SCENE ONE Betrayal ۹
The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.
—Maurice Blanchot
In To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, Hervé Guibert, who is dying from AIDS, notes how loyalties are tested and found wanting.1 He remembers his friend Bill, who has the pull to enter Guibert in an antiretroviral drug trial but fails to come through. Then there is Marine, whose capriciousness interferes with Guibert’s chance to earn badly needed money. Guibert makes us wonder: what is more jarring—the disaster of HIV or the betrayal of his friends?
Is disaster a betrayal? Is betrayal a disaster?
Disasters impact devotion, what we owe each other, and to whom. They radically reconfigure how people are put together and our expectations of others. This is partly because disasters place overwhelming limitations on everyday life, constraining our capacities to fulfill shared obligations. They can shift the very nature of these demands as life is no longer governed by the same boundaries. Faced with new forms of affective scarcity, social expectations may no longer be achievable. Accountability may be reconfigured altogether as new rules and matching forms of affective labor are demanded to sustain revised social standards. Disasters catalyze conditions for letting each other down; they amplify betrayal.
Edward Simpson suggests that we may be better served if we open the examination of disasters to broader and deeper questions of the human condition that may intersect with disasters at hand and exceed them.2 Ben Anderson asks: “How might attention to the affective lives of disasters, to how disasters become through urgency, abandonment, hope, and many other affects, help us understand how they relate to existing and emergent forms of power?”3 I connect these mediations and Lauren Berlant’s earlier reminders that the present is felt before it is known; it is “mediated affect,”4 with disaster recovery literature that proposes “moving on” is first and foremost affective.5 Affect is the ether through which the immediacy of the disaster seeps into the ongoing wake, the unfurling disastrous present.
Disasters surface as an “incoherent bundle of affects,”6 changing relations. They prompt us to reimagine the very meaning of what constitutes a “relationship.” Anne Allison shows this in her exploration of the Tōhoku earthquake in Japan.7 Abandonment and betrayal are disaster aftershocks, as are state failure and the traumas produced by violent humanitarian regimes. The colonial present, too, can be thought of as an ongoing disaster. Yarimar Bonilla and colleagues suggest the same in their mediations on the aftershocks of Hurricane Maria in the unincorporated US territory of Puerto Rico.8
Approaching betrayal, as both an embodied (lived and felt) experience and a shared (affective and material) social condition, the scene centers Niaz, whose life in the pahars is further confounded by another betrayal, that of his body.9 As a result of an injury (permanent as judged by doctors but temporary as judged by Niaz), bodily limitations placed significant constraints on Niaz’s life in the “unruly” pahars long before the earthquake that devastated his Himalayan village. Niaz’s failed body (a body that refuses to “recover”) presents a critical counterpoint to the quake, both life-altering events. However, Niaz does not attribute his most profound dysphoria to either the accident or the earthquake but to the disloyalty of a close friend.
The unhinging betrayal of Niaz’s friend, when placed within the broader social milieu of the earthquake, draws attention to the residue of disasters that exceed technocratic time. Through immersion in the affective afterlives of catastrophe, a reconfiguration of what it means to relate to one another is brought into focus. Niaz helps us appreciate disasters as cascading forms of violence and catalysis of social letdowns. He shows us that disasters are not necessarily “definite” ruptures but part of the ongoing labor of inhabiting the world and making it one’s own. This connects well with Berlant’s argument that a “crisis” is rarely an exception; rather, it is the drama of the ordinary that unfolds as one is confronted with the shock that the world can no longer sustain the organizing fantasies of an imagined good life.10 As well as with Veena Das’s insight that the shadow of violence is not simply experienced as trauma but continually worked through via a deeper engagement with the everyday. And the everyday is not a space of transcendence but immanence, of deep living and striving.11
Niaz directs us away from the breakage of his bodily functions to some other possibility, where the most significant factor holding him back is not his bodily disrepair (nor the earthquake)—but some other. His refusal to accept the salience of his bodily confinements provides a vital place of pause, forcing an unlikely confrontation: who “names” the event and whose readings of “reality” count? As reality is always contestant and emergent, I pay attention to the compromises, translations, and mediations that unfold as different epistemic choices are weighed and ultimately exercised.
Niaz’s contemporaneity is not conducive to story and collides with the violent desire for “form, coherency, and credulity”;12 he can be situated in an “in-durable” genre of sociality.13 One that “takes its objects from those things that constitute normative arrangements of life, or the events that change them, or that contain a ‘transformative potential of becoming.’ ”14 Niaz draws attention to the experiences of an uncertain life “that is circumscribed within a present that seems to go nowhere.”15 But life, in the meantime, is not wasted but is a present fertile with potentiality, emergence, and desire. Attention to desire is critical as desire constitutes mastery and expertise; Eve Tuck notes its insufficient treatment within the literature on becoming.16
Far from being universally protective, the blanket term of community obfuscates power relations;17 it is too often romanticized18 and fetishized.19 Community can mimic the state in reproducing violence. Niaz shows us that not only can community fail to deliver, but its very incongruences can inspire new genres of life altogether—antiheroics enacted in the here and now. Rather than focusing only on the legibility of the subject of violence, what if we allow their unknowability to do the work: teach us vocabularies that capture life’s newness despite its (radical) alterity? David Graeber argues that to recognize alterity, we must accept that we can never entirely understand other lifeworlds, but “nonetheless allow the concepts that underlie it to ‘unsettle’ our own theoretical beliefs.”20 This, to me, is an ethical stance, especially if we approach ethics as an inexorable affirmative response to difference and not through the inability to totalize the other.21
I am not looking to generate a phenomenology of violence22 nor to demonstrate breakage and repair in that redemptive order, despite how seductive the chiasmus may be.23 But more so, in dwelling in the interstitial spaces that punctuate the life that Niaz invokes, I am drawn to those modes of life that defy stable patterns of living and feeling to appreciate their incoherence, noncausality, and retroactiveness. Disasters are not just glitches in “the reproduction of life,” which warrant the replacement of broken infrastructure necessary for sociality to extend.24 They are also revelatory spaces to understand “how that extension can be non-reproductive, generating a form from within brokenness beyond the exigencies of the current crisis, and alternatively to it too.”25 Disasters provoke new forms of humanness and relating; the routes are circuitous and cruddy.
