The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Read online

  Anne and I took a taxi to Chowpatti on our third day in Mumbai, weeks before I learned of the gun battle that had taken place there, ending in Khan's death and Kasab's arrest. Chowpatti Beach was mostly empty that morning, at least by Indian standards. Girls in saris stood knee-deep in the water, wringing out their skirts. A boy was trying to fly a kite in a fitful breeze. Somebody had drawn a heart with a love message in the sand.

  We crossed a footbridge over Marine Drive, the street where Khan and Kasab had run into the police barricade, and asked directions to Mohandas Gandhi's former residence in Mumbai, now a museum called Mani Bhavan. A simple two-story wood-frame building on a shady street, it might be put on exhibit in a museum of museums. The books in the downstairs library, cloistered in their glass-doored cabinets, seemed too precious to read, and a churchlike hush pervaded the place. The brittle, water-stained photographs; the caption informing us that Gandhi rode a bicycle to the temple, shaved without a mirror, and scavenged in the street; the sophisticated naiveté of his letter to Hitler, calling him "friend" (he addressed Roosevelt the same way) and urging him to please reconsider the destruction of Europe; Gandhi's sandals, drinking cup, spindle, and fountain pen enshrined in a case on the wall—all possessed an eerie, sanctimonious aura. An Indian man later told us that every city in India has its own collection of the Mahatma's domestic tools, just as in every religion the bones of saints proliferate over time.

  Upstairs we looked at miniature three-dimensional tableaux of significant events in Gandhi's life, among them a doll-sized Gandhi and his followers gathering salt on the shore of the Arabian Sea in 1933 to protest the British salt tax, the original target of his satyagraha (truth-force) campaign. The "force" of that philosophy helped free India from foreign domination, but it didn't prevent the violence that took place before and after Partition. Both Gandhi, the martial pacifist, and Chhatrapati Shivaji, the martial conqueror, are loved, praised, and extravagantly idealized throughout India, though these days the Gandhian philosophy tends to be seen as a venerable but irrelevant remnant of the past, worthy in principle but not in practice, and it's the man of violent means whose name is more commonly invoked by public institutions like Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus.

  Famous Gandhi quotations had been framed and hung throughout the house. "The cry of blood for blood is barbarous," he said during the riots of 1946–47, when Hindus and Muslims slaughtered each other en masse leading up to and following the creation of a separate Muslim state, Pakistan. We'd heard that cry at the demonstration outside the Taj Mahal Palace the day we arrived in Mumbai, and while those who cried for blood cried the loudest, other Indians, among them the novelist Amitav Ghosh, were calling for restraint. What the terrorists mainly hoped to achieve by the attacks, he pointed out in the Hindustan Times, was the panic-stricken response of the Indian government—the sort of response that the government of the United States had been gulled into after 9/11.

  The upstairs room that Gandhi stayed in at Mani Bhavan is much as it was when he stayed in Mumbai. Central to its few deliberately simple furnishings is a spinning wheel, the symbol of Indian independence. That work as hard and monotonous as spinning came to represent freedom from oppression remains one of the compelling paradoxes of the Gandhi legend. It wasn't machinery itself he objected to, he said, but the "craze" for it. Another Gandhian precept, the idea that one can gain real power through nonviolent means, seems equally dated in an age of terrorism.

  I started following Ajmal Kasab's story after returning from India, on the basis of what others wrote about him and his translated statements, first to the police, later to the trial judge. The cunning, spectacular nature of the attacks guaranteed wide and detailed news coverage—a side effect of terrorism that its architects depend on to advertise their cause. These days such attacks are more like publicity stunts than acts of war, and it may have been the lure of publicity, as much as needing a job or righteous hatred of the infidels, that convinced Kasab to enlist. To someone faced with the prospect of becoming a beggar or a thief, the alternative of worldly fame and a glorious martyrdom might look like a much better deal.

