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Holding mirrors in a hall of shadows

The following is something I wrote when I lived in Chennai, India for a while (seven years ago!) And found it again. Unfortunately, everything is still true.

Chennai, India – November 2001.

Here I am without a mouth; I am mute; I don’t have a voice. Why?

What I’m about to write is absolutely true and it shouldn’t be.

I had some free time the other day (I don’t have much of that here!) So I decided to get out of the apartment and go for a walk, only this was a different kind of walk than what I’m used to. in the lovely woodlands of Epping Forest, or on the lush and truly elegant streets of Woodford Green, Essex. This was a walk through a different place: here, this place, Chennai, India, amidst people living in deplorable degradation.

It was me and Orin, a New Yorker who lives in the same apartment as me. We were on a casual stroll, that’s all, and then we decided, on a whim, to get off the main so-called “highways” and turn onto streets that many just walk away from. We go down the winding and narrow lanes to see and know the truth of where we live, because especially here we live in a rich isolation, surrounded by a falsehood: we live in a bubble, a bit of the first world that pretends that the rest of the world it doesn’t really exist, that these “other” people don’t really live, or if they do, they don’t.

So we walk these streets. The houses, as they are, are in ruins beyond repair, they would never be repaired, they would be condemned elsewhere; they have no running water, no electricity, no gas, and there are only a few modest possessions inside. However, the residents are the lucky ones, because many others are homeless, they live on the streets by the river (a sewer actually), in a garbage dump (literally), because there is more nutrition in a dumpster. down a sewer than many other places here.

And so we begin, only slowly, to know where we live. And seeing, hearing, smelling people who live this way agitates the mind, destroys the sensitivity. Having to face him, being so close to him, and standing there with a £ 400 digital camera in one pocket and a wallet full of a thick pile of 4,000 rupees (a lot of money for these people!) In the other. , makes me want to vomit.

I see a child, a seven or eight year old boy coming down the bumpy and muddy road on a rusty bicycle coming back from the nearest (dirty) water hole, laden with spilling buckets full of contaminated water because that it is the only water that they ‘have obtained. And then to stand there as it passes by and know, really know, that the mere satisfaction of this child’s thirst is fraught with danger, a genuine life-threatening danger, is absolutely heartbreaking.

As we walk the trails, these little twisted paths, the broken doors are all open to let in the freshest air there can be, but they also let me in: these doors become holes that expose the poverty of the lives that are they live inside. Against my good judgment, and with the fear, perhaps, of attracting someone’s attention, I feel my eyes drift to the left, and I see inside and from the gloom come images of the remains of empty and broken furniture, a boy standing in a bucket from dirty water washing; clothes, mere rags, hanging limply on faded and scratched chairs to dry after they too were washed in this same dirty water. I see an old man, bent over an old crooked table, mending old sandals, probably his only footwear (but many have none). And a young woman, maybe twenty-five years old, stands in another doorway, framed by her faded green paint, a child of maybe two or three in her arms, and the child is calm. When we pass, she smiles, and we smile too, and for the first time I know that although I am in the midst of such deep and anguished poverty, I am also deeply within the measure of the humanity of this people.

Because all these people have a deep dignity, they have humor, they smile, they smile constantly. Children come up to us and want to shake hands, so we do, and then their fragile little bodies shudder with joy and laughter, their voices intoned with wonder and amazement (we are a sight to them! Over here! ). And yet these same fabulous people have to pee and shit in the streets, crouch over a cesspool, in full view of the whole damn world, if the world can be cursed enough to take a look at them.

If someone has nothing, no house, no water that won’t kill him, no dirt-infested clothing, no bathroom, no place to belong, what else can be taken away from him? What else does a society want to deny? They don’t have access to health care, wellness, education, information, jobs, nutritious food, healthy water, none of that. There are no records of their lives, they do not appear in any census, no medical records, no official reports, nowhere; nowhere do they appear more than as shadows on the dirtiest streets.

And then, as quickly as we get here, we re-emerge into the general disorder of the rest of Chennai, which seems so tolerable compared to what is now just “back there.” And Orin is talking, but I’m not listening, because I’m trying to think, trying to figure out what just happened, trying to find a way to do it, although for the sake of my sanity I want to escape from it. .

This I do know: I wanted to see it, hear it, smell it, I wanted its stench on my face because for me, to deny it is to be a liar. But then, knowing and then turning around and walking away is, I feel, shameful cruelty and a denial of his own humanity. And again, living so majestically, so grandly in a land of such catastrophic deprivation gives me goose bumps. And I don’t want any of that.

And then we walked along the beach and then we walked back and then I went to work and worked all night, and then the next day I came home, and slept fitfully, and dreamed. And in my dream, I went down to the river bank here in Chennai, to where it suffers the worst of everything.

In my dream, I passed the cow dung houses (these cabins really are made from cow dung!), Passed the stench of human and animal waste, and went down to the water’s edge.

And at the water’s edge there was a wild man (and he is real too! He wears dark blue clothes and has a thick jet black beard and lives in the garbage by the bridge over the Kwam River. Sometimes I see him watching the world go by , to me happening). He was sitting in an overturned bucket, looking across the river. I knelt next to him, thick black water bubbling off my shoes. He didn’t look at me and I didn’t look at him. I looked desperately at the dark flow before me.

And I said, “How long have you been living here?” And he said, “For over a thousand years.” And I said, “Why don’t you go?” and he said: “Here only in the whole world I am allowed at least to live. So I remain, among people who here only in the whole world can die at most.”

Then there was silence, except for the cawing of crows and the odd cough or two of one or two children inside the cow dung houses. He spoke again: “I have seen things that will never fade, I have heard things that will never be silent, and I have felt things that will hurt me forever.” And then he turned to me and looked at me, and I turned to him and saw in his bright, striking blue eyes. And then he said, “If you could lick my heart, I would poison you.”

And then I woke up with a start, I jumped up at that point, and I’m so glad I woke up at that point, because that last sentence scared me, and it scared me because that last sentence is real, lives in the real world and belongs to Yitzhak Zuckermann, a magnificent and noble human being, who was one of the main instigators and combatants of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt of February-April 1943 during World War II when the Jewish community that remained in the ghetto, after that so many had been so brutally murdered in the Treblinka death camp, rose up against their oppressors, the murderers, and fought with extraordinary dignity and determination to preserve, if not their lives, then their humanity. But Yitzhak survived that, and survived much longer before, and then he said what he said from what he saw, heard and felt, from what he knew.

And I in my dream, and now, I do not intend to degrade his words, to take his words in vain and use them in such a different context, in such a different way, because I do not intend to equate that, the Holocaust, with this, the slums; not that, the deliberate industrial slaughter of millions of innocents with this, the slow and casual elimination of millions of poor people across the face of the earth. Or me? Should?

Here I am without a mouth; I am mute; I don’t have a voice. Why? Because I’m standing here screaming and screaming in the middle of a huge moral vacuum.

I wrote all of that in the last fifteen minutes, but it took me almost fifteen days to know that I could write it. It’s long and complicated, I know, and I apologize for that. It is also the most honest thing I have ever written in my life, and I apologize for that as well.

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