The shadowlines of history are often drawn in arbitrary fashion, as the civilisational narratives of South Asia and West Asia illustrate, but they make for compelling post-war stories. For instance, in Param Vir: Our Heroes in Battle , Major General Ian Cardozo, the first war-disabled officer to be approved for command of an Infantry Battalion, recounts the improbable real-life story of a retired Brigadier in the Indian Army, who lost a son in a tank battle during the 1971 war with Pakistan. Nearly 30 years later, on a ‘bucket list’ visit to his hometown, in current-day Pakistan, the Brigadier is hosted by a gracious Pakistani Army officer and his family. Their two countries may have been at loggerheads, but the two soldiers find themselves drawn together by an unlikely bond of friendship and a karmic connection.
On the eve of the Brigadier’s departure, his Pakistani host makes a startling ‘confession’: it was at his hands that the visitor’s son had died in the 1971 tank battle. The revelation, acknowledged with soldierly grace by both parties, does nothing to diminish their kinship.
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Colum McCann’s part-fact-part-fiction ‘hybrid novel’ traces a similar unlikely friendship between Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian ‘terrorist’ who grew up in a ‘cave’ near Hebron, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli graphic designer, whose father-in-law served as a
General in the Israeli Army. The two men have only one thing in common: each of them lost a young daughter to the conflict. Rami’s daughter Smadar, who once featured as a poster child for peace, was killed in a 1997 attack by Palestinian suicide bombers in Jerusalem. Bassam’s daughter Abir, born in the year that Smadar died, was killed by a rubber bullet fired by an Israeli soldier.
But overcoming the impulse for hate-propelled revenge, the two men channel their grief as a weapon for peace. Like Bassam’s ‘prison number’ (220-284), they become metaphorical ‘amicable numbers’, a mathematical curiosity that entwines their destinies and lets them see each other as humans united in the equality of pain.
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Infinite sides
Together with others in similar situations, on both sides of the border, they gather under the banner of the Combatants for Peace, and become catalysts of a peacenik impulse. To the point where they are able to narrate each other’s stories. Rami manifests a preoccupation with the campaign to end the ‘Occupation’; and Bassam, who once delighted in watching Holocaust documentaries for the joy it gave him to “watch Jews die”, signs on for a Peace Studies programme to study the Holocaust in an effort to “understand the history of another.”
For their efforts, they are reviled by hotheads within their own community. Rami’s wife Nurit, a liberal university professor, is mocked as a ‘Jewrab’, a traitor, a whore, for campaigning to end the Israeli ‘Occupation’. In an introspective passage encapsulating his peacenik philosophy, which might just as easily apply in other geographies (including some nearer home), Rami muses: “Some people have an interest in keeping the silence. Others have an interest in sowing hatred based on fear... And, let’s face it, in Israel we’re very good at fear, it occupies us... We use the word security to silence others.”
Such ruminations lead him to an affirmation of his life’s mission: “to personally try to help prevent the unbearable pain for others... to convey this very basic and very simple message, which says: We are not doomed, but we have to try to smash the forces that have an interest in keeping us silent.”
For all its peaceably polemical tone in such reflective passages, Colum McCann’s novel — which, he says, weaves together elements of speculation, memory, fact, and imagination — is a work of pure lyricism. Structured much like the stories from the One Thousand and One Nights — which were themselves drawn from places and cultures as far away as India, Tibet, the Balkans, Baghdad, Damascus and Egypt and across vast expanses of time — Apeirognon (which means a shape with an infinite number of sides) weaves together real and imagined stories across centuries and civilisations. These stretch from Biblical times to Mahatma Gandhi’s Dandi March to French President Francois Mitterrand’s last meal to the correspondence between Einstein and Freud (on building the defences against hate) to Bassam confronting U.S. Senator John Kerry over the murder of his daughter. The 1,001 passages in the novel are threaded together by interlinking strands that connect them cosmically, with fewer than six degrees of separation.
The flutter and the flap of bird-wings echo with every turn of the pages of this epic novel: there are evocative passages of birds in flight in arguably one of the world’s bloodiest avian flight corridors, and a thrilling account of the mechanics of capturing falcons; there’s also a pulse-racing passage on French artist Philippe Petit’s high-wire act in 1987 across the Hinnom Valley, during which he releases a dove. Even these seemingly unconnected strands come beautifully together, like the fascinating murmuration patterns formed by starlings in flight. The story that McCann narrates may be dense at times, but his magical prose carries it aloft on light literary wings.
venky.vembu@thehindu.co.in
Apeirogon; Colum McCann, Bloomsbury, ₹550