Appropriation (a short story)

“You’re resisting because it’s fashionable, not because you’ve suffered or are going to,” I said to Jyoti.

(1)

The cricket stump that H___ hit Nazeer on the head with and which in the process broke into two pieces that still somehow clung on to each other through a thin layer of—what?—varnish?—had been in cricketing use for two years, though it remained anyone’s guess if the velocity with which the stump travelled towards Nazeer’s head was comparable to the velocity with which cricket balls usually hit the stump, and when later that evening H___ spared a thought for his useless stump he figured that nothing could be said with confidence—because the number of direct strikes, which is to say clean-bowled and direct-hit run-out dismissals, was not very high in the matches that he played with his mates—but then he also realised the futility of such reasoning, reasoning which did nothing for him, nothing at all to reduce his feeling of being cheated, which was a strong feeling because he vividly remembered the sports-shop proprietor in Meerut using the words “international quality” while selling him the kit, and if the stump was really international quality than it should have been able to withstand even Shoaib Akhtar’s bowling, and given that that could not have happened, given that he could not have swung the stump at Nazeer’s head at a speed greater than 100 miles per hour, those words were nothing but the whitest of lies and there was nothing that the proprietor could truthfully say to defend the thing now, unless he tried to cheat H___ again, unless he tried to say that a particularly hard part of Nazeer’s skull had hit a particularly soft part of the stump, that such things happen all the time, that skulls and wood are not uniformly hard and sometimes an ill-fated collision can cause lasting damage, to which possibility H___, determined now to stand his ground for a replacement or a refund, decided to respond by saying: “I don’t care about all that.”

(2)

There was that point, a month or so ago, when the pandemic began to surge and the lockdown began to ease. The middle class knew that the dispensation would market mistakes as strokes of genius, and none of them really bothered. Being a writer, I had a difficult relationship with marketing. But being young and healthy and alone, I could also decide to care less about the virus. And so I arranged an evening in which I could enjoy the company of two other young writers, both of whom I admire and at times try to imitate. Invitations were sent and accepted on WhatsApp, and eventually, the three of us were together, sitting on my drawing-room sofas with drinks in our hands. I was the happy host, and there were a hazaar harmless things to talk about. But I hoped the evening would not be one of empty pleasure. These were fraught times, and not just because of the virus. The most burning question for Indian writers—whose stories should we tell?—was burning blazingly. I wanted some creative heat from the meeting.

My guests did not arrive at the issue at once, of course. There were pleasantries. There were commiserations for the state of the nation. There was solidarity. There was gossip, too, as much as a shared abhorrence of other, more successful writers can provide. The conversation began to turn towards the question only after an hour or so when Bharat found an opportunity to talk about his writerly anxieties and reveal their latest source. He reminded us of a story of his from four or five years ago, a story in which he had included a gay character and made this character’s homosexuality a plot point of sorts. The story had apparently attracted considerable private criticism—the kind that doesn’t come out in reviews but is whispered in long phone calls, typed out in private groups, or spoken about in meetings such as this one—from peers who considered themselves better disposed to render characters of a certain sexuality. Given that these peers had increased in influence over the years, and given that some among them had started critiquing the story more openly, Bharat now felt anxious and misunderstood and even a tad regretful. He said he might be in the way of what he called “literary harm”, and he confided that he had visions—thankfully, he avoided calling them nightmares—of being called out for his blind spots, or, if I were to attempt to paraphrase from the complex way he put it all: the vacant areas of sensitivity that his small-town origins and the consequent sense of always catching-up had left him to regard as accreting.

In the brief silence that followed, I noted how like on so many previous occasions Bharat had again found an innovative way to present his having come from a small town as a disadvantage. I couldn’t say I appreciated that. I believe that in most cases, English writers from Indian small towns are not very distant in socio-economic class from their metropolitan peers. They certainly don’t carry an inordinately heavier burden in terms of educating themselves. I have lived my whole life in South Delhi, and I probably went to a better school than Bharat did, but weren’t my life’s starting conditions also imbued with the ills of patriarchy and homophobia and whatnot? I didn’t say these things to Bharat, though, not least because there was a smidgeon of doubt in me: What if what I was thinking was merely a result of not having anything like small-town origins to claim for myself? What if I was just being jealous? These doubts fused with my convictions, forming a complex defence mechanism that then triggered unkind questions. Like: why should I be so cordial and attentive and reverent to someone so fixed about being inferior? Wasn’t it clear that Bharat had made even his heterosexuality seem like a disadvantage?

Perhaps Jyoti, who’d grown up in South Mumbai and now lived in South Delhi, saw the thought-churn on my face, for she looked at me conspiratorially and offered a hint of a smile. I returned a decidedly blank expression. Reciprocating such gestures can be dangerous. My book of short stories was due later in the year and I wanted Bharat to review it and review it well. Jyoti wouldn’t touch it, of course. She was too much against love stories. And she tended to conflate honesty with brutality. 

Seeing my noncommittal face, Jyoti gave the smallest shake of the head and sucked in some air. She then moved her right hand in a gesture that seemed quite literally like a clearing of the air before her. She started by rubbishing Bharat’s fears and calling his “so-called peers” silly. She said that they had “something stuck up their asses,” and then she laughed at the gross impropriety of what she’d said. It was that trademark Jyoti laughter: vulgar, persistent, somewhat powerful. Bharat and I joined in. There was a brief riot, in fact, and it stayed for a full minute. It even seemed to cause a temporary glitch in the large anglepoise lamp on the far side of the drawing room. 

“And now, Bharat… now you’re fighting back and how,” Jyoti said just as the laughter was beginning to subside.

“Fighting back?” Bharat asked.

“Fighting back, yes. That’s why there are Nazis in your fiction now, no? Cutesy Nazis.”

“I’m sorry?” Bharat asked again.

“Oh, come on,” Jyoti said, “aren’t your Nazi stories a way to challenge the firmament? A way of saying: ‘You know what, I once had a gay person in my story and you gave me shit. I now have Nazis. Nazis as depressed characters. Nazis as likeable characters. So what do you say to that?’ That’s what you’re going for, right?”

“I wouldn’t say that, no,” Bharat replied. “It’s much more complex than what you’re saying.”

I’d read one of those Nazi stories, and I remembered feeling nothing at all while reading it. It was about a man named Albert Speer.

(3)

At the Nuremberg trials, Albert Speer was not convicted of mass murder. He was convicted, instead, for employing forced labour in his war machinery, machinery which he oversaw as the Minister of Armaments and War Production. During the trials, Speer accepted his guilt more readily than everyone else. “Who else is to be held responsible for the course of events, if not the closest associates around the Chief of State?” he said. People called him “the Nazi who said sorry.” 

Speer was sentenced to twenty years. He spent all of that time inside Spandau prison in West Berlin. There he completed the greatest project of his life—greater even than the Reich Chancellery building or the Fuhrerbunker, both of which he had designed, and both of which were destroyed at the end by the Soviet army. What was this project? Well, it wasn’t much. It was very close to being nothing. It was probably nothing. Nothing but a long, long walk, sustained by the imagination and for the most part expiring into it.

(4)

Jyoti is the most political of us all. For her, we aren’t in the middle of a right-wing takeover; the process is already complete. “Countdown to black events,” that’s where she says we are. She writes sans regard for form and so directly that the old purists cannot help but criticise her. She is adept, however, at ridiculing the criticism on Twitter, where she has a sizeable following and where she always receives a stupendous number of retweets for her WIP, run-on-sentence microfictions. For new purists, Jyoti’s popularity is undeniable proof that grammatical errors and punctuation misplacements and head-hopping thuds have ceased to be of relevance to millennials. 

Jyoti is a Brahmin who hates Brahminism. On some days she can be a Communist who hates Communism. Before the riots in North-east Delhi she was thick into protesting, even getting the chance to read poems at Shaheen Bagh once. She never clicked selfies during the protests, but always managed to find incidentally captured videos or photos of herself, which she duly shared on Twitter. The riots, when they happened, brought an urgency to her writing, something that has now become a hallmark. Her stories, ie. refined versions of the run-on sentences, are beginning to find space in notable journals outside India, leading to payments in dollars and much envy all around. 

Aesthetically speaking, her stories deliberately give up atmospherics altogether as if all they are there for is the heart of the matter. No irony, no subtlety, no change of season, no cyan yarn or teal sea, and no common decencies find space in her stories—unless they can add to the cruelty of what is already cruel from the get-go. Her characters come embroiled in blazing situations. Muslims suffer, and lately, Dalits and Adivasis have been included in hell as well (though it remains unclear to me how everyone knows that the non-Muslim sufferers in Jyoti’s stories are Dalits and Adivasis, given that first names, which is all that she gives, aren’t usually conclusive). The act of violence doesn’t always happen on-screen, so to speak. And more often than not, we are trapped in the minds of the perpetrators. Her stories have an undeniable power, but since they want the reader to bear something unbearable, and go to great lengths to gain this weight, they always risk triggering readers’ defence mechanisms and cannot be permitted (by readers’ minds) to be memorable. Aware of this possibility from the very beginning, Jyoti has always premised her microfictions on trending images (of human suffering), thus ensuring memorability at least in the short term. But this has also led to not a small amount of brouhaha from well-meaning folks and trolls alike. A new purist has lauded this tactic by calling it a “strategic memorializing of national trauma.” An old purist has called it “a commitment to sensationalism.” That old purist was called a Nazi on Twitter; not by Jyoti, but by those who can safely be assumed to form her reader base.

Naturally, Jyoti has no compunctions in accessing—which is also to say, assuming—which is also to say, appropriating—the life stories of other people, irrespective of the distance between her own identity and theirs. She does so deliberately, seeing a mix of access, assumption and appropriation as the very point of writing fiction, or of writing fiction today. 

“These are end-times, there are urgencies. Some stories NEED to be told, so let’s not be fussy about who told them”—she had tweeted only a few hours before our meeting that day in my drawing room.

(5)

The diesel that H___ poured all over eighty-five-year-old Fathima—before making four failed attempts to flick a lit matchstick, full filmy style, on her, and then giving up on the theatrics and protecting the fifth matchstick’s flame with a cupped hand, so much so that right till the moment of ignition it may have appeared that the tiny flame was for something sacred—had been borrowed from a nearby transporter, rather an owner of three trucks and no more, who weeks later caught hold of H___ and demanded that the diesel be returned to him, which is of course a demand that disappointed H___ and made him ask the transporter, in as earnest a voice as he could summon, as to why something that had been donated to a good cause was now being asked to be returned, where was the logic in it, where was the good sense; but of course the transporter had an all-too-materialistic explanation that detailed how in the intervening weeks the excise duty rise had changed the price of diesel from X to Y, how he was under pressure now, how he had given too much diesel away, how he had never promised that he would not ask to be reimbursed for the diesel that he had given away, how H___ was not the only person that he was demanding money from, how he had asked five other “borrowers” and how two of them had already paid while a third one had returned the diesel itself (since he hadn’t had the courage to use it and had been hiding it in his house), and so on and so on, till H___’s disappointment turned into anguish and he asked the man if he could truly, with a solemn hand on his heart, knowing the specific purpose that H___ had used the diesel for, demand compensation, did he really have it in him to be that money-minded, which is all of course equivalent to H___ positing that The Spectacle of Fathima's Death > Y - X , and also that The Value of Fathima’s Life < Y - X, and although the transporter understood these equations innately and without really seeing them in their mathematical form, he was now feeling a different fever, a different set of compulsions, a different set of needy eyes, the prospect of different tears, of long simpering rather than short screaming, and therefore all he could say to H___ was the following: “I don’t care about all that.”

(6)

“It’s complex, yes,” Jyoti continued, “but it’s also not complex at all, you know.”

“You’re making no sense,” Bharat said.

“Allow me,” Jyoti said. Then she paused, knowing fully well what the pause would do to Bharat. She extended it by pulling up her legs and slowly folding them under herself. Her knees pointed away from Bharat and her upper half was turned towards him, and somehow this posture conveyed that she was comfortable in the conversation yet also not fully committed to it. 

It was finally starting. I could have licked my lips.

“You know,” Jyoti started, “you show Nazis as individuals, as individuals with memory and privacy and interiority and whatnot. Great. But one is compelled to ask why. Why them? Why now? And I link it with your thesis about your vacant areas of sensitivity or whatever. And it all makes splendid sense when I do. It does. I think you do it to prove that blind spots are everywhere, that they aren’t worth mentioning.”

“That’s a load of nonsense. How so, if I may ask?” Bharat said.

“Well, to begin with, you take us to a historical context that is far away. That isn’t ours. This lets you ensure that, in some ways, we are all blind as soon as we enter. The only thing we have at the beginning is our common knowledge—that Nazis are evil, that they are the scum of the earth, et cetera—but then you never reward that knowledge with any narrative assent.” 

“That knowledge doesn’t need any narrative assent,” said Bharat.

“Right. So everyone else who’s ever done Nazi stuff is a fool, then. Anyway, it’s one thing not giving narrative assent to the ‘Nazis are evil’ theme. Quite another to keep the door open for interpretations. Quite another to sneak in compassion for the Nazi.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No, no, let me say it all. I actually see it clearly now. I see you covering up for your vacant areas of sensitivity in two distinct ways. First, by taking us to a vacant area. Someone else’s history, that is. And second, by giving us a lot of low-key sensitivity. Shaded, shady compassion. And why that? Probably because you want to convince us that your compassion is universal, so universal that it can even be extended to Nazis.” 

Jyoti’s comment felt true to me. I had not felt anything after reading the Albert Speer story. Its historical context was a vacant area for me. All I took away from it, I now remembered, was a sense of Bharat’s ingenuity. A story that does nothing besides informing us of the writer’s talent—that’s not a story, is it? 

“You haven’t understood the story at all. At all,” Bharat said. “I’m surprised. There are a lot of things going on there, and I’m surprised you don’t see any of them. You see nothing. You don’t see it’s an attempt to speak to the current moment tangentially,” Bharat spoke the last bit in a cutting tone, the kind that believes it is delivering a hard fact even as it reaches for abstraction.

“Excuse me! How, exactly, are you speaking to the current moment?” Jyoti said. “Is that our ministers’ futures that you’re showing us in the garb of an Albert Speer story? I’ll be shocked if I find someone who reads it like that. It doesn’t appear like that at all. At all.”

“No, not that way. But fuck it. It’s clear. I shouldn’t worry about what you make of it.”

“Oh, and, by the way, why must the current moment be spoken to tangentially?” asked Jyoti, unfolding her legs and placing her feet on the floor. It looked like she had lost the equanimity to use her posture as a weapon.

“Because we know nothing of the current moment,” Bharat said slowly, stressing each word as if what he was mentioning should have been obvious. There was a pause that we observed with varying levels of agreement, after which Bharat added: “We don’t know the abyss, so to catch a glimpse we have to find safe ways to circle it.”

Jyoti arched her eyebrows in mock surprise. “Safe ways?” she asked Bharat. “So safe that you’ve to take us to someone else’s history? So safe that nothing happens? So safe that nothing is supposed to happen? You know your abyss is the same as your vacant area. Both have fucking nothing to do with the reader. Nice little aesthetic quibbles, that’s all. And a circle is of course harmless geometry to tread. So neat, no, this whole circling thing? Kind of like what your Speer does. An illustration of nothing. Creating the illusion of making a grand point and then not making it.”

This stung Bharat. He placed his whisky glass on the centre table in slow motion. Then he leaned forward—elbows on knees, fingers interlaced, eyeballs solid. We could hear him inhale and exhale.

