The biggest event on CM was the publishing of “Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination – “a curated, edited collection” of sepoy’s posts in book form, with foreword from Amitava Kumar, launched with much fanfare, and earning rave reviews (here, here).

Meanwhile, commentaries and reflections on happenings in Homistan continued to grace CM: Ramanujan’s transformative texts, Salmaan Taseer’s murder and an exploration of the “emergence of the Prophet as a centralising and orienting raison d’etre for Pakistan,” Pakistan’s fugue state and “the notion of treason and affiliation in the colonial and postcolonial setting,” the state of Pakistan’s ways of seeing, and the forgotten “memory of East Pakistan and the sins of West Pakistan.”

Sepoy continued his essays on the frontier in imperial imagination, experts and policy prescriptions that aid the myopia of empire.  Reflections on the 10 years since 9/11 by Sepoy, Farangi, and Lapata delighted CM readers, as did discussions of Imperialism and racism (I, II, III).

Lapata was busy holding art-shows and winning awards for her writing , but found time to hold a flash fiction contest with Kuzhali Manickavel as judge, which Amitava Kumar won. The Best Writer of 2010 brought us insightful review essays of Aag ka Dariya, Teju Cole’s Open City, Dictator literature, “Yashpal’s great Partition novel, Jhootha Sach,” and a reflection on the interior landscapes in early Indian novels (and an adda post!). Lapata also interviewed some “prominent Blaft personages” including the “illustrious flash fictionista Kuzhali Manickavel,” and reviewed a host of Tamil pulp fiction.

PS. Naim Sahib contributed a characteristically brilliant review of Deborah Baker’s “The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism.”

PPS. Jassasa’s Goat Spy won the internets (here, here, here, here).

PPPS. See Lapata on OBL, and dental care.

PPPPS. More pics! (here, here, here).

PPPPPS. See yours truly’s humble attempt at an essay.

I like to think I wrote a fair amount this year – maybe not as much as last year but still, a fair amount. But I also have a bunch of posts stuck in the “Draft” view. Gonna delete them, but here are the snippets for what-might-have-beens.

Objects

Yesterday, I went to see Schätzes des Agha Khan at the Martin-Gropius-Bau. Later, on the U-Bahn, I tried to rationalize why I was rather disappointed in the curator-ship. Most of the list which formed – think Africa is not a country, chronology is not a suggestion, objects have uses etc. – led back to a discussion I witnessed on the future of Museums in Berlin in early 2010. I had meant to write about it, but clearly I missed
link, link…

Things

Sir Alexander Cunningham and the Beginnings of Indian Archaeology (Dacca: Asiatic Society of Pakistan, 1966), 53n.Schmidt, Richard. (1898) Śrīvara’s Kathākautuka. Die Geschichte von Joseph in persisch- indischem Gewande. Sanskrit und Deutsch. Kiel.

People

Roma, Zigeuner, Tzigane, Gitanos, Zincali, Zutt, Jats.
In Johann Zedler’s 1749 Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Kuenste they are wicked and godless. In Denis Diderot’s 1750 dictionary they are vagabonds who will trick you. “c’est ainsi qu’on appelle des vagabonds qui font prosession de dire la bonne aventure, à l’inspection des mains. Leur talent est de chanter, danser, & voler.” By 1783 they were connected to India – philologically – as in Johann Rüdiger’s Von der Sprache und Herkunft der Zigeuner aus Indien

Sounds

The soundtrack to my recent trip: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Rant

I haven’t actually read Mohsin Hamid’s short story, Terminator: Attack of the Drone.

I joked on twitter about Hamid confusing two movie franchises.

I also commented that he was channeling Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In terms of the patois.

Ok, I read the first paragraph.

I was totally turned off his short-story in Granta: Pakistan issue which was some first-person account of a beheading.

I didn’t like it.

And I didn’t like his essay on how Pakistan is teh Awesome in an edited volume I reviewed.

Like is a flimsy word. I was angry at that essay.

I have not read his novels, except that first one.

Given all that, I am not going to say anything about the Mohsin Hamid short-story. I want to rant however on the idiocy that compels us to theorize all around the issue of the drone except to the basic point: they are a form of illegal warfare that eliminates human beings without any specific criminal judgement. Let alone civilians, the drones kill members of a violent group itself without any

Moon

Much “academic” work taunts and haunts, but some rabbit holes are just too enticing. One is the moon.

The light streaming down from the moon has no part in the theater of our daily existence. The terrain so deceptively illuminated by it seems to belong to some counter-earth or alternate earth. It is an earth different from that to which the moon is subject as satellite, for it is itself transformed into a satellite of the moon. Its broad bosom, whose breath was time, stirs no longer; the creation has finally made its way back home, and can again don the widow’s veil which the day had torn off. The pale beam the stole into my room through the blinds gave me to understand this. The course ofmy sleep was disturbed; the moon cut through it with its coming and going. When it was there in the room and I awoke, I was effectively unhoused, for my room seemed willing to accommodate no one besides the moon.
- Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, p. 115

(my thanks to KP)

From Kāvyamīmāṃsā (found in Bhojaprabandha – later text/collection), p.46, Dalal, Sastri edition, (transl. mine, feel free to improve if you wanna use it)
For men who are together with beloved, long night is diminished to a moment,
when they are separated the coolest moon is heating like fire.
Since I have neither a beloved nor separation, for me, in both situations
the moon shines in a form of a mirror, neither cool nor hot.

An Anthology of Sanskrit Poetry, Vidyākara’s Subhaṣitaratnakoṣa, tr. by Ingalls
You have not seen my mistress’ face, cakoras,
its charms arranged by Love himself;
for had you seen its perfect loveliness,
how could you relish still the taste of moonlight? [Rājaśekhara] p.170 v.411

Cast your glance beyond the hedge and guess
what cool-rayed orb is this
that wanders on the earth without its deer.
The cakoras of the park, who feed on only nectar,
follow as she scatters moonlight
white as ripened parrot-plum. [Rājaśekhara] p.175 v.447

You listened not to words of friends,
you heeded not your relatives’ advice;
but when your dearest fell before your feet
you struck him with the lily from your ear.
So now the moon is burning hot
and sandal paste turn into fire,
the nights each last a thousand years
and the lotus necklace weighs like iron. [Amaru?] p.231 v.702

“Like to a fire surrounded by sharp rays –
a very wonder. Can the sun my friend,
be rising even now at night?”
My sweet, it is the moon.”
“But how should moonlight bring me fever?”
“Ah, what is not contrary, child,
to one without her husband!” [Puṣṭika] p.238 v.738

At me the bow of Love shoots arrows fiercely,
the humming of the bees brings pain
and the moon casts rays of fire;
but these being shamed by the alluring beauty
of my darling’s brow, her sweet-toned voice, her face,
I fare not think what angry measures
the three may take with her. [Śāntākaragupta] p/247 v.776

Your birth was from the sea of milk;
Śrī was your sister, the kaustubha jewel your brother;
your friends are waterlilies and your beams
flow with ambrosia, while your face
is rival to the lotus face of women;
how then, oh moon, crest jewel of God,
should you poor forth on me these painful fires? [Rājaśekhara] p.250 v. 799

Drink all this sea, cakora birds, of moonlight
darting your beaks out as you raise your necks,
that the moon thus reft of brilliance spare the lives
of those who pine in separation from their loves. [Rājaśekhara] p.250 v.800

The moon was born of the same womb as poison;
the sandalwood is known to shelter snakes;
pearls are raised from the salty sea
and lotuses are lovers of sun.
How then could anything exist in these
to assuage the flames of love?
But by mistake of their appearance
we forget the truth and are deceived. [Rājaśekhara] p.250-1 v.801

Grieve not, oh earth; the darkness will not last.
Be happy, lily pond; do not despair cakoras.
The moon now rises, a lamp to all the world,
sole mountain from which flow
all streams of moonlight nectar. [Rājaśrī] p.273 v.899

The cat, thinking its rays are milk,
licks them from the dish;
the elephant, seeing them woven through the lattice of the trees,
takes them for lotus stems;
the damsel after love would draw them from her couch
as if they were her dress:
see how the moon in its pride of light
has cozened all the world. [Bhāsa?] p.274 v. 905
*(I know it’s not exactly what you need but I like this verse )

The moon, which here has multiplied its light,
checkered with spots of darkness by the beaks
of cakora birds unsteady with intoxication,
constructs a graceful foliage of finger painting
to serve for strewing on the couches
of damsels weary from their bouts of love. p.278 v.929

A palace for the sports of damsels fair as moonlight,
a lake whose waves are nectar,
a lump of butter churned from the sea of milk,
a waterstone for cooling the earth’s fever,
forehead ornament of night, sole recourse of those in love:
the moon climbs into heaven, a rain of camphor,
giving its light to the suppliant cakoras. p.282 v.955

Two or three stars are left, the color of old pearls;
the cakoras sleep, inert of limb from drinking of the moonlight.
The moon, pale as an empty honey comb, goes to the Western Hill.
while the east receives the color of a kitten’s eyes. [Rājaśekhara] p.284 v. 964

Walking

“As the Romans liked to say, Solvitur ambulando! (Solve it by walking.)”
–Edward Casey,

Taking

What?

what?

