Prologue
[NEW YORK, MARCH 2003] — In the beginning I traveled in the hushed hours between midnight and dawn. I savored the quiet that fell over a city when the sky was at its darkest and its streets were nearly empty—all conflict diminished by the loom of night. In the beginning I pictured myself as seasoned and savvy, attempting to beat the rush, aiming to arrive early to the next emerging crisis. But after what happened to my colleagues Johanna and Margot struggling to exit Damascus two Septembers ago, I unceremoniously switched to day traveling, relishing the company of strangers and bright-eyed airport attendants, happy to be noticed for my high-tops and denim jacket, remembered, searched, and even questioned.
Today is no different. No matter the city or the angle of shadow cast from the sundial or the skyscraper, the routine on my day of departure remains steadfast. I inevitably check and double-check that I have enough pens and reporters’ notepads to get by the first months, and stuff the suitcase with extras (pencils, hard candies, Scotch tape, paper clips) with which to barter; I make sure I have extra batteries and an adapter for my tape recorder, though I rarely use the device. I remember how my former translator, Rafiq, had long admired it, and I resolve to gift it to him if I ever see him again. I repack my satchel with its reinforced shoulder strap, an effort to utilize every inch. Today I slide in a few of Virginia’s books, slim volumes of poetry she won once during a college trivia contest. Some things of hers to carry with me wherever I go. I finger my mother’s opal ring, which I wear on a simple silver chain. I triple-check travel documents and the validity of my passport with extra pages sewn into the back like an epilogue to a story that is yet to be written. I call the airline to make certain that departure is taking place. Since September 11, things that I once took for granted are no longer assured. I pace by the window until an airport limousine, inevitably delayed because of the afternoon rush, arrives.
Today is no different, and relief courses through my veins when the airline agent confirms the flight, her voice nasally and bored. Now I check my watch, then stare at the apartments across the street from Ford’s condominium. I’ve made myself at home—especially now that he’s gone out of town and I’ve stopped answering the phone. This is the kind of woman I am these days: married to my handsome husband, Sebastian, but camping out at my old flame Ford’s apartment across town. Married to one man but sleeping in another’s bed—often with him in it. Twice I pick up the phone to call Seb but I hang up before I complete dialing. Twice I begin to write Ford a note, but I rip up sheets of hotel stationery that he uses for scratch paper and deposit my false starts in the trash. I don’t want to share what I now know. This is the kind of woman I am, carrying secrets at once big and small.
Across the street, everyone is out, even the grandmother on the seventh floor. I have named her Edith because of the Wharton-style hat she dons every time she leaves the apartment she shares with a middle-aged man, presumably her son, and a pair of beagles. I don’t know for certain, but I think the building across the street doesn’t allow pets. The beagles are the only pair I’ve ever noticed. My money is on Edith: In all the time I have observed her, this grandmotherly face has remained somber and stony, a woman who regularly stares into an abyss of grief but has the strength to look away.
I know that look.
Today is like every other international departure except that I have no mother to say goodbye to, no mother to wish me bon voyage.
*****
Chapter 1
[APRIL 2001] — The flight is not full, and I fall asleep across the empty row despite my best intentions to see the mysterious world at night from my window seat. I wake to find my shawl draped over me and the oval-shaped light from the window coursing across my face. The sun feels good. I close my eyes and the light from the window creates a converging pattern of red lines on my eyelids. They are missives, plentiful like a sky full of paper planes. Come home. Your mother is dying. Come home. Your husband needs you. Come home. Your family needs you. Come home. There are plenty of stories and news assignments to be had in America, in New York. We have all survived Y2K and millennium doomsday scenarios; the future is limitless—if you leave your foreign assignment behind and return. Come home.
But I know a thing or two. I love my job. I am only as good as my last good story. I love cataloging the present with my practiced eye and transforming it into history, however rough. I’ve earned the privilege to do this job.
If I were a man no one would be telling me to come home.
A plane change in Cairo, and then off to my destination. Customs is perfunctory, and a young man holding up a sign with my newspaper’s name and Elena Keppler meets me just outside the translucent sliding doors. I smile. “That’s me,” I say, pointing to the sign. “You can call me Rita.” He looks puzzled and I show him my press badge, something I love to do as it eases the tension in every situation where the face they expect to see does not match the name on the placard. He introduces himself: Rafiq Sayed. My new driver and translator. He is young and round, bearded, with glasses that make him look studious. He wears Western clothes: a collared shirt and beige slacks, closed-toe shoes.
I look around and, for fun, count the number of children milling about (fourteen) and the number of nonblack bags on the carousel (six).
We are quiet as I take everything in.
Rafiq asks, “How was your flight?”
“Great,” I say, my go-to word when I can’t or don’t want to tell the truth. It is the slightly better version of “Fine” that everyone in America says in automatic response when someone asks how they are. “Managed to get some sleep.”
We gather my bags and head toward the parking lot, then we exit the airport checkpoint and venture toward the center of the city. This place resembles the Indian subcontinent: the dust on the roads, the muddy brick and stone architecture of the buildings, and the types of cars, compact, older models; the winding layout of the side streets. I see mosques from my window and vast, open-air tent city markets, a hospital, apartment complexes, and the entrance to a garden, in the distance animals grazing. Ahead a construction site, yellow and red cranes beak forward like birds of paradise.
It smells like spices and sweat—and food cooking nearby. Minus the continuous addition of incense on the streets, from the Kali mandirs along the paths. There are Kali mandirs everywhere in Kolkata, in every neighborhood, the miniature black clay goddess dressed in shimmering silk with a necklace of clay heads around her neck. But I am not in India, I am thousands of miles away. I am in [————— ], but I could have been in Kolkata, Mumbai, or Delhi. This place neither smells nor looks like the sterile, paved, unoccupied streets of America—my brain can’t help but compare each place I’ve lived in America with this crowded, bustling present. The American cities where I’ve lived, with the exception of New York, are ordered, homogenous.
Like India, here there is always the undertone of something burning. Maybe that’s what I smell now. Someone in the distance is burning something to the ground as people go about their lives, shopping for dinner ingredients and picking up their children from school. People are not the only subjects of my stories; whatever the subject, it has the odor of something burning. The questions rise through me: Who set this world on fire, and why? Where? How much more damage do you expect? What are your preventative measures to keep this from happening again? How much of this world has been burned to the ground already? What are your losses? Who is in charge, and what is their arrangement with their adversaries? And how much longer before the fire spreads to where all these innocent people stand now? Who is responsible for the fire? Who oversees the matches and the gasoline? How many were harmed by the previous fires? What are the names of those who were burned? How much did the fire obliterate? What are your plans to contain the fire that is burning out of control now? These are always the questions. The reporter merely substitutes the word fire for war, government, police, corruption, racism, misogyny, assault, trafficking, famine, displacement, or drugs.
Even as I enter this new world and new assignment, I miss India. I miss how I’ve spent the last year in the land of my mother’s birth. I had written the bulk of my stories outside the capital, and this had worked in my favor. My immediate boss, Hughes, had been fine with the arrangement I had set up for myself. But Rich, also on the international desk and a peer of Hughes, was a bastard in the last month after the high court in India had handed down a ruling banning headscarves for Muslim girls at the local university. Rich didn’t like that I had covered that particular story from afar, and he insisted I move to Delhi and set up residence where almost all of the other international reporters lived. Rich didn’t like that I was doing a good job, that readers and peers had been complimenting my work. Rich doesn’t like that there are women in the newsroom, and he has held that belief since we were both in Florida. Rich doesn’t like that someone, probably the managing editor, gave me a shot at a coveted position.
“The paper needs a physical presence, Keppler,” he had said, the line cutting in and out when he stopped to take a breath. “You’re not even in the same state, for god’s sake.”
I’d corrected him about my name, but he ignored me.
I liked my role as a ghost, going places to cover events but always returning to haunt Calcutta. I pumped out stories about the drought in Mumbai, about the voting irregularities in Bihar, about the exploitation of textile workers in Orissa; about the Indian government eschewing the British spelling and pronunciation of the cities of India, transforming Calcutta back, finally, to Kolkata, Bombay to Mumbai, Madras to Chennai. I had a tiny office, I squatted in the Reuters spacious floor on Taratala Road (near the house where my great-aunt grew up, in Behala, that was sold to settle my great-uncle’s considerable gambling debts after he died). The wire service guys were friendly, always buying me masala cha and offering to help.
On any given assignment, I had spoken to officials on the phone and then donned a baggy neutral-colored salwar kameez and affixed a sparkly bindi to my face. I hitched rides, had chances to see the issues for myself. I blended in and was a spectator, a witness. I looked like every other interested bystander, only I was holding a small pad and a pen. I untucked my press badge and spoke to them in fluent Bengali or a child’s version of Hindi. Nine times out of every eleven, they agreed to speak to me on the record, they congratulated me for the job I was sent to India to do. Unlike Americans, they didn’t balk at my pointed questions or examine my credentials, or ask me more than once where I was from and who’d taught me English.
In fact, Rich was the first person to ask me, loudly and slowly, my first day in the Florida newsroom if I spoke English. I was glad I was able to answer him flippantly in the moment in front of everyone, without missing a beat. “It is my second language,” I’d said in my best southern drawl, and everyone but Rich had laughed. But later, in the bathroom, I had shut the door to the stall and felt my face flush with heat and hot tears sting the corners of my eyes. As much as I despise Rich, it is the Indian government liaison, Mr. Sharma, who I wish would acquire an untreatable rash. The villainous Mr. Sharma as I liked to call him behind his back, mostly because of his cartoonish mustache and thick brows, tried to feel me up at lunch one day not too long ago. When I didn’t reciprocate, he complained repeatedly to Hughes of my purported mistakes, my bad attitude, my unprofessionalism. Hughes asked me four times if something had happened, and I played it off as sour grapes that I hadn’t used Mr. Sharma for the upcoming Bhopal accident anniversary story. I knew better than to tell Hughes or anyone else about Mr. Sharma’s roving hands: It would have confirmed their suspicions that women weren’t cut out for this kind of job.
Mr. Sharma was probably one of the reasons for my expulsion, one of the excuses for my probation and this new trial position in [ ]. I missed a big story: the statues. Over and again, I was told to cover the news with an impartial eye, as in Impartial I. Yet there are eyes back in New York who look from afar and try to impose what they claim to see from thousands of miles away—not trusting the reporter on the ground, so to speak.
When the Taliban threatened to bomb the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the sixth-century statues carved into the central Afghan mountains, none of the editors in New York took the warning seriously. For one thing, the site could not be reached at a moment’s notice. It’s northwest of Kabul and a long journey, especially from Kolkata or Delhi. Second, no one believed it could even happen: These Buddhist reliefs were almost fourteen hundred years old and had been there for public viewing without incident for nearly a millennium. Yet the men who orchestrated the destruction were angered by a restoration group’s stance that funding would be used solely to repair and restore the statues; it would not be used for the feeding and care of the hungry children in the nearby village and the thousands of residents in the region. At that point the sanctions imposed by the United Nations had already had an impact throughout Afghanistan.
I asked Hughes if he wanted me to go cover the story, but he’d said no. Then Rich called back the next day and said for me to be ready and go on a moment’s notice, that this could be a really good one. Rich and, to a lesser extent Hughes, had looked at the threat like children would look at a bully on the other side of a tall fence. From their vantage points, the bully was all talk and there was no anticipation of any action. The newspaper editors wanted to compete with cable TV broadcasters, and in this new era of twenty-four-hour coverage, they wanted a blow-by-blow description.
Still, everyone was caught unaware. On a Monday, just as these men had warned, the Taliban used dynamite and guns and blew off the faces of these two Buddhist reliefs, much to the horror of the people who had come to repair them. There was one video of the bombing, taken by a restoration worker when he realized the Taliban was going through with the threat, since none of the news stations were there yet. The world watched the grainy video the following day on all the channels, after it was verified. Rich’s call came after the video was published. Sadly, the world is concerned with old relics in history only after they are threatened. The lining, in silver: Now suddenly everyone around the world is questioning their government. What are you doing to protect our past? What are you doing to protect our monuments and the marks of our civilization?
In response to the Taliban’s action, many Buddhist societies around the world announced plans to build replicas of the destroyed statues and place them on public display in a show of unity. In places such as New Zealand and Poland, China, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, and India; and inside the United States in Hawai’i, California, and Illinois. I was able to interview via telephone a film crew from India that captured the reliefs with their noses blown off and a member of the restoration group from Sri Lanka who had returned home. One of the film crew returned to Delhi, and I was able to interview him in person. I had written two stories. The lede for the second story: “Rakesh Bhatia never dreamed he’d become an eyewitness to the destruction of history on the eve of his 20th birthday.”
Still, Hughes had not been satisfied. “You did know this was happening? Your crystal ball is polished, right?”
Another phone call with New York—this time Hughes and Rich on the line together. I stood at a busy corner of the floor where reporters like me were trying to phone back to their home countries. The stench of body odor and tension permeated the air. “What, that they were going to blow up the faces? No.”
I heard Rich in the background. “Mike Barrett is going to land in . . .” Hughes clamped a hand over the receiver to muffle the noise. On my end, a percussion of voices near and far.
A moment or two passed. “I’ve got to go if you want that follow-up story,” I said into the phone, the line hissing indiscriminately. Some of my colleagues looked over at me. I must have been shouting.
“Next time your crystal ball says—” Hughes began.
“Next time?” I interrupted. “I’m in the middle of a sexual assault story. Remember the girl on the bus?” A teenager had been raped on Delhi public transport and died later from her injuries. There were nine people on the bus, including the driver, and no one had intervened on behalf of the five-foot-one fifteen-year-old on her way home. The teenager had just started high school. The police had been quick in finding and detaining all the passengers and the bus driver, but there were no answers to the reporters’ questions at the daily press briefing. I’m not an ambulance chaser, though perhaps this is what Hughes wants. Someone who drops everything or someone who can do six things at once. There are threats like the potential destruction of Buddhist statues all the time. I hadn’t guessed correctly. I’d missed a big story. “You said the girl on the bus was a priority.” There was a rumor that an English tourist had been molested on a Delhi bus but that she was unwilling to go public. I needed to track down the tourist.
Hughes interrupted back. “Next time, we will have a chance to do better than this coverage . . .”