(7)

In the first two years of his prison time, Albert Speer read more than two hundred books. Biographies, histories, guidebooks, spiritual works, and some cheap fiction too. There were times when he wondered if he would have served the same bosses had he read all these books earlier. The answer, more often than not, was “Yes.” Over the war years and earlier, as he’d done the things that landed him in Spandau Prison, his answer to many questions had been “Yes!” Reading had rubbed out the exclamation mark and left behind a period in its place—but that was all there was to it.

The whole world was a post-war world, sighing and sputtering, and so was Spandau prison. At first, the prison library didn’t have enough to support Speer’s reading voracity. Special arrangements had to be made. The prison authorities, it was rumoured, had struck a deal with Speer: “We will let you read if you don’t try to write.” Speer was provided with pen and paper for note-taking etc., but he had to agree to show his notes to the prison guards every now and then. Writing memoirs was forbidden for imprisoned Nazis. 

This abnormal amount of reading, while doing nothing to elevate Speer from his general depression, had had the side effect of changing his constitution to a sedentary one, which is to say that he got fat. The prison guards, many of whom regarded reading as an affliction of the rich, did not pity him. The guard who was in charge of checking Speer’s notes, and who saw nothing but gibberish in the notes, held a more considerate view. One day, gathering some courage, he told Speer that History works in strange ways, that it was already working in odd ways, and that there was a fair chance that people would do other things than spit on him when he got out. The guard added that there was still hope, that Speer could come out of prison after twenty years and still lead some sort of life, and shouldn’t that be enough motivation for him not to choke his arteries and be more active? 

Whether due to the guard’s advice or not, Speer decided to reduce his reading and took to taking long walks along the prison fence. Gradually, helped not only by the exertion of the walks but by the fastidious following of a set routine, his spirits improved. He started chatting with those around him and even started sharing jokes (including Hitler jokes). His mind swatted the cobwebs formed by all the words that he had read in the last two years. He started having his own thoughts and ideas, and they seemed to him clearer than what he had weaned from pages. 

One fine evening, while ambling along the east end of the prison, Speer felt a new turn of feeling. It emerged from the warmth inside his chest as he noticed stars twinkling in grey autumn twilight. Within minutes he was struck by an idea: what if he walked through the entire world from inside the prison? 

Speer could not sleep that night, for he was convinced this was a capital idea. And as was usually the case with Nazis like him, a capital idea had to lead immediately to a grand scheme for its fulfilment. The very next day, Speer requested the prison library to provide him with detailed maps of Europe, starting from a street-level view of the place he was in. He also asked for tourist guidebooks. The prison authorities were sceptical at first. They wanted to know why he needed these things. Speer said that he needed the items to imagine and execute the exact foot route from the Spandau Prison in Berlin to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The authorities thought of this as ridiculous, but there was also a low-grade panic among them. After all, they were dealing with the man who was once in charge of executing Hitler’s Nero Decree: the mandate to burn everything of any utility to the oncoming Allied forces between Paris and Berlin. Even otherwise, what could be funny about it: a Nazi had just asked them for maps. 

It took a couple of weeks of deliberation—during which the hot rumour inside Spandau prison was that a matter concerning Albert Speer had been sent to the American embassy, and from there to the White House—for the authorities to conclude that no harm could come out of granting Speer’s wishes. The man was soon provided with the things that he had asked for. 

Once he had the resources, Speer undertook a month of toil to prepare a route. All he had to do then was imagine. 

He imagined while walking. 

He imagined walking. 

He imagined walking on the imaginary route. 

He walked on the imaginary route.

He walked on the route.

If, while walking in a straight line, Speer reached the prison boundary and could go no further, he would just turn one-eighty degrees and start walking again (in his mind, he gave about-turns the concession of not existing).

What Speer was also doing was using his mind’s eye to recreate whatever he had seen in the tourist guides and picture books. He conjured features and natural landmarks that were liable to be in his path. If he reached a new town, he would rest and read about the town’s history, its culture, its people, et cetera. He even penned his observations. As earlier, he was required to show his writings to the guard, who, on seeing his hometown described with crystalline accuracy in one of the notes, got perturbed and decided to show the notes to his superiors. The superiors didn’t know what they could do about such imaginative writing, and after concluding that the material was neither autobiographical nor historical nor ideological, decided to let it be. 

