Amitav Ghosh - Incendiary Circumstances - A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

…Mother,

they asked me, So how's the writing? I answered My mother

is my poem. What did they expect? For no verse

sufficed except the promise, fading, of Kashmir

and the cries that reached you from the cliffs of Kashmir

(across fifteen centuries) in the hospital. Kashmir,

she's dying! How her breathing drowns out the universe

as she sleeps in Amherst.

The poem is packed with the devices that he had perfected over a lifetime: rhetorical questions, imperative commands, lines broken or punctuated to create resonant and unresolvable ambiguities. It ends, characteristically, with a turn that is at once disingenuous and wrenchingly direct.

For compared to my grief for you, what are those of Kashmir,

and what (I close the ledger) are the griefs of the universe

when I remember you — beyond all accounting — O my mother?

For Shahid, the passage of time produced no cushioning from the shock of the loss of his mother: he relived it over and over again until the end. Often he would interrupt himself in mid-conversation: "I can't believe she's gone; I still can't believe it." The week before his death, on waking one morning, he asked his family where his mother was and whether it was true that she was dead. On being told that she was, he wept as though he were living afresh through the event.

In the penultimate stanza of "Lenox Hill," in a breathtaking, heart-stopping inversion, Shahid figures himself as his mother's mother:

"As you sit here by me, you're just like my mother,"

she tells me. I imagine her: a bride in Kashmir,

she's watching, at the Regal, her first film with Father.

If only I could gather you in my arms, Mother,

I'd save you — now my daughter — from God. The universe

opens its ledger. I write: How helpless was God's mother!

I remember clearly the evening when Shahid read this poem in the living room of my house. I remember it because I could not keep myself from wondering whether it was possible that Shahid's identification with his mother was so powerful as to spill beyond the spirit and into the body. Brain cancer is not, so far as I know, a hereditary disease, yet his body had, as it were, elected to reproduce the conditions of his mother's death. But how could this be possible? Even the thought appears preposterous in the bleak light of the Aristotelian distinction between mind and body, and the notions of cause and effect that flow from it. Yet there are traditions in which poetry is a world of causality entire unto itself, where metaphor extends beyond the mere linking of words, into the conjugation of a distinctive reality. In Shahid's last months I thought often of the death of Babar, who was not just the first of the Mogul emperors but also a poet and writer of extraordinary distinction.

Shahid thought of his work as being placed squarely within a modern Western tradition. Yet the mechanics of his imagination — dreams, visions, an overpowering sense of identity with those he loved — as well as his life, and perhaps even his death, were fashioned by a will that owed more perhaps to the Sufis and the Bhakti poets than to the modernists. In his determination to be not just a writer of poetry but an embodiment of his poetic vision, he was, I think, more the heir of Rumi and Kabir than Eliot and Merrill.

The last time I saw Shahid was on the twenty-seventh of October, at his brother's house in Amherst. He was intermittently able to converse, and there were moments when we talked just as we had in the past. He was aware, as he had long been, of his approaching end, and he had made his peace with it. I saw no trace of anguish or conflict: surrounded by the love of his family and friends, he was calm, contented, at peace. He had said to me once, "I love to think that I'll meet my mother in the afterlife, if there is an afterlife." I had the sense that as the end neared, this was his supreme consolation. He died peacefully, in his sleep, at 2 A.M. on December 8.

Now, in his absence, I am amazed that so brief a friendship has resulted in so vast a void. Often when I walk into my living room, I remember his presence there, particularly on the night when he read us his farewell to the world: "I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World." I remember how he created a vision of an evening of ghazals, drawing to its end; of the bediamonded singer vanishing through a mirror; I remember him evoking the voices he loved — of Begum Akhtar, Eqbal Ahmed, and James Merrill — urging him on as he journeys toward his mother: love doesn't help anyone finally survive. Shahid knew exactly how it would end, and he was meticulous in saying his farewells, careful in crafting the envoy to the last verses of his own life.

ON MAY 11, the Indian government tested several nuclear devices at a site near the small medieval town of Pokhran, on the edge of the Thar Desert, in the western state of Rajasthan. I traveled to the area three months later. My visit coincided with the fifty-first anniversary of independence, the start of India's second half-century as a free nation. As I was heading toward Pokhran, the prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was addressing the nation from the ramparts of Delhi's Red Fort — an Independence Day tradition. Driving through the desert, I listened to him on the car radio.

Vajpayee belongs to the Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP, or the Indian People's Party), which is the largest single group in the coalition that now rules India. The BJP came to power in March, and the Pokhran tests followed two months later. The tests occasioned outpourings of joy among the BJP's members and sympathizers. They organized festivities and handed out sweetmeats on the streets to commemorate the achievement. There was talk of sending sand from the test site around the country so that the whole nation could partake of the glow from the blasts. Some of the BJP's leaders were said to be thinking of building a monument at Pokhran, a "shrine of strength" that could be visited by pilgrims. Nine days after the first tests, the prime minister flew to Pokhran himself. A celebration was organized near the crater left by the blasts. The prime minister was photographed standing on the crater's rim, looking reverentially into the pit.

But now, three months later, speaking at Red Fort, the prime minister's voice sounded oddly subdued. The euphoria had faded. On May 28, Pakistan had tested its own nuclear devices. This had had a sobering effect. In the following weeks, the rupee fell to a historic low, the stock market index fell, prices soared. The BJP's grasp on power was now none too secure.

I was traveling to Pokhran with two men whom I'd met that morning. They were landowning farmers who had relatives in the town. A friend had assigned them the task of showing me around. One man was in his sixties, with hennaed hair and a bushy mustache. The other was his son-in-law, a soft-spoken, burly man in his early forties. Their Hindi had the distinctive lilt of western Rajasthan.

It was searingly hot, and the desert wind chafed like sandpaper against our eyes. The road was a long, shimmering line. There were peafowl in the thorny trees, and the birds took wing as the car shot past, their great tails iridescent in the sunlight. Otherwise, there was nothing but scrub to interrupt the view of the horizon. In the dialect of the region, my guides told me, this area was known as "the flatland."

In Pokhran, my guides were welcomed by their acquaintances. A town official said he knew exactly the man I ought to meet. This man was sent for. His name was Manohar Joshi, and he was thirty-six, bespectacled, with a ready smile. He'd grown up in Pokhran, he told me. He was twelve in 1974, when a nuclear device was first tested in the district. The prime minister then was Indira Gandhi.