Charles Dickens would have turned 200 today. If you haven’t read his books, here is the digested read. At the request of BBC World Service I wrote a brief reminiscence recalling my experience reading Dickens in my childhood. Here is the longer version of what I recorded for them:

Children have lurid imaginations. They don’t need much help imagining misfortune. But if you are aware of poverty, or see suffering around you, Charles Dickens can be a boon. This is because he is so good at populating that stricken landscape with indelible characters outfitted with violent habits and unforgettable names.

I grew up in a small town in India. The novels of Charles Dickens, in abridged form, were required reading in schools. My uncles on my mother’s side worked in prisons. I could look up from a page of Great Expectations and see the convicts working in the house, sweeping a stone courtyard or feeding the cows. Each man, clad in white khadi with blue stripes, would have an iron manacle around his ankle. I went back to the page I was reading, but now troubled by the thought that soon one of them would be beside me, asking me to fetch a file.

In the books that we read, a dramatic pencil illustration would be printed every few pages, with a line from the novel serving as a caption.

“Please, Sir, I want some more.” That line was Dickens’s gift to me.

At bus-stops, in the homes of less well-off relatives, outside tea-stalls, I looked at the faces of other children as they regarded food that was displayed, or that someone else was eating, and I’d think back to the line I had read in Oliver Twist.

In the new shining India, 42.5 percent of its children suffer from malnutrition. The term “Dickensian” evokes cold dark workplaces and cramped rooms. It doesn’t belong to the India of teeming cities with soaring flyovers and glittering multirise buildings. Yet, you can still look at the stunted children and remember, without sentimentality, that old line from Dickens: “Please, Sir, I want some more.”

Franz Kline's New York

I had been asleep when the first plane hit the World Trade Center’s North Tower. What woke me was the sound of my wife sobbing. A phone call had come from India, from an editor, asking me to write. So, that is how we learned about what had happened.

The piece I wrote that day had some anger in it, anger not only at the hijackers but at the Americans. This was the kind of thing that would be called “the chicken coming home to roost” argument. A few days later, in the New Yorker issue dedicated to September 11, with its famous black cover designed by Art Spiegelman, I read a piece by Amitav Ghosh. His brief essay told the story of a man, an engineer involved in the design of the Twin Towers, staying back in the building to help people escape. The man and his wife, both of whom worked in the destroyed buildings, were Ghosh’s neighbors. And Ghosh’s piece was filled with a kind of sad tenderness that made me feel ashamed about my rage. I felt as if I had arrived drunk at a funeral.

That feeling would change. It would change around the time the first bombs began falling on Afghanistan. Or maybe even before, when I read pieces by writers like Arundhati Roy, offering sympathy for the victims of the attacks but not flinching from offering critique, including of the role that the Americans had played in funding the Taliban in their strategic fight against the Soviets. The change had certainly come by the time I read another piece in the New Yorker, this one by Akhil Sharma. Titled “Bonus,” this brilliant piece only briefly invoked the attacks but so deftly did it portray their appearance and disappearance amidst financial calculations in the mind of a Wall Street executive, that it served a reminder that the necessarily sentimental piece written by Ghosh wasn’t the only way to represent September 11.

So, right from the beginning, the attacks and the question of one’s proper response to it had been a problem for me. I began teaching a class that I’d call the “literature of 9/11.” I wanted to understand the different responses to the attacks and the fateful consequences.

An important part of the impulse behind this has been my search for other voices, voices from India and Pakistan, for instance. I have used books like Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist or H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy to, well, provincialize the monumental sense of grief that Americans often have about the attacks of 9/11. We need to ask ourselves about the other lives that were destroyed by the attacks, not on that day, but through the changes that followed.

In recent years, my course has focused on linking what happened on that bright September morning to everything else that has followed, for example, the image of a man in an orange suit kneeling in a cage in Guantanamo. Last semester, when I taught this course, I included in the syllabus a reading of two excellent works of reportage from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers and Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War. From this perspective, what happened on that Tuesday a decade ago seems impossibly distant. We are now stuck in the quagmire of war and intolerable suffering.

When I was an undergraduate in Delhi three decades ago the prescribed reading for us was Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve. The novel wasn’t very good. I think it was in the syllabus because it hit you over the head with the image of rural suffering—poverty, flood, famine, you get the idea. I’m skeptical of middle-class people talking at great length about the lives of the lowly. I’d rather deal with their—our—calm complacency instead.

A few years ago, when I was staying in a friend’s barsati in Delhi’s Defence Colony, my host came home one evening with a painting. The canvas showed a work done in Kalighat style, but the subject was modern. It showed a bhadralok couple sitting together, drinking tea; behind them, on a table with a blue tablecloth, stood a big television set showing the World Trade Center. Smoke was coming out from one of the towers. On the edge of the screen, on the right, another plane was visible in the sky. The image spoke to me.

The artist’s name was Kalam Patua, and I can only guess at his intentions for doing the painting. But what his remarkable work communicated to me was the complexity of a world in which disaster gets consumed as easily as a cup of tea. And that wasn’t all. I was also drawn to the intact world of the Indian middle-class, to the fact that it was in touch with the daily life of the planet but not necessarily in a way that disturbed its inertia. I tried to write about that world in my first novel Home Products (which was published in the US under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing).

