My short-story “Postmortem” is on a short-list of works chosen from those published at World Literature Today over the past ten years. You can vote too! I had written this story originally for NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction.

The nurse left work at five o’clock.

She had seen the dead woman’s husband sitting, near the entrance, under the yellow sign that Doctor Ahmed had hung some months ago. “While You Wait, Meditate.” He was sitting with his arms crossed, elbows cupped in the palms of his hands, and hadn’t looked up when she passed him on her way out.

Just after lunch, a convoy had come from the Army camp. Two uniformed soldiers carried in the body on a stretcher. One soldier, a small rifle in his left hand, threw open the office door and announced the Colonel. Doctor Ahmed had automatically stood up.

The Colonel was plump. He looked calm and extremely clean, the way bullfrogs do, gleaming green and gold in the mud. He put his baton on the table and asked the nurse to leave the office.

When Doctor Ahmed rang his bell, the nurse went back in and was told to get his wife, Zakia, from their home on the top floor. Usually, he just called her on the phone. The nurse hurried up, guessing that she was also to give the news about the Colonel.

Doctor Zakia was a pediatrician but she immediately understood why she was to do the postmortem. The soldiers put the stretcher in the operating room and left. The doctor removed the white sheet and then, choking, recited the Fatiha. It was difficult for her to continue the examination – she had a grown-up daughter.

Then the nurse was alone with the young woman for over four hours, cleaning her of the blood and the filth, and then stitching her up. The abdomen and thighs had turned green, but this was expected. There was a pronounced swelling of the tongue and lips.

The nurse wondered whether the body would last till the funeral. If there was a protest, it would take the entire day in the sun for the procession to reach the cemetery.

A year ago, a doctor in the north had announced that the corpse brought to him was of a woman who had been gang-raped. This was a mistake. The Army put out the story that the woman used to come to the camp for customers and that her husband found out and had probably got her killed.

In the warm and stuffy room, the nurse realized that her teeth were chattering. She stopped and for a long while stared at the back of her gloved hands. Then she turned them over, as if she were praying, and studied the film of dark coagulated matter on her fingers.

There was no slippage and still it was hard work. Doctor Zakia would probably tell the family that the body had been washed thrice. The women would nevertheless insist on doing what was proper. How was she to save them? No one teaches you in nursing school to cover cigarette burns on the privates or to stitch torn nipples.

When she finally stepped out of the room she was startled to see a dozen soldiers in the hallway. She met the eye of the one closest to her and flinched, but he was quiet, even shy, like a dog that has brought in a squirrel and dropped it on the carpet.

At six, she was sitting in front of the television in her tiny living room. And there she was, the young woman in her wedding photograph. The newsreader said the body had been found in a ditch after the woman had gone missing for twenty-six hours. She had been struck sometime at night by a speeding vehicle.

A new issue of Seminar is out. It is a special issue entitled A Country of Our Own. I have fiction in this issue, “Revolutionary Road.” The piece is not available to all but here is a link to another piece of fiction by me; both pieces are part of the same novel that is a work-in-progress.

This American Life, my favorite radio show, has issued a retraction. (Read a quick report here.) What I like about this is that the retraction itself makes for a great show. I’m being a trifle pedantic, but truth-telling is a performance. This show is an exercise in revealing the truth, sure, but it is also a staging of the truth. There is drama there, and great artistic skill.

So, Mike Daisey is revealed to be a liar and also somewhat of a coward. As one of his critics put it, perhaps the practice of lying could make a great subject for a one-man performance. I guess I’m saying that the final act of the TAL show “Retraction” could perhaps have been devoted to precisely that question. In such a performance, it would be a little more difficult to pin villainy on only one person. Like the question of one’s participation in the business of propping up unfair labor practices in China, what is the truth and what is outright falsehood can, beyond an easily assignable point, become a more difficult thing. I should mention that I first heard of this via a tweet by Philip Gourevitch, and my first thought was that Gourevitch’s own work with Errol Morris on the Abu Ghraib affair was to complicate the truth rather putting it on a pedestal with a gold medal around its neck.

Of great interest to me is the detail that this debate shares some aspects of the recent controversy over the publication of John D’Agata’s new book, The Lifespan of a Fact. But aren’t there any differences between them? Are the elisions of the same order?

I’d wish for a greater awareness on Daisey’s part of the fact that he was staging the truth, and, more than that, I’d have liked him to have shared this fact with his audience. That sense of self-reflexive awareness is one definition of art and what distinguishes it from mere experience. This awareness, I’d argue, is present in D’Agata’s performative writing. I had liked Jen McDonald’s NYTBR review of D’Agata’s new book, but I’m sure a part of my appreciation for the piece was my desire to see the review as a fine critical performance.

