Riot

~ ~ ~

Professor Mohammed Sarwar to V. Lakshman

August 26, 1989

Thanks for receiving me. It’s flattering to think I made enough of an impact in college that you still remember me.

Yes, I’m at the Univ now, good old Delhi University, teaching in the History Department. Actually, I’ll be here for a few weeks. Trying to do some research in my period that seems oddly topical right now. I’m working on the life of a man called Syed Salar Masaud Ghazi, popularly known as Ghazi Miyan, a hugely revered Muslim warrior-saint in these parts. You haven’t heard of him? So you see why my research is necessary.

The fact is that we have, especially in North India, an extraordinary tradition of heroes, whether warriors or saints or, in this instance, both, who are worshipped by both communities, Hindu and Muslim. You hear a lot about the “composite culture” of North India, but not enough about what I tend to call its composite religiosity. A number of Muslim religious figures in India are worshipped by Hindus — think of Nizamuddin Auliya, Moinuddin Chishti, Shah Madar, Shaikh Nasiruddin who was known as Chiragh-i-Delhi, or Khwaja Khizr, the patron saint of boatmen, after whom even the British saw fit to name their Kidderpore Docks in Calcutta. Ghazi Miyan is in this league.

But it’s not enough to hail composite religiosity, to applaud complacently the syncretism of Hindu-Muslim relations in India. Of course we have to keep reminding people that tolerance is also a tradition in India, that communal crossovers are as common as communal clashes. But we mustn’t abdicate the field of religious conflict to the chauvinists on both sides. What we need, as my friend and fellow professor Shahid Amin, whom you knew at college, likes to say, are “nonsectarian histories of sectarian strife.”

Ghazi Miyan, according to popular belief, was a great Muslim warrior who was killed on the field of battle in A.D. 1034 fighting a bunch of Hindu rajas not that far from here, a bit to the north, at Bahraich. Soon after his death he was canonized in popular memory; people began gathering regularly at his tomb; ballads of his exploits were composed in both the Awadhi and Bhojpuri languages, and he is mentioned in a number of Persian and Urdu histories, though if I were writing this Id put “histories” in inverted commas — some of them are little better than unsubstantiated hagiographies. But what’s interesting is that the Ghazi Miyan of the historical texts was no apostle of Hindu-Muslim unity. He was a warrior for Islam. In one seventeenth-century text he’s even described as the nephew of Mahmud of Ghazni, that notorious invader who destroyed the fabled Somnath temple in the eleventh century. And as a soldier, the texts say, he went about his business slaying infidels and smashing idols with the worst of them. When he died he was a martyr on a jihad, and his soul may be assumed to have gone straight to an Islamic heaven with no vacancies for Hindus.

So why is this same Ghazi Miyan worshipped by the very Hindus he apparently attacked? Why do Hindu women pray at his tomb for a male child of his noble qualities? Why are songs and ballads to him sung by Hindus? And they were — in fact many of these songs were collected by British colonial ethnographers in the late nineteenth century across a wide swath of North India from Delhi to Varanasi. Now, what’s interesting about them is that they tell a different story, of a warrior born with the curse that he would die unwed, who was killed on the day of his wedding when he went forth to protect his herds and his herdsmen from the marauding Hindu Raja Sohal Deo.

And what did his herds consist of? Of cows! Now, doesn’t that ring any bells for you? Does the youthful warrior defending his cows not remind you of Lord Krishna of Hindu legend, seducer of milkmaids and protector of cows? In fact, in one of the popular ballads, it is Krishna’s foster mother, Jashodha, who makes a dramatic entry into the wedding celebrations of Ghazi Miyan, drenched in the blood of cowherds slaughtered by Raja Sohal Deo, and pleads with him to rise to the defense of the cows. Imagine the scene as this young Muslim bridegroom rises, casts aside his wedding finery, begs forgiveness from his mother, straps on his sword, and walks out to do battle against the killer of kine. It’s stirring stuff, I tell you, and there’s more in the songs and ballads I’ve collected: tales reinventing episodes from the Ramayana, tales featuring Krishna himself, all wrapped up in the life of Ghazi Miyan, and sometimes in the miraculous powers of his tomb.

What explains these contradictory legends, of the martyred jihadi revered by Muslim fundamentalists and the noble cow-protector worshipped by ordinary Hindus? Extremists of both stripes have sought to discredit the secular appeal of Ghazi Miyan. The Hindu fundamentalists have attacked the ballads as fraudulent tales made up by scheming Muslim tricksters to hoodwink gullible Hindus. They’ve also given much circulation to the jihadi versions of Ghazi Miyan’s story. And as to the episode of the cows, they argue that the cows had actually been earmarked for slaughter at Ghazi Miyan’s wedding feast, and that the reason Raja Sohal Deo attacked the Ghazi’s cowherds was in order to liberate the cows from certain death at the hands of the Muslims. Hindus, they say, have been duped for centuries into worshipping an oppressor, and a foreign invader at that. The Hindutva types lament that the offerings made by Hindus at the Ghazi’s tomb go to support Islamic schools, hospitals, and mosques — the very fact that the secularists hail as evidence of composite religiosity.