But, like Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve, the “literature of 9/11” draws us back to the pathos of distant suffering. In fact, I believe it represents a new low definition of bare life. We read accounts of incarcerated men in Guantanamo, or American soldiers with amputated limbs, or the death of children from drinking mud, and we see how much of life’s terrain, the realm of individual subjectivity, is subject to the brutal will of the state. Which is to say, for me, the “literature of 9/11” is an ongoing exploration of the ways in which life and liberty—or their absence—are authored by the military state.

There are several artists, including the Bangla-American Hasan Elahi, who have responded with great inventiveness to the new regimes of surveillance introduced after the attacks of September 11. Toward the beginning of the semester I ask my students to read the 9/11 Commission Report but I always follow it up, sooner or later, with a presentation of the work of the artists like Elahi, Trevor Paglen, Martha Rosler, and Jill Magid.

In a week, my new class will meet. This time I will use an essay that I just read last night. It’s by Pico Iyer and has appeared in the latest Granta Magazine. Iyer writes of his experience of being stopped and subjected to interrogation at airports in Japan. This happened to him after the 9/11 attacks. He writes of how his American friends assured him that this was happening to them too. In other words, it wasn’t just his brownness that earned him this scrutiny. Maybe. The point that Iyer wants to make, however, is that brown folks had always found it difficult to cross borders. They were always suspect.

I’m not sure I want the tragedies of September 11 and its aftermath to be reduced to the matter of travails of travel. The airport isn’t a battlefield; nor is it a quiet village suddenly erupting in fire because of a drone strike. Nevertheless, the conclusion that Iyer offers is stark and eloquent, and I’d like my students to consider what he is saying: “I understand why my friends feel aggrieved to be treated as if they came from Nigeria or Mexico or India. But I can’t really mourn too much that airports, since 9/11, have become places where everyone may be taken to be guilty until proven innocent. The world is all mixed up these days, and America can no longer claim immunity. On 12 September 2001, Le Monde ran its now famous headline: WE ARE ALL AMERICANS. On 12 September 2011, it might more usefully announce: WE ARE ALL INDIANS.”

The film “Zero Bridge” is a film set in Kashmir and, therefore, the word “terrorist” is used in the film. But only once. This happens when a couple of young white men, tourists, lounging on a shikara on the Dal Lake have the following exchange with the film’s central character, Dilawar:

• Western tourist 1: What does “Dilawar” mean? Your name?
• Dilawar (with a smile): It means a terrorist.
• Western tourist 1 (laughing): I knew it!
• Western tourist 2 (also laughing): Yeah, you look like a bad guy.

The youth Dilawar is in trouble in the troubled land. Which is not to say that he has been picked up from the street and tortured in a notorious prison, but simply that he isn’t on the straight and narrow. In fact, he is a pickpocket and, for a variety of reasons, you want him to get away with it. You also want him to learn to say hello to a woman, but I’ll come to that in a minute.

“Zero Bridge,” which had its theatrical premiere earlier this year at New York’s Film Forum, was written and directed by Tariq Tapa. Tapa is described in the press materials as “a US-born filmmaker of Kashmiri/Jewish-American descent.” (In response to an interviewer’s question about his bring Jewish as well as Muslim, Tapa replied: “Yeah. I used to like to tell the joke that when I go into a building, I don’t know whether to buy it or to blow it up.”)

Tapa’s father is Kashmiri and when Tapa was a child, he would visit Kashmir during the summers. In 2006, and then again in 2007, Tapa went back to Kashmir with a backpack full of equipment. The idea for “Zero Bridge” emerged after he had stayed in Srinagar for three months. While shooting the film, Tapa was his sole crew, shooting, directing, recording sound; his actors are all non-professionals, appearing in a film for the first time. Tapa has said that he was committed to showing ordinary daily life in Kashmir. A shoestring budget only partly explains these choices, and says quite a bit about Kashmir and its place in a war of representations.

Tariq Tapa is exasperated that Kashmir has served only as an exotic backdrop for Bollywood songs; he is also not too satisfied with the ways in which Western documentaries have equated Kashmir with terror. Not for him, then, the “blunt dialectics of tourism and terror.”

A direct result of this orientation is that we see a Srinagar we haven’t seen on the screen before. Instead of the landscape, the camera hovers in close-up near the faces of the actors; often, we see the dull, dimly-lit, stained interiors of rooms in which the characters work or wait. I read somewhere that the director would ask his colorist to drain the images of their rich colors. In a near-literal way, then, Tapa is interested in dirty realism.

His desire to not employ any actors from Delhi or Mumbai meant that for his central character he auditioned about 70 boys who had shown up in response to the posters he had put up on the walls of Srinagar. When I read this, I thought about Truffaut’s “400 Blows.” Truffaut had placed an ad in the papers and that is how he found the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud; the boy had run away from boarding school to audition for the film. There is a great deal of freshness and charm in “400 Blows”; there is also a great deal of visual poetry in the way in which Truffaut’s camera looks at his beloved city. Even when portraying poverty, or cruelty, there is a sensitive attention to form and sensual detail. Such attention is missing in Tapa, and it’s possible he is simply not interested in a familiar form of aestheticism.

