anedoctal and unverified. Liberals, and all that guilt

One of my favourite books, growing up, was Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse. Billy’s an adolescent in a dreary Yorkshire town, dreaming of the London stage. He’s not sure how he’ll ever make it: Sometimes, all he will dare do is “suck a Polo mint right through without breaking it”. He makes up for his lethargy with a vibrant fantasy life, one in which TV shows are made about him: “Genius — or Madman?”

For all its wit and dry sweetness, what I remember Billy Liar for is its terribly acute depiction of guilt. The eponymous Billy hasn’t led a blameless life. He has a “Guilt Chest”, full of lurking misdemeanours that bring a twinge of recognition to your gut — a letter his mother wrote to ‘Housewives’ Choice’ that Billy unsealed and never sent, love notes from a girl he wants to break up with, risqué magazines... and a couple of hundred calendars. These “stiff cardboard efforts” have been lying in Billy’s Chest and weighing on his conscience ever since he was assigned to post them by his employers, but he pocketed the money instead. Now they are so many dead bodies. He scatters some on the moor, “sweating over an image of the police picking them up and piecing them together”. It’s been nine months and Billy has only managed to get rid of 14 calendars. As the story begins, he stuffs four more under his sweater and goes off to work — and to one of the most poignant, cold-sweat-and-laugh-inducing scenes I’ve read.

Billy tries to flush the evidence down the toilet: Tearing out pages from a calendar, scrunching them into the pot. He pulls the chain, the paper swirls and then, oh horror, half a dozen soggy leaves return. “I began gnawing at my lower lip and checking the signs of panic.” But worse is to come. As Billy waits helplessly for the cistern to fill again, Shadrack, his boss, comes to the bathroom. With the evidence, and his future, floating before his eyes, Billy engages Shadrack in awkward conversation through the bathroom door until he can flush again. Still, two soggy balls remain and, “face disfigured with nausea”, Billy scoops them out, stuffs them into his pocket, and walks out, past his boss, with what remains of his frayed nerves.

There are, of course, grander evocations of guilt in literature — Macbeth , Crime and Punishment — but there’s something about those bits of paper floating pitifully in a pot that captures its essence: Guilt is so hard to get rid of.

I’ve been thinking about guilt the last few weeks, ever since I felt a sudden surge of it when I went to watch The Tashkent Files, a propagandist take on the death of India’s second prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri. It isn’t a terrible thing to watch a film, and besides, my cousin has a role in it and it’s a nice kind of joy to cheer for family. The minute I booked it, though, I had a sinking feeling; that vaguely helpless regret that comes from letting self-interest win over lofty principles, and forms the core of ‘liberal guilt’. Something about participating, however passively, in a film of such violent intent at this particularly volatile moment in our history was more unsettling than I thought it would be.

Like the ‘nationalist’ ideology from which the film draws inspiration, its real intent is to divide. In one long dog-whistle of a scene, we travel all the way to Samarkand so that a character may point at Timur’s tomb and tell us of his ambitions to conquer Delhi. There’s a sepia-tinted map and a heavy bass. Cut to a more recent map of the capital — ‘Bharat ka dil ’ — on which our informant draws a circle: “This is Lutyens’s Delhi, and anyone who captures it, captures the country’s beating heart. Imagine a good man coming to power in such a place? Every artery of this heart will conspire to strangle him!”

What does it all mean? Nothing, and everything. The argument is as silly as the rhetoric is suggestive. In a moment, Timur and Lutyens’s elite have conspired to murder Shastri. For the makers of such arguments, of course, liberal guilt is as contemptible as Timur or Lutyens’s. I haven’t always thought highly of guilt myself. It’s too easily confused with shame, an emotion often encountered, and countered, in gay literature — perhaps nowhere with more savage humour than in The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp.

It’s also confused with weakness, but is it really? Joy fades all too soon, sorrow eventually. Anger and love subside. But guilt will make you flinch over decades. Guilt demands engagement, whether to acknowledge or repudiate. Mark Twain has a hilarious story about a man wrestling his conscience, literally: “In an instant I had my life-long foe by the throat... I cast the bleeding rubbish into the fire, and drew into my nostrils the grateful incense of my burnt-offering. At last, and forever, my Conscience was dead!”

No such luck for Billy. Before his story’s through, his Guilt Chest has been discovered, his lies have unravelled. Billy, close to unravelling himself, tries to run away, and yet... as the book ends, he begins, instead, a “slow walk home”. Partly, perhaps, it is guilt that makes him turn around. The kind of guilt that demands you look yourself in the eye, before turning your gaze upon the world.

Parvati Sharma

Parvati Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and the author, most recently, of Jahangir: An Intimate Portrait of a Great Mughal

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