The White Tiger: Moral ambiguities for one Spartacus of the Ganges

To exist in perpetual servitude is a profoundly unjust human experience shared by billions of people throughout millennia and is seemingly impervious to the dazzling kaleidoscope of political systems. History never sleeps: uprisings of Spartacus, Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses nailed to the door of the Wittenberg Castle church, the storming of the Bastille, 1848 Springtime of the Peoples, Decembrists, Gandhi, Selma to Montgomery marches, the Singing Revolution of the Baltics, the Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia, Arab Spring, “We Are The 99%,” Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Hong Kong, BLM… The full tally of every resounding “enough” to oppression is bedazzling enough to overshine the Milky Way. And yet here we are, having come so far from the muscular hominids roaming the steppes of Pangea, all the way to the inertly masticating digi-tech addicts, doom-scrolling from one tragedy to another. Hadron collider and horoscopes, butt implants and child trafficking, all has its place under the sun in our world, in a crazy leap through logic and progress. Ours is an age of contrasts, and nowhere is this more pronounced than in The White Tiger’s India, the India of Light and the India of Darkness, the India of fiberoptic magic in the outsourcing-capital-of-the-world Bangalore, and the India of street urchins, tuberculosis, and Balram.

“A rich man’s body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. Ours are different. My father’s spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog’s collar; cuts and nicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip bones into his buttocks. The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.”

Balram the servant, Balram the beaten, Balram the survivor. Fate has snubbed him and cast him straight into one of the two remaining post-industrial castes, the caste of Men with Small Bellies (spoiler alert – the Big Bellies club is not an impenetrable fortress, after all). His identity is branded into Balram’s very corporeal understanding of the world, from the moment he watches his dead mother’s toes curl up, defiantly resisting the voraciousness of the Ganges, to the time he traces his father’s poverty on his body:

Fate hasn’t been entirely unkind to this proletarian superhero, for it has given him a sage-like understanding of this world and how it works. Balram may be happy to serve a spineless ponce and taxi him around Delhi in an air-conditioned Honda, but there is no fog of oblivion in his eyes when it comes to the noose of corruption and nepotism that wraps itself around democracy’s fragile neck. Balram may be from the Darkness, but he’s not Rousseau’s Noble Savage by any account. He knows what’s up, cobbling together a very sober study of the social condition:

“Me, and thousands of others in this country, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a pen-light, and you’ll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks, which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news, bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep.”

Balram, contrary to The White Tiger’s readers’ biggest hopes, is hardly a revolutionary of the caliber requisite to lead the masses to storm government offices and overthrow governments. He is more of a prototype. A Work-In-Progress. A first draft, in which freeing oneself and filling one’s belly takes precedence over extending a helping hand to one’s brethren. For now though, the giant slumbers:

“An Indian revolution? No, sir. It won’t happen. People in this country are still waiting for the war of their freedom to come from somewhere else – from the jungles, from the mountains, from China, from Pakistan. That will never happen. The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out, and read. Instead of which, they’re all sitting in front of color TVs and watching cricket and shampoo advertisements.”

Balram’s revolt materialized in a violent way that striped away any romanticized notions of a smooth and harmonious social change. No matter the era, bloodless revolutions are far and few in between. Far too many secret killing fields emerge once the pathos slows down and the smoke clears. And yet, in all the grit and pragmatism of survival among the likes of Balram the world over, there is space for poetry, art, and beauty:

“The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.”