According to the press materials, when looking for his female lead, Tapa posted notices at several girls’ technical colleges but not at drama schools. There is a well thought-out but also rather severe, and in my judgment, limiting, logic of artistic creation at work here. Like the refusal to treat Kashmir as a location of exotic beauty, this determination to use actors who have no previous experience is a part of the same resolve to eschew–what exactly? Clichés? Yes, but Kashmir is the place where, as Tapa knows well, cinema-halls were gutted by militants or turned into garrisons by the security forces. There is no widespread culture of cinema in the valley. In the absence of any shared convention of movie-making as well as movie-watching, the actors often appear a little lost. Or maybe it isn’t the actors but only the viewer. The conventional viewer like me who doesn’t know if the character I saw stumble or hesitate on the screen was doing so because he faced a moral quandary or because he just didn’t know how to act in front of the camera.

The truth is that Tapa’s characters don’t always know how to act – they are trapped in their situation in life, and in Kashmir. They are played by people who are not trained as actors – they translate the lives of others with different degrees of ease or unease. There is a connection between those two things.

Let’s consider the scene where Dilawar makes a list of steps that are necessary in romance. Perhaps he should first say hello? He then writes down the second step: “So what’s after hello? Marry me?” He decides this is wrong. Another friend says he should say “hello” a thousand times–except, in a rush, he can just say “good evening” fifty times. While watching the sequence, I thought, “This is the independence that the Kashmiri want.” Which is not to say that the only demand the Kashmiris have from the world is the desire to be set free to love. Instead, it is to recognize that a character’s search for identity or for the right kind of knowledge can be seen also as the desire for a people to define their independence. I like this very much. All good works of art must ask this question: you want to breathe free, yes, but do you know how to kiss?

I couldn’t have been alone in this, but it was only after the news of Mubarak’s departure that I watched for the first time the video of Asmaa Mahfouz making her appeal for the gathering that became the protest action of January 25. That video, when posted on Facebook, became a rallying cry. As I learned a bit later from this interview with Mahfouz, January 25 was chosen because it is observed as Police Day in Egypt, and she was interested not in honoring the police but in pointing out that they were the arm of oppression. In the video you see this twenty-five-year-old woman speaking with great anguish of the three Egyptian men who had set themselves on fire to protest. It is humbling, and so wonderfully inspiring, to realize that such a tumultuous movement, one that has moved the entire world, could have had such small beginnings. The West has insisted on monumentalizing the suffering of September 11. And I don’t mean to repeat that gesture when I invoke that day even in this context. But it struck me as I watched footage of Mubarak’s departure that 2/11 was just like 9/11, except in reverse. I felt connected to everyone around me, not in grief, but with that kind of joy that makes new possibilities imaginable. What was odd or at least remarkable about all of this was that my connection to a greater world was experienced through the Internet. I was watching Al Jazeera live on my computer, and I was exchanging emails with friends, and sharing in celebrations on Facebook and Twitter. My artist-friend Daisy Rockwell had been producing small, iridescent paintings of the revolution in Egypt in her Inqilab series. I wrote to her while watching the people celebrating in Tahrir Square, begging her to commemorate the moment with a celebratory painting. Another friend, Ali Mir, who is a business professor by day and a film lyricist by night, penned some impromptu verse which he posted on Facebook: Salaam Misr ke logon ki aan baan salaam / Salaam quvvat-e baazu-e naujavaan salaam / Salaam jazba-e baaghi, ye subh-e shaan salaam / Salaam tujh pe, o Tahrir ke maidaan salaam (here is Ali again, in the role of a reluctant translator, “Salutations to the splendor of the people of Egypt / Salutations to the power of the youth / Salutations to the passion of the revolutionary, to this glorious dawn / Salutations to you, o Tahrir Square.”) As inspiring was the piece by Tariq Ali that appeared on my screen. Tariq Ali had quoted the Arab poet Nizar Qabbani:

Arab children, / Corn ears of the future, / You will break our chains. / Kill the opium in our heads, / Kill the illusions. / Arab children, / Don’t read about our suffocated generation, / We are a hopeless case, / As worthless as a water-melon rind. Don’t read about us, / Don’t ape us, / Don’t accept us, / Don’t accept our ideas, / We are a nation of crooks and jugglers. / Arab children, / Spring rain, / Corn ears of the future, / You are the generation that will overcome defeat.

There was–there is–such optimism in the air. I’d have been a bit skeptical about all this ordinarily but who can deny the reality of the millions dancing on the streets of Egypt? That and the reality of this. It makes you believe it can happen anywhere.

Painting: “Riot Girl” by Daisy Rockwell. Acrylic on wooden panel, 6″ X 6″.

You will do well to start with any of the books written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Her best-known work is Infidel. Her latest book is Nomad. She has also written a few other things. Anything written by Hirsi Ali will do; they all say the same things about the terror of Islam.

I read Nomad recently. It is littered with stories like the following: “In February 2009 in Buffalo, New York, a forty-seven-year-old Muslim businessman who had set up a cable TV station to ‘promote more favorable views of Muslims,’ beheaded his wife, who was seeking to divorce him.”

