| BREAD: ON THE MAKING OF A TERRORIST |
Stevan Orescan
He said I had no heart. I refused him bread.
I had just finished a cup of coffee and was in the process of buying bread and curd to take
back to my two dollar a night Calcutta hotel room when he approached and started telling me in an
oblique way that he had no money. As I finished my purchase and was about to leave he came
out with it and asked me to buy him bread. I said no. He replied that he was not asking for a
hundred dollars, just a small loaf of bread, two or three rupees.
I looked at him closely. About sixteen or seventeen years old, strong, healthy looking, all his
limbs, not with the usual reeking, scabrous infirmities one sees on the endless procession of
Indian beggars that harangues one throughout the day. Not even thin or undernourished; a bit
shabby, obviously down and out but not any more so than ninety-five percent of the other
inhabitants of the neighborhood. Again I said no.
His eyes blazed. Hate or hunger? He was angry and I was irritated. Irritated for being put in this
position again; irritated because I was being detained and had things to do; irritated because he
thought that I was rich when I was living close to the edge myself; irritated because he asked
for so little to keep body and soul together and I knew that what he asked for would not
help him one wit; and irritated because there was absolutely nothing I could really do for him
except buy him a piece of bread which would not solve his problem.
I turned to go and bumped into an enormous fat lady wrapped in a diaphanous pink sari whose
eight yards of cloth was unable to conceal her massive mounds of quivering flesh. Fat slob, I
thought as I apologized, a dainty, dancing hippopotamus out of Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Another
twice born, no doubt, carrying her poundage like so much gold from her last incarnation, snug in the
belief that the gods have favored her by bequeathing favors denied to others because she deserves
them. And what does she do with them? Stuffs herself.
I took a deep breath. My irritation was reaching its peak and I didn’t want to blow it. Just get
out of here, I said to myself, get back to your room, you’ve had enough of this wretched city and its
people for one day.
“A few Rupees! Why don’t you buy me bread?” It was more of a demand than a question, a
command rather than an appeal. I turned around and looked him in the eye.
“A few Rupees?”, I said. “ Do you know how many times a day I’m asked for a few Rupees? I’
m not rich. As a matter of fact, strange as it might seem to you, I’m poor and have to count my
paisa like everyone else. Get a rickshaw, shine shoes, sell newspapers or dope, use your
imagination but stop bugging me and every other westerner who scrimps and saves his
pennies so he can visit this god-forsaken country. I’m a guest here; you ought to be feeding me.”
With that I turned and walked off. Hard hearted bastard, I thought to myself.
The next day I passed him on the street.
“You have no heart”, he said as he walked by.
“No heart”, I mumbled to my self as I continued down the garbage strewn cobblestones, still
pungent with the effluvium of the day’s offerings that its residents deposit in the open gutters outside
their hovel doors.
No heart. What is it inside of me that bleeds for you and every other empty, aching belly and
outstretched hand in this miserable land? What is it that cries at the sight of bloated and emaciated
children picking through refuse heaps for a mouthful of someone’s discarded swill? What is it that
screams at the inequity and venality of a lopsided and lunatic system that allows its people to slowly
starve a thousand deaths as it polishes a bomb it claims is there to protect the very people its
killing? Better to drop it on them and rid yourself of the problem, stop your ethical and moral
masturbation and make it easier for all concerned. You have cut the testicles off your men; why not
kill off your beggars?
I have a heart, my friend. My problem is I have too much heart. If I had no heart I would buy
you the bread you so need, salve my conscience, soothe my guilt and walk away feeling generous
and holy, smug with the pride of having given to my less fortunate brother, despicable though he
may be – though that, of course, makes the act even more holy, more righteous since it’s so difficult
to do.
Someone has said – an Indian – that through shock, the horror, the unease, the sympathy is there
but under veneers of indifference carefully cultivated as a defense. Well I don’t see it. I come with
fresh eyes and an open mind and I don’t see it. I see the indifference, which cannot be cultivated,
as well as selfishness and grasping. Are these characteristics cultivated as well?
I also see a nation of racists with thieves mentalities whose problems are in direct proportion to
the consciousness they live and project. From the lowest to the highest, from the blackest to the
whitest, in my six visits to this land in the past twelve years, I have met very few people that I felt
were compassionate and trustworthy. I lost many articles before I came to this understanding I am
sorry to say. It matters not because these things were just ‘stuff’ and of no intrinsic value. But
what I lose more and more everyday that is of value is my respect for the people and what the
country has stood for in the eyes of the world.
