Brutality, the Teacher

I've been more than vocal about my intentions here in India; while voyeurism is an inescapable dimension of travel, and spectacle a perceptual failing that I haven't yet subdued, I'm nonetheless trying to learn from India, at least as much as I learn about it. I'm not confident it's the case that the most important lessons are the ones taught by the harms we undergo, but it seems to me that the most salient teacher, at least, is suffering. So let me warn you in advance; this particular entry has a more sombre tone than those which have preceded it, and it contains some graphic descriptions that not everyone will find valuable. I've debated whether or not to write this privately or publicly or a few days, and have decided that painting a picture of India through rose-colored glasses is unfair to both those who are witnessing India vicariously through my writing, and to India itself. Those of us who enjoy immense privilege ought to know how the rest of the world is living, and the rest of the world ought to have a chance to have its stories told, even if only to an audience of a half dozen or so. In  the Wes, our media has weened us on drama and the spectacle of tragedy; we have become adrenaline junkies, and we tend toward privately enjoying our vicarious access to disaster and woe. What I'm going to write about isn't 'big', it's just very sad; there's no adventure in this story, but there's a fair but of hurt. So, there's the disclaimer.

In the movie A Mighty Heart, Angelia Jolie's character is a woman who travels to Africa to aid the sick and starving. Upon arrival, she finds herself shocked with the magnitude of the harm around her, and seeing a child nearly dead from starvation, begins to berate a doctor who chooses not to give the child aid because the child isn't likely to survive. She thinks him a monster, unable to understand how he could turn his back on a child near death if there is even a chance it could live, and he in turn mocks her for her ignorance and condescension. It takes her a long time to overcome her privileged ideas about welfare to understand that in the part of Africa she's traveled to, not everyone can be saved. The resources just aren't there, and being frivolous with them kills more than it saves. Her ideas about right and wrong become shattered by a reality she hadn't really been able to conceive of until she was faced with it. The film reflects a lesson I have tried to learn in advance. Anthropology has taught me to think deeply about matching ethics to circumstances, to admit reality. In much more egocentric fashion, I am also loathe to be laughed at or to be found naive, and so try to consider how appropriate my perspective is to my environment to avoid embarrassment. Both of these elements of myself play out in the story below.

I knew that India would bring me face to face with things I had never seen, and to some extent had prepared myself for this. I've had to look children of four or five in the eye and tell them no, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to give you any money, because I know that the money would not go to themselves, but to an owner who exploits them. I've seen a woman whose eye-balls had been torn from their sockets and not put back in properly, so that they jutted red and ragged from her face, secured by thick coils of scar tissue that made stalks of the nerves that must once have carried the currents of vision. We are not wealthy; on this journey, our air cannot be philanthropic. Ninotchka and I do our best not to waste food, and when we have left-overs we don't care for, to give them away to such people. We extend kindness to some who might receive precious little of it. When we settle in the North, we will volunteer our time; but this is the extent of our power, for the time being. Facing this has challenged me; but at the same time, I've been able to cope with it, primarily by relying on the reflex of jaded apathy Western society has bred in me, barricading myself behind it long enough to escape their begging, and then releasing it, letting in the familiar, cloying shame that is only assuaged by the mass complicity of all the urban populations of Earth.

Though, to give this city its due, Mumbai is no stranger to adversity, and in far better form than Western cities, Mumbai copes, after a fashion, with its vicissitudes. There are eighteen-million people in this city (my previous figure of twenty-two was an incorrect statistic), and the truth is, most of them take care of each other in ways many of us at home wouldn't recognize. It's possible, though not incredibly nourishing, to eat here for perhaps fifty cents CAD a day, and the population here seems to have an implicit agreement not to take on too much in their roles, so that meagre jobs can be born of almost any deed. Which doesn't mean that the work might not be brutal; rather, by dividing labor into simple tasks, whether back-breaking or monotonous, more opportunities for work obtain. In this way, more people than could otherwise be find themselves enmeshed in the fabric of the city's economy. In general, starvation is less of an issue than is quality of life, and survival far less uncertain than is flourishing. Born to a nation of free health care, minimum wage and the McJob, it's all struck me rather viscerally, but I've done my very best to try and live by the old adage, "when in Rome, do as the Romans do". I've tried to see India through Indian eyes, to avoid what anthropology has taught me think of as ethnocentrism. Yet, a few days ago I found myself in a situation that I could not reconcile with any ethos of cultural relativity, and which has therefore cut me rather deeply. This is a very long entry, but I'd like to feel that I did the experience, and not just the tale, justice.