This is a short short-story. You can narrate it at parties. Imagine the shock (but perhaps not the silence, because these days everyone, it seems, has a story to tell about Islam). But you should also learn from Hirsi Ali’s style of writing. Starting with Infidel, her assault on Islam has been a spectacular success largely because she speaks from personal experience. She has suffered undeniable personal trauma but what you can emulate is her ability to cast the whole of the Islamic world as her victimizer and, in a stroke of genius, the whole of the West [read militarist, interventionist, Bible-toting US of A] as her savior.

There are other trade secrets that you can glean from a reading of Hirsi Ali.

I don’t think Hirsi Ali is popular only because she serves so well the designs of an Islamophobic West. Rather, she is read also for her simplicity and her success. That is worth thinking about. Nothing is more powerful as a shock-and-awe weapon of control than the idea called “the American Dream.” It insists that we invest the wealth of all our utopian energies in two ways of thinking: oversimplication, and delusions of grandeur that border on megalomania.

My wife’s hairstylist in our small town in upstate New York, a Muslim immigrant woman from Lebanon, has been reading Hirsi Ali in an effort to improve her English. This is because Hirsi Ali is a skilled writer. She tells her story in a direct, unadorned prose. Her style is of great assistance to her, not least because she believes in oversimplifying the world.

But Hirsi Ali is nothing if not also a seller of dreams. What she lays down on the page with such terrible earnestness is appealing because she keeps retelling the magical story of immigrant transformation. Reading her you feel redeemed. You too ought to think and write like that; if you do so, your reader will often make the mistake of going past your false righteousness and admire, instead, your grit and enterprise as a writer.

Hirsi Ali had asked once: “How many girls born in Digfeer Hospital in Mogadishu in November 1969 are even alive today? And how many have a real voice?” There’s real tragedy behind that question but at the end we only see Hirsi Ali’s high cheekbones shining on CNN.

You, Young Islamophobe, have shown great enterprise in choosing this moment to pursue your dreams. A conservative think-tank will soon be reaching out to you. I’m a messenger of your future well-being.

Yours etc.,

Amitava Kumar

[Mutineers, the Asian American Writers' Workshop sent two dinner tickets and six cocktail-hour tickets for this event. Who wants them? And why? The first eight to convince us they should be there get the goods. More details: Featuring Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzru, Faiza Patel, and others. Tuesday, November 2, 6-7 pm dinner with authors, 7-9pm cocktail program. At the home of Faiza Patel, 111 Hudson Street, Apt. 6, New York City. Dinner with authors 6-7pm. Cocktails & literary discussion., 7-9pm.]

[Amitava Kumar and Lorraine Adams will be in conversation today, August 27, at 6.30 PM at the Aicon Gallery in New York City. Admission is free.]

I have just received a letter from a man in prison. His name is Hemant Lakhani. Lakhani was a women’s clothing salesman who, in 2005, was convicted of selling an Igla missile to an FBI informant posing as a member of a jihadist organization.

Lakhani is one of the people I write about in my new book A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Bomb. He learned about the book’s publication by reading a review in the New York Times.

Mr. Lakhani writes to congratulate me but also to invite me back. There is more to tell, he writes. If I listen to his story, and write about it, he promises me that the book will be a bestseller. I will be interviewed by the mainstream press, including Charlie Ross (sic).

The Times review had also mentioned that I had visited a strip-club outside the Missouri high-security prison where Lakhani is incarcerated. I had a conversation there with a dancer about the man I had come to meet in Missouri. This didn’t sit well with Mr Lakhani and he writes in his letter that I must promise him that I will not go back to the strip-club again. Actually, in my opinion, Mr Lakhani is neither very moral nor very smart. But like his lawyer I’m very convinced that his client would not have made a good arms smuggler. No real terrorist would have come to him. There is little chance that he would have acquired a missile unless the FBI had arranged for one to be given to him.

Mr Lakhani is 75 years old and in poor health. It is very likely that he will die in prison. His letter to me is a sad document, and I apprehend its appeal, but I’m unwilling to engage it any further. It is true that I’m critical of the US government’s war on terror, and its futile and expensive engagement with minor characters like Mr. Lakhani. But that doesn’t mean that I’m also willing to pack up my bags any time soon and leave for Missouri.

But mine is hardly the only way to write about the war on terror.

Lorraine Adams is an American writer who was awarded a Pulitzer for work in journalism. But she quit her job as an investigative reporter for the Washington Post to write a prize-winning debut novel, Harbor. The novel tells the story of Aziz Arkoun, a 24-year-old Algerian stowaway who surfaces in the waters of Boston harbor.

Aziz was based on a real-life character, an Algerian man named Aziz Ouali, a 26-year-old East Boston dishwasher. He too had been a stowaway. After spending 52 days in the hold, he had swum ashore. This was in the late nineties. An Algerian man named Ahmed Ressam tried to cross into the US, near Seattle, with the trunk of his rental car packed with explosives. Soon, the government carried out a massive sweep, detaining Algerians across the board. Ressam was carrying a cellphone number that led the police to another Algerian man who was a room-mate of Aziz Ouali’s. They were all arrested.

