Riot

  Then someone brought a can of petrol. Or two. I wasn’t there, but I have relived that horrible scene a thousand times, so that it is more vivid in my imagination than most things I have actually seen. I can imagine the faceless bastard, his features twisted in hatred and excitement, eyes bloodshot, swinging the can, the colorless liquid pouring out from it, splashing the metal, the glass, the windshield wipers, the rubber of the tires, the fucking petrol flowing in a graceful arc until the car was thoroughly doused with it. And then someone screaming for a match, a match, a motherloving match, and setting the car alight.

  The flames must have soared instantly, and these unspeakable motherfuckers watched, cheering, as a decent man and his little boy were roasted alive in their seats. They must have tried to escape, my brother-in-law would have preferred to face the mob than to burn to death, but the locks on the doors must have fused together with the heat of the blaze, and they remained trapped inside, asphyxiating, burning, choking to death.

  Ever since that day I have been haunted by the thought of little Navjyot, his hair tied on the top of his head under a navy blue kerchief, a bright little boy whose greatest ambition was to open the batting for India one day like his hero Gavaskar. I was not there, Randy, I was not there, but I imagine his round eyes widening in horror and bewilderment as the mob surrounded his car, I imagine his father trying to reassure him, calmly locking the damned doors, and I imagine his little face pressed to the window, staring in disbelief as the flames consumed him.

  When his mother, my sister, heard the news, she quite literally lost her mind.

  When I found out what had happened, I was beside myself with grief and rage. That was when I wanted to resign: I could not bear to serve a system that had allowed this to happen. The Delhi police had claimed they were overwhelmed. It took the bloody government three days to bring out the army and suppress the riots; in the meantime hundreds of Sikhs had lost their lives, thousands had lost everything they possessed. Rajiv Gandhi, the new prime minister, even condoned the violence by declaring that “when a mighty tree falls, the earth shakes.” The earth of Delhi was soaked in Sikh blood, and it was the bosoms of the Sikh widows that were shaking in grief and despair. I felt that all my training, all my faith in the country and its bloody institutions, had been futile.

  But no, I didn’t resign. My father, Navjyot’s grieving grandfather, the man who was proudest to see me a cop, stopped me.

  “Don’t be a fool, Gurinder,” he said to me, holding me by the shoulders as if he wanted to shake some sense into me. “Sikhs have lost so much already this year; let us not lose more. Your staying on will help prevent such tragedies in the future. What is the point of throwing away your ability to pursue the criminals, to uphold the law, to ensure that some other mob doesn’t murder someone else’s favorite nephew?”

  I wept, I raged, I argued with him, I spoke of the Sikh soldiers who’d mutinied, I told him about a brilliant senior cop, Simranjit Singh Mann, who had quit the fucking police and joined the Khalistanis, and how I wanted to do the same thing. But he kept holding me, his sad brown eyes looking into the depths of my despair, and he shook his head. “Where do you think this will lead them?” he asked. “Will they achieve anything for their community, or for their country, except to cause more destruction and more unnecessary suffering? Do you want to throw away your future? Do you want to throw away India’s future?”

  I don’t care, I said, and he looked at me as if he’d been shot. But you’ve got to care, he said. You’ve got to care about this country the way you care about your mother or me.

  I don’t know, I replied, I don’t know if I can think of this country as mine anymore, after what has happened. I told him of overhearing a Hindu officer saying, “Damned good thing, it’s time we taught those Sikhs a lesson.”

