Riot

~ ~ ~

letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani

April 5, 1989

…

“How can you love me?” he asked me suddenly. “When you know nothing about my background — my parents, my village, my ancestral home, where I went to school, what I grew up eating, thinking, listening to, dreaming of?”

“But that’s the whole point, Lucky,” I replied. “I don’t care about your background. I don’t care whether you lived in a thatched hut with no running water or grew up in a mansion. I don’t care if your parents drove a Mercedes or brushed their teeth with twigs. I love you. Not your family, not your village, not your caste, not your background. I love you. And that’s all that matters to me.”

He seemed taken aback by this, as if it was a new idea. “I love you too, Priscilla,” he said, but there was a note of uncertainty in his words I had not heard before….

Did I tell you he’s a poet? Even published a few poems in Indian magazines. “The standards aren’t very high,” he said apologetically, and you can see the rough edges in his work. I’m copying one below that he gave me. “A bit on the earnest side, as Wilde might have said,” he joked, “but then you know why it’s important to be earnest.” He comes up with these dreadful one-liners when he’s nervous, which I find really endearing. Anyway, it is earnest, but he means it, I think. Here it is:

Advice to the World’s Politicians

How to Sleep at Night

Try to think of nothing.

That’s the secret.

Try to think of nothing.

Do not think of work not done,

of promises unkept, calls to return,

or agendas you have failed to prepare for meetings

yet unheld.

Think of nothing.

Do not think of words said and unsaid,

of minor scandals and major investigations,

of humiliations endured, insults suffered,

or retorts that did not spring to mind

in time.

Think of nothing.

Do not think of your forgotten wife,

of lonely children and their reproachful demands,

or the smile of the pretty woman

whose handshake lingered just a shade too long

in your palm.

Think of nothing.

Do not think of newspaper headlines,

of the insistent transience of the shortwave radio,

or the seductive stridency of the TV microphones

thrust so thrillingly

into your face.

Think of nothing.

Do not think of the waif on the foreign sidewalk,

her large eyes open in supplication,

her ragged shift stained by dirt and dust,

stretching her despairing hand towards you

in hope.

No, do not think

of the woman at the building site,

wobbling pan of stones on her head,

walking numb for the thousandth time

from pile to site and site to pile

as her neglected baby scrabbles in the dust,

eats sand and wails,

unheard.

Think of nothing.

Do not think of the starving infant,

parched lips mute in hunger,

sitting slumped in the mud,

his eyes fading before his heart.

Do not think

of the stark ribs of skeletal cattle,

unable to provide milk, or hope,

in drought-dried lands of which

you know nothing.

Think of nothing.

Do not think

of the dead-eyed refugee, dispossessed

of everything he once called home.

Do not think

of the unsmiling girl whose once-sturdy thigh

now ends at the knee, the rest blown off

by a thoughtless mine on her way

to the well.

No, do not think

of the solitary tear, the broken limb,

the rubble-strewn home, the choking scream;

never think

of piled-up bodies, blazing flames,

shattered lives, or sundered souls.

Do not think of the triumph of the torturer,

the wails of the hungry,

the screams of the mutilated,

or the indifferent smirk

of the sleek.

Think of nothing.

Then you will be able

to sleep.

What do you think, Cindy? He’s genuinely earnest, discontented with the state of the world. He was telling me one day about this elite cadre he belongs to, the Indian Administrative Service, the IAS. We’ve got nothing like it Stateside. You won’t believe what it takes to get in: hundreds, thousands of young men and women studying sixteen hours a day so 150,000 of them can take an annual exam from which 400 are selected for all the top national government jobs that year — and maybe 25 of those for the IAS. Lucky says he had to wake up at 4:30 each morning to “cram,” to learn zillions of facts and figures about all sorts of things, not because you need to know them to do your job properly but just to prove you’re smart enough to do the job. To many guys, the exams are the be-all and end-all of their lives; getting through is a passport to power, privilege, clout, and lifetime job security.

Lucky had had hopes of becoming a writer, but he couldn’t afford to support himself on his writing, and his family put a lot of pressure on him to take the civil service exams. He says it seemed a noble aspiration to him: he did the exams because he wanted to make a difference. “Like Wilde, I’ve put my genius into my life and merely my talent into my writing,” he says. It’s odd to hear him constantly quoting Wilde, because you can’t imagine anyone less like an apostle of aesthetics. He’s not at all the stereotyped Victorian dandy with a lily in his hand and a book of verse in the other. He’s a bureaucrat, for Chrissake, a government official. And he’s an idealist about his work, as well as a traditionalist culturally and socially, the product of a middle-class professional Indian upbringing. The Oscar Wilde part of him is just in his intellect, I think, something from his education that hasn’t fully seeped into his life. And look at his life. He has a job with no room for the Wildean witticisms and quips he learned to enjoy at college. Maybe these allusions are a kind of refuge for him, giving him some distance from the daily realities he has to deal with. Maybe I’m another kind of refuge too?

I don’t know, Cindy But the guy’s an idealist, and there aren’t too many idealists around in the government. “I didn’t spend a year of my life sharing a tiny room with three other guys all swotting for the IAS in order to serve slum dwellers,” one of his batchmates (colleagues from the same entry year) told him at the training academy in Mussoorie. “I did it so I could be set for life, look after my parents in their old age, and get myself a good wife.” I’m not kidding, Cin; all these guys become instantly more desirable marital prospects the moment they pass the IAS exams. In many parts of India a government job is the ultimate accomplishment, and being in the IAS is the government job to end all government jobs. So fathers of eligible daughters double the dowries on offer when an IAS candidate heaves into view. Listen to one story: Lucky tells me a couple of his college friends fell in love and wanted to get married. Problem was, the girl was from a well-off Brahmin family, and the boy was a Naga from the Northeast, a Christian and a “tribal.” The girl’s father ranted and raved, made the poor girl’s life hell, and forbade any further contact between them. The guy then got into the IAS on the Scheduled Tribe quota, a kind of affirmative action program for India’s underprivileged, and suddenly the father’s objections melted away. They’re now married, and the same father who railed against an “accursed [expletive deleted!] tribal” now boasts of his “IAS son-in-law.”

But Lucky’s really conflicted about his work. On the one hand, he says, he can do good; as district magistrate he has real power here.

On the other hand, he says he’s frequently disillusioned with the cynicism he sees around him in government, especially the corruption. A lot of his colleagues are on the take — official salaries are modest, and the way they see it, since all their college classmates are busy making money as businessmen, engineers, whatever, why shouldn’t the smarter ones, the guys clever enough to get into the IAS, make money too? India’s so full of rules and regulations that government officials can make a fortune from the way they exercise their power to permit — the building of a factory here, the grant of a loan there. And then there’s the political interference, from the local legislator, the MLA, or from ministers higher up in the state capital, Lucknow. Some of it is for petty favors — hire this person, authorize this action, expedite that approval — and he does it as part of the way things are. But when the politicians ask him to favor a dubious contractor or promote an undeserving officer or improperly allocate government funds, he refuses, and then they make their displeasure clear, even start threatening to transfer him. That’s one good thing about his job: he can’t be fired, the worst they can do is transfer him if he won’t do their bidding. He doesn’t, of course, and so one day he may really get to be too much of a pain for the bigwigs in Lucknow and might find himself suddenly made Deputy Commissioner of Inland Waterways or whatever. I can’t bear the thought.

Neither can his wife, of course. Lucky tells me that she keeps asking him why he makes such a point of his principles, why can’t he just let well enough alone? Why rock the boat? Doesn’t he care about her convenience, and the child’s? Lucky says rather bitterly that the rank, the house