Incendiary Circumstances Read online

  ...Mother,

  they asked me, So how's the writing? I answered My mother

  is my poem. What did they expect? For no verse

  sufficed except the promise, fading, of Kashmir

  and the cries that reached you from the cliffs of Kashmir

  (across fifteen centuries) in the hospital. Kashmir,

  she's dying! How her breathing drowns out the universe

  as she sleeps in Amherst.

  The poem is packed with the devices that he had perfected over a lifetime: rhetorical questions, imperative commands, lines broken or punctuated to create resonant and unresolvable ambiguities. It ends, characteristically, with a turn that is at once disingenuous and wrenchingly direct.

  For compared to my grief for you, what are those of Kashmir,

  and what (I close the ledger) are the griefs of the universe

  when I remember you—beyond all accounting—O my mother?

  For Shahid, the passage of time produced no cushioning from the shock of the loss of his mother: he relived it over and over again until the end. Often he would interrupt himself in mid-conversation: "I can't believe she's gone; I still can't believe it." The week before his death, on waking one morning, he asked his family where his mother was and whether it was true that she was dead. On being told that she was, he wept as though he were living afresh through the event.

  In the penultimate stanza of "Lenox Hill," in a breathtaking, heart-stopping inversion, Shahid figures himself as his mother's mother:

  "As you sit here by me, you're just like my mother,"

  she tells me. I imagine her: a bride in Kashmir,

  she's watching, at the Regal, her first film with Father.

  If only I could gather you in my arms, Mother,

  I'd save you—now my daughter—from God. The universe

  opens its ledger. I write: How helpless was God's mother!

  I remember clearly the evening when Shahid read this poem in the living room of my house. I remember it because I could not keep myself from wondering whether it was possible that Shahid's identification with his mother was so powerful as to spill beyond the spirit and into the body. Brain cancer is not, so far as I know, a hereditary disease, yet his body had, as it were, elected to reproduce the conditions of his mother's death. But how could this be possible? Even the thought appears preposterous in the bleak light of the Aristotelian distinction between mind and body, and the notions of cause and effect that flow from it. Yet there are traditions in which poetry is a world of causality entire unto itself, where metaphor extends beyond the mere linking of words, into the conjugation of a distinctive reality. In Shahid's last months I thought often of the death of Babar, who was not just the first of the Mogul emperors but also a poet and writer of extraordinary distinction.

  Shahid thought of his work as being placed squarely within a modern Western tradition. Yet the mechanics of his imagination—dreams, visions, an overpowering sense of identity with those he loved—as well as his life, and perhaps even his death, were fashioned by a will that owed more perhaps to the Sufis and the Bhakti poets than to the modernists. In his determination to be not just a writer of poetry but an embodiment of his poetic vision, he was, I think, more the heir of Rumi and Kabir than Eliot and Merrill.

  The last time I saw Shahid was on the twenty-seventh of October, at his brother's house in Amherst. He was intermittently able to converse, and there were moments when we talked just as we had in the past. He was aware, as he had long been, of his approaching end, and he had made his peace with it. I saw no trace of anguish or conflict: surrounded by the love of his family and friends, he was calm, contented, at peace. He had said to me once, "I love to think that I'll meet my mother in the afterlife, if there is an afterlife." I had the sense that as the end neared, this was his supreme consolation. He died peacefully, in his sleep, at 2 A.M. on December 8.

  Now, in his absence, I am amazed that so brief a friendship has resulted in so vast a void. Often when I walk into my living room, I remember his presence there, particularly on the night when he read us his farewell to the world: "I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World." I remember how he created a vision of an evening of ghazals, drawing to its end; of the bediamonded singer vanishing through a mirror; I remember him evoking the voices he loved—of Begum Akhtar, Eqbal Ahmed, and James Merrill—urging him on as he journeys toward his mother: love doesn't help anyone finally survive. Shahid knew exactly how it would end, and he was meticulous in saying his farewells, careful in crafting the envoy to the last verses of his own life.

