|
In The Dust of Outlaw Armies The last time we flirted our way into the magnanimous gesture of going to war for the people of Iraq, I got trapped in India for the first three days after the much-debated international deadline, surrounded by one hundred million grateful Muslims. Need I have worried? As an old South Asia hand, I thought the best thing to do would be to find a hotel in some obscure part of Old Delhi, hide out, and await there my flight to Italy. In case of vengeance attacks, any crack would be better than the popular tourist spots, like Connaught Circle, and if nothing else I could read books. Setting out from the bus station on foot, at the end of an obscure path I found the sort of hotel where any traveling Indian businessman might lay up for a few days. A series of sleeping chambers each not much larger than the bed, with a table and a chair facing the plywood door, the place wasn't luxury, but I had found my crack. My privacy was guaranteed from spying neighbors by a sheet of plywood at least a half-inch thick. Downstairs the manager examined my passport, as if deciding what the odds were that I wasn't a spy. It was January 15th, the day before the international deadline. The TV above his desk blared out talk show speculation, in English, about what was likely to transpire on the battlefield the next day. Officially, Indian Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar was opposed to what they termed an aggressive use of force by the usual club of colonial powers. Even before it had started, the war was one vast spectator event, and debates had raged for months in all the usual chat shops and tea stalls, everyone from the sweepers right up to the most ardent Brahmins exhibiting their expertise in public. Later, as I went through the market, I found an unsettling question in the faces of people turned in my direction. Some actually called out to me -- "What is your country?" -- making my normal style of meander slightly rushed as I made my appointment. It was dinner with a tent of young Israelis, who were all returning from the backpacker trails of India to their army mobilization center, for flights to Greece the next day. The bombing started that night. The next morning I was on the roof of the hotel when the manager came up to give me the news. I heard the door open, and closed my book as he approached. He held a flower in his hand, a red rose from his garden. It was a token, he said, for the fact that my country had started a war. His gaze was difficult to read but certainly included the emotion of pity, most likely for the burden of responsibility I assumed now as an American. I was left wondering what to do with the flower, the thorns of which were removed. It was certainly a lot less abstract than the ponderous ideas of the two European intellectuals whose book I was reading. I held up the rose, inhaling, and tried to remember the people killed a thousand miles away. The skyline of Delhi was speckled with dozens of paper kites from rooftops all over the city; try as I might, it was difficult to imagine what it must be like to be where the bombs had fallen the night before. Later I went to check my visa requirements at the Italian embassy. The Information Secretary practically threw her newspaper in my face. "Look what you've done," she said bitterly. The front page of the newspaper screamed the headline -- "100,000 killed in Baghdad." It was a lie, but no one would know that for days. In the meantime this is what people believed, that a massacre of civilians had occurred overnight. A hasty little riot was organized outside the American embassy. With a sinking urgency, I scanned the front page for anything to hold on to, finally landing on the bottom on a story about protests in San Francisco closing the Golden Gate Bridge. "See," I pointed out, "this is where I'm from." Incredibly, the news of protests in America had traveled this far. I felt a rush of gratitude to everyone in the protest movement, though over the next twenty four hours it was easy to see the way things were tilting in the media. A four page special edition started appearing on the streets of New Delhi, with alarming reports that hysterically echoed the thrill of imminent destruction. Later that afternoon, an old man outside my hotel, his head wrapped in a turban, stood shaking his stick in the air under my window and calling out in a vengeance-summoning voice the name of his God. He appeared to be having one of the best days of his life, a moment that reversed his usual bad luck and petty subordination; things being right-or-wrong in a Western sense, always to his loss, might be happily reversed today, along with his whole tally of minor subtractions, all of it reprieved with this one irreducible cry. Around town things were rapidly approaching a flash point. A powerful bomb exploded at the American Airlines office, killing