To foreshadow, a moment of waxing introspective: the plight of animals is often harder for me than are those of people, a condition that I've confessed to and discovered I share with many others. Perhaps compassion simply surges stronger for the innocent, but I suspect there is more at play. I think that in the West we have learned to hide behind the fact of human agency, so that we can say to someone in destitution: this is your fault, you could leave this situation if you tried hard enough, I am not responsible for this. In short, we have diminished the extent to which we allow ourselves to emotionally contact the suffering of others, in self-defense rather than dispassion. But when it is animal pain we face—especially in a culture where the animals we eat are never seen alive, and the animals we keep are generally pets—we lose the safety and comfort of our rationalized disconnection. A wounded animal cannot seek medical attention; a starving puppy can't 'get a job'; the homeless creatures that line the roads here can't make the choice to stop breeding in order stay the swelling tide of new mouths to feed. A wounded animal can't cheat us or trick us or otherwise use our sympathy against us, and so the pain of an animal is the most honest thing in the world. It can pass, like light through a windowpane, by all of our defenses and egotisms to detonate in a vulnerable part of ourselves we tend not to offer up for exposure.

Ninotchka and I had gone to the train station to get tickets for the next leg of our visiting tour. At the station, there are a half dozen booths lining a wall from which to buy your tickets, and so far as I have seen, the lines descending from them never close to less than twenty or thirty bodies deep, even in mid-afternoon, when much of Mumbai naps away the worst of the heat. Waiting in line, I could see a dog beneath the booth we were approaching, lying pressed and motionless against the wall. I have had about a hundred momentary embraces with panic since arriving here, because the innumerable dogs that roam the city spend much of the day sleeping, and they do this anarchically, lounging literally anywhere. Whether in the middle of the road, across sidewalks, or beneath trucks (where the shade is plentiful), there are dozing canines everywhere, and until you see their chest rising and falling, you can never be completely sure that they're alive. I could see from some way off that the dog we were approaching was wounded; lying sprawled on its side, the underside of its chin facing toward me, the line of its brow was only a thin red and black horizon, obscuring the extent of the injury that must have existed atop its head. Its breath was shallow, its eyes were shut. Pressed up against the wall as it was, there was no vantage of it's other side except from straight above, a gaze I could't realize until we reached the booth. A heavy, sickening dread formed in my stomach; I knew, had known, for some time that there could not be so many animals fending for themselves in such a busy, jarring place without the occasional tragedy. I had been surprised, in fact, that in such traffic I hadn't yet witnessed any deaths from vehicles. So in my mind repeated my awful anticipation like a manic prophecy: this is it, this is it, this is it, I went. I was preparing psychologically for what I was going to witness, or at least trying to at any rate. I have seen the raw, bleeding legs who have chewed away their own flesh to fight the fleas, and I have seen the limping losers of back-street squabbles over food and the privelege of domination. I was anticipating something similar, if a more intense example for its being a head wound. It was nothing of the sort.

As our chance to purchase a ticket arrived, the dog chose that moment to spare a fraction of it's waning strength to look about at its surrounds. Its head rose for just a moment, and when it glanced behind it, it's ruined skull turned into full view, coming blatantly into my gaze in a disturbingly shameless fashion, like an adult with a child's mind exposing their genitals. A fist-sized tract of the top of its head was just absent, and in its place a ragged hole was left, out of which protruded its brain, framed by a gory cusp of serrated bone and coagulated blood. It is the way of animals to appear not to notice their wounds; it is because they are spared of hope and temporality, and thus do not worry about recourse. They simply endure, and this creature was no different; it completed its survey, and returned the remainder of its head to the pillow of its paws.

The pace of my internal monologue is sometimes a cruel gift, and on this occasion I would have stopped my thoughts if I'd been able; my talent for logic, for puzzle-solving, is mechanical and automatic. Sometimes, I reflexively interpret what I see before I can decide if I care to. Before I had access to the emotional levers that would shut the gates of thought, involuntary and computational curiosity uttered its conclusions in my head: how could that hole have been made? A skull is a very strong thing; this dog could not have fallen from a height because no other part of it is injured. Another dog could not have done it; the canine jaw cannot apply that much pressure, and wouldn't attack like this, besides. If it had been hit by a car with this much force, there, on the very top of its head like that, surely its neck would have broken, or its body would have been pulled under, and it would have some other damage. This is too local, too particular, too precise, too... human. This was he last knee-jerk inference I made before I managed to silence my thoughts. Although the deduction took less than a fraction of a second to complete, as is the way with the poly-semantic blossoming of reflexive logic, it was already too late to retract the conclusion. Someone had kicked or beaten the animal with enough violence to smash a piece of it's skull from its head, and had subsequently left it to die. Whether it had crawled up into the shade of the booth to find some margin oft solace, or if the abuse had been committed there and the dog had been unable to move, or uninterested in moving, was unclear. But in either case, the broken thing was sitting there, placidly baking in the afternoon heat while its brain mushroomed out of its shattered head, waiting quietly to die.