Niaz helps us consider that perhaps repair is less about resolution or reconciling the social and more about opening a future that makes the present palpable, despite the contradictory, sabotaging, and jagged edges of sociality. And that repair is governed by its own willfulness and open-ended futurities.26 He offers a unique view of the world, his view, one that is unfazed by the deceptions and promises of community.
The scene portrays how Niaz makes the world his own. It draws attention to those quiet, tucked away, analytically awkward, thin, transient textures of life that offer multiple tellings of the future when centered. The scene is devoted to Niaz’s worlding: the ontologies through which relationships, knowledge, and beliefs are performed in the everyday.27
Worlding
I will not detail here the events that led to Niaz’s injuries, simply because that is not my story to tell, except to say that because of an accident, his body, as Niaz describes, “was rendered useless, it was destroyed.” His bodily placements are continually at odds with the landscape.28 His refusal of the salience of these confinements presents a threshold. Eve Tuck and colleagues describe thresholds as sites of crossing from one state to another, “as places that demand pause to mark that passage,” necessary for the ethical integrity of the endeavor.29
Niaz can traverse space and geography in their conventional sense only via a wheelchair, which he can navigate mostly independently if someone can help him onto it. However, this form of mobility is limited to the immediate vicinity of his room and the small adjoining courtyard, which offers relative planeness; everywhere else, even the passage leading from his detached room to the rest of his family’s dwelling, is inconducive to the wheelchair. Niaz is stitched to location.30 When asked if he feels confined to his room, Niaz responded: “The world is very vast; it is all a matter of the mind.”
Above Niaz’s charpoy is an old wall clock. The clock helps him to regulate the day and introduce variance in it. He lives by the clock. Early morning, noting the time, he offers Fajr prayers at the dawn hour; the recitation of the Quran follows this for some thirty minutes. Shortly after, his niece brings him breakfast. He can often be seen nervously checking the time, indicating that he has a busy schedule to maintain. Niaz spends most of the morning listening to the radio and chatting with his relatives on the phone, which works intermittently.31 Some of them live far away in Lahore; the phone is what keeps them connected. At noon, his niece brings him some lunch. His brother then helps him onto the wheelchair, and he shifts to the courtyard to enjoy the sun. He spends several hours reading, writing, and dreaming with his books. Niaz maintains an impressive book selection, which he keeps in clear plastic bags in an adjacent storage room. He was planning to get a bookshelf made so that the books could be better organized and protected. At 5 P.M. sharp, he returns to the bed to relax his back after sitting upright in a chair for so long.
With the aid of the wall clock, Niaz creates a timescape in a life situation where routines are challenging to hold. Acute attention to time allows Niaz to prevent the finite limits of the physical world from creeping into the unorderly, routine-defying properties of the stillness of time. The clock, and abiding by it, allows Niaz to impose order and structure on his day and create temporal rhythms. He mused how time slows down during difficulty: “After my accident and also after the earthquake, time considerably slowed down [it became difficult to pass the day; there was too much time]. Nowadays, the day feels very short, but back then, I had too many worries.”
Niaz travels by way of his books, the radio, and the telephone. He keeps himself well-informed on global and national affairs. In the evening, propped up with pillows on the charpoy, he is visited by children from the village who need assistance with their homework. “I love teaching. I don’t charge anyone; if I do, they might stop coming,” he shared. Niaz is one of the few people in the vicinity who have completed a bachelor’s degree. He has also finished a primary teacher certification (PTC). Both credentials were obtained via distance education from a local university several years after the injury. Distance education in the pahars takes the form of a correspondence course, in which students rely on the postal system to submit coursework and access reading materials.
While isolated from much of the grittiness of village life in terms of physical participation, Niaz invites the world into his courtyard. In the evening, after the children leave, neighbors, friends, family members (mostly men) can be seen congregating around him. They come to him for his companionship and seek advice or assistance in writing and reading letters, filling out forms, or just reading the newspaper. In exchange, they bring gossip and news. Others visit Niaz for no specific reason but as part of their daily routines and affective investments in Niaz as a friend or family member.
Niaz redefines the very nature of the social expectations placed on him and draws our attention away from his bodily disrepair to other life details. He helps us understand that the world is not only physically situated but is bounded by sociality and ethics. However, there are material limits to Niaz’s expectations from life. The frigid winter months, particularly, accentuate his isolation: “When it becomes cold, I remain frozen on the charpoy. I find it difficult to even take my hands out from the blanket to grab the Quran. It is almost impossible to do wuzu [ablution], and when I pray by taking my hands out from under the covers, it takes forever to get warm again.” During winter, Niaz finds it extremely difficult to fulfill his spiritual commitments. He explained: “Namaz (prayer) and reading the Quran; they take care of my heart. In the winter, I am unable to devote myself to either.” On another occasion, when asked what he misses the most about life before the injury, he responded: “That I could offer namaz standing up.”
