Riot

~ ~ ~

from Priscilla Hart’s scrapbook

February 14, 1989

…

“No, I’m not particularly young for this job. By the time Jesus Christ was my age, he’d been crucified.”

I laughed a little uncertainly, not knowing how to take this. “Do you see your role here as some sort of Messiah to the people?”

“No,” he said directly. “Do you?”

I was a bit taken aback at this. “Me? No! Why?”

“Well, you’ve come to this benighted place, leaving behind all your creature comforts, your microwave ovens and video stores and thirty-one flavors of ice cream, to live in the armpit of India and work in population control. Why do you do it?”

“Population-control awareness,” I corrected him. “I’m just teaching — I mean telling — people about their rights, about what’s out there, what can help them. That’s all,” I added, knowing as I said it that I was sounding more defensive than I should.

“Why? Are you pursuing some sort of missionary vocation?”

“Don’t be silly. I mean, I am a believing Methodist, but my church didn’t send me here. I’m here as a student anyway,” I replied, a little more spiritedly. “Doing my field research. It all fits in, and I’m glad to be useful.”

“Useful,” he murmured, his fingertips touching under his chin, an amused look in his eye. “I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that usefulness is the last refuge of the unappealing. But even a man of his proclivities would have to agree that that last adjective doesn’t apply to you.”

It took me a second to get his meaning, and then I blushed. So help me God, I blushed.

“I didn’t know Indian administrators were required to read Oscar Wilde,” I ventured a little lamely, to cover up my confusion.

“God, we read everything,” he replied. “What else is there to do in these godforsaken places they post us to? But Wilde, actually, I performed in college. St. Stephens. ‘The Importance of Being Earnest.’ My friends and I loved his use of language. ‘Arise, sir, from that semirecumbent posture!’ ‘Truth is rarely pure, and never simple.’ ‘Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?’ For months after the play we went around talking in Wildeisms, some of which we made up ourselves. It got to the point where I could no longer tell the authentic Oscar epigrams from the ones I’d invented on the spur of some particularly opportune moment. I’m afraid the one I just came up with may well have been one of my own. A mere Lakshmanism.” He laughed, lightly, softly, and that was the moment I knew I wanted him to kiss me.

“That’s an India I’ve never known,” I said.

“The India that performs ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’? That makes up Wildean epigrams? That considers the pun to be mightier than the sword? You haven’t met many Stephanians, then. The products of St. Stephen’s College, the oldest college in Delhi University and the best institution of higher education in India— just ask any Stephanian. The one place where you could actually have a classmate saying, ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my silk kurtas.’ Mind you, we produce all sorts of Stephanians. I should put you in touch with our chief cop here, Gurinder. No Wildean — quite the opposite, in fact — but in his own way, he’s far worse than me.” He smiled, dazzlingly, a perfect set of white teeth against the darkness of his face. “Priscilla, my dear, we’re just as Indian as the pregnant women in your population-control proawareness programs. Unless you think you’re somehow less authentically American than the welfare queen from Harlem.”

I grimaced inwardly at the last stereotype but saw the point he was making, so just nodded.

A little grinning boy brought in tea. “Ah, Mitha Mohammed,” Lakshman greeted him. “His tea is always too sweet. He has a heavy hand with the sugar, which is why we call him Sweet Mohammed. You don’t have to drink it if you don’t want to.” He took a large gulp from his own cup anyway as the boy, still grinning, salaamed and left. “But how come you haven’t met many Stephanians? Didn’t you say you’d lived three years in Delhi?”

“Yes, but I was a kid then,” I replied. “Just fifteen when I — we — left. I was at the American International School the whole time. The only Indians I knew were kids whose parents were working for American companies, or who’d already studied abroad for one reason or another before coming here and so couldn’t go back to an Indian school. My parents didn’t know that many Indian families, and those who came to the house didn’t bring kids. So the only Indians I really got to know were our servants.”

“That sounds awful,” he said with a grim expression on his face, and I thought I’d caused some terrible offense. But he laughed again. “What a deprived childhood you’ve had, Priscilla. My poor little rich American kid.”

As he said it, he leaned over to pat my hand, which was on my lap, and I felt myself blushing again, a deep shade of crimson this time, I was sure. “We were hardly rich,” I retorted. “Middle-class, maybe. My mother taught school.”

“Look, Priscilla, by Indian standards an American janitor’s rich,” he said. “Do you know what salaries are like here? You may think I live like a king here, and in many ways I suppose I do, but my take-home pay would put me below the poverty line in the United States. I’d be eligible for food stamps!” He seemed delighted to be able to make a cultural reference few in India would have understood. He’s pretty clued up, I found myself thinking, and then — But that’s what he’s trying to show me.

“Speaking of food, are you getting hungry?” he asked. “Do you have dinner plans? Because if not, I’m sure Geetha and Rekha would be very happy to see you again.”

I began to protest that I couldn’t possibly impose, but he waved away my objections. “Look, the servants always cook more than we can eat, so it’s really no extra trouble,” he said. “But the one thing I should do is to let Geetha know you’re coming, so she’s not taken by surprise.”

He picked up the phone, spoke to an assistant in Hindi, smiled at me as he waited and then spoke again in Hindi, this time, I guessed, to a servant at home. I looked around his office a little uncomfortably: shabby walls, government-issue furniture with musty files tumbling off the shelves, a calendar with a garish picture of some Hindu gods hanging crooked and forlorn on one side. This was a man blissfully unaware of the importance of appearances. Then his wife came on the phone and any embarrassment I might have felt at intruding on their privacy disappeared, since he spoke to her in a rapid-fire southern language of which I did not know a word. There was a bit of an exchange between them; he seemed insistent, and after a few minutes hung up with a wry smile.

“Look, I really don’t want to be any trouble,” I began. “Why don’t we do this some other time?”

“It’s no trouble at all,” he assured me. “I just caught Geetha on her way to the temple. I’d forgotten Tuesday is one of her usual temple evenings. But dinner’s fine — it’ll just be a bit later. Would you mind very much if we had dinner, say, in two hours from now?”

I was still hesitating — not because I didn’t want more of his company, but because of the apparent awkwardness of the situation, and also because I wasn’t sure how I could put the intervening time to good use — when he spoke again. “Have you seen the Kotli?” he asked suddenly.

I shook my head.

“Then you must!” he replied, grinning with delight. “Zalilgarh’s only authentic historic sight. You’ve been here two months and still haven’t seen it?” He tut-tutted theatrically while rising from his desk. “I must take you there. And dusk is the perfect time. You’ll see the sunset over the river.” He briefly gripped my upper arm as if to lift me from the chair. His grasp was strong, firm, yet light; I didn’t want him to remove his hand. “Come. It’ll fill the time very nicely until Geetha is ready for us.”

He rang a bell. A chaprassi came in to carry his briefcase to the waiting car.

“My bike?” I asked, uncertainly.

“You can leave it here,” he said. “My driver will drop you home after dinner, and you can pick up your cycle again in the morning.”

Well, I thought, getting into his official Ambassador car, here’s a man who thinks of everything.

from Randy Diggs’s notebook

October 11, 1989

Of course there’s no real hotel in Zalilgarh. Why would they need one? Just a few “lodges” for traveling salesmen and whores, dingy rooms above fly-infested restaurants. But the embassy has managed to get the government to give the Harts the use of the official Public Works Department guest house, which is where visiting officials stay when they’re touring the district. There is a bit of confusion when it turns out the staff only prepared one bedroom for Mr. and Mrs. Hart. Word of their divorce has apparently failed to penetrate down to the PWD caretakers. Nor have they been told about me. But the guest house is empty except for us. So, after a bit of to-do and some anxious hand-wringing on the part of the main uniformed attendant, not to mention the two twenty-rupee notes I slipped into his folded hands, a couple of additional locked rooms are opened up for our use. They’re musty and haven’t been dusted in weeks, and the once-white sheets on the beds are rough and stained, but I’ve no doubt they’re better than the alternatives in town. Hart seems glad enough to take my word for it.

After a government-issue dinner (atmosphere strained, soup not), Mrs. Hart retires to her room. Hart must be exhausted too — the jet lag, the courtesy meetings at the embassy, the slow and bumpy ride down from Delhi. His face, his eyes especially, tell the story: he hasn’t slept in days. But he wants to talk. We sit on the verandah in reclining wooden chairs whose woven-cane seats have begun to sag, and the mosquitoes buzz around our ears. Hart swats at them irritably until I produce a can of insect-repellent spray. “Thanks. Didn’t have the time to think about this stuff,” he says shamefacedly.

