In 1961 a family in the town below ours gave my grandmother a room behind their shop and did not charge her for it for two years. The father of that family is dead. His son runs the shop. My mother sends food to that house at Losar, every year, and has done for fifty-odd years, and neither household has ever discussed why.
When somebody tells me, as somebody does every few years, that we should be grateful to India, that is not the thing they mean. And when someone in my community answers that we owe nothing, that a state acted in its own interests and a policy is not a kindness, that is not quite right either, and the reason it is not right is sitting in a house below the town with a bowl in it.
I want to take the demand seriously enough to work out why it fails, because dismissing it has become reflexive among people my age and I think the reflex costs us something.
Gratitude, on any account I know, is owed to an agent. It requires that somebody could have done otherwise and chose. That is why we do not thank the weather. The demand that a refugee be grateful to a country therefore has to treat the country as an agent that chose, and this is where it comes apart — not because states never choose, but because what actually happened is a sequence of decisions by many people over decades, some generous, some strategic, some grudging, some made by officials who would have preferred otherwise and were overruled. There is no single act with a single intention behind it. The demand asks me to direct a personal attitude at an aggregate, and the aggregate does not have the property the attitude requires.
So the refusal looks correct. A state is not a benefactor. Policy is not a gift.
Except that I have watched my mother carry food down that hill for fifty years, and whatever is happening there is not nothing, and it is not gratitude either — gratitude is discharged by being expressed, and this has not been discharged in half a century, and neither household would know how to stop.
What I think is going on, offered with no confidence, is that there is a relation with no name in the political vocabulary, and it is owed to particular people and not to a state, and it is closer to being written into somebody's account of themselves than to owing them anything. That family's story about who they are includes a woman in a room behind the shop. Ours includes them. Neither can now be told without the other, and what is owed is the continued accuracy of both — which is why food goes down the hill and why nobody says thank you, because thank you would close it, and closure is precisely what this relation does not admit of.
If that is right, then the demand and the refusal are both category mistakes pointed at the same fact. One says: feel gratitude toward a state. The other says: I owe a state nothing. Both are true about the state, and neither is about the shop.
Now the objection, which is not a philosophical objection at all and is much harder for it.
Be grateful is not usually a sentence about ethics. It is an instrument. It is said to people who have complained about something, in order to make the complaint inadmissible, and it works by converting a claim about present conditions into a debt from the past. Every minority in every country has heard it, in almost the same words, and it functions the same way everywhere: the grateful are not permitted to ask for anything, because asking demonstrates ingratitude and ingratitude retroactively voids the shelter. Anyone who gives this demand a philosophical footing, however careful, has handed something to people who will not use it carefully. I have written a paragraph above that could be quoted at a person in the third generation who wants a right and is being told to remember 1961, and I know it, and I have written it anyway.
I cannot defeat that. The most I can do is notice that the instrument works precisely by aiming at the state what belongs to the shop — it borrows the weight of a real relation between particular people and applies it to a political demand that no particular person made.
And then there is my daughter, who is the second case and who is the reason I have not been able to leave this alone.
She was born in India. She has never met anyone from that family who was alive in 1961. When she is told to be grateful — and she will be, she is seven and it has already happened once, at school — she is being asked to hold an attitude toward an event two generations before her, on behalf of people she never knew, directed at an entity that did not decide anything. Every part of the demand is now false and the underlying fact is still there: she is walking to school on a road in a town that let us stay.
I do not know what she owes. I know what I would like her to do, which is carry the food down the hill when my mother cannot, and I am aware that wanting that is not the same as being able to justify it, and I have noticed that this is the second time I have ended an essay in exactly that position.
The shop sells stationery now, and phone credit, and the son is nearly seventy. He asked after my mother in March. He has never once mentioned the room, and I have come to understand that this is not modesty. It is that in his account of his father, it is not a remarkable event.