Every year for centuries, perhaps indeed since 1034, Ghazi Miyan’s wedding ceremony is rescheduled around the supposed date of the real event. It’s always interrupted, as the original event was. Hundreds of baraats, marriage parties, converge on the shrine, but always some “unexpected” calamity — a thunderstorm or even the hint of one will do — leads them to abandon the ceremony. The marriage does not take place. That’s the ritual. But the baraats, both Hindu and Muslim, will be back next year.

That’s the story I want to look into. There’s a wealth of material to collect, some of it around Bahraich, but a lot in the Zalilgarh area too. I’m meeting up with some of the Dafali singers who popularize the ballads to the Ghazi. And I’m staying in town with the sadr here, Rauf-bhai — I don’t know if you know him? You do? He’s a cousin of my mother’s, and one gets a sense of Islam as it is practiced in small-town Uttar Pradesh just by waking up every morning in the Muslim basti and talking to the neighbors.

The whole point is that historians like myself, who haven’t sold our souls to either side in this wretched ongoing communal argument, have a duty to dig into the myths that divide and unite our people. The Hindutva brigade is busy trying to invent a new past for the nation, fabricating historical wrongs they want to right, dredging up “evidence” of Muslim malfeasance and misappropriation of national glory. They are making us into a large-scale Pakistan; they are vindicating the two-nation theory. They know not what damage they are doing to the fabric of our society. They want to “teach” people like me “a lesson,” though they have not learned many lessons themselves. I often think of Mohammed Iqbal, the great Urdu poet who wrote, “Sare jahan se achha Hindustan hamara” — “Better than all the world is our India” — and who is also reviled for his advocacy of Pakistan, though what he wanted was a Muslim homeland within a confederal India. Iqbal-sahib wrote a couplet that is not often quoted these days: “Tumhari tahzeeb khud apne khanjar se khudkhushi karegi / Jo shukh-i-nazuk pe aashiyan banega, napaidar hoga.” Oh, I’m sorry, you’re a good Southie who doesn’t understand much Urdu. What he’s saying is that ours is a civilization that will commit suicide out of its own complexity; he who builds a nest on frail branches is doomed to destruction. The problem is that our Hindu chauvinists don’t read much Iqbal these days.

letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani

February 16, 1989

…

I couldn’t face the prospect of going to dinner with his wife after what had happened, so I told him to make some excuse for me — that I had developed a headache, or something. He didn’t hide his disappointment, or the fact that he wasn’t looking forward to the prospect of his wife’s displeasure after he’d rung her and got her to organize the meal. He made me promise to come some other time — and, since I had been to dinner at his place earlier, I said yes.

In the morning a note arrived for me at the office, in a government envelope in the hands of a uniformed messenger (or peon, as they quaintly call them in India). “My dear Priscilla,” it began, and I imagined him trying various salutations — “Priscilla” (too abrupt), “Darling Priscilla” (too effusive), “Dear Priscilla” (too routine), maybe even “Dearest Priscilla” (too premature!) — before settling on “My dear.” His handwriting was firm, clear, rapid. “It was wonderful being with you yesterday. Please forgive me for this means of communication, but I realize you have no phone at home, and I must see you again. Please ring me if you can — my direct line is 23648. Or send me a note through the peon who is carrying this envelope. Yours, Lakshman.” (Again, how long had he hesitated over that closing? “Yours sincerely”? Too formal. “Yours very sincerely”? Too insincere. “Yours ever”? Too presumptuous. So the simple, slightly suggestive “Yours” — I liked it.)

I hesitated for no more than a few seconds. Using the office phone — and we had only one — for a personal conversation was out of the question. So I scrawled on the same sheet of notepaper: “same time, same place, tomorrow?” The peon bowed and salaamed when I gave him the envelope.

Oh, Cindy, I know what you’re thinking and it’s not so. I wish we could talk. I miss you so much, Cindy. There’s nothing I’d rather have more than one of our long sessions curled up on your bed, hugging those monstrously fat and cuddly pillows of yours (you should see the hard thin slab that passes for a pillow in Zalilgarh) and just talking. Writing to you about all of this isn’t really the same thing, and I’m so out of practice writing letters that I’m not sure I’m telling you really how I feel. I know the things that would worry you about all this — he’s married, he’s Indian, I’m far away and lonely and don’t know what I’m doing. If I were you, I’d worry about me too! But Lakshman’s special, he really is, and I know I want to be with him more than anything in the world. Am I crazy, Cindy? Don’t bother replying to that question — by the time your answer arrives I’ll know whether I’ve just been really dumb or whether I’ve simply found Mr. Right in the wrong place at the wrong time….

transcript of Randy Diggs interview

with District Magistrate V. Lakshman (Part 1)

October 13, 1989

RD: Mr. District Magistrate, thank you for agreeing to see me. I’m Randy Diggs, South Asia correspondent of the New York Journal. Here’s my card.

