Under The Nuclear Shadow

This week as diplomats' families and tourists quickly disappeared, journalists from Europe and Americaarrived in droves. Most of them stay at the Imperial Hotel in Delhi. Many of them call me. Why are you stillhere, they ask, why haven't you left the city? Isn't nuclear war a real possibility? It is, but where shall Igo? If I go away and everything and every one, every friend, every tree, every home, every dog, squirrel andbird that I have known and loved is incinerated, how shall I live on? Who shall I love, and who will love meback? Which society will welcome me and allow me to be the hooligan I am, here, at home?

We've decided we're all staying. We've huddled together, we realize how much we love each other and wethink what a shame it would be to die now. Life's normal, only because the macabre has become normal. While wewait for rain, for football, for justice, on TV the old generals and the eager boy anchors talk of firststrike and second strike capability, as though they're discussing a family board game. My friends and Idiscuss Prophecy, the film of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dead bodies choking the river, theliving stripped of their skin and hair, we remember especially the man who just melted into the steps of thebuilding and we imagine ourselves like that, as stains on staircases.

My husband's writing a book about trees. He has a section on how figs are pollinated, each fig by its ownspecialized fig wasp. There are nearly 1,000 different species of fig wasps. All the fig wasps will be nuked,and my husband and his book.

A dear friend, who is an activist in the anti-dam movement in the Narmanda Valley, is on indefinite hungerstrike. Today is the twelfth day of her fast. She and the others fasting with her are weakening quickly. Theyare protesting because the government is bulldozing schools, felling forests, uprooting hand pumps, forcingpeople from their villages. What an act of faith and hope. But to a government comfortable with the notion ofa wasted world, what's a wasted value?

Terrorists have the power to trigger a nuclear war. Non-violence is treated with contempt. Displacement,dispossession, starvation, poverty, disease, these are all just funny comic strip items now. Meanwhile,emissaries of the coalition against terror come and go preaching restraint. Tony Blair arrives to preach peace-- and on the side, to sell weapons to both India and Pakistan. The last question every visiting journalistalways asks me: "Are you writing another book?"

That question mocks me. Another book? Right now when it looks as though all the music, the art, thearchitecture, the literature, the whole of human civilization means nothing to the monsters who run the world.What kind of book should I write? For now, just for now, for just a while pointlessness is my biggest enemy.That's what nuclear bombs do, whether they're used or not. They violate everything that is humane, they alterthe meaning of life.

Why do we tolerate them? Why do we tolerate the men who use nuclear weapons to blackmail the entire humanrace?