I have a review of Granta’s ten years post-9/11 issue up on The Sunday Guardian (New Delhi). When I first wrote my draft, I sent it to Sepoy, because I was worried it was too much of a screed. Sepoy, upon reading it, was disappointed in the lack of screedishness of the review. He had hoped for something more screed-like. Now it is for you to judge, Dear Readers, whether or not this is a piece of screedery. Here’s a preview:

Early in the morning on September 11, 2001, I spoke on the phone with a student of mine. After briefly discussing the attacks on the World Trade Center, which had just occurred, he asked, half joking, “will you come visit me at the concentration camp?” He was referring to his religion (Muslim by birth) and his skin color (brown). A couple of days later, a group of female students came to my office. They all wore hijab and were anxious because, they said, their fathers had told them not to wear any head coverings for the time being to avoid hate crimes. They had previously understood their commitment to wearing hijab as an act of pride in their faith that should not be abandoned in the face of ignorance or hate. But should they ignore their fathers? They did.

Read the rest here.

I have a new piece up at Caravan on Yashpal’s great Partition novel, Jhootha Sach. It’s very nicely reproduced, though I seem to have missed the weird new title during the editing process (“Night Smudged Light”). My title, “Late for the Party,” must have seemed too cavalier. Here’s an excerpt:

Jhootha Sach, first published in two volumes in 1958 and 1960, has long been considered by Hindi readers to be the most important novel on the Partition, but the fact that it was extremely long and—until a year ago—remained untranslated has kept it out of the robust conversation on Partition literature that has grown in recent years. I have waited nearly 20 years
now to bring up the novel in discussions on Partition literature without synopsising the entire plot and supplying a full biography of the author every time I mention his name. I have longed to loan it to friends and hand it out as a Christmas gift. Unfortunately, hardly anyone I know reads Hindi. And I suspect those who do wouldn’t choose to read a novel of more than a 1,000 pages. This includes certain scholars who write about Partition literature and can read Hindi, but mostly rely on English translations, or have passed over Jhootha Sach in favour of shorter Hindi works. As Harish Trivedi remarks in his introduction to this translation, the conversation on Partition literature will need to be “substantially recast” now that Jhootha Sach is available in English. He adds, “So far, it may even seem, it has all been a bit like talking about Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.” The Prince of Denmark has at last made his entrance; let the conversation begin.

Read the whole thing here.

When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled “made in Germany”; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism;it will be called, of course, “Americanism.”  Halford E. Luccock, Keeping Life Out of Confusion

Before

Times were good for many Americans—or, at least, times were good if appearances were to be believed. Even some of our sharper minds were deluded. After stapling the 1960’s and 1980’s in place with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Bonfire of the Vanities, journalist-by-novel Tom Wolfe addressed the impending aughts with the historically inapt essay, What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium: An American’s World, from Hooking Up.

Wolfe employs a Proletarian air-conditioning “mechanic” as everyAmerican—the sort of character David Brooks would later clothe in madras shorts and pop-neurology for the purpose of contriving New Yorker columns explaining his we to us. Wolfe’s pen is nimbler than Brooks’ iPad, but An American’s World still suffers from Ozymandian conceits, exemplified by messes like:

…[H]is own country, the United States, was now the mightiest power on earth, as omnipotent as Macedon under Alexander the Great, Rome under Julius Caesar, Mongolia under Genghis Khan, Turkey under Mohammed II, or Britain under Queen Victoria. His country was so powerful, it had begun to invade or rain missiles upon small nations in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean for no other reason than that their leaders were lording it over their subjects at home…

Which was true, far as it went. Everyone was getting mad-rich and feeling tres sexy, thank you very much—we told ourselves, and we believed us when we heard: these are the good old days. Yet, as Wolfe’s mechanic cavorts in St. Kitts among the ruins of Marxism, one detects a whiff of regret among the words, as though the writer is struggling to find a narrative peg on which he might hang a complaint:

…[I]t was standard practice for the successful chief executive officer of a corporation to shuck his wife of two to three decades’ standing for the simple reason that her subcutaneous packing was deteriorating, her shoulders and upper back were thickening like a shot-putter’s—in short, she was no longer sexy… the [new wife] and her big CEO catch were invited to all the parties, as though nothing had happened.

Many of us had similar misgivings at the time, I think. I remember scholar, blogger and writer Paul Kerschen giving a first-listen report on Radiohead’s 2000 release, Kid A that folded the nameless nagging into useful context: “It’s like two hours,” he said, “—an excellent two hours, understand, but two hours—of rain drizzling on the rusted shroud of a semi-functional HVAC unit. Things are not OK.”

There was plenty of evidence to help us shuffle through a decades-long sleep-walk.  The federal budget was in surplus. Peace, erupting everywhere: Bono partied in Sarajevo, Arafat chilled at Camp David, East Timor lurched at independence, Sinn Fein had lain down its guns, and many Rwandans committed to turning from a decade of barbarism and evil.

We focused attention on what seemed to work, ignoring what did not:  Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount and the ensuing second intifada, for one non-starter. We glossed over others: Russian war crimes in Chechnya, Chechen war crimes in Chechnya, the sudden absence of diversion for central Europe’s dedicated Mujahids, queer diseases of the mind infecting humans who’d eaten meat from cows fed—for efficiency’s sake—with the brains and bones of other cows.

Americans failed to consider they were buying pets.com stock with money borrowed from retirement funds, paying for vacations with home-equity loans, or that they stood a greater chance of seeing an American manufacturing plant while partying in Tijuana than at home, in Toledo, Ohio.

But even those palliative facts were hard to come by in summer 2001. The transition from news to infotainment was complete by then, and Fox, having by its creation exposed a previous bias in favor of its non-existence, combined with Matt Drudge’s Report to frame the national conversation in inane leading questions seeming to consist of whether sharks were angry at swimmers, whether celebrity sex videos were good or bad, whether the erotic proclivities of U.S. Congressmen were interesting or not, and whether Liberals were evil, stupid or just plain un-American.

Dull, sated and conditioned by the Clinton carnival to watch politics rather than engage in them, Americans allowed a Presidential contest to be determined first by a group of screaming frat-boys in Florida, then by a group of scribbling nudges in Washington, D.C., in the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court. Given the margin of error in the Florida recount, it’s likely we can never know for certain who won the 2000 U.S. Presidential election; what matters is we were told who won, and these years on, it is clear who lost.

“Winner,” George W. Bush plucked the residents of the Project for A New American Century—a neoconservative, Straussian think-tank that had for a decade clamored to remake the Middle East in its own image through regime change brought, in one proffered scenario, by catastrophic “pearl-harbor-type events”. Bush placed the tank’s alleged thinkers at the heart of America’s foreign policy apparatus. The list includes Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Dick Cheney, Francis Fukuyama, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and William Kristol.

Lacking any adult supervision, they went about three tasks: cozying up to energy cartels, including the disgusting Saudi royals, preparing for war with Saddam Hussein, and ignoring with extreme diligence any intelligence on threats to U.S. “interests” that did not comport with a worldview they already held.

Despite warnings—in person, from Richard Clarke, and in a written brief titled Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US, President George W. Bush and cohort continued their Freudian obsession with “the guy who tried to kill my dad,” and brought America’s national delusion to its penultimate phase.

Remember the American Colossus? Shopping, screwing, drinking, drugging, investing on margin, engaging in voyeurisms of all sorts and to the last stroke before blindness lying, mostly to itself, but also to the world, lying and denying until there was almost no truth left; all this, all of it, while the unquiet, dissatisfied planet wobbled between its knees.

“…”

After

The 9/11 Commission Report is a bloated, condescending, piece-of shit doorstop. God willing, future historians will regard this fetid bilge-tank of doublespeak as symptomatic of the decline of one society, presaging the need, and rise, of another. For now, it is accepted “history,” a narrative that must be addressed on its own terms. Those terms are best defined in negative space, looking to what’s denied, rather than admitted. The Report is the civic equivalent of a mall-kiosk hidden-image poster.

Thomas Kean, who chaired the Commission that released this steaming turd, warned ahead of its release that neither Clinton nor W. were “well-served” by the FBI and CIA. As a result, the report made extensive recommendations for changes to prevent another attack, including the creation of an extra layer of bureaucracy atop the country’s dozens of publicly-acknowledged intelligence agencies, and a massive new Homeland Security apparatus. Implemented, all.

But remember, now: Osama bin Laden, a Saudi, was a son of the Saudi Royal Family’s chief architect and civil engineer, beloved by many for modernizing Mecca’s infrastructure and connecting the Kingdom’s cities with paved roads. Osama bin Laden lived in Arabia for much of his life, as well as Yemen and Sudan, but only Yemen and Sudan when he—and his evolving beliefs—had worn out his welcome in the Kingdom.

Bin Laden’s organization, al-Qaeda, was, and probably is, a shaky quasi-theological crime-syndicate built on a grab-bag of adulterated Salafist martyr-cult stupidity and the exported-on-cassette paranoiac rantings of the Egyptian Sayyid al-Qutb, further interpolated by Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon who lusted bin Laden’s purse—fatter or thinner, depending on how Saudi benefactors regarded bin Laden’s most recent antics—to realize the goal of a post-Nasserite Egyptian theocracy.

After the Taliban secured victory over Northern Alliance foes in post-Soviet Afghanistan, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, having been drawn to the Jihad, found themselves without a worthy foe in the wild-east of the Afghan/Pakistani no-man’s land. Motivated by the objectively sickening U.S./Saudi alliance, which had given the Pentagon a foothold in the Arabian Peninsula, and secondarily by U.S. support for Israeli interests, they sought to take al-Qaeda, an Eastern-Hemisphere annoyance, global.

Al-Qaeda had dozens of documented contacts with Saudi Royals, Saudi government functionaries and Saudi citizens, at levels from the Court, to the Intelligence bureaus, to the parlors of fellow travelers.

