Incendiary Circumstances Read online

  Thirty-six years had passed since I first landed at that airport, in a shuddering blunt-nosed Dakota. The aerodrome, as it was then spoken of, was a relic of an older war, in which Colombo had served as the nerve center of Lord Mountbatten's Southeast Asia Command. I was nine then, a fresh entrant into that moment of childhood when we first begin to truly inhabit the world, in the particular sense of committing it to memory. I remember Colombo's red-tiled roofs, like stacks of hardback books spread open on a desk; I remember my school, Royal College, and the stairway where I first tasted blood on my lip; I remember after-school cricket matches on Layard's Road and wickets knocked over by kabaragoyas; I remember marshmallow ice cream at Elephant House and the pearly insides of mangosteens; I remember the palm trees at Hikkaduwa leaning like dancers over the golden sands; I remember Elephant's Pass and the road to Jaffna, as narrow as the clasp between a necklace and its pendant; I remember at Pollonaruwa a cobra coiled on the floor of a rest house, looking up as though in surprise at my silhouette in the doorway; I remember a train on a slope, its smoke mingling with the mists of Nuwara Eliya.

  Such was the paradise from which I was abruptly torn when I arrived upon the threshold of adolescence. In the summer of 1967, when I had reached the age of eleven, I was sent away to be educated at the other end of the subcontinent, in Dehradun, which was said to be one of the most picturesque places in India. But for me this sub-Himalayan valley proved to be anything but Arcadia: I found myself imprisoned in a walled city of woe, with five hundred adolescents who had been herded together to be instructed in the dark arts of harrowing their peers. That it was my parents who were the agents of my expulsion from paradise was not the least part of the bewildering pain of my banishment. It was in that sub-Himalayan purgatory that I learned what it was to recall a time of joy in wretchedness. Now, in the recollection of that emotion, I have come to recognize a commonality with many, perhaps most, Sri Lankans—indeed, with everyone who remembers what it was to live in Serendib before the Fall.

  Michael Ondaatje writes:

  The last Sinhala word I lost

  was vatura.

  The word for water.

  Forest water. The water in a kiss. The tears

  I gave to my ayah Rosalin on leaving

  the first home of my life.

  More water for her than any other

  that fled my eyes again

  this year, remembering her,

  a lost almost-mother in those years

  of thirsty love

  No photograph of her, no meeting

  since the age of eleven,

  not even knowledge of her grave.

  Who abandoned who, I wonder now.

  These lines look back—as do I when I think of Sri Lanka—to a childhood long past. But the poem was published recently, in New York, and I doubt that it would have sounded this exact note had it been written at any other time and in any other circumstances. This is not merely a eulogy for Rosalin; it is an elegy of homecoming spoken in a voice that has been orphaned not just by the loss of an almost-mother but by history itself. It is a lament that mourns the passing of the paradise that made Rosalin possible.

  At the other end of the subcontinent lies another land devastated by the twin terrors of armed insurgency and state repression: Kashmir, of which an emperor famously said:

  If there is a paradise on earth,

  It is this, it is this, it is this.

  In the mid-1990s, at about the same time that Michael Ondaatje was writing his elegy to Rosalin, the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali was writing his great poem "The Last Saffron." The poem begins:

  I will die, in autumn, in Kashmir,

  and the shadowed routine of each vein

  will almost be news, the blood censored,

  for the Saffron Sun and the Times of Rain

  The poem ends with these verses:

  Yes, I remember it,

  the day I'll die, I broadcast the crimson,

  so long ago of that sky, its spread air,

  its rushing dyes, and a piece of earth

  bleeding, apart from the shore, as we went

  on the day I'll die, past the guards, and he,

  keeper of the world's last saffron, rowed me

  on an island the size of a grave. On

  two yards he rowed me into the sunset,

  past all pain. On everyone's lips was news

  of my death but only that beloved couplet,

  broken, on his:

  "If there is a paradise on earth,

  It is this, it is this, it is this."

