When The Moon Landed In America

Two months ago, as I was about to board a Eurostar train to Paris from Waterloo sta-tion, London, I was stopped, taken to a room with dark windows, and questioned by a man in plainclothes from the Metropolitan police's anti-terrorist squad. He was courteous, at least until he discovered the visas for Pakistan and Afghanistan. There was an odd excitement in his eyes when he looked up and began an increasingly aggressive interrogation. I told him that I was a writer and had gone to these countries on behalf of an American paper. It seemed hard for him to believe me. He kept asking me about whether I had met anyone close to Osama bin Laden, whether I knew any Islamic extremists, and my truthful answers only seemed to work him up into a kind of frenzy.

Minutes passed. I told him that I had a train to catch. I felt the contempt in his voice when he said he had to check me against certain profiles of potential terrorists he had. I resented his tone, but at the same time felt nervous and almost guilty of some unremembered misdemeanour. Luckily, I had the idea of asking him to check my name on the websites of some newspapers. I don't know whether he did or not when he went away briefly. But he looked subdued, if unapologetic, when he returned.

With only a few seconds remaining, I ran to my coach. I seated myself and then discovered that my hands were shaking. I looked around. The other passengers—French, returning, I later learnt, from protesting against the decision by Mark and Spencer's to close their outlets in Paris—seemed to be staring at me. I turned towards the window and saw a dark-skinned man with a quasi-Muslim beard. I looked away. The white people were still staring. I opened The Guardian and saw strings of meaningless words. In just a few minutes, something had profoundly distorted my relationship with the world.

The moment passed. In the merciful light of Paris, the world became neutral and manageable again. And it was interesting to think later that just a few weeks before I had been seen as a representative of the powerful West by radical Islamists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It barely mattered to them that I was, in one sense, the worst kind of infidel: a Hindu by birth and Indian by nationality. And they did not much talk about Kashmir. The important thing for them was that I had travelled from England, and I was writing for an American paper. And so the phone calls I made were swiftly returned. Doors normally shut to local journalists opened easily; people were courteous and frank.

In squalid madrassas, where the Taliban had been given the most rudimentary Islamic education, and where another generation prepared themselves for jehad, men spoke calmly of how the oppressed Muslims of the world had come together to destroy one superpower—the Soviet Union—and would, with the grace of god, also take care of America and Israel if they did not relent in their persecution of Muslims. This was the message they expected me to take back to the West.

I went to an international conference of radical Islamists near the border with Afghanistan, where 2,00,000 men—many of them from North Africa, the Middle-East, and Central Asia—listened to speeches on similar themes. The atmosphere was of a medieval desert fair: men walking urgently around the sprawling township of tents under a vast cloud of dust, past the stalls selling beautifully illustrated copies of the Quran in Urdu and Arabic, along with posters of Osama bin Laden, clearly the star of the event.On the first day, a ferocious dust storm blew off some of the tents. The white salwar-kameezes of the men flapped in the wind as they ran out from under the swaying tents; the new Afghan rugs lost their bright colour and blended into the dust-white ground. But the speeches remained fierce: speaker after speaker urging Muslims to join the jehad against the US and its allies.

It took me some time to sort out my own responses to all this. I knew about the corruptions of jehad; of the leaders grown fat on generous donations from foreign and local patrons, sending young men to poorly-paid shahadat (martyrdom) in Kashmir and Afghanistan. But I hadn't been prepared to be moved by the casual sight in one madrassa of six young men sleeping on tattered sheets; I hadn't thought I would be pained to think of the human waste they represented—the young men, whose ancestors had once built one of the greatest civilisations of the world, and who now lived in dysfunctional societies, under governments beholden to, or in fear of, America.

My own feeling for America had developed over many visits. It was separate from the fact that I wrote for American papers, that the country's marginal but robust intellectual life—given so little due in the knee-jerk denunciations of American culture—had made possible for me to sustain a career as a writer. No, it was something else. I felt it as a ridiculous pang in my heart as the plane banked for final approach at jfk and the towers of the city at the edge of the vast entranced continent rose serenely into view. I felt it again, as nostalgia, after I was thousands of miles away from America. I began to put complex contradictory words to it only after I read John Updike, longing, while he was lonely in London in 1969, for America, and wondering about the extraordinary civilisation the "last new race" in the world had created, about "the breezy big kitchens, and the lawns burnt brown by August, and the twirling sprinklers and fainting skies, and the cracked tender terrible confident emptiness of it all."

It was easy to denounce that vision of endless space and well-being and leisure as a deception; to speak of the dirty work of empire-building and empire-maintenance, the ruthless suppression of remote and near enemies, that went on behind it. But it remained seductive, particularly so to those of us from struggling tormented societies, even when you had, like me, no plans to live in the US. Here was a country whose nation-building traumas seemed to lie in the remote past, where a widely shared affluence appeared to have taken care of the social and economic disparities that complicated our lives elsewhere.

And it was this frail fantasy of America as an untainted, almost Arcadian realm that I selfishly mourned when I heard the news in the Himalayan village that has been a part-time home to me for many years. I had no TV or radio near me, and horrible images arose in my mind, images that seemed to have accumulated over the last twenty years of relentlessly bad news from Punjab and Kashmir. But such was the imaginative dissonance between Manhattan and the Kashmir valley that they obscured at first what I struggled to articulate to myself: that the brutality of the world I had grown up in—the tens of thousands of murders and hundreds of suicide attacks on individuals and institutions—had come to America, and, in the process, had irrevocably altered the hierarchies of the world.