Al-Qaeda and its aims were known to anyone paying attention. I remember discussing them in great detail in a law school International Relations seminar, in 1998. We spoke of Bin Laden’s interest in the subcontinent—because of the Pakistani “Islamic Bomb,”—and how the Kashmir/Jammu conflict could be manipulated by demagogues, as well as the dangers inherent in partnering with the ISI, which we regarded as a poisoned honeycomb, dripping with corruption, taking aid money with one hand, shaking the hands of jihadis with the other.

In 1998.

The University of Toledo College of Law is a fine school—but it is not the Kennedy School, Georgetown, nor The War College; if we knew those things, our betters should also have known them. It is disheartening to read, in the Report, and in Wright’s Looming Tower, how willfully blind America’s leaders were four years on; they should have known better. They did know better.

Acknowledging the obvious dovetails between bin Laden and his Saudi patrons, The Commission admitted fifteen of the hijackers were Saudi, but “found no evidence the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials within the Saudi government funded al-Qaeda.” Without delving into the obvious fallacy we’re offered, i.e., that no evidence of is evidence of no, it’s easy to see enough room left between the words of the Report’s phrasing to rebuild the Kobar Towers with cash from Bandar’s BAE slush & bribe fund and drive a full tanker-truck right up next to them.

Formal or informal Saudi complicity, whether from sympathy or to buy internal peace, are real Acts of War. In any sane period of history, Bandar and his corrupt platoon of brothers would be rotting in the stocks of Leavenworth, or better yet, hung in Saudi for domestic crimes or omissions, from gallows fashioned by the hands of Saudis themselves—or, rather, gallows paid for with Saudi money and fashioned by the hands of Indian and Philipino craftsmen.

In our remembering Americans must not forget, no matter how deeply buried in the Report, or made a non-subject by the American media, that bin Laden’s story, 9/11’s story, our story, is peopled by a cast of characters dominated more or less by Egyptians and ideas popularized by Egyptians, and more, much more, by Saudis and Saudi culture, specifically metastasizing, exported Wahhabism, and other distinctly Saudi problems, like bin Laden himself. We must remember to remember:

This why George W. Bush sent American teenagers to Iraq.

No, it doesn’t make sense. And Americans must remember it doesn’t make sense, because the world as it is mapped today is nonsensical. Only by keeping to mind that America went down the rabbit-hole in the middle of the last decade can it begin to find its bearings.

Egyptian ideas, Saudi money.  Say it over and over until it stops making sense; say it and repeat yourself sane:

This why George W. Bush sent American teenagers to Iraq.

According to the Report, while meetings between al-Qaeda representatives and Iraqi government officials occurred, the panel had no credible evidence Saddam Hussein assisted al-Qaeda in preparing or executing the 9/11 attacks.

That is cold, late comfort to thousands of dead Iraqis and the confused, homesick soldiers Bush and the Boys sent to “defend our freedom.” Because from the President of the United States to various party flunkies at the local level, American leaders conflated Iraq, Islamism, Jihadis, al-Qaeda, bin Laden, terrorism, Israeli national security, the emotion terror, Islam itself, Afghanistan, the Taliban, Iraqis fighting Americans post-invasion, a group of terrorists the U.S. Media learned to call al-Qaeda in Iraq (as though bin Laden dealt in franchise licenses from Tora Bora), U.S. national security, Palestinian causes, Egyptian radicals and various other Middle Eastern regimes. Fox News anchors, in tone, gesture and connotation, abetted this slander 24/7/365, reducing complex foreign policy concerns to either/or polls and making a mockery of legitimate analysis.

Relatedly, and of pressing, current interest, the report also offered evidence of increased contact between Iran and al-Qaeda.

So, you know, stay tuned.

Instead

A pause, now, while we address the “conspiracy thing”: the Report ignores many incongruent threads of fact that, if only treated plausibly by people who could treat them, might dispense with inevitable counter-narrative spinning; so much so, that other Committees were compelled to address some of them in supplemental memoranda. Yet this is the nature of tales, even of many eye-witnessed events.

We might consider here the words of Hunter S. Thompson, whom, it should be noted, numbered among “truthers.” He wrote these lines long before 9/11, though, in bittersweet nostalgia for the Summer of 1967:

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

Our problem is we are without any sweet to measure against the bitter. It is at least flattering to think someone with real power cared enough to throw, help throw, or allow the planet to be thrown into chaos, rather than think for a minute that a sickly Bond-villain hiding under a rock in Pakistan could play Jenga with Manhattan landmarks all by his lonesome.

Either way, it doesn’t matter. The truth, as received, is horrible enough.

Between

During the remaining Bush years, Americans became convinced by talk-radio idiots like Sean Hannity and the entire Fox roster, as well as anyone running for public office from either major party, anywhere in the country, that American shores, schools and courts faced imminent invasion from Sharia-spouting Jihadis and that individual Americans were at great risk of personal attacks from Muslims.

Americans tossed away freedoms—a subject to which we shall return presently—as well as the keys to the public treasury. No price seemed too high, no DARPA project too outlandish, no Pentagon request too expensive. Trillions spent, that’s with a T, and counting, with interest, if you care to amortize.

Little time-bombs of a more lethal, but less obvious character, began to blow in the middle-part of the decade. Bill Clinton had brokered a devil’s deal with Wall Street to break down the firewalls between investment banking (i.e., endlessly debt-ridden derivative speculation) and regular banking, where depositors loan a bank money for free, which the bank then loans to other people, at a profit. Clinton and Congress made this bargain with the likes Robert Rubin, the appalling Sen. Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan, then the insipid, spittle-flicking, polysyllabic, idiot-savant Federal Reserve Chairman.

For their part, they had been inspired by a misanthropic, chain-smoking, Russian dwarf named Ayn Rand. When not wrecking the homes of ardent disciples, Rand spent her time subjecting the world of popular philosophy to the agonizing resolution of an Elektra Complex that had seized her after rampaging Bolsheviks collectivized her father’s business. Rand had discovered—and you can too!—that, despite hundreds of years of human economic experience, capital markets, if left to tend themselves, would put fuzz on bunnies and photosynthetically generate Vitamin C in babies’ bodies. All that stood in the way of a Capitalist Utopia were the sorry collective impulses that had robbed her childhood of privilege.

Amid the wars emptying the American treasury, PNAC’s ongoing project of American global dominance financed with the Federal Reserve’s Platinum Credit Card, and unrestrained by sensible New Deal legislation, the chain of bubbles supporting Western capitalism since 1980 began to collapse. Seems allowing banks to gamble on margin borrowed at a thousand-times deposits wasn’t a smart thing to do. One evening, thanks to Clinton, Cronies, Congress and Dwarf, Christian civilization learned it was bankrupt.

George W. Bush attempted to step aside for his—and our—true masters, and have Congress acclaim Henry Paulson, of Goldman Sachs, Emperor of the United States. This is not hyperbole, not cited to The Onion—look it up. To its credit, Congress balked at coroneting Paulson; still, as though to make amends, the Federal establishment fell all over itself borrowing money from the Chinese government on behalf of unborn Americans to satisfy debts owed by its friends, individual and corporate, to parties unknown, incurred at the trillion-dollar global banking mega-casino. In 2008, America was bruised, broke, angry and paranoid. Americans elected—without the help of the Supreme Court—a black man with an Arabicized name to fix this bullshit.

I overheard an old woman in Troy, Ohio, exclaim, after voting, “I think America hates Bush more than it loves racism.”

[we are aware Bush wasn’t officially running—ed.]

In 2009, Barack Obama took office. He made a nice speech to Muslims in Cairo. Angry people, organized under the name of a thrilling sexual pastime, yelled at him, though they seemed unsure why. Obama appointed the same bankers who ruined the economy to fix it. He threw twice as much free money into the bottomless pit at Wall Street, rigged the health-care system to guarantee in perpetuity, by law, paying customers for insurers. Then, without breaking a sweat, he picked up the PNAC project exactly where his predecessors left it. He even found some places it might be improved.

He also authorized a Navy Seal team to kill Osama Bin Laden. They obliged.

President Obama usually avoided getting his shoes dirty en route to signing catastrophic-when-not-ineffectual laws, as the paths through the White House grounds have been repaved with the clean, pure aspirations of those who trusted him, and sealed with the distilled, water-tight essence of what we once knew as the American Dream.

Within

How many wars? Iraq; Afghanistan; Yemen; Libya. Four? Probably more underway, under various definitions, forms and dispensations, if we had the information an informed citizenry should.

And we don’t.

At first, this lack of information was a function of our incompetent and negligent press; following 9/11, the flow was stymied by gate-keepers whose access to the cocktail party circuit would’ve been curtailed if they had done their jobs. When the resolve of those tasked with keeping State Secrets, and disseminating State Propaganda, splintered, the press itself came under attack. There is now no real refuge for useful public knowledge. The very concept is an Enemy of the State.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves—I mention the count of wars because, focused as we are now on, if not in, Afghanistan, and with the—gasp—newly discovered, Pakistani loyalty problem, we generally forget the aspect of The Global War on Terror that affects Americans most. 2,752 people died in the September 11, 2001 attacks. Hundreds of thousands have died in the ensuing conflicts. Still, the least mourned victim is the American Republic itself. What over a million died protecting in the years between Independence and V-J Day was traded away on the memory of several thousand and a promise it wouldn’t be permitted to happen again.

The truest memorial America could offer those who died on 9/11 is to refuse to fall into the moral orbit of  the death-cults we claim to abhor. No reflecting pools, no spires at 1776 feet, none of it. We shouldn’t have become the photo-negative of jihadis seeking martyrdom, cowering in the skirts of craven politicians promising to shield us from harm and make our streets safe for commerce.