  He didn’t flinch, my old man. “There will always be people like that,” he said, and for the first time I felt the difference in our ages, in what we had lived through, what we had learned. “If I brought you up to believe everything would be easy, that the whole world would act with integrity and honesty and decency and fairness, then I have failed you,” he said. “You can only be true to yourself, and to the soil from which you have sprung, and to the oath you have taken.” He looked at me then, looked into me. Thirty-seven years earlier he had lost everything in the massacres of Partition: his home, his ancestral lands in what had become, by the scratching of a careless British pen, the foreign country of Pakistan. He had worked hard to rebuild, to build himself the life he now led: the car, the servants, the club, the son in the Indian Police Service. He had sweated to build his share of India; he was not going to let me throw it away for bugger-all. “You say you do not know if this country is yours anymore? Don’t be a fool, Gurinder. Whose country is this if not yours? Since the days of Gandhi, we have tried to build a country that is everyone’s and no one’s, a country that excludes nobody, a country that no one group can claim is exclusively theirs. When Jinnah and the Muslim League wanted to create a country for Muslims, their Pakistan, did the Congress leaders say fine, we will create a country for Hindus? The whole point about India is that this is a country for everybody, and everybody has the duty, the obligation, to work to keep it that way. To fight to keep it that way. I did not bring you up to give up so easily, Gurinder. You have a job to do. You have sworn an oath of office to do it. A Sikh’s oath is his sacred duty, Gurinder. You don’t have the right to give up on your country.”

  And Navjyot, I asked, but feebly, because he had won me already. And because I realized I had wanted him to.

  Because of Navjyot, he replied without hesitation. Because that should never have happened, and because you have a share of the responsibility to ensure that it never happens again.

  He turned me to the photograph of Navjyot that stood on the dresser, a picture of an innocent little face, tender parted lips, shining eyes that had not yet seen the horror that would shut them forever. “That boy will always live in my heart,” he said softly. “But somewhere in India there is another grandfather like me whose only hope for the safety of his grandson lies in the trust that he places in you and the policemen under your command. Do not, Gurinder, do not ever betray that trust.”

  And so I stayed. And that’s why I’m still a cop: because a sad, quiet, neatly dressed man in a white beard, my blessed father, had more fucking faith in me than I had in myself. And because, for all the corruption and venality and inefficiency that assails this bloody profession, it is still the last bastion of civility and order in our racked and torn society. And because I want to ensure that, as far as I can help it, no other family has to endure what my sister had to.

  And because I am haunted by the face of a little ten-year-old boy enveloped in flames, a boy who loved cricket and called me Uncle.

  I want to save that boy. I want to save other children like him. I want to put out the fires.

  letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani

  August 15, 1989

  Cindy dear, it’s Independence Day today. India’s. I’m sitting at my desk in my loosest cotton shift as my rickety fan totters on its pedestal and blows hot air into my face. August is murderous in Zalilgarh, but it’s not as bad as May or June, before the monsoon, when you step into the street and think you’ve walked into an oven. It’ll start cooling down in October, but as it gets colder you’ll have the pollution to cope with — the smoke from hundreds of charcoal braziers on the sidewalks, thousands of buses and cars and autorickshaws, and God knows how many factories, all rising to be trapped under the winter mist rising from the river. Gurinder said the other day that just breathing Zalilgarh’s air is the equivalent of smoking a pack of Charminars a day. And he picked an unfiltered brand to make his point!

  I’m alone at home today, the office is closed, Lucky’s probably officiating at some flag-raising ceremony this morning, surrounded by self-important functionaries. I imagine him stiff in his safari suit, saluting a foreign flag, a flag without stars
or stripes — heck, I don’t even know if they salute the flag at these things — and I tell myself, he’s a foreigner. But Cin, the word doesn’t mean anything to me anymore when I think of him. I know him so well — the strength of his long arms around me, the two crooked front teeth when he smiles, the slightly spicy smell of his sweat when we’ve made love, the little tilt at the corner of his mouth when I lie on his chest and look up at his face. He’s no foreigner. He’s more familiar to me, more intimate to me, than any American I’ve ever known.

