Pissing and Praising

Acknowledgments page

I’m writing this while waiting at Delhi airport for my flight out of India. I wish to offer praise. But first a word about pissing.

Earlier this year, I had written a piece for Granta in which I had mentioned that at a reading I had done in January at Kunzum in GKII, an Indian diplomat who was reading with me had taken objection to my having written earlier that if Frederico Lorca had been from my hometown Patna, his poem “Landscape of a Pissing Multitude” would have been a long epic. I found such criticism strange. Not least because the news just that day was about an Indian man on a New York-Delhi flight who had urinated on a fellow co-passenger, an old woman sleeping on her seat. What is it with our people and pissing? One of the items in the news these days in India has been the episode from Madhya Pradesh where a video was shot of a drunken Brahmin man, a cigarette between his lips, pissing on the head of an Adivasi man. In the usual way that any horror or tragedy is turned quickly into farce, the Chief Minister of the state has washed the feet of the victim in order to apologize. The fact that the perpetrator had links to the ruling party might have been a factor in the staging of this spectacle. The man’s house has also been bulldozed by the government.

I come here not to piss on my compatriots but to praise them. My journey during the past fortnight without the help of so many people, some of them strangers, who hosted me or talked to me. Relatives like Meher, Sonam, Dolly, and Didi, my elder sister; my former students Udbhav and Anish and their lovely, delightful parents; my college pal Vivek in Kolkata, and his son Tanuj from Pronto’s who makes the best mutton burger; in the Sundarbans, Asit and his crew; the journalists who hooked me up with contacts, particularly Soutik and my old friend Raj Kamal; in Uttarakhand, my driver Surender, stuck with me for sixteen hours on the highway; and talking of strangers, again in Uttarakhand, Sanjayji who insisted on paying for my hotel, and his daughter, Tanishka, who cooked a meal for me just because I had arrived at their home during lunch. So many people gave generously of their time and taught me more about the land I was traveling through and the people who surrounded us. In the end, I should thank you, my reader.

We live in murderous times. Yesterday in the poll violence in Bengal at least sixteen or seventeen people died. The social discourse in this country is acutely polarized. It never ceases to amaze me how in recent years we have arrived at a place where it is normal to casually give voice to vicious Islamophobia. In such a scenario, the challenge is to produce art and writing that opens up a space where one can breathe a cleaner, calmer air. And the way to do this is notice the kindness of our fellow human beings. Here’s a paragraph from Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City that I have always cherished and which gets to the heart of what I’m trying to say here—I just Googled the lines I seem to remember by heart and here’s the screengrab: