I Have the Keys to a House I Have Never Entered

There are three keys on a loop of wire in a drawer in my kitchen in Dharamsala. Two are long and flat with a single ward; one is smaller and has gone the colour of a coin. They opened a house and a storeroom in a village north of Lhasa, and my grandfather carried them out of Tibet in 1959 in a bag that also contained, I am told, a copper ladle and a photograph.

He never went back. My father never went. I have never stood in that village, and given the arrangement of the world I am unlikely to, and the house — I have this from a cousin who saw it in 2004 — has not existed in any form for a long time. There is a road.

So: keys to nothing, kept in a drawer, moved twice between apartments, and I would be genuinely distressed to lose them. The interesting question, which I have been unable to answer for twenty years, is whether that distress is a moral fact or a sentimental one.

Try to put the obligation into any of the standard accounts and watch it fail.

Consent will not hold it. I never agreed to anything. I was born in India to people who were born in India, into a set of expectations I received the way one receives a language, which is to say before one could refuse. An obligation I could not have declined is not an obligation on any account that takes agreement as the source of duty, and those accounts include most of the ones I was taught.

Benefit will not hold it either, and this is where it gets uncomfortable. What have I received from that village? Not property; there is a road. Not opportunity; my education, my work and my daughter's school are all Indian. If anything the ledger runs the other way: what I have received from that place is a set of difficulties — a statelessness that took decades to soften, a language that costs me effort to keep, a grandmother who cried on particular dates. Gratitude for benefits received cannot ground a duty to a place that has, in the plain accounting, cost me.

Reparation is closer but it points the wrong way. If a wrong was done, the obligation created runs from the wrongdoer to the wronged. It does not create a duty owed by the wronged to a landscape.

And yet if I threw the keys away I would have done something wrong. Not merely something upsetting. Wrong, in a way I would owe someone an account of. I am confident of this and I cannot derive it, and after twenty years I have stopped assuming the failure is mine and started suspecting it is the theories'.

Here is what I think is happening, offered without much confidence. Some obligations are not transactions at all. They are constituted by a practice — by there being a thing people do, over time, whose point is internal to the doing of it. Consider a promise that is kept by continuing to make it. My grandfather did not hand my father a debt; he handed him a practice, whose content was roughly: keep the keys, keep the account of the house accurate, do not let the fact of it become vague. My father did that, and in doing it he did not incur an obligation, he participated in one. When he gave me the loop of wire he was not transferring an asset. He was asking whether I would go on doing the thing, and I said yes, in the way one says yes to that, which is by putting it in a drawer and not throwing it away.

If that is right then the duty is not to the village and not to the dead. It is to the practice, and the practice has no beneficiary — which is exactly why it slips through every framework built to find one.

Now the objection, and I want to state it at full strength because it is the reason I have never written this down before.

This is the mechanism by which grievances are transmitted across generations in every long conflict on earth. Somewhere there is a man holding a key from 1948, and somewhere there is another holding one from 1912, and each of them will tell you, sincerely, that he did not choose it and cannot put it down. If I am going to say that a practice can obligate without consent and without benefit, I have written a licence for exactly the inheritance that makes these situations permanent, and I have written it in a form that is unfalsifiable — you cannot argue a man out of a practice, because it does not rest on a claim you can check.

I do not think that objection can be defeated. I think it can only be narrowed, and here is my attempt, which I am not sure holds. The distinction is in what the practice asks of you. Some inherited practices are inhabitable: keep the language, keep the account accurate, keep the keys. You can do them for a lifetime and remain a person who can be reasoned with, whose daughter can have a life, who is capable of noticing that the road is there and saying so out loud. Other practices are not inhabitable, because their content is the collection of a debt, and a debt that cannot be collected in a lifetime is a debt that must be handed on, and the handing on is the whole of it. The first kind can be finished. The second kind can only be transmitted.

The obvious problem with my distinction is that nobody has ever believed they inherited the second kind. Everyone believes they were given keys and an accurate account. I have no procedure for telling them apart from the inside, and I am suspicious of the fact that mine came out looking like the good kind.

My cousin in Toronto gave hers back. She found the family's keys among her mother's things after the funeral, and she posted them to an uncle with a short note, and she has told me she has not thought about them since and does not consider this a loss. I have known her all my life and she is not shallow. When I told her I was writing this she said the thing I keep returning to: that she did not refuse the practice, she simply noticed she had never been asked, and that being handed something in silence is not the same as being asked.

She may be right that I was never asked either, and that I said yes to a question nobody put to me.

The keys are in the drawer with the spare fuses and the batteries, which I am aware is not how one treats a relic, and is exactly how one treats something in use. My daughter found them when she was five and asked what they opened. I said a house. She asked whose, and I said ours, which was either the first true thing in this essay or the beginning of the whole problem, and I have not decided which.