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Sister India / Sister South
Sister India / Sister South
- by Peggy Payne
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On a fall morning ten years ago, in an apartment close to the Ganges, I woke to find that
the city around me was shut down by police. The cook for this two-bedroom guest house
met me as I came out of my room. "Banaras cor-foo," Sakhai said. I didn't understand.
Leah, the other guest, who spoke Hindi-Urdu, was on the phone trying to find out more.
I had only recently arrived in this Hindu holy city, Varanasi, or Benares as it is also
called. I was there to take notes for a novel. Leah put down the phone. An incident had
occurred nearby, she said, over on Assi Road. Hindus had been carrying an image of a
deity through a Muslim neighborhood to the holy river. Fireworks exploded too close to a
window. A fight had broken out. Five were dead. Sakhai sank down onto the edge of the
couch, hands on his knees, said in his sparse English: "Not good." Naively, I had
expected a time of quiet contemplation in this ancient pilgrimage city.
What began that day in 1991 led to two weeks of day-and-night curfew, lifted
occasionally for a few hours in one neighborhood and then another. There was more
violence before it was over--though nothing near the scale of the attack that has struck
our nation. In that more local conflict, both Hindus and Muslims died, hundreds of people
were taken to jail, and all the businesses suffered in this city of a million people.
I learned a few things from this experience and its aftermath, even from the safe distance
where I stood. I found out, for example, how the facts of what has happened can seem to
alter from minute to minute. I kept my balance better when I realized that beyond the
facts that were all too plain, the full truth would take a little time to come clear.
And it wasn't the numbers that mattered anyway. It was the individual's story or the
particular detail that carried the full weight of the horror. In Varanasi, the account that
wrenched my heart was of a man with a Muslim name, beat to death by police; this man
was a doctor and president of the local peace committee. Here at home, I felt the shock
when I heard on my car radio the voice of a 22 year-old woman rushing from hospital to
hospital searching for her husband: she feared he was dying without her beside him.
Even for those of us at a distance, there can be surprising long-lasting effects. For a
couple of years after my return, I had daily flashbacks of imagined scenes of the carnage.
I hadn't seen a blow struck; but I'd read and heard and imagined. The images I'd conjured
flickered before me, coming and going in the space of a second. I couldn't get rid of them
until I stopped pushing them away. Finally, I let the visualized scene-of people pulled
from rickshaws and stabbed to death-play out fully in my mind. It was as if in a dream: I
was there, sobbing, imagining myself holding onto the rickshaw bench, blood and
screaming all around me.
Before my first brush with terrorism, I had enjoyed reading true crime stories. Since then,
I've never read another one. My experience also led me to feel the truth of a philosophy
I'd long held: that random striking back at innocent people of another community does
not put a stop to fanatic violence. It only creates new terrorists and fuels the rage.
I learned one other thing; it was on a weekend away in Delhi, toward the end of my
pilgrimage. On Sunday, I was ready to come home to Varanasi, but pilots went on strike
that day. At first I was disgruntled, but then made plans to spend the afternoon in the
bazaar near Old Delhi's Red Fort. By the time I was happily ready to set off for that
market, I learned, with slight dismay, that I was booked on a flight that afternoon. So I
walked back into the flat in Varanasi just in time to turn on the English recap of the TV
news. A bomb had exploded mid-afternoon near the wall of the Red Fort, four had died,
and forty more were injured. Staring at the TV, trying to make sure I'd heard right, I
understood in my gut that no matter how I maneuver, there is no sure safety, not even in a
holy city; there is no way to make the guaranteed right decision. Theologian Alan Watts
called his book on this subject: The Wisdom of Uncertainty. In essence: take the
reasonable precautions, knowing there are no perfect precautions and that, paradoxically,
there is some relief in that.
The story I eventually wrote I called Sister India, because of the similarities I sensed-in
religiosity, volatility, pride-between that country and my native South. But it isn't just
Southerners, Hindus, and Muslims: we all know the hunger for vengeance. Never more
so than now. What I hope is that we will resist blind retaliation. Because when people
go mad on behalf of who and what they love, atrocities are committed, and made worse
by the fervor of righteousness. My hope is that we can keep pouring our furious energy
into rescue and rebuilding, and into bringing the terrorists to no more or less than justice.
(Peggy Payne's novel Sister India is a New York Times Notable Book for 2001. She will speak at
no charge by speakerphone with any book club reading the novel. www.peggypayne.com for info)
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