Riot

  — It’s not that kind of adjustment I’m talking about. I mean adjusting within myself. Look, let me explain. It’s something that troubled me from the start, but I kept pushing it aside, telling myself it didn’t matter. In my culture, no man with any self-respect gives his mangalsutra, his ring, his name, to a woman who’s been with other men before. I never thought that in my life I would ever be in a position where another man could even think, “I have slept with his wife. I have seen his wife naked. His wife has pleasured me.”

  — You’re sick.

  — I’m Indian. As far as I know, that’s the way the vast majority of the world thinks: The woman you marry is the repository of your honor.

  — I don’t believe I’m hearing this, from an educated man in 1989.

  — That’s the point. I learned. I became an educated man of 1989. I trained myself not to let it matter. I learned to love you without letting the shadows of the others fall between my love and your body. Oh, I suppose that, without thinking about it, I had sort of shared the general belief here that there are the women you sleep with, and the women you marry. I’ve grown out of that belief, quite consciously. I had started off sleeping with you, not even thinking of anything permanent, let alone marrying you. Then I fell in love. Now I found myself wanting to marry the woman I was sleeping with.

  — How convenient.

  — Spare me the irony, Priscilla. My knowledge of your past has tormented me far more than I let on. But I told myself I had to understand the culture you came from. That by the standards of your peers you’re practically virginal. And above all, that what mattered was that you loved me.

  — Yes.

  — I told myself, how does it matter who she’s been with before? What matters is that she’s with me now. I have her. These other men don’t.

  — Exactly.

  — I want so much for it not to matter, don’t you see? But can you blame me for being scared? How can I know that a woman who has slept with six men will never contemplate sleeping with a seventh? Can I afford to sink myself emotionally into a love that might be withdrawn from me as it has been from others? Or should I tell myself, love her while she loves you, love her while you can, let the future take care of itself?

  — What does that mean? The future never takes care of itself. You have to take care of your own future if you want one.

  — I’m just trying to explain my torment to you. I have a career where I try to make a difference to my own people. I have a daughter whom I want to see make her way in the world. And I have you. Or at least I think I do, but I’m scared.

  — You can only have me if you want me, Lucky. If you truly love me.

  — I love you, Priscilla. But …

  — But?

  — But there’s too much involved. I’m wondering whether I can find the strength to accept that I have to love you enough to let you go.

  — How can you say that? That’s nonsense. How can you love me and let me go?

  — I don’t know. I only know it would be as painful as amputating a limb. It would mean going round for years afterwards haunted by the ghost of what might have been. And yet, old Oscar put it best: “In love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others.” I guess I’ve deceived myself; I had no intention ever of deceiving you. But the more I think of it, the more it seems to me it would be the right thing to do.

  — Right by whom? Not by me.

  — Right by my family, by Rekha, and by you. You have a wonderful future awaiting you in America. I shouldn’t presume to deprive you of it. If I were to say, darling Priscilla, I do not know about our future, I am full of doubt and uncertainty, I love you but I am in torment, I do not want to inflict this on you, take your freedom if you want it — what would you do? What is best for you? Think about it. But please don’t doubt my love. Everything I’ve said comes out of my love for you. Even my willingness to let you go.

  — I can hardly believe all that I’ve heard. Are you saying you want me to be involved with you but you can’t leave your wife and daughter? Are you saying you might leave them for me if I hadn’t been with other men before? Are you saying you love me but not enough to disrupt your life to be with me? You sound terribly confused.

  — I am. When we got involved I began to think nothing else mattered. Not my wife, not my job, not my child, not your past. But I’ve discovered it all does. That I can’t just walk away from it all.

  — But you can just walk away from me.

  — No, I can’t! Don’t you see how terrible my torment is?

  — But don’t you see that I can’t wait forever for you to end your confusion?

  — I know you can’t.

  — You’ve come to mean more to me than anyone I’ve ever known. I thought we had a future together.