I always think about this stuff, of course. And also about booze. Hart looks almost pathetically grateful when I extract a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black from my bag and get a couple of plain glass tumblers from the attendant. No ice. Hart doesn’t seem to mind. He clutches his glass so hard I’m grateful it’s thick PWD issue — a finer glass would have left him with crystal embedded in his palm. So we sit there, the gloom barely dispelled by the dim light of a solitary bulb in a metal lampshade (dipping and flaring alarmingly with the inevitable voltage fluctuations), the buzzing mosquitoes — maddened and repelled by our proximity and our chemicals — swirling around us. And we talk. Or rather, Hart talks, and I listen, letting the tape recorder run discreetly, scrawling the occasional note.

Rudyard Hart to Randy Diggs

October 11, 1989

I asked for India, you know. The office couldn’t believe it. “What the hell d’ya want to go down theah for?” they asked in Atlanta. Coke had a decent-sized operation in India, but it was headed by an Indian, fellow called Kisan Mehta. Since he took over Coca-Cola India in 1964 the only Americans around had been visiting firemen, you know, checking out one thing or another, basically coming to remind the bottlers and the distributors that they had a big multinational corporation behind them. No American executive had been assigned full-time by Coca-Cola to India since the early 1960s.

But I was so goddamned persistent they relented and let me go after all. Just before Christmas 1976, I was named marketing director for India. I’d argued that a dose of good ol’ American energy and marketing technique was all that stood between us and real takeoff. Coke had opened its first plant in India in 1950, and at the time that I was asking to be assigned there, late ’76, we had twenty-two plants, with about 200,000 distributors. Not a bad rate of growth, you might think, but I was convinced we could do better. They were selling about 35 million cases of Coke a year in India in those days — a case had twenty-four bottles, seven-ounce bottles, two hundred milliliters in Indian terms. As far as I was concerned, that was nothing. A country with a middle class about a hundred million strong, and we couldn’t get each of them to drink just one small Coke a week? I argued that with the right approach, we should be selling 200 million cases in India, not 35 million. And that was a conservative estimate, because a Coke a week per middle-class Indian was really nothing, and I was confident we could exceed my own projections.

Besides, I wanted to go to India. I’d heard so much about the place: my parents had been missionaries there. They’d loved it, the whole schtick, the Taj Mahal, The Jungle Book, you name it. They’d even named me Rudyard in honor of Kipling, can you believe it? By the time I was born they had moved to China, but my parents were still so nostalgic for India that they were dreaming Bengal Lancers in the land of Pearl Buck. The missionary life came to an end when China went Communist, and I grew up mainly in the States, but my parents left me with an abiding dream of India that I never shook off.

Much of my working life was spent in companies that had overseas operations everywhere but India. But when I joined Coke I knew this could be my chance. Katharine wasn’t thrilled, I’ll admit it. I had wanted to take her to India for our honeymoon, but she didn’t want to go and we ended up in Niagara Falls instead. She always hated our foreign travels. Always preferred the life she knew in the States, her books, her teaching, to any exotic foreign adventure. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to work in India. She was afraid the kids’ schooling would be disrupted. She argued long against it, but I wouldn’t listen. In the end she gave in and I figured she’d just accepted how much I wanted this for us. For us.

We arrived in Delhi in early 1977. January first week, I believe it was. God, it was great to be there. The weather was fabulous, cool and sunny in January. The government was making all the right noises about opening up the economy to foreign investment. Mrs. Gandhi had been quite hostile to America up to that point, and you remember she’d proclaimed a state of emergency in mid-’75 and darkly claimed the CIA was out to destabilize her government. But with her opponents locked up and the press censored, she thawed quite a bit, and when I was still in Atlanta I’d read about her unexpected appearance at Ambassador Saxbe’s for dinner, which everyone interpreted as a major signal that she wanted to really open up to America. And, of course, to American companies. Her younger son, Sanjay, was already talking to McDonald’s about coming into India. We, Coke, were already in India, of course, but the possibilities seemed limitless.

Mehta told me soon after I arrived about the earlier warning signs. India had passed a law called FERA, the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, in 1973, which governed the activities of all companies involved in international trade. One of the provisions of the law, Section 29 I believe it was, required foreign companies doing business in India to apply again to the government for registration, in other words to be reapproved to do business here. We treated this as just another bureaucratic requirement in a country obsessed with forms and procedures — you know these Indians, red tape runs in their veins. So we applied, quite routinely, and the government sat on our application, also quite predictably, and we went on doing business, so nothing was really affected by FERA. Except that, as Kisan Mehta reminded me, our case was still pending with the regulatory bodies, and in the meantime a fair bit of political hostility had been whipped up against us.

It seemed faintly absurd to us in Atlanta or elsewhere in the world that Coke should have become an object of political controversy at all. Sure, there were always people on the hysterical left, whether in Latin America or in India, who would scream that Coca-Cola was a CIA plot, but the attacks on Coke in India were particularly bizarre. People would stand up in Parliament and accuse us of “looting the country” and “destroying the health of Indians.” One firebrand socialist, George Fernandes, demanded to know, “What kind of a country is India, where you can get Coke in the cities but not clean drinking water in the villages?” Another of his comrades stood up and asked in Parliament, “Why do we need Coca-Cola?” I remember, just before I came out to India, meeting the chairman of the company, Paul Austin, and hearing him marvel that, in a country with so many pressing problems, Indian members of Parliament actually had the time to devote to attacking Coca-Cola! But it didn’t faze us. We’d been through worse as a company in France in 1949—50, when attempts to ban Coke nearly led to a trade war. We could handle our share of lefty nationalist hysteria.

Amidst all of this, Mrs. Gandhi ended her state of emergency and called an election. I guess you’ve done your homework on those days, but it was an incredible time, Randy. She had been a dictator, for all practical purposes, for the twenty-two months she’d ruled under emergency decrees, and here she was, allowing the victims of her dictatorship the right to decide whether she could continue her tyranny! India’s an astonishing place, and this was India at its most astonishing. We’d barely unpacked when the election campaign began, and it was as if we’d pitched our tents in a hurricane. Before I had even drawn up my marketing strategy and got moving toward the first phase of my two-hundred-million-cases target, Mrs. Gandhi had been defeated in the elections and a new coalition government, the Janata government, took office. And guess who was named Minister for Industry in the new cabinet? Coke’s favorite Indian politician, the socialist George Fernandes. Minister against Industry might have been a better title for him.

Kisan Mehta had already urged me not to be too ambitious. Our sales curves in India showed a growth rate comparable to Coke in Japan, he said. This is not the time to rock the boat by trying to double our speed when we should be happy that we’re sailing at all. But I didn’t listen to him. I thought I knew better.

Now, you’ve got to understand that Coca-Cola India was actually a wholly owned company, wholly owned by Coca-Cola in the U.S., and what we did was to manufacture and supply Coke concentrates, plus provide the marketing and technical support to our franchisees. The bottlers were all Indian-owned companies that bought the concentrates from us. This way we kept control of the product and of our secret formula, 7X, but we didn’t need to employ more than a hundred people in India ourselves. The downside of this was that we were very definitely a foreign company in India.

Well, Mr. Fernandes lost no time in going after foreign companies. IBM and Coke became his first victims. He demanded that we indigenize our operations and that Coke, specifically, should release our secret formula to the authorities as the price of doing business in India. We refused. Paul Austin said at the time, “If India wants Coke, they’ll have to have it on our terms.” Well, India — at least as represented by this Indian government — didn’t want Coke on our terms. In August 1977, eight months after I’d gotten to India, our long-pending application under Section 29 of FERA was rejected by the government. Coke was ordered to wind up in India.

It was a helluva blow, I’ll tell you that, Randy. Not just professionally, though that was bad enough. We spent two million dollars grinding up every Coca-Cola bottle in India, and all we got in return was publicity for the sanctity of our secret formula. Big deal. I’d uprooted my family and dragged them halfway across the world and now it seemed the whole reason for doing so had disappeared. It didn’t make sense, when they’d just settled down to life and school in India, to uproot them again and drag them back, and frankly it’s not as if Coke had something better to offer me back in Atlanta either. Plus there was the question of professional pride. Coke was keeping on a skeleton staff to handle all the liquidation work, including an interminable excise tax case going back decades, so I asked to stay on with them. I felt that if there was a creative way back for Coke in India, I was the man to find it. I wanted desperately to be able to vindicate, one day, my original decision to come to India.

