Incendiary Circumstances Read Online Free

others had arrived with the same expectation. As always in such situations, there was considerable confusion about who would get on. After the ministers had boarded, a minor melee ensued at the foot of the ramp that led to the plane's capacious belly. Knowing that I stood little chance of prevailing in this contest, I had almost resigned myself to being left
behind when a young man in a blue uniform tapped my elbow and pointed across the airfield. "You want to go to Car Nicobar? That plane over there is carrying relief supplies. Just go and sit down. No one will say anything."
    I sought no explanation for this unsolicited act of consideration; it seemed typical of the general goodwill of the military personnel I had encountered on the islands. As if on tiptoe, I walked across the tarmac and up the ramp. The plane was a twin-engine Soviet-era AN-26, rusty but dependable, and its capacious fuselage was lined with folding benches. The round portholes that pierced its sides were like eyes that had grown rheumy with age; time had sandpapered the panes of glass so that they were almost opaque. The cargo area was packed with mattresses, folding beds, cases of mineral water, and sacks of food, all covered with a net of webbing. Some half-dozen men were inside, sitting on the benches with their feet planted askew beside the mass of supplies. I seated myself in the only available space, beside a short, portly man with thick glasses and well-oiled, curly hair. He was dressed in a stiffly ironed brown safari suit, and he had an air of irascibility that spoke of a surfeit of time spent in filing papers and running offices. He was muttering angrily when I came aboard: "What do those people care? What have they ever done to help anyone...?" Ofall the people on that plane, he was perhaps the last I would have chosen to sit beside. I was keen to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, while he seemed determined to draw attention to himself. It could be only a matter of minutes, I thought, before the airmen evicted him. Inexplicably, they did not.
    When the engines started up, my neighbor turned his attention to me. "These big people think they are so great, but what help have they given?" I assumed this to be a general expression of disgust, of the kind that is to be heard on every train and bus in the country. But then he added suddenly, "Let them go through what I have gone through. Let them suffer—then they would see..."
    This hit me with the force of a shock. His well-laundered safari suit, his air of almost comical self-importance, his irascibility—
there was nothing about him that bespoke the victim. But I understood now why the airmen had ignored his rants; they knew something about him that I did not, and this was their way of showing compassion.
    In the meanwhile the tirade continued: "If those politicians had suffered as I have, what would they do? This is the question I want to ask."
    I winced to think of my first response to his mutterings. "What exactly has happened?" I asked. "Tell me."
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    He did not want his name published, so I shall call him "the Director." This indeed was his official title: he had been posted to Car Nicobar in 1991, as the director of the island's Malaria Research Centre and had lived there ever since. He was originally from Puri, in Orissa, and had been trained at the University of Berhampore. During his tenure in Car Nicobar, he had married and had two children, a son, who was now thirteen, and a daughter, who was ten. His home was in Malacca—the seafront township I'd heard about in the camps—and his office was just a few minutes' walk from where he lived. In this office he had accumulated a great wealth of epidemiological knowledge. Car Nicobar had once been rife with malaria, he told me. In an island with a population of just 30,000, the annual incidence had been as high as 3810, even as recently as 1989. But during his time there he had succeeded in bringing the rate down to