Run and Hide by Pankaj Mishra

Author:Pankaj Mishra
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

* * *

An email announced its arrival with a ping, and I wondered if you had wi-fi; no plastic gadget with winking lights and clumsy cables marred the clean surfaces of the room. I had googled you cumbersomely that morning – disconnecting the cable from my rotary-dial Bakelite, connecting it to an old laptop with a dial-up modem, only to find that the number in Chandigarh was as usual busy – and had wished, not for the first time, for broadband in the village.

Aseem said to you, ‘You should talk more to Arun about Virendra. He knew him well at IIT where we all shared some unforgettable experiences.’

You looked up at me, and smiled vaguely. It seemed to me then a polite gesture to a guest. Was I wrong? You then moved to pick up a pink cardboard folder that lay next to the ashtray on the floor.

‘I would really so love to,’ you said as you settled back into your seat. ‘Perhaps we can meet soon.’

‘Yes, yes, I would like to,’ I said, again struck by the English words blurting out of my mouth and worried if they were the right ones.

You and Aseem went back to the conversation about your book.

Aseem had developed some fresh insights into the matter. ‘People in my generation,’ he said, ‘grew up believing what my hero Naipaul once wrote: that if you allow yourself to become nothing, you have no place in the world. If you are a black or brown person, there is no point in complaining about racism and claiming victimhood and hoping for some Damascene moral conversion among the whiteys on top. You have to get to the top yourself, and then make the world safe for your own people, and for the generations to come. That’s what those WASPs and then the Jews in America had done in the white-shoe firms of Boston and New York before the Indians arrived. That’s what the people who voted for Trump are doing. That’s also what Virendra and those other Indians abroad were trying to do, but I guess they went too far.’

There was a pause; and then he said, ‘But the thing you have to keep in mind about Virendra is that he was a Dalit, and more than anything he wanted to squeeze out the blood of the untouchables flowing through his veins. Poor Barack Obama – he arrived at Harvard Law School a few years before Virendra and left with the blood of slaves still flowing through his veins. No wonder it left him in awe to bullies like Larry Summers, so much beholden to rich white men on Wall Street, and made him a weak protector of his own people.’

‘Fascinating,’ you said, looking up from the screen. ‘That’s really fascinating.’

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