Shaun Bythell’s Diary of a Bookseller: On reading, retail, and regrets

In case you’re beside yourself with curiosity, there is more than a smidge of Dylan Moran’s gorgeously disheveled elegance in this scrupulous account of a small-town bookshop’s daily comings and goings. However, to slap on Shaun Bythell’s narrator a generic “misanthrope” label would be a cruel negation of the devotion, patience, and more than the occasional act of clemency bestowed upon rude customers, insubordinate employees, and the merciless meat grinder of online retail. To own and operate a bookshop, in case it’s not already painfully clear in the era of Amazon blitzkrieg on all manner of retail, one must sweep away the idealist confetti of fantasies in which a bookseller is a sagely wizard, sprinkling his paperback and hardcover magic onto the souls hardened by their routines and devices, awakening that proverbial inner child, thawing the frost of transactional interactions, breathing life back into the community, blah blah blah. No. That never happens maybe once or twice a year. The rest of the time it’s long hours, slobs, curmudgeons, cheapskates, ingrates, tech failures, estimating, pricing, haggling, packing, lifting, and delivering of boxes across and beyond the quiet corner of southwest Scotland where this heaving epicentre of literary activity is situated. Wigtown and The Book Shop (and its allegedly obese cat) are very much real (and tantalizingly cozy as per Google Maps), which makes the sardonic everyday encounters even more hilarious:

“When the old man in the crumpled suit came to the counter to pay for the copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, I discreetly pointed out that his fly was open. He glanced down – as if for confirmation of this – then looked back at me and said, ‘A dead bird can’t fall out of its nest,’ and left the shop, fly still agape.” 

There’s more Rabelaisian stuff in here:

“The source of the shit became the subject of discussion for the rest of the day. Nicky leading the investigation with forensic scrutiny, which included rifling through the bin to retrieve it so that she could measure it. She became increasingly convinced that an elderly visitor had done it without noticing, and that it had slipped down their trouser leg. Other theories included the suggestion that it was actually icing from my birthday cake, which Anna has made. When Stuart suggested that the turn may have been Captain’s, Nicky’s instant and vituperative response was, ‘Nae chance, the bore’s wrong.'” 

Beyond assorted bits of hilarity, what is bound to spur sentimentality is a substantial quantity of episodes on the subject of legacy, heritage, death, bereavement, and the lifecycle of books as they pass hands, like orphaned treasures, sometimes for centuries. There is a particularly moving account of a two-volume Decameron finding a new home with a young woman after lingering for God knows how long in a sad little flat after coming to Scotland’s shores once upon a time in a suitcase of a courageous Italian immigrant. We die, but books stay for a wee bit longer, retaining the micro doses of our hands’ warmth deep within their pages. That’s where the bookseller comes in, the dutiful ferryman between the dead and their books which go on living…

At present, the scythe of ecommerce is merciless and methodical, so the following encounter with a witless customer seems increasingly less daft and ever more existential:

“One of the new customers was a woman who spent ten minutes wandering around the shop before coming to the counter and asking, ‘So what is The Book Shop? Do you sell the books or what? Do people just come in and take them?’ Temporarily stupefied, I was unable to answer. Thankfully, she broke the silence and ploughed on, ‘I am not from here, I am a tourist. Do people just hand you the books in? What happens in here? Is that what happens in here?'”

“Retailpocalypse” was declared by business savants two years before the pandemic has delivered its deathly punches. The future is foggy, but in the meantime Shaun Bythell has two new books out. Marvelous.

Svetlana Alexievich: Anthropology of Homo Sovieticus through compassionate eyes

“No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.”

Svetlana Aleksievich, Secondhand Time: An Oral History of the Fall of the Soviet Union

Belarusian author, journalist, oral historian, and now also a political dissident Svetlana Alexievich, to use that chilling Stalinist phrase about writers, is a certified “engineer of human souls” and has a Nobel prize to prove it. Four decades ago she acquired a tape recorder (500 rubles, an astronomic number for your run-of-the-mill 100 rubles desk job salary) and set out to catalogue a multitude of voices, old and young, surging in a cacophonic symphony of victimhood and heroism from every far and near corner of the Land of the Soviets. Six books were born out of this labour, each one a raw manifesto of truth, suturing a particular apocalyptic wound (Second World War, Afghanistan War, and Chernobyl, among them).

