Life during wartime

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were meant to end the war that was born of the earlier `war to end all wars', says RUCHIR JOSHI, in the concluding part of his essay on New York. A passer-by looks at a mural in New York's East Village.

SITTING here in London, watching the World Trade towers go down on TV, my nine-year-old son asked me — "Papa, why do people hate America so much?" It was the same question many New Yorkers asked themselves as the debris of their normality rained down on their heads. And it was pretty close to the one I asked myself in New York — why do people hate India so much?

There were some easy answers — they were jealous of our genuine independence from both America and the Soviets, they envied us — our democracy, our stability (tenuous though it was), our free press and comparatively open, culture, and so on and so forth. The problem was that none of these really held water. Over the years the real answers became clear to me and I stopped asking myself the question. I stopped asking because none of the answers managed to justify the violence the Indian state had done, both to its own people and to those just outside its borders.

New York is a place that helped me distil ideas and it was there I began to grasp that, like America, India too had its list of crimes and guilt. I began to understand that if I kept quiet despite knowing about these crimes, then I too was implicated in them. Later I also understood that the fact that these crimes could take place meant that it was actually ``normalcy'' that was deeply abnormal in this world.

This doesn't mean that I can accept bombs blowing me or anybody else up in Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi, or Tel Aviv or Kabul. Nor does it mean that I hate Americans, or that I didn't feel a desperate stab of fear for those of my American friends who could have been on one of those flights or in one of those buildings. What it does mean is that I don't share this sense of the world stopping, or of an apocalypse greater than any we have seen before, or even the start of a brand new war.

Wars, by their very nature, change gear from time to time, especially when one side decides that the only way to win is by "greater sacrifice" and escalation. In the Second World War, the bomber crews taking off from English airfields with Dresden or Berlin as targets knew fully well that many of them would not be coming back, as did each Japanese fighter pilot that left the ground for a suicide attack on the U.S. Navy. As far as the men who did September 11 were concerned, the war had been on for some time and it was time to go up a gear. So they planned and executed synchronised kamikazes on the two operational headquarters of the enemy — Military and Economic. To them, anyone who worked in the targetted buildings was a combatant and there was no losing sleep over them, much in the same way that the U.S. Air Force launched missiles without losing any sleep over the possible death of a cleaner who happened to work in a suspected chemical arms factory in Sudan.

People who thunder on about this being another Pearl Harbor are missing the point — they are grabbing the wrong end of that war. In style this bears a direct lineage to the kamikaze dives the Japanese began towards the end of the war — with Manhattan as the aircraft-carrier — and the content is much closer to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the certain death of hundreds of thousands of women, children and male civilians was deemed justifiable in order to end a long war with an implacable enemy.

All this is not to suggest that the New York and Washington attacks were in any way the ending of a war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were meant to end the war that was born from the earlier ``war to end all wars''. And, of course, that war didn't end. Among the many other things that they were, those two nuclear bombs were the mushroom wombs of several new wars. Because of them war mutated, it went Cold, it went Guerrilla, it went Terrorist. Like humans, maybe wars also jump generations in showing particular characteristics, and now, perhaps, we will have some genetic strain of that first nuclear attack fissioning up on to the surface of our lives. I hope and pray to whichever God I can find that that is not what will happen.

One of my other hopes is that the planners of September 11 and the pilots flying the planes into the WTC may have got one thing badly wrong. They may be right in that America will play their game, get blood-stupid and react, but I have this mad faith that deep New York will actually absorb this holocaust in a different way — it is much bigger than two planes and two buildings, and the 1.5 million U.S. flags that were bought in the three days after the strike, and even, without ever forgetting a single detail of their murder, the several thousand dead. The city has had a lot of practice in chaos and brutality, albeit differently from, say, Calcutta or Bombay. The apocalypse has been an ongoing business all over the planet and the world is a stop-start kind of place. And New York is more so than most places.

When I was there, the word ``war'' was a favourite expletive of New Yorkers, usually coupled with the word ``f***''. A waiter in a busy restaurant would shout at a slow chef — ``Move it man! It's a f***ing war out there!'' or a Vietnam Vet taxi driver would poke his head out into the traffic-jam and shout "Whatcha want? A war? Don't f*** wid me, I been there before and I'll kill you!" or a friend who'd had his leather jacket taken off him at knifepoint: ``Jeez man, I thought he was going to switch me off. F***, it's like, the guy was in a one-man war?'' And I sort of understood what they meant — we all carried some war or the other with us, whether ongoing or, as in my case, about to burst to the surface just as I returned to India.

My flatmate in New York was a young philosophy student called Lou and our landlord was an old man called Mr. Chill. We were always behind on the rent, and when the cold draft of Mr. Chill's poisonous after-shave pushed past all the other smells on the sixth floor, we knew trouble was about to knock on our door. Like Lou, Chill was Jewish, and he would laser all his shrill demands for last month's hundred dollars past Lou and straight at me. Chill took no prisoners on the rent, but somewhere he had a soft spot for Lou, who he saw as an errant son. Lou, on his part, hated Chill with a venom, and so it usually fell to me to go to Chill's office once we had scrabbled together the rent.

One hot day in the summer of 1982, I walked into the office with the money. Chill sat there, a yarmulke sweating on his bald head, dabbing himself with a handkerchief. When he saw me he did something he had never done before in his life — he smiled. ``Hot huh?'' he asked, as he took the money, ``Nothin' compared to where I'm going tomorrow! I'm going to Israel! I'm gonna go help kill some Arabs!'' His dentures made war-like noises as he grinned at me. Then his smile vanished and his eyes went narrow. ``Where you from?'' he asked, even though I'd told him a dozen times. ``You're not Arabic or something?'' I briefly considered squeezing him by his neck and saying, ``Yeah. I'm from Beirut. And did I tell you my two little sisters died in a missile attack last week?'' I thought about it for a few seconds, but then my civility autopilot kicked back in. I shook my head. ``No Mr. Chill,'' I said, ``I've told you. I'm from India.'' Then I turned and left, hoping never to see him again.

That summer some of us spent a lot of time watching Israel invade Lebanon on TV. Watching tall buildings burning in Beirut, it sometimes felt as if we were witnessing the beginning of the end of the world. Being young and optimistic, we assumed both that it was the end, and that it would take some time before the end reached us. I took to fast-forwarding the projected proximity by answering my phone with a brisk and cheerful ``Beirut Golf Club! Can I help you?''

I remembered that summer last week, as I watched the Manhattan carnage looping over and over, repeatedly napalming my TV screen. Even before their faces and details were out, it occurred to me that some of the men involved in making September 11 might have been around my age; that they might not have been poor Afghani youths but educated, middle-class, middle-aged men like me; and, like me, a couple of them might even have been petrified of climbing into a plane. It also occurred to me that one or two of them might have been in Beirut as the city was barbecued around them. That would have been the end of the world as they knew it, and they might have carried that final apocalypse with them for 20 years before bringing it all back to New York. Before trying to erase the difference.

But in this impending boom market, in this burgeoning import- export of death, I hope that those men haven't managed to wipe out the critical difference between me and them. I hope that they haven't managed to erase the crucial distinction between the New York that belongs to the world and the America that never has.

(Concluded)

The first part of this article appeared in the Sunday Magazine, The Hindu, dated October 14.

(The title of this essay is taken from the title of a song by the Rock group Talking Heads. The song was a big hit in New York during the time I describe.)

(Ruchir Joshi's first novel The Last Jet-engine Laugh was published earlier this year by HarperCollins India.)

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