  Here I am, on Independence Day, wanting to give up my independence for him, knowing he has to win his own independence first. I can’t believe he’s even hesitating to leave a loveless marriage he hates for the woman he says he loves. It’s when he talks about his conflicted feelings, his obligations, that I begin to believe he really is a foreigner after all. …

  Anyway, speaking of foreigners, I’ve just had another reminder that I’m one. I went to the bazaar on the weekend, just to see what I could pick up to bring home, you know? It’s crazy, these places, stores spilling out on the sidewalks, the shopkeepers openly importuning you to come and buy their wares, the flies buzzing about, the heat so oppressive that you think of going to the nearest Bollywood movie just for the air-conditioning. Anyway, I spotted a couple of embroidered cushion covers I thought you’d like. How much? I asked. “Two hundred each, but for you, three hundred the pair,” said the greasy man in the shop. Now, I’ve been here long enough to know about bargaining, so I promptly said, “No, two hundred for the pair.” I was appalled at the alacrity with which he accepted my offer. Sure enough, I show the cushion covers to the wretched Kadambari, and she says, “How much did you pay? Sixty?” Even making allowances for her bitchy nastiness, it’s clear I’ve been ripped off again. I guess it’s part of the price you’ve got to pay for being a foreigner in India. But why must I, of all people, have to pay that price? I’m not some tourist in a five-star hotel — I’m me! And that ought to count for something. …

  from Lakshman’s journal

  August 19, 1989

  Can’t sleep, so am up at 3 a.m. writing this. Geetha is sleeping soundly as usual, her face swollen in unwitting complacency. I can’t bear to see that face every time I wake up, and I always wake up before she does. How the hell did I like that face enough to agree to marry her?

  Despite myself, I looked in on Rekha in her room. I didn’t switch on the light but the moon was bright enough for me to see her angelic face, calm in repose on the oversized pillow. I gently brushed away a curling strand of hair that had fallen over one eye. In her sleep, she smiled at me.

  It’s Rekha, of course, that I think about all the time now. Priscilla’s supposed to leave Zalilgarh in less than two months, and she thinks it’s decision time. Do I want to go with her? She has to return to the States, at least for now, and the prospect of escaping with her has its temptations. She showed me, only half jokingly, an ad in an American magazine: “Unemployment is lower in Switzerland. Owning a home is easier in Australia. Going to college is more likely in Canada. Vacations are longer in Denmark. And crime rates are lower in England. But more dreams come true in America.”

  An alluring prospect, if I had those dreams. But do I, really? Is it freedom I want, or Priscilla? I know I could get her to change her plans and stay on in India, for me. She’ll do it — but only on one condition. Only if I tell her I’m leaving my wife for her. That’s what she wants. And she wants it now. I can understand her impatience, but I’m not sure I’m ready for anything quite so … cataclysmic. How can I explain to her that I’m not even sure I have the right to do that to Geetha, to abdicate my husbandhood? I didn’t choose to start my marriage in the first place; how can I choose to end it? My role as a husband and father is central to who I am; it concerns my rootedness in the world; it is inextricably bound up with my sense of my place in the cosmos. I have been brought up to believe that such things — marriage, family — are beyond individual will, that they transcend an individual’s freedom of action. Priscilla’ll never understand that.

  And what about little Rekha, who did not ask to be born into my life but who is there, whose world is circumscribed by the pairing of Geetha and me? How can I ever explain what she means to me to Priscilla? “What’s the matter, Lucky?” Priscilla asked me this evening.

  You ask, my love, what the matter is.

  Why do I sound fatigued? stressed? torn?

  The matter is that I am as I sound.

  I, who have accepted your soul’s gift of love,

  Am a soul in torment, fearing as I love.

  I give you, my darling, the best part of myself:

  The part that feels most profoundly as a man,

  That knows the warm rush of passion

  At every sight of your smiling body,

  That rejoices in your warm embrace,

  And belongs to you in total surrender.

  That part is yours, my love, forever:

  It can never know again the exaltation,

  The exultation, the poignant sweetness of

  Such flooding love as I bear for you.

  That part is yours; but it is a part,

  For I am, in rendering it, rent;

  Having your love, yet not having it;

  Giving my love, yet not parting with it;

  Withholding, as I give, for a prior creditor.