In Adams’s treatment of her character, there is a great deal of sympathy. Aziz Arkoun has a rich past; like Ouali, he is a refugee from political violence. But, in what is certainly more a feature of fiction, Adams endows her protagonist with a fine and sensitive interior life. He is sentient in a way that earns the reader’s respect.

A few months ago, Adams wrote about the fate of Aziz Ouali. He was in prison, awaiting deportation. Ouali is a flawed character, of course, and Adams’s attention to this ambiguity is a part of the persuasiveness of her plea. In fact, the many pitfalls in his life, some of his own doing, make for heartbreaking reading.

In doing what she is doing, Adams has produced fiction that stands in opposition to the Manichean fictions of the post-9/11 state. In Mao II, Don DeLillo had famously written: “I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.” But people like to repeat this quote without in any way elaborating on the fact that the surveillance state has been most successful at governing our social spaces and our individual imaginations. An Aziz Ouali knows he is alive, or he is well, or if his family is whole, if he can see the outline of his face on a tiny piece of plastic called a green card.

The argument I am making here could be made clearer with another example. Do you remember the news-report about a videotape that showed Jose Padilla, jailed in solitary confinement for three and a half years, being taken out to a dentist? Padilla, jailed on suspicion of plotting a dirty-bomb attack, had been in his cell in the army brig in Charleston, South Carolina. In the report, his lawyers said that the video-tape showed that the torture, including solitary confinement, which their client has undergone at the hands of the military, has left him so psychologically damaged that he could not stand trial. In fact, Padilla’s lawyers had a difficult time persuading him that they were on his side.

In an article in Artforum, critic Graham Bader had this to say about Padilla: “In the videotape documenting one short episode of his military detention, he is shown on his way to a root canal down the hall from his cell, wearing blackout goggles and noise-blocking headphones, thereby prevented from experiencing even briefly anything outside himself, outside his merest existence as bare life, wholly at the whim of the state.” The video is testimony to “the state’s role in authoring the most basic experiences of life and death.”

The state is the real author, not Adams, not I. The state produces our stories and handcuffs them to our selves. We can reach out for other stories, but it is difficult. Adams has written that Ouali didn’t have enough English to read Harbor. His wife, an American woman from Boston, never told him about it. She said it was too painful.

Amitava Kumar and Lorraine Adams will be in conversation today, August 27, at 6.30 PM at the Aicon Gallery in New York City. Admission is free.

Klingeman: “Do you go to parties and talk to people about what you do for a living and tell them that you’re an informant?” Rehman: “No, sir.” Klingeman: “So again, who shows you respect for what you do?” Rehman: “Whenever you see any crime behind it there’s an informant and when someone is arrested. And when any time someone stops the crime behind it there’s an informant. And the whole world respects him. That–when I say respect that’s what I mean.” I was struck by this exchange, mostly because it showed the informant as the mirror image of the defendant: a man of small means, beset with difficulties, projecting himself onto a grand stage. Each one was a failed man in many ways, a failed man, with more than a touch of desperation, dreaming of success. Both were immigrants, afraid of their perceived worthlessness, worried at the ways in which each plan they had devised had proved ineffectual. Each one tried to impress the other about how he was at home in the West. The two had their origins in enemy countries divided by a border; not once did they talk of their own religious difference or say anything bad about the other’s faith or religion. The two men were worried about their families and both were committed to the cheap art of the hustle. Each believed in making a deal. Each was lying for a cause, if dreaming of a better life can be described as a cause. I wonder whether at any time during their association as business partners, there had been a moment when one of them had seen himself in the other, and whether this recognition had made him flinch.

I very much wanted to share this with Sepia Mutiny readers. If Amardeep is not going to be around, someone else will have to answer the question whether the readers here, in contrast to the listeners of the Leonard Lopate Show, will find something different or more resonant in passages like the one I have quoted above. Because one of the things I think you’ve been talking about is the shaping of a reading practice: through the cultivation of affiliations but also the discovery of sympathy, often sympathy rooted in shared histories. Thank you, Amardeep, for having so long held a mirror for us.

P.S. For more on the art shown here, visit the “Malleable Memory” Exhibit at the Aicon Gallery in NYC. The show is curated by Nitin Mukul. At the beginning of this blog post, you see Eric Ayotte’s “Media Event (The Wish)” and, at the bottom, Anjali Srinivasan’s “Mirror Painting #4″. (In the middle is the “Unda Chicken Roll” illustration from the Kati Roll Menu.

[Originally published in The Caravan under the title "A Normal Man in a Not So Normal World." Photos by Preston Merchant.]

On a warm July morning, I boarded the London Tube to Boston Manor station. The southbound Piccadilly Line, represented by a Navy Blue line on my map, would terminate at Heathrow airport. My stop came a few stations before the line ended.

The people I had come to meet were waiting outside in a car, and after introductions had been made, we drove to a store to buy meat and beer for lunch. The man who was driving was in his early 30s. He wore a stylish shirt and dark glasses. His name was Aryian Singh, but he later told me that this wasn’t what he had been named at birth. He had changed his name after he had come out of prison. When I questioned him about his job, he said he was working on a couple of film projects but didn’t provide details. I noticed that there were small scars on his face. I later learned that a couple of them were from injuries inflicted by his mother when he was a kid–once, his mother had smashed his face with a milk bottle.