Immediately, I felt the vomit rising in me as though under the impetus of some violent inversion of grvity; I turned, I stepped out of line, I made for the nearest parody of privacy, the corner made by a vending machine and a stone wall. I hung my head over the floor, my weight heaved against my outstretched arm, and waited for the nausea to coalesce. A spared a moment's thought for all the eyes around me, and was suddenly horrified to discover that I couldn't complete the expulsion; the retching abandoned me in my throat, would not complete, and it backed away, retreating queasily to my gut. I was disappointed, and shocked to discover I wanted the release; television has told me that this is a proper way to unveil my disgust, and I wanted to play out that drama. I was ashamed that I could witness that and keep my breakfast, but I was also ashamed to be the only one so affected. Still, my composure waned; the vomit would not come, but my I could not stop my tears, and I dropped my sunglasses from my forehead, to hide them. It was an ironic move, juxtaposed against the psychological need to vomit—or be seen vomiting—I'd had just a moment earlier. It was at this moment, I have since reflected, that some deeply entrenched and extremely disturbing splinter of ego entered into my consciousness, from the part of me I pretend doesn't exist, and I have been working against the grain of habit and denial to better understand it since. But I get ahead of myself.

A thousand people had to have walked by that dog—not dozens, not a hundred, but easily a thousand. And there it sat, apparently undiscovered. It wasn't bleeding profusely, no arteries had been cut. Perversely, the size of the hole was providing an escape for the pressure that must have ensued from the swelling around the wound, which explained why it was still alive, and  worse, awake. The blood was black, and drying. The damn thing was not going to die from its wound; it was, in all likelihood, going to die very slowly, as its brain dehydrated, because it wasn't losing blood and the air temperature was over thirty degrees. The exposure was at the top of its brain; suddenly what little neuroscience I remembered from my introductory classes was haunting me, and I felt bullied by a relentless train of thoughts that just kept coming. This thing was going to lose functioning in all the wrong order; the base of its brain was still protected, it was going to survive the death of its brain from the outside in. It might lose sight, and memory, all the complex systems that make us perceive dogs as "mans best friend", but its lungs, its heart, its ability to feel pain and move by reflex would be in tact until the end.

I knew all of this within the space of a moment's thought, and I knew that the only choice was to kill it, a merciful death instead of a slow and wilting one. Most of the people passing by had to know that the only course of action was to kill it, but what I knew, and what they didn't know, or at least weren't considering, was that no one needed to shoot it or choke it or otherwise engage in violence. No one needed to risk being bitten, no one needed a weapon. The pen in my pocket would do; one good push  into its brain stem, through the fatty tissue leaking out its skull, would take its misery away. I could end its suffering in a moment. My nausea rose noncommittally at the thought. There were hundreds of people around. Mob mentality is a fact of life in Mumbai; I've heard stories of people being killed by mobs simply for causing a traffic accident in which no one was harmed. This many people can live together in relative harmony because no one rocks the boat. The status quo is a vital organ in a population so dense, especially when resources are so sparse. I was afraid to do anything; I was afraid people would be angry that I was interfering with their getting to work on time. I was afraid that I would be accused of having harmed the dog. I was afraid that people would not understand what I was doing, and that I would be in danger for trying to help; I was afraid they would be angry at me for doing what they had long ago buried, of necessity, the impulse to do themselves. Sadly, these are all legitimate worries, and in all likelihood the consequences of acting on my own would have spelled trouble or even danger for me. But it doesn't matter, because I didn't even try.