It becomes difficult for people to visit him during the cold. He admits: “No one can be here with me twenty-four hours in any case.” Niaz must work extra hard to establish temporality, sequence, and variance in the wintery days to transcend collapsed space and time. This is when the isolation is at its peak. “The winters are the loneliest,” he shared with me.
Dysphoric Disablement
Erin Durban-Albrecht writes about a trans survivor amid the earthquake in Haiti. Their most profound dysphoria was not caused by broken bones or limbs but by the destabilization of their gender identity when a medic accidentally referred to them in the wrong gender.32 The source of Niaz’s most disabling and unhinging dysphoria was likewise neither the earthquake nor a life-altering injury but a seemingly trivial event that occurred within the nondescript folds of an interpersonal relationship. Niaz explained: “Getting injured was a life-changing event, but I will recover. The earthquake was very difficult, but it passed. Then there is Ahmed, the villain in my life. I can never forget what he did.”
Ahmed, currently a schoolteacher, was once a dear friend. To this day, Niaz cannot forget how Ahmed betrayed him:
While studying for the PTC course, I had an assignment to submit. Usually, I ask my brother to post my letters, but it was heavily raining that day. Ahmed was sitting with me, and he offered to post the assignment as he was headed toward the bazaar. He took the envelope and promised to drop it in the mailbox. For the next few days, he stopped visiting me. I sensed Ahmed was avoiding me. Some more time went by, and I hadn’t heard back from the tutor [at the university]. I got worried. After several tries, my brother persuaded Ahmed to come to see me. I inquired about the letter. He avoided answering the question; he couldn’t even look me in the eye. Finally, he blurted out that he didn’t post it.
As a result, Niaz failed the PTC course. He tried to reason with the university administration, but they would not extend the deadline. Niaz recalled: “This was an enormous setback; I failed the course. Ahmed purposely hid my assignment, so I wouldn’t pass and become a teacher. It took me another two years to recover. I finally reenrolled and cleared the course. Ahmed was jealous that I would also get a teaching post like him, or worse, replace him. He is insecure. The worst part is that I used to help Ahmed study for his PTC course; he wouldn’t even be a teacher if it wasn’t for me.”
It took Niaz some time to gather the financial and affective resources to pull himself together. While much of the coursework is completed via self-study at home, candidates must sit for exams at the university’s campus in the city. Niaz’s trips to the city are somewhat of a public ceremony, and the entire village is alerted of his journeys. He relies on them to make travel possible. In this way, the “public” participates in his educational quest and places their investments in the endeavor (and its outcomes), raising its significance. He described the journey:
With the help of neighbors, my brother secures me on a bed, which they then carry on their shoulders to the road below. The passage is steep, and it takes at least four to five men as I am a large man.33 From there, they help me onto a jeep [the road accessing Niaz’s village is modest at best and can be navigated only on a 4×4 vehicle]. The car then takes us to the bazaar. My brother helps me onto the wheelchair and pushes me to the bus stop. Finally, my brother [with some assistance from others] seats me on the bus. The wheelchair is folded and placed with the luggage. Upon reaching the city, my brother helps me onto the wheelchair again. Then he pushes me to the university. The return journey takes the same effort. [The entire trip typically takes about two days to complete and involves an overnight stay in the city. It is equally cumbersome for Niaz to enter a hotel room as none of the buildings are accessible.]
After this very public, labor-intensive, and arduous journey, which spans multiple hours and bodies, Niaz reaches the university. He explained: “No one cares. I pass through the city, and people don’t even look at me or move an inch. Instead, they say, ‘Get out of my way, what are you even doing here?’ ” Niaz shared an incident that took place during the examination:
The candidate next to me was cheating; he had his notes hidden in his clothing. What a great idea; I thought of doing the same! I don’t have much control over my body, making it impossible to peek at a neighboring student’s paper. Anyways, I took the risk. For the next exam, I came prepared; as I glanced at my hidden notes, the invigilator caught me and forcefully yanked the paper away. He yelled: “Why didn’t you study for the exam? It isn’t like you have anything else to do. All these normal people are busy [they have responsibilities]; they don’t have the time to study. If they cheat, it is OK, but what is your excuse?”