Why do I keep coming back to this country if it’s so terrible? I’ve asked myself that question
many times. I have concluded that there must be a perverse side to my nature, something that is
drawn to and fascinated by the utter misery and unhappiness of the place, maybe even Satanic.
Lots of religions, lot of blathering about God and spirituality, but few people living a truly holy or
religious life. When the occasional saint appears he shines that much more brightly because of the
pitiful darkness around him. But one cannot judge a people by its few saints for all countries
possess them to some degree. One assesses and appraises, accepts or rejects, forms opinions by
the people that he meets, does business with and communicates with. There is much beauty and
gentleness here, much sensitivity and intelligence, much resourcefulness and ingenuity. But there is
so much greed and avariciousness that it reduces the positive to a mere crumb.
So what to do? Shall I give you my few rupees, you beggars and thieves? Shall I give you my
shirt? Shall I carry it to its logical conclusion and join you, entwine my starving body with yours so
we can both die on the street? If I had the faintest, the tiniest, the most embryonic belief or hope
that it would help, I would. But the world would just laugh and shake its head as it has since Christ
and Gandhi did that very thing. It would do no good, it has done no good in the past and will do no
good in the future unless you are of one mind and one heart, Mother Teresa notwithstanding.
So I don’t feed you, my brother. But maybe by my refusal I give you another kind of
nourishment, maybe I implant in you that seed of anger that can one day soon grow into a fully
blown hate; a hate for injustice, a hate for intolerance, a hate for apathy; a hate for all things that are
robbing you of what is rightfully yours; a hate for the greed of your elected officials whose
consciousness is but an extension of your own; a hate for the callousness, arrogance and
indifference of the rich for the poor, the white for the black; a hate for all things that keep you in
your chains and your bellies empty; a hate to get the fires burning that will destroy the prejudice and
superstitions that keep you locked in the world of hopeless illusion, a world of your own making.
I walk the streets of your cities and dare not smile or say hello, dare not life my eyes to make
contact with yours. I pass, head bent, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, through your
market place, parks and public buildings with fear that the moment any kind of human contact is
made I will be pounced upon. Baksheesh! Buy sell? Give! Sahib! Master! Baba! One chapatti,
ten paisa! An inexorable babble of the despised, the lowest of the low that only a spiritual
wasteland could produce.
Spiritual, did I say? I’ve seen more so called spirituality, more brotherhood, more consideration,
kindness and compassion from the despised and despairing black man in my own country and from
the raggedy western hippies that come to your country to search for truth and smoke your ganja.
Your spirituality is theatre, acting, a stage of temples and orange clad silver-tongued mesmerizes
posing as wise men, the best performers being exported to the West to beguile the naïve and pass
the collection plate.
And we can’t blame THEM either because them is us, another version of yourself that was
subjected to the same machine, the same conditioning process, the same fear and ignorance. You
are responsible for your own lives, your own empty bellies and for the changes that must come
about to fill those bellies. And you who are so strong, so young and seething with energy are the
ones that should be making those changes, not the old men who sit sleeping and farting in congress.
It matters not if you or I die in the process, what matters is your awareness of the freedom that has
been sucked from you and your willingness to reclaim that freedom at whatever cost.
So get off your knees; don’t wait for the white man, the rich man, the Brahmin, the corporations
and government to suck your completely dry. Are you going to continue to forfeit your freedom to
your keepers who have no intention of granting you equality? Do you believe you are on a lower
rung of the karmic and evolutionary ladder as your master’s claim? Do you believe that you
deserve your miserable existence? Do you believe you were born hungry and must die hungry in
order to expiate your past sins and return as a fat man? If you believe it, so be it, because you are
what you believe you are, a beggar or a godman. But don’t delude yourself that the white man or
the rich man is your superior in any way, shape or form. They are not and way down in the depths
of their blackest of black hearts they know they are not. They are afraid and they are clever and
they are guilty before God and the whole world, and they know it as much as they try to deny it and
sweep it into the folds of their “cultivated” indifference. They tremble with fear yet their pride and
arrogance continues to sow hatred and greed throughout the world.
You must set fire to this world of their making for they will never relinquish it willingly. They have
no solutions for the sickness they have foisted upon their fellowman, no remedy for the
emasculation and vampirization of their weaker brother. They are criminals, gangsters’ intent only
on fulfilling their own appetites and desires. Make puja before the alter of your own dignity, not tin
gods, politicians and educated nincompoops who pretend to serve while stuffing their own pockets
and bulging bellies.
The only thing that can fight money and power is more money and power – or blood. We would
like to think love, ahimsa, metta and all the other noble ideals that man has espoused and aspired to
since time began when the first two stood facing each other, eye to eye, and the world began to
shudder, ever so slightly in the beginning but which now has become such a roar it threatens to
annihilate all of us. And we, you and me, are responsible; we are the preservers as well as the
destroyers and it is only by our own awareness and action that we can save ourselves.
So I don’t feed you my friend because I don’t want you to starve. I offer no solutions because I
have none but I offer you my observations, for whatever they are worth, of a cancer I see eating
your entrails, a cancer that somehow must be cut out if you want to share in the earth’s enormous
abundance. You had no choice in what you were given – God knows it wasn’t very much – but
you do have a choice in what you do with what you were given.
We are beggars and thieves because we think like beggars and thieves, our minds have
imprisoned us with our ignominious thoughts and only we can slay our jailers, only we can knock
him down and take the reins of our own lives. And if we die in the process, achaa, at least we will
no longer be hungry.
I pray, my Indian brother and sister, that I will have the strength to refuse you bread the next time
we meet.
Twenty years have passed since that young man asked me for bread. I have thought of him often.
I think of him now. He is still out there but fully grown, still with anger, still with rage but now more
focused, more determined that ever to get not only his share, either in this life or in the next, but to
make us, those who gave birth to his rage, his hunger, pay the price for his years of pain. But now
he and his fellows have leaders, those that will guide them to the Promised Land, the land of plenty.
Their names are Osama, Yassar, Mullah Omar, Mohammad Atta; they have many names and are
from many countries, sometimes they wear a turban, sometimes a baseball cap, but within the folds
of their garments they carry the bomb or the bullet and within their hearts the bitter bile of
retribution. Watch for them for they are everywhere and let us ponder deeply the next time we are
asked for bread.
I had just finished a cup of coffee and was in the process of buying bread and curd to take
back to my two dollar a night Calcutta hotel room when he approached and started telling me in an
oblique way that he had no money. As I finished my purchase and was about to leave he came
out with it and asked me to buy him bread. I said no. He replied that he was not asking for a
hundred dollars, just a small loaf of bread, two or three rupees.
I looked at him closely. About sixteen or seventeen years old, strong, healthy looking, all his
limbs, not with the usual reeking, scabrous infirmities one sees on the endless procession of
Indian beggars that harangues one throughout the day. Not even thin or undernourished; a bit
shabby, obviously down and out but not any more so than ninety-five percent of the other
inhabitants of the neighborhood. Again I said no.
His eyes blazed. Hate or hunger? He was angry and I was irritated. Irritated for being put in this
position again; irritated because I was being detained and had things to do; irritated because he
thought that I was rich when I was living close to the edge myself; irritated because he asked
for so little to keep body and soul together and I knew that what he asked for would not
help him one wit; and irritated because there was absolutely nothing I could really do for him
except buy him a piece of bread which would not solve his problem.
I turned to go and bumped into an enormous fat lady wrapped in a diaphanous pink sari whose
eight yards of cloth was unable to conceal her massive mounds of quivering flesh. Fat slob, I
thought as I apologized, a dainty, dancing hippopotamus out of Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Another
twice born, no doubt, carrying her poundage like so much gold from her last incarnation, snug in the
belief that the gods have favored her by bequeathing favors denied to others because she deserves
them. And what does she do with them? Stuffs herself.
I took a deep breath. My irritation was reaching its peak and I didn’t want to blow it. Just get
out of here, I said to myself, get back to your room, you’ve had enough of this wretched city and its
people for one day.
“A few Rupees! Why don’t you buy me bread?” It was more of a demand than a question, a
command rather than an appeal. I turned around and looked him in the eye.