This is not the kind of literary product one can savour with a glass of flinty Chablis, half-listening to the analog grit of some fresh lo-fi chillop. This is work both for the intellectual and the emotional aspects of readership, often punctured by tears, but always ending in a classic cleaning catharsis. I am fortunate to be able to read Alexievich in the original Russian, but even the English translations retain the thunderbolt strength of her laconicism. Truly, if the story (in this case, hundreds of stories) is enthralling, it requires no embellishment (sorry, Tolkien). Today, as the pandemic world convulses in the corrosive slops of populism, and in Alexievich’s native Belarus the emboldened dictator releases smug videos of himself with an automated gun (and his own underage son grotesquely clad in a spetznaz uniform), I revisit her Secondhand Time in search of answers, clues, and prophesies. What is the essence of a Soviet (and post-Soviet) person? What knowledge (if any) has been retained after decades with so much happening within them and yet with so little to show? What hope is there for hundreds of millions of identities stumbling, half-conscious, from ideology into ideology?

Alexievich the chronicler, Alexievich the therapist, Alexievich the compassionate anthropologist… It is precisely this nurse-like compassion that makes Secondhand Time such a precious jewel among numerous other attempts to understand the “Soviet mystique.” Solzhenitsyn did this in Gulag Archipelago and in pretty much everything else he’s said or written, and also Aleksandr Zinovyev did this with his sarcastic buzzword Homo Sovieticus. This archetypal “Soviet man” is, in the words of Leszek Kolakowski, an “ideological schizophrenic, honest liar, a person always ready for constant and voluntary mental self-mutilations.” Bingo. That’s exactly it. Alexievich treads the very same conceptual path that Zinovyev and Solzhenitsyn stepped on before her, capturing the essence of homo sovieticuses from Belarus to Kazakhstan. What is this essence? Emanating from a breadth of ethnically and religiously diverse voices, the Homo Sovieticus is a brittle jelly held together by one thing and one thing only – a terrifying ability to consciously gobble up lies and to rationalize brain-frying contradictions. Homo Sovieticus reconciles the irreconcilable within the humble square footage of his grey matter. Homo Sovieticus is at once pitiable, admirable, loathsome, pathetic, heroic, insightful, ignorant, passionate, and inert. Homo Sovieticus, coming out of Alexievich’s pages, can start a sentence opening up about his parents being butchered by the Soviet regime, and finish off with emotional nostalgia over the golden years of Soviet bounty and the vitriolic indictment of democracy. There is no logic, no cause-and-effect relationship. There is only Stockholm syndrome and a severe, pan-national, untreated PTSD.

Many Westerners and ex-Soviets (the ones younger or simply fortunate to be better oriented in matters of history and truth) scoff at the Homo Sovieticus for possessing the naivete of a blind kitten. Not Alexievich. There isn’t an ounce of ridicule in her approach. Instead, there is a profoundly humanist understanding of immeasurable loss and confusion, of deracinated personhood, and of a perpetually shifting system of ideological coordinates that only amplifies this disorientation. At work you say one thing, at home another, you pretend to do your job, your employer pretends to pay you, in public you pretend to be atheist while at home you teach your kids to say the namaz, and on and on it goes, this neverending umbilical cord of duplicity, chaining a person to the regime of lies.

Why is this Homo Sovieticus anthropology important today? Well, for one it helps explain Transdnistria, Abkhasia, Crimea, Donbas, and other scenarios as something more than just bona fide putinist imperialism. This is a war for the last remaining grey matter square footage of the last remaining Homo Sovieticus generation.  More globally, Alexievich’s catalogue of Soviet souls, read against the backdrop of today’s fake news pandemic, clearly demonstrates just what kind of dire consequences befall the people who are brainwashed into kissing the cold portraits of their family’s murderers. Every and all evil can be excused if we cannot even agree whether the sky is blue…

Image: Vasily Kolotevy, Queue.

Deja vu from the New East: a few lines on the pandemic

‘Unprecedented times’ a chilling déjà vu from the New East

Unwilling crusaders, we gaze into the tenebrous middle of this pandemic, our global anxiety convulsed into a spasm of momentary respite from the max-level self-isolation, somewhere before the second wave of infections floods the unstable dikes of our innately human hubris and the bubble-gum optimism of #wereallinthistogether. This is the eye of the storm. Not quite the grand apotheosis of Edvard Munch’s The Scream – more like the hold-your-breath foreboding of Francisco Goya’s diabolic donkeys in The Devil’s Lamp. The maddening allegretto is passing the baton to a reluctant entr’acte. Time to collect our thoughts before they flee, like beads of mercury flee a broken thermometer, into the dim corners of Netflix and doomscrolling. What the hell is going on? How ‘unprecedented’ is this ‘new normal,’ really?