  COUNTDOWN 1998

  ON MAY 11, the Indian government tested several nuclear devices at a site near the small medieval town of Pokhran, on the edge of the Thar Desert, in the western state of Rajasthan. I traveled to the area three months later. My visit coincided with the fifty-first anniversary of independence, the start of India's second half-century as a free nation. As I was heading toward Pokhran, the prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was addressing the nation from the ramparts of Delhi's Red Fort—an Independence Day tradition. Driving through the desert, I listened to him on the car radio.

  Vajpayee belongs to the Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, or the Indian People's Party), which is the largest single group in the coalition that now rules India. The BJP came to power in March, and the Pokhran tests followed two months later. The tests occasioned outpourings of joy among the BJP's members and sympathizers. They organized festivities and handed out sweetmeats on the streets to commemorate the achievement. There was talk of sending sand from the test site around the country so that the whole nation could partake of the glow from the blasts. Some of the BJP's leaders were said to be thinking of building a monument at Pokhran, a "shrine of strength" that could be visited by pilgrims. Nine days after the first tests, the prime minister flew to Pokhran himself. A celebration was organized near the crater left by the blasts. The prime minister was photographed standing on the crater's rim, looking reverentially into the pit.

  But now, three months later, speaking at Red Fort, the prime minister's voice sounded oddly subdued. The euphoria had faded. On May 28, Pakistan had tested its own nuclear devices. This had had a sobering effect. In the following weeks, the rupee fell to a historic low, the stock market index fell, prices soared. The BJP's grasp on power was now none too secure.

  I was traveling to Pokhran with two men whom I'd met that morning. They were landowning farmers who had relatives in the town. A friend had assigned them the task of showing me around. One man was in his sixties, with hennaed hair and a bushy mustache. The other was his son-in-law, a soft-spoken, burly man in his early forties. Their Hindi had the distinctive lilt of western Rajasthan.

  It was searingly hot, and the desert wind chafed like sandpaper against our eyes. The road was a long, shimmering line. There were peafowl in the thorny trees, and the birds took wing as the car shot past, their great tails iridescent in the sunlight. Otherwise, there was nothing but scrub to interrupt the view of the horizon. In the dialect of the region, my guides told me, this area was known as "the flatland."

  In Pokhran, my guides were welcomed by their acquaintances. A town official said he knew exactly the man I ought to meet. This man was sent for. His name was Manohar Joshi, and he was thirty-six, bespectacled, with a ready smile. He'd grown up in Pokhran, he told me. He was twelve in 1974, when a nuclear device was first tested in the district. The prime minister then was Indira Gandhi.

  "In the years after 1974, there was a lot of illness," Joshi said. "We had never heard of cancer before. But after the test people began to get cancer. There were strange skin diseases. Sores. And people used to scratch themselves all the time. If these things had happened anywhere else in the country, in Bihar or Kashmir, people would rise up and stop it. But people here don't protest. They'll put up with anything."

  Growing up in Pokhran, Joshi had developed a strong interest in nuclear matters. His family hadn't had the resources to send him to college. After high
school, he'd started to work in a shop. But all the while he'd wanted to write. He'd begun to send opinion pieces to Hindi newspapers. One of them had taken him on as a stringer.

  On the afternoon of May 11, he was preparing for his siesta when the ground began to shake, almost throwing him off his cot. He knew at once that this was no earthquake. It was a more powerful jolt than that of 1974. He recognized it for what it was and called his paper immediately. This, Joshi said proudly, made him the first journalist in the world to learn of the tests.

  Joshi told me about a village called Khetolai. It was just six miles from the test site, the nearest human habitation. The effects of the 1974 tests had been felt more severely there, he said, than anywhere else in the district.

  We drove off into the scrub, along a dirt road. The village was small, but there were no huts or shanties: the houses were sturdily built, of stone and mortar.