Completion of the PTC is a mandatory requirement for teaching in public schools. Teaching in a school is a highly esteemed and sought-after profession in the pahars as it comes with a modest but regular monthly salary, health benefits, and a pension. It is one of the few ways for residents to secure a job while staying close to home. Most men are forced to migrate to faraway cities for unskilled and precarious work, an option not available to Niaz. Teaching is also an excellent way to contribute locally to one’s community; this is an essential consideration for Niaz. While Niaz has completed the PTC, he still has not applied for any positions. Most of the time, he gets wind of an open vacancy only after the deadline has passed. Postings are advertised in newspapers, and he cannot always get his hands on one. One can purchase a newspaper only in the city, and it is only when people come back home that they bring newspapers into the village. Niaz explained: “People here don’t share vacancies with me. They keep this knowledge to themselves, worried that I will create even more competition for that one job. They pretend to be my friends. They sit in my house, talk with me, send their children but withhold valuable information [of a job opening]. They are jealous. They believe that if the most able-bodied of men can’t even get hired, why should I?” It is not only the public that is invited into the realm of the private in Niaz’s trips to the city. The journeys also point to the dilation of the domestic itself: the extension of the family and the familial. It is not settled what constitutes the domestic here as distinctions between the public and the private, the household and the communal, are increasingly blurred. Niaz’s educational quests extend the domestic by opening Niaz tremendously to others. Perhaps Niaz is best located at the cusp of these opposing forces culminating in the public’s invitation into the private while simultaneously extending the realm of the domestic itself. It is perhaps this canceling effect that Niaz is most attuned to. In many ways, the entire village resembles the family, ripe with codependency, a sense of duty, and jealousy. People rely on Niaz to teach their children. In return, they helped him get to the university. At the same time, they withhold job advertisements, fearing that he will get that one job they so badly desire. And if he does, who will then tutor their children after school?
(Photograph by Ali Akbar Shah.)
Social DNA of the Disaster
Adriana Petryna’s work on Chernobyl shows how disasters can impact the very DNA of survivors, reconfiguring their biological citizenship.34 What about the social DNA?
Many people in the pahars viewed each other with skepticism35 and reminisced about the fragmentation that seemed to be initiated by the earthquake. Niaz’s mother remarked: “Life was hospitable; people were good. But since the earthquake, everyone has grown apart; love has decreased.” Niaz sighed: “Even the younger generations have become ill-mannered and disconnected from our morals and values. Love within families has decreased; the children don’t get along with their parents.”
Niaz did not explain why the earthquake reconfigured the social architecture of his village. But he (along with others) provided plentiful clues that can help us piece together the reasons behind these microsocial breakdowns.
Feeling the Quake
The earthquake was surely felt. As described earlier in “The Mountains Echo,” the quake created new forms of separation between landscape and people. Destinations became inaccessible as the landscape shifted and pathways and routes were destroyed. Niaz’s family (like many others) lost most of their livestock and have not yet replaced them. Since these animals were critical conduits to the landscape, their absence provides less incentive to circulate therein. Loss of livestock also reduced the availability of affective goods such as milk, butter, and cheese. Niaz’s mother explained: “The availability of desi ghee [homemade clarified butter] has substantially decreased because we no longer have enough cows for milk. As a result, the food’s flavors, its richness, and aroma have diminished.” She added: “Now there is a trend to use dalda [commercially prepared ghee].” Dalda is considered nutritionally inferior to desi ghee: “Dalda has taken the breath out of our young people [they tire easily]. They don’t have the strength to work anymore [in the pahars]!” The reduction of livestock also meant that residents had less access to manure and must instead purchase commercially prepared fertilizer, the use of which was heavily encouraged by the humanitarians. This has also changed the taste of the produce. Niaz sighed: “The sweetness of the saag has decreased [from the use of commercial fertilizers].”
The earthquake led to a diminishment in how food and, by extension, life is enjoyed and how bodies are embedded in the landscape. The senses—aroma and taste of food—shifted, as did bodily aches and pains with newer routes and routines that opened. The earthquake altered how life felt. The quake also rearticulated ideas of public and private shame. Selling desi ghee or milk is taboo, as these are affective goods, shared only out of love and communal reciprocity. However, since the earthquake, there has been an increase in the sale of these items as families struggle to get by. The quake shifted understandings of pride, shame, respectability and led to the commodification of gifts.
Humanitarian “Vomit”
Aid distributed after the earthquake created intense competition. Niaz explained: “Relief was unevenly distributed, without much consideration of who deserved it, so some of us got more, and others got far less. It was as if foreign countries vomited over our villages. We don’t know the basis on which relief was distributed. This created enmity among people. Those who received less accused those who got more of deception and treachery.”36
I met a man from an adjacent locality who proudly stated how, after the more recent monsoon floods, village elders blocked the entry of humanitarian assistance. This decision was based on the experiences of social discord created by the earthquake relief several years prior. He elaborated:
Let’s say I am the nazim [locally elected public official]. Any aid flowing into my community will have to pass through me. Social expectations dictate that I must first channel assistance to my family members before directing it elsewhere, regardless of who deserves it. If I don’t do that, my blood relatives will hold a grudge against me for the rest of my life. If I do, the villagers will hate me. The elders decided that it was better to push through these difficult times than allow relief to destroy our community.
Aid organizations, too, are not immune to these pressures. They rely heavily on resident volunteers for facilitation; much frontline staff is locally hired. They can be oblivious to the micropolitics that determines who receives direct assistance from volunteers despite the presence of beneficiary lists, operational protocols, and standard procedures.37 I sifted through hundreds of claims and accusations of how so-and-so funneled relief only into their own family. Humanitarian distributions became sites where old scores were settled (by denying assistance to specific families), or friendships and loyalties were renewed or developed (e.g., sending the choicest of humanitarian goods to already powerful households). Niaz was selected to receive a cow from a relief agency. But some jealous neighbors convinced its staff to cancel his name by insisting, “He can’t even move; what will he do with a cow?”