We should have rebuilt the towers exactly as they were, within a year. We should have marked the ground with a small, tasteful plaque, and held annual parades celebrating the season we brushed off the worst Osama bin Laden and his pals could dish, then turned on the demagogues screeching from the most shameful perspectives present in our national dialogue when they asked us to pay for the victims’ deaths with civil liberties. We should be whooping and hollering and singing songs about how al-Qaeda bored us, how bin Laden died from neglect, his corpse reeking in the stank of his own sick creed, how not one American teenager died thinking he or she was fighting Saddam over 9/11, and no Afghani or Iraqi teenager died thinking American teenagers were invaders, or occupiers.We should be celebrating how we were centered enough to tar and feather our own vilest blowhards and ride them to Harlem on a rail.

Alas, little more than six weeks after the attacks, Congress had a spryly captioned bill in the hopper—The USA PATRIOT Act.

The timing is a bit suspicious; anyone experienced with the Federal bureaucracy would be forgiven for asking, really? It can take longer than six weeks to get an acknowledgment that you, a constituent, have contacted your Representative in writing; it’s worse if you need action on an important matter. Washington does not move quickly. Is it beyond the pale to suggest that this law, or some version of it, had been pre-written, and was collecting dust in a drawer somewhere, awaiting the right calamity?

The Patriot Act is a travesty. It can be read to enshrine the noxious Korematsu doctrine that interned the Japanese Americans in World War II. It does not explicitly allow detention of U.S. Citizens, but without recourse to due process, a detainee has no forum to which he may claim habeas corpus, and assert his citizenship. It permits clandestine, secret searches of homes and businesses, allows the FBI to search phone, email and financial records without warrants, and lays open library borrowing records to law enforcement agencies.

The erotica you borrow from your public library is, by standing U.S. law, the intelligence community’s business. These are the same folks who claimed surprise at learning bin Laden himself enjoyed a blue movie now and then—if that was the case, and not some disinformative psy-op.

Worse—and it gets much worse—The Patriot Act represents what Americans were willing to give up, not what has been lost. Much more has been lost, as much more has been taken.

The Patriot Act is the public face of a ghost that has possessed the machine of the American Body Politic. Possession came welcomed, one assumes, upon the adoption of the Unitary Executive theory that Dick Cheney and Department of Justice ringers cooked up to allow Cheney himself, and the President, to operate outside six-hundred years of established Anglo-Saxon law. Under that specious theory, an American wartime executive enjoys immunity from impeachment for crimes committed pursuant to national security initiatives, domestic prosecution for acts taken pursuant to authority as Commander in Chief, and perhaps some defense to international war crimes proceedings.

What Cheney hath wrought, Obama embraces—under the 44^th President, whom I remind you, was hired to fix this bullshit, an Orwellian cancer has spread to the national lymph nodes. Obama has not even tried to stem it; his administration is part of it, thrives on it, is one with it. This totalitarian demon, which infuses almost every aspect of American life, is of a width and breadth unimaginably vast, and its aims seem nothing less than total awareness, total power and total obedience to its shifting whims.

Legal scholar, writer and Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald has done yeoman’s work providing an outline of its forms and habits; he has taken to calling this unclean thing the National Security State.

It needs perpetual war. Without it, claim to the powers it craves are laughable, on their face, to a free people. What luck then, that the external war in which we are now engaged has no fixed enemy, no fixed field, no fixed milestones for victory. After 9/11, America didn’t declare war on anything, except an abstraction—the emotion of fear, of terror. As such, the only end to the external war in which we are now engaged comes when our species evolves beyond fear of its own demise, or beyond the crippling empathy inspired by learning that harm may come to a loved one.

The National Security State is fragile. Only by knowing more about its citizens than its citizens know of it can the Beast coerce obedience to directives against the citizenry’s interests. George W. Bush and Barack Obama hid, and hide, their least defensible orders under the aegis of National Security, which usually terminates further discussion or challenge in public fora.

The National Security State’s expansive, wholly illegal wiretapping of the entire American telecommunications infrastructure under George W. Bush (or further back—Bush extended National Security protections retroactively, to protect former Presidents’ documents, if they want them classified) was shielded first under this notion, then retroactively ratified by a Congress that included then-Senator Obama. That Congress went as far as immunizing telecom companies from liability for violating the privacy of Americans, a reward for cooperating with illegal demands.

A successor NSA program currently rakes the telecom grid for bad-guys, and is overwhelmingly effective, because it does not differentiate between friend and foe; the NSA holds a record of your digital life, and mine, as well as those who might be planning to commit crimes. This initiative violates the long-standing ideal that citizens judge citizens in citizen tribunals—our military and intelligence apparatus operates outside our borders, not within them. Everyone knows this program is illegal, immoral and unconstitutional, but the National Security State must be fed with data, so highfalutin legal concerns be damned. Knowing the program is evil is not a sin; the sin lies in saying it is.  Well meaning, good hearted real patriots, in good faith, have tried to warn us; the National Security State has destroyed their lives in return.

The Bush administration fostered the program; while the Obama administration acknowledges it, the Administration regards criteria set for its use as a State Secret, and has revealed its claims to the program’s legitimacy and legality only to select Members of Congress, who, when not rubber-stamping such things, are prevented by from making their knowledge public. If they have concerns that might incline them to disclose criminal activity by the President or his subordinates, they are put in a double-bind—treason by silence, or treason by disclosure? Silence is the safer choice.

The National Security State is sadistic. America, as well as any other entity seized of corporate authority, ever, has and will torture. The idea that Dick Cheney invented water-boarding is ludicrous; however, Cheney, as an acolyte and High Priest of the National Security State, introduced the positively barbaric notion that torture should be euphemized into normality, and when it could not that  permissions for it be written into the standing, published law of this once Constitutional Republic—probably in anticipation of possible criminal proceedings resulting from orders he, or they, have given. Nevermind “torture” is a poorly cloaked rape-fantasy inspired by Jack Bauer fandom and snuff-films; never mind it is methodologically unsound and disavowed by those, like the CIA, who should be inclined to use it; never mind that in a scenario where it would work, it would be likely done anyway. 

There is something in the hoary nature of familiar evil that desires recognition, even as it obscures its own identity. Our current interrogation regime is a testament to this violent, literally tortuous facet of the National Security State’s multiple personality disorder.

The TSA is another tip-of-the-iceberg public aspect of the hidden thing, this National Security State, that has subsumed what was once America. For our safety, the National Security State has employed what seem to be the least observant, least capable, least fit examples of the population—many with personal, vocational or situational axes to grind with the world at large—and placed them in positions of authority, armed them the imprimatur of Homeland Security, and tasked them with enforcement of no-exceptions, no-common-sense- required, black-letter policies. America’s airports, in 2011, are kakistocracies. The only people inconvenienced by the TSA are those with someplace to go; idiots with C4 in their skivvies seem to get along, and get past, just fine. But that’s the point: the National Security State requires legalized brutality, humiliation, degradation and inhumanity because the National Security State gets off on it.

The National Security State fears Due Process and enumerated rights. At its core, the National Security State cannot justify itself without innuendo, hyperbole and fear; open and just civilian tribunals—for criminals, terrorists, “leakers,” for any accused person—expose the Beast’s dearest parts, its regions most sensitive to comment, criticism and ridicule. From that need comes FISA, secret detentions, black-site prisons, military tribunals, and the shameful Guantanamo Bay facility. The National Security State skulks in the curtilege because its reasons for being exist not for long, and only in shadow.

Finally, the National Security State requires control of the Word. Information is its antidote—the more accurate, the more timely, the more comprehensive, the more potent. While indefensible, pursuing “leakers,” in Washington is at least understandable, but the National Security State can brook neither dissent, nor the exposure of sunlight to its deeds if that exposure will inspire dissent, no matter from what direction the light comes.

Remember Bradley Manning, who has done allegedly to GWOT what Daniel Ellsberg did, to great acclaim, to Vietnam? Manning, very likely, now lies naked, fetal, in the throes of a long-term, dehumanizing breakdown and brainwash, for no purpose other than to be made an example of—his crime, allegedly, is having given information embarrassing to the powerful to someone who would make it public.

Achtung

Julian Assange, while in turns complicated and unsympathetic, is a hero. Full stop. Hero.  In Assange’s case, students of the history and practices of espionage will read “alleged rapist” on his vita as “dumbass poon-hound caught in a honey-pot.” He has much more bad to do before the good he has done is offset.

The Assange case is reminiscent of an earlier, deft move by the nascent National Security State on U.S. intelligence operative Scott Ritter, during the months preceding the Iraq war. Ritter, who worked as a contract employee with Central Intelligence and whose ongoing interests in sex with young girls would have been—or should have been—a matter of polygraph record, was nevertheless considered fit to serve on the U.N. Weapons Inspection Team in Iraq.

He was deemed unfit to comment in public, by the mainstream media, on the subject of whether those weapons existed, when he decided they did not. The reason? Not his qualifications, but an earlier sex sting arrest. Suddenly, his criminal past was highly relevant, available and a point of commentary from every interviewer who addressed him.

Flacking someone like Ritter, or in a better example, Assange, personally, is not enough to satisfy the National Security State when the information flow will not cease with personal destruction. As an independent source, Wikileaks itself is under constant DOS battery; the National Security State apparently thinks the exposure of policy and facts relating to the causes of death of innocents in the conduct of American foreign policy is a greater harm than the actual loss of human life. The concept of unmediated disclosure of “classified” material is what’s at issue, not the material itself. The Beast requires both the head, and the carcass, it seems.

If the National Security State cannot tell us its story, there can be no story at all.