  — Please don’t cry. Here, take my handkerchief.

  — I don’t understand, Lucky. You tell me I’m the woman you’ve always dreamed of, I fulfil every desire you have as a man, and when I tell you I feel the same way and I want us to be forever, you withdraw?

  — I’m not withdrawing, Priscilla. I love you. I just can’t break up my family, destroy my daughter—

  — I’d never ask you to destroy your daughter. Can’t you take her away from that dreadful wife of yours?

  — I doubt a court would give her to me. And with my life, my work, how could I take care of her?

  — I’d help.

  — But you’re not her mother, Priscilla. With all her faults, Geetha is.

  — Please remove your arm, Lucky. I’m leaving.

  — I don’t want you to go.

  — No, you want me to stay, so that you can fuck me and then you can go, to your wife. Thanks, but I’ve had enough of that scenario.

  — Priscilla, don’t get up, please.

  [Silence.]

  — Priscilla, I love you.

  [Silence. A long silence, followed by the creaking of a door, a sibilant sniffling retreating down the stairs, the rattle of a bicycle chain, and the squeaking crunch of thin tires on the twig-strewn ground, fading into the distance.]

  from Lakshman’s journal

  August 22, 1989

  Words, old Oscar would have said, mere words — but how terrible, how vivid, how cruel. And is there anything so real as the words we use to define our lives?

  I remember an old sadhu my parents took me to once, a wizened bare figure whose skin hung impossibly in folds, the hair on his head sparse and unruly, his white beard his only adornment. We sat at his feet for what seemed to me the longest time, but when I began to speak he raised an aged finger to his white-shrouded lips. “Whatever you have to say, my son,” he said, “say it in silence.”

  It is a prescription I forget too often: Whatever you have to say, say it in silence.

  With Priscilla now, silence is all I have.

  letter from Lakshman to Priscilla

  August 25, 1989

  My darling Priscilla,

  Please try and understand what I’m going through. The last three days since I saw you have been the worst three days of my life. I was shattered when you left like that, and I haven’t slept a wink. I feel physically ill. I told you that losing you would be like amputating a limb — they say you constantly feel pain from the place where the limb used to be. In my case, that’s my heart.

  I feel I’ve conducted a terrible mutilation of myself in telling you why I couldn’t give you the commitment you seek. Watching you cycle away into the darkness last Tuesday was the most wrenching experience of my life.

  And yet I have made my own bed and I must lie in it. I’m a desperately sad human being who is suffering terribly, and my suffering is made no more bearable by the fact that it is self-inflicted. I could have said something else to you, but I knew you deserved the truth. I felt I could not do otherwise, my dearest Priscilla, and be true to myself, above all to my obligations as a man and my duty as a father. It was the most difficult choice I’ve ever had to make, and
at one level I still can’t believe I’ve made it.

  I can’t bear to think I won’t see you again at the Kotli. I’ll be there anyway tomorrow, as usual. I’ll understand if you don’t want to come anymore. I’m in too much pain to be anywhere else on Saturday, so I’ll go there, even if it is to be alone with my memories.

  May the divine Providence in which both of us believes give you strength and happiness, and may some of it rub off on me.

  Always your (un) Lucky

  from Lakshman’s journal

  August 26, 1989

  She comes to him that Saturday, of course. She leaves her cycle in the shrubbery and walks softly up the old stone stairway to their lair. He is sitting on the ledge, his hair swept back by the wind, looking pensively at the river as darkness slowly reaches out to embrace the horizon. She sees him and her heartbeat catches in her veins like a scarf on a doorknob, so that she stumbles on the threshold and has to steady herself. He turns then, mist in his eyes, and when he sees her the gloom lifts off his shoulders like a veil. He rises and bounds to her, and she is caught up in his arms like a butterfly in a strong gust, fluttering but imprisoned, and he is kissing her so hard that the breath is pushed out of her. She surrenders, feeling his hands running up and down her body as if to reassure himself she is all there. He finds that she is, and his heart is delighted, his eyes sparkling in wordless pleasure as she in turn strokes his face, still silent, and he catches her fingers and kisses them, and before she knows it he is on top of her and inside her and it is as if he is strumming the same tune she has always heard and it has never stopped playing. And afterwards neither of them wants to speak because each is afraid of what the other might say.