The social and political capital gained from locally employed humanitarian staff and volunteers extends well beyond the duration of their engagement. Many of those who facilitated humanitarian assistance after the earthquake were again approached after the floods to take on similar roles, further bolstering their social positions. I was easily able to identify such individuals and noted how much social power and capital they commanded. Extremely impoverished households would periodically send gifts (such as corn from their limited supplies or the choicest cucumber from their fields) to these individuals, perhaps with the hope that during the next humanitarian incursion, they would be remembered and prioritized for relief.
Aid also instituted new power structures, which sprang up to respond to the various demands of the humanitarian apparatus. These included the community-based organization, or the CBO, which facilitated humanitarian organizations (much to the chagrin of landlords, elders, and political representatives). However, in parallel, the CBOs policed and regulated assistance to their own kinship networks and specific constellations of locally held power. In attempts to bypass existing (possibly) corrupt power structures, aid agencies inadvertently created parallel and equally corrupt power structures in the form of the CBOs themselves. The CBOs are genuine social innovations run by big men (and sometimes big women) who have successfully co-opted the language of international development, such as “participation” and “gender equality.” CBOs became unique conduits of power, subjectivity, and politics that circumvented humanitarian and development agendas by seeking local gains that are not always democratically shared.
It is not uncommon today for every village in the pahars to have multiple CBOs created along caste, political affiliation, or any other difference. Competition for resources within CBOs and their constituencies is intense and has led to further social fragmentation. Many people expressed deep suspicion toward CBOs. Niaz remarked: “They are all thieves.” At later stages of the humanitarian operation, some aid organizations, frustrated by CBO politics, chose to bypass them, opting to attempt local engagement on their own, creating even further organizational structures such as village councils and local committees. This led to even more fragmentation.
Home as Social Disarticulation
The earthquake destroyed many homes (along with other infrastructure) in the pahars. The humanitarian community channeled only conditional cash payments to households to reconstruct houses based on preapproved earthquake-resilient designs. The newly approved plans proposed single-family homes, whose designs were significantly different from previous housing forms, which celebrated the joint family. The former designs typically comprised a shared complex for the extended family, organized around a communal kitchen. The new designs led to the fragmentation of the household and challenged sacred expectations and accountabilities of being and belonging to a family. Niaz remarked: “Since members of the family no longer live together, their demeanor toward one another has changed. Previously, I would see my siblings and their families daily. Now, as we are separated, sometimes I don’t see them for several days.”
An emphasis on the separation of the kitchen also created unique distinctions between public and private spheres of domestic life, offering fewer opportunities for sharing. Niaz explained: “Previously, it was easier to get by. We would sit together and eat. If someone lacked something, we could share; taking and giving were easier. Now it is not possible the same way.” On another occasion, Niaz added: “Before, I always knew what others from my family were going to eat for dinner; I could always ask to sample my favorite dishes. I can’t do this anymore.” The distribution of housing payments within families also led to much discord as there was no clarity on how the money should be distributed in the context of shared housing.38
Infrastructure collapse was the leading cause of death in the earthquake. However, the older homes provided specific social contributions, which were embedded in their design. For example, their flat mud roofs (which were replaced by sturdy, sloped iron sheets after the earthquake) provided some relief to the region’s steepness and offered a semblance of flatness. The roofs served as social sites for people (including women) to come together, sit, have tea, exchange news, and gossip without interfering with the privacy of the home and the gender segregation it demands. Men would sometimes play kabaddi (a wrestling game) on these flat(ish) roofs and could gather for various community events, such as offering funeral prayers. The mud houses also allowed residents to collect honey. Villagers maintained special cavities in their walls for honeybees. The bees stopped coming once the materials changed to cement—many expressed nostalgia at how honey was formerly shared among family and friends. The new housing design interrupted sociality, shrinking the few social sites available in the pahars.
Playgrounds were also not a reconstruction priority. Young people lamented the loss of play after the earthquake and reminisced about the days when they would compete in cricket tournaments, which brought villagers together in a festive mood. As Brian Massumi reminds us, without play, there can be no ethics; in play, life is at stake itself.39
The Commodification of Mutual Assistance
As previously described, humanitarian projects focused on rebuilding public microinfrastructure through community participation. Hundreds of able-bodied men were drafted into cash-for-work schemes, which paid them to rebuild small-scale community infrastructures, such as water channels, roads, and sanitation lines. This led to the monetization of bodily labor outside the regimes of formal work, reducing incentives for people to help one another (and themselves). Before the earthquake, villagers pooled their labor to work on joint projects or assist one another in a ritual process of coming together known as haashar. They are large gatherings of men (young and old) who willingly donated their bodily labor for tasks such as rebuilding a damaged road or helping a neighbor repair his home or tend to his fields. Food and tea were offered in exchange for people’s kindness, but no money changed hands. People reported a reduction in the size and frequency of the haashar. One person remarked: “It isn’t the same as before; now people don’t help one another without money.” Niaz added: “They now only run after NGOs and beg for their assistance. If you tell someone that NGO personnel are in the village, they will leave everything and rush to them, even if they were praying in the masjid.”
The Betraying Body
Niaz described that his body changed further because of the earthquake: “Previously, I could prop myself up and even stand with someone’s support. But since the earthquake, it seems as if my body has lost all muscle; I can’t even sit up on my own anymore.” In the panic, chaos, and dislocation that followed the earthquake, there was little opportunity for Niaz to focus on his bodily repair: “After the accident, the doctors recommended regular exercise. My brother helped build an exercise frame for me. The structure provided support, helping me stand upright. There were also a few other pieces of equipment. The earthquake destroyed them all. In the months following the quake, I stopped exercising. There wasn’t an opportunity to mend the exercise tools. I was stuck to the bed and, eventually, the wheelchair. Presently, I cannot stand up; my body isn’t the same as before.”
