RD: Tell me what happened.
GS: Well, the procession began as scheduled. And it was bloody apparent that it was going to be a problem. I’d never seen anything like it myself–
RD: You mean in size?
GS: Size, passion, militancy. Lucky and I were there, of course. He was clutching the piece of paper these bastards had all signed. Bhushan Sharma, Ram Charan Gupta, the whole lot of them, bloody hypocrites to a man. All their written assurances weren’t worth the cost of that single sheet of paper. They weren’t worth the sweat on Lucky’s hand that dampened that sheet every time he disbelievingly reread the undertakings they were openly violating. Restraint in sloganeering? Forget it – the most vulgar and vicious slogans were screamed out by the marchers, initiated by some of our precious signatories. No weapons? The procession was swarming with trishuls and naked daggers, which they flashed and pumped up and down as if practicing for a fucking javelin-throwing contest. Tie those bastards to a hydel generator, and you could have powered the pissing town for weeks. All this was bad enough, but then the leaders suddenly tried to steer the procession into the heart of the Muslim bastis. Just to provoke a reaction. Mind you, this was something they had specifically promised not to do, the sons of bitches. But I hadn’t trusted their promise anyway, so my men were in place, and we stopped their little attempted detour. We firmly pushed the slimy sisterloving marchers back to the agreed route.
RD: So you were able to keep things under control for a while.
GS: Yeah, for a while. But how the fuck do you control thirty thousand people on a hot September day if they’re determined to make trouble? The sun was getting higher, and so was the temper of the mob. By noon our shirts were soaked with sweat.
Here, have another drink. I could certainly use one.
RD: Thanks.
GS: It was tense, man. Tense. Want me to paint a picture for you? A seemingly endless procession, winding its way slowly, tortuously damned slowly, through the narrow lanes. Dust swirling upwards from their tramping feet. Chauvinist slogans rending the bloody air. Get it? Imagine the scene: The heat. The noise. The confusion. The hatred being spewed. The bloody adrenaline flowing. Those blasted blades flashing in the sun. People pumped up, thirsty, hoarse. Shouting.
RD: Then what happened?
GS: As it passed the main mosque, the procession paused, as if to attack. Lucky’s executive magistrates and my police had to physically push the frenzied young buggers onward. In case they forgot they were here to march and turned on the mosque instead.
RD: And the Muslims of the town? Where were they while this was going on in their neighborhood?
GS: At this point, they were all barricaded in their bloody homes. No Muslim was seen out of doors. Not even a circumcised mouse.
RD: Go on. What happened next?
GS: By midafternoon about two-thirds of the procession had passed by the Muslim bastis. Lucky and I began to believe we were going to get away with it. Without the explosion we’d both feared. We should have known we were as likely to escape untouched as a whore at a stag party. Ah! – some fresh soda at last.
Where were we? Yes, we were standing at the crossroads before one particular mosque. Not the main one. A smaller mosque, which had been the site of several communal battles in the past. The Mohammed Ali Mosque, I think it’s called. Doesn’t matter. In fact that was the mosque where we predicted the frenzy of the procession would reach its climax. That’s why we were both there. Bloody DM and twice-bloody SP. Pushing the crowd forward. Acutely alert for a clash. That’s the damnedest bloody thing, Mr. Diggs. We were there, prepared for the worst. We weren’t even taken by surprise.
RD: You can call me Randy.
GS: Only when I’ve seen you with a woman. But go on, have another. Soda’s okay now. You can’t let me drink alone.
RD: Thanks. Actually, it’s short for Randolph. But please go on.
GS: As I said, we were prepared. We had prevented an attack on the main mosque. We thought we were seeing this through. Then, suddenly, a bunch of young men came running, in absolute panic. Running from the opposite direction, that is, towards our part of the procession. They were shouting. At first we couldn’t hear what they were saying. I even thought they might be Muslims charging the marchers. But they were Hindu all right. And the agitation on their faces suggested something else. They were screaming, “They’re attacking us! Bomb maar rahen hain!” – they’re bombing us. Who? we asked, and of course the answer came, the Muslims. The Muslims had thrown a bomb into the crowd and a Hindu processionist had been killed. Shit – this was it, the moment we’d feared. Lucky and I ran immediately to the spot. It was barely a hundred meters away. The enraged crowd had gathered round a young man who was lying bleeding on the ground. His chest had been torn open by a crude bomb. His life was quickly ebbing away. People were screaming their fear and rage. The mood was uglier than a hijra’s crotch. Lucky quickly lifted the youth into his car, which was waiting nearby, and told the driver to rush him to hospital. He died before he got there.
RD: The first victim.
GS: You’re bloody right. The first victim. Lucky and I had a job to do. We were confronting an infuriated mob screaming for bleeding vengeance. We knew that if we didn’t act immediately, we’d have a lynch mob on our hands. They’d be running wild through the Muslim bastis. We had to deal with the provocation before it got out of control.
RD: Sounds like it already had.
