Orr’s Crab Apples and Modi’s ED

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The latest raid by India’s ED [Enforcement Directorate] on NewsClick and the arrest of its founder remind me strangely of Joseph Heller’s character named Orr in the novel Catch-22.

Orr and Yossarian are both in the US Air Force. Now Yossarian is in the hospital undergoing treatment. The war is going on and hence Yossarian, like most other soldiers, would love the treatment to go on endlessly. Yossarian’s pain in his liver refuses to become jaundice. “If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him.”

Orr is Yossarian’s roommate. When Orr was a kid he used to walk around all day with crab apples in his cheeks, he says. Yossarian wants to know why. Orr says it’s because crab apples are better than horse chestnuts. Yossarian repeats his question. Why would anyone walk around all day with anything in his cheeks?

“I didn’t,” Orr says, “walk around with anything in my cheeks. I walked around with crab apples in my cheeks. When I couldn’t get crab apples I walked around with horse chestnuts. In my cheeks.”

Yossarian thinks Orr is crazy. But then everybody in the regiment knows that Yossarian is crazy because he has an unreasonable belief that everybody around him was crazy.

Just then Orr says that he walked around with crab apples in his cheeks because he wanted apple cheeks.

“Why did you want apple cheeks?” Yossarian demands.

“I didn’t want apple cheeks,” Orr says. “I wanted big cheeks. I didn’t care the color so much, but I wanted them big. I worked at it just like one of those crazy guys you read about who go around squeezing rubber balls all day long just to strengthen their hands. In fact, I was one of those crazy guys. I used to walk around all day with rubber balls in my hands, too.”

“Because rubber balls are better than crab apples?” Yossarian asks.

No, to protect his reputation, Orr says. “With rubber balls in my hands I could deny there were crab apples in my cheeks. Every time someone asked me why I was walking around with crab apples in my cheeks, I’d just open my hands and show them it was rubber balls I was walking around with…”

Yossarian gives up He doesn’t even answer when Orr asks him, “Do you want to know why I wanted big cheeks?”

Why did this episode rush to my mind as I was reading about Modi’s latest assault on journalists who questioned him? Modi has put a few hundred journalists behind bars. Many more have been thrown out of jobs. ED and CBI are Modi’s crab apples and rubber balls. But why is he doing this? Like Yossarian, I’m losing interest. I don’t know who is crazy. Modi, me, the journalists? All of us?