The earthquake interfered with Niaz’s rehabilitation. His body as a site of repair was no longer a priority. Niaz did not blame his family even once for this shift in preference, perhaps to protect them from my analytical intrusions. Instead, he chided himself: “I have gained too much weight because of which I can no longer stand upright.” Niaz’s body, too, is a site of betrayal (and potentially repair) on account of its very refusal to maintain itself.
What Makes It Through the Disaster?
Why are the exercise instruments still in disrepair despite being crucial for Niaz’s bodily repair? What makes it through the disaster? What does not? And why? The tandoor (underground clay oven) provides an interesting counterpoint to Niaz’s exercise instruments. This traditional underground oven is a technical and historical tool. Its construction and use are managed solely by women, knowledge of which is passed down intergenerationally. Niaz’s mother remarked: “I learned to make the tandoor from my mother, who learned to make it from hers.” The oven is a locally constructed, intergenerationally protected technology that points toward a moral and ethical community and demonstrates an attachment to place in the “desolate” pahars. The tandoor points to cultural continuity, a historicity of sorts. It is also a practical tool, a production belt that reduces the labor of cooking by allowing multiple rotis (flat unleavened bread) to be readied simultaneously. It even comes with its own set of rituals. Niaz’s mother explained: “After it is built, we add sugar to flour to make sweet roti [to inaugurate the tandoor].” Its construction is technical, and a variety of grasses, soils, and rocks are used, each providing different features, such as reducing the amount of smoke, regulating heat, providing insulation, and presenting the correct texture for the dough to stick to. Niaz’s mother added: “Everywhere we go [referring to the various transitory places of rest in the pahars, such as those on the way to the pastures], we make a tandoor.”
The remains of Niaz’s exercise instruments can be seen in the background. (Photograph by Niaz.)
Avery Gordon argues that the past (haunting social forces) controls contemporary life in far more complex ways than presumed by social analysis.40 Jens Zinn states that strategies to deal with uncertainty do not follow standards of instrumental rationality, nor are they irrational, but they follow their own logic, which works well under particular circumstances.41 Not every object practice merits revival, and not every revival reflects importance. Some are impossible to revive; for example, several pahari pathways were permanently closed after the earthquake. Other object practices were intentionally restored (such as the tandoor), while others were not (e.g., some households no longer go to the maliyan). These choices reflect not merely the importance of the object practice of revival but an assessment that they may no longer have a place despite their significance. Perhaps they reflect a bygone era, a past life whose value cannot be calibrated any longer, at least not in the same way.42
A tandoor. (Photograph by Ambreen Nawaz Khan.)
The earthquake catalyzed the emergence of new life spaces, where food tasted and smelled different. The body’s investments in the landscape changed, as did people’s dispositions toward one another. Not all object practices require revival in this new life space. Decisions regarding what to revive and what not to are perhaps possible modes of grieving and commemoration, to render the experiences of the earthquake immortal and atemporal, as events not just of the past but also of the present and the future. Every time I inquired about the instruments, Niaz just shrugged: “It just hasn’t happened yet.”
The Life That Niaz Invokes
Niaz’s father passed away in 2014. His death revealed weaknesses in the continuity of Niaz’s care (after all, the elders reinforce social accountabilities), raising anxieties about the future. Niaz is worried about who will care for him after his mother passes away. But the future is a touchy subject. I was scolded by a villager for asking how he is planning for his future, to which he curtly responded: “The future isn’t something that can be planned for; it is that which arrives. All we can do is ask Allah for strength to face whatever may come our way. Don’t ask us about the future.”
Niaz wants to complete his master’s degree as a next life project. He believes this will make him more competitive for a teaching job. The open-air village school is just a few meters away from Niaz’s home, yet outside his reach. To add to the irony, there is a current shortage of qualified local teachers. The school board recently moved to hire candidates from other parts of Pakistan, bringing people to the pahars who are not equipped to navigate them. A teacher joked: “Many of us start the day with a prayer; we stare at the dizzying pahars and ask ourselves: ‘Do we really want to make this hike today?’ ” Another remarked: “I am from the other side of the country. One night, I was sleeping when I heard loud sounds. I went out to see what was happening; the villagers were playing the drum to scare the monkeys away from their fields. Life here is indeed strange.”
Niaz is taken by the promise of education, that of employment, stability, and enlightenment. Niaz believes that the obstacles to a teaching job are not his bodily impediments (which he is sure are temporary) or unfair hiring practices but a lack of qualifications. He shared: “There is a special quota for people with disabilities in schools; perhaps I will get one.” He is confident in the state’s capacity to enforce rules and keep its promises. While Niaz is hopeful of securing a post, he admitted: “There is no guarantee I will ever get hired. It is a matter of fate. But I am also studying to learn about the world, and to expose myself to newer ways of thinking and knowing. Education provides exposure and wisdom.”
Niaz believes that the purpose of life is to be helpful to others. And advanced formal education assists with this ambition. He clarified: “Whoever understands the human [the qualities that make us human] understands everything in the world [that is, the knowledge needed to unlock all other forms of knowing].” He wants to obtain a master’s in Islam and Pakistan studies. He believes mastery in these areas will equip him to be a better Muslim and Pakistani citizen. According to him, a country can progress only through education; the desire to help children succeed academically is also his patriotic duty.