VL: Thanks. Here’s mine. But I suppose you know who I am.

RD: I know who you are, Mr. Lakshman.

VL: So what can I do for you?

RD: I’m doing a story on the young American woman who was killed here last month, Priscilla Hart.

VL: Yes. Priscilla.

RD: And I thought I’d find out from you as much as you can tell me about the circumstances of her killing.

VL: The circumstances?

RD: The riot. The events that led to the tragedy. Her own role in those events. Anything that can explain her death.

VL: She had no role in the events. That was the tragedy.

RD: She—

VL: She was here to work on a population project. And study the role of women in Indian society. She had nothing to do with the Hindu-Muslim nonsense.

RD: So she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

VL: I suppose you could say that. If there is such a thing as the wrong place, or the wrong time. We are where we are at the only time we have. Perhaps it’s where we’re meant to be.

RD: Well, I—

VL: Don’t worry, I’m not going to entrap you in philosophical arguments. You’re here to talk to the DM about the riot, and I’ll tell you about the riot. Do have some tea.

RD: Thanks. Is this already sugared?

VL: I’m afraid so. That’s the way they serve it around here. Is it all right?

RD: That’s fine. Tell me about the riot.

VL: You know about the Ram Sila Poojan? On 15 September, the Bharatiya Janata Party and its militant “Hindutva” allies announced the launching of direct action to build a Ram temple at the disputed site of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. The legal and political processes they could have resorted to in order to achieve this agenda were abandoned. It was clear from the kind of language their leaders were using that there would be an all-out and, if necessary, violent battle to accomplish their goal.

RD: Sorry, just checking if this is recording properly … it’s fine. “Accomplish their goal.” Please go on.

VL: Okay, where was I? Oh, yes. Trouble started elsewhere before it got here. In the next few days, much of North India was seized by a frenzy unprecedented since Partition. Groups of surcharged young men paraded the streets in every town, morning and evening, day after day, aggressively bearing bricks in the name of Ram, throwing slogans at the Muslims like acid. Slogans which were horrible in their virulence, their crudeness, their naked aggression. The Muslims, huddled in their ghettoes, watched with disbelief and horror, which turned quickly to cold terror and sullen anger.

RD: You couldn’t stop them? Ban the Ram Sila Poojan program?

VL: I wished I could. I saw what was happening as nothing less than an assault on the political values of secular India. I asked permission to ban the processions in my district. It was denied. Only West Bengal, where the communists have a pretty firm hold on power, actually banned the Ram Sila Poojan program. The other state governments were trying to have it both ways. They proclaimed their secularism but did nothing to maintain it. They didn’t want to alienate the Hindutva types, so they refused to ban the Ram Sila Poojan. They probably thought, to give them some credit, that banning it would simply give the Hindutva movement the aura of martyrdom and so help them attract even more support. So they let it go ahead. There were certainly some in the government who had a sneaking sympathy for the cause of rebuilding the Ram Janmabhoomi temple. Not just sneaking: many expressed it openly. So the government’s inaction in the face of all this provocation profoundly alienated the Muslims. For many of them, their faith and hope in Indian secularism, built over four decades of dogged efforts by successive administrations, soured.

RD: So tensions were high among the Muslims that day.

VL: Tensions were high. And not just amongst the Muslims. The Hindu community was in a state of great agitation. Their leaders — or perhaps I should say, those who claimed to speak in their name — were openly whipping up passions on the Ram Janmabhoomi issue. Even the media and intelligentsia were quickly infected by the communal dementia sweeping the land.

RD: And the secular voices?

VL: What secular voices? There was a deafening silence.

RD: Was this a widespread phenomenon or did you have a particular problem on your hands here in Zalilgarh?

VL: It was pretty widespread in this part of the country: U.P. — you know, Uttar Pradesh — Bihar, parts of Madhya Pradesh. Not so much where I come from, in the South. But here, it was pretty bad. In less than ten days after the announcement of the Ram Sila Poojan, riots broke out in town after town — militant processions brandishing Ram bricks, shouting hate-filled slogans day after day, violent retaliation by small Muslim groups, followed by carnage, deaths, arson, and finally curfew. At one point around three weeks after the launching of the program, as many as 108 towns were simultaneously under curfew.

