The Wikipedia page on “Fake News” also carries the following statement: “During and after his presidential campaign and election, Donald Trump began to use the term ‘fake news’ to describe negative press coverage of his presidency.”

  During all these years of the Trump presidency, the term fake news has been all around us. Trump saw as fake precisely what was real. Good journalists fact-checked him, pointed out his lies. My passion was for something narrower: I felt the need to keep an eye on the real even in the fake. For instance, in Trump’s wax figure unveiled at Tussauds just before the inauguration, his hair was “a mixture of human hair and yak hair.” I liked the fact that the wax figure’s golden coif had required a bit of research: Tussauds called the stylist from The Apprentice. The hairstylist said: “It’s hairspray and almost like a lacquer.” From another news story, this quote also noted in my journal on January 19, 2017: “Getting his tone right was also a challenge for coloring artist Verity Talbot whose palette is full of pink and magenta; an array of tones that she hopes will bring the President-elect to life.”

  7.

  How to respond to rumors?

  With strong assertions of truth. Possibly.

  But how to find the truth?