  Khetolai was an unusual village, Joshi explained. Its inhabitants were reasonably prosperous—they made their living mainly from tending livestock—and almost everyone was literate, women as well as men. Many were Bishnois, members of a small religious sect whose founder had forbidden the felling of trees and the killing of animals. They thought of themselves as the world's first conservationists.

  We stopped to look at a couple of buildings whose walls had been split by the tests, and we were immediately surrounded by eager schoolchildren. They led us into a house where three turbaned elders were sitting on charpoys, talking.

  On May 11, at about noon, they told me, a squad of soldiers drove up and asked the villagers to move to open ground. People who owned refrigerators and television sets carried them out-of-doors and set them down in the sand. Then they sat under trees and waited. It was very hot. The temperature was over 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Some three and a half hours later, there was a tremendous shaking in the ground and a booming noise. They saw a great cloud of dust and black-and-white smoke shooting skyward in the distance. Cracks opened up in the walls of the houses. Some had underground water tanks for livestock. The blasts split the tanks, emptying them of water.

  Later, the villagers said, an official came around and offered them small sums of money as compensation. The underground tanks had been very expensive. The villagers refused to accept the money and demanded more.

  Party activists appeared and erected a colorful marquee. There was talk that the BJP would hold celebrations in Khetolai. By this time the villagers were enraged, and the marquee was removed for fear that the media would hear of the villagers' complaints.

  "After the test," a young man said, "the prime minister announced that he'd been to Pokhran and that there was no radioactivity. But how long was he here? Radioactivity doesn't work in minutes." Since 1974, he said, some twenty children had been born with deformed limbs. Cows had developed tumors in their udders. According to the young man, calves were born blind, or with their tongues and eyes attached to the wrong parts of their faces. No one had heard of such things before.

  The young man held a clerical job for the government. He was articulate, and the elders handed him the burden of the conversation. In the past, he said, the villagers had cooperated with the government. They hadn't complained, and they'd been careful when talking to the press. "But now we are fed up. What benefits do we get from these tests? We don't even have a hospital."

  Someone brought a tray of water glasses. The young man saw me hesitate and began to laugh. "Outsiders won't drink our water," he said. "Even the people who come to tell us that everything is safe won't touch our water."

  My guides were subdued on the drive back. Even though they lived in the neighboring district, it had been years since they were last in Pokhran. What we'd seen had come as a complete surprise to them.

  I spent the rest of the day in the town of Bikaner, about a hundred miles away. That evening I walked around its royal palace. It was vast, empty, and beautiful, like a melancholy fantasy. Its pink stone seemed to turn translucent in the light of the setting sun. The palace was of a stupefying lavishness. It was built around the turn of the century by Maharajah Sir Ganga Singh of Bikaner, a luminary who had cut a very splendid figure in the British Raj. He entertained viceroys and sent troops to Flanders. He was a signatory of the Treaty of Versailles. There were photographs in the corridors showing Maharajah Ganga Singh in the company of Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, and Lloyd George.

  In New Delhi, many people had talked to me about how nuclear weapons would help India achieve "great power status." I'd been surprised by the depth of emotion that was invested in that curiously archaic phrase "great power." What exactly would it mean, I'd asked myself, if India achieved "great power status"? What were the images that were evoked by this tag?

  Now, walking through this echoing old palace, looking at the pictures in the corridors, I realized that this was what the nuclearists wanted: treaties, photographs of themselves with the world's powerful, portraits on their walls. They had pinned on the bomb their hopes of bringing it all back.

  The leading advocate of India's nuclear policies is K. Subrahmanyam, a large, forceful man who is the retired director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. Subrahmanyam advocates an aggressive nuclear program based on the premise that nuclear weapons are the currency of global power. "Nuclear weapons are not military weapons," he told me. "Their logic is that of international politics, and it is a logic of a global nuclear order." According to Subrahmanyam, international security has been progressively governed by a global nuclear order made up of the five nuclear-weapons powers—the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France. "India," Subrahmanyam said, "wants to be a player and not an object of this global nuclear order."