  Back home I studied the photo of the trigger-happy kid from provincial Pakistan striding through the railway station and wondered what need was great enough, or what principle important enough, to make him want to kill innocent people. For all the effort and expense devoted on the official level to protecting us from terrorists in recent years, relatively little has gone toward understanding what motivates them. It's not just that we can't know but that we don't want to know. To do so is to risk seeing ourselves less than favorably, for example, as monopolists of wealth, the people living in the big house behind a locked gate in Rawalpindi that Kasab and Muzaffar Khan dreamed of pillaging: another class of untouchables at the opposite end of the social scale.

  Months after his arrest, a video of Kasab's interrogation in the hospital was published on the Internet with a captioned translation. There's a bandage on his neck, and he's obviously in pain. When they asked him why he'd done it, he said that his father had first encouraged him to seek work with the mujahideen: "[My father] said, 'These people make loads of money, and so will you. You don't have to do anything difficult. We'll have money; we won't be poor anymore. Your brothers and sisters can get married. Look at these guys living the good life. You can be like them.'"

  Asked how much money they'd given him and if it had been placed in an account, he said, "There's no account. They gave it to my dad." Some terrorist organizations are known to pay the families of volunteers for suicide missions or those, like Mumbai, in which the recruits are sworn to die fighting. But in Kasab's case, it's not clear who paid what to whom. Shortly after he was imprisoned, before Pakistani officials cut his family off from further contacts with the press, a reporter tracked down Ajmal's father in Faridkot and asked him if he had received or been promised money in exchange for his son's participation. He replied, "I don't sell my children."

  Kasab first appeared before a judge without leaving his cell, on closed-circuit TV, to minimize the chances of a Jack Ruby—style execution. A "bomb-proof, chemical-proof" corridor was built especially for him so that he can walk safely between his cell and the judge's chamber. When not in court, he speaks to no one and has nothing to do in his fetid cell but read the Koran, a book that it had never occurred to him to read before becoming a terrorist. At the start of the legal proceedings he asked for a Pakistani lawyer and was denied. His first lawyer was attacked in her home by rock-throwing Hindu activists. When she was replaced because of a conflict of interest (she was also representing the family of one of the people killed in the attacks), the court assigned Abbas Kasmi as Kasab's defense lawyer.

  Kasmi doesn't go anywhere without bodyguards. The social club he belonged to has blackballed him. He believes in the righteousness of the Indian judicial system, saying, "We want to prove to the world that we are a civilized nation and we give a fair trial even to a so-called terrorist." When he complained that Kasab's cell had "no fresh air or ray of light" and relayed his client's request for some perfume to mask the stink, the press made a deafening mockery of it.

  Kasab's initial confession to police, in the hospital, was ruled inadmissible during the trial because it had been given under duress. His lawyer entered a plea of innocent for him, and India was preparing itself for months of contentious legal proceedings when Kasab surprised everyone, his lawyer included, by standing up and saying in Hindi that he was not, in fact, innocent. He just wanted to be sentenced and have the trial end. The last I heard, he wasn't so sure.

  Fourteen months after the attacks, Indian and foreign news media continue to camp out at Arthur Road Jail, Mumbai's oldest and by every account its worst prison, where Kasab is being held in solitary confinement during his trial. For all the hatred directed at him by the Indian public—most of whom want to see him executed as quickly as possible both for the sake of justice and to keep from wasting any more of the taxpayers' money—he's also become an objec
t of widespread fascination. The media still hang on his every word, and in his new career as a spokesperson for terrorism he has come as close to living "the good life" as he ever will.

  Thus far Ajmal Kasab has accomplished two of the three goals he named in his schoolboy definition of jihad: he killed, and he became famous. He has yet to achieve the third goal—"being killed"—thereby completing, however inadequately, the terms of his contract with Lashkar. His imprisonment and trial have already cost the Indian people much greater effort and expense than the execution of an ordinary murderer, but it might be worth all the trouble. The trial of one man accused of "making war on India" is a far cry from what the designers of those attacks may have hoped for: another round of warfare between India and Pakistan. It has diverted national attention from Pakistan to a single, powerless Pakistani citizen, who has achieved greater fame as the surrogate object of national vengeance than he ever hoped for.