Now

And so it goes. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

God knows what bin Laden envisioned ten years on.

One assumes he would be pleased that if we did not collapse explicitly, we have come to take for granted that the democratic elements of the Republic have ossified to the point of uselessness and we have yielded wholly to autocratic elements imbued with a spirit of Fascism, which have expanded to fill the roles required for the operation of a functioning nation-state. Since 9/11, our systems—financial, moral, legal, constitutional and philosophical have gone bankrupt.  To the extent they continue to work at all, they serve those who can afford them. Our politics are nauseating: America’s “left” is right-wing and its right wing is fucking batshit crazy. Neither have anything relevant to say or constructive to propose.

Two successive presidents have spoken differently while acting uniformly; trillions of dollars have gone wasted on “security,” yielding arrests in conspiracies that law enforcement agencies appear to have concocted themselves, mostly for the purpose of making arrests. The law enforcement and intelligence community trumpet the apprehension of a few sorry wannabes like Jose Padilla, while real plots usually seem to be foiled by Muslim beef-frank vendors, airplane passengers or sharp-eyed locals.

With war upon war upon economic calamity upon natural disaster besetting America, the beleaguered Yank—perhaps an everyAmerican air-conditioning mechanic—who once might have been set to howling at the slightest encroachment upon his prerogatives, now learns the Central Intelligence Agency has set up shop within the New York City Police Department in order to spy on them, even though they are fucking American citizens who just happen to call God’s name in Arabic—he learns the CIA has done this, without compunction, with impunity, in bald violation of its charter.

And the “mechanic,” shrugs. It’s just one more thing.

Other one-more-things are coming—one-more-things akin to the general strikes, riots and conflagrations of the Maghreb, of Tel Aviv, or London and Paris, or Athens and Rome and Madrid and Reykjavík, which illustrate the real war unfolding between a financier elite and those of us they intend to have serve them, or at least service debts they claim are owed.

You can hear echoes, see the stirrings, on the San Francisco BART, can’t you? It’s almost an odor, rife with potential, terrifying and exhilarating at once—

On arrival of these somethings-else, these other, new things, our poor everyYank may find himself ill-suited to mark the time. In the course of human events he may find he surrendered more than convenience in his deal with the National Security State. He may find he surrendered the best parts of his humanity as well—the cruelest irony being the surrender will have been in bin Laden’s name, to exorcise the fear that the unexpected strike inspired and nurtured, but in bin Laden’s name all the same.

When he requires the tools he entrusted to the National Security State for safekeeping—his civil liberties, the rule of law, human rights—the mechanic may find they are not where the National Security State promised him they’d be. He may find, in buying his purported enemy’s defeat with what should have been the last things he would spend, he will have ensured the realization of his enemies’ ultimate aims.

Of all the things to reflect upon this sordid anniversary, and if only to keep a pinch of truth alive in dark times, we should note the facts of the post-9/11 American experiment, as they coalesce around us: unless we remember ourselves, unless we remember what we promised the world we could be, 9/11 will not only mark the day we began giving up our dearest ideals, it will mark the day America gave up altogether.

A Spy called Jassasa

Click on Page 1 to read the diary from the beginning

Page the Fourth—In which one-half of the face of metropolitan evil is presented to Jassasa who makes small talk and a funny discovery

AS I WAS led up the narrow staircase and into the presence of the gang leader, I was already working out the agenda for the meeting in my mind. Master and I were the principal condiments of the jarred Apocalypse pickle. The canned pictogram was a new spice that had sped up the pickling process but carried unknown consequences for flavour and taste. On my part, I did not have any regrets about leaving the island early, but let us not forget that I was duped into it through artificial means. The diplomatic protocol was breached moreover, by the verbal excesses of 2-in-1 Eye. I had been had twice and was determined that anyone reaching for a third helping of me should get the full Jassasa.

I worked myself up in preparation for my meeting to which I was accompanied by 2-in-1 Eye and Panni-Pack.

2-in-1 rapped once at the door and we were in the gangster’s den.

I have since gone through the standard texts and all the iconic movies on gangsters, their psychology, and their universe, but I have nowhere come across the heavy ether and petulant gloominess that enwrapped Black Nipple. A man in his late thirties, bald-pated and clean-shaved, he was someone on whom a cultivated air of self -importance sat uneasily with a deep sense of personal inadequacy.

2-in-1 Eye went and stood behind his chair. Panni-Pack remained by my side.

“Jassasa! Jassasa! Welcome to the City of Lights!” Black Nipple raised a hand heavily adorned with rings from the table and took a sip from the cup he was holding in his other hand. I noticed approvingly the large bottle of single malt standing on his desk.

He had not gotten up to greet me. That called for heavy negative marking on the spot. I answered his greeting with all the dignity it merited, by showing him some teeth. It bothered him a little because he quickly turned his gaze into his cup. I could see that it bothered 2-in-1 Eye a whole lot more.

“And an advance welcome to your Master, the great Dajjal!” Black Nipple continued as he took another sip.

Quick-pacing a conversation is a game at which two can play. I now thought it prudent to set him straight.

“Master has sent you a message!” I said.

“A message? For me?” Black Nipple leaned forward then looked up at 2-in-1 who seemed confused.

“Master says, Fuck you!”

I don’t remember if I have mentioned anywhere in these pages that I am very good at playing it by the ear.

Everything moved rather quickly after that, what with 2-in-1 reaching for something nesting in his butt cleavage, my shouting, “Leash your bitch, Nipple!” and the latter raising an arm to restrain 2-in-1, and just as things were stabilizing, a foamy gob of spit flying from my mouth and audibly landing onto Black Nipple’s glass-topped desk.

“That’s hello from me!” said I.

Crimson in the face, Black Nipple rose from his desk with such urgency and violence that it knocked down his cup from the table, spilling all the good single malt.

I used the occasion to raise my right rear hoof and leisurely scratch behind my right ear and under the chin. From the corner of my eye I noticed Panni-Pack staring at me rather oddly. But I was pensive. I had just noticed a rather large paper bag on the chair before me writ with the words Chairman Mao. The Chinese were also involved?

I was feeling tired, and stepping forward I pulled out a chair and heavily threw myself onto it.

After rolling his eyes sideways sullenly, Black Nipple turned them upon me.

“I’m also very sorry for the misunderstanding!” I said earnestly.

Black Nipple lowered his eyes, looked up to exchange a quick glance with Panni-Pack standing behind me, and then his still crimson face broke into a diabolic smile. An economic laugh later he entered with, “What a fucking country!”

It would have been premature to make comment. I kept my quiet.

“Clean up this mess,” Black Nipple turned toward 2-in-1 Eye. “And pour me and buddy Jassasa here a drink. Show some respect to our guest!”

That was a nice touch. Black Nipple had realised that 2-in-1 Eye had now entered into my bad graces. To please me he wished to humiliate his minion by making him clean up the mess when he could have as easily asked Panni-Pack to do it. That would conveniently put him in his place.

“Thank you,” I said as I received my drink from 2-in-1 Eye. He avoided my gaze. I heard Panni-Pack chuckle.

“Now leave us, we’ll have a nice chat together,” Black Nipple said.

I guess the “sizing up” ceremony was over and I had been found of full measure.

Black Nipple was reaching for the Chairman Mao bag. It turned out to be food. I then remembered Master reading me some received wisdom about the way to a man’s heart passing through his big intestine. Or was it the small intestine? Either way, this Chairman Mao knew it and was trying to get to his man. I must look him up one of these days.

“Cheers!” Black Nipple said.

“Cheers!” I said, and took a sip.

Now I know my single malt. Both Master and I have a hard time keeping off it, and we have tapered off our excesses with the bottle after great struggle and mutual bonding. Thanks to the small dramas weekly enacted in the sea between the coast guards and the smugglers, we have often had occasion to fish out with Master’s long pole crates of the very best waters thrown overboard by the smugglers, and floating in the big saline in styrofoam packs, before they can return to collect them.

I can swear on my testicles that Black Nipple, this man who was supposed to be pulling the strings of Karachi underground puppet theater, was not drinking it. A city where even gangster lords do not know the difference between A-grade stuff and swill must be really something. Black Nipple had got something right after all. What a fucking country!

…Page 5 (coming soon)

A Spy called Jassasa

Click on Page 1 to read the diary from the beginning

Page the Third—In which Jassasa learns the truth about the infamous Dajjal Island and the circumstances of his landing at Keemari Jetty
A VAGUE ANXIETY took hold of me as I steered my vessel toward the source of light which was now blinking in a signal. Who were these men? How did they know my name? I was equally baffled by the phenomenon of the other shore materialising so near the island. I had been barely a half hour in the sea, and, as I believe, going in circles, before I was hailed. Had I entered a parallel world where time and distances shrank and strangers could informally ID me? I privately cursed myself, too, for losing my composure when they called out my name. I should have made a more dignified entry into their first impressions.

Soon I was at the pier where I was received by a party of three men. I needed no introduction, it seemed. I was not only amply expected, but from the passionate bodily greetings lavished on meI got an indication of how powerfully welcome I should feel among them. The leader of the delegation introduced himself as Nazru 2-in-1 Eye. He greeted me with voluble emotion and informed me that his boss awaited me “with open arms”. Soon thereafter his two lieutenants, smiley faced Pappu Panni-Pack and the robustly spiritless Chhotu Charsi, covered our small party with a bed-sheet and we rushed toward a waiting jeep under its fluttering cover. If I had not lately consigned my fate into the hands of Providence, I would have inquired the why and wherefore from my hosts. But I thought that perhaps it was some religious ritual; it did make me feel all excited about the adventures that awaited me.

