Grace under fire

The Indian sub-continent has produced more than its share of the world's wise men.

In fact, the region overflows with noble thoughts and formulae for maximising human happiness. Yet for several years now the region has been torn by internal conflict.

Millions of lives have been lost and a greater number of people have been rendered homeless in the killing fields of South Asia.

Sadly, reports of terrorist killings in the region have blunted people's sensitivities""the tragedy for the people living it has become nothing more than a daily count.

Such is the regularity of atrocities that field reporters too eventually get inured to human tragedy, while reporting from the region. After all, the reportage of so much daily destruction is always tempered with the pressing need to investigate the claims and counterclaims.

Books like Fragments of Grace happen only once in a while. Pamela Constable, a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post and an intrepid journalist with 28 years of experience under her belt, has done what few journalists would ever do.

Instead of waxing eloquent on her exploits with the keyboard from the battlefields of Sri Lanka, Kashmir, and Afghanistan, she has written about the sufferings of the people she met and saw while on assignment. Constable writes with compassion, her account is sincere and honest.

Sent on a reporting assignment to South Asia in 1998, she couldn't have asked for a more happening time. The region was on the boil""not that it isn't now.

Militants and security forces were slugging it out in the Kashmir valley and in the jungles of north Sri Lanka. (In 2001, there was to be a royal massacre in Nepal.)

But a worse human tragedy was unfolding in Afganistan, where the Taliban rule had reached its pinnacle. All civil rights were suspended as the Taliban tried to enforce their own warped code of ethics. Men and women who refused to submit to the Taliban rule were given pre-historic punishments.

Not so long ago, Kabul was a modern place. Those who lived there in the 1970s remember that its people were liberal and women were not discriminated against. The bazaars would bustle with trade, while the countryside was beautiful. The war with the Russians and then the rule of the Taliban have made Afghanistan one of the poorest countries in the world.

Most of Constable's Afghan experiences unfold in Kabul and Kandahar, chatting with mullahs in mosques and madrasas and recounting the travails of ordinary people.

What she discovered was hardly startling: ordinary people had little to do with the Taliban and just wanted to get on with their lives. Still, few journalists have chosen to explore the social upheaval the religious revival in the region caused as Constable has.

Most people choose to dismiss the fighting in Afghanistan as part of the land's age-old culture: "An Afghan is at peace only when he is fighting."

Constable's book shows this is not true. They too want to improve their life chances. But the Taliban scotched them all. The stories recounted by Constable are all tragic. The Afghan were even made to give up their humble indulgences""Buzkashi and Bollywood music, for instances.

Constable stayed on till the Taliban were driven out of Kabul, and Pakistan severed its ties with the regime of hardliners and clamped down on the madarsas.

As a result, she was able to get a ring-side view of how the Afghans who were driven out of their homeland to refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran were trying to pick up the pieces and rebuild their lives.

It also made her alive to the hatred the US attack on Afghanistan had generated against America. Of course, she is more sensitive to the sufferings of women. Her account of women in Pakistan and Afghanistan hounded by their own relatives (husband and brothers included) for honour killing is spine-chilling.

When it comes to India, like most first-time visitors to the country from the West, Constable has been prolific in writing about people defecating next to railway tracks, beggars with mishapen limbs, and people who trust gods rather than hospitals to cure their ailments. Still, her book is an excellent read.

FRAGMENTS OF GRACE

Pamela Constable
HarperCollins Publishers India
Price: Rs 495,
Pages: 269