[Reader-list] Making conversation

[Alice Albinia]

There are news reports, there is the radio, there is
the occasional (from London) image on TV. But what one
misses is the conversation. Recently, when I logged
onto Sarai’s list, looking, like Gayatri, for words
about Gujarat, their absence didn’t feel like silence
to me – more like the sound on mute. I know you are
all talking about it: on the telephone, in your
offices, in the street, to the rickshawalla in the
morning. I imagine it is difficult to write such
things down. On the other hand, “What is it like?”
isn’t such a stupid question – after all, it is what
we asked friends in New York – and I am grateful for
the postings I read about Sept 11th and the emails I
got, which attempted to describe the mundane detail of
being witness to that calamity. So maybe those of us
who wanted to know should have asked the right
questions. 

In London, everybody I met at the beginning of March
talked about Gujarat; even I found myself being
questioned by people who three days before had never
heard of Vajpayee, Godhra or Lord Ram. But in London,
cliché is what one finds oneself spouting; and then
one reads the same thing in the papers; and sees it
again on TV. (For a while, cliché is cathartic.) 

One of the strangest conversations, for me, was a
silent one. Saturday morning, 2nd March, top floor of
the School of Oriental and African Studies: my weekly
Hindi class (a joyous thing about being in London). We
are five students and a teacher. I am the only
non-Indian: though only the teacher (he is from
Mussorie) and I have actually lived on the Indian
subcontinent. There’s a Tamil lawyer, a Punjabi
computer engineer, a singer from Karachi, and a
journalist from Bangladesh (… whose dad runs a
restaurant called Diwali). Second or third generation
immigrants, now middle class British citizens,
learning Hindi to have freer speech on the way back
home? And so on Saturday morning – having read the
papers, listened to the news, trawled the internet – I
asked about Gujarat. There was a silence. In our class
and outside it, we talk about Hindi films old and new,
about the Bollywood invasion of London, about how not
to eat a ‘balti’ in Diwali. Indian things common to us
all. Maybe we avoid the hard stuff? Did it seem, to
them, bad taste to discuss Hindu-Muslim atrocities in
Gujarat? (For the first time, I felt like an
outsider.) Or did they, like other British citizens,
simply not know what to say or think? (How to make
conversation about Godhra.) 

But there is no excuse for not talking about Godhra,
is there? Nor any reason to retreat into the apathy of
being an ‘outsider’. I have read Harsh Mander’s
report, and the other postings about Gujarat sent to
this List. And the things he describes remind me of
other places I have seen, and read about, and heard
of, and no doubt the people who killed in Gujarat had
these killing clichés in their minds’ eye too. 

Several Hindus I met in India explained the militancy
of the RSS or the VHP to me as the ‘studied
self-defence of an essentially pacifist people’. We
learnt it from the Muslims, they said, We had to ... 

I have never been patriotic. Neither about the country
I was born in nor any other. I don’t know who I would
fight for if I was sent into battle. I find the idea
of battle a bewildering concept, and the concept, say,
of dropping bombs on an axis of evil a preposterous
idea. So how is it, then, that conflict / battle / war
never fail to increase the popularity of the leaders
who wage them? How? How? How? Ever since I visited the
battlefields of Bosnia as a naïve nineteen year old, I
have been petrified of war. There was the evidence –
civilised affluent country – that it could happen any
time, to me, to you. Not just Sarajevo: London. Not
just Gujarat ... 

Maybe mankind is bent on destruction. Maybe it’s the
fault of the way we teach history, of the heroes and
clichés we choose. If the Balkans are red with the
blood of communal tension, so is Northern Ireland,
Chechnya and Cyprus; and if only the blood of each
Iraqi or Afghani civilian killed by British bombs
stained the hands of the nation who dropped them,
Britain would be red with it too. 

So I gave up being surprised that Gujarat had dropped
out of the British news so quickly: there was too much
other killing to catch up on. 

Often, when I sit and read the news of Bush’s latest
outrage, or Tony Blair’s new foray into
push-of-a-button carnage, I feel it is simply a matter
of time before I am listening to Iraqi/Serbian bombers
droning over my head. Or queuing up to receive Red
Cross rations. Opening aid packages put together by
sympathetic (but only so-so) Kurds … All empires come
to an end. It doesn’t require much imagination to
picture the militant Mexican (or Afghani or whoever
you choose) raising a hammer (or international trade
treaty, or UN sanction) over the head of cowering
America, and smiling: We learnt it from you too.

My most salient history lesson occurred when I was
eleven years old, and studying the Spanish Armada at
school. I will never forget the indignation and fury
on the face of the visiting Spanish boy who, for
eleven Spanish years, had been taught that particular
battle the other round. 

As scientists work to complete the mapping of the
human genome, the world awakes to the realisation that
genetically there is no such thing as race. That the
classic division of racial types is a figment of human
imagination – that we humans, ha ha, are all the same.
Who played that cosmic trick (race, religion) on us? …
I have one last fear. That someday someone will make
another startling discovery: that actually God really
does exist. And that s/he has known this truth about
humanity – and watched us burn for our ignorance – all
along. 

And now for something completely different. A Brighton
view of post 9/11: www.drparsons.co.uk


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