Free Incendiary Circumstances by Amitav Ghosh Page A

northeast India to western China and Kashmir, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. In this immense stretch of territory, Van Creveld's vision was not just one of many possible forks in the road: it was a turn already taken. Nor could I any longer regard Myanmar and its brutally despotic regime as an aberration, a holdover from a preempted past. I was forced to ask myself whether that country might not hold some portents for the future. Burma is a country to which terrorism and insurgency came exceptionally early: within a few months of independence, in 1948, the Rangoon government was besieged by sixteen rebellions. Accounts of life in Burma in the 1950s are replete with tales of derailed trains, bombs in stations, sudden ambushes, and the like. Within a few years civil society collapsed, and there followed an absolute militarization of political life. The results are well known. That this could happen elsewhere did not seem improbable.
    Not unaware of the world's discontents, I took Van Creveld's vision seriously and tried to incorporate his warnings into my everyday life. I made a point, for example, of not trying to shield my children from news of violence and terror. Yet no matter how carefully we prepare ourselves for the future, the reality is always far in excess of our imaginings.
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    On the morning of September 11, I was sitting at my desk in my house in Brooklyn when my wife called from her office in mid-town Manhattan to tell me about the attacks on the World Trade Center. My ten-year-old daughter, Lila, was at school a couple of miles away, and my eight-year-old son was at home: this was to have been his first day in a new school, and I was scheduled to take him there later that morning. But instead we rushed out together to fetch Lila home from her school in Brooklyn Heights.
    Downtown Brooklyn was choked with people, and in the distance we saw a plume of dust rising into the clear blue sky, darkening the horizon like a thundercloud. Everyone was heading away from the river; only the two of us seemed to be walking toward the darkness in the distance. I held my son's hand and walked as fast as I could. On arriving in Brooklyn Heights, we found Lila in the basement of her school. Her eyes were bright, and she was eager to tell me what had happened. "Where were you?" she said. "I saw it all. From the window of our history class we had a clear view."
    We stepped out and joined the great wave of dust-caked evacuees that was pouring over the Brooklyn Bridge. I held my children's hands and tried to think of words of reassurance, something that would reattach the moorings that had come undone that morning and restore their sense of safety. But words are not to be had for the asking, and I could think of none.
    Since then I have come to recognize that there is very little I can say to broaden my children's understanding of what they saw that day. As a writer I have tried to live by the credo that nothing human should be alien to me. Yet my imagination stops short as I try to think of the human realities of what it must mean to plan a collective suicide over a span of years or to stand in a check-in line with people whose murder has already been decided on; of what it takes to speak of love on a cell phone moments before one's death or to reach for a stranger's hand as one leaps from the topmost floor of a skyscraper. These are new dimensions of human experience, and I realize that they will become a part of the generational gap that separates me from my children: their imagining of the world will be different from mine, and that very difference will create a new reality. From my own childhood I remember a day when I stared at a newspaper, mesmerized by a picture of a Buddhist monk burning at a crossroads in Saigon. At that time, this too represented a new addition to the armory of human motivation: this was the moment that inaugurated the era of political suicide in the modern world. Since then such suicides