This week as diplomats' families and tourists quickly
disappeared, journalists from Europe and America
arrived in droves. Most of them stay at the Imperial
Hotel in Delhi. Many of them call me. Why are you
still here, they ask, why haven't you left the city?
Isn't nuclear war a real possibility? It is, but where
shall I go? If I go away and everything and every one,
every friend, every tree, every home, every dog,
squirrel and bird that I have known and loved is
incinerated, how shall I live on? Who shall I love,
and who will love me back? Which society will welcome
me and allow me to be the hooligan I am, here, at
home?

We've decided we're all staying. We've huddled
together, we realise how much we love each other and
we think what a shame it would be to die now. Life's
normal, only because the macabre has become normal.
While we wait for rain, for football, for justice, on
TV the old generals and the eager boy anchors talk of
first strike and second strike capability, as though
they're discussing a family board game. My friends and
I discuss Prophecy, the film of the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dead bodies choking the
river, the living stripped of their skin and hair, we
remember especially the man who just melted into the
steps of the building and we imagine ourselves like
that, as stains on staircases.

My husband's writing a book about trees. He has a
section on how figs are pollinated, each fig by its
own specialised fig wasp. There are nearly 1,000
different species of fig wasps. All the fig wasps will
be nuked, and my husband and his book.

A dear friend, who is an activist in the anti-dam
movement in the Narmanda Valley, is on indefinite
hunger strike. Today is the twelfth day of her fast.
She and the others fasting with her are weakening
quickly. They are protesting because the government is
bulldozing schools, felling forests, uprooting
handpumps, forcing people from their villages. What an
act of faith and hope. But to a government comfortable
with the notion of a wasted world, what's a wasted
value?

Terrorists have the power to trigger a nuclear war.
Non-violence is treated with contempt. Displacement,
dispossession, starvation, poverty, disease, these are
all just funny comic strip items now. Meanwhile,
emissaries of the coalition against terror come and go
preaching restraint. Tony Blair arrives to preach
peace - and on the side, to sell weapons to both India
and Pakistan. The last question every visiting
journalist always asks me: 'Are you writing another
book?'

That question mocks me. Another book? Right now when
it looks as though all the music, the art, the
architecture, the literature, the whole of human
civilisation means nothing to the monsters who run the
world. What kind of book should I write? For now, just
for now, for just a while pointlessness is my biggest
enemy. That's what nuclear bombs do, whether they're
used or not. They violate everything that is humane,
they alter the meaning of life.

Why do we tolerate them? Why do we tolerate the men
who use nuclear weapons to blackmail the entire human
race?