ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects from the point of view of Mangalesh Dabral's translator into English on the intimate role of the interrogative in literature that attempts to rethink the grammar of communal identity a language away, by considering both Suketu Mehta's essay and Dabral's poem trade in impossible questions about the relationship of "he" to "you" to "we". In order to engage with Mehta's stratagem most effectively, the chapter describes Gyanendra Pandey's readings of colonial representations of violence – the rhetoric of inevitability and instead arrive at a more complicated understanding of the relationship between pronouns. As if to insinuate that the enterprise of reframing the grammar of fanaticism is a delicate business, and that translation to imaginary conditionals is not as easy as it would at first appear given the layers of distance that constitute the tense attempts at negotiating common ground.