I was seated in the rear between Charsi and Panni Pack. The 2-in-1 Eye man drove, and the jeep soon left the jetty and turned into a street.

I was eager to satisfy my curiosity about the location of our island but wished to broach the matter discreetly. I leaned forward and asked 2-in-1 Eye in a whisper if I was in the designated land. He nodded his head. I next asked how far I had come. He expectorated a stream of betel juice into the breeze before answering, “One mile.” Perplexing as his answer was, I must say I was prepared for it after the experience of my micro journey. But I wondered how Master would receive the information that all this time we had lived at a stone’s throw from the designated land.

A while later I noticed 2-in-1 Eye watching me in the rear-view mirror. But as I stared back thinking he was trying to convey a message, he looked away. We kept driving in silence through the streets and I had a feeling that we were randomly choosing the alleys and side streets into which we made turns. Was someone tailing us and was 2-in-1 Eye trying to shake him off?

As we turned into Burns Road I got the strangely terrifying smell of burning goat flesh. My hair on end, I rose in panic from my seat and let out a nervous bleat. I was quickly pulled down by Charsi. Both he and Panni-Pack laughed but 2-in-1 Eye became apoplectic. “Shut him up! Shut him up! He will get us all killed!” he shouted. I was stunned by his outburst. All his affability had vanished. Charsi and Panni-Pack also sobered up. The latter put a hand over my muzzle but his grip was not suffocating.

As we drove onwards I considered my situation. Even disregarding the impolite bump our new friendship had received, I should realize that my life was in some danger. But what? Maybe the meeting with his boss would clarify matters. I leaned back in the seat resignedly. I was wrong to assume that I had had a soft landing.

We were now travelling in the dark recesses of Kharadar. We came to a stop outside a building that seemed to be tottering on its foundations. 2-in-1 Eye got down and disappeared into a dark staircase through an entrance. Charsi got down to relieve himself and have a smoke, and I found myself in the grinning company of Panni-Pack.

I wished to take back some of my fate into my own hands now and decided to query my companion about the circumstances of our meeting. I knew I had little time and I had to be careful with my words so as not to raise any suspicions. But Panni-Pack proved a tap that was turned on all too easily. Besides, he was intimately involved from the beginning in the operation that led to my presence there. The summarised tale he made of it knocked my cognitive faculties into a mad disarray.

From his account I realised I had been received into the hands of a gang. Their leader―a man with spiritual tendencies―had thought of the original idea of recruiting to his cause the Dajjal when he appeared. He planned to use Master’s powers to eliminate members of the rival gang with whom his men fought daily battles for the control of the city. In search of clues about the whereabouts of the Dajjal, and to learn of his expected time of advent, he had visited a fortuneteller at the shrine of Pir Abdullah Shah Ghazi. The fortuneteller had drawn lots with the help of a parrot and learned that Dajjal and his goat-spy were occultating away on the Oyster Rocks islets a short distance from the Karachi beach. However, Master’s advent was a good ten years away.

The unexpected news of Dajjal’s close proximity and easy accessibility convinced the gangster that he could carry out his plan by expediting Dajjal’s advent. But it could only be spurred by the goat-spy leaving the islet of his own volition.

At a meeting of the gang, Panni-Pack’s droll imagination furnished the idea of sending the bottled messages to rouse Dajjal. His was the hand that had drawn the ones I so admired. When I told him that I was a fan of his work, Panni-Pack sheepishly admitted that when Dajjal was not roused by the bottled messages it was he who had stolen into our cave one day when it lay vacant and learned of my canned toy collection. That had given him the idea to address one directly to me which led to my presence on those shores. He had left the steamer there and returned on an inflatable boat.

I looked hard at Panni-Pack. He lowered his eyes. Somehow I could not find it in my heart to be angry with him.

But I braced myself. I had appeared in the designated land ten years ahead of time and there was no knowing what shape things would now take. I had to expedite Master’s advent as well by a full ten years, which would have its own set of unknown consequences. It was all very irregular and held the promise to become even more so.

We heard footsteps coming down the stairwell. 2-in-1 Eye had come to take me to their boss. As Charsi slowly materialised from the shadows, I asked Panni-Pack in a whisper, “What’s the name of your boss?”

He laughed a sad laugh and answered, “Black Nipple.”

…Page 4

A Spy called Jassasa

Click on Page 1 to read the diary from the beginning

Page the Second—In which is revealed how Jassasa started in search of the designated land aboard a steamer furnished by Providence

NO SOONER DID I inform Master about the End of Time thing than he turned upon me with an I knew it! They have got to you! You’re now in league with them! accusation. He pulled me out of the cave by my ear, and pointing toward the watery horizon with his other hand shouted, “Go then! Go into the world and fulfill your destiny. But remember, I shall not be in the offing. Not in a year’s time, not in a hundred. Tell it to the scrawling apes who sent the summons.” With that he roughly pushed me away and returned to his cave.

And there you have in thumbnail sketch my fickle Master and his usual lording over a small, helpless goat. I have put up with a great deal over the years without a bleat, but the injustice of the words accusing me of treachery broke my heart. Now why would he say such a thing to his own Jassasa? Perhaps a short separation from Master would not be a bad thing after all? It would teach him the value of a goat friend.

Lately, I have felt too in my wattles a longing to explore the terraqueous globe whose centre Master and I have inhabited in stationary isolation for so long. I headed for the shore, asking for a sign from Providence the while if indeed it was time and it wished me up and about my business. Lo and behold, close to the mangrove causeway an unmarked steamer of immaculate construction had materialized to carry me away to my waiting destiny. It flew a green and white flag. I was going to the land of grass and water.

That settled it. Master willing or not, I would not shirk my responsibility to find him the designated land where he must announce his advent―a place which some prolix grammarian had described as “ringing with the profane cacophony of men in ecstasies of depraved thought.” Guessing from the pictogram missives received on these shores, the place surely existed. It was just a matter of finding it for Master to yoke to his cause. I decided to go unarmed, but for appearances alone: My little cranial projections are hard as chisels and keen-edged as daggers. Having no longings for martyrdom myself I can always lend a helping horn to others so inclined.

I knew I’d see Master soon enough, but a feeling was growing inside me that it was the last I was seeing of the island where all my prissy billy youth was spent. I trotted away with tearful eyes to say farewell to my favourite haunts. Ours being a small island, it did not take me long, and I returned to the quay to check how sturdy was the vessel.

I guess one cannot find fault with steamers furnished by Providence, but it could have done with a spot of cleaning. The passages were marked with betel juice and there was more than a whiff of uric acid about the place. I went on the deck for a breather and found a lounge-chaise where I lay down to stretch myself.

The gentle undulation of the steamer on the waves lulled me to sleep. I woke up with a start upon hearing a loud thud which was followed by Master’s bellow, “Jassasa, come help!” I looked down and saw Master standing on the quay laden with sacks of beans he had been hoarding in the cave for my departure day. He had thrown one onto the deck and was struggling under the weight of a large one.

“You have a long journey ahead of you!” he said as he held it up one to me.

That’s typical of him. Rather than apologize for any words said or deeds done, he just carries on as if nothing has happened. At another time I’d have taken a stand to force him to apologize, but I did not wish to leave on a bitter note. I quietly pulled up the sack which he offered me. He kept bringing more and just the sight of them made my heart sink. I would not be long in reaching the Other Shore on a prolonged diet of beans!

By sunset the steamer was fully loaded, and now the prospect of our separation was fully upon us.

“I might come, after all,” Master muttered as he passed me on the deck.

“No need,” I said testily, recalling his earlier spoken harsh words.

Master abruptly turned tail, jumped down the steamer and scurried lumpishly away to his cave. I turned my face away.

We had both proved bad at saying our goodbyes at the first opportunity offered us. There was now nothing more to do but steam away. That I did.

Alas I did not realise that it was a moonless night. The darkness was soon upon the waters and the vessel, and my plans to watch the dance of moonlight on the waves had to be put in abeyance. I steered the boat with a steady hand but a feeling that I was going in circles did not leave me.

I switched off the engines and came up on deck. There was utter darkness all around.

I had begun wondering if darkness could be whiled away by a tryst with the beans when I thought I heard human voices nearby. Another ship? I asked myself. But where were its lights? I hoped it was not going to ram into the steamer. I stood at the bow peering into the darkness. Then a powerful light shone in my face and blinded me. As I raised a hoof to shade my eyes, a voice called out, “Oye, Jassasa!”

I got such a shock that I nearly fell into the sea.

Packets of coarse laughter bounced on the waves.

…Page 3

A Spy called Jassasa

Being the private papers of Jassasa, the goat-spy of the true False Messiah, the End-of-Times Deceiver, the One-Eyed Antichrist aka Dajjal

Page the 1st—In which is revealed how Dajjal and Jassasa were alerted to the approach of the End of Time

OKAY, SO NOW it’s confirmed: Evil’s really risen in the world.

This morning as I lay supine at the cave entrance, my Master returned from his walk by the seashore and tossed me a tin can. It was the kind in which one finds stuffed toys. They come to me by hazard—the same process by which other inedible items of value found washed up on our island have entered my collection. Already in possession of the stuffed moose and kangaroo in this particular series, I was hoping this time the bounty of the sea had capsized a boat to send me a stuffed elephant.

