Everybody finds their own way to figure out how to live, to make sense of the world. I found mine at the business end of a country-made pistol pointed at my face in Bundelkhand.

It was my fault, but it took me a long while to come to terms with my responsibility, far longer than it took to heal from the broken nose, the chipped teeth, the torn earlobe, and the bruised bones that came after.

I was in college then, or to be more truthful, I had just failed in BSc (chemistry), a course that I was not even interested in. In fact, I did not know what I really wanted. The late 1980s and ’90s were a bad time in India — riots and curfews, murders and massacres for which justice is yet to be delivered. And I am not sure they will ever be. As a student doing accelerated calculus, physics and chemistry in an international high school, these things touched me peripherally, but when they did, they hit home hard. A cousin was murdered on the way back from Friday prayers, an uncle was told by his company that it could not keep him safe from other employees, not because of anything he had done, but because of who he was. My school did evacuation drills in anticipation of mobs, and when I came home from vacation, the police stopped my rickshaw as my neighbourhood was under curfew.

It was hard to understand what was happening. My education had not taught me why people would do this to each other, to neighbours. At the same time, one of the worst conflicts of the post-Cold War-world — the Balkan War — played out on our newly-available international TV programmes. For four long years the Serbian Army surrounded and pummelled the multi-ethnic city of Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the secretary of state of the sole superpower, the US, said, “We don’t have a dog in that fight.”

Maybe I should not have cared, maybe these things were so far beyond anything a common person can do to change, that it was pointless to even think of them. But that was not something my education had taught me either. As a child, in another international school, in a foreign country, a Japanese delegation visited us. They showed us photographs from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where the US had dropped atomic bombs. It was horrifying, seeing the pictures of those irradiated people moving around in a destroyed landscape, marked by their coming death.

Maybe my education was just wrong. I wanted to take time off, to try and understand, but I did not know how to even frame the question, to try and convince my parents of what I did not know. It was no surprise that they did not understand. I did not either.

So I went to college, but did not find the answers, only more confusion, and with that I lost what little interest I had in studies. I stopped attending classes, took exams for which I had not prepared, missed a good number of them as well... Failure was not so much an option as a certainty. Still, when the results came, they hit me hard. I had never failed, never imagined I could.

I walked away, that day, in Banda, unable to face my parents. I went to the river Ken — besides which I had spent much of the best days of my childhood — and bathed in the flowing water. When I came out, I found a man sitting by the riverside and he asked me from where I was. I should have said it was my home, my mother’s home, but I spoke the other truth, and uttered the name of my father’s hometown, “Gorakhpur”.

He pulled out a country-made pistol and pointed it in my face, and asked me to follow him. Maybe I should have listened, but at that moment it came to me that the world was always going to be beyond me. I can never change the world, the odds will always be greater, that the only thing I could control was my own response.

Maybe I could have chosen a wiser response. Had I known the man had accomplices — one with another gun, and another with a lathi — I might have. Instead, I chose to resist. It cost me a great deal, but that moment of clarity has not left me. For whatever the wounds I received, the scars I bear, I am thankful that I was forced to confront my self-pity, and come to the realisation that I could either act, or not. There is no other choice.

BIO-OMAIRjpg

Omair Ahmad

 

Omair Ahmad is the South Asia Editor for The Third Pole, reporting on water issues in the Himalayas;

Twitter: OmairTAhmad

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