Why does Niaz offer devotion to a collectivity that does not reciprocate his love but rather carelessly expels him? Why do state subjects express loyalty to a center that fails to provide the dignity one is entitled to by way of citizenship? Some ways the state “expels” Niaz include the lack of social and physical infrastructure needed for his “unwieldy” body, which therefore in many ways excludes him economically, socially, and politically. Yet Niaz reflects the state’s official narrative, where the Muslim subject is in congruence with the national citizen, and possible separations between the two are purposefully minimized.43 Niaz holds the labels of “Pakistani” and “Muslim” as analogous to ethical striving in affective relationality with the state. In her work on Gilgit-Baltistan, in the northern part of Kashmir, Nosheen Ali argues that feelings and emotion are central to the state-citizen relation, which in itself hinges on love, betrayal, and desire.44 She argues also that the state is less a coherent system of legibility and rather an assemblage that achieves rule through emotional regulation. We are also reminded that in the liberal political imagination, the potential for coercion, cruelty, outrage, disorder, and brokenness is an abiding aspect of social life.45
Labels such as “Pakistan,” “Muslim,” or “disability” facilitate Niaz’s legibility but do not highlight the experimentation and hybridity that describe his life. The social forces of education and Islam as intertwined with state-making further increase anxiety within Niaz. They constitute a multivalent form of sabotage—a “cruel optimism” of sorts46—a dissonant collision between the safety and stability they offer and the raw deals of life, which cannot be ameliorated by being a good Muslim, a dutiful son, an excellent community member, or an abiding citizen. Niaz is captivated by the excellence of education and religion, which, instead of safety, produces further apprehension. For Niaz, the future is a contradictory destination, which demands good citizenship but does not provide adequate recourse when desirable genres of life are interrupted (such as by bodily disrepair).
At the same time, Niaz embodies an ontological framework that allows him to grapple with the disenchantments and failures of life and a capacity to aspire. Arjun Appadurai described aspirational capacity as a navigational map to find resources to contest and alter the concrete conditions of oppression.47 Appadurai locates aspirations within the “wider, ethical and metaphysical ideas which derive from larger cultural norms,” situated in the thick of social life.48 Niaz is convinced that his injuries are temporary and that he will regain complete control of his body despite the doctors claiming otherwise. He reminded me: “This impairment is only temporary, a difficult phase of my life; it too shall pass. Allah has given me the determination to persevere and see this difficulty through. Some people say that I am foolish to hope to walk one day again. But I don’t let their words sadden my heart. In any case, it is Allah who will decide, not them.”
Niaz’s confidence in his bodily potential is exceeding and seemingly irrational. He does not understand his current state of disrepair as a detriment to his future since it will dissipate. Niaz’s hopefulness is radical in its own way; it is relentless, incessant, seemingly illogical, and beyond the limitations of the world (the boundaries of medical knowledge, the nation-state) yet enabling. At the same time, Niaz’s hopefulness is based on a reality lodged in his body, a product of suffering, survival, and genius, and on an ability to live with each other in atmospheres of distrust. His hopefulness is the very “temporal structure and orientation of living sanely and ethically acting in the social world.”49 Anna Tsing asks: “What manages to live [in the ruins we have made?]”50 Perhaps it is hope. Paulo Freire famously said: “I don’t understand human existence and the struggle needed to improve it, apart from hope and dream.”51 He elaborates: “Dreaming isn’t only a necessary political act; it is an integral part of the historico-social manner of being a person. It is part of human nature, which within history, is a permanent process of becoming.”52 Dreaming is desire.
Niaz lives in anticipation of his bodily revival; his pursuit of educational qualifications is a form of dwelling in outcome. He is attuned to a future that is not here—yet/never. Ghassan Hage calls the work of anticipation “waiting,” which indicates that we are engaged in and have expectations from life.53 Lauren Berlant describes the wait as the “impasse,” understood as the “exemplary cases of adjustment to the loss of this fantasy [of the good life].”54 Elizabeth Povinelli recognizes these adjustments as suffering that does not rise to the level of an event.55 And Zoe Wool uses the term endurance, as not the work of overcoming adversity but “the practices of making do in a protracted moment of dire and even life-threatening uncertainty,” which emphasize “affective modes of sheltering in place while waiting for a new genre of social life to emerge.”56
Niaz’s strivings demand their own analytics, future-making that takes a robust point of departure from the unachievable safety and predictability offered by an otherwise life. Allowing the circulation of Niaz’s desires—the life he invokes—provides an opening, even if it does not provide answers to outstanding questions such as why his exercise instruments are yet to be revived.
Do the expectations of bodily repair unhinge the temporal pathways to Niaz’s desired future(s) in ways we cannot understand through our analytical intrusions? Is the choice of leaving the exercise instruments in disrepair a reflection of life’s riskiness, a devotion to continuing living, a process of experimentation, strivings for an ideal never to be attained—aspirations with no fixed ends?
Futurity Without Form
Betrayal is a breach of trust. “Its threat lies precisely in its rupturing the invisible cohesion of community,” contesting how people are put together socially, morally, and ethically.57 Betrayal dismantles the promises of the future bent by (liberal) hope, revealing gaps, inconsistencies, and incoherence in life’s conceptual frameworks. Betrayal points to exhaustion, irritation, malaise, revealing life’s ethical stakes.