So we stayed on. My eldest son, Kim, was in his last years of high school, and the company agreed I should stay until he’d finished, trying to get Coke back into business here. Katharine had found a job teaching at the American International School. The pay was terrible, but at least it meant she had something to do besides resenting India and me. Lance, the youngest, was just a kid, a bit slow, what they’re now beginning to call learning-disabled, and he was happy enough wherever he was. It was Priscilla that India had the greatest impact on. She was twelve when we arrived, just awakening, I suppose, to adolescence and emotional maturity, and it all happened here. I never thought of her in making my decisions, whether to come or to stay, and now I know it was her I should have thought of the most.

Yes, thanks, I’ll have another. Didn’t have the time to think about getting this stuff. Glad you did. Nah, don’t worry about soda. I like the stuff neat. Doesn’t do anything to me, really. Except makes me talk.

The professional challenge soon turned out to be a hopeless one. I may as well admit it, though at the time I kept trying to persuade myself and Atlanta that I was on the verge of a breakthrough. With shrewd advice from that old veteran Kisan Mehta, I came up with one clever scheme after another, but nothing worked. I tried to work with the Indian bottlers, who were initially the hardest hit by the government’s decision, to generate a change of attitude, pointing out that it was Indians, not just an American company, who’d been hurt by the expulsion of Coke. No dice. And the bottlers figured out soon enough that they could do just as well manufacturing Indian substitutes for Coke, free of the threat of international competition, so that argument lost its force as Thums Up and Campa-Cola were born and thrived in the vacuum we’d left behind. In fact George Fernandes even got the government into the soft drink business, converting a dozen Coke bottling plants to the service of a product called 77. Or maybe it was Spirit of 77. Anyway, it was a rather feeble spirit, and it disappeared pretty quickly from the market. But with all this stuff coming out, I needed another approach to try and bring Coke back into business.

One idea that occurred to me was to take a leaf out of the Pepsi strategy in the Soviet Union. You remember how Pepsi had slipped behind the Iron Curtain while we were still blacklisted there? Their trick was to offer a real quid pro quo — marketing a Soviet product, in their case vodka, in America in exchange for being allowed to market their product, Pepsi, in the USSR. It worked for Pepsi in Moscow, but not for Coke in Delhi. I suggested that we could use Coca-Cola’s expertise to set up a chain of stores in the U.S. selling Indian handicrafts, bringing major export revenues to India, in exchange for resuming our sales of Coke in India. The Indian bureaucracy considered it for about three months, then nixed that too.

I kept on trying, Randy. That was the story of my three years in India — trying to get Coke back to a firm foothold in this market, in the face of impossible odds. How ironic it felt, during this time, to be attacked as a tool of Western imperialism! The old imperialists just marched in and took over, or took what they wanted, or both. Here we were desperately trying to court the Indian authorities, inventing new ways to please them, asking to be allowed to bring them the pleasure that our product could provide. This is imperialism?

I’ll give you one example. The government had different rules for joint venture companies, so I tried to figure out a way to get those rules to apply to us. Coke itself would have to remain in American hands, of course, so I tried to invent a partnership between Coke and the bottlers that would qualify as a joint venture. But that didn’t wash with the Indian regulators. Then I spent an incredible amount of time with a whole bunch of lawyers inventing a scheme under which we’d establish a different Indian company in which Coke would have only a forty-percent stake; we’d manufacture the Coke concentrate ourselves, of course, as before, but we’d transfer it, at cost, to this new company, which would be the company actually selling the product to the bottlers.

I was making some headway in getting the Indian authorities interested in the idea when I found my home base slipping away from under my feet. Atlanta was not interested in pursuing such an unusual strategy for the kinds of rewards India seemed likely to offer. One of the suits in Atlanta wrote me a stern memo: “Coke is a product avidly sought by countries around the world. We shouldn’t dilute our own prestige by bending over backwards to accommodate every unreasonable demand of every intransigent government.” Every unreasonable demand of every intransigent government. I still remember the phrase. Those words are practically burned into my brain. It was with them, I think, that I began to stop trying.

I was still going to stay on in India till Kim finished school, of course, but increasingly I was just going through the motions. And, I’ll admit, I had found other ways to occupy my time. What the hell, it all came out in the divorce proceedings, anyway, so I may as well tell you.

I began an affair, Randy. In the most obviously predictable way possible. With my secretary.

Looking back, I’m ashamed of myself, and I suppose I was ashamed of myself even then, except that I was too blinded by own desires to see my own shame. That’s probably the missionary’s son talking. My marriage to Katharine had settled into a rut. Sometimes a rut can be a comfortable place to be, but ours was full of too many differences and resentments to be wholly comfortable. I had always had my own way in the marriage — about what we’d do, where we’d do it, when, how. Katharine had always argued, and always given in. In the process she’d become more resentful, I guess, except that I was too busy with my own work to notice. But in turn she was less and less appealing to me. She’s a couple of years older than me, I guess you know that, but that wasn’t all. Those stolid American middle-class values, her sensible clothes, her sense of responsibility, her moderation in all things — frankly, they bored me. We made love less and less, and she didn’t even seem to miss it.

I did.

But I didn’t miss making love with her. What I missed, frankly, was sex. The excitement of discovering a woman’s body, opening her up to my touch, possessing her as no one like me had possessed her before. That’s what I was seeking, and that’s what I found with Nandini.

She was exotic, Randy. I mean it — exotic. She shimmered into the office in gorgeous saris, bedecked with jewelry, fragrant with attar of roses, every nail perfectly painted, every hair in place. She smiled dazzlingly at me, her slightly uneven teeth gleaming, and she answered the phone in that convent-educated English with that special lilt only Indian women can manage, and she drove me crazy. I would call her in to dictate some meaningless routine correspondence and ask her to read it back to me just so I could hear her voice lend magic to my words. And also, I’ll admit it, so I could look at her.

Have you felt the allure of the exotic yourself, Randy? All right, you don’t have to answer that. Just give me some more of your Scotch. Sure you don’t want some yourself? Anyway, where was I? Yes, Nandini. Nandini was simply so unlike Katharine, I could have been dallying with another species. She wore little sleeveless blouses that revealed a generous amount of cleavage whenever that front fold of her sari slipped, which it did often enough, whenever she turned, or bent to pick up something, or moved in a dozen different ways. And then, of course, there was the sari itself. What a garment, Randy! There isn’t another outfit in the world that balances better the twin feminine urges to conceal and reveal. It outlines the woman’s shape but hides the faults a skirt can’t — under a sari a heavy behind, unflattering legs are invisible. But it also reveals the midriff, a part of the anatomy most Western women hide all the time. I was mesmerized, Randy, by the mere fact of being able to see her belly button when she walked, the single fold of flesh above the knot of her sari, the curve of her waist toward her hips. That swell of flesh just above a woman’s hipbone, Randy, is the sexiest part of the female anatomy to me. And I didn’t even have to undress her to see it. I was completely smitten.

And she was attracted to me, too. I could see that. In her smile, in her way of talking, in her eyes when she looked at me. It was not just that she was trying to ingratiate herself with her boss. The signals she sent me were quite clear.

It still took me some time to read them. But one day, late one evening, in my office, when everyone else had gone, it just happened, as these things do.

She was on my side of the desk, standing next to me as she looked over my shoulder at a document I wanted her to retype. As I explained my revisions to her, she looked at the document and took quick notes on her steno pad. Then at one point, she dropped her pencil accidentally, right into my lap. Instinctively, she reached down to pick it up.

My hand closed on hers, keeping it in my lap.

“I like it there,” I said.

Don’t worry, I’m not drunk. I can handle this stuff. I even used to live on Indian Scotch, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. “Indian-made foreign liquor,” they used to call it. Would you believe it! “Indianmade foreign liquor.” But it was better than the fake Scotch the bootleggers peddled at four times the price. There was more Johnnie Walker Black Label sold in India than was ever manufactured in Scotland, I can tell you that. Go ahead, pour away.

It’s good I can hardly see your face in this light, Randy. I don’t have any excuse for myself, and at the time I wasn’t really looking for any. I wanted her, it was as simple as that. And at a time when I wasn’t able to have much else I wanted, Nandini came as a source of pure, unqualified satisfaction.

When she moved her hand, it was not to extricate herself but to burrow her fingers deeper into my lap. “I like it there, too,” she said.

And then she was kneeling by my side and I could smell the fragrance of the attar of roses, I could sense the pressure of those uneven teeth, I felt those elegant fingers on my thigh, and I was in another world, in my office and yet completely outside it, my head swirling with pleasures tangible and imagined. .

