Lillian expresses in her own life a personal suffering and a violence present in close ties. She also embraces in herself wider forces of violence as well as difference. She freely admits a connection with criminal elements in the city, and this is vital to her own power. Lillian represents herself as a totalization of diversity and claims a knowledge of eighteen languages (eighteen being a symbolic number of the totality of human existence)…. Lillian, I note, is an embodiment of fragmenting force but also a potency for the control and mastery of such force. This is one significance of her warrant from Vishnu, the guardian of Buddhism on the island and a major ordering power. Lillian is pleased with her own success in business. She has controlling interest in three taxis.
Lillian's clients invoke the powers that reside in her body. Some address her directly as Bhadrakali maniyo. Lillian says that she has cut thousands of huniyams [sorcery objects], and has used her powers in the making and breaking of marriages, the settlement of court cases, and the killing of personal enemies.9
This powerful story reminds us that the world around us—whether conceived of in terms of supernatural or market forces, of sectarian, class, or caste identifications—is potentially a source of well-being and destruction. Not only must we struggle against an external world that limits our choices and circumscribes our existence; we must struggle against our inner fear of being crushed and erased, as well as our anger against the forces that oppress us.
I have cited Lillian's story at length because it brings into dramatic relief the complexity of the struggle to exist in a world sundered by sectarian violence, class conflict, and oppressive political power. Strategies to earn an income through business ventures coexist with tactics to avoid domestic violence and channel the powers of the gods. But Lillian's story also calls into question the appropriateness of labeling her choices as real or illusory, or asking whether it is better to struggle against injustice rather than devote oneself to “private projects of self creation.”10 There are no algorithms for answering such questions. We can neither know for certain whether a Marxist analysis of social injustices in Sri Lanka would be helpful or harmful nor know for sure whether our understanding of Lillian reflects our own Western dismay at unnecessary human suffering. For Rorty it is enough to describe and testify to the lives of others, as far as we can, on the grounds of our human solidarity with them. They are not misguided creatures, in alien worlds, but ourselves in other circumstances.11 But to invoke poetry or to speak of the consolation of wild orchids may be to risk rendering the world too benign and to leave its social violence unremarked. During his first trip to India, Rorty spoke to a fellow philosophy professor who was also a politician. After thirty years of attempting to help India's poor, this man confessed that he had found no solution to the problem. “I found myself,” Rorty writes, “like most Northerners in the South, not thinking about the beggars in the hot streets once I was back in my pleasantly air-conditioned hotel.”12 But back in America, recalling his experiences, Rorty's only conclusion is that all the love and talk in the world—the technological innovations, the new genetics, the power of education, the politics of diversity—”will not help.”13 Is this defeatist? A confirmation that, for us, the poor will always remain unthinkable? And where does such a conclusion leave us? Withdrawn into the safe confines of our own small world, immunized from the perils of actually entering the world with which we claim solidarity, consoled by poetry? Or inspired to return to the streets until we find one person whose life is changed, no matter how imperceptibly, by his or her encounter with us, so that the question is no longer whether solidarity can be thought into existence but how it is actually brought into existence by our everyday choices of what we do.
CHAPTER 3
Hermit in the Water of Life
And in the evening of my days
Let me remember and be remembered
By the friends that I have made…
—Brijen K. Gupta
If I have recourse to metaphors of water and darkness to describe myself at twenty-one, it is partly because I spent that turbulent year in a harbor city buffeted by high winds and ransacked by winter storms. In this emotional maelstrom, I knew only one person who seemed to have the knack of staying afloat. And so I clung to him as to a life raft, buoyed by his concern for my welfare, guided by his advice, secure in his example. In retrospect, I am amazed that Brijen Gupta was only ten years older than I was.1 Yet the difference between twenty-one and thirty-one is the difference between youth and manhood, and it was magnified, in this instance, by Brijen's political savvy, breadth of experience, and formidable self-confidence.
Though he lectured in the Asian studies program at Victoria University of Wellington, he enjoyed the company of students as much as academic colleagues and presided over our small circle of leftists and would-be writers with the autocratic assuredness of a guru and the bemused detachment of a Cheshire cat. Whether in the student cafe or at a Ghuznee Street coffee shop, Brijen would play the avuncular roles of provocateur and sage. I remember riding in his car through rain-swept, pitch-dark Wellington streets as he, by turns, chanted Hindi lyrics or chided me for my romantic illusions about tribal societies.
Talking in the cities, longing for the earth,
Those ignorant of life will tell their neighbors
That in the country there is natural bliss
For men and women, who are nearer angels
Because they feel the wind upon their faces,
Or eat their supper sore from tramping furrows
And see the lightning scorch the prairie night.
These have not woken in the smothering dark
To listen to the clock draining away,
Second by second, the inner spring of joy;
Nor caught the smell of death that floats around
The farmhouse in the early afternoon.2
That I was not crushed by Brijen's criticisms may have been because I had such a dim view of myself and envied Brijen's urbanity, erudition, and forthright way of engaging with everyone he met, from gas station attendants to professors. But it irked me that he was always in the right, always calling the shots, always knowing what was best, politically, aesthetically, and intellectually, and brooked no opinion that ran counter to his own. Perhaps this was his failing, or the price of his precocious and encompassing knowledge of so many fields—that he was inclined to associate with those who would assent to his opinions and look up to him as a god. In any case, it was the absolute asymmetry of our relationship—his assumption of authority, and my willing acquiescence to it—that made me deaf or indifferent to the snippets of information he shared about his background. And it wasn't until I came to Harvard in 2005 that I rectified this and asked Brijen—who was now retired from university teaching and living in Rochester, New York—if he would agree to a conversation about his early years in India and the United States. So began a series of meetings and e-mail exchanges that gradually filled in the gaps in my knowledge of this man who had figured so importantly in my development, a man to whom, in many ways, I owed my life.
Not long before our conversations began, I had read Albert Raboteau's essay on Thomas