RD: Tell me about Zalilgarh.

VL: Well, you’re here, you’ve seen it. It’s a small district town in Uttar Pradesh. Not much to write home about! But like any other small town in these parts, Zalilgarh could hardly remain untouched by the sectarian fever that had infected the land. An undersized, haphazardly planned town of fewer than one lakh persons—

RD: A hundred thousand?

VL: That’s right. About a lakh. With an uneasy balance of almost equal strengths of Hindus and Muslims. In fact, I discovered soon after I arrived that Zalilgarh is classified in official files as “communally hypersensitive.” The records show that the first communal clash took place as far back as 1921.

RD: When you say “communal,” you mean—

VL: Hindu-Muslim. At that time, Zalilgarh suffered a Hindu-Muslim clash even though in much of the country Hindus and Muslims were united in a joint campaign, the Khilafat agitation against the British. These clashes have been repeated with frightening regularity over the following decades.

RD: What causes these communal clashes?

VL: Oh, many things. The issues are mostly local, such as attacks on religious processions, desecration of shrines, illicit relationships between men and women of different communities, and so on. The two communities live separately but near each other in crowded shantytowns or bastis, and any small spark could set ablaze a bloody confrontation. Each skirmish would leave behind its own fresh trail of hostility and suspicion, which offered fertile ground for the next clash.

RD: Knowing all this, wasn’t there anything you could do to prevent what happened? You and the police?

VL: I’ve asked myself a thousand times if I could have done more than I did. Guru — Gurinder — too. You know the superintendent of police?

RD: Gurinder Singh. I’m interviewing him next. A friend of yours, I believe?

VL: Yes. We were at college together. St. Stephen’s, in Delhi, a couple of years apart. I didn’t know him well there, but we’ve become very good friends here. A tremendous officer. But such an unlikely cop.

RD: Why?

VL: Oh, he studied history in college, you know. Played hockey and played hookey. Drank a lot, even then. Was known for cracking bad jokes. They called him “the Ab Surd” — Sikhs are “Surds,” you see, short for “Sardarji,” which is an honorific for them — oh forget it, like most cross-cultural jokes, it’s just too complicated to explain. Anyway, he’s absurd when he wants to be, especially with a glass in his hand — make that a bottle. And he swears a lot. As I fear you’ll find out. “The story of my life,” he says, “begins with the words, ’Once a pun a time.’” Today he’d probably say “a fucking time,” so be prepared. He took the IAS exams, as so many of us did at St. Stephen’s, largely to please his parents. He really wanted to be a farmer — a peasant, he said, but secretly his ambition was to be a big commercial farmer, mechanized agriculture, tractors, irrigation canals, the lot. Simple pleasures, as Wilde said, are the last refuge of the complex. So he didn’t try hard enough in the exams. Couldn’t get into the Administrative Service, but made it to the police service. He hoped his parents would credit him for the effort and let him go off and work for his grandfather, who had the land but still tilled it the old-fashioned way. But they were horrified at the prospect. The police, they said, was hardly a great career, but it was better than farming. What sort of status would they have in society if their son were a mere flogger of bullocks? It was one thing if he’d failed the exams altogether, but here he had the chance for a real job, with real power. They weren’t going to let him waste his life farming. How much money could a farmer make anyway? He gave in. [Pause.] We all do. [Pause.] I wanted to be a writer. My parents had other ideas.

RD: In America, parents have stopped trying to tell their kids what to do in life.

VL: It’ll be a long while before we get to be like America.

RD: I’ll say. So you were telling me about Zalilgarh. The demographics. The background. Whether there was anything more you could have done to prevent what happened.

VL: Whether we could have done anything more? I honestly don’t think so. We did everything. It started the same way, you know, in Zalilgarh as elsewhere. The pattern was the same — daily belligerent processions and slogans of hate. Gurinder and I responded by the book, doing everything we’d been taught to do in such situations — calling meetings of the two communities, advising restraint, registering strong criminal charges against the more rabid processionists, energizing the peace committees, preventive arrests and so on.

RD: Peace committees?

VL: It’s something we set up pretty much everywhere where we have a history of communal trouble. Committees bringing together leaders of both communities to work together, sort out their problems. We used every mechanism we had, every trick we knew. These measures might have been enough in normal times.

RD: But these weren’t normal times?

VL: No, these weren’t normal times. As the Ram Sila Poojan campaign gathered momentum, there was nothing we could do to ebb the raging flood of communal hatred.