  And they are right not to speak, for how can either of them explain what has happened? It is a blur in his mind, and yet an indelible blur. He peels off her clothing, the soft cotton skirt with the swirling print, the comfortably loose blouse, as light and flammable as the spirit it sheathes. The hooks of her bra do not resist him this time, her panties slide off like a wisp, and she is naked in his urgent arms, unquestioning in her surrender. He is still kissing her as he turns her around, and she shows no surprise at finding herself on her knees on the mat. He is behind her now, tugging at his belt, and he sees them both in the mirror, that long mirror in which they have so often seen the sunset, except that what it reveals now in the shadows is the paleness of her beneath him on her hands and knees, her face averted, her breasts swaying with each thrust as he takes her from behind. He is transported by his conquest as he watches her in the mirror and beneath him, the curve of her back vividly stretched in her submission, his hands on the soft flesh below her hips as he drives home his message of need and possession. He remembers that this is not supposed to happen, that this is the one thing she will not do, but he has not asked and she has not resisted. He keeps his eyes open throughout, blinking only briefly in climax, and in his wonderment he does not see, or he imagines he cannot see, the solitary tear that drops gently down her love-saddened face.

  Geetha Lakshman at the Shiva Mandir

  September 2, 1989

  Every Saturday I have come here with my daughter to pray, Swamiji, and I have sought your blessings and your advice. Remember how you told me that a devout woman like me should not hesitate to come to you with any kind of problem? Tonight I really need your help, Swamiji.

  Yesterday my husband’s friend Gurinder told me he had to speak to me. He said he had thought about it for a long time and hesitated but now he felt he had no choice. He made me swear not to breathe a word to my husband about what he was going to tell me. And then he said — aiyo, such a terrible thing. He said my husband was in love with another woman and wanted to leave me. It was the yellow-haired American woman, of course. And he was thinking of leaving my daughter and me and running off with her to America.

  Gurinder said he was telling me this because he wanted me to do everything I could to prevent this from happening. He wanted, he said, to save my husband from himself. He was doing this as a friend, because my husband would not listen to his advice that what he was doing was wrong.

  What can I do, I wailed. That is up to you, Gurinder said. Plead with him. Love him. Make him feel he must stay. You must fight to keep your husband, Geetha, or you will lose him.

  Swamiji, my heart broke. When Gurinder left I rushed to my husband’s study, where he keeps all his papers. He is often there, even at night, writing, writing, so much. He gets up at night to go and write there and I pretend to be asleep because I know he doesn’t want me to know what he’s doing. Sometimes, in the old days, when he went to work I used to sneak in and read what he had written. But it was all very difficult Yinglish poetry that I could not understand. So for a long time I had not bothered to read his writings. Now I knew I had to.

  This time it was heartbreaking, Swamiji. What Gurinder had told me is true! He is having an affair with this woman. He has written so many chhi-chhi things about the things they do together. And he has written that he does not love me and he is thinking of leaving me and our daughter. What can I do, Swamiji? I cannot talk to him about this. It would kill me if I had to tell him what I knew! I can only turn to God, Swamiji, and to you. Please conduct a special puja for me to help me keep my husband!

  Yes, of course, Swamiji. Beyond a puja? Anything you say. No, no, I don’t have to ask my husband for money. My father will send you the money. I don’t care about the expense. I don’t care how you do it. Use tantra, do the tandava, use anyone and anything you want, Swamiji, but please don’t let this foreign devil-woman run away with my husband….

