Lessons learned in blood are the ones best remembered. For me, the lesson I hold closest to my heart sent me to the hospital with a broken nose, torn scalp, broken teeth, and an earlobe hanging by a piece of skin.

It was a black day to begin with. I had received news that I had failed my college exams. This was no surprise. I had not written the exams, so the chances of passing were slim. In a two-year tug-of-war between my parents’ wish that I continue to pursue the sciences — in which I was good — and my confusion over the use of that study in a world that I did not understand, I had won. It was not a sweet victory.

It was 1995. The blood and violence of the Ayodhya movement, the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the Bombay riots and the Bombay blasts had gone roaring by during the years of my school and the opening years of my college life. The Bosnian war and the Rwandan genocide had passed too. It was a time of blood, and one that I did not understand. Closer at hand, the Kashmir conflict was at its peak, with its murders and torture, its forced exiles and madnesses that continue to affect us till today. And I honestly understood nothing of it.

I was interested in nuclear fusion and chaos theory, in awe of Mandelbrot and fractal geometry, but humanity, and the inhumanity that humans could dish out to each other, was beyond my comprehension. Like the young all over the world, I wanted to change the world. Like the young all over the world, I did not know how. Like the young all over the world, the scale of my ambition, compared to the knowledge of my limitations, led me directly to a state of black, unleavened despair.

So I stopped functioning, I gave up, and part of that giving up was boycotting classes, ignoring exams until the results came in, confirming what I had always believed: that I was a failure.

It is not that easy, though. I could not face the consequences of that failure, could not face my parents, so I took a small bag, put in a change of clothes, and went to bathe in the river. This was the Ken, in Bundelkhand, a small river in a land dry most of the time, except during the monsoon when it is a huge, mighty thing, a sea almost, that eats up the horizon. It is the river that I had grown up along, where I had learned to look for stones, along which I had learned to hunt, where I had learned the call and flights of birds as I tracked them through gunsights.

I went, then, to the river to bathe, and came out to find a man with a gun — a homemade one — pointed to my face, who wanted to take my bag, my wallet, whatever petty riches I had on my person. I looked at his hard, sharp face, twisted into a rictus of anger and command — and also fear, I suppose. I looked at the barrel of the gun thrust in my face, and I realised that I could always give up. There would always be an excuse to give up, to bow before force.

I realised that I had a choice not to accept that. I grabbed the gun by the muzzle, twisted it to point back towards my mugger’s face, pulled back the hammer, and let it go. The gun did not go off. Maybe it was not even loaded. I wrestled it away. Two other men arrived, one had a gun, another had a staff. They kept their distance, but cocked the second gun. They took me a little distance, into the rocks, and laid into me. I grabbed at the second gun, and tried to fight with one hand. The staff caught me in the face, and I fell. At some point I tried to surrender, but that is not an option when you are being beaten. So I fought back to my feet, and kept at it until the noise had become too much for their safety and they ran.

Two years they spent on the run. One of them died. The other two were charged, spent years in jail. I have often thought of them; their poverty, their desperation, the lessons their violence wrote on my body. There is no equality in the world, no fairness, and we will never be fully prepared to deal with the madness that such a world unleashes upon us. But it is always our choice to accept or resist.

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

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW