"Yes, they do burn their dead in the West," I managed to say somehow. I raised my voice too now. "They have special electric furnaces meant just for that."
The imam could see that he had stung me. He turned away and laughed. "He's lying," he said to the crowd. "They don't burn their dead in the West. They're not an ignorant people. They're advanced, they're educated, they have science, they have guns and tanks and bombs."
"We have them too!" I shouted back at him. I was as confused now as I was angry. "In my country we have all those things too," I said to the crowd. "We have guns and tanks and bombs. And they're better than anything you have — we're way ahead of you."
The imam could no longer disguise his anger. "I tell you, he's lying," he said. "Our guns and bombs are much better than theirs. Ours are second only to the West's."
"It's you who's lying," I said. "You know nothing about this. Ours are much better. Why, in my country we've even had a nuclear explosion. You won't be able to match that in a hundred years."
So there we were, the imam and I, delegates from two superseded civilizations vying with each other to lay claim to the violence of the West.
At that moment, despite the vast gap that lay between us, we understood each other perfectly. We were both traveling, he and I: we were traveling in the West. The only difference was that I had actually been there, in person: I could have told him about the ancient English university I had won a scholarship to, about punk dons with safety pins in their mortarboards, about superhighways and sex shops and Picasso. But none of it would have mattered. We would have known, both of us, that all that was mere fluff: at the bottom, for him as for me and millions and millions of people on the landmasses around us, the West meant only this — science and tanks and guns and bombs.
And we recognized too the inescapability of these things, their strength, their power — evident in nothing so much as this: that even for him, a man of God, and for me, a student of the "humane" sciences, they had usurped the place of all other languages of argument. He knew, just as I did, that he could no longer say to me, as Ibn Battuta might have when he traveled to India in the fourteenth century, "You should do this or that because it is right or good, or because God wills it so." He could not have said it because that language is dead: those things are no longer sayable; they sound absurd. Instead he had had, of necessity, to use that other language, so universal that it extended equally to him, an old-fashioned village imam, and to great leaders at SALT conferences. He had had to say to me, "You ought not to do this because otherwise you will not have guns and tanks and bombs."
Since he was a man of God, his was the greater defeat.
For a moment then I was desperately envious. The imam would not have said any of those things to me had I been a Westerner. He would not have dared. Whether I wanted it or not, I would have had around me the protective aura of an inherited expertise in the technology of violence. That aura would have surrounded me, I thought, with a sheet of clear glass, like a bulletproof screen; or perhaps it would have worked as a talisman, like a press card, armed with which I could have gone off to what were said to be the most terrible places in the world that month, to gaze and wonder. And then perhaps I too would one day have had enough material for a book which would have had for its epigraph the line The horror! The horror! — for the virtue of a sheet of glass is that it does not require one to look within.
But that still leaves Khamees the Rat waiting on the edge of the square.
In the end it was he and his brothers who led me away from the imam. They took me home with them, and there, while Kha-mees's wife cooked dinner for us — she was not so ill after all — Khamees said to me, "Do not be upset, ya doktor. Forget about all those guns and things. I'll tell you what: I'll come to visit you in your country, even though I've never been anywhere. I'll come all the way."
He slipped a finger under his skullcap and scratched his head, thinking hard.
Then he added, "But if I die, you must bury me."
NOTES
page
THE GREATEST SORROW
[>] Nessun maggior dolore: Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans R. & J. Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2000), Canto V, lines 121–23.
[>] The last Sinhala word: Michael Ondaatje, "Wells," in Handwriting (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 50.
[>] I will die, in autumn: Agha Shahid Ali, "The Last Saffron," in The Country Without a Post Office (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 27–29.
[>] We know: The lines of Dante's from which the title of this essay is taken are thought to be based on a passage from Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy: "Among fortune's many adversities the most unhappy kind is once to have been happy" (Dante, The Inferno, p. 99).
At a certain point: Agha Shahid Ali, "Farewell," in The Country Without a Post Office, pp. 22–23.
[>] At the heart of the book: I have described this event in detail in my book In an Antique Land (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 204–10.
[>] Ranajit Guha: Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), lecture III.
[>] It is for this reason: It is not without interest that the corresponding administrative term — handed down from the Raj — is "civil disturbance." "Everything is finished": "The Country Without a Post Office," in The Country Without a Post Office, pp. 49–50.
"For his first forty days": Ondaatje, "The Story," in Handwriting.
[>] "With all the swerves": Ibid.
"THE GHAT OF THE ONLY WORLD"
[>] At a certain point: Agha Shahid Ali, "Farewell," in The Country Without a Post Office (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 22–23.
[>] "Imagine me at a writer's conference": Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English, ed. Agha Shahid Ali (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), pp. 1, 3, 13.
[>] "A night of ghazals": Agha Shahid Ali, "I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World," in Rooms Are Never Finished (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 97. It was Shahid's mother: Ibid., p. 99.
"I am not born": Agha Shahid Ali, "A Lost Memory of Delhi," in The Half-Inch Himalayas (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), p. 5. I would like to thank Daniel Hall for bringing this poem to my attention.
[>] "I always move": "I Dream I Am at the Ghat," p. 101.
"It was '89": "Summers of Translation," in Rooms Are Never Finished, p. 30.
[>] "and I, one festival": "Lenox Hill," in Rooms Are Never Finished, p. 17.
"Nothing will remain": "The Country Without a Post Office," in The Country Without a Post Office, p. 50.
"I will die, in autumn": "The Last Saffron," in The Country Without a Post Office p. 27.
[>] "Yes, I remember it": Ibid., p. 29.
[>] "Mother, they asked me": "Lenox Hill," in Rooms Are Never Finished, pp. 18, 19.
COUNTDOWN
[>] In the course of writing this piece I talked to many hundreds of people in India, Pakistan, and Nepal. The impossibility of severally listing these debts serves only to deepen my gratitude to those who took the time to meet me. The book would be incomplete, however, if I were not to acknowledge my gratitude to the following: Smt. Krishna Bose, M.P., Madiha Gauhur, Shahid Nadeem, Najam Sethi, Dr. Dursameem Ahmed, Eman Ahmed, Dr. Zia Miyan, Dr. M. V. Ramanna, Kunda Dixit, Kanak Dixit, Pritam and Meena Mansukhani, Radhika and Hari Sen, and my infinitely forbearing publisher, Ravi Dayal. Dr. Sunil Mukhi, Dr. Sumit Ranjan Das, Dr. Sourendu Gupta, and other scientists at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay were generous in giving of their time to discuss various aspects of the nuclear issue, from many different points of view: I owe them many thanks. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Ananda Bazaar Patrika, Himal, and The New Yorker. I am particularly indebted to Nandi Rodrigo, who did an astonishingly thorough job of fact-checking my New Yorker piece, and to Bill Buford, who saw it to press. Madhumita Mazumdar contributed greatly to the background research and provided invaluable logistical support: I am deeply grateful to her.