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Voices of Peace
Volume VI
Arundhati Roy, Booker prize-winning author, looks at the conflict
over Kashmir from her home in New Delhi.
Under the Nuclear Shadow
by Arundhati Roy
Least We Forget, a Hiroshima Atomic bomb victim,
a 14 year old girl burned by radiation.
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The Guardian/ Observer
Observer
Worldview
Sunday June 2, 2002
This week as diplomats' families and tourists quickly disappeared, journalists from
Europe and America arrived in droves. Most of them stay at the Imperial Hotel in
Delhi. Many of them call me. Why are you still here, they ask, why haven't you left
the city? Isn't nuclear war a real possibility? It is, but where shall I go? If I
go away and everything and every one, every friend, every tree, every home, every
dog, squirrel and bird that I have known and loved is incinerated, how shall I live
on? Who shall I love, and who will love me back? Which society will welcome me and
allow me to be the hooligan I am, here, at home?
We've decided we're all staying. We've huddled together, we realise how much we love
each other and we think what a shame it would be to die now. Life's normal, only
because the macabre has become normal. While we wait for rain, for football, for
justice, on TV the old generals and the eager boy anchors talk of first strike and
second strike capability, as though they're discussing a family board game. My friends
and I discuss Prophecy, the film of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dead
bodies choking the river, the living stripped of their skin and hair, we remember
especially the man who just melted into the steps of the building and we imagine
ourselves like that, as stains on staircases.
My husband's writing a book about trees. He has a section on how figs are pollinated,
each fig by its own specialised fig wasp. There are nearly 1,000 different species
of fig wasps. All the fig wasps will be nuked, and my husband and his book.
A dear friend, who is an activist in the anti-dam movement in the Narmanda Valley,
is on indefinite hunger strike. Today is the twelfth day of her fast. She and the
others fasting with her are weakening quickly. They are protesting because the government
is bulldozing schools, felling forests, uprooting handpumps, forcing people from
their villages. What an act of faith and hope. But to a government comfortable with
the notion of a wasted world, what's a wasted value?
Terrorists have the power to trigger a nuclear war. Non-violence is treated with
contempt. Displacement, dispossession, starvation, poverty, disease, these are all
just funny comic strip items now. Meanwhile, emissaries of the coalition against
terror come and go preaching restraint. Tony Blair arrives to preach peace - and
on the side, to sell weapons to both India and Pakistan. The last question every
visiting journalist always asks me: 'Are you writing another book?'
That question mocks me. Another book? Right now when it looks as though all the music,
the art, the architecture, the literature, the whole of human civilisation means
nothing to the monsters who run the world. What kind of book should I write? For
now, just for now, for just a while pointlessness is my biggest enemy. That's what
nuclear bombs do, whether they're used or not. They violate everything that is humane,
they alter the meaning of life.
Why do we tolerate them? Why do we tolerate the men who use nuclear weapons to blackmail
the entire human race?
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