[Reader-list] Ruchir Joshi - Life during wartime

[Harsh Kapoor]

The Hindu
Sunday, October 14, 2001
Features

Life during wartime

All through his time in New York, RUCHIR JOSHI carried a bag of fear 
inside him, as the city never lost a certain hum of general 
aggression and nastiness. But it also had a chaotic warmth ... a 
sense of camaraderie, its inhabitants happy at living in the innards 
of this particular beast and no other. New York was the world, and 
the whole planet sent bits of itself to the city as human tithe. The 
first of a two-part article.

WHEN I lived in New York I never saw it as a part of America. New 
York was New York and, even though I had no plans to settle there, it 
felt like it belonged to me as much as anyone else. America, on the 
other hand, was emphatically not mine. America was the soulless mess 
that began once you came out of the tunnel or got off the bridge into 
New Jersey or southern New York state. The grey suburban-industrial 
penumbra of the city was a truly foreign place and not where I liked 
spending any time. I journeyed out when I needed to, on as few 
occasions as possible, and escaped back to the city as fast as I 
could.

I rented a top floor garret between Avenue B and Avenue C, not too 
far from Wall Street. The World Trade Center (WTC) was pretty close 
by NYC standards - a friend who lived next door and worked down near 
Tribeca got there in 15 minutes every morning - but for all real 
purposes the twin towers were on the other side of the planet, so far 
away that they could even have been in America. Downtown was where 
all the world's money was, and the East Village was where all the 
world's money was not, unless of course you happened to be in the 
narcotics trade.

I loved this non-American, un-dollared, neighbourhood which had been 
the first beachhead on the continent for so many generations of 
immigrants, from Ukranians and Poles in the early 20th Century to, 
more recently, the Puerto Ricans and Bangladeshis. I loved the sounds 
that welcomed me as I returned home every day, the old alcoholics in 
Tomkins Square beating up mad salsa rhythms on their beer cans, the 
timbre of each can changing as it emptied, the warring boom-boxes on 
the basketball courts, the modern-jazz guy reverberating the empty 
school building across my street with his tenor sax, the acappella of 
police sirens, the broad Belfastese of the Irish Republican Army 
(IRA) priest who ran the boys' shelter next door, the deep hammer of 
a Harley when a local Hell's Angel landlord rode by, cruising for 
some tenant late on his rent.

As I climbed up the six floors to my "apartment" there was also a 
whole sequence of smells, and I could almost identify each floor with 
my eyes closed: stale urine and dirty cat litter on the ground, ganja 
on the second, pork fat frying on the fourth, industrial strength 
bug-killer on the fifth, old dust and fresh coffee on my own floor, 
the sixth.


No, it was not America, or not just America, it was the whole world, 
and I was sure it was like no other place on earth.

It was not always nice. All through my time in New York I carried a 
little bag of fear inside me, and there were times, when faced with a 
gun or a knife, when the bag burst open and spilled out total, 
abject, terror. Besides the fear, the city never lost a certain hum 
of general aggression and nastiness. Then there was a visibility to 
poverty here that put the visibility of the rich into sharp relief, 
like morning light shining sideways on a tall building. There was 
that huge verticality always dwarfing you, and that fed into a 
particular New York loneliness. If you happened to be broke when the 
December wind funnelled down an avenue and jumped you, it could 
become chillingly clear that nobody really gave a damn whether you 
were starving or not.

But the city also had a chaotic warmth. I came from Calcutta, and 
there were similarities that I appreciated. The naked garbage on the 
streets was comforting, as was the maelstrom of traffic - there was 
the satisfaction that not everything worked and not everything had 
to; strangers would pick up conversations, have opinions they needed 
to communicate, advice to offer about your shoes, and questions to 
ask about the universe; friendships would form much faster than in 
other western cities - there was a sense of camaraderie against this 
beast we were living in, but we also shared an electric sense of 
adventure, a happiness at living in the innards of this particular 
beast and no other.

New York was the world, and the whole planet sent bits of itself to 
the city as human tithe. In one day, without being conscious of it at 
all, I would find I had stopped at the Cuban's bodega to buy my 
coffee beans, visited the bakery run by the three old Jews on East 
9th to get bagels and poppy seed cake, shook hands with the East 
African Gujaratis running the subway newstand ("Bawss, ek Playboy 
aney ek Voice aapjo ney!"), chatted to the Ukranian lady as she 
served me my lunch of borsht and chala bread at Veselka, visited the 
trendy new Japanese restaurant for a quick beer, and ended the 
evening knocking back Wyborowa Vodka and cursing the Soviet 
leadership in the Polish bar called Blue and Gold; and most of all of 
this within seven minutes of where I lived.

Besides my American friends, around me also lived several different 
non-Americans who had nothing to do with running shops and 
restaurants. Till I reached New York, job-descriptions such as 
"bohemian", "revolutionary", "exile" and "dissident" were only 
romantic words I had seen on paper. In the East Village I found 
myself surrounded by real exiles and dissidents. As I looked around 
at the diverse people around me I totted up yet more lists and this 
was the "political" one: there were the two Iranian Communists who 
had been persecuted by the Shah's Savak and who then had comrades 
executed by the Ayatollah's goons; then there were the 
anti-communists, some young Cubans, and the slightly older Poles, one 
of whom gave me a real Solidarity union badge from the Gdansk 
shipyards; there was the anti-Zionist Israeli sculptor; and then 
there were a couple of Palestinians at the breakfast diner who kept 
to themselves, but who began nodding hello to me once they realised I 
was Indian. In the middle of all this there was me, neither an exile 
nor a dissident, very happy to be where I was for the time being, and 
happy precisely because I knew I could always go back home to a 
normal life in Calcutta.