The man whose face I was now watching in the rearview mirror interested me. His name change and the reason for it wasn’t what one has come to expect as a staple of Indian fiction about diasporic lives–Samiullah changing to Sam or a Madhu becoming Maddy, one pining for the neem tree outside his ancestral home and the other for her mother’s cardamom-scented fish curry. In those stories, particularly those written in the US, the only crime a human seems capable of is forgetting to write a letter home. Or if there are transgressions they seem to have blossomed out of a fantasy spun out in a garden called a creative writing MFA program. But Aryian Singh’s story appeared to be different. Sitting in the backseat of the silver Mercedes E220, I imagined an entry into another life. Not one offered as homage to quiet domesticity but one lived in recognition of the reality of the street. Singh lives in a modest, semi-detached house with his wife and a couple of boarders. There is also a dog in the house, a handsome German Shepherd named Simba. Singh’s father, a large, taciturn man named Gurdev, was in the house that day. He had come from India as a teenager several decades ago and worked first in a factory that printed labels for bottles. He had also worked in construction, and as a cook, making chicken tikka at a restaurant. He now began to prepare the chicken and fish that his son had bought at a Punjabi butchery on Uxbridge Road after picking me up at the station.

We were sitting around a tiny table in the kitchen, a few feet from the stove, drinking beer from tall glasses. Singh’s wife was away, visiting her family, but he wanted to show me their wedding album. I saw from the photographs that the wedding had cost money; and the commemorative album came boxed in black velvet. It was while looking at the album that I noticed that Singh’s mother was missing from the pictures.

The older man rarely spoke but his son joked with him, and teased him with sexual banter, and this surprised me. This was because the father, Gurdev, despite his many-decades-long absence from India, could still be mistaken for a man from Jallandhar. Gurdev was probably used to more deferential, patriarchal treatment. When I commented on their warm relationship, the son told me quite frankly that his father had been missing from his life for eight years. His parents had separated when he was young, and when he was 13 his mother gave him up to social services. He became a ward of the state, and lived in a succession of children’s homes. He hadn’t been in touch with his father, and rarely saw his mother. He was no longer attending school after he lost his home. He said he had been in trouble with the law. But one day, standing outside a children’s home with a girl, he saw Gurdev visiting the house next door. “That’s my Dad,” he said to the girl, who thought he was joking. When his father came out of the house, he recognized the boy whom he had not seen for several years and asked, “Kiddaan? How are you?” The two have been close ever since, except for the long periods when the son has been behind bars.

Earlier, Singh had been telling me that when he was in the children’s home, he fell in with the wrong crowd and started using drugs. Then I learned that around that same time he and two of his mates broke into a house–they had needed to use a bathroom. One of them decided to pick up a car stereo and jewelry but later they got scared and tried to return the stolen goods. They got caught. This was Singh’s first scrape with the police but he and his friends got off lightly with a burglary warning.

I asked him when had he first gone to prison. Singh was sent to Stanford House in Acton at age 15, where juveniles were incarcerated for crimes that, if they had been adults, would have earned them a life sentence. The charges against Singh, for criminal acts he had committed when he was 14, included kidnapping, robbery, false imprisonment, and carjacking. After Singh escaped from this facility, he turned himself in and entered an institution in Feltham for under 21-year-olds, a place notorious for its high suicide rates. He was in prison for nearly two years and returned there again after nine months because he had committed armed robbery while he was out. What were the guns used? Singh seemed prepared to recite a list but stopped at “Shotguns.” He received a six-year sentence but was granted parole after three years for good behavior.

Perhaps because he was describing events that had taken place more than 15 years ago, or more likely, because he was describing a person that he didn’t believe he was any longer, Singh spoke without embarrassment. In fact, there was an undeniable charm in his narration, balancing details of the horrors of prison life with evidence that he survived to tell the story. During his first stint in prison, he had escaped and, in the process, even managed to imprison in his cell the men who were supposed to guard him. I marveled at his knowing how to make his bid for freedom but he grinned and said that if I had been locked up, I too would have known from repeated observation the right key on the guard’s belt that would open the prison locks.

The chicken that Singh’s father had made was spicy and very tasty. We ate it with thin slices of raw onion and salad. It was cool inside the kitchen and the men would step out into the backyard to smoke. There were companionable silences, and then I’d get Singh to pick up the thread of his story. I became aware that Aryian Singh, with his devilish charm and roguishness, and also his ambition, reminded me of someone I knew, a fictional character who had inhabited my mind for three years. This was Rabinder, one of the leading characters in my own novel, just published in the US under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing. When we first meet Rabinder, he is in a prison near Patna, dreaming of owning a cellphone agency when he comes out. More than that, he wants to film a commercial for his product, using as actors his childhood friend who is now a Bollywood star. He wants the actor to be sitting alone in a cell, putting a phone to his ear and calling a woman who would be played by Manisha Koirala or Raveena Tandon. The woman’s lips would part to say something but the viewer wouldn’t hear what she was saying because of the sound of the music beating like waves on a beach. The song on the soundtrack, filled with yearning and promise, would be AR Rahman’s hit from Bombay: Tu hee re, Tu hee re…tere bina main kaise jeeoon. By the time the novel ends, Rabinder is out of prison and his head is full of ideas about films that can be made about Bihar. He collaborates with a popular director, someone who very much resembles Mahesh Bhatt, on a film that deals with migrant youth and terrorism and is called Prithvi, or The Earth.