  If the twin terrors of insurgency and repression could be said to have engendered any single literary leitmotif, it is surely the narrative of the loss of paradise. Nowhere is this story more precisely chronicled than in Shyam Selvadurai's 1994 novel, Funny Boy. The novel is set in Colombo, in the turmoil of the early 1980s, when long-simmering tensions between Sri Lanka's Sinhala-dominated government and the minority Tamil population exploded into a savagely violent conflict. The narrator is a teenage boy from a wealthy Tamil family, and the novel's final chapter recounts the events of July 1983, when a terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan army triggered massive reprisals against the Tamils of Colombo.

  In Funny Boy the destruction of paradise is assigned precise dates and an exact span of time: it starts at 9:30 A.M. on July 25, 1983. It is only a few hours since the novel's teenage narrator and his family have learned that "there [is] trouble in Colombo": the night before, a mob has gone wild after a funeral for thirteen slain soldiers and many Tamil houses have been burned. At 9:30 A.M. the family begins to ready itself for a hasty departure from its own house. "We are supposed to bring a few clothes and one other thing that is important to us. I can't decide which thing to take." But the boy's mother has already decided; not the least of her provisions for the uncertainties of the future is the preparation for the coming age of sorrow: "Amma is taking all the family albums. She says that if anything happens they will remind us of happier days."

  All through the day, the family waits in the once-beloved home that has now become a prison. As the hours pass, the narrator seeks consolation in his journal, recording rumors and reports. He hears that the government has distributed electoral lists to help the mobs locate Tamil homes; he is hugely relieved when he is told that a curfew has been declared, and is therefore doubly dismayed to learn that the announcement has made no difference, the mob is still on the rampage. He hears of the police and army watching in silent indifference as a Tamil family is burned alive in a car. At 11:30 P.M. the boy writes: "The waiting is terrible. I wish the mob would come so that this dreadful waiting would end."

  The next entry is written a little more than half a day later, but in that brief span of time the world has become a different place. Nothing will ever be the same again; the boy's childhood has become a place apart. This is the moment when history, the connection between time past and time ahead, has ended and memory has become an island that is severed forever from the present and the future. "July 26, 12:30 P.M.: I have just read my last entry and it seems unbelievable that only thirteen hours ago I was sitting on my bed writing in this journal. A year seems to have passed since that time. Our lives have completely changed. I try and try to make sense of it, but it just won't work."

  What has happened is this: the long wait has come to an end soon after the writing of the penultimate journal entry. On hearing the chants of an approaching mob, the family has taken refuge in a Sinhala neighbor's house. Huddled in a storeroom, they have listened as their house is burned to the ground.

  The morning after, they have looked over the remains of the house. The sight has made little impression; it is almost incomprehensible. The boy notes that his vinyl records have dissolved into black puddles, that the furniture has cracked open to reveal the whiteness of common wood. "I observed all this with not a trace of remorse, not a touch of sorrow for the loss and destruction around me. Even now I feel no sorrow. I try to remind myself that the house
is destroyed, that we will never live in it again, but my heart refuses to understand this." It is only later, on being told of the destruction of his grandparents' home, that he is able to grieve: "I thought about childhood spend-the-days and all the good times we had there. These thoughts made me cry. I couldn't cry for my own house, but it was easy to grieve for my grandparents' house." A precocious prescience has led the boy to grasp the precise nature of his grief: he ascribes it not to the immediacy of his own experience but to the memory of better times—to that act of remembrance than which, as Dante's Francesca da Rimini tells us, there is "no greater sorrow": that is to say, in the recollection of better times.

  This depiction of the violence of 1983—and to my mind Funny Boy is one of the most powerful and moving accounts of those events—was published in 1994 in Canada, where Shyam Selvadu-rai's family had settled after leaving Sri Lanka. I draw attention to this only to underscore two facts: that Funny Boy was written by a recent immigrant to North America and that it is an act of recollection that tells the story of a departure. These facts appear unremarkable, yet there is to my mind a puzzle here, and it lies in this: an immigrant's story is usually a narrative of arrival, not departure. And nowhere is this more true than in North America.