An architect by training and also someone who had held high office, Speer was used not only to planning days in advance but to push for precision in execution. He had measured his footsteps and counted them obsessively during the walks. He wanted exactitude, a perfect match with reality; in going from town A to town B he would want to cover the exact distance that his maps said existed between the two. 

He was often seen mumbling the step counts, and a group of guards began to see this as proof that he was performing some sort of black magic. One of them (not the note-checking guard) wondered if there could, one day, be a magical device that would count our footsteps and compute for us the distance that we had covered in this world, and if wearing that device would turn everyone crazy, just like Albert Speer. His friends dismissed the idea, but they all agreed that Speer knew magic and would one day walk through the prison fence without being noticed. 

Speer, it must be said, wasn't crazy or delirious or insane or any of that: he knew very well that he was only imagining. He knew that exact correspondence with reality was impossible, that he could, even with the greatest exertion, only stretch his constraints. He was holding on to a fiction, and this fact was absolutely clear to him; but he also knew, as any Nazi might be assumed to, that it is through the path of fiction that all truth and falsity reach us. As practice sharpened his imaginative faculties and as time granted his peregrinations a semblance of continuity, Speer’s notes began to resemble the work of a more than competent travel writer. Months passed, years passed, villages and towns and cities passed, hills and waterfalls passed, fields and forests passed, and Speer’s notebooks filled one after the other. He slowly became conscious of the worth of all his writings, and even allowed himself the fantasy of publishing them after he was released from prison. 

The prison term ended in 1966. During a month-long period before his release, Speer had confined himself to his cabin, causing much fuss among the authorities. Some of the new guards, who blindly believed the myths they had inherited, thought that this was the Nazi’s final disappearing act. The guard who used to check his notes had gained two promotions in the period. He had, however, continued to glance through Speer’s papers now and then, out of interest if nothing else, and knew what was really happening. Speer was crossing the Atlantic, and he was doing so in a submarine, a model that his war factories had once produced in big numbers. The man had stopped the walking routine and shut himself up only in order to simulate being inside a submarine. 

On the day of his release, Speer mentioned that he was in Guadalajara, Mexico. The guards laughed, but the old one among them solemnly said: “You see, the Nazi did not vanish. He just sharpened his imagination.”

(8)

“The grounding assumption in whatever you’ve said, Jyoti, is that my reader belongs to a particular historical context,” Bharat spoke slowly, softly. “That they belong to India, to today’s India, that they need to see fascism’s excesses. But that may or may not be true. Literature is not news, you know.”

“Literature is news that stays,” pat came Jyoti’s reply.

“So you mean that anyone not doing news is not doing literature?” Bharat asked.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You have made a big deal of me taking the reader to distant histories. I have to ask: what’s the difference between my Speer and any of your guys? Sure, I wasn’t there in Germany. But were you there, wherever the action in your stories is supposed to be taking place. Were you there in North-east Delhi?”

“Come one, I’ve been in protests,” Jyoti said, “you know that.”

The comment made Bharat smile ever so slightly. He leaned back on the sofa to assume his earlier position. It looked like he’d found a way of clinching it. “But were you there when they burnt people alive?” he asked. “Were you there when they shot someone in the eye? Were you there when someone hit a Muslim man with a cricket stump? No, you weren’t. You read the news, and then you write. I read other things, and then I write. We are both imagining things after a point. We are both circling the abyss.” 

This struck me as true, and because this struck me as true I was plunged into doubt. Minutes ago I was in agreement with Jyoti, believing that Bharat’s Speer story had done nothing other than informing us of his talent. But now I found myself in agreement with Bharat, in that they are both more alike than they seem at first. Weren’t Jyoti’s long run-on sentences also a way to show off, an exercise in breathlessness and nothing else?

“I’m not as distant from the action as you say,” Jyoti replied, “neither in time nor space nor context nor responsibility.”

“Nor hashtags,” Bharat added smugly. Then, after a pause: “The Unbearable Today, that would be a good name for the snippets collection.”