Deep, deep down inside me was a tiny voice I remember now, but which I refused, in the moment, to hear or acknowledge: you can't do it, you can't kill it, it's gross, it'll bite you, maybe you'll miss,  someone should but you can't, you can't, you can't. I could have faced that voice, I believe, if I'd been alone, if it had been my only adversary. But what for some time afterward made me sick with myself, what I couldn't admit at that moment but later recognized within me, was this thought: you're being a baby, this is just a dog, no one cares and you only care because you're an over-priveleged, sheltered little white kid who wouldn't know hardship from a paper-cut; if you try and help, people are going to gossip about the crazy, melodramatic foreigner for weeks, you're just going to embarass yourself. Some part of me that I should have left in highschool was here, on the station platform, whispering me away from the real problem, the dying dog a few meters behind me. I hid my tears because I was afraid that everyone around me would be laughing, or disgusted by my weakness, or resentful that I was letting their city hurt me when none of them seemed affected. I was afraid that I was getting India wrong, that I was wrong to feel this way, that I was projecting my culture onto theirs. And still, another voice persisted: it's dying, it's suffering, this is not about culture or ego, this is about life and suffering and cruelty. They can't afford to care, there's too much of this here for them to risk caring, the pain of a whole life of this would crush anyone who didn't learn to look the other way. You're not wrong, and neither are they, but you are the only one here who has the privilege of compassion. Do something, do something, do something. There was a war in me, and I went quite immediately into shock.

Ninotchka did not see the creature; she only saw me, and my hurt. She heard it from me, but she heard it in the context of my grief. Her concern was for me, for her partner's pain. She rightly told me not to get involved on my own. I listened to her, and I wanted to listen to her; I wanted to be absolved of responsibility. She suggested we talk to the train station police, who were sitting at a booth nearby. I presumed it was futile; they were sitting ten, maybe fifteen meters from this withering life that already innumerable people had witnessed and ignored; if this was supposed to be their problem, it would already have been. But it was an excuse; I didn't know that, nor could I have without speaking to them. I just assumed it as a fact, distributing my responsibility into the ether of rationale and probability and speculation. I'd heard a story in my introductory psychology class, about a woman who had been  stabbed death near her home. She had screamed for help for more than thirty minutes, and thirty-eight bystanders had heard her screams and done nothing; everyone assumed that someone would deal with it, that they shouldn't get involved. But one did get involved, and she died limping back to her apartment. I was stunned, shocked, and horrified by that story; not because people could be so callous, but because that fear could lead to such inaction. I have for a very long time believed that I would never do that, that I would be the one in those situations, because someone has got to be. I have generally led my life this way, even though I have never faced a situation even fractionally so dire. In general, I have seen that mentality go wrong too often, "someone else will do it" becomes "no one will do it" so very, very often, at home or school or work. So, a voice inside me went: if not you, then no one; you know better, you know better and if you won't do anything, that dog is without an ally, without hope of mercy.

I said as much to Ninotchka, who relented and suggested we call someone, ask if it would be viable to intervene. As a way of helping me to help myself, it was a good idea; her concern was for my pain. But for me, whose aim was to help the dog, it was a ridiculous notion; no one was going to tell me to intervene, least of all someone we knew, someone who was responsible for my well-being. I knew it, deep down. Beneath my conscious awareness I was already accepting that I wasn't going to do anything, that I was going to join the crowds in walking away. I agreed to call someone—it happened to be Cheryl—but it wouldn't have mattered who I called, everyone I know in India would have advised the same thing. In retrospect, I know now: I didn't want advice, I wanted an accomplice, I wanted to be forgiven, I wanted to be extricated from the situation. The moment I agreed to make the phone call, all my grief became nothing more than a self-righteous attempt to save my wounded ego, to explain away the terrible, terrible argument real life was presenting against my delusions of heroism. The dog ceased to exist the moment I began to dial; it was alone, again, in a crowd of humans whose lives had made it too hard to care about its plight. I went back to the station a day later, and there was no sign that the dog had ever been there. Someone, whether in time to end its suffering or merely to clean up an unsightly mess, had thankfully done more than I had.

I spent the next two hours in dialogue with my conscience, negotiating. I moved through successively more foolish ideas about what to do. The first was retributive; find the person who did it, scream at them, beat them, turn them in, something. It was immediately dismissed on grounds of impossibility, with a secondary nod to how little the dog would benefit from vindication. My anger began to cool, to wilt, to sink into a helpless apathy. I hated India, Indians, humanity. I was disgusted with this place that could ignore such hurt, that would walk, in scores, by an animal dying so grotesquely and do nothing. I projected my own shame and guilt onto the landscape and its people, assailing them in my head with blame and accusation, but that too faltered soon enough. I knew better, I knew that the burden of responsibility was mine. I didn't care what anyone else had done or failed to do, and it would be arrogant to pretend that I really understood the circumstances in which they'd made those choices. It was the inability to reconcile my idea of myself as the sort of person who would get involved with the fact of my impotence that was troubling me, and turning my eyes outward to spend my painful emotions on accusation and deflection was a waste of time and energy, a lie I couldn't swallow. Then my thoughts grew truly ridiculous; I decided to go without food or water for the rest of the day, to suffer with the dying dog. An incredulous, punitive voice spat contempt at me: and adding your suffering to the world will aid this creature how? I bargained better: I will rescue a street dog. I will find one, save it, take care of it; a life saved to replace the one I allowed to end in misery. I spent twenty minutes in this fantasy, imagining the grand life my rescued puppy would live. Though I may find that I'd like to do something like this before I leave India, it wouldn't undo my choice to walk away, and it wouldn't help the brutalized dog I'd left dying in a train station. It was at this point that a horrible, sinking feeling came over me, as I realized what I was really doing—self medicating.