  Ram Charan Gupta to Randy Diggs

  (translated from Hindi)

  October 12, 1989

  I shall be frank with you, Mr. Diggs. I don’t know whether I am wasting my time talking to you. You foreign journalists and photographers who cover India are only interested in the kind of India you want to see. The horrible, dark India of killing and riots, like this riot that you are so interested in, of course: it is all of a piece with the stories of poverty and disease, of the widows of Benares, the caste system and the untouchables, poor people selling their blood or their kidneys, the slums of Calcutta or Bombay, brides being burned for not having brought enough dowry — how many such stories have you written for your American readers, Mr. Diggs? Of course it is even better if the bad things about India are being set right by kind white Christians — Mother Teresa is a real favorite of yours, I’m sure, especially after she won the Nobel Prize, and isn’t a white man making a lot of money these days by selling the pornography of poverty in something he calls “The City of Joy”? I do not deny that these things exist in India, Mr. Diggs, but they are only a part of our reality, and not such a large part of it either. But it is all that you and your cohorts in the foreign press are interested in, and you tell the world that is what India is all about.

  You protest, Mr. Diggs? Just because I am speaking to you in Hindi, do not think I cannot read your English-American papers. In fact I will add to my indictment. I have only listed your bad-news stories, and I know you write less negative pieces too. But what are those, Mr. Diggs? Exotic local color. The maharajas and their palaces, their polo games, their fabulous wealth, their lavish lifestyles. You westerners are fascinated by them long after they have lost whatever importance they had in my country. Of course you write about Rajasthan, its colorful festivals, the Pushkar Mela, the camel fairs, the religious pilgrimages, the beaches of Goa, the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho. I am glad this brings a few tourists in to spend their American dollars in my country, but do not think, Mr. Diggs, that you or they are seeing “India” either.

  So what does that leave us with when it comes to hard news, Mr. Diggs? Simplicities. Hindu-Muslim violence; “Hindu fundamentalism”; the secular Congress Party; the westernized pilot Rajiv Gandhi; the fanatic forces of Hindu revivalism. How many dozens of foreign correspondents are there in Delhi, Mr. Diggs? And how many of those have departed from this stale menu? How
many have written stories that pay honor to India’s great culture and civilization, its history, the complexities and philosophical grandeur of Hinduism? I know of very few, Mr. Diggs. I have no reason to believe you are an exception.

  I know you are only interviewing me about this riot because an American girl was killed in it. Tragically killed, I grant you that. But dozens of Hindu youths were also killed, stabbed, wounded, and they do not matter to you. You and your tribe will write of attacks on minorities in India, especially Christians, but you will not mention that minorities — Jews, Parsis, Christians, and even Muslims — have found refuge in this country for two thousand years and have been allowed to practice their own faith without hindrance by Hindu rulers. When will you and your friends in the foreign press give your readers an article on the richness and glory of this ancient country, Mr. Diggs, its varied and profound civilization?

  Don’t bother to answer me: I know what the truth is. Even before you arrive in Delhi, you foreign presswallahs already have your biases, stereotypes, predilections about India, and they never change with experience. Some of your clichés are romantic ones: John Masters, Gunga Din, the Bengal Lancers, Kipling’s innocent Western jungle boy surrounded by the dark animals of the Hindu kingdom — you know them all. But their stories are not my stories, Mr. Diggs. You are writing Western stories for a Western audience and telling them you are writing about India.

  And some of your preconceptions are the obvious ones: poverty, the caste system, the untouchables, religious strife. Your norm is a world without any of these, a world that is prosperous, clean, and tranquil. But do you not have Harlem, Mr. Diggs? Or Appalachia? Don’t think I do not know about your American poverty. Or your discrimination against your Negroes, your so-called blacks. Isn’t that a hundred times worse than our caste system? After all, very often you cannot tell a man’s caste by looking at him, but you can always tell black from white at first glance, can’t you? And don’t you have your own Christian Coalition? How is that different from our Sangh Parivar? Or is religious belief only acceptable in politics if it is Christian, not Hindu?