![]() ![]() His house is white, but his pyjamas become brown every night.” Nixon and his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, became, as Mistry puts it, “names to curse with.” Mistry’s protagonist amplifies a commonplace conjecture: “The CIA plan” involves supporting Pakistan against India, because India’s friendship with the Soviet Union “makes Nixon shit, lying awake in bed and thinking about it. Enterprise, into the Bay of Bengal, millions of Indian minds went dark with geopolitical paranoia. When, during the short ensuing war between India and Pakistan, Nixon implicitly threatened India by ordering a nuclear aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. (Pakistan’s clearly understated figure is twenty-six thousand.) ![]() The total number of the dead is unknown, but Bangladesh’s official estimate is three million. After all, Pakistan had launched a murderous campaign against the Bengalis, leaving India’s impoverished and volatile border states to cope with ultimately some ten million refugees fleeing the carnage. Like Mistry’s characters, Indians were confused and incensed by President Richard Nixon’s support for Pakistan’s military rulers and by his hostility toward India. “CIA bastards are up to their usual anus-fingering tactics.” The novel is set in 1971, the year that India intervened in Pakistan’s civil war and helped create a new nation-state-Bangladesh-from the Bengali-speaking province of East Pakistan. “Did you read today about what America is doing?” one of the Indian characters in Rohinton Mistry’s “Such a Long Journey” asks. During the war in East Pakistan in 1971, some ten million refugees fled to India. ![]()
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