Husband Of A Fanatic : A Personal Journey Through India, Pakistan, Love, And Hate

In the tradition of Philip Gourevitch's startling breakthrough work on Rwanda, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, Indian American writer Amitava Kumar's remarkable and deeply personal journey into the heart of hatred.

In the summer of 1999, with India and Pakistan at war, Amitava Kumar - a Hindu Indian writer living and teaching in the U.S. - married a Pakistani Muslim woman, leading to a process of discovery that prompted him to examine the hatreds and intimacies joining Indians and Pakistanis, Hindus and Muslims, fundamentalists and secularists, writers and rioters.

More than a travelogue, the resulting book is a portrait of the people the author meets as he travels across the South Asian continent, people dealing with the consequences of the politics of faith.The book is divided into eight chapters, plus prologue and epilogue.

In the prologue-"My Lunch with a Bigot" he shares a disquieting lunch with the amiable bigot who had posted Kumar's name on his website blacklist of Hindu traitors; in Chapter 1, "The Blind Men," he meets the victims of an accepted, casual cruelty - accused criminals who had acid poured into their eyes - as well as their punisher, a policeman; he visits a classroom in riot-torn Gujarat, a village beside the Ganges, a psychiatric ward in Kashmir.

At the border crossing between India and Pakistan in Wagah ("Zero Point" - Chap 2), patriots shout slogans at each other while guards on both sides lower flags in a kind of ritualized dance, betraying intimacy.

In Chapter 4 "Textbook Enemies," Kumar compares letters exchanged between children in his old high school in Patna, India and children from his wife's in Karachi, Pakistan.Throughout, Kumar retraces the scenes of ruthless killings and rioting while reconsidering history, literature, film, and forms of popular culture, producing a fiercely personal essay on the idea of the enemy.