Grace in times of mayhem

Washington Post's Pamela Constable's very personal memoir of south Asia is a cut above the rest.

Fragments of Grace
Pamela Constable
HarperCollins
2004
Society, politics, Travel
Pages: 288
Price: Rs 495
ISBN: 1574886185
Paperback

I always seem unable to make the leap from romance to love, glibness to wisdom, from frantically meeting deadlines to taking a deep breath and writing what I really mean. Is one quality the necessary cost of the other?”

HT Image

Pamela Constable’s thought, halfway through her book Fragments of Grace: My Search for Humanity from Kashmir to Kabul, is not the kind you expect from a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. But it’s this kind of honest introspection that lifts her memoir of her 1998-2002 south Asia posting above the genre of post-tour-of-duty books by overwhelmed foreign journalists.

Pamela was busy. With all that was happening — the Taliban rule in Afghanistan, Musharraf’s takeover in Pakistan, recurring violent episodes in Kashmir and in Sri Lanka, a royal massacre in Nepal, and then the US retaliation for 9/11 — she had little time for feature reporting from India.

With all that experiential input, she perhaps felt an obligation to piece together the puzzle that is modernity’s madness. She obviously is a damned good reporter, with a keen sense of sight and sound. And she’s able to make insightful analogies based on what she sees. “Kashmir looked like Switzerland, but it felt like the Gaza Strip”, she says of the Valley. And in Lanka: “The Muslim teenager, who died blowing up an army post in Kashmir, dreaming of Islamic paradise, could easily have been the Tamil Tiger cub who died blowing up an army post in Batticaloa, dreaming of Tamil Eelam”.

However, parachuting from one hotspot to another does not substitute for deep reflection, and what’s woefully apparent from Pamela’s writing is that she hasn’t read enough. From the quote mentioned at the start, however, it’s also apparent she’s aware of this shortcoming, and so she’s tried to make up for it with two intertwined explorations.

Here were the most important figures of Afghanistan's history, its tyrants and heroes, its conquerors amd defenders. And yet here was Ahmed, as sly and nervous as if offering me illegal hashish pipes or erotic tribal stattuettes. "We  have to be very careful of the religious police, you know," he said.

One is an evaluation of her life, her failed marriages, her doomed relationships and the lack of an emotional anchor in her half-century of existence. This usually turns up at the end of each chapter (divided by the country she’s writing on) as an interlude, and it works touchingly. The other is, as she puts it, the search for something elusive: “When I finally found something redeeming, it was such a slender, ephemeral fragment of grace that I almost missed it in all the mayhem”.

As a result, the parts of the book that work — and they do so extremely well — are the parts where she is emotionally involved in the assignment. So her chapter on the Maha Kumbh and her assistant’s son’s mundan ceremony doesn’t really convince.

What, on the other hand, works really well is her reportage on Afghanistan, both during the Taliban rule and after. Part of it is her Western liberal outrage at the Taliban’s exaggeration of Afghan conservatism in their laws governing the conduct of the public, particularly women. She is continually frustrated in trying to seek out women whom she can interview, yet whatever she manages turns into exhilarating writing.

Indeed, I wondered why she didn’t stick to just Afghanistan. It would have made for a more intellectually focussed and emotionally powerful book. Her journey to Nepal, for instance, made for a wonderful snapshot of the assassinated King Birendra’s funeral, but beyond that it’s nothing more than a distraction. The Sri Lanka chapter is, like the chapter on India, a throwaway. Sloppy editing worsens these narrative speed breakers.

So don’t read this for provocative ideas about Muslims in south Asia. Read this as a personal memoir. The sub-title describes it as a search for humanity from Kashmir to Kabul, but it’s more Pamela’s search for humanity within herself. And in that regard, it’s a moving memoir.