2 — Animal’s People/Indra Sinha

Last night I went out, drank too much tequila, and still came home and read. Because once you’ve posted about a challenge on social media, it’s too embarrassing not to go through with it.

My sister loves this book. She sent it to me in a care package in college because it changed her life, and here I am, finally getting around to reading it.

“’Jaha jaan hai, jahaan hai.’ We have the world, while we still have life.”

It follows the story of a young Indian man whose spine was deformed as the result of a Bhopal-esque disaster, whose life as a crippled street orphan left him, let’s say, rough around the edges (and down to the core). This book is a fairly intense piece of literature, the language is artistic (and thus, often slow-going) and a feeling of everything being “in translation” is overwhelming (usually in a good way).

This book is oozing with quotable lines, but more than that, it has me thinking about “the power of nothing.” Its an idea that activists in the book use when discussing how all the poor and sick people of Khaufpur might get justice in their fight with the company (Kompani) that poisoned their air and water and soil and refused to take responsibility.

“There is a strength that comes from having nothing because you have nothing to lose. What is it? Maybe courage, or ingenuity, or desperation, it appears where there is no help and no hope. Look at how you come to us. Out of nowhere and out of nothing…”

This quote doesn’t make much sense sans the 366 pages of context around it, but it gets us close. There’s something NdT said in yesterday’s book about anti-matter. That all the things that exist in the universe, atoms, humans, planets, stars, galaxies, everything made of matter, exist only as the result of a 1 in a billion imbalance. For every billion matter-antimatter pairs in the universe (who, when they meet, annihilate) there is one rogue atom of matter.

The imbalance is still unexplained by physicists, but it speaks to this sense that despite overwhelming nothingness in the universe, there is something. The power of nothing, it is clear, is the dominant force in the universe. And yet, our existence is a Something despite the Nothing. Maybe the “power of nothing” is the knowledge that despite the natural tendency of the universe towards it, towards destruction and hopelessness and meaninglessness, something has already won out, something has smuggled just enough being past the nothingness to craft the known universe. Our existence is a rebellion against nothing.

I don’t quite know what to do with this, but it seems like a little piece of what I’m looking for here. This book makes my heart ache for India. The mix of Hindi and (serendipitously) French throughout the book reminds me how much my life has changed in the last few years. How much I’ve seen and learned. It’s hopeful, its making me reflect on what it means to be human, what it means to be an animal, what it means to know myself and the world around me. I’ll leave you with this quote that I have to keep reading over and over like a song that I can’t get out of my head.

“I am a small burning, freezing creature, naked and alone in a vast world, in a wilderness where is neither food nor water and not a single friendly soul. But I’ll not be bullied. If this self of mine doesn’t belong to this world, I’ll be my own world, I’ll be a world complete in myself. My back shall be ice-capped mountains, my arse mount Meru, my eyes shall be the sun and moon, the gusts of my bowels the four winds, my body shall be the earth, lice its living things, but why stop there? I’ll be my own Milk Way, comets shall whizz from my nose when I shake myself pearls of sweat shall fly off and become galaxies, what am I but a complete miniature universe stumbling around inside this larger one, little does this tree realize that the small thing bumbling at its roots, scraping at its bark, clawing a way into its branches, is a fully fledged cosmos.

I, the universe that was once called Animal, sit in the tree and survey the moonlit jungles of my kingdom.

“Now I am truly alone.”

Book 3 — Hunger: An Unnatural History/Sharman Apt Russell