Disasters catalyze betrayals in interpersonal relationships and interrupt the social glue that keeps people together (or apart) as families, neighbors, friends, community members, and citizens. This is to say, disasters are atemporal; their consequences far exceed the parameters within which they are localized. Miguel Loureiro’s work on post-earthquake Kashmir insists that many of the social changes that survivors ascribe to the disaster (mainly changed housing structures and social breakages) cannot be empirically attributed to the disaster.58 He argues that these changes were already occurring because of the changing national character and modernization. He believes these narratives instead point toward creating a shared public myth needed to move on and make sense of the past, present, and future.
Niaz invokes anxiety in those around him and discombobulates along multiple scales and temporalities. His unwieldy and hypereducated self frustrates his peers.59 His pursuit of education is performative and public; the community “participates” in it. They rely on Niaz’s literacies, and their futures (their children) also depend on him. They are invested in his protection and sabotage, offering prayers for his safety and sometimes his demise—just like family.
Niaz points at competing disaster aftermaths. He illuminates the constitution of bodies in relation to their world and how the earthquake possibly recast this relationship. How Niaz feels betrayed by his body is also elaborated in the betrayal by his close friend. It is worth pointing out that the earthquake’s tremors were themselves considered a form of betrayal by many as the laws governing geography, time, space ceased to hold: the earth shook, the mountains moved, rivers changed course, and time slowed down. In the earthquake’s very materiality and its suspension of taken-for-granted guarantees, the physical and the social collapsed as one.
Niaz is excluded from the village by physical access, but he has cocreated an altersociality in his courtyard and room. And while I have focused on the unpredictability and dissatisfaction of relationships, it is fair to say many bonds withstand breakages. Loss is not the only lens through which changes in Niaz’s life should be engaged. It is also essential to consider the forms of sociality that were gained.60 Take Niaz’s new room, for example, constructed after the earthquake. The separate room enabled a different mode of coming together. It shifted the emphasis away from his bodily rehabilitation to obtaining more education, reinforcing his status of being educated, pulling both adults and children to his home. However, the question of what is “gained” (and, for that matter, what is “lost”) after a disaster is tricky. Both qualifiers are impositions, readings of life set against predefined expectations, and calibrations of what constitutes a good life and relations. Even though I have maintained a sense of nostalgia and loss in my earlier reflections on the earthquake (partly because that was also the mood reflected by my interlocutors and it is difficult for many to speak of disasters in any other way), my intention is not to distill the aftermath of disasters along the binaries of loss and accumulation. It is rather to push the relationship between catastrophe and sociality altogether and emphasize that disasters do not break asunder a coherent world. Repair is not necessarily the regaining of lost coherence but can be thought of as remnant dwelling.61
Niaz repeatedly stated that he could not enroll in the MA, his subsequent life project, because of a lack of funds. He was given a generous stipend for his involvement in this research. When I was leaving the pahars, I suggested that Niaz use the money to enroll. When I returned the next year, I inquired whether he had registered; the response was negative. Instead, he used the payment to insulate his room by repairing the various holes and gaps in the roofing and walls. Niaz was similarly remunerated that year, and I gently suggested that perhaps the money could be used for his MA this time around. When we spoke some months later, I learned that he still had not started a graduate degree.
Why has Niaz not used the money to enroll in an MA program, a life project he yearns for? Recall that Niaz told us that the winter season compounded his loneliness. It becomes so cold inside the room that he has difficulty extending his hands from under the blanket to offer his prayers or grasp the Quran. These crucial rituals, which ground him, are made possible in a warmer room. Weatherproofing his dwelling also meant that his guests could stay longer and had more incentive to see him during the isolating winter season. In the winter following his father’s death, Niaz had many visitors who came to offer their prayers and condolences. An insulated room meant that more people could visit and pray for his father, and in this way, he contributed to the safety and well-being of a dear departed relation. This was a rare opportunity for Niaz to prove himself as a good son and a responsible family member and, for once, to take care of someone else instead of always being cared for. The money also went to the funeral. Insulating the room is a form of repair, meant to protect and nurture his heart (by allowing him to engage in his spiritual endeavors), take care of others, and enable his altersociality to flourish in the cold.
Niaz redefines the nature of expectations placed on him and draws our attention away from his bodily disrepair to other features of life and the world. He shows us that the world is not only a physically situated place and that it is not just landscapes that are reconstituted after disasters but also bodies. He enables us to appreciate disasters, first, as catalysts for social letdowns and, second, as cascading forms of violence where relationships fade and possibly reconstitute and where large and small events coalesce. While disasters are often understood as forms of rupture entailing breakdown of infrastructure or access, the repair of which constitutes the work of recovery, Niaz demonstrates that, in fact, sociality may remain elusive in the aftermath; and indeed, it may never have been experienced as plenitude to begin with. Therefore, the work of repair also encompasses coming to terms with the fragility of the normal62 and dismantling the “feelings of skepticism” embedded within a “frayed everyday life.”63 Niaz compels us to think through the naming of a disaster as such—what constitutes a “disastrous event,” and who names it?
Shahana bibi1 offered me some red grapes. I tried them. They were sweet and refreshing. She encouraged me to take some more. “I picked these from my garden this morning,” she told me. “I covered them with newspaper to keep the flies away. I saved them for you. I have been looking forward to eating them all day. Strangely, my mind kept circling back to them as if they were the only thing that matters in the world.”