That was how it began, Randy. And it continued, madly, obsessively, everywhere I could contrive — in hotel rooms booked by the company for visitors who hadn’t yet arrived, on official trips where no secretary had been taken before, and of course at the office, mainly on the couch where I received visitors.

And once, thrillingly, on my desk. I came back one day from a particularly frustrating meeting with a smug functionary called the Controller of Capital Issues and Foreign Investments, having heard in tones of complacent arrogance that I was pushing what his government considered an “inessential product.” Furious and defeated, I stormed into my office. Nandini walked in behind me, concerned, and closed the door. “Bad meeting?” she asked, gently rubbing the nape of my neck, where a hard knot of tension throbbed.

In response, I turned around and kissed her full on the mouth, holding her so tightly that she almost gasped for breath as I prised her mouth open with an insistent tongue. Without a further word, I pushed her onto the desk, unzipping myself with one hand without releasing my grip on her, then lifting her sari and slip and thrusting myself into her. At that moment, her surrender was total, and for me, that was all that mattered. Her eyes were closed, her bare arms in that sleeveless blouse flung back, her legs splayed as they dangled from the desk, and I was on top, deep inside her, her conqueror. It didn’t last very long, but in those few minutes in which I forgot myself, I regained my sense of who I was, and why I was here, and what I had come to do.

I’m sorry, Randy. Do I sound like a shit? Sometimes when I relive those moments I feel I’m reminding myself that I really am the complete asshole Katharine portrayed in divorce court.

In hindsight it’s easy to see it inexorably coming to an end. At the time all I could think about was how to make it even better. Nandini was chafing at constantly having to watch out for noises at the office door, constantly having to hurry to vacate a hotel room, constantly having to avoid detection. She wanted, she said, to be alone with me without having to feel tense all the time. Her own place was impossible, not just because she was married, but because she lived with an aged mother who was always in the house. So it had to be mine.

I brought method to my madness. I took a greater interest in my wife’s and kids’ school schedules than I had ever done before, learning by heart her library hours, Kim’s bagpipe lesson schedule, the servants’ siesta times. Even allowing for a half-hour’s margin of error on either side, the house was completely empty from one to three-thirty on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons.

On those days I dismissed the driver and took Nandini home myself, confident it was absolutely safe. She loved being there, sinking into the American king-sized bed that Katharine and I had carried around the world with us, seeing us naked together in the full-length mirror, relishing the quiet efficiency of the air-conditioning. And what did I feel, thrashing about with my secretary on the bed in which my wife of twenty years would sleep, her back to me in a flannel nightdress, a few hours later? A twinge of guilt, I’d like to think, but mainly, if I’m honest with myself, excitement, a sense of having reclaimed the conjugal bed for its rightful purpose.

By the time we began trysting at my place, matters were coming to a head anyway. Kim was almost finished at school, and I was ready to admit failure to my bosses and accept a transfer somewhere else. Nandini was beginning to ask about our future and I had not even considered whether we had one. I had embarked on our relationship without thinking beyond the next day. It was clear she had gone much further. Nandini was seeing herself in my marital bed, and convincing herself that’s where she belonged. I was beginning to feel trapped.

One night Katharine noticed a suspicious scent on the sheet, and wondered if one of the servants were taking their siesta in her bed. Their injured protestations of innocence made it clear the idea was unthinkable to them. Before long Katharine began to think of another possibility she had considered unthinkable.

You find this embarrassing, Randy? Nah, you journalists have pretty thick skins. You’ve heard worse, I’m sure. But this is all off the record. You understand that. Fact is, when I’ve had a few I talk too much. Especially these days. It’s all I’ve got left, Randy. Words.

Yeah, pour the rest. There isn’t much left. Might as well finish the bottle.

So Katharine was beginning to get suspicious. But it wasn’t my wife who found out. It was Priscilla. And in the worst possible way.

Of all of us, it was Priscilla who led the most Indian life. Kim had his high school friends and his exams; Lance had a small group of American friends with a shared addiction to comics, which they exchanged incessantly; Katharine had her teaching and the household; I had my work and Nandini. Priscilla was the one person with a genuine curiosity about Indians — not the handful of Americanized rich kids she met in her school, but what she called “real Indians.” Early on she decided to teach the alphabet to our servants, and was soon giving them reading lessons after dinner. One day she went with the gardener to his home and came back with a horrified account of his family’s poverty. I had no choice but to double his wage. Soon everyone who did any work for us wanted her to visit them too.

It was Priscilla who was the most active member of the school social service league, Priscilla who volunteered to read to blind children, Priscilla who helped Sundays at the Catholic orphanage. She didn’t know a single Indian with a college degree or a fancy job, but she really cared for the underside of this society.

So inevitably, when the dhobi’s young son, who carried the bundles of laundry for his father, came to our home looking feverish and ill one Wednesday, it was Priscilla who insisted he rest instead of continuing with his father’s rounds. I was already at the office; I only learned this later. When the father protested that he could not possibly take the boy back home with so many visits left to make, Priscilla declared the child could rest at our place, aspirined and blanketed, and be picked up by his father at the end of the dhobi’s day. And it was typical of Priscilla, of course, that she would decide to skip her regular afterschool commitments to come home early and make sure her patient had been properly fed by the servants and was doing well.

If I had paid more attention to my daughter, I would have realized all this. And I would not have been at home, buck naked and whooping as I took Nandini doggy-style, slapping her ample behind like a cowboy taming a mare, when Priscilla, puzzled by the noise, opened the door.

She didn’t scream. She didn’t slam the door. She didn’t run away. Instead, she just stood there, her baby blue eyes widening in bewilderment and hurt, not comprehending what was going on, not wanting to comprehend. And as I saw her, I stopped moving, frozen in shame and embarrassment.

“Ruddy, why do you stop?” Nandini clamored, kneeling on the bed on all fours, her breasts still swinging from the momentum of our coition, her eyes shut in ecstasy, oblivious of the intrusion.

That broke the spell in which Priscilla was imprisoned. A solitary tear escaped from one eye and rolled down her cheek. And then she began to sob.

“Priscilla,” I said, not knowing what to do. I pulled myself out of Nandini and tried to clamber off the bed while hiding myself, wanting to go to her but anxious to wear something, knowing that she had never seen me naked, let alone in these circumstances.

“Don’t come near me!” she screamed then. “I don’t want you to touch me! I hate you, Daddy!”

Everything is a blur thereafter. Nandini s little shriek, my pulling on a pair of pants, Priscilla running down the corridor crying, my setting off after her, Priscilla running blindly out of the house toward the street, my chasing her bare-chested and barefoot, trying to hold her in my arms, Priscilla struggling with me on the pavement, raining little blows on my shoulders with her fists, still sobbing. And then Katharine’s car screeching to a halt beside us and my wife, also returning early to test her suspicions, leaping out. And my marriage collapsing around me like a tent.

Lakshman to Priscilla Hart

February 27, 1989

I’m an administrator, not a political scientist, but I’d say there are five major sources of division in India — language, region, caste, class, and religion.

Very simply: There are thirty-five languages in India spoken by more than a million people each, fifteen spoken by more than ten million each. The Constitution recognizes seventeen. Take a look at this rupee note: you can see “ten rupees” written out in seventeen languages, different words, different scripts. The speakers of each major language have a natural affinity for each other, and a sense of difference from those who speak the other languages. Hindi is supposed to be the national language, but half the country doesn’t speak it and is extremely wary of any attempt to impose it on them. In my part of the country, Tamil Nadu, you’d do better asking for directions in English than in Hindi.

So language divides. And this is compounded by the fact that, within a decade after independence, the government reorganized the states on linguistic lines, so most language groups have their own political entities to look toward to give expression to their linguistic identity. The people of Punjab speak Punjabi, of Bengal Bengali, of Tamil Nadu Tamil, and so on. So we have the twenty-five states in the Indian Union becoming ethnolinguistic entities, helping give rise to strong regional feeling going beyond the states themselves. The “Hindi belt” in the North — overpopulated, illiterate, poor and clamorous — is resented by many in the better-educated, more prosperous South. And both are seen as distant and self-obsessed by the neglected Northeast. There’s a real risk of disaffection here, especially as long as power remains concentrated in Delhi and the outlying states find themselves on the periphery, paying tribute to the north.