As I eagerly pulled at the tab with my teeth, Master came close to share in my joy. But the popping of the can was the knock-knocking of evil. When he saw what the can contained, Master let out an Arrrgh! and rushed out of the cave. It was not a stuffed animal that had fallen out of the can but a familiar piece of cardboard covered with pictograms depicting Master and me in attitudes that offered slanderous sexual comment on our Platonic relationship. When the first such message was received in a clear glass bottle about a month back, Master had reluctantly and haltingly explained to me what these reprehensible motifs signified. Seeing how upset he had become upon its receipt, I had quietly put the paper back into the bottle, sealed it as before and thrown it back into the sea. I did the same with the next few bottled messages. I read all of them and must admit that some of them were funny.

Once, when Master was out walking, with me following grazing lazily at a distance, I looked up and caught him hurling a bottle into the sea. I felt glad that he had learned to ignore those dirty messages. I did not realize that before returning the bottle to the sea, my impulsive Master had put in it a paper scrawled with a pictogram message, for the sender, after his own heart.

That was a big mistake. The person or persons sending those bottled messages, perhaps in the hope of finding some confirmation of Master’s presence in those aquatic environs, had finally received it in his own hand.

From the next day we daily found multiple bottles on our shores. Sometimes there were two, sometimes as many as four. I once also saw a fifth bottle floating in the waves but for some reason it did not make it to the island. The fecundity of a dirty mind is a phenomenon deserving close study. No two pictograms were alike, but there was clearly more than one party involved in the drawing of them. I had become an amateur of the genre from daily study and could see manifested in one particular style the mechanical thrashings of a caustic wit.

Master let me handle the gathering and disposal of the bottles. He had learned his lesson.

The present canned message, however, is a provocation addressed to me. Whoever sent it knows not only about our presence on the island, he also knows I like stuffed toys out of cans. To malign the innocent relationship between a man and his goat friend is one thing; to make a document of it and secret it away in an innocent can of promised toy something else altogether. It is the sign of malignant evil uncoiling itself and now in a slimy, slithering fashion fully afoot in the world.

It means of course that the time has come to set in motion the plans for Master’s foretold advent. I have to gently break it to him. He has more than once made it clear to me where he stands on that whole creating-rumpus-at-the-End-of-Time thing. He has done what he was required to do, imparting to me a training in disguise and such, but he has often told me of his absolute happiness in his life on the isle in my companionship, and that he would much rather spend his days there to the End of Time making gentle rumpus with his hairy paws splashing in the waves.

But alas, destiny is not for our own making as frequently as we would like it to be. Moreover, I have been poked cruelly in my soft emotions by the canned message received today, and I am full eager that the person or persons who have sent the unsigned pictograms should speedily encounter their just deserts.

I think I will tell the Master to prepare for his advent after he has had his supper. As soon as he finishes his sea-urchin torte I will spring him with a melodious “Hear, hear! Da End of Time’s here.”

…Page 2 

My new show, Political Animal, opens in White River Junction, VT, at the Main Street Museum this Friday, April 15th, 5-7 PM. Here is a sneak preview of what will be exhibited, for those of you who, ahem, might not be in the neighborhood.

First, the Inqilab series:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

And second, my series of paintings of Vladimir Putin and his alleged lady friend Alina Kabaeva:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Our hardworking judge, the illustrious Kuzhali Manickavel, has pored long and hard over all the submissions for our flash fiction contest. She has selected one first place winner, and two entries are tied for second place. She found the decision very difficult and hopes that everyone enjoys the results. In first place, we have a story by Amitava Kumar, and in the two second places, we have stories by Sridala Swami and Mircea Raianu. Thanks to all for participating! We may have another contest soon, so watch this space. And here, again, is the prompt for the story, a tweet by @polgrim:

I was deep in conversation with an ambassador’s wife of an ‘x’ country over dinner when I get a text from Paris to tell me Egypt is free.

1. The winning story:

I am deep in conversation with an ambassador’s wife of ‘x’ country over dinner when I get a text from Paris to tell me Egypt is free.

Our conversation has been desultory so far: the stadium lights on the other side of Mathura Road, Lisbeth Salander’s charms, and now the naked woman on the Cycles Gladiator bottle the waiter has brought us.

In her husband’s company, she is serious; she is determined to be funny with me. I am twice divorced, I’m no longer in charge of the Ministry; it is her loneliness, a taste of melancholy in it, that makes her even try. I could cup her sad mouth.

The woman on the label, her fleshy rump and the fiery orange hair flying, is the subject of my companion’s strained disquisition.

I notice that she has deposited a drop of balsamic vinegar on my blackberry. But who can resist that slender wrist as it separates the salad from the baked salmon?

When I discreetly bring the tip of my napkin to my phone, it lights up and I read the text. I say to her “Mubarak is gone!” and in that moment know that I will have her tonight.

-By Amitava Kumar

2. Second Place Entry #1:

Hashtag HomeintheGround

Meet X: He’s just seceded from his family and now lives inside the garden sump. He’s working on a text-and-image creation using the mildew patterns on the walls.

Meet A: She’s here to bring X news of the world and ask why he doesn’t reply to SMSes. A has begun to wish there was a way to include hashtags in irl conversations for performance value.

A meets X as if she were a traveller in an antique land. He beckons her into what he calls his adobe.

— Where have you been? I’ve been texting you! Egypt is free! #Egypt #Jan25

— What did you just do with your hands?

— Never mind. Why are you living in the ground? And where d’you pee?

— Never mind where I pee! I wanted out of social media, ya. I’m making something that’s going to be, like, Bhimbetka. You want to see?

— What – that fungus on the walls? Un-hunh. Didn’t you hear me? Egypt is Free! #Egypt #Jan25

— You’re doing that thing with your hands again.

While A and X free-associate in the sump, meet Ammi: She’s buried in the garden, up to her neck, amongst the flowerpots. This is what she says: ‘Another heavenly day.’

-By Sridala Swami

3. Second Place Entry #2:

One day when I was two and a half years old, my mother took me to the park in a stroller. It was the park we always went to, hidden on a back street just off the main boulevard leading to University Square. As it happened, the park belonged to the University club, a small white building where students would gather, surrounded by dirt paths, empty stone fountains, and a few birch trees.

On our way home, a great mass of people moved quietly along the street, saying nothing. Some were holding white rags to soak up the blood, and some were being carried. I spent the rest of the evening in our apartment, while relatives came in and out to watch television, smoke cigarettes, and spin conspiracy theories. I don’t remember the crowds, or the old man on television who stumbled through the speech, got slightly confused, went behind a curtain and then climbed into a helicopter. Twenty years later, when I saw Hosni Mubarak walk up to the podium on my computer screen, I thought I would finally get to see an old man crumble. But he only left a few hours later, during the night, while I was sleeping.

-By Mircea Raianu

I also have a review out today on Bookslut of long-time CM reader Teju Cole‘s superb new novel Open City. The novel comes out tomorrow. Everyone must read it! An excerpt from my review:

The review materials I received with Open City ask me to compare Cole’s writing to that of W.G. Sebald or J.M. Coetzee. I was instead reminded of Wharton and James, of their pacing, of their detailed descriptions of place, history and person and of their slightly god-like distance from their characters and subjects. I read in Open City a kind of sequel to Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: the writing style, similarly precise and clear; the city, even less innocent than it was then. Cole, who is also a photographer and an art historian, has an enviable ability to take a subject, say, the city of New York, and turn it inside out and upside down, shake it out, and examine the contents, then pack it up again. In this, his writing resembles his photography, which, unlike most urban photography, manages to find grand vistas and great heights in the claustrophobic clutter of a city landscape. In a photograph such as this one, a bird’s eye view of what appears to be the interior of a multi-storied shopping mall becomes a delicate abstraction, the suspended star-shaped lights an orderly arrangement of origami, the tiny shoppers, so many ants dotting the background.

Read the rest here.

Following my interviews with Blafters Rakesh Khanna, Pritham K. Chakravarthy and Kuzhali Manickavel, my review of a number of books from the Chennai-based publishing house Blaft is up on Bookslut today. Here is an excerpt:

He was a dark man, with white hair and white teeth. A thick moustache covered his dark lips. His chin had a deep cleft. He wore a silk shirt, a polyester veshti, and a thick gold chain with a leopard claw pendant around his neck. He smelled strongly of perfume.
–From the story “Hurricane Vaij” in the Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, Vol. I

A friend whose fiancé was learning how to perform past life regression therapy once observed to me that it was odd how many people discover they were Cleopatra or someone else really famous in their past lives. Even people who do not find out they were Cleopatra, such as my father, a great regression therapy enthusiast, always discover they were human. When I argue with my father that it’s statistically unlikely that all current living humans are reincarnations of previously living humans, and that traditionally animals, and bugs, and worms are thrown into the mix of transmigrating souls, he becomes irritable and says I don’t know what I’m talking about. In Bollywood movies, reincarnation, a fantastic plot device, becomes even more narrow: young couples whose love transcends lifetimes (what’s known as a janam-janam ka rishta in Hindi-Urdu) die under cruel circumstances only to be reborn in a human form exactly identical to their previous incarnations. Thus the same actor and actress can go ahead and play the lovers in their next lifetime as well.

Read the rest here.

This 6th year of CM will go down in the annals of Chapatism, first and foremost, as a year of the renaissance sprung by Lapata’s posts – for which readers have the bureaucratic morass of academy, “the insane rants of an inflamed tea-partier”, and Sepoy’s badgering to thank – illuminating the particularities of partition or the reluctant feudalism of mango farmers, introducing CM readers to Naiyer Masud and Amitava Kumar, or providing a peep into Memon Sahib’s literary striptease, and culminating in The War and Peace of Hindi Literature!

Sepoy moved to Berlin but continued to bring readers reviews of the quality that they have come to expect from him; reviews such as that of William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives, Amitava Kumar’s A Foreigner, Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword, and last but not the least, a takedown of a globe-trotter’s cartographic musings.