  North America is famously peopled by immigrants, and nowhere else on earth is the experience of immigration so richly figured as it is here: in popular culture, literature, film, and indeed every aspect of public life. In photography, the emblematic image of this experience is that of a family of immigrants standing on the deck of the ship that has brought them across the Atlantic. In these pictures the immigrants' eyes are always turned in the direction of the waiting shore, toward the Statue of Liberty and the towers of the shining city ahead. Many of these immigrants have suffered terrible hardships, yet we would search in vain for similarly powerful images taken at the hour when they boarded the ship: that moment holds only passing interest in this story. This is because, classically, narratives of immigration to North America are stories of arrival, not departure, stories of suffering but not sorrow or regret; they are stories of hope, founded on a belief in the redemptive power of the land ahead. The vitality of these stories derives in no small part from the obvious parallels with the Biblical story of the Promised Land, which is, of course, equally a story of hope and of arrival. Those who followed Moses out of Egypt did not linger to cast glances of melancholy longing upon the Nile. They looked only ahead; their memory of Egypt was of unmitigated suffering; there were no times of joy there to be recalled in wretchedness. The mark of an exodus lies in the direction of these eyes, looking ahead toward the far shore, confident in the belief that the bonds of community will not perish in the process of migration. But this is not the direction in which Selvadurai's narrator has turned his gaze. Here is the novel's penultimate sentence: "When I reached the top of the road, I couldn't prevent myself from turning back to look at the house one last time." And this is how he ends his story, with the narrator looking back, through the rain, at the charred remains of a home that was once filled with happiness.

  It is the direction of the gaze that identifies this as a story not of an exodus but of a dispersal, the story of an irrevocable sundering of the dual bonds that tie members of a community to each other and to other like communities. In the experience of an exodus there is an unspoken ambiguity: the sufferings of displacement are tinged with the hope of arrival and the opening of new vistas in the future. A dispersal offers no such consolation: the pain that haunts it is not that of remembered oppression; it is rather that particular species of pain that comes from the knowledge that the oppressor and the oppressed were once brothers. It is this species of pain, exactly, that runs so poignantly through the literature that resulted from the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. We know, from that line of Boethius which Dante was later to give to Francesca da Rimini, that among fortune's many adversities, the most unhappy kind is to nurture the memory of having once been happy.

  This is where recollection turns its back on history, for it is the burden of history to make sense of the past, while the memory of dispersal is haunted always by the essential inexplicability of what has come to pass; by the knowledge that there was nothing inevitable, nothing predestined about what has happened; that far from being primordial, the enmities that have led to the sufferings of the present are new and unaccountable; that there was a time once when neither protagonist saw the other as an adversary—a time that will be irrevocably lost with the dissolution of the history that made it possible for many parts to be a whole.

  That which I, in the fever of my pride, am struggling to put into words has been much better said in Agha Shahid Ali's poem "Farewell":

  At a certain point I lost track of you.

  You needed me. You needed to perfect me:

  In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.

  Your history gets in the way of my memory.

  I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.

  I am everything you lost. Your perfect enemy.

  Your memory gets in the way of my memory...

  There is nothing to forgive. You won't forgive me.

  I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.

  There is everything to forgive. You can't forgive me.

  If only somehow you could have been mine,

  what would not have been possible in the world?

  There is nothing arbitrary, then, about the ending of Selvadu-rai's novel—the story ends here because it must. To carry it any further would be to link it to the present and the future, to imply the possibility of a consolation. And this, of course, the writer could not do, for the reason that there is no greater sorrow than the recalling of times of joy is precisely that this is a grief beyond consolation.