  "I do not want punishment from God," he told the judge. As if he had any choice in the matter. "Whatever I have done in this world I should get punished for it by this world itself."

  The guilty man betrays his innocence.

  The Vanishing Point

  Verlyn Klinkenborg

  FROM The New York Times Magazine

  AUSTRALIANS CALL THE NORTHERNMOST CHUNK of their continent the "Top End," a breezy moniker, as though Australia were a boiled egg sitting upright in an eggcup waiting to be cracked open with a silver spoon. Just how much Top End there is is open to debate, the kind that gets worried out with maps drawn in the dust. While I was there last September, I saw dust maps that gave the Top End most of Australia north of the Tropic of Capricorn—about a third of the continent. Others included only Cape York and the rather windswept-looking peninsula that includes the roistering town of Darwin, the capital city of the Northern Territory.

  The Top End I visited was vastly narrower—the river flats and hill country just inland from Van Diemen Gulf. But it was still an imponderable slice of terrain, long ridges of sandstone giving way to the floodplains that edge Kakadu National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site and the largest park in Australia—bigger than Connecticut and Delaware combined. To Australians, Kakadu and the country around it feels like an ancestral reservoir, a cultural repository with Aboriginal roots and an oasis of native biodiversity. Here, the sandstone endures, the monsoon floods come and go, and then the fires follow—erratic and regenerative in the early part of the dry season, unforgiving in the later part. But this oasis is going dry almost unnoticed.

  This is a landscape that seems to ask, "Why have you come here?" There's no hostility in the question, only the indifference native to a continent of punitive, natural harshness. Every traveler will have a different answer. Mine was mud, and also, more broadly, the difference between nature as a norm and nature as merely what is, whether it should be or not. Here, the grandeur of nature is well disguised by the impenetrable thicket of life itself.

  For weeks after visiting Australia, I found myself thinking about mud: the living mud on the banks of Sampan Creek, which insinuates itself into Van Diemen Gulf, not far from Bamurru Plains, a safari-style eco-lodge that opened here a few years ago. When the wicked tide falls on the creek's lower reaches, it leaves behind long, sloping shelves of ooze. In December, the monsoon comes, and when it does, Sampan Creek and all its fellow creeks and rivers break their bounds and spread their mud—an originating mud—out over the coastal plains. It daubs the fur of Agile wallabies grazing on the floodplains. The water buffalo seem compounded of it. The magpie geese glory in it by the tens of thousands. I saw a similar mud in the billabongs at Kakadu and beneath the freshwater mangroves at Wongalara, a former cattle station southeast of Kakadu that has been converted into a nature sanctuary by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.

  On Sampan Creek, canoe-length saltwater crocodiles come creasing down the banks, slicking their tiled bellies across the mud. They slip into the silted current, eyes like dark and watchful bubbles. You may be on dry ground, termite plinths all around you, the astringent scent of crushed tea tree leaves in the air, but a part of your mind will still be thinking of those estuarine eyes not quite looking at you, yet not quite minding their own business either.

  One afternoon, I saw four young Australian men fishing in a Kakadu billabong. They were standing in a small pram with plenty of beer. Meanwhile, around the corner, a line of crocodiles waited their turn at the carcass of a water buffalo, which lay half in the water, its central cavity opened, its wet, white ribs showing. The crocodile at work seemed almost drugged by the turbid scent of decomposition. At long intervals, it drove itself up onto the ribcage, rolling sideways, then using its weight to tear free a mass of rotting flesh. It showed a white stump where its left foot had been, lost in some recent crocodilian controversy—the very antithesis of Captain Hook.

