My first novel, The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, was published in 2001. The conceit of that book is that it’s a story of three generations of a middle-class Indian family spanning a hundred years, from 1930 to 2030. When it was released, the book depicted the previous seven decades that India had actually passed through and the three decades that were yet to come. The device was intended to illuminate the last few years of
the 20th century using the twin spotlights of the known past and an imagined future.
Even though the things I described from the imagined near-future were mostly tragic and horrific, there was a kind of perverse pleasure in constructing events and realities based on what one could reasonably project at that moment in history. I was fully aware that I would get a whole lot of things wrong; there was even an inverse-superstitious hope that by writing them on to the page, most of my darker predictions would stay contained in fiction, a cautionary yarn that would be read in the first decades of the new millennium that were far happier than they were in the book.
Published a few months before 9/11, there are unspecified references in the book to something big and horrific having happened in New York; then, India loses a conflict with Pakistan and allies in the first decade of the century, laying North India to waste and making Delhi almost a border town; Bombay-Mumbai is destroyed by a dirty nuke in 2012. Following these events, one of the main protagonists, a young woman named Paramita, volunteers for the Indian Air Force and ends up leading an elite fighter-bomber squadron of women pilots in a pre-emptive attack on a tank formation of a Pak-Saudi alliance. This new war is seen as the ‘return match’ and it ostensibly ends in an Indian victory that is made pyrrhic by twists of history, including multiple environmental disasters.
The novel has been re-issued and I received a copy on May 8 just as conflicting details of India’s air attacks on Pakistan were coming through. Watching the competing tandav-dances of claims and counter-claims emerging from the two countries, I couldn’t help but compare them to my nightmare-fantasy from twenty-five years ago. Reality will always be simultaneously less dramatic and far crazier than whatever us fiction-merchants can dream up, but it appeared to me as though two new-gen fictional narratives had just flown up in tight formation to blow my ageing story out of the sky.
According to the Indian side, our intrepid warplanes rained down hell upon the terrorist dens ranged along the Pakistan border and, in one fell swoop, we destroyed several jihadi training centres killing hundreds of Islamist militants who had been attacking our country. Yes, we took ‘some losses’ but we showed Pakistan who’s the boss; the first raids and then the ‘retaliatory’ second wave were like sharp, short, shock-punches that let the enemy know that we could hit much harder next time. This resulted in Pakistan begging for mercy after which we hit the pause button but not the stop one.
The narrative of Pakistan’s officials and its media goes like this. India launched a gratuitous assault for which the brave Pakistanis were more than ready. Even as the Indian planes headed towards the border, Pakistan’s new Chinese missiles smashed five of India’s warplanes, including three of the IAF’s newest French toys. The only damage the Indians inflicted was to bomb a few mosques and kill some innocent civilians. Then, when India launched more missiles, Pakistan’s defence systems dealt with them and delivered a counter-blow hammering targets in India. When India, through the good offices of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio & Co, asked for a ceasefire, Pakistan graciously gave a winner’s assent.
These two rival tales are the more conservative ones; the war-onanism of the news anchors and WhatsApp groups that have seen the Karachi port captured, Lahore destroyed, the Pakistani nuclear network dismantled, or, conversely, Jammu shattered, and the Indian army in Kashmir in a bloody shambles, are in themselves things of fabulist wonder.
What becomes clear after the smoke has dispersed is what was already clear twenty-five years ago. Wars are usually started for political gain and innocent populations take the brunt of the damage. Governments and the military (in Pakistan’s case, the military government) do not like telling the truth about what occurs in a conflict; the truth has to be prised out by an independent media. If a country’s media is leashed and muzzled by power, it is nothing but a propaganda arm of the ruling dispensation. In terms of effectivity, sending warplanes on bombing missions does very little to contain, discourage or disable terrorism — it’s like taking a hammer to a fever. There is no military solution to the problems besetting India and Pakistan — all a war will do is sow seeds for future wars. In the intervals between wars, previous conflicts will provide fodder for jingoism and macho posturing (for the Germans, they never lost the First World War — they were betrayed; for pro-Establishment Pakistanis, they never lost in 1971 — they were forced into an early stop and a ‘draw’ by America and Russia). When you fail to differentiate between rulers and ordinary people, when you dehumanise an entire population, you end up committing crimes against humanity (for instance, Israelis insisting all 2.2 million Palestinians of Gaza are terrorists or, now, India weaponising water treaties).
As individuals and as societies, we are moulded by the stories we tell ourselves, including the stories we tell about ourselves. After reading my novel, an Israeli friend said to me, “Your book would never work in Israel because you don’t leave the reader with any hope. Given our history, we Israelis always need to end with hope.” As today’s Israel carpet-bombs its own future, as it continues to search out and destroy all hope from its own region, it provides a stark lesson for us in South Asia. The question rises up, yet again: what stories can we tell ourselves that will steer us away from self-destruction?