RD: Sorry, I just need to change the tape here.

from Lakshman’s journal

March 26, 1989

“I suppose I never forgave my father,” she said somberly. “Just seeing him — doing it, doing that, with that awful woman from his office. I was barely fifteen, and I felt personally hurt, as if it was me he’d betrayed, and not my mother. He tried to talk to me, to explain, even to beg forgiveness, though he was too proud a man to use the word. I’ll never forget the contempt with which, in my fifteen-year-old superiority, spouting some Freudian wisdom I’d picked up God knows where, I told him witheringly, ‘You’re pathetic, Dad. Don’t you realize you were just trying to make up for not being able to penetrate the Indian market?’?

She laughed, quietly, at the recollection of her own words. “I was known in the family as precocious Priscilla,” she said. “Dad was particularly fond of the phrase. He stopped using it after I said that.”

I stroked her hair, then kissed her tenderly on the cheek. “Precious Priscilla,” I said.

“Oh, I prefer that,” she replied, kissing me quickly on the lips. But then she turned serious again.

“I was very upset about what happened,” she went on. “It sort of crystallized a whole lot of half-formed feelings I’d developed about my father. What was he doing in India, after all? Trying to sell Coke. For God’s sake, it’s not as if he was bringing in medicines, or new technology, or clean drinking water, or electrification. It was Coke, for crying out loud.”

“Indians do drink Coke, sweetheart.”

“Well, some Indians do. But it hardly struck me as a noble endeavor. You know, in school there were the kids of diplomats, but there were also the kids of missionaries working in the tribal districts, others whose fathers were in India to construct dams or power stations or even an underground railway — useful things, necessary things. How I used to wish my dad was doing something like that, and not just selling Coke.” She shook her head, and her hair fell across her eyes, a curtain across her regret. I gently pushed it aside as she went on. “The irony is that these other kids actually envied me. ‘Your Dad works for Coke? Coo-oool.’ You know the kind of thing. They thought their parents’ professions were boring, while my dad was glamorous because he sold a product they all knew and valued. Strange, huh?”

I nodded, not wanting to contradict her.

“And then when he didn’t do so well, and the government threw Coke out, and he was reduced to spending his time trying to explore schemes to get it back into the Indian market, I began to feel really conflicted about him, you know? On the one hand a part of me thought of him as a bit pathetic, and on the other I was kinda glad he was doing it because this meant we could stay on in India, and I loved India. For years I’d worshipped him, you know, the perfect father figure, tall and strong and handsome, with an easy laugh and a habit of throwing me up in the air when I was a little girl and catching me before I fell. And then I got too big to be thrown in the air, and too wise to see perfection in him, and too intelligent not to question what he was doing. Am I boring you?”

“No, of course not,” I said, kissing her this time on the forehead. “Go on.”

“I was disappointed, too, in how little he saw of the India I loved. He knew the air-conditioned offices and the five-star hotels and the expatriate party-circuit, and he complained about the incompetence of the government and the inefficiency of the postal system and the unpredictability of the water supply, but he never set foot in a bazaar, he never visited the servants’ quarters, he never saw the inside of a temple or a mosque, he never saw an Indian movie, he never made a real Indian friend. He thought he was going to conquer India with his Coke, but all he ended up conquering was a pathetic slut on the make.”

I held her tightly. “Let it be, Priscilla,” I said softly. “It was a long time ago.”

“I know that.” She shook herself free of my embrace: this was important. “But I can’t forgive him. Not just for doing what he did, hurting Mom, destroying the family I’d always taken for granted. But also for being careless enough and thoughtless enough to do it there, in Mom’s and his bed, on that afternoon, and letting me find him. I hated finding him like that. For years I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, let a boy touch me. I would shudder remembering my father, seeing him naked like that, moving in and out of that woman, slapping her behind, I’d remember the noises they made, his whoops, her moans — it was awful.”

“I understand,” I said, holding her, and this time she did not shake herself free of me.

“But then I decided I couldn’t let him ruin the rest of my life too. Mom had brought us back to the States — we were in New York — and you have no idea what the peer pressure is like, if you’re halfway decent-looking and not obviously crazy. Every boy in my grade and one or two grades up wanted to take me out, carry my books home, invite me to the movies. When I resisted at first, or when I agreed but wouldn’t do anything they wanted me to, it was awful. Kids in school were beginning to whisper that I was a freak, that I wouldn’t even let a boy kiss me, that maybe I was a lesbian. I couldn’t stay sealed up like that. And then I wanted — I wanted a pair of strong male arms around me again. I wanted to be thrown up in the air again, and caught as I came down. I wanted so much to find someone who’d help me forget Dad, someone who was as different from him as possible so that he couldn’t possibly remind me of him.”

And then you ended up with me, I couldn’t help myself thinking. Another married man cheating on his wife with an exotic foreigner.

But that was not where she was leading: not yet.

“So in my senior year at high school I got involved with a kid in my class. Well, I may as well say it, a black kid in my class. Darryl Smith. He was an athlete, the captain of the basketball team, not particularly bright or anything, but a really nice guy. And God, was he tall: the thing I’ll always remember about my first kiss was having to stand on tiptoe like a ballerina to reach his lips, even though he had to bend down a long way to reach mine.” A light shone in her eyes like a distant star, pulsing through the clouds. “People started talking at school, of course, and I suppose I should have felt I was doing something daring, something risky. But in fact with Darryl I felt completely safe, completely free of the shadow of my father. When he took his clothes off for the first time, I couldn’t keep my eyes off his lean and well-muscled body It was as if I was soaking every detail into my memory, registering another set of images over the ones of my father that had haunted me for so long.” She looked at me, suddenly, as if she was conscious for the first time that it was me she was talking to. “Does this bother you, Lucky? I’ll stop if you want me to.”

“No,” I lied, my voice thickening, because it was beginning to bother me a great deal. “I want to hear what you have to say.”

She hugged me tightly. “It’s important, for us, don’t you see? I want you to know everything that matters to me. I want you to understand.”

“I know,” I said. “Go on.”

“When my parents found out, they were both upset with me. My father was back in Atlanta, working at Coca-Cola headquarters, so I saw him just three or four times a year. But he was furious, just because Darryl was black. ‘They’re not like us,’ he kept saying. And, ‘How could you?’ To which I couldn’t always resist replying, ‘That’s a question you ought to answer first, don’t you think, Dad?’ And of course he refused to meet Darryl, not that I particularly wanted him to, anyway. Mom disapproved, too, in that dry way she has, never raising her voice, never even mentioning his color, just saying, ‘Priscilla, you know you can do better. What about that nice boy on the debate team? He wanted to take you out, and you never—’ And of course the boy on the debate team was smart, and rich, and white, and Darryl fell short on all three counts. Which made me love him all the more.” Her voice lightened, as if to take the drama out of her next sentence. “Love in the face of impossible odds. I began to convince myself that Darryl and I would be together forever.” She laughed a little, as if at her own naiveté. “But of course it wasn’t going to last. And our problem was not that he was black and I was blonde, not even that he was a jock and I was a straight-A student. It was that we didn’t talk to each other. Darryl was uncomplicated, and affectionate, and pretty straight with me, but again unlike my father, he was a man of few words. And he didn’t particularly want to listen to mine, either. If I tried to tell him about my family, or about India, or about a book I was reading, he would simply smile a big, gleaming smile and shut me up with a kiss. Which would go on to more than a kiss. And afterwards, he’d want to go get a bite, or a drink, or go dancing; but he wouldn’t particularly want to talk.

“I just accepted that as part of how we were. I would talk instead with my girlfriends, especially Cindy, who’s the closest friend I have, someone I’d known since grade school, since before we went to India. And I thought, well, he doesn’t talk much, but I know he cares about me, and that’s what matters. I didn’t mind his laconic ways till the day he told me, in that happy, direct way he had, that he had received a basketball scholarship from Gonzaga. In the state of Washington, for God’s sake. And he was planning to take it.

“ ‘Gonzaga?’ I practically yelled. ‘You never told me you’d applied to Gonzaga. I thought we were going to stay here, near the City.’ And none of the colleges I’d applied to were anywhere near the Pacific Northwest. Well, it turned out that a Gonzaga talent scout had come around to one of the high school games, liked him in action, and arranged the scholarship. We’d gone to a movie that very evening, and he’d forgotten to tell me about the encounter. So I was completely stunned. ‘What about us?’ I asked at last. And then I realized the question hadn’t even crossed his simple mind, that basketball was what, at that point in his life, he lived for, and I was completely incidental. I had spent so much time in his arms, but I had no idea what was going on inside his head.”

She turned to me then, looking directly into my eyes. “He was the first boy who’d really kissed me, you know, kissed properly, not just pecked on the cheek after a date, and of course the first man I’d ever slept with. And in all the ten, eleven months we were together, he never once told me he loved me.”

“Because he didn’t, Priscilla,” I said, pricked by jealousy. “He didn’t love you.”

“He could have said the words,” she replied. “They’ve been said to me by so many guys who never meant them. But Darryl was too honest to mislead me. I’d merely misled myself.

“I turned to Mom after this, and she was there for me, you know? She was patient and loving and nonjudgmental, and she helped me get over the pain. And she said one thing I never forgot. She said my problem was that I saw things in people that they didn’t see in themselves.