  In 1983, at the time of the Colombo riots, I was hard at work on my first novel, The Circle of Reason. I was living in New Delhi, where I had succeeded in finding a minor appointment at Delhi University. Some of my colleagues and mentors at the university—Veena Das and Ashish Nandy, for example—had close connections with human rights activists in Sri Lanka. They were thus able to acquire many of the documents, records, and testimonies that were produced by Sri Lankan researchers. Newspaper accounts of the riots were shocking enough, but the picture that emerged from these independent reports was more menacing still. They left no doubt that some parts of the machinery of state had been used to target a minority population. I don't remember whether we asked ourselves what would happen if this pattern were to spread through the subcontinent. The question was perhaps too grim to pose in an India that was beset by insurgency, calamity, and terror.

  A year later, with Indira Gandhi's assassination, the tide crested on our own doorsteps. I remember that day graphically: I remember taking the bus across Delhi; I remember the eerie silence in the university, I remember the evil that gleamed in the eyes of the thugs who began to attack Sikhs wherever they could find them. I have written about these events in detail elsewhere (see "The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi," [>]) and will limit myself here to noting only the close parallels between the patterns of violence in Colombo in 1983 and in New Delhi in 1984. In both instances, inexcusable crimes were committed by insurgent groups in the name of freedom; in both cases, the information-gathering function of government was turned to the sinister purpose of targeting minority populations; in both there were clear instances of collusion between officials and criminals.

  Through the riots and their aftermath, I, like many of my friends and colleagues, worked with a citizens' relief organization called the Nagarik Ekta Manch. After the immediate crisis was over I returned to the manuscript I was working on. This novel, The Circle of Reason, was the story of a journey, and its central section told the story of a group of immigrants—South Asian and Middle Eastern—living in a fictitious oil-rich sheikdom in the Gulf. Looking back today, it strikes me that The Circle of Reason could, within the parameters that I have used here, be identified a
s an exodus novel, a story of migration in the classic sense of having its gaze turned firmly toward the future. The book ended with the words "Hope is the beginning."

  I was working on the last part of the book in 1984 when the riots broke out. After the violence it was a struggle to bring the manuscript to a conclusion: my attention had turned away from it. Unlike Shyam Selvadurai, unlike the Sikhs of New Delhi, I was not in the position of a victim during the riots of 1984. But the violence had the effect of bringing to the surface of my memory events from my own childhood when I had indeed been in a similar situation.

  Somehow I did manage to finish The Circle of Reason, and soon afterward I started the novel that would eventually be published as The Shadow Lines. When I began to work on the manuscript, I found that the book was following a pattern of growth that was exactly the opposite of its predecessor's. The Circle of Reason had grown upward, like a sapling rising from the soil of my immediate experience; The Shadow Lines had its opening planted in the present, but it grew downward, into the soil, like a root system straining to find a source of nourishment.

  It was in this process that I came to examine the ways in which my own life had been affected by civil violence. I remembered stories my mother had told me about the great Calcutta killing of 1946; I remembered my uncles' stories of anti-Indian riots in Rangoon in 1930 and 1938. At the heart of the book, however, was an event that had occurred in Dhaka in 1964, the year before my family moved to Colombo; in the unlit depths of my memory there stirred a recollection of a night when our house, flooded with refugees, was besieged by an angry mob. I had not thought of this event in decades, but after 1984 it began to haunt me: I was astonished by how vivid my memories were and how fully I could access them once I had given myself permission to do so. But my memories had no context; I had no way of knowing what had happened, whether it was an isolated incident, particular to the neighborhood we were living in, or whether it had implications beyond. I decided to find out what had happened. I went to libraries and sifted through hundreds of newspapers, and in the end, through perseverance, luck, and guesswork, I did find out what had happened. The riots of my memory were not a local affair: they had engulfed much of the subcontinent. The violence had been set in motion by the reported theft of a holy relic from the Hazratbal mosque in Srinagar. Although Kashmir was unaffected, other parts of the subcontinent had gone up in flames. The rioting had continued for the better part of a week, in India as well as the two wings of Pakistan.