It was Jyoti’s turn to be stung. She didn’t like the word snippets and that showed. “I’m not afraid, Bharat,” she said. “I don’t take the easy way out as you do. You’ve become this guy—whether that’s because you’ve given too much thought to coming from a small town, I don’t know—but you’ve become this guy who has a phobia about being blamed for appropriating things. Plus you’re also scared to acknowledge the evil that is very much present in your vicinity. And so you do what your fears allow you to do: reinvent faraway historical characters whose evil is beyond question and then argue that it's all for speaking to the times tangentially… blah blah blah. It’s all so convenient, no? Staying as anodyne as possible, picking up scenarios where any humanizing surplus becomes an act of bold empathy, ignoring the collapse of this republic—all so convenient. Bravo to thinking that this is how literature stays. Time will tell.”

“Yes, time will tell,” Bharat said. “But I must say it’s rather strange to be lectured on these things by someone who publishes on Twitter and uses the mob to drown criticism,”

“The mob!” Jyoti shook her head. She was now visibly agitated. “My Twitter is my business, and how people react to it is their business. Also, just to remind you, my stories get placed in big lit mags, where I haven’t had the pleasure of finding your work.”

Bharat and Jyoti continued to trade such volleys. This wasn't an unwelcome thing, not as far as I was concerned. I liked such tussles between them, and had, in fact, arranged the meeting with a wish to get the two of them into such states. I knew that the insults they were hurling at each other would land heavily in this moment. And also that they’d both forget them by the time the evening ended. To me, what they were saying was all bitingly exact. Listening to their talk gave me a new understanding of their works and of all fiction in general. Or of fiction in India. Or of the art of fiction in the year 2020. Well, something like that. The word appropriation began to ring in my head.

“Can I say something?” I asked.

Both of them stopped, looking at me as if surprised that I was still there. Then they said “yes” simultaneously.

“Bharat, about your Speer story…” I started. But then I stopped. I realised I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say.

“Go on,” Bharat urged me.

“Umm… you mentioned that it would not be right to assume that your reader is Indian, or that they share the current historical context. That made me imagine a different scenario.”

“What scenario?”

“I mean… I imagined your story being read in Germany, or Europe, whatever. And things didn’t fit. At least not in my imagination. Does a German reader need an Indian writer to introduce them to Albert Speer? Does a German reader need an Indian writer to be scared of Nazi imagination? I think not.”

Jyoti sniggered. Bharat cleared his throat but said nothing.

“I think not,” I repeated, slightly scared of how Bharat would take it from now on. But I was also growing confident of what I was saying, in a way that made it impossible to stop. So I carried on: “And since the German or European reader doesn’t need the story, one would guess that you wrote it for the contemporary Indian reader. So the why this or why now sort of questions that Jyoti raises are valid, according to me.”

“Oh, so you’re siding with her?” Bharat said. It sounded like a threat.

“No, I mean, yes,” I said, “at least as far as the validity of her questions is concerned, yes.”

Jyoti burst into that laughter of hers. The anglepoise lamp heard it and flickered. I realised that that was because Jyoti’s convulsions shook the electric wire plugged into the socket next to her sofa. I suddenly remembered my short-story collection and felt a spike of nervousness. I reran my words in my head to see if they had been inappropriate. Be appropriate, I told myself.

“Go on, my friend, go on,” Jyoti said to me.

“I don’t have more,” I said, and then to find some balance, added: “I’m not too sure whether writing these Nazi stories is a response of fear, though. I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s more a case of creative liberty.”

“Creative liberty?” Jyoti said.

“Yes,” I said. “I mean, Bharat is going where his mind takes him. One can’t really complain about that.”

“Oh, like how your mind is taking you to love stories?” Jyoti asked me. “Of lovebirds having difficulty meeting in the pandemic? Or of a woman accidentally sending a picture to an ex?”

I must have reacted in a pathetic way—with a gasp, or with an open mouth, or with reddened ears. I looked at Bharat and saw him laughing. Jyoti was laughing, too. The lamp flickered. Then the two of them did something that distressed me to no end. They high-fived. 