My thoughts were all concerned for me, all concerned with how to rectify my shattered ego. That was the moment when I realized what I alluded to above; that in choosing to ask for permission to help, I had already abandoned the dog, and I realized with further shame that my bargaining with my conscience was only taking me further and further away from reality, and deeper into the safety of fantasy. I resolved in that moment to accept responsibility for my choice. The only thing left to do was to admit it all, to accept it all, and learn from it. I began to study the logical performance that had played itself out in the theatre of my mind, in order to recognize the rational mechanisms that had led to my choices, to know them with as much intimacy as I could, perhaps to recognize and refuse them when next they surfaced. The best thing I could do then was to learn how not to do it again. I was tempted to let myself believe that it was a way to honor the dog, but that too I dismissed as merely one last ploy for redemption. The dog had never wanted to teach me anything, it had no sense of self, no ego, to satisfy with the knowledge of its memory. It hadn't wanted to matter; if it could be said to have wanted anything, it was an intact skull.

The resolution unfolds: I have forgiven myself for my inaction, because it was the only apology I could make. To cling guilt would be to plant a seed that would germinate and grow into a larger creature, a sapling whose branches would carry fingers of doubt and self-loathing into other parts of me, ensuring that when next I faced a situation where action was the only answer I would only feel inept and incapable. In short, keeping the guilt to serve as punishment would only increase the chance that I would commit again the very harm about which I was so ashamed. And it was a hard thing to do; so long as we have guilt, we cling to the possibility of redemption. Guilt is an unacknowledged theory of innocence; if the forgiveness can come from some external source, then we can be absolved of responsibility, never guilty in the first place. Forgiving myself was really a way of accepting what I had done, of being able to both admit that I had done it and also agree to keep on living. It meant that the principles I had claimed to hold were worthy ones, yet also their co-existence was now in contradiction with the facts, and the harder choice, in the moment, was abandoning the latter. But, beyond that choice, I have found the beginnings of a certain freedom.

I have not had to abandon my values; I have not had to let go of the idea that I live in a world wherein the choice to act on another's behalf is the right one. I have not had to relinquish the idea that I do not live in a universe where cowardice or apathy are acceptable. Rather, though I have demonstrated cowardice and apathy born of selfishness, I've done this in a universe which can forgive those actions without needing to sanction them. It means that I am imperfect, but the universe is not, and I've discovered (to my surprise) I prefer this scenario to its inverse, because its not hopeless. In short, I am free to try again to be the person I have aimed at being.

I've shared this story because it happened, and it mattered, and it's really what goes on here. Horrible things happen all over the world, but they happen more often in some places than in others; Canada was in many ways easy to live in (perhaps too easy), India I can bare, but Somalia I wouldn't step foot in. While I think of this as a travel blog, the choice to travel into a place that doesn't have the resources to polish away all of its deeds, nor a closet to hide them in, means that my experiences won't always fit tidily into the space of culture and cuisine and curiosity. My intention isn't to create melodrama or to sensationalize what I see, but to do my best to explain through the microscopic lens of circumstance the macroscopic vista of India. I have always joked with my professors that the sociological or anthropological view can be likened to waking from the Matrix in that just as there is no blue pill after you wake, neither can you retrace your steps to a shrunken perspective.  So I can't really help but see this experience in terms of how a geography and a social climate shape a people, and how they  reshape those features in turn. The dog was a salient experience for me, the introspection that obtained was a true and personal account of what happened to me in response to it. But, though the entire encounter is a glimpse of how life unfolds here, I haven't written it as though it were definitional of India. Rather, it is an exemple of the circumstances that do define India, just as the privilege of coping with this event on a blog, to an audience of friends and family who care about me, poised in front of my MacBook thousands of miles from home depict some of the circumstances that define Canada. In summary, I just believe that juxtaposition—the zig that occurs in full view of the zag—shakes us loose from the habits of thought that keep us sleeping, a necessity if we ever want to move out of a world where stories like this are harder to tell.