Last night, I sent a message to a former student of mine whose admirable nonfiction thesis, written under my supervision, had won the best essay award here at Vassar. With his permission I’m pasting our midnight exchange–our own small attempt at recreating the dialogue between D’Agata and Fingal:

AK: here’s a tweet that i wanted you to see

Former student:

see, to me, ira glass is kind of a coward.

AK:

you are so hard-core.
but it is more of an intellectual cowardice.
that said, the daisey fellow doesn’t come across as one with very serious intent or artistic ambition. he _is_ a liar, d’agata is not.

 
Former student:

yeah, i see what you mean.  the funny thing is my parents went to see daisey’s show in new york and were blown away by it, moved, entertained, inspired.  and i don’t think that the validity of that goes away.  and the cowardice lies in running something that’s explicitly performance, sort of figuring out what you’re getting into, and then getting attention from attacking the guy, assuring publicly that YOU do not stand by this.  In general, when people start talking confidently about their truthfulness and ethics, as though those things are constant, i get suspicious.

AK:

but you know, both you and i have a great deal of investment in producing writing where we express our own fuckedupness. it is a more truthful or at least a more modest exercise, sure. but i’m also a bit leery for what I see my own propensity to valorize writing that takes a certain pleasure in showing all its faults. we don’t want to be the drunk at a party greeting everyone by saying sorry about how drunk he is.

Former student:

ha, yeah, you’re completely right.  i am, almost always, drunk by the front door.  but still, that’s what I want to be taken as.  I want my writing to be taken as perhaps enlightening but ultimately fucked up.  and i think there’s a reason why those are the ones people remember (didion, hunter s. thompson, david foster wallace, michael herr.)

AK:

good, good, but i don’t know whether i want you to be, to use your own word, so “confident about your truthfulness,” even if the confidence is only about truthfulness-through-lack-of-authoritative-truthfulness.
you’re right abt the suspicion about the forceful invocation of ethics. people who do that are caught the next day masturbating in public.

Former student:

trust me, i am very unconfident about my truthfulness.

AK:

alright, man.
thus contented, i trudge off to sleep.

Former student:

always a pleasure, sir.

My JLF interview with Michael Ondaajte is now up on Guernica:

A typical Michael Ondaatje line is like an eye opening onto a scene. The scene that falls into place on the page might be a quiet one. But the reader is always being startled into awareness. We are aware of the act of looking. In The English Patient, the young woman Hana recalls a line from Stendhal, “A novel is a mirror walking down the road.” Even a discussion of language only uncovers a lesson in the optics of meaning. Again from The English Patient: “Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water.”

Ondaatje’s latest novel, The Cat’s Table, recounts a boy’s journey by ship from Colombo to England in the early 1950s. The narrator, eleven-year-old Michael, becomes friends with two other boys on ship, and picks up the nickname Mynah because he repeats what he hears from one to the other. The physical journey, the people on board, the events that transpire are all witnessed from the perspective of the boys. This takes a near-literal form when many years later one of the trio becomes a well-known artist, and produces work from his memories of that trip, the paintings recapturing the very angle from which the boys had seen the shore. Our narrator, coming across those paintings nearly two decades after the journey that inspired them, observes, “I read somewhere that when people first celebrated the distinct point of view of Lartigue’s early photographs, it took a while before someone pointed out that it was the natural angle of a small boy with a camera looking up at the adults he was photographing.” That same tilt is present in the narrative of The Cat’s Table, giving the novel its feeling of quick wonder and delicate mystery.

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In the new issue of the PEN America Journal, devoted to maps, I have a short essay.

The house was in an alley, set away from the winding street, and in that house were three communists who, during my first visit, sold me a book and several magazines. This was in my hometown, Patna, in India. I had left Patna some years before; I was a graduate student in cultural studies in Minnesota; now, back home for a month, I was looking for a topic to research for a course in which I had taken an incomplete.

In one of the Hindi magazines I bought that afternoon, I read a long poem written by a poet I hadn’t heard of before, but who, I found out from the biographical note, had been living in Patna for years. The poet’s name was Alokdhanwa. He, too, had been a communist or a communist sympathizer, writing poetry about peasant struggles in the land. The poem I had come across was titled “Janta Ka Aadmi” (“Man of the People”). As I said, it was a long poem, and it started with a series of electrifying declarations on behalf of poetry, a kind of bravely anti-aesthetic manifesto, and then it set its sights on what one might call media critique, denouncing newspapers that carried everything but the news:

Woh log peshewar khooni hain / jo nangi khabron ka gala ghoant dete hain / Akhbaar ki sansanikhej surkhiyon ki aad mein / Weh baar-baar uss ek chehre ke paaltu hain / Jiske peshaabghar ka naqsha mere gaon ke naqshe she bada hai. (They are professional murderers / those who strangle to death the naked news / in the shadow of sensational headlines / they show themselves again and again the serfs of that one face / the map of whose urinal is bigger than the map of my village.)

