A Fatal Love

To understand what happened in Kargil you have to go back half a century, to the colossal and premature sundering of the Subcontinent known as Partition. The men who killed each other over Tiger Hill and Drass and Batalik were dealing with the unfinished business of Partition. I have no personal experience of Partition; my family is Gujarati, from Calcutta and Kenya, and I have no relatives in Pakistan or Bangladesh. My own partition was at the age of 14, when I immigrated with my family to New York. I am a novelist. What I try to do is to get to the struggling human being underneath the massive foot of history. The greatest scholar of Partition was a fiction writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, a man who died in Lahore mourning his separation from a whore named Bombay. "Uper di gur gur di mung dal…", chants the madman in "Toba Tek Singh". Fiction writers and lunatics have their own truth. Our enemies are the writers of school textbooks. As the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert said: "for anybody else, not to tell the truth can be a tactical manoeuvre. But a writer who is not telling the truth — is lying".

My family borders are not subcontinental; they are inter-national. But Partition, like the Big Bang, has echoes that will forever permeate the universe of people I write about. In my work, in my fiction as well as in my non-fiction, I have been looking at riots, at communal conflict, in Banaras, Punjab, and especially Bombay. Most of this conflict has its roots in Partition "batwara", which in different circumstances could also have meant "sharing". It is a family quarrel, as when three brothers live side by side in the same house, walling up the rooms, always conscious of the others in the rooms beyond. Kargil is only the latest battle in that endless property dispute; the brothers have come to blows in the street. There will be more to come, before the children grow up and say to their fathers and uncles: Enough.