“A few Rupees?”, I said. “ Do you know how many times a day I’m asked for a few Rupees? I’
m not rich. As a matter of fact, strange as it might seem to you, I’m poor and have to count my
paisa like everyone else. Get a rickshaw, shine shoes, sell newspapers or dope, use your
imagination but stop bugging me and every other westerner who scrimps and saves his
pennies so he can visit this god-forsaken country. I’m a guest here; you ought to be feeding me.”
With that I turned and walked off. Hard hearted bastard, I thought to myself.
The next day I passed him on the street.
“You have no heart”, he said as he walked by.
“No heart”, I mumbled to my self as I continued down the garbage strewn cobblestones, still
pungent with the effluvium of the day’s offerings that its residents deposit in the open gutters outside
their hovel doors.
No heart. What is it inside of me that bleeds for you and every other empty, aching belly and
outstretched hand in this miserable land? What is it that cries at the sight of bloated and emaciated
children picking through refuse heaps for a mouthful of someone’s discarded swill? What is it that
screams at the inequity and venality of a lopsided and lunatic system that allows its people to slowly
starve a thousand deaths as it polishes a bomb it claims is there to protect the very people its
killing? Better to drop it on them and rid yourself of the problem, stop your ethical and moral
masturbation and make it easier for all concerned. You have cut the testicles off your men; why not
kill off your beggars?
I have a heart, my friend. My problem is I have too much heart. If I had no heart I would buy
you the bread you so need, salve my conscience, soothe my guilt and walk away feeling generous
and holy, smug with the pride of having given to my less fortunate brother, despicable though he
may be – though that, of course, makes the act even more holy, more righteous since it’s so difficult
to do.
Someone has said – an Indian – that through shock, the horror, the unease, the sympathy is there
but under veneers of indifference carefully cultivated as a defense. Well I don’t see it. I come with
fresh eyes and an open mind and I don’t see it. I see the indifference, which cannot be cultivated,
as well as selfishness and grasping. Are these characteristics cultivated as well?
I also see a nation of racists with thieves mentalities whose problems are in direct proportion to
the consciousness they live and project. From the lowest to the highest, from the blackest to the
whitest, in my six visits to this land in the past twelve years, I have met very few people that I felt
were compassionate and trustworthy. I lost many articles before I came to this understanding I am
sorry to say. It matters not because these things were just ‘stuff’ and of no intrinsic value. But
what I lose more and more everyday that is of value is my respect for the people and what the
country has stood for in the eyes of the world.
Why do I keep coming back to this country if it’s so terrible? I’ve asked myself that question
many times. I have concluded that there must be a perverse side to my nature, something that is
drawn to and fascinated by the utter misery and unhappiness of the place, maybe even Satanic.
Lots of religions, lot of blathering about God and spirituality, but few people living a truly holy or
religious life. When the occasional saint appears he shines that much more brightly because of the
pitiful darkness around him. But one cannot judge a people by its few saints for all countries
possess them to some degree. One assesses and appraises, accepts or rejects, forms opinions by
the people that he meets, does business with and communicates with. There is much beauty and
gentleness here, much sensitivity and intelligence, much resourcefulness and ingenuity. But there is
so much greed and avariciousness that it reduces the positive to a mere crumb.
So what to do? Shall I give you my few rupees, you beggars and thieves? Shall I give you my
shirt? Shall I carry it to its logical conclusion and join you, entwine my starving body with yours so
we can both die on the street? If I had the faintest, the tiniest, the most embryonic belief or hope
that it would help, I would. But the world would just laugh and shake its head as it has since Christ
and Gandhi did that very thing. It would do no good, it has done no good in the past and will do no
good in the future unless you are of one mind and one heart, Mother Teresa notwithstanding.
So I don’t feed you, my brother. But maybe by my refusal I give you another kind of
nourishment, maybe I implant in you that seed of anger that can one day soon grow into a fully
blown hate; a hate for injustice, a hate for intolerance, a hate for apathy; a hate for all things that are
robbing you of what is rightfully yours; a hate for the greed of your elected officials whose
consciousness is but an extension of your own; a hate for the callousness, arrogance and
indifference of the rich for the poor, the white for the black; a hate for all things that keep you in
your chains and your bellies empty; a hate to get the fires burning that will destroy the prejudice and
superstitions that keep you locked in the world of hopeless illusion, a world of your own making.
I walk the streets of your cities and dare not smile or say hello, dare not life my eyes to make
contact with yours. I pass, head bent, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, through your
market place, parks and public buildings with fear that the moment any kind of human contact is
made I will be pounced upon. Baksheesh! Buy sell? Give! Sahib! Master! Baba! One chapatti,
ten paisa! An inexorable babble of the despised, the lowest of the low that only a spiritual
wasteland could produce.
Spiritual, did I say? I’ve seen more so called spirituality, more brotherhood, more consideration,
kindness and compassion from the despised and despairing black man in my own country and from
the raggedy western hippies that come to your country to search for truth and smoke your ganja.
Your spirituality is theatre, acting, a stage of temples and orange clad silver-tongued mesmerizes
posing as wise men, the best performers being exported to the West to beguile the naïve and pass
the collection plate.
And we can’t blame THEM either because them is us, another version of yourself that was
subjected to the same machine, the same conditioning process, the same fear and ignorance. You
are responsible for your own lives, your own empty bellies and for the changes that must come
about to fill those bellies. And you who are so strong, so young and seething with energy are the
ones that should be making those changes, not the old men who sit sleeping and farting in congress.
It matters not if you or I die in the process, what matters is your awareness of the freedom that has
been sucked from you and your willingness to reclaim that freedom at whatever cost.
So get off your knees; don’t wait for the white man, the rich man, the Brahmin, the corporations
and government to suck your completely dry. Are you going to continue to forfeit your freedom to
your keepers who have no intention of granting you equality? Do you believe you are on a lower
rung of the karmic and evolutionary ladder as your master’s claim? Do you believe that you
deserve your miserable existence? Do you believe you were born hungry and must die hungry in
order to expiate your past sins and return as a fat man? If you believe it, so be it, because you are
what you believe you are, a beggar or a godman. But don’t delude yourself that the white man or
the rich man is your superior in any way, shape or form. They are not and way down in the depths
of their blackest of black hearts they know they are not. They are afraid and they are clever and
they are guilty before God and the whole world, and they know it as much as they try to deny it and
sweep it into the folds of their “cultivated” indifference. They tremble with fear yet their pride and
arrogance continues to sow hatred and greed throughout the world.
You must set fire to this world of their making for they will never relinquish it willingly. They have
no solutions for the sickness they have foisted upon their fellowman, no remedy for the
emasculation and vampirization of their weaker brother. They are criminals, gangsters’ intent only
on fulfilling their own appetites and desires. Make puja before the alter of your own dignity, not tin
gods, politicians and educated nincompoops who pretend to serve while stuffing their own pockets
and bulging bellies.
The only thing that can fight money and power is more money and power – or blood. We would
like to think love, ahimsa, metta and all the other noble ideals that man has espoused and aspired to
since time began when the first two stood facing each other, eye to eye, and the world began to
shudder, ever so slightly in the beginning but which now has become such a roar it threatens to
annihilate all of us. And we, you and me, are responsible; we are the preservers as well as the
destroyers and it is only by our own awareness and action that we can save ourselves.
So I don’t feed you my friend because I don’t want you to starve. I offer no solutions because I
have none but I offer you my observations, for whatever they are worth, of a cancer I see eating
your entrails, a cancer that somehow must be cut out if you want to share in the earth’s enormous
abundance. You had no choice in what you were given – God knows it wasn’t very much – but
you do have a choice in what you do with what you were given.
We are beggars and thieves because we think like beggars and thieves, our minds have
imprisoned us with our ignominious thoughts and only we can slay our jailers, only we can knock
him down and take the reins of our own lives. And if we die in the process, achaa, at least we will
no longer be hungry.
I pray, my Indian brother and sister, that I will have the strength to refuse you bread the next time
we meet.
Twenty years have passed since that young man asked me for bread. I have thought of him often.
I think of him now. He is still out there but fully grown, still with anger, still with rage but now more
focused, more determined that ever to get not only his share, either in this life or in the next, but to
make us, those who gave birth to his rage, his hunger, pay the price for his years of pain. But now
he and his fellows have leaders, those that will guide them to the Promised Land, the land of plenty.
Their names are Osama, Yassar, Mullah Omar, Mohammad Atta; they have many names and are
from many countries, sometimes they wear a turban, sometimes a baseball cap, but within the folds
of their garments they carry the bomb or the bullet and within their hearts the bitter bile of
retribution. Watch for them for they are everywhere and let us ponder deeply the next time we are
asked for bread.
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