  I had expected to hear about regional threats and the Chinese missile program. But as Subrahmanyam sees it, India's nuclear policies are only tangentially related to the question of India's security. They are ultimately aimed at something much more abstract and very much more grand: global power. India could, if it plays its cards right, parlay its nuclear program into a seat on the United Nations Security Council and earn recognition as a "global player."

  Subrahmanyam told me a story about a film. It was called The Million Pound Note, and it featured Gregory Peck. In the film, Peck's character uses an obviously valueless piece of paper printed to look like a million-pound note to con tradesmen into extending credit.

  "A nuclear weapon acts like a million-pound note," Subrahmanyam said, his eyes gleaming. "It is of no apparent use. You can't use it to stop small wars. But it buys you credit, and that gives you the power to intimidate."

  Subrahmanyam bristled when I suggested that there might be certain inherent dangers to the possession of nuclear weapons. Like most Indian hawks, he considers himself a reluctant nuclearist. He says he would prefer to see nuclear weapons done away with altogether. It is the nuclear superpowers' insistence on maintaining their arsenals that makes this impossible.

  Issues of safety, he told me, were no more pressing in India than anywhere else. India and Pakistan had lived with each other's nuclear programs for many years. "It was the strategic logic of the West that was madness. Think of the United States building seventy thousand nuclear weapons at a cost of $5.8 trillion. Do you think these people are in a position to preach to us?"

  Subrahmanyam, like many other supporters of the Indian nuclear program, sees little danger of the deployment of nuclear weapons. In New Delhi, it is widely believed that the very immensity of the destructive potential of nuclear weapons renders them useless as instruments of war, ensuring that their deployment can never be anything other than symbolic. That nuclear war is unthinkable has, paradoxically, given the weapons an aura of harmlessness.

  I went to see an old acquaintance, Chandan Mitra, a historian with an Oxford doctorate. I had come across an editorial of his entitled "Explosion of Self-Esteem," published on May 12. At Delhi University, when I first knew Chandan, he was a Marxist. He is now an influential newspaper edi
tor and is said to be a BJP sympathizer.

  "The bomb is a currency of self-esteem," Chandan told me, with disarming bluntness. "Two hundred years of colonialism robbed us of our self-esteem. We do not have the national pride that the British have, or the French, the Germans, or the Americans. We have been told that we are not fit to rule ourselves—that was the justification of colonialism. Our achievements, our worth, our talent, have always been negated and denied. Mahatma Gandhi's endeavor all during the freedom movement was to rebuild our sense of self-esteem. Even if you don't have guns, he said, you still have moral force. Now, fifty years on, we know that moral force isn't enough to survive. It doesn't count for very much. When you look at India today and ask how best you can overcome those feelings of inferiority, the bomb seems to be as good an answer as any."

  For Chandan, as for many other Indians, the bomb is more than a weapon. It has become a banner of political insurgency, a kind of millenarian movement for all the unfulfilled aspirations and dreams of the past fifty years.

  The landscape of India teems with such insurgencies: the country is seized, in V. S. Naipaul's eloquent phrase, with "a million mutinies now." These insurrections are perhaps the most remarkable product of Indian democracy: this enabling of once marginal groups to fight for places at the table of power. The bomb cult represents the uprising of those who find themselves being pushed back from the table. It's the rebellion of the rebelled against, an insurgency of an elite. Its leaders see themselves as articulating the aspirations of an immeasurably vast constituency: more than 900 million people, or "one sixth of humanity," in the words of the Indian prime minister. The reality, however, is that the number is very much smaller than this and is dwindling every day. The almost mystical rapture that greeted the unveiling of the cult's fetish has long since dissipated.