Next, caste. That’s basically a Hindu phenomenon, but caste is hardly unknown amongst converts to other faiths, including egalitarian ones like Sikhism, Christianity, and Islam. There are hundreds of castes and subcastes across the country, but they’re broadly grouped into four major castes — the Brahmins, who’re the priests and the men of learning (which in the old days was the same thing); the Kshatriyas, who were the warriors and kings; the Vaishyas, who were the farmers and merchants; and the Sudras, who were the artisans and manual workers. Outside the caste system were the untouchables, who did menial and polluting work, scavenging, sweeping streets, removing human waste, cleaning toilets, collecting the ashes from funeral pyres. Mahatma Gandhi tried to uplift them and called them Harijans, or children of God; they soon found that patronizing and now prefer to call themselves the Dalits, the oppressed. One interesting detail that’s often overlooked: the top three castes account for fewer than twenty percent of the population. There’s a source of division to think about.

Class comes next. It’s not the same as caste, because you can be a poor Brahmin or a rich Vaishya, but as with caste, the vast majority of Indians are in the underclass. The privileged elite is, at best, five percent of the country; the middle class accounts for perhaps another twenty percent of the population; the rest of India is lower class. You can understand why the communist parties thought the country was ripe for revolution. Of course they were wrong, and one of the main reasons they were wrong (I’ll come to the other main reason in a minute) was the extent to which they underestimated the fatalism of the Indian poor, their willingness to conform to millennia of social conditioning.

This was because of the fifth great source of division in India, religion. Hinduism is great for encouraging social peace, because everyone basically believes their suffering in this life is the result of misdeeds in a past one, and their miseries in this world will be addressed in the next if only they’d shut up and be good and accept things as they are, injustices included. So Hinduism is the best antidote to Marxism. It’s interesting, in fact, how many of the leading communists before Partition were Muslims, because of their natural predisposition to egalitarianism. And Brahmins, because they had a natural affinity for dictatorships, even of the proletariat. But religion also breeds what we in this country call “communalism” — the sense of religious chauvinism that transforms itself into bigotry, and sometimes violence, against the followers of other faiths. Now we have practically every religion on earth represented on Indian soil, with the possible exception of Shintoism. So we’ve seen various kinds of clashes in our history — Hindu-Muslim, Muslim-Sikh, Sikh-Hindu, Hindu-Christian.

Now, you might be forgiven for thinking that with so much dividing us, India was bound to fall apart on one or several of these cleavages. But in fact it hasn’t, and it’s belied every doomsayer who’s predicted its imminent disintegration. The main reason for that is the other thing I said the communists were wrong about. It was that they also underestimated the resilience of Indian democracy, which gave everyone, however underprivileged or disaffected, a chance to pursue his or her hopes and ambitions within the common system. In Tamil Nadu in the South, in Mizoram in the Northeast, yesterday’s secessionists are today’s chief ministers. Agitations in defense of specific languages or specific tribal groups? No problem, deal with them by creative federalism: give the agitators their own units to rule within the federal Indian state. Naxalites chopping off the heads of landlords in Bengal? No problem, encourage the commies to go to the polls instead, and today the pro-Chinese Communist party celebrates a dozen years in power in Bengal. The untouchables want to undo three thousand years of discrimination? Fine, give them the world’s first and farthest-reaching affirmative action program, guaranteeing not just opportunities but outcomes — with reserved places in universities, quotas for government jobs, and even eighty-five seats in Parliament. The Muslims feel like a threatened minority? Tsk tsk, allow them their own Personal Law, do not interfere in any way with their social customs, however retrograde they may be, and even have the state organize and subsidize an annual Haj pilgrimage to Mecca.

Do I make it sound too easy? Believe me, it isn’t. Skulls have been broken over each of these issues. But the basic principle is simple indeed. Let everyone feel they are as much Indian as everyone else: that’s the secret. Ensure that democracy protects the multiple identities of Indians, so that people feel you can be a good Muslim and a good Bihari and a good Indian all at once.

It’s worked, Priscilla. We have given passports to a dream, a dream of an extraordinary, polyglot, polychrome, polyconfessional country. Democracy will solve the problems we’re having with some disaffected Sikhs in Punjab; and democracy, more of it, is the only answer for the frustrations of India’s Muslims too.

But who, in all of this, allowed for militant Hinduism to arise, challenging the very basis of the Indianness I’ve just described to you?

from Priscilla Hart’s scrapbook

February 14, 1989

The car stopped where the road ended, at a rusting gate with a sign forbidding entry to unauthorized visitors. The driver took a long stainless steel flashlight out of his glove compartment and got out to open the gate. It creaked painfully. Ahead, there was an overgrown path heading toward the river.

“It’s okay,” Lakshman told the driver. “You wait at the car. We’ll be back soon. Give me the torch.” The driver looked relieved, even though Lakshman took the flashlight from him, leaving him alone amid the lengthening shadows.

“He’ll probably sleep until we get back,” Lakshman assured me cheerfully.

“Tell me more about this place,” I said. “Did you say Koti?”

“Kotli,” Lakshman replied. “No one quite knows where the term comes from. A ‘kot’ is a stronghold, a castle; a ‘kothi’ is a mansion. This wonderful old heap we are about to visit is something in between. People have been calling it the Kotli for generations. It’s been a ruin for somewhat longer than anything else that’s standing in the Zalilgarh area.”

“How old is it?”

“Who knows?” he replied disarmingly. “Some say it goes back to the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and there’s probably an Archaeological Survey of India finding that confirms that, though I haven’t seen it. But it’s old, all right. And deserted.”

“Why is it all closed up? Shouldn’t you open it for tourists to visit?” I asked.

“Tourists?” Lakshman laughed. “Tourists? In Zalilgarh? My dear girl, I don’t think we’ve had a tourist here since 1543, when Sher Shah Suri camped here while building the Grand Trunk Road. Why would a tourist come to Zalilgarh? Even you don’t qualify as one.” Suddenly his hand was on my upper arm again. “Watch your step here — there’s a lot of rubble on this path. I don’t want you twisting an ankle.”

But he released his grip almost instantly as we walked on.

“What happened was that the Kotli sat here undisturbed for generations, like so many ruins elsewhere in India,” Lakshman explained. “The land from here to the river belonged to the old nawab and then to the government, so nobody could build here, and nobody wanted to, either. It’s quite an isolated place, far away from the town, near nothing. Plus there was a rumor that it was haunted.” “Haunted?”

“The story goes that the owner of the Kotli was murdered in his bed by his wife and her lover. But he never let them enjoy the fruits of their villainy. He haunted the house, wailing and shrieking and gnashing his teeth, until he had driven them away in terror. No one would live there after that, so it just fell into disuse.”

“Do people still think it’s haunted?”

“In India, myths and legends are very slow to die, Priscilla.” “Unlike the human beings,” I found myself saying. I was just trying to be clever, in keeping with his mood, but as soon as I said it I wished I hadn’t.

“Unlike the human beings,” he repeated slowly. “Now why would you say a thing like that, Priscilla? Have you seen so much of death and dying here? I’d like to think Zalilgarh has been a pretty peaceful place in recent years. Haven’t had so much as a riot since I’ve been here. And our infant mortality rates are dropping too.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. It was a foolish thing to say.”

“No, not foolish,” Lakshman said gently. “We’ve seen more unnecessary deaths and suffering in my country than I can bear to recall. It’s just that things do get better, you know. And in this respect, they have.”

We walked on in silence for a couple of minutes. Then, silhouetted against the dramatic evening sky — a blue-black canvas splashed with the angry saffron of the setting sun — I saw the Kotli.

It was a ruin, all right, but it stood strong and solid, its stone rectangular shape a striking contrast to the suppler lines of the foliageladen trees, the forlorn weeds, the flowing river beyond it. In the evening light it seemed to rise from the earth like a fist.

“Come inside,” Lakshman said, switching on his flashlight.

I picked my way over the rubble-strewn approach and, predictably, tripped, falling heavily against him. He turned quickly to hold me, but only for as long as it took to steady me. And then, as he turned again toward the Kotli, he slipped his free hand into mine.

“Come with me,” he said unnecessarily, that voice of his huskier now, a voice like mulled wine.

I felt the pressure of his hand in mine. It was a soft hand, a hand that had never wielded any instrument harder than a pen; unlike the other male hands I had held, it had never mowed a lawn, washed a dish, carried a pigskin over the touchdown line. It was the hand of a child of privilege in a land where privilege meant there were always other hands to do the heavy lifting, the rough work, for you. And yet in its softness there was a certain strength, something that conveyed reassurance, and I clung on to that hand, grateful that in the gathering gloom its owner could not see the color rising to my cheek.