That single line—“the map of whose urinal is bigger than the map of my village”—enters my mind every time I step into a large, clean bathroom.

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From my essay “Salman Rushdie and Me” in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Don’t get me wrong. I did my best to sound like my teachers, and wrote sentences whose texture was inevitably thicker than cement. Still, Rushdie could always be trusted to provide the perfect epigraph—by turns elegant, cutting, or comic—for the challenging edifices of prose that I was building. I would still construct my academic platforms of multiple subordinate clauses and reinforced concrete, but a line from Rushdie sat on the top, like a glorious, fluttering pennant.

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An article that I wrote earlier this week has been published today in the Hindustan Times under the title “Sea of Poppycock.”

I have long admired Amitav Ghosh; see here, here, here, here, and here. He is an influence. We have a disagreement, however, on the question he asked on Twitter about the protest at Jaipur Literature Festival. Here is Ghosh’s piece on the JLF. I have some doubts about literature festivals myself, but, O Ganesha, please free me from claims to purity! And the piety!

The fact that Ghosh is my near-namesake is an amusing part of our history. Once I was being interviewed on NDTV—this was after the 2002 publication of my book Bombay-London-New York—and I was later told that throughout the interview the name on the screen was “Amitav Ghosh.” After the terrible tsunami in December 2004, a news agency reported that I was in the Andamans; an editor in New York sent me an email asking me for a 1000-word piece, but it turned out that it was Ghosh who was there. There have been other such occasions. Once we were on a panel together at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi, and I saw that Ghosh’s first name had been misspelled, to read like mine. I flinched at the thought that the great man would have to see himself in me.

Now, we are linked again, by this polemical exchange. I see myself in some of the arguments he makes about the writing culture. That is to say, I agree with him on some matters, especially when I consider how eager I am to turn away even from this distraction and return to work. But I also wonder whether he finds himself here in my words, in the words of a writer who has expressed praise for him in the past and finds it necessary now to call him out on his falsehoods.

Recently, Amitav Ghosh announced in these pages (Writings, not writers, February 7) that he wasn’t going to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival any time soon. Or ever. I don’t harbour any illusion that attending a literary festival is like a visit to the library. Literary production might take place primarily in a room, where the writer sits alone, but literary culture as such, aided by conversation and debate, is a more social affair and flourishes in scores of crowded places.

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When is Geoff Dyer anything but brilliant! This from his interview in Guernica:

One of the reasons so many nonfiction books are so boring is because what they’ve done, very diligently, is fulfill the terms of their proposals—they’ve written up their proposal, long-form, and often what this does is then set up a sort of serial deal, where the whole book can essentially be reduced back to the size of the original proposal! What I really like about this book is that the proposal would be turned down instantly: there’s nothing to propose. Nicholson Baker talks about the way in which the most successful nonfiction books are those that can be boiled down into an argument so that everybody can wade in with an opinion without having to undergo the inconvenience of having to read the book itself. The more you can condense it, the better. Malcolm Gladwell is the supreme exponent of this: Blink—oh yeah, I get it! “Blink.” That’s all you need to know.

From my essay in the latest Caravan:

The first year that I went to the Jaipur Literature Festival, I was given the honour of engaging in a public conversation with my early hero, Hanif Kureishi. Hanif is a writer of clean sentences; he has a dry wit, and isn’t afraid to be perverse or provocative. He also speaks just the way he writes, his utterances coming out clothed in elegant perfection, their hair gelled. He was in fine form that morning but quite unprepared for what, best as I can recall, was the very first question from the audience: “Mr Kureishi, are you circumcised?”

That was good, very good, in fact, and amused everyone. Much better than questions like, “Sir, how many books have you read?” that had been posed to me the previous day after my own panel. I’m calling such statements banalities, but I quite appreciate their directness and honesty. It’s important to know where these questions are coming from. The man with the pressing inquiry about Hanif’s foreskin really wanted to ask about Muslim identity; his own grandson, the questioner explained, had recently been circumcised. Why should young children undergo this trauma? Of course, we might want to ask why anyone would consider writers a source of great wisdom on such worldly matters: what exactly makes someone who does nothing but spend a lot of time alone in front of their computer uniquely qualified to answer questions about violent conflicts, or stubborn social customs, or world historical changes?

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From the New York Times IndiaInk blog: