There are some stories you strain hard to believe, let alone comprehend. I did not even know Ansarbhai owned a gun, let alone that he was capable of using it. And against such a target — the kind, patient, and loving mother of his two teenage sons! What makes people snap, what drives them to acts of such horror that their own hearts cannot abide what they have done? I keep turning over the accounts I have heard of the incident and can find no answers in its terrible finality. For years we had been discussing a summer visit by the Khan family to New York, where I lived; I kept expecting to hear his cheerful voice on the phone, asking me to inquire about apartments available on short-term lease. Life itself, I realize, is something we each have only on a short-term lease. A moment of anger, of madness in a marriage, of carelessness in a hospital, of a rogue gene running amok in your cells, and your lease is up.
Three other dear friends left the world more peacefully in this period, at the culmination of lives full of accomplishment. One did not, strictly speaking, have an Indian connection, other than a great partiality to Indian food: he was a frequent habitué of desi restaurants in New York, ever ready to try a new one. Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, was a delightful companion (especially at the dining table, where he loved my former wife's Indian cooking), a witty and kindhearted man whose literary eminence never impeded his interest in younger writers, to whom he was unfailingly generous. One of my proudest possessions is a photo his wife, Valerie, sent me of Joe stretched out on his sofa reading my novel Show Business. A healthy and vigorous seventy-six, he died suddenly one night of a massive heart attack, depriving the world of a brilliantly original satiric voice.
And finally, two remarkable women whom I had known since my childhood passed away after long and debilitating illnesses. Sakuntala Jagannathan, the dynamic head of Maharashtra Tourism in the 1960s and a wise and accessible author (her book on Hinduism is a model of its kind), had written to chide me for giving, in an earlier column, all the credit for Kerala's literacy to its Communist rulers. She felt rightly that I should not have overlooked the earlier contribution of her grandfather, the formidable Dewan of Travancore, Sir C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar. I promised to make this point when I next returned to the subject; sadly, I never expected it to be in an elegy for her. Pearl Padamsee, my mentor in theater and a close friend and counselor for many years, was someone whose bouncy vivacity I had written about. The last time I saw her, illness had reduced her to a wisp, but her strength of personality shone through. I can imagine her in heaven, organizing a cast of angels to mount a celestial production of Godspell.
If there is any consolation at all in the voyage of these seven friends to that undiscovered country from which no traveler returns, it can only lie in their own release from the burdens of this world. No one is truly happy, Euripides wrote two millennia ago, until he is dead. I hope these friends are happy wherever they are; it is us they have left behind who are filled with questions, longings, and regrets.
4. Experiences of India
38. Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames
IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN A MATTER OF PRIDE for me that one of the very few countries in which the Jewish people never suffered any persecution is India. The first Jews came to what is today Kerala following the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of their first Temple there by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar in 597 B.C. A second wave followed a few centuries later, after the Romans destroyed the second Temple. This migration was not all that surprising; trade routes between the Roman world and the southwestern coast of India were well established, so the refugees were not sailing on uncharted waters. (The Romans even established a port in Kerala, Muziris, one of the great port cities of the ancient world.)
The Jews of Kerala settled down largely around Cranganore and practiced their faith and their customs unhindered. It was only a millennium and a half later that they suffered for being Jews — when the Portuguese, fresh from the Catholic Inquisition, arrived on India's western shores and started persecuting the Jews they found. The Jews then fled Cranganore and established themselves in Kochi, where they built an exquisite synagogue that still stands, though attrition and migration (to Australia, I am told, rather than Israel) has taken its toll, and the community living in the indelicately named “Jewtown” of Kochi has now dwindled to forty-two.
The story of the Kerala Jews came back to me when I read Jael Silliman's fascinating book Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames. Not that they are even mentioned in the book, for there are two other distinct Jewish communities in India — the Bene Israel of Maharashtra (the largest numerically, who lived undisturbed for centuries till a wandering rabbi recognized them for what they were) and the “Baghdadi Jews” who migrated from various parts of the Arab world to urban centers in India during the British Raj. It is with the latter that Dr. Silliman is concerned. Jael, whom I knew as a teenager in Calcutta and will therefore call by her first name, is the fourth generation in her family to have lived in the Baghdadi Jewish community of Calcutta, and her story traces the lives of the preceding three — her great-grandmother Farha, her grandmother Miriam, and her mother, Flower. The book is subtitled Women's Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope. It tells an eye-opening story.
The four women's lives trace, in intimate fashion, the transformation of the community over a little over a century. Farha, who arrived in Calcutta around 1890, “dwelled almost exclusively in the Baghdadi Jewish community no matter whether she was in Calcutta, Rangoon, or Singapore,” Jael writes. Miriam, living in British colonial Calcutta, was more Anglicized, called herself Mary, but still saw herself as part of a close-knit community of Calcutta Jews. Flower came of age with the Indian nationalist movement, lived in an independent India with an eclectic circle of Calcuttan friends, and taught in a Roman Catholic convent. Jael saw herself as Indian first and foremost, went to study in the United States like so many of her contemporaries, married a Bengali Hindu physicist there and is again part of a diaspora — but this time of the Indian disapora rather than the Jewish one.
Their stories are told with an effective blend of historical research and personal anecdote, much of it in the form of family reminiscence by Flower, who lives with Jael and her family today in Iowa City. Though there is enough social and cultural detail to have given Jael material for a novel, she approaches her subject as a scholar, and her analysis is informed by a serious academic's understanding of both colonialism and feminism. But the scholarship, though backed by an impressive collection of endnotes (which the general reader may cheerfully skip), never undermines the readability of her narrative, which unfolds in clear, precise, and sometimes sparkling prose. The text is also brightened by a striking collection of black-and-white photographs, ranging from colonial Calcutta to a Jewish bar mitzvah gathering to Jael's daughters Shikha and Maya in Bharatanatyam costume, perfectly tracing the history of these four generations.