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

We came to a point where a rectangular platform of cement shone brightly under the sun. The Director stepped up to it and placed his feet in the middle. "This was my house," he said. "Only the foundation was concrete. The rest was wood. My wife used to say that she had moved from a white house to a log cabin. You see, she was from an affluent family — she grew up in a bungalow with an air conditioner. She used to teach English in a school here, but she always wanted to leave. I applied many times, but the transfer never came." He paused, thinking back. For much of the time that we had been together his voice had carried a note of sharp but undirected annoyance; now it softened. "There was so much she could have achieved," he said. "I was never able to give her the opportunity."

I reached out to touch his arm, but he shook my hand brusquely away; he was not the kind of man who takes kindly to expressions of sympathy. I could tell from his demeanor that he was accustomed to adversity and had invented many rules for dealing with it. The emotion he felt for his family he had rarely expressed; he had hoarded it inside himself, in the way a squirrel gathers food for the winter. Loath to spend it in his hectic middle years, he had put it away to be savored when there was a greater sense of ease in his life, at a time when his battles were past and he could give his hoarded love his full attention. He had never dreamed — and who could? — that one bright December day, soon after dawn, it would be stolen, unsavored, by the sea.

I began to walk toward the gently lapping waves, no more than a hundred yards away. The Director took fright at this and called me back: "Don't go that way, the tide is coming in. It's time to leave."

I turned to follow him, and we were heading back toward the blazing palms when he stopped to point to a yellow paint box peeping out of the rubble. "That belonged to Vineeta, my daughter," he said, and the flatness of his voice was harder to listen to than an outburst would have been. "She loved to paint; she was very good at it. She was even given a prize, from Hyderabad."

I had expected that he would stoop to pick up the box, but instead he turned away and walked on, gripping his bag of slides. "Wait!" I cried. "Don't you want to take the box?"

"No," he said vehemently, shaking his head. "What good will it do? What will it give back?" He stopped to look at me over the rim of his glasses. "Do you know what happened the last time I was here? Someone had found my daughter's schoolbag and saved it for me. It was handed to me, like a card. It was the worst thing I could have seen. It was unbearable."

He started to walk off again. Unable to restrain myself, I called out after him, "Are you sure you don't want it — the paint box?"

Without looking around, he said, "Yes, I am sure."

I stood amazed as he walked toward the blazing fire with his slides still folded in his grip. How was it possible that the only memento he had chosen to retrieve was those magnified images? As a husband, a father, a human being, it was impossible not to wonder, What would I have done? What would I have felt? What would I have chosen to keep of the past? The truth is, nobody can know, except in the extremity of that moment, and then the choice is not a choice at all but an expression of the innermost sovereignty of the self, which decides because nothing now remains to cloud its vision. In the manner of the Director's choosing there was not a particle of hesitation, not the faintest glimmer of a doubt. Was it perhaps that in this moment of utter desolation, there was some comfort in the knowledge of an impersonal effort? Could it be that he was seeking refuge in the one aspect of his existence that could not be erased by an act of nature? Or was there some consolation in the very lack of immediacy — did the value of those slides lie precisely in their exclusion from the unendurable pain of his loss? Whatever the reason, it was plain his mind had fixed on a set of objects that derived their meaning from the part of his life that was lived in thought and contemplation.

There are times when words seem futile, and to no one more so than a writer. At these moments it seems that nothing is of value other than to act and to intervene in the course of events. To think, to reflect, to write, seems trivial and wasteful. But the life of the mind takes many forms, and after the day had passed I understood that in the manner of his choosing, the Director had mounted the most singular, the most powerful defense of it that I would ever witness.

THE IDEA OF EMPIRE, once so effectively used by Ronald Reagan to discredit the Soviet Union, has recently undergone a strange rehabilitation in the United States. This process, which started some years ago, has accelerated markedly since September 11. References to empire are no longer deployed ironically or in a tone of warning; the idea has become respectable enough that the New York Times ran an article describing the enthusiasm it now evokes in certain circles.

It is of some significance that these circles are not easily identified as being located either on the right or on the left. If there are some on the right who celebrate the projection of U.S. power, there are others on the left who believe that the world can only benefit from an ever-increasing U.S. engagement and intervention abroad — for example, in ethnic and religious conflicts (such as those in Rwanda and Bosnia) or in states run by despotic regimes or "rogue" leaders (such as Iraq). It is on grounds like these that the idea of a new imperialism has recently been embraced by Britain's Labour Party.

That elements of the left and the right should discover common ground on the matter of empire should come as no surprise. Contrary to popular belief, empire is by no means a strictly conservative project; historically it has always held just as much appeal for liberals. Conversely, the single greatest critic of the British Empire, Edmund Burke, was an archconservative who saw imperialism as an essentially radical project, not unlike that of the French Revolution.

The idea of empire may seem too antiquated to be worth combating. But it is always the ideas that appeal to both ends of the spectrum that stand the best chance of precipitating an unspoken consensus, especially when they bear the imprimatur of such figures as the British prime minister. That is why this may be a good time to remind ourselves of some of the reasons that imperialism fell into discredit in the first place.

To begin with, empire cannot be the object of universal human aspirations. In a world run by empires, some people are rulers and some are the ruled; it is impossible to think of a situation in which all peoples possess an empire. In contrast, the idea of the nationstate, for all its failings, holds the great advantage that it can indeed be generalized to all peoples everywhere. The proposition that every human being should belong to a nation and that all nations should be equal is not a contradiction in terms, although it may well be utterly unfounded as a description of the real world.

It is precisely the exclusivism of empire that makes it a program for ever-increasing conflict. If the mark of success for a nation consists of the possession of an empire, then it follows that every nation that wants to achieve success must aspire to one. That is why the twentieth century was a period of such cataclysmic conflict: emergent powers like Germany and Japan wanted empires as proof of their success. Those who embrace the idea frequently cite the advantages of an imperial peace over the disorder of the current world situation, but this disregards the fact that the peace of the British, French, and Austro-Hungarian empires was purchased at the cost of a destabilization so radical as to generate the two greatest conflicts in human history, the world wars. Because of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, there can be no doubt that a twenty-first-century empire would have consequences that are graver still.