GS: Look, it was one death so far. We were fearing hundreds. It was pretty clear to me, after a couple of questions, where the bomb had been hurled from. There was a small double-storied house in a very narrow by-lane. This lane branched off, as crooked as a beaten mongrel’s leg, from the main lane of the Muslim quarter through which the procession was passing. The idiots who’d thrown it had clearly made a stupid little calculation in those twisted little minds they keep up their ass somewhere. They figured the first bomb would bring the procession to a halt. Then the enraged mob would rush the house. Once the crowd was near the house, these stupid buggers would throw their little collection of homemade bombs from above. Kill a lot of the marchers – that was their only thought. If “thought” isn’t too strong a word for their stinking little scheme. And they’d have accounted for a few Hindu fanatics, I have to grant them that.
RD: But they’d have been killed too. Their house could have been burned down.
GS: You’re right. Though it wasn’t their own house. But don’t look for rational thinking in communal riots, Randy. These buggers had been at the receiving end of insults and slogans and petty offenses of all sorts for days leading up to the Ram Sila Poojan. They were maddened like a chained animal that’s been regularly prodded. Of course the poor bastards felt it was time to retaliate.
RD: But the Muslims had already taken action, right? With the motorcycle assault? Was there any connection?
GS: Different buggers. But it was the same sort of attitude that prompted the Muslims on the motorcycles the previous night to stab those Hindu boys. You don’t think as far as the next step. You just want to do something, now.
RD: Was the crowd already at the house when you got there?
GS: No, Lucky and I had run to the spot as soon as we heard of the incident. People were still in shock, focusing on the wounded boy. Once we got him off in the DM’s car, though, we knew the crowd would become a mob. And mobs want only one thing. Revenge.
from Lakshman’s journal
June 2, 1989
We speak, inevitably, about writing. I picked up her scrapbook once without asking her, and she snatched it away with a little scream. These Americans and their exaggerated sense of privacy! I paraphrased Wilde: “Everyone should keep a diary — preferably somebody else’s.” She wouldn’t budge. So I needled her enough to get her to show me some things in it. Not the very personal stuff — about me, perhaps? — but her creative musings, poems, sketches. She’s not a bad poet. There’s one on Zalilgarh, written last Christmas, that’s probably g
ood enough to be published. I tell her so, and she blushes. She doesn’t write for publication, she tells me, only for herself. Everything in her scrapbook is for herself, and no one else.
“What’s the point, then?” I demand. “Ever since college I’ve been struggling to find the time to write because I have something to say to the world, and here you have the time to write and you want no one to read it.”
That gets us onto my own writing — my erratic, disorganized, unfocused writing, my whenever-I-can-fmd-the-time-and-the-mood writing, my escaping-from-Geetha writing. I am defensive, almost embarrassed, about my poetry; I do not mention my journal. But I think aloud about fiction.
“I’d like to write a novel,” I tell her, “that doesn’t read like a novel. Novels are too easy — they tell a story, in a linear narrative, from start to finish. They’ve done that for decades. Centuries, perhaps. I’d do it differently.”
She raises herself on an elbow. “You mean, write an epic?”
“No,” I reply shortly, “someone’s done that already. I’ve read about this chap who’s just reinvented the Mahabharata as a twentieth-century story — epic style, oral tradition, narrative digressions, the lot. No, what I mean is, why can’t I write a novel that reads like — like an encyclopedia?”
“An encyclopedia?” She sounds dubious.
“Well, a short one. What I mean is, something in which you can turn to any page and read. You pick up chapter 23, and you get one thread of the plot. Then you go forwards to chapter 37, or backwards to 16, and you get another thread. And they’re all interconnected, but you see the interconnections differently depending on the order in which you read them. It’s like each bit of reading adds to the sum total of the reader’s knowledge, just like an encyclopedia. But to each new bit of reading he brings the knowledge he’s acquired up to that point — so that each chapter means more, or less, depending on how much he’s learned already.”
“What if she,” Priscilla asks in pointed feminism, “begins at the end?”
“It won’t matter,” I respond excitedly. “The beginning foretells the end. Down with the omniscient narrator! It’s time for the omniscient reader. Let the reader construct her own novel each time she reads it.”
Priscilla bites her lip, as she always does before saying something she’s afraid I won’t like. “I don’t know if this can work,” she says slowly.
“Maybe not,” I reply with cheerful defiance. “But you know what Wilde said about form being more important than content. But of course I’d have all the classic elements of the novel in it. You know, the ancient Sanskrit text on drama, the Natya Shastra, prescribes the nine essential emotional elements that must go into any work of entertainment: love, hate, joy, sorrow, pity, disgust, courage, pride and compassion. They’d all be there. Every single one of the nine tenets of the sages would be included. But why bother to do it conventionally? Can’t you write a novel about, say, religion without describing a single temple or mosque? Why must you burden your readers with the chants of the priests, the orations of the mullahs, the oppressive air of devotion? Let your readers bring themselves to the book they’re reading! Let them bring to the page their own memories of love and hate, their own feelings of joy and sorrow, their own reactions of disgust and pity, their own stirrings of courage and pride and compassion. And if they do that, why should form matter? Let the form of the novel change with each reading, and let the content change too.”