On the last pages of V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River, the Indian narrator, untouched so far by the violence of his African country, is told to get out fast by an African official: "One day they'll rough you up and then they'll discover that you are like everybody else and then very bad things will happen to you." Whatever else happened now, I felt, the attacks on the

WTC and Pentagon had made America appear—and appearances are all—mortal and vulnerable; had destroyed its formidable aura of a superpower, which America could never regain, no matter how many fighter jets were scrambled into the air, or naval fleets positioned in the Gulf, or ominous plans drawn up for 'ending' hostile states.

It was terrifyingly easy to guess at the responses of the jehadis I had met in Pakistan and Afghanistan. How fast they would have moved from their sense of besiegement and impotence—of which I had an intimation at Waterloo station, when a resentment against the West and its harsh arrangements had stirred even within my privileged being—to exultation at the sight of fewer than two dozen motivated and patient Muslims bringing a rich and proud superpower to its knees. How drunk they, and all other enemies of America—known and unknown, well-deserved or not—would be on their new sense of power.

Something terrible lay in this discovery of America's vulnerability. But equally appalling revelations awaited me in the next few days as I received anguished

e-mails and phone calls from friends in America—people distressed by not only the destruction of innocent lives but also the vicious revenge that was now being sought for it. From what they told me, retaliation—swift and cruel—was already in the air. The dogs of nationalism and war had begun to bark all across America.

As I write, a week after the attacks, no evidence directly implicating bin Laden as either the sponsor or mastermind of the attacks has emerged. What little detail is available at present links the hijackers most inconveniently to Saudi Arabia and Egypt: two Middle-Eastern countries with repressive America-backed regimes, and strong if ruthlessly persecuted Islamist opponents. Nevertheless, President George Bush now seems ready to put on—and, by the time you read this, may have already set off—a spectacular display of America's war machinery against the lifeless background of Afghanistan, which might be bombed into the Stone Age, a condition that country has almost achieved, partly through a previous involvement with America in the days of the Cold War.

But then, what? The most frightening possibility is an Islamist backlash in Pakistan. The Bush administration supposes their country will be safely out of the mess in South Asia, after having reached its aim, which, when you discount the moralising and geopolitical claptrap, is simply this: to make the world see that the American military will always have the upper hand over the likes of bin Laden when it comes to violence and destruction. Or perhaps American troops are expected to be around forever to deter future enemies, whom the Chicago Tribune warns that "life is long, we are not finished, they must feel the terror": the kind of rhetoric which has stultified even responsible sections of the American media, and which is only some banal machismo, for people like bin Laden feel no terror, and what is also depressingly true is that thousands await to take their place—the thousands who now have a clearer idea of the damage they are capable of inflicting by the simplest of means.

It probably appears disingenuous now to be outraged by the moral nullity of US' leaders, and the lynch-mob rage they currently stoke across the country. All of America's wars in the last half-century have been conducted far from home, and, more recently, from 30,000 feet up in the air. A country so well-shielded from the mass tragedy and trauma almost all other nations have experienced could only have a complacent and largely unexamined collective life. And, after all, it was America's lack of a rigorous self-awareness, its sensuous self-absorption, that had beguiled so many of us.

It is what now strikes hardest at all of us who have been half in love with the country, and who, half turning away from, even while deploring, the always visible corruptions of empire, had secretly poured our shy bumbling affection on its mass illusions: on an unselfconscious vitality that now reveals itself as ignorance, quickly combusted into a xenophobic fury, and on a dreamy innocence that was not of this world, could not live long, and, it seems increasingly, had no right to exist.

In the last few days, the abyss between America and the rest of the world that many of us bridged with private fantasies has grown even wider. I had a sense of this when I watched the images of the burning and collapsing towers on a small grainy black and white screen, in a daily-wage labourer's tin shack deep in the valley below my cottage. Around me swarmed a large family, busy cooking a meagre meal over a kerosene stove in one corner. They weren't sure why I, the well-off-seeming man in the big cottage, was present in their cramped dingy quarters, watching something they had seen and forgotten about. The labourer stood behind me. Once he said, his quiet voice almost drowned out by the excited commentary, but chilling in its heart-felt conviction, "Yeh sab Bhagwan ki marzi hai (this is all God's will)," and for an extraordinarily lucid second I saw what he meant on the screen, where the mighty towers erected by man in defiance of nature were being brought down to earth, by a power which, though quite mortal itself and made devastating only by modern technology, suddenly appeared, in the scale of what it had achieved, to have been abetted by a malevolent divinity.

It was a profoundly disturbing moment, in all of its reminders of our not so common humanity. I knew then that the more widespread and morally ambiguous response to the event could never be captured on TV cameras, could barely be expressed in words: that it probably lay buried in the hearts of millions of humiliated peoples around the world, and not just those who have felt the malign hand of American foreign and economic policy in their lives, but all those who have been excluded from the banquets of the 'free world', condemned to centuries of deprivation by the injustices of history. These are people in whom the sight of the collapsing towers did not so much induce shock and horror, or a craving for bloody revenge, as a great awe, and a bitter smug shrug at how the arbitrary cruelty and pain they have long lived with had caught up with the most privileged people, and the most magnificent city, in the world.

Raw American nerves might mistake this for the crude gloating of a handful of Palestinian refugees shown on TV. But the reactions outside America to the terrorist attacks are much more complex and ambivalent than Americans will let themselves believe. They reflect the real divisions of the world that at such moments—with the reports pouring in of hate crimes against Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs—seem, in a sinister way, as much racial as economic.And the animosity and distrust these divisions breed will continue to fester silently even as the leaders of America bully all the good peoples of the world into joining a show of unity against the suitably 'shadowy' evil lurking in the ravines of Afghanistan.