Not what I meant to do

I just set my new personal low for stunningly botched fieldwork. I am still, frankly, reeling.

As you know, I’ve been interviewing members of the Indian parliament lately. This has been going pretty well and has had the nice side-effect of quadrupling my consumption of very sweet and milky tea and various sorts of biscuits. In fact, I was considering myself practically a Girl Friday as of a few days ago. The interviews are fairly formal and they usually cannot be too long—one to one-and-a-half hours. And I try to write fairly narrow questions about specific junctures in the person’s life because I’ve found my “big think” queries don’t really go anywhere. And I’m mostly just hoping the respondent will drop one or two political factoids that will be helpful to me as they give me what is otherwise a fairly well-rehearsed line. (I will mention that it is entirely by design that I am doing rather cerebral interviews with not-particularly-representative Indians, as opposed to, say, trying to go into the Indian countryside to get an accurate sense of the life of the man on the street. The notion that I could possibly do the latter has always seemed ridiculous to me. Let’s face it: I am the sort of person who knows the names of many kinds of cheese and no professional basketball players. In short, I’m not even good at understanding real life in my own society, how would I understand it in India?)

I have, of course, wondered how honest my respondents are being. I definitely wonder if the people who seem sincere are merely the most accomplished liars, and I have similar questions about the respondents who seem dim or persistently confused in their facts. It is particularly difficult to square the people I interview with the rather nasty deeds ascribed to Indian politicians in general and/or to the respondent in particular. And questions in that vein are hard to phrase in a delicate manner: “so, tell me about the time you broke with your coalition partners and restarted a civil war…” or “How’d you get so good at bombing trains?”

My interview today, for example, raised just such a delicate issue, in this case because the politician I was going to talk to—let’s call him Mr. Morgan Thomas Mitchell from constituency X (Stanford Human Subjects would be so pleased with me)—had both his legs blown off when an insurgent group he once had ties to tried to assassinate him. I prepared for this interview earlier this week because I thought I was going to get in to see him on Wednesday. But when I got there I instead spoke to a secretary who found out what I was doing and then told me to go to the MP’s residence on Sunday. This actually put me in a pretty good mood, because if this Mr. Mitchell was important enough to have a secretary who screened his appointments (unlike the usual MP taking his own calls), well, who knows what fascinating political facts he’d have for me?

Interview day arrived, and I made my way to the house maintained by Mr. Mitchell’s state to be used as a residence for politicians and official guests. Let me note that part of the reason the corruption of my respondents is always a little hard to gauge is that they live in pretty modest circumstances. I mean, again with the upholstery ecosystem that could, at any moment, support the emergence of vertebrates. The whole place, like so many buildings in India, somehow managed to look simultaneously like it is still under-construction and falling apart from old age, and had the eerie-bombed out feeling of, well, a place where there are no signs of life other than men who are either repaving or destroying the driveway and a group of people who do not seem to have anything in particular to do except sit on the very dirty couches, waiting for the power to come back on so that the single fan will begin to make the dust stir again.

The same secretary I had seen on Wednesday showed me to a somewhat nicer room and sat down to take a phone call. I assured him that I knew I was a bit early and that I was happy to wait, and I pulled out my newspaper. Then the secretary said, “Well, shall we start?” And I wonder to myself, “Is he going to do the interview for the MP? Is he the MP? And, how can that be? He is most clearly not a double amputee. Is it possible that this is some kind of a con job, that I’ve been lured into an interview with an impostor? And who would try to impersonate someone in a wheelchair without attending to that small detail?” (Keep in mind, constituency X is in one of the scarier places I study and perhaps this is all some kidnapping set-up). I was, in short, totally flustered. In the best case scenario, where this guy is the MP, I have, first of all, been talking about “Mr. Mitchell” consistently over two meetings now, so it’s not like he won’t know I was mixed up and, second, I know nothing about this man. The guy I prepared to interview was not only legless, the political career that led his opponents to hire his estranged rebel supporters to attempt to blow him into his next incarnation was pretty distinctive—even in a pretty violent place like India. And, given my chosen interview style, I do not really have any all-purpose questions prepared. But, then again, I’m not completely sure that this man isn’t Mr. Mitchell because, after all, maybe the reports of the extent of the damage to his limbs were exaggerated or maybe I’d somehow become mixed up about that detail. In short, I had nothing.

The interview never really recovered. After an excruciating hour or so, I stumbled back through the Sarajevo-by-way-of-Haiti state house, and into the Delhi sunlight. I rode home in a daze, wondering with almost an idle curiosity what had just happened.

I am sure that someday I will find this hilarious, but the answer to the question turns out to be that there are two high-profile Parliamentarians in constituency X with rather similar names. One is Morgan Thomas Mitchell and the other is Thomas Morgan Mitchell. In fact, they are in the same political party. And, naturally, in newspaper articles there are often references to Mr. Mitchell, the honorable member from X, and it can be a bit hazy who the referent is. And, well, Mr. Thomas Morgan Mitchell is, it seems, still in his home state recovering from the rather nasty attempt on his life, while Mr. Morgan Thomas Mitchell and I just enjoyed some sweet tea, Ritz crackers, and not terribly high-quality discussion of Indian federalism.

Whoops.