“But how will any reader understand the truth?”
“The truth! The singular thing about truth, my dear, is that you can only speak of it in the plural. Doesn’t your understanding of the truth depend on how you approach it? On how much you know?”
She bites her lip. “Either something is true, or it’s not,” she says at last.
“Not so, my darling,” I declare. “Truth is elusive, subtle, manysided. You know, Priscilla, there’s an old Hindu story about Truth. It seems a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. Her father, the king, thought he was a bit too cocksure and callow. He decreed that the warrior could only marry the princess after he had found Truth. So the warrior set out into the world on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and monasteries, to mountaintops where sages meditated, to remote forests where ascetics scourged themselves, but nowhere could he find Truth. Despairing one day and seeking shelter from a thunderstorm, he took refuge in a musty cave. There was an old crone there, a hag with matted hair and warts on her face, the skin hanging loose from her bony limbs, her teeth yellow and rotting, her breath malodorous. But as he spoke to her, with each question she answered, he realized he had come to the end of his journey: she was Truth. They spoke all night, and when the storm cleared, the warrior told her he had fulfilled his quest. ‘Now that I have found Truth,’ he said, ‘what shall I tell them at the palace about you?’ The wizened old creature smiled. ‘Tell them,’ she said, ‘tell them that I am young and beautiful.’ ”
from Priscilla’s scrapbook
June 22, 1989
He gave me another poem today. “You know so little about me,” he said. “This is something about my high school years, in Calcutta, the building where my parents lived. It’s a bit all over the place, but then so was I at that time.”
Another self-conscious one-liner. The poem must mean a lot to him.
Minto Park, Calcutta, 1969–71
The road bends still in my outstretched mind
into the narrow lane bounded by grey battlements
looming castle-like above the ground,
disguising their true function
as “servants’ quarters,” to which
cooks and houseboys would retire
after the last drink was drunk, the last dish washed.
Behind the battlements stood my building — one of two, both grey
and stately — set on manicured asphalt,
with the luxury of a garden beneath, where frangipani and bougainvillea wafted scents into the air
like the shuttlecocks of the badminton players
next door, launched with the confidence that sent cricket balls
blazing from adolescent bats through the wire fence
into another exclusive address, the Bhowanipore Cemetery.
I would search for the balls there, amongst weed-littered graves,
stumbling across a crumbling tombstone to a little English boy
taken away by malaria, aged nine, a hundred years ago;
or hear the jackals cry at night, their howls a faint echo
of the processions down the road from the maidan,
spewing fear and political anger into the sultry air.
We kept them out, behind the fence, outside the battlements.
When power cuts came (“load-shedding” the favored euphemism)
to the rest of the smoke-numbed city, we basked in an
oasis of privilege, our electricity connected to the
Alipore Jail, the Shambhu Nath Pandit Hospital, the lunatic asylum,
all too dangerous to be plunged into darkness. Hope like a lamp
glimmered on our desks. Luck (and good connections)
lit our way into the future.
At the corner of D. L. Khan Road sat the Victoria Memorial,
her marble skirt billowing with complacent majesty,
as potbellied boxwallahs took their constitutionals
in her shade. Young wrestlers performed their morning asanas
on the lawns, their contortions a widow’s legacy. Traffic belched its way
across Lower Circular Road. The world muddled through.
In my building, the Asian Paints manager, cuckolded by his bachelor neighbor,
traveled often, leaving his gangling cricket-mad son to dream
of emigration to Australia. The bosomy nymphet four floors up
kissed me wetly on the lips one night, then took up with a boy
years older, a commerce student. They are now married.
Just a
bove us was the executive who resembled a Bollywood star.
My mother’s friends swooned if they passed him near the lift.
High up, kind Mr. Luthra, white-haired and gentle, went higher still
one night, his last words to his wife “I don’t want to die.”
He always haunts the building in my mind, fighting to live.
Down the street, the muezzin wails, calling the Muslim faithful
to prayer. They must jostle past the bell-jingling Hindus
trotting to the Ganesh mandir in the middle of the street, their devotions
drowned out by the loudspeakers outside the domed gurudwara,
chanting verses from the Granth Sahib. My favorite Jesuit priest
cycles to jail, bringing succor to prisoners. The millionaire brewer’s son
drives by in his open Sunbeam, racing noisily past the complacent cow
grazing idly at the corner. Peace flaps in the wind like washing.
The world we lived in was two worlds,
and we spoke both its languages. In the night
we dreamt of school, and exams, and life,
while the day burned slowly like a basti brazier,
blackening the air we breathed. Naxalites drew proletarian blood
while refugees poured into our streets,
children of a Bangladesh waiting to be born.
In the distance, the politicians’ loudspeakers growled like tanks
rumbling across the border to craft another people’s destiny.
The sun seared away our patience.
Behind the battlements, we slept, and lived, and studied,
never quite finishing the last drink, nor emptying the last dish.
Poor cousins from the country stayed with us
till shorthand classes and my father’s friendships
won them jobs. We raised funds for Mother Teresa.
The future stretched before us like the sea.
At dawn the saffron spread across our fingers,