Some conversations that started in 2009 continued in 2010: amidst growing alienation, Faisal Shehzad became the face of a “Pakistan native;” Pakistan’s originary myth remained tied to spectacular events; Zaid Hamid was given thorough examination by a “so called Pakistani historian,” who also reflected upon the history of erasures and repressions that culminated in the horrific attack on an Ahmadi mosque in Lahore in “We Are All Ahmadi” series. In the year of catastrophic floods, the fires of hatred continued to burn (in) homistan, while the discussion amongst politicians remained focused on how to save the children.

Towards the end of the year, the major event at CM was Granta: Peccavistan (also reviewed by Lapata) and an exploration of the Cocoonistan from whence developmentalist discourse springs.

PS. Simon Digby and Tony Judt will be sorely missed.

PPS. Also see Syed Ahmed Khan and Urdu, and Basanti’s stellar review of Ishqiya.

My new column, a review of Granta 112 (“the Pakistan issue”) is up on Bookslut. Here’s an excerpt:

Green is the theme color in the Shahzads’ bedroom. The curtains pick up the tone of the bed linens, and a bamboo print hung between the windows extends the botanical motif.

“There was nothing out of the ordinary about the house,” Del Vecchio [his real estate agent] says. “There was nothing obvious; no radical posters or anything.”

–From a description of the home of Faisal Shahzad (“The Times Square Bomber”) in Connecticut, in CNN Money

When Faisal Shahzad was arrested for trying to detonate a bomb in Times Square last spring, his prepared statements, read out when he entered his guilty plea, were mostly ignored by the media. Instead we were treated to speculations about how and where he was “radicalized,” and real estate slideshows of his abandoned over-mortgaged home in Connecticut: “Our conversations were plain-vanilla, mostly about the real estate market,” muses his former real estate agent. Where in this suburban drab do we see the makings of a bloodthirsty killer? Lorraine Adams’s moving piece in the new Granta 112, an issue dedicated to Pakistan, is the first in-depth look at Shahzad’s case that takes us beyond this befuddlement over the yawning chasm between his suburban décor and the quickie seminar he took in bomb-making techniques from the Pakistani Taliban.

Read the rest here.

I have a new column at Bookslut. The title of my column comes to you courtesy of Sepoy. Here’s the link. The column is meant to introduce readers to South Asian literature beyond the Barnes and Noble display tables. The first installment is a review of India: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, edited by Chandrahas Choudhury. Suggestions for titles to review from you, gentle readers, are always welcome.

Tennessee resident Gary Middleton worries that the mosque could house extremists. “It’s just another mosque, training kids to be terrorist,” he said.

Stan Whiteway also objects to a new mosque for local Muslims. “I’m sorry, but they seem to be against everything that I believe in. So I don’t want them necessarily in my neighborhood,” he said.

–From an article about opposition to mosques in the United States, chosen at random from Google News

I. Retirement

My father calls me at least once a week to ask me if I know anyone who has ever been abducted by aliens. No, I say, I don’t. Me neither, he replies, a hint of regret in his voice. My father, a life-long agnostic by belief and eccentric artist by profession, will turn seventy-nine on Friday. Throughout much of his seventies he has been deeply focused on paranormal phenomena and philosophies of reincarnation and the after-life. At first he read Krishnamurti extensively, then it was past life regression and out-of-body experiences, now aliens. His chair in the living room is surrounded by books written by mediums, psychics and other experts on the paranormal. Not for him the second adolescence of retirement communities in Boca and the shuffleboard and sweetheart dances of senior cruises. His preoccupations remind me of the regimen of religious observances favored in India by the elderly, or those we call ‘retirees’ and ‘senior citizens’ in the US.

A combination of climate, gender, friendlessness, foreignness and a dissertation that needed to be written kept me often at home at our roof-top barsaati in Allahabad some years ago. Living in a barsaati affords an excellent view of the courtyards and front yards of neighboring houses. From this vantage point, I could see the neighborhood’s senior citizens seated in the sun on their respective charpoys, engaging in religious observances. In the courtyard of our own house, our landlady, a Partition immigrant from Multan, sat each morning and read small paperback books of Hindu prayers written in Urdu script. Across the way, a grandfather sat cross-legged on his perch above rows of drying chili peppers, reciting Sanskrit prayers. Another man, next door, often appeared to be napping or peering over the fence to see what the neighbors were doing, but even he spent a certain amount of time in prayer.

II. Apprenticeship

Years later, in Chicago, my dissertation on Hindi literature finished, I was determined to learn to read and write Urdu properly, after years of false starts. A colleague helped me find a tutor. He was from the Indian city of Hyderabad, the retired Chair of Arabic Studies at Usmania University. He was also the Sufi imam of a mosque in the basement of the brick courtyard building where he lived on the north side of Chicago, somewhere around the confluence of Clark and Ashland. As I sat on the floor across from him, reading aloud from Pakistani children’s primers, he would nod agreeably and correct me when necessary. All the while he managed from his cell phone the affairs of his flock, fielding calls about problems ranging from the spiritual, to health, to travel to marital counseling.

As an imam, and an Arabic scholar, my Ustad was, with respect to his spiritual observances, many steps ahead of the retirees I had known in Allahabad. Nevertheless, he was not about to give himself a pass. He took particular care to say the Bismillah in its entirety before undertaking any task, luxuriously elongating the long vowels and stopping to emphasize the consonants: Bissssmillllaaaah al-Rahmaaaan al-Rahiiiiim. It was clear from his delivery that he strove with each invocation to renounce the automatic patter of frequently uttered prayers. Before beginning anything, whether it was our lesson, or opening the door of my car when I gave him a ride to his other son’s home, he would stop, shut his eyes and then intone, slowly and loudly: Bissssmillllaaaah al-Rahmaaaaan al-Rahiiiiim. The same practice pertained to sneezing, to which he fell prey in Chicago’s allergy season: <sneeze> Alllhummmmdulllllaaah.

As his shagird, or student, I was obliged, as much as possible, to help my Ustad, or serve his needs where feasible. This was a perk of which he took only light advantage. Most often, I gave him rides to various nearby points in his neighborhood, especially in inclement weather. One particular special occasion arose during my time with him. This was a visit from his son’s in-laws, a retirement aged couple who were coming to the US for the first time, having never traveled anywhere besides India and Saudi Arabia. It was arranged that one afternoon, I would drive the three of them around the city to see the sights.

III. Alienation

As we drove up and down various Chicago streets, my Ustad pointed out salient details of the city landscape. After a half an hour or so in the car, we were driving down Clark St., toward Lincoln Park. Our guests had been mostly quiet, staring out the windows with that bewilderment one feels in a totally unfamiliar place. At last, scanning the rooftops, the husband remarked thoughtfully, “You don’t see many minarets around here.” No one wanted to break the news to him that you don’t see any minarets in much of the city, so we talked instead of the subtlety of Chicago’s mosques, housed unobtrusively in old churches, apartments, storefronts and basements.

Soon we arrived in Lincoln Park, a sprawling green space along the curved shore of Lake Michigan with unobstructed views of the downtown skyline. Our party made our way slowly along the paths to the shore, dodging joggers, roller-bladers and cyclists. It was a bright spring day, warm enough for Chicagoans to throw off most of their clothing, but slightly chilly for my older Subcontinental companions. They were all three heavily dressed, the men with turbans, long coats, kurta-pajama, woolen socks and lace-up shoes, the wife of the couple in shalwar-kameez under a long, black robe, her hair covered in a black headscarf. We sat for some time as they warmed themselves in the sun, mostly in silence, looking out at the lake and people-watching. After some time, the husband of the couple turned and asked my Ustad with some puzzlement, “Why do so many people have dogs with them?” My Ustad did not skip a beat. “In this country,” he explained, “everyone is separated: child from parent, husband from wife, brother from sister. They all live alone. They keep these dogs with them as companions in their solitude.”

In February, I posted a review of Amitava Kumar’s novel Home Products. That self-same book, with minor revisions, is now out from Duke University Press under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing. Below is an excerpt from the review; to read the whole thing, click here.

This past week, some years after hearing Amitava Kumar read excerpts from Home Products, I was finally able to read the book. I had remembered that there was something about its aesthetic that seemed very familiar to me. As I began to read, I knew right away what it was. Home Products feels like a Hindi novel. It even feels like a translation of a Hindi novel. I say this as someone who has translated substantial quantities of Hindi literature. In fact, the day before I began to read Home Products, I had been revising some old translations of Hindi short stories. As I read, I felt tempted to get out my red pen and cross out certain word choices as too close to the literal translation from Hindi.

The pace of the narration, the close attention to the mundane details of daily life, a certain reserved quality, a sense of connectedness to history, to human struggles, to politics, these are all markers that are ever-present in the Hindi novels of the mid-twentieth century novels. Kumar makes it clear through sections of dialogue and narration that this similarity is no accident. Characters make references to prominent Hindi authors throughout; some have degrees in Hindi literature. Binod’s family is solidly Hindi-medium, English literate. Though Binod writes for an English-language newspaper, he chooses to do so after some deliberation between Hindi and English.

The fact that Home Products has been written in conversation with Hindi literature is astonishing. I can think of no other English language novel that does this. Because of the hierarchy of language-medium education in India, it is rare for a writer in English to have read any literature in Hindi whatsoever. In my experience researching Hindi literature, I found that the English-educated classes outside of Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, people who could read, write and speak Hindi, had read virtually no literature written in Hindi and had heard of no Hindi author other than Premchand. The fact that I was studying Hindi literature at all was usually met with derisive laughter. What could there possibly be to read in Hindi?