To this chip off the old block (the Eastern Bloc, that is), much of this eschatology feels nauseatingly familiar. We have been here before, us, post-Soviets, perestroika survivors (and escapees), the periscopes of our experience hoisting themselves above the sea of daily COVID-19 litanies. In the surreal world of today, personas as respected as the CEO of Ford take up earnings calls to wax philosophical about how “there is no future if we don’t have an economic system that is always on” and how immense is the surprise that “there was an off switch.” But the citizenry of the New East has lived through the flipping of this primordial switch, the syncopated aftershocks of this civilizational crack reverberating through the hollowness of our bones. Through immigration, we packed our proletariat blues and galloped away from those anarchic late-eighties-early-nineties… only to find ourselves strangely back in time, a historic joke courtesy of some RNA and a bit of protein.

The Language of Apocalypse

“The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter.” Strange for a godless society, these words from the Book of Revelations were whispered in many kitchen tete-a-tetes after Chornobyl explosion which was a monumental push in the avalanche of revelations (pardon the pun) that brought about USSR’s swan song. Wormwood was not just for making absinthe. Wormwood was also for recognizing the Apocalypse because Chornobyl means ‘wormwood’ in Ukrainian. How’s that for fate. The symbolism of fear and doom was a bizarre life jacket for people trapped in an order where truth was not on the government menu. Today, similarly, many flee from the discomfort of uncertainty toward horoscopes, prophecies, and the good old Nostradamus, while others hang their self-righteous halos on the nail of a theological idea that coronavirus is divine punishment for humanity’s incalculable catalogue of sins. The moral lens of a pandemic is a well-worn-out sleeve  – from the Elizabethan fervor of John Donne and his peers, elegantly resting their metaphysical heft on skulls, candlelight, and other paraphernalia of memento mori, the disease is sin, and suffering is its cure. My grandparents, in those shrouded kitchen conversations of late eighties, talked about how Chornobyl was punishment for the crimes of communism. Today, we talk of how this virus is indictment of environmental destruction, neoliberalism, Pax Americana, and several other sins yet to be codified.

Magical Thinking

Cocaine in France, saltwater in China, cow dung and urine in India, volcanic ash in the Philippines – magic accompanies this pandemic much like it did the Black Death, and to think oneself intellectually above folk remedies and loopy superstitions is, at best, an arrogant habit of one who strayed a bit too far toward the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and its loquacious serpentine tenant. During perestroika, the nation of multicultural atheist engineers who sent the first human into space would congregate by the televisions every evening, holding jars of water next to their TV sets in hopes that a nerdy ‘spiritual healer’ Alan Chumak would ‘charge’ them for ‘positive energy.’ The longest game of chess between Reason and Superstition, locked in a white-knuckled stalemate, culminated with the cracking of the very chessboard it was played on, and not even the 1991 coup d’etat and the tank armada aimed at the clinical whiteness of the Russian White House could glue back the rebellious pieces.

The Invisible Enemy

Svetlana Aleksiyevich, in her magnum opus that so inspired the Chornobyl miniseries,  tells of a cognitive dissonance experienced when facing the invisible enemy, radiation: “They didn’t understand why we had to bury their gardens, rip up their garlic and cabbage when it looked like ordinary garlic and ordinary cabbage. The old women would cross themselves and say, “Boys, what is this – is it the end of the world?”  In those early days after the explosion, when cherry trees were adorning themselves in milky blossom, when young pioneers were ironing their red ties in anticipation of May Day parade, when it was still possible to lie to your exploited citizenry even though Swedish experts were already sounding the alarm, the ghost of danger aptly evaded the sketch artist’s gaze. Sure, we taped the window frame gaps to prevent this plutonium poltergeist from seeping through the pores of our apartment bloc monotony, but most of this was atavistic, like crossing yourself when you wake up in the middle of the night, sweaty and shattered from an instantly forgotten nightmare. Today, many refuse to wear face masks to shield against the coronavirus, still others don them more out of courtesy or civic duty, or for psychological solace. The invisible enemy has a new name but operates according to the same principle: to obfuscate, to confuse, to evade, to deny. Nihil novi sub sole.