I felt tears rush into my eyes. I blinked furiously to keep them from dribbling out. I suddenly remembered a line that I’d read somewhere, about good writers needing bad writers only to serve as readers and stewards. They didn’t think I was one of them. I tried to smile back.

“Do you have something to say about her work, too?” Bharat asked me.

“Yes, I do,” I said, my voice enfeebled by the idea of lending myself to some other secret joke.

“Shoot.”

“You’re resisting because it’s fashionable, not because you’ve suffered or are going to,” I said to Jyoti. It came out in low volume, but perhaps in a tone more cutting than I had intended. Be appropriate, it sounded in my head. I decided to shun the advice. “Which means that there is a violent lie at the heart of your enterprise, an appropriation,” I continued. “Your resistance is on behalf of someone, but that someone, other than in the story about the two Jeevans, that someone isn’t even the one whose situation we are offered. Evil is banal, some people are getting fucked, some others are doing the fucking, and here I bring some more horror for you just because I can—that’s what your work is, that’s what I think of it.”

Jyoti and Bharat didn’t laugh or high-five or low-five this time. There was a silence. Perhaps my voice had carried some of my anguish.

It was Bharat who broke the silence after a minute. “Well, writers do what they can do,” he said with an affected sigh, “and what they can do, they must do.” 

I didn’t agree with that comment but I let that pass. I didn’t agree because it equated capability (can do) with responsibility (must do). It didn’t have anything about self-enforced restraint or limits: restraint that Bharat doubtless thought he had missed in that old story of his with the gay character; limits that Jyoti had implicitly accepted in not accessing Nazeer’s or Fathima’s experience; restraint that Bharat and Jyoti had missed while high-fiving; limits that Speer and his bosses knew not one iota of… 

Almost instantly, a new credo formed and etched itself inside my head. 

Appropriate to be appropriate. 

(9)

The mobile phone that Jeevan sold at a throwaway price to leave behind some money for his wife and his child—money that would be enough for six meals or a three-day-long ride home but not both—before jumping into a nearby naala and relieving the cosmos of his own needs and wants, that phone, was resold at a hundred and ten per cent profit to a man named Ishwar who’d bought the phone in no small degree of desperation himself, spending a good chunk of his money on it, in fact, because back in the village his eight-year-old son, also named Jeevan, had fallen from a rooftop—a news that Ishwar had received on his old phone, the phone that he’d dropped in the naala two days ago while trying to avoid a police lathi on the bridge, also the phone on which the naala’s slow flow had then played a cruel joke by pushing it close to Jeevan’s twisted body, such that when the corpse was found it was found with the phone almost stuck to it, Ishwar’s phone next to Jeevan’s corpse, that is—and so Ishwar’s ink-stained shirt pocket now carried Jeevan’s phone, on which Ishwar received the news that his son’s situation was serious and soon thereafter the news that his son was dead, after hearing which Ishwar, sitting on the same bridge where he had avoided the police lathi and clasping the old-new phone in his right hand, tried to remember his son’s face but found the vision too hard to summon, tried to cry but was too dehydrated for tears, tried to hum but was too out of rhythm, which left him to believe that this, this lockdown, this uncrossable bridge, the home that was too far, the sun’s glare, was all wrong, that this was all a miscalculation made by someone, a punishment that had gone too far, or an error that would be rectified any time now, and it was waiting for this rectification that minutes or hours or some other quantum of time passed, till Ishwar suddenly heard shouts of “Jeevan gaya, Jeevan gaya, Jeevan gaya” from not very far, shouts to which his first response was puzzlement, for he wondered how people here knew that Jeevan had gone to another world, and the second response was happiness, for his mind told him that somehow, owing to some miracle, he had been transported home, and the third response was shame, for he had allowed himself to feel happy; and it was all this puzzlement and happiness and shame that brought together the last bits of his energy and made him stand up on his feet and walk up to the bridge’s railing and jump while shouting: “I don’t care about all that.”