  Throughout the Top End, I sensed an incoherence, an unresolved moral burden in the landscape. Take Kakadu National Park. It is a very recent creation, first proposed in the mid-1960s but not confirmed until more than a decade later. It is mostly escarpment country, gouged wilderness, a landscape of rock and time. And yet in some sense Australia has not yet decided what Kakadu should be—a reminder of just how new the conservation ethic is here and how hard it is to create coherent preservation schemes in a place where time collides the way it does down under. In some ways, Kakadu is an experiment in trying to resolve historical tensions rather than a place of natural conservation.

  For one thing, Kakadu is one of the few truly national parks in the country—administered by federal, not state, authority, for the simple reason that it sits on Aboriginal land. One of the great sticking points in the park's recent history is whether Australians should pay an entrance fee. At present, the answer is best summed up by the empty site of the former east entrance station, expensively built and expensively bulldozed when fees were rescinded in 2004. The fees have just been reinstated.

  Then, too, there is the critical shared management of Kakadu with its traditional owners, many of whom, mostly Aboriginal Bininj/Mungguy, still live within the park. They're conservators of the land and their traditions within it, visible in its rock art and its sacred sites, but the Aborigines hunt and fish throughout the park practically at will. They also harbor nonnative animals like buffalo and, notoriously, a herd of shorthorn cattle visible in the grasslands around Yellow Water, for reasons that are both spiritual and carnivorous.

  The park's Aboriginal heritage is also overlaid with the more recent history of white holdings within its boundaries. The strangest and most significant is the Ranger uranium mine, which is still being worked within the park's borders. And then there is Jabiru—a town established to service the Ranger mine. The streets are quiet, utterly domestic in feel. Apart from the vegetation, and the flying foxes hanging dormant in a tree at midday above the elementary school, Jabiru could be a suburb of Dallas.

  Like much of Australia, the Top End demonstrates that nature favors invasive species over native ones, at least in the short term. They proliferate. They burgeon. But what matters isn't only what invasive species do to the balance of life in the wild. What matters too is what they do to our minds, since that's where the difference between native and invasive is finally assessed.

  In their proper element, for instance, cane toads are no more loathsome than any other toad, though they are poisonous. On the floodplains east of Darwin, they will be clustering near the oil lamps by night, bobbing for insects and getting underfoot. Or they'll be lying tire-flattened on the Arnhem Highway (the east-west road between Darwin and Kakadu) or splayed out, on their backs in a dusty paddock somewhere, their digestible meaty bits eaten away by the few birds that have already somehow learned how to eat them without fatality. For cane toads are relatively new to Australia, which is not their proper element.

  Cane toads explain the wistfulness you hear among some Australians when they talk about their roadkill. "You used to see a lot of pythons dead on the highway,"
said Sab Lord, a legendary bush guide, as we drove one day across the Top End toward Darwin. The toads have spread outward across the country from Queensland cane fields, where they were introduced to help control beetles, and they have decimated the reptiles and birds that have eaten them. As a result, the roadkill census—which is how most people see most wildlife—reveals fewer and fewer native reptiles and more and more cane toads, which hark back to the Americas. The first cane toad arrived in Darwin only recently, and believe me, it was not welcomed.

  I didn't fly halfway round the world from New York to see cane toads. But then that's the point of flying halfway round the world—to see what you didn't expect to see.

  I didn't expect to see swamp buffalo in the Top End, either, and yet there they were, some domesticated and bucolic, some feral and simply rancid with anger, but all descended from the few Indonesian buffalo brought by the British to the Cobourg Peninsula in the 1820s. In the 1980s and 1990s, the government tried to shoot out the buffalo, to control disease. But the buffalo are making their way back, crossing out of the Aboriginal reserves, where they were never shot out, into Kakadu and the floodplains north of it. There, on places like Swim Creek Station, where Bamurru Plains is sited, the buffalo are a cash crop, gathered by airboats and helicopters in February during the monsoon and shipped back to Southeast Asia for human consumption.