On March 1, my flight from London to Delhi was cancelled. I was on my way to the Raisina Dialogue, where foreign ministers and strategists would spend three days debating how to manage a world in cascading crisis. I arrived a day late, after passing the intervening hours in an airport terminal, reading.
The novel I had with me was Dr Anamika’s Door Desh Ke Parinde (Birds of a Distant Land), the latest work from one of Hindi literature’s most searching voices. Its opening scene felt, under the circumstances, less like fiction than like diagnosis: a flight diverted by war, strangers suspended in a terminal, briefly assembling into something like community before dispersing again. Anamika has a word for these places. She calls them “a-sthaan,” non-places, the transit lounges and border crossings and railway platforms where the displaced are made to wait. I was, for one grounded afternoon, an accidental resident of her literary world.
Forums like Raisina and Davos do vital work, convening the people who must make decisions under pressure, with imperfect information, in real time. What they less often find room for is the kind of question Anamika’s novel quietly insists upon. The in-between spaces we experience as interruptions are where the most honest human encounter becomes possible, precisely because no one belongs there and therefore no one is performing belonging. And the in-between times, the intervals between conflicts, the contemplative pause before the next eruption, are not voids. They are the only windows in which the question violence tends to foreclose can be seriously asked.
The novel follows Jean Christophe, a French Indologist who travels to India between the World Wars and encounters Tagore, Gandhi, and the poet Nirala, arriving at the conviction that cross-cultural dialogue through literature is the only durable antidote to civilisational violence. Understanding another culture’s soul, he believes, makes it impossible to destroy them. In the framing story, set in that airport, a refugee and a journalist of mixed heritage join the narrator, all three made homeless by history, reading Christophe’s century-old manuscript in their shared a-sthaan. That they are still there, still waiting, still displaced, is Anamika’s quiet verdict on what happens when the world ignores him.
Tolstoy understood the same stakes from a different direction. War and Peace is not really about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. It is a demolition of the great-man theory of history, the delusion that wars are made by generals rather than by the accumulated, invisible choices of ordinary people. War depends on abstraction, on the erasure of the particular human being, and the novel, with its insistence on interiority and irreducible specificity, is by its nature opposed to that erasure. Tolstoy too was obsessed with the in-between: his most luminous scenes take place not on battlefields but in the quiet that surrounds them, the long convalescence in which his characters finally become themselves.
Anamika describes dusk as two phases of the day sitting quietly with their feet dipped in water. It is a small image for something large: the idea that the pause between states, between day and night, between wars, between one life and the next, is not empty time. It is the only time the deeper question gets asked. In that slowing, the abstractions that make violence possible begin to loosen. The stranger becomes the person sitting beside you, equally suspended between departure and arrival.
We are not short of wars. We are short of the patience to inhabit another person’s story long enough to find them irreplaceable. That patience is what the novel defends, quietly, against the abstractions that make violence possible. For one grounded afternoon in an airport terminal, sitting among other stranded travellers in Anamika’s a-sthaan, it did exactly that.
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