one person. People talked excitedly about the start of World War III. The prevailing mood in the streets was festive. I wondered if the population was so used to dictators, and had practiced patience and waiting for so many thousands of years, waiting for despots to disappear, that it meant nothing for them to wait for the end of this as well? I considered it a wonderful time for propagandists and provocateurs; I was hardly able to get through the bazaar without sensing an unspoken accusation, from the eyes that sought mine, that I had personally ordered the air strikes on Baghdad. At Connaught Circle people were grabbing any war bulletin that tumbled from the back of a delivery truck, and no one cared to separate the smoke and mirrors of hysterical headlines from what common sense might have told us. Or perhaps common sense itself had vanished. I had dinner with a businessman from New York that night. He was flying home on Pan Am, and had decided his plane was likely to be hijacked, or to explode in mid air. So he was getting drunk, as quickly as possible. He'd already had an undeclared number of whiskeys; we decided to go for the sumptuous feast offered at one of the most lavish middle eastern restaurants in town. As things turned out, the place was full of other Westerners. We were all waiting for flights to safety, and the atmosphere was a bacchanalia of the end-of-the world variety. Why not enjoy the suspense of being a target? There was nowhere to go to hide anyway. The waiters were smiling and bustling around. The sound of toasts chimed in from the next table. My companion, the New York businessman, rambled on about how they'll get you, like it or not -- no use modifying your behavior now. I was thinking he must be right -- it was too late to change anything the minute bombs had started to fall on Baghdad. With the war genie out of the bottle, anyone might have their wish fulfilled. After wishing my companion an uneventful flight to New York (it was), I made my way back through the shuttered, dark deserted streets to that obscure hotel, where I was supposed to be safely hiding. Constables were patrolling the back alleys with long walking sticks, knocking out a slow rhythm, and enforcing tonight's emergency curfew. I huddled in the narrow safety of my room, and every time I heard an officer circling under my window I felt safer. Other times, bands of drunken revelers stationed themselves in the same place, talking so loudly I couldn't deceive myself who their intended audience was. So much for the most obscure place in town. The Persian Gulf might as well have been next to the Red Fort. Every repressed complaint came back from the consignment of its oblivion to stand under my window, in the form of twenty year old unemployed college graduates, breaking the curfew and muttering in the dark alley below about the f-ing American -- taking a turn at reversing the old colonial drawers of their maps. After a few hours of restless sleep, I woke to hear the manager in a heated argument downstairs. His voice came from the lobby; I gathered that was he was debating several others just inside the front door. As I strained to hear, the hair literally up on my neck, a shuffling broke out, followed by the report of furniture going over. When the crowd rushed clomping up the stairs, I was sure they were coming to grab me in my room. I leaped out of bed, desperately searching through my kit for anything resembling a weapon. The only thing I could find was a Swiss army knife. What a terrible joke; I'm a pacifist. But I was that terrified. I stood clutching my tiny blade in front of a plywood door, ready to make my last stand wearing nothing but boxer shorts. Fortunately the rumble of footsteps continued past my door, to the next level. Even now, remembering the tread of those feet makes me nervous. As we move to repeat all the old mistakes in Iraq, I can't cure myself of the belief that the old hostilities, perhaps magnified in the last dozen years, will only be more prevalent among people whose lives are broken up by terror. After all, we bombed Iraq almost daily in the intervening years. Multiply one day of terror -- say, 9/11 -- by twelve years, or 4380 times, and what sort of result do we end up with? The next morning I was grateful all over again. The hotel manager not only gave me a refund for my extra, third night, he sympathized with my situation when he didn't have to. "War makes people crazy," he said. At least in 1991 the international community gave their legal stamp to the invasion -- this one has been illegal. In places like South Asia, where the spirit of the vanquished is never finally repressed, people are still fighting about issues dating back to the 17th Century. How will we ever achieve a lasting end to the dust-up and the violence if we deny the lessons of history, hoping instead to win at the point of a gun? |