“But Darryl did one thing for me. He cured me of my father. He went off to Gonzaga, and I wept for a week, and when I stopped weeping I realized he’d freed me. From himself, but also from the distaste and the fear that the thought of sex had evoked in me since the time I saw my father with that — that whore. Through Darryl, I’d sort of become normal again. You know what I’m saying?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“After Darryl, it was easier to be a normal, red-blooded American woman,” she said matter-of-factly. “I went out with a lot of guys in college, dated a couple of them quite seriously, even, but they just weren’t right for me, you know? One of them, a guy from Boston, Winston Everett Holt III, even wanted to marry me. It was in my junior year of college; he was a senior. Win was a Boston Brahmin, very preppy, with that accent only people with his sort of breeding have, y’know, ‘cah pahk’ and all that — no, of course you don’t know, how could you know — anyway, he had it all, name, family, wealth, good looks, good connections, good prospects. This was what my mother wanted for me. And I turned him down.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t love him. Or maybe I should say that I couldn’t love him. He was too much like my father.”

“This father of yours has a lot to answer for,” I said, lightly, but it was not lightness I felt at her revelations. I was troubled, even hurt, strangely, even though intuitively I had known all along that her life must have been something like this, an American life. I tried to gloss over my own feelings, but they would not be contained, and I found myself blurting: “These guys you went out with, did you sleep with them?”

“Some of them,” she replied, and then she looked at me curiously, realizing that the question was not a casual one. “Oh Lucky, does it matter to you?”

“I don’t know,” I said, only half untruthfully, because I really didn’t know how much it did, though I could scarcely be oblivious to the emotions seething inside me.

“Lucky, I’m twenty-four,” she said, holding me by both shoulders. “You didn’t expect me to be a virgin, did you?”

“No,” I replied honestly.

“When you made love to me, here, that first time after the sunset …”

“I wasn’t thinking then,” I said defensively.

“Well, you must have been pretty glad I wasn’t a virgin then, right?”

“Right,” I said in the same tone, but my cheerfulness was strained, unconvincing. “It’s not important, Priscilla. Forget it.”

She looked at me quizzically, then nestled herself into my body, her head upon my chest. I was silent. “Can I ask you something?” she said at last.

“Of course.”

“Your wife. When you met her — was she a virgin?”

“Does the Pope’s wife use birth control pills?” I asked in mock disbelief. “Are you kidding? An Indian woman in an arranged marriage? Of course she was a virgin. Forget sex, she hadn’t kissed a boy, she hadn’t even held hands with one. That’s how it is in India. That’s what’s expected.”

“Expected?”

“Expected,” I asserted firmly. “If she wasn’t a virgin, no one would have married her. No decent woman from a good family would be anything else.” I had surprised myself by my own vehemence.

She was very silent, very still, and I realized I’d hurt her by my choice of words. “I’m sorry, Priscilla. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“What did you mean, then?”

“Just that things are very different here, in India. I guess we’re repressed, after centuries of Muslim rule followed by the bloody Victorians. And of course there’s a lot of hypocrisy involved. But as Wilde would have said, is hypocrisy such a terrible thing? It’s merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.” I tried to lighten my tone. “But sex simply isn’t something that’s acceptable or even widely available outside of marriage. There’s still a great deal of store placed on honor here. Women don’t sleep around. And if they did, no one would marry them.”

“And men?”

“What about them?”

“Were you a virgin when you had your precious arranged marriage?”

“Practically,” I said.

“What kind of an answer is that?”

“I hadn’t had a girlfriend or anything like that. There were some guys in college who did, but they were a tiny minority, and I’m not even sure how many of their girlfriends actually slept with them. I mean, it wasn’t easy — girls and boys weren’t allowed into each other’s hostels, no one in college could afford a hotel room, you couldn’t even hold hands in public without stirring up trouble. But yes, I did lose my virginity the way many of my friends did. We all had the same normal urges as anyone in America, after all, but none of the same opportunities. So, one night, a group of us from college paid a visit to a brothel.”

“No,” Priscilla breathed, sitting up. “That’s disgusting.”

“It’s the time-honored way,” I replied. “Men have to learn what it’s all about, and no decent girl will show them, and in the normal course you only meet decent girls. That’s why red-light districts exist. A hundred rupees, I think it was, for a dark chunky woman with betel-stained teeth and too much powder on her face. It lasted two minutes: she never took off her blouse, just lifted a crumpled petticoat and let me in. I never went back.”

“I hope not,” she breathed.

“Oh, some of the fellows did, the ones who could find a hundred bucks from time to time. I couldn’t, but I didn’t want to. My curiosity was satisfied. And I was repelled.”

“So what did you do?”

“Do?”

“For sex, of course.”

I laughed. “My dear woman,” I said in my most Wildean voice, “have you never heard of the sin of Onan?”

She blushed then. This lovely woman, who had just told me so matter-of-factly of having experienced the touch-and-thrust of sex with God knows how many men, was blushing at the thought of my having given myself a helping hand.

“So you understand why, when my parents wanted to arrange my marriage, I didn’t protest too much.” I smiled. “I was ready. Boy, was I ready!”