  I have, as you know, an earlier love,

  One for a little soul, first glimpsed

  Tadpole-like in a nurse’s arms,

  Pink, precious, and premature:

  The child I had prayed for, who did not seek

  To be mine, but is, and whose life

  Ennobles mine. I have loved her

  Without reservation, without selfishness,

  Without condition, as I could never

  Love a woman. Even you.

  Now I look at her each day,

  Wake her in the morning, give her breakfast,

  Do homework with her, take her to the library

  And the movies, and I know I fear nothing more

  Than I fear not being there for her.

  When she cries out, “Daddy, am I as tall

  As you were when you were six?”

  I am there in the evening to confirm it;

  When she tells me of news from school,

  Or asks about God, or geography,

  I am there as the question occurs to her.

  I teach her Tamil songs, passing on a heritage

  She traces in her genes; I trim her hair,

  Cut her nails, quiz her over breakfast

  On the oceans of the world.

  Now I look at her and I ask myself,

  Can I deny her that?

  Can I deprive myself of her?

  Can I absent myself from the rest of her childhood?

  When she first meets a boy whose easy charm

  Starts flutters in her heart,

  Will Daddy be the one she tells of her confusions?

  Can I ever be happy knowing that I

  Have pulled from under the secure carapace of her life

  The struts that held her up?

  But can I be happy either,

  Knowing that you are no longer mine,

  That you have returned to America,

  That I have shut my eyes to the one true glimpse of happiness

  I have ever had as a man?

  You ask, my love, what the matter is.

  And I can only say, everything is the matter.

  Deep emotion and lack of sleep make for unconvincing poetry. Fifteen lines a stanza: is there such a form anywhere in the canon? I know I should thrust it aside; in an hour now dawn will break across my torment like a twig. But this is what I feel, and it’s at a level quite different from what Guru was trying to make me feel. Truth, Wilde wrote, is just “ones last mood.” Is this mood of tormented despair the one truth that counts now? How will Priscilla understand that my agonizing is not about her, not about us? But if she loves me
, mustn’t I help her understand? Perhaps I ought to give her this poem. I’d title it “The Heart of the Matter.” Or perhaps “A Matter of the Heart.” Or, more originally, both?

  I’m too tired to think. And too full of thoughts to sleep.

  Rudyard Hart to Mohammed Sarwar

  October 14, 1989

  You know, I stopped at a cold-drink place this morning. Guess what they’re selling? Pepsi. Bloody Pepsi. Except that they call it Lehar Pepsi here. Some Indian rule against foreign brand names.

  Despite myself, I bought it. Took a swig. And tasted defeat. Pepsi didn’t exist in the Indian market when I was here last. Now they’re here and we’re not. We could have been ten years ahead of them if we’d played our cards right.

  You know, when we see a population without Coke we see an untapped market for the finest beverage invented by man. Not being here is an indescribable waste all around. Indians are being deprived of a wonderful product, and we’re being deprived of a chance to lead in this country too, as we do in so many countries.

  We’ve got to come back to India. And we will. It’s the way the world is going. You’ll have American products, American ideas, American values all spreading throughout the land. And you’ll have to have Coke.

  I’ll tell you what your problem is in India. You have too much history. Far more than you can use peacefully. So you end up wielding history like a battleaxe, against each other. Whereas we at Coke don’t care about history. We’ll sell you our drinks whatever your history is. We don’t worry too much about the past. It’s your future we want to be a part of.

  My daughter believed in your future too. You know, I went through hell asking God why she had to be killed in a quarrel she had no part of. But now I realize it was her choice to be caught up in this country’s passions. She wanted to change India for the better. She was working for the future when she was struck down by the past.

  It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Can’t say it makes me feel a whole lot better, though. But I now think I’ll ask Coke to send me back to India. Give it another try. I think Priscilla would have wanted me to.