After Singh came out of prison, he attended a 16-week filmmaking course at the Brighton Film School. He showed me the script he had written as part of his diploma work: it was called Loose Talk and turned around a series of scenes in an interrogation room. Right now, he is more interested in a script that began to take shape in his mind three years ago while he worked as a chauffeur at Heathrow and other places. It is centered around a chauffeur whose resentment and rage is exploited first by jihadists and then by the intelligence services. The idea would be to make a thriller with twists and betrayals. When I asked him who he’d like to see act in the film, Singh said, “Anupam Kher and Robert De Niro.”

That is Singh’s dream but, at the moment, he is helping a rich relative sell double-glaze windows to businesses. It is impossible for anyone to foretell whether he will find work, or funding, as a filmmaker. If I were to be honest, I’d say that for me the real story was not in the imagined fiction about international intrigue but in the real details of Singh’s own life. He told me that once when he was working in the prison canteen he heard a woman’s voice that was filled with kindness. He went to talk to her and discovered that she taught writing in that prison. Singh told her that he wrote in his cell and he would like her to look at what he had written. She agreed. The teacher was very impressed, Singh told me, and helped defer his transfer to another prison just so that he could continue writing under her supervision.

Could I see what he had written for her? Singh told me that his older sister, Anita, probably had the file. He called her and, sure enough, she had it safely stored. I took the phone from Singh and asked Anita, who was just about to leave for work at Tesco’s, whether she’d mind reading me the opening lines of what her brother had written. This is what she read out:

I was born on May 21st, 1978. I’m not anyone famous, nor am I saint or a devil. But I’m someone you know. Everyone who punishes knows who I am. Everyone who receives punishment knows who I am. Everyone who loves, everyone who hates, everyone who wants, everyone who needs, they all know who I am. I’m a normal man in a not so normal world. But then, what is a normal world and what is a normal man?

As Anita went on reading, in a calm voice, I found myself responding to the unadorned, bare poetry of Singh’s prose. For years, we have read Indian writers who ventriloquise the voices of the underclass; in the diaspora, especially in America where I live, you won’t find a single desi writer who doesn’t have a university degree. It is a small, insulated world where everyone breathes the closed suffocating air of privilege. I thought, as I listened to Anita, that I was hearing a new, different kind of testimony as literature. Art in this case had been refined by experience. I asked Anita why she had held on to her brother’s prison notebook and she said to me, without hesitating, that reading it had reminded her of all the things in her life that she had either forgotten or tried to forget. She had possibly been talking of her childhood, of her parents’ alcoholism, or even perhaps her first marriage, to an Indian man who dealt in heroin and had employed her young brother when he was a teenager.

After our phone call, I asked Singh what had gone wrong between his parents. He looked up at his father, standing beside the stove, and asked him in Punjabi if it was okay for him to tell me. The older man said yes. Singh said that his mother had come from India as a little girl. When she was older, her father took in lodgers in their house in Southall, and she fell in love with one of them. Singh’s grandfather didn’t like this and asked the lodger, a young migrant from Punjab, to leave the house. A marriage was arranged between the young girl and Gurdev but it was a loveless relationship. His father started drinking, and then his mother did too. Their home just fell apart. Then, strangely, his mother accused Gurdev of having sexually abused their children. He was arrested and taken to prison. It was only when Anita and Aryian told their maternal grandfather that their mother had forced them to make their statements to the police that the case was dropped and Gurdev released.

Singh had spoken of his mother without affection; in fact, he blamed her for some of what had gone wrong in his life. Yet, in one page of his journal, which I later saw, he had written with sympathy about the tragedy of his parents’ marriage and, more particularly, of his mother’s fate:

The sadness of my mother, being taken away from her childhood sweetheart, forced into a marriage, bearing children to a man she hardly knew, probably never loved and seeing no future for herself…whilst for my father the confusion of his wife’s strange behaviour, coping with her resentment for his family and living everyday with the constant mood swings of his wife.

As a writer, Singh had no doubt done what he had accomplished with his name change. He had invented a new self, not in the sense of fabricating a tall tale, but instead shaping a coherent story of what had made and unmade him. That is why I valued this story as much, if not more, than the story he was trying to tell about a chauffeur, though I wished him success in bringing that project to fruition. After all, who doesn’t like danger, and delight in watching thrillers? I myself experienced a small frisson of delight when, in the car on the way back to my train, Singh rubbed his eyes tiredly in response to a question I was asking and said, “Well, I have left that life behind. But even now…I could make a call and men would come and take you to an empty room somewhere. They’d tie you in a chair, pour petrol over you, and set you on fire… But I have learned to control my anger. I don’t let anything get to me.”