“Well, I hope you weren’t disappointed,” she said, a bit cuttingly, returning her head to my chest.

“Actually, I was,” I said very quietly. “Geetha wasn’t just a virgin, she was horrified by what I wanted to do to her. Her mother, it seems, had given her the most basic instruction in what to expect. She refused to disrobe completely — she thought the very idea was disgusting. She showed no desire for my body either. So yes, I guess you could say I was disappointed.”

Priscilla looked directly at me with those amazing eyes. “I’m sorry, Lucky,” she said softly “That couldn’t have been easy for you to tell me.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’ll tell you something, too, that I haven’t told anyone. There’s one thing I’ve never done. In bed, I mean. I’ve never let anyone make love to me the way my father was doing it with that woman. From behind.”

I looked at her, and she looked back, unblinking, and I was overwhelmed by the desire to seize her in my arms, to turn her around, to do to her exactly what she’d said she’d never do. I touched her gently on the cheek.

“I understand, Priscilla,” I said.

from Randy Diggs’s notebook

October 12, 1989

Muslim professor I’d met in Delhi, Mohammed Sarwar, came to see me here at the guest house. He said he was staying with relatives in Zalilgarh while doing historical research, and it would be more convenient if he came to me. Unusual for an Indian — they’re always inviting you home. From which I surmise not just that this isn’t his home, but that the people he’s staying with are very poor. Or conservative. Or both? Mustn’t ask.

Sarwar arrives, young, slim, moustache, thinning hair, while I’m sitting on the verandah with Rudyard Hart. There’s my first surprise.

“Don’t I know you?” asks Hart, his eyes narrowing. “I’m sure we’ve met before.”

“We have, Mr. Hart,” Sarwar replies, as he mounts the steps and shakes his hand. “Over ten years ago.”

“Ten years… of course! I remember you now. You were — what did they call you? A student leader.” He pronounces the words with exaggerated care, as if they were a rare species of butterfly. Or an exotic disease.

“That’s right.” Sarwar is unabashed.

“With the commie student union, if I remember right.”

“With one of the commie student unions, Mr. Hart. There are two at the university.”

“Only in India.” Hart is cheerful. “Communism is fading away everywhere else in the world, but in India it sustains two student unions.” He wags a finger at Sarwar. “And you were leading a demonstration outside my office.”

“Down with American imperialism,” Sarwar recites. “U.S. capitalist exploiter murdabad. Coke is a joke on India’s poor.”

“I liked that one particularly. Coke is a joke. You must have had great fun making those up.”

“Not really. We took ourselves very seriously.”

“Of course you did. I invited you into my office to discuss your demands.”

“That’s right.”

“And,” Hart adds with satisfaction, “I offered you Coke.”

“Which I declined.”

“Which, as I recall, you accepted. And drank two.”

“No, that wasn’t me. I refused. I was from the SFI. It was the girl who was with me, from the AISF. Her father was an extremely rich landlord from Calcutta, a member of Parliament for the Communist Party of India. She had grown up on the stuff. She told me later that it wasn’t thirst that led her to accept; drinking your Coke was a way of exploiting the exploiter. She was extremely good at rationalizing the indefensible.”

Hart laughs. “What’s she doing now?”

“Oh, she’s teaching at an American university, Emory I believe. Lecturing on postmodernism and feminism. I’m told she has a green card, a tenure-track post, and the best music system on campus. She still contributes articles to the ‘Economic and Political Weekly’ here critiquing India’s dangerous compromises with the forces of global capital.”

“And you? Are you still leading demonstrations outside American imperialist institutions?”

“No.” It is Sarwar’s turn to laugh. “I gave that up a while ago. I’m a professor now.”

“A professor? In what subject?”

“A reader, actually, in the Department of History at Delhi University. What you’d call an associate professor.”

“History,” Hart murmurs. “You have a lot of that in this country.”

“Yes,” Sarwar agrees. “Unlike yours. When I was at college I wanted to take an optional course in American history. The head of the department dissuaded me. Americans, he said, have no history. We, of course, have both history and mythology. Sometimes we can’t tell the difference.”

“What sort of history do you teach?”

“I’m specializing in what we call Mediaeval Indian History. Also called by some the Muslim Period. The time when most of India was ruled by various Muslim dynasties, ending with the Mughals.”

“An odd choice, for a communist.”

“Oh, I gave that up a while ago too. It was a faith, really, and I soon discovered two other faiths that I realized meant more to me.” “And what were those?” Hart asks.

“Democracy,” Sarwar replies quietly “And Islam.”

“Sounds like a perfect segue,” I chip in. “This long-delayed reunion is marvelous, Rudyard, but do you think I could proceed with my interview with Professor Sarwar now?”