Green Thumb

Divine geometry of the perfect English garden, with a layover on the perfect English lawn (not without the aid of a certain textile engineer who adapted a carpet cutter into world’s first lawn mower), has embraced the pandemic with enthusiasm for growing food from scraps and even foraging, peppering Western publications with advice such as “flowers you can eat, fiddleheads you can fry, weeds you can sautee.”  This conjures up a déjà vu of a typically Darwinian spring of the early-mid-nineties in the New East. No year-round greens. Hyperinflation. Sauerkraut preserves are running thin as we stare into capricious April that mercifully bestows upon our decidedly un-English parks a wild harvest of young nettles, so young they barely sting. Pick them, chop them up, throw them in a salad, boil them in a soup, add a solitary egg, boiled so hard the yolk is blue. A humble meal for the new beginnings. We watch as our new compatriots in the Sated West (or so we thought) excitedly dip their toes into the practice we thought was relegated to our embarrassing past. We feel equally smug (aha, gotcha!) and terrified (this wasn’t supposed to happen, not twice in one lifetime!), but nobody has yet outsmarted history. From food shortages to the panicked pantry padding, this is the work of a narrator who is running out of new stories, so much so that once-in-a-lifetime plot twists are ditching their bathroom breaks, and the seismograph needle of time dances ever faster.

The Isolation of Borders

For us post-Soviets, wielding a Western passport was arguably the pinnacle of success, for it symbolized Freedom in its greatest manifestation. A Soviet subject was, by nature, a prisoner. Going abroad was uncommonly rare and always accompanied by a series of humiliating bureaucratic dances, reference letters, and other proofs of moral fortitude. Homo Sovieticus had to be incorruptible, especially if headed beyond the womb of Warsaw Pact satellites and into the lair of alluring capitalist sirens. Even after the Empire fell, few of us second-rate Europeans could obtain a travel visa to explore the manicured cities of our Western brethren. Instead of euro-trips, we had staycations. A summer in granny’s village, a summer on hot city pavement or, for the lucky few, a summer in some seaside sanatorium with Charcot showers, gruel, and awkward discotheques. Over the last few years things have decidedly improved, as New Europeans, armed with Ryanair (and Schengen Zone membership for the lucky ones), have completed the coveted trips to most notable tourist shrines. With the pandemic shutting of the borders, the feeling is eerily familiar to the stifling claustrophobia of the Soviet era. There’s nowhere to run except toward the greenhouse on your dacha, if you have one. Time, untampered by discount flights and all-inclusive vacations, moves slovenly, like rising dough, and the nauseating feeling, somewhere in the innards of your reptilian brain, is whispering the scariest ‘what if’ for a post-Soviet survivor to face: what if they never reopen the borders?

The End?

We’ve been here before. “But that’s good,” some say, “that’s an advantage.” “Experience builds resilience,” echo others. Experience also births immeasurable fatigue. Fatigue at the thought of bread lines, rationing and coupons, contraband, barter trade, nepotism and backdoor deals, forced minimalism and economizing, isolation, superstition, fear, suspicion and, just an arm’s stretch away, savagery. “Hold up,” post-Soviets groan, “this wasn’t part of the deal, we have already fulfilled our quota of apocalyptic events per lifetime.” Somewhere, in the increasingly legitimized corners of the Internet, a fellow putinist troll will type, with palpable Schadenfreude, “this is your punishment for betraying the Motherland, a traitor always gets what he deserves.” Other politicos will nurse cultural tropes about the moral virtues of Confucianism fertilizing the antivirus exceptionalism of the New New East – this idea of a heavy-handed paternalistic state is also, quite obviously, something us post-Soviets are well-versed in.

At some point, perhaps after a second or a third wave, the hand wielding this pandemic’s scythe will tire and maybe, just maybe we will learn some sort of a global lesson with a modicum of coherence. For now, the mowing is deafening and the déjà vu’s appear like clockwork. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Image: a mural on a residential building in Kyiv.