We stepped into the Kotli. There was no floor left, only grass and pebbles where once thick carpets, perhaps, had covered the stone tiling. But Lakshman’s flashlight danced across the walls and ceilings, illuminating them for me. “Look,” he breathed, and I followed the torch beam to a patch of marble that still clung to the stone, the fading lines of an artist’s decorative flourish visible across its surface. The flashlight traced the vaulting lines of a nave, then moved to a delicate pattern in the stone above a paneless window, then settled on a niche where a long-ago resident might once have placed his oil lamp.

“It’s marvelous,” I said.

“Come upstairs,” Lakshman said urgently. “Before the sunset disappears entirely.”

He pulled me to the stairs, his hand insistent in mine. Part of the roof had long since disappeared, and much of the upper floor was a long open space, ending in a half-wall, like a battlement. I began to walk toward it, intending to stand at the edge, the breeze in my hair, and watch the sun set over the river. But Lakshman pulled me back.

“No,” he said. “There’s a better place.”

He walked to the right of the roof floor, the beam of his flashlight dancing, until it caught the dull glint of a padlock. This was attached to a bolted wooden door, clearly a later addition to the premises.

“Only the district magistrate has the key.” Lakshman laughed, gaily pulling a bunch from his pocket. He turned the key, extracted the lock, and pulled back the screeching bolt. “Follow me,” he said, and pushed the door open.

We stepped into a little room, no larger than a vestry. To the left was a rectangular opening in the wall, a window of sorts, through which the river and the sky were visible, framed as in a painting.

“Come and sit here,” Lakshman said.

I sat gingerly where he indicated, on a raised stone slab in an alcove where perhaps a bed had once lain. Lakshman sat beside me, crossing his legs contentedly. There was an expression on his face I hadn’t seen before, one of barely suppressed excitement.

Anticipation suffused his breathing. “Look,” he said, pointing with his flashlight, and then switching it off.

I looked, and felt my blood tingle. Directly across from us a mirror had been hung on the wall. It was pitted black with age in places, but it still served, a silvery glint upon the stone. When Lakshman’s beam of light went off, the scene filtering in through the rectangular window was reflected brilliantly in the mirror.

“Now you can watch your first stereo sunset,” Lakshman said.

I could not say a word; all sound would have caught in my throat.

I looked out through the rectangular window and watched the saffron spread like a stain across the darkening sky, then turned my eyes and saw the colors incandesce in the mirror. Outside the air was thick with the scent of gulmohur and bougainvillea, which seeped in through the opening to mingle with the warmth of Lakshman by my side, his breathing now calm and even, his teeth flashing white beneath a happy smile.

“You like it?” he asked, squeezing my hand.

I wanted to thank him, but the words wouldn’t come. My eyes strayed from the scene outside the window to the scene in the mirror. It was simply the most beautiful sunset I had ever seen. I was absurdly conscious that this was Valentine’s Day, and that I had never spent it in a more romantic setting. So without really thinking, hardly conscious of what I was doing at all, I pressed myself against him and kissed him on the cheek.

Well, mainly on the cheek. But the edge of my lips touched the edge of his, so that the silken bristles of his moustache grazed my own upper lip, and then it wasn’t just a kiss on the cheek anymore. His hands rose to encircle my body in a tight embrace, and both pairs of lips moved with a volition of their own toward each other, and I devoured him hungrily, feeling the faintly spicy taste of his mouth, my tongue exploring the soft moist mystery of him, until the sound that had been trapped inside me emerged at last as a long, low moan.

He pulled his mouth away then, but his hands were still holding me, holding me tight.

“Priscilla,” he said huskily, as if he did not know what else to say.

“Lakshman,” I replied, tasting the unfamiliarity of those two syllables, as unfamiliar and intimate as the taste at the tip of my tongue.

“I — we — I shouldn’t be doing this,” he said, and I suddenly felt it was as if a page was being turned back in a book I wanted to continue reading.

I leaned forward then, intending to muzzle my face in his chest, but I never got there. A look crossed his eyes then, a look of both longing and desperation, and I felt his hands seize my face and raise it to his lips, and then I closed my eyes, and let myself be loved.

from Randy Diggs’s notebook

October 12, 1989

Met local Hindu chauvinist leader to check out the politics behind the riot. Man called Ram Charan Gupta.

Indeterminate age — I’d say sixtyish, but could be ten years off either way. Olive skin, shiny, taut, not much loose flesh about him. Strong head, topped by a crown of closely cropped white hair around a sallow bald pate. White kurta-pajamas. Sandals reveal gnarled toes, but the soles of his feet are smooth: not a man who has walked much.

Spoke only Hindi, but I suspect understands more English than he lets on.

Said to be highly respected for his “moderate” and “reasonable” views and the patience with which he expounds them.

Unsuccessful parliamentary candidate in the last elections; it’s expected that he’ll do better next time.

Ram Charan Gupta to Randy Diggs

(translated from Hindi)

October 12, 1989

Yes, that was a glorious day. I remember it well. I can tell you the exact date — it was September fifteenth. That was the day that our leaders launched the Ram Sila Poojan program.

Do you know about our god Ram, the hero of the epic Ramayana? He was a great hero. A king. But because of a scheming stepmother, he suffered banishment in the forest for fourteen years. Such injustice. But Ram bore it nobly. While he was in the forest, his wife Sita was kidnapped by the evil demon Ravana and taken to Lanka. But Ram, with his brother Lakshman and with the help of a monkey army led by the god Hanuman, invaded Lanka, defeated the demon, and brought his wife back. A great hero. I pray to him every day.

Now Lord Ram was born in Ayodhya many thousands of years ago, in the treta-yuga period of our Hindu calendar. Ayodhya is a town in this state, but a bit far from here, more than four hours’ journey by train. In Ayodhya there are many temples to Ram. But the most famous temple is not really a temple anymore. It is the Ram Janmabhoomi, the birthplace of Ram. A fit site for a grand temple, you might think. But if you go to Ayodhya, you will see no Ram Janmabhoomi temple there. In olden days a great temple stood there. A magnificent temple. There are legends about how big it was, how glorious. Pilgrims from all over India would come to worship Ram there. But a Muslim king, the Mughal emperor Babar, not an Indian, a foreigner from Central Asia, he knocked it down. And in its place he built a big mosque, which was named after him, the Babri Masjid. Can you imagine? A mosque on our holiest site! Muslims praying to Mecca on the very spot where our divine Lord Ram was born!

Naturally our community was very much hurt by this. Is that so surprising? Would Muslims be happy if some Hindu king had gone and built a temple to Ram in Mecca? But what could we do? For hundreds of years we suffered under the Muslim yoke. Then the British came, and things were no better. We thought then that after independence, everything would change. Most of the Muslims in Ayodhya left to go to Pakistan. The mosque was no longer much needed as a mosque. Then, a miracle occurred. Some devotees found that an idol of Ram had emerged spontaneously in the courtyard of the mosque. It was a clear sign from God. His temple had to be rebuilt on that sacred spot.

But would the courts listen? They are all atheists and communists in power in our country, people who have lost their roots. They forgot that the English had left. It was English law they upheld, not Indian justice. They said no, neither Hindus nor Muslims could worship there. They refused to believe the idol had emerged spontaneously; they claimed someone had put it there. They put a padlock on the gates of the mosque. I ask you, is this fair? Do we Hindus have no rights in our own country?

For years we have tried everything to undo this injustice. The courts will not listen. The government does nothing. My party leaders finally said, we have had enough. It is the people’s wish that the birthplace of Ram must be suitably honored. If the government will not do what is necessary, the people will. We will rebuild the temple.

With what, you may ask? With bricks — sila. Bricks from every corner, every village, of our holy land. Bricks bearing the name of Ram, each brick consecrated in a special puja, worshipped in its local shrine, and then brought to Ayodhya. This was the Ram Sila Poojan, the veneration of the bricks of Ram. The building bricks of a great new temple, to commemorate the birth of our great and divine king.

What excitement we all felt that day! The announcement of the Ram Sila Poojan was greeted with pride and joy across the country. All of India burst into a frenzy of activity. In every village, young men came out to bake the bricks, to write or carve or paint the name of Ram on them, to venerate them at their local temples. A thrill was in the air. It was a thrill that comes from the prospect of the imminent fulfillment of a long-cherished dream. When the bricks were ready, they were carried through each village in a sacred procession, then to be taken to Ayodhya to rebuild the Ram Janmabhoomi there.

In Zalilgarh too, we were busy with the Ram Sila Poojan. We are not such a small-small town as you people from Delhi may think. Zalilgarh is the district capital, after all. So after days of doing our Ram Sila Poojan in each village of the district, we had planned a big procession in Zalilgarh town on Saturday the thirtieth of September. It was intended to be the climax of all our Ram Sila Poojan work throughout the area. Volunteers from each village in the district would bring their bricks, those from each neighborhood in the town would do the same, and we would all march together in one glorious procession, shouting slogans of celebration. From there we would proceed all the way to Ayodhya, to take the bricks to the spot near this usurper’s mosque, where they were being collected for this holy purpose. At last, after centuries of helplessness, we were about to right a great wrong.

We were going to rebuild the temple.

What preparations we made for that day! Young men worked so hard, making flags, printing posters, preparing pennants in holy saffron that we would string along our route. Our women sewed bunting, painted placards for the men to carry. The tailors of Zalilgarh toiled overtime to make shirts and kurtas in saffron for us. And the bricks! They were perfect: red like the blood we would so gladly have spilled for our Lord, with the name of Ram painted on them in bold white Devanagari script. We were going to make it such a great occasion. What do you call it in English? A red-letter day.

But these Muslims are evil people, Mr. Diggs. You have to understand their mentality. They are more loyal to a foreign religion, Islam, than to India. They are all converts from the Hindu faith of their ancestors, but they refuse to acknowledge this, pretending instead that they are all descended from conquerors from Arabia or Persia or Samarkand. Fine — if that is so, let them go back to those places! Why do they stay here if they will not assimilate into our country? They stay together, work together, pray together. It is what you Americans, I know, call a ghetto mentality.

Now these Muslims have already divided our country once, to create their accursed Pakistan on the sacred soil of our civilization. Some of the greatest sites of Hindu civilization — the ancient cities of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, the world’s oldest university at Takshashila, even the river Indus from which India gets its name in your language — are all now in a foreign country. It galls me to say this, but we have swallowed our pride and accepted this vile partition. But is this enough for them? Oh no! The Muslims want more! And we had Muslim-loving rulers, like that brown Englishman Jawaharlal Nehru who was our first prime minister, to give it to them. Muslim men want four wives, whom they can divorce by chanting a phrase three times — so Nehru gives them the right to follow their own Personal Law instead of being subject to the civil code of the rest of the country. Muslims want to go abroad to worship at their Mecca, so the government pays for the ships and planes to take them there every year and the hotels and lodges for them to stay in on the way. I ask you, why should my tax money go to helping Muslims get closer to their foreign god?

I see all this is new to you. It is worse, Mr. Diggs, it is worse! Muslims have their own educational institutions with government subsidies, they have top jobs in the bureaucracy, they have even managed special status for the only Muslim-majority state we have, Kashmir. Do you know a Hindu from anywhere else in the country cannot buy a piece of land in Kashmir?! And worst of all, these Muslims are outbreeding the Hindus. They claim the right to four wives, and they keep them constantly pregnant, I tell you. While Indira Gandhi forcibly dragged our young men away to be vasectomized during her emergency rule a dozen years ago, these Muslims resist even voluntary family planning, saying it is against their religion. They all have dozens of children, Mr. Diggs! You only have to look at the population figures to know what I am talking about. When they broke our country with their treasonous partition, many of them left for their accursed Pakistan. In what was left of India, the Muslims were barely ten percent. By the time of the last census even the government was saying they are twelve percent of the population; and today, believe me, it is fifteen percent. It will not be long before they produce enough Muslims to outnumber us Hindus in our country, Mr. Diggs. You know what their slogan was, back in those days of Partition? They sang, “Ladke liye Pakistan, haske lenge Hindustan”: “We fought to take Pakistan, we will laugh as we take Hindustan.” That is the grave danger we are facing, Mr. Diggs. And what is the answer of successive Congress Party governments? Nothing but appeasement. Pure and simple appeasement.

Things have declined even more dangerously under Nehru’s successors. The latest one, his grandson Rajiv Gandhi, is the worst, I tell you. Have you heard of the Shah Banu case, Mr. Diggs? A Muslim man wants to get rid of his seventy-five-year-old wife, and since it is easy for Muslims, he does so. But he wants to pay her just forty rupees in alimony, because he says that in his religion he is only obliged to return the bride-price that had been given when they got married, sixty years ago. Well, she goes to court, saying how can she live on forty rupees today, and what sort of justice is this after sixty years of marriage? The court upholds her claim, awards her a fair alimony every month, and reminds the government that the Constitution’s directive principles call for the establishment of a common civil code for all Indians. You will not believe the outcry from our Muslims! A common civil code — exactly what you have in America, Mr. Diggs — and their leaders acted as if the gas chambers had been prepared for their entire community. So what does the craven Rajiv Gandhi do? He quickly passes a new law, which he cynically calls the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights Upon Divorce) Act, to undo the court’s judgment. Muslim women, under the law, will have to abide by their religion’s mediaeval rules, and if they are left destitute, there is no protection, no remedy available to them from our civil courts. They will have to get help from their religion’s charitable boards, the waqfs. Can you imagine such a thing? In the twentieth century? And all to accommodate the most obscurantist Muslim leaders! When will this pampering stop?

I’ll tell you, Mr. Diggs. Not until we have defeated these so-called secularists who are ruling our country and have brought us to our knees with their corrupt and self-serving ways. Not until we have raised the forces of Hindutva to power. Only then will we be able to teach these Muslims a lesson. Your Lakshman and others accuse us of fomenting violence. What nonsense! It is always others who do it, and then blame us. Sometimes I suspect the so-called secularists start the violence deliberately, just in order to discredit us. Wherever Hindutva governments have come to power — as they have done in four or five states, Mr. Diggs — there has been no communal violence, no rioting under their rule. What do the secularists say about that, hah?

Do you know what my colleague Sadhvi Rithambhara says? The Sadhvi is a famous preacher — a woman, for we are a progressive, modern faith, Mr. Diggs: have you ever heard of a Muslim woman preacher? Anyway, this is what she says: Muslims are like a lemon squirted into the cream of India. They turn it sour. We have to remove the lemon, cut it up into little pieces, squeeze out the pips and throw them away. That is what we have to do, Mr. Diggs. That is what the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, the Shiv Sena, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and all the associated organizations of our political family, the Sangh Parivar, will do one day. And the whole world should be grateful, because these Muslims are evil people, I tell you. Why is it that no Muslim country anywhere in the world is a democracy? Look around you, anywhere on the map, they are all dictatorships, monarchies, tyrannies, military regimes. Take my word for it, it’s the only way they know. Muslims are fanatics and terrorists; they only understand the language of force. Where are Muslims in power where they are not oppressing other people? And wherever these Muslims are, they fight with others. Violence against non-Muslims is in their blood, Mr. Diggs! Look at what Muslims are doing in the Middle East, Indonesia, the Philippines. Only in Yugoslavia do Muslims live in peace with non-Muslims. But that is because the Muslims there are the only Muslims in the world who are not fanatic about their faith. Unlike the ones we have here.

But I digress. You asked me about the background to the riot. Our Ram Sila Poojan procession. As I was saying, these Muslims are evil people, Mr. Diggs. They could not abide the thought of us Hindus reasserting our pride. We were peacefully minding our own business — what did it have to do with them? We did not have any great love for these Muslims, it is true, but we would not have attacked them. Why spoil a sacred event with an unnecessary fight? No, it was they who started it. As they always do.

I will tell you what happened. How it happened. It was the eve of the day of the great procession — Friday the twenty-ninth. Yes, yes, Friday is their holy day, but their big prayers were long over and we had not disturbed them. Our volunteers, good Hindu boys, stalwarts of the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, were doing their work in the evening, preparing for the great day the next day, Saturday the thirtieth. They were putting up posters, tying flags to lampposts, stringing the bunting and the pennants across the road. My own son Raghav was amongst them.

The work took time, it became dark, but everyone was in good spirits. Some were singing. It was late, but though they were tired, they were looking forward to the next day. Suddenly, they heard the noise of a motorcycle engine. Out of the darkness it came, two men on a motorcycle, with no light on.

Muslims.

Muslims! Their evil faces were masked with burqas, the black robes their women wear so that no one can see them. The motorcycle slowed down. Some of our boys were standing and working quite far from the road. But two boys, Amit Kumar from Bahraich, and Arup, Makhan Singh’s son, good boys from decent families, were painting slogans on a wall near the pavement. The motorcycle neared them. Still the rest of the group didn’t realize anything was wrong. Then those burqa-clad cowards raised their arms. Dull steel flashed in the moonlight.