Despite all the craziness, there was a normalcy to New York too. 
Life's major upheavals happened elsewhere and we, as was due to those 
living at the centre of the world, received news of them. In no 
particular sequence, I remember the following taking place between 
the Augusts of 1981 and 1982: Jaruzelski's crackdown on the 
Solidarity movement which signalled the beginning of the end of the 
Soviet Empire; the war in the Falklands, which would be cited nine 
years later as a kind of precedent and model for the Gulf War; the 
first cases of AIDS starting to come to public notice; the war in 
Afghanistan escalating as the war between Iran and Iraq continued; 
Britain exploding into race riots; Israel invading Lebanon, and the 
butchery at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps being overseen by an 
ex-Panzer General called Ariel Sharon.

There were things brewing in India too, but I was less aware of these 
than I should have been. I was far more interested in the events in 
other parts of the world. There were signs though, if only I had been 
clever enough to read them, and they would lead to a shattering of 
many normalcies that I took for granted at the time.

Over the next decade, all the components of September 11 would 
appear, one by one, in the arena of Indian politics. Before the 
Lockerbie crash there would be the bomb which exploded Air India's 
"Kanishka" - the first instance where airport security was breached 
not to take hostages but to bring a plane down. Next, Rajiv Gandhi 
was killed by a woman with a bomb strapped to her body - till then 
the highest profile murder by a suicide bomber. Bombs also went off 
in an attempt to destroy the Air India building and the Bombay Stock 
Exchange, two tall buildings standing near the sea, in the financial 
heart of the major commercial city of the country. These and the 
other blasts across Bombay were in retaliation for attacks on 
Muslims. Looking back, one can see the whole kit that went into 
making the WTC atrocity being laid out, as if a macabre collagist was 
cutting out the various bits he was later going to stick together to 
make a bigger deconstruction.

In New York I had, of course, no idea that any of this was coming. 
Despite knowing so many people, all of whom were, in some sense, 
questioning where they had come from and where they now found 
themselves, I continued to hold on to a certain idea of India - one I 
had carried with me in some shape or form throughout my conscious 
life. Despite its many problems, mistakes and failures, India, to me, 
was the "good guy", stable, and inherently decent. India was the 
David to the Goliaths of America, the former USSR and China. India 
was, in more ways than one, home.


I was from India but also, in a deep sense, India was from me. In 
retrospect, it seems a crazily nave idea to have retained till the 
ripe age of 21. I was old enough to know better, and it was in New 
York, in the international bhelpuri I found myself in, that my 
picture of India first got dented and began its irretrievable slide 
towards disintegration.

The first time "India" got knocked was at a falafel stall near 
Madison Square Garden. Whenever I passed by I used to pick up a kebab 
and pita from this place. The two guys who ran it looked like they 
were from my part of the world, but I never had the time to ask them. 
Then, one day, as the man handed me my loaded pita, he asked me - 
"Where you from?" "India," I said, "What about you?" "Kashmir, I am 
coming from Kashmir." I nodded. "So, same. India, no?" The man's eyes 
flashed and he shook his head. "Not India! Azad Kashmir!" Some 
patriotic gland inside me secreted adrenalin and I retorted, "Oh, you 
mean Pakistan Occupied Kashmir!" The man was about to hand me my 
change, but he froze when I said this. I would swear to myself later 
that if he had had a kebab skewer or a meat knife handy he would have 
cut me open. For that one paused moment I could see the options 
flashing through his eyes. Something in him decided not to kill me in 
broad daylight on one of the busiest crossroads in the world. Instead 
he leaned forward and spoke quite slowly, making sure I got it. "No 
India and no Pakistan. One day all Kashmir - free!" Then he pressed 
the change into my hand as if giving me back all of India.

I dismissed the man as some fool loaded with the delusion that 
Pakistan would ever let Kashmir be independent. I tried to put the 
incident out of my mind, but the Kashmiri had opened a Pandora's box. 
A couple of weeks later, I fell into a conversation with a 
Bangladeshi man who told me he had fought in the Mukti Bahini against 
the Pakistanis in 1971. True or false, I was fascinated by his 
stories and quite unprepared for what happened as we came out of the 
bar.

"I would say let us meet again," he said to me, his slurring making 
it difficult for me to understand his East Bengali accent, "but I 
have found it is best not give you Indian bastards too much. You can 
never trust an Indian. First we thought you were our friends, but now 
... but now." He expelled some abuses that I recognised despite the 
accent, " ... now we know, really, really what Big Brother means!" He 
spat a couple more expletives at me and turned and walked away, 
leaving me mystified.

India, as far as I remembered, had given shelter to hundreds of 
thousands of East Bengali refugees fleeing the murderous Pakistani 
army. Finally, our own army had gone in, fighting a war to free what 
was now Bangladesh from Pakistan.

I just could not understand the man - what had India done wrong? 
Equally confusing was the drunken Nepali who tried to beat me up one 
January night outside the Astor Place subway. "You! India! Bastard!" 
I can still remember the words coming out of his mouth, three 
distinct shapes smoking up in the winter air as he lurched after me, 
throwing punches. As I sprinted away from the madman the same 
question ran with me - why? And then a variation of it, when once or 
twice Sikhs I passed on the street looked at me funny - had they, 
perhaps, mistaken me for a Pakistani?

(To be continued)

(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.