Tuna Princess by Daisy Rockwell

**Mohamed Mahmood Alessa was arrested with his friend (and co-conspirator) on the way to join a militant group in Somalia. His mother has said that he wanted to take his cat, Tuna Princess, with him, but she did not allow it and they argued. **

Acrylic on wooden panel, 14″ x 14″

I haven’t unpacked my bags yet. Just yesterday I was in North Adams, Massachusetts, where I had driven on Thursday to attend the opening of Rasgulla, Daisy Rockwell’s art-show. (Daisy is a wonderful artist whose work I hadn’t known about till only a few months ago; I have met her since, and regard her as a close friend.) The exhibition in North Adams of Diasy’s paintings draws upon the idea of what Sanskrit aestheticians called “rasas,” the nine perfected moods, distillations of human emotions into a pure form. An important part of the exhibition is Daisy’s exploration of “political rasas,” her attempt to take fleeting news-images of public figures and turn them into physical objects. You see the painting of the Ayatollah in a purple forest; Barack Obama as a boy, standing on the tarmac with his father’s arms around him; Sarah Palin, wearing red shoes, sitting on a sofa, surrounded by dead animals. For me, the greatest interest lay in Daisy’s paintings of those accused of terrorist acts. I have long held that many of the writers and artists working in the aftermath of 9/11 have presented a faux familiarity with the so-called terrorist mind. Daisy’s art makes no such claims. It returns us to what is real–and therefore surprising–about human lives. She has painted portraits of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, and there must be some bravery involved in putting these up on the walls of a gallery, but what Daisy is especially good at is painting those one would call ordinary terrorists. These are people who might be behind bars but in the paintings emerge as individuals, as individuals who are neither particularly heroic nor particularly villainous. This isn’t what DeLillo was writing about in a story that invoked Gerhard Richter–this isn’t about a viewer seeing that even terrorists can be forgiven. There is too much irony in Daisy’s paintings, and often, also glitter. There is ambiguity, perhaps, and more than that, a plain sense of attention. It is as if in an effort to find more about the world in which we are living, a world where the war on terror is a fact, the artist has finally found a human face.

But the state lacks all subtlety. Earlier this evening, I read that a six-year-old girl from Ohio, Alyssa Thomas, has been put on a “no-fly” list. Her father, Santhosh Thomas, a doctor, has readily admitted that Alyssa has probably been mean to her sister in the past. And added, “She may have threatened her sister, but I don’t think that constitutes Homeland Security triggers.” I think Daisy should paint the portrait of this little terrorist.

Objects are like people: they can tell you where they come from. I count objects that look desi. Look at the plane above. You have probably seen that art on trucks in places like Lahore or Ludhiana. It might be two in the afternoon. It is hot and dry around you, the man selling sugarcane juice is sleeping in the shade of a tree, and there’s no one else around. Your shadow is the smallest you’ve ever seen in your life. And then a truck comes to a stop beside you. The exhaust pours out as if from a chimney in a brick kiln. If you look past it, however, you see painted on the side of the truck, a landscape that includes snowy peaks, colorful huts, cool skies, fields brimming with flowers that will live longer even than plastic. Folk utopia!

Now, what happens when that painting is transposed on to the body of an airplane? The wish for flight becomes literal as a vehicle for the imagination. I imagine this make-believe airplane as a prop in one of those old-fashioned studios, the kind where couples stand in front of the backdrop of a waterfall. The painting touches me by its use of color, and its playfulness. It is the work of Sana Arjumand, a highly talented Pakistan-based artist whose paintings are on display at the Aicon Gallery in New York.

The other works on display convey the same visual wit–and verbal wit, too, if you think about the titles. For instance, “Let’s Give Each Other Space,” in which fighter aircraft draw heart-shaped patterns in the sky. I read it as a wry comment on the militarism in Pakistan, and the fatal love with its heavily-armed neighbor, India.

Arjumand’s representation of issues of identity, the ways in which they relate to gender or religion, are poignant and recognizable. Consider her works “Then Their Shadows Fell From the Sky” and “A Hundred Thousand Years of Growing Beards.” A part of the appeal of this work is that it addresses pressing contemporary realities: I delighted in them, but I was also disturbed by the easy familiarity. It reminded me of what I feel when I read a lot of South Asian fiction: on the one hand, there is the thrill of seeing real life represented on the printed page, and, on other other, there is the fear that the writer is turning an event into a symbol. Which is to say: even as I’m engaged by Arjumand’s obvious preoccupation with, say, Islam and the role of women in Pakistani society, I’m slightly turned off by her ready abstractions, the use of the crescent or the burqa or the iconic stars.

In a statement that I read online, Arjumand’s colorful airplane was described in the following manner: “Sana covers her airplane — so often associated in a post-9/11 society with the shadow fear of terrorism — with the same religious and patriotic imagery which decorate South Asian cargo trucks, subverting the shadow paradigm with playful images that invoke a spiritual path — the term Mairaj referring to the invitation from the divine to ascend the self and experience the pure essence of being…” I prefer my own reading, where I link the plane to the prop in the studio in the small-town in South Asia. In my reading, the airplane is closer to the ordinary experiences of the people around the artist. In contrast, the reading that I have quoted above, by situating the painting in the framework of 9/11 life, makes everything that is done by desi artists and writers only an extended conversation with the West. We begin to speak only in the idioms that the West itself grants us. To do so is wrong or reductive because it makes terror the only reality of desi lives. The West never was, or should be, our sole interlocutor, and the readings we do of our books and our art should attempt to multiply, rather than simplify, our complexities.