Daggers! Mr. Diggs, they had daggers!

Savagely they slashed at the Hindu boys. The others stared mesmerized for a moment, helpless as the attackers’ arms went up and down, again and again, striking our two boys in the back, arms, legs, face. They screamed as they went down, and my son Raghav and his friends rushed towards them. But it was, Raghav tells me, as in a dream, when your legs don’t carry you forward as fast as you want to go. The motorcycle engine revved and it was gone, one last flailing of an arm nearly slashing my son’s face as he ran towards Amit and Arup.

The poor boys were in a very bad way They were bleeding from cuts everywhere. Their arms and legs dangled helplessly, Raghav said, like those of a rag doll. They picked them up, rushed them to the Zalilgarh government hospital. They called me. I went straight to the hospital, then to the police. It was terrible. The boys needed many emergency operations. All through the night we waited, rage and prayer mingling in our hearts. Ram be praised, they survived. But Amit would never walk again without a limp. And Arup Singh, a handsome boy who was to get married the next month, was left with a hideously scarred face that he would have to live with for the rest of his days.

There was blackness in our hearts that night, Mr. Diggs. These Muslims could not be allowed to get away with this. We knew what they wanted — to stop our procession the next day. To thwart our Ram Sila Poojan program. To prevent, in the end, the rebuilding of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple itself. This was a victory we were determined they would never be allowed to have.

At dawn that morning, the thirtieth of last month, I was asked to go to the police station. Me? The police station? What wrong had I done? But no, they told me, it was for an emergency meeting of Hindu community leaders. Others would be there — the pramukhs and leaders of the RSS, the VHP, the Bajrang Dal. All the major Hindu groups. So I agreed, though I had no great faith in this young district magistrate or his ally, the superintendent of police. These people, they come to our districts with fancy so-called secular ideas they have learned in English-language colleges, and they try to tell us what to do. They, who do not understand their own culture, their own religion, their own heritage. Such people have no right to call themselves Indians. But they rule over us, you see.

When we assembled at the police station, the DM and the SP were already there. Lakshman, the DM is called. From the South. A good- looking man, if with somewhat feminine features, and rather too dark to have found himself a good bride here. The SP is a turbaned Sikh, Gurinder Singh. Neither Hindu nor Muslim, though his people have fought the Muslims for centuries. But with people like Lakshman and Gurinder it didn’t matter what their religion was. They had both been to the same college, I believe, some fancy-shmancy Christian missionary place in Delhi where they only talk English and eat with forks and knives. So they thought alike. That was our problem.

Lakshman didn’t waste any time getting to the point. “I know you are all concerned about the incident last night,” he said.

“Concerned?” the Bajrang Dal man, Bhushan Sharma, interrupted him, almost screaming. “We’re bloody enraged! Those boys were brutally murdered in cold blood!”

“They’ll be all right,” Lakshman said calmly. “I’ve spoken to the doctors. There’s been no murder in Zalilgarh. Yet.”

“No thanks to the Muslims,” Sharma was still shouting. “Murder is exactly what they intended. What kind of law and order are you maintaining in this city?”

“We have made some arrests overnight,” Gurinder said, smiling. He smiled a lot, especially when he was talking about deadly serious matters. “We will find the perpetrators.” He always used words like that. “The perpetrators are absconding.” Even when he was supposed to be speaking Hindi. “Perpetrators abscond kiye hain.” Still, Gurinder had a reputation for being an efficient man. And an honest one, which is rare enough in his profession.

“But I want to ensure that the situation doesn’t get out of hand,” Lakshman added. “The police will bring these assailants to justice. But I must appeal to you all to stay calm. And above all, to refrain from any action that could inflame the situation.”

“Refrain? Us refrain?” Sharma was belligerent. “Are we to sit back and take anything the Muslims fling at us? Especially today, when we have so much at stake?”

“Especially today,” Lakshman replied. “In fact, after what has happened last night I wonder about the advisability of proceeding with your march today. I suggest you consider postponing—”

But he could not get the rest of his sentence out before he was drowned in a hubbub of protest from all of us. After everyone had shouted their objections, I stood up, leaned on the table, and looked him squarely in the eyes. “That is exactly what the Muslims want us to do,” I said quietly. “They hoped to intimidate us into giving up our plans. And you want us to play into their hands? Never!”

Lakshman tried everything. Oh, what a variety of approaches he tried. Calm reasonableness. Firm advice. Earnest appeal. Passionate entreaty. Tensions were high, he said. Our Ram Sila Poojan program had awakened the fears of the minority community. They were afraid, anxious, easy prey for extremists and hotheads. We had already seen what could happen. If we marched, there was no telling what else could occur. A small spark could ignite a conflagration. Did we want that?

“They attack us, and you tell us they are afraid?” Sharma was scathing. “We want to march peacefully, and you tell us we are inflaming tensions? This is a strange way of seeing things, District Magistrate-sahib.”

After several attempts, he realized we were implacable. The Ram Sila Poojan march through Zalilgarh would go ahead as planned. We were determined not to be diverted from our long-planned course.

He changed tack. “Change your route, then,” he suggested, pulling a map out of a folder that Gurinder passed him. “The route you are planning to take for your march is dangerous. It goes right through Muslim mohallas, and in two places passes right in front of Muslim mosques. Some Muslims will see this as provocation, and I must say I can’t disagree with them. You will simply incite some of the hotheads into doing something like last night.”

“If they do, DM — sahib,” I replied, “they will be breaking the law. And it is your job to deal with them. Yours and the SP’s.” Gurinder did not react, other than to smile again. “We are exercising our democratic rights to take out this procession. You are afraid that some criminal elements will break the law if we do. Well, then, catch them. Prosecute them. Punish them. But don’t punish us.”

“There are more than thirty thousand young men, volunteers from all over the district, gathered in Zalilgarh for this march,” Sharma added. “Are you going to try and stop them, Mr. Lakshman?”

Lakshman and Gurinder exchanged glances, as if to say that this was exactly what they had considered doing. It would have led to violence if they had tried — violence between the volunteers and the police. They had clearly thought better of it.

“No, I am not going to try and stop you,” Lakshman replied at last. He did not say “stop them,” but “stop you.” He was looking at me rather than at Bhushan Sharma. “But I am relying on your good sense to ensure that your volunteers behave. And that nothing is done, especially in the Muslim neighborhoods, that threatens the peace here in Zalilgarh.”

“Of course,” said someone, trying to be conciliatory, and before we knew it, Lakshman and Gurinder were laying down conditions. We could march, but we must not beat drums or cymbals near the mosques. We could shout slogans, but they had to be moderately phrased, and not inflammatory. We could carry placards, but no weapons. Conditions he was entitled to impose on us by virtue of the power vested in him as district magistrate. We had to agree, or his smiling Sikh accomplice could withdraw the police permission we had to march. Surely they wouldn’t dare? We could have called their bluff, but there was nothing to be gained by confronting them. We agreed.

“I want it in writing,” Lakshman said, biting a lower lip.

These overeducated college types. They want things in writing, as if the magic of a few words-turds on a page would cast some sort of spell on us peasants. We looked at each other; Sharma shrugged. Gurinder wrote down his rules on a sheet of police stationery, and we all signed.

We knew it would make no difference. Whatever was going to happen, was going to happen.

And we were prepared.

from Priscilla Hart’s scrapbook

July 16, 1989

Learned something interesting about the Hindu god Ram, the one all the fuss is about these days. Seems that when he brought his wife Sita back from Lanka and became king, the gossips in the kingdom were whispering that after so many months in Ravana’s captivity, she couldn’t possibly be chaste anymore. So to stop the tongues wagging, he subjected her to an agni-pariksha, a public ordeal by fire, to prove her innocence. She walked through the flames unscathed. A certified pure woman.

That stopped the gossips for a while, but before long the old rumors surfaced again. It was beginning to affect Ram’s credibility as king. So he spoke to her about it. What could Sita do? She willed the earth to open up, literally, and swallow her. That was the end of the gossip. Ram lost the woman he had warred to win back, but he ruled on as a wise and beloved king.

What the hell does this say about India? Appearances are more important than truths. Gossip is more potent than facts. Loyalty is all one way, from the woman to the man. And when society stacks up all the odds against a woman, she’d better not count on the man’s support. She has no way out other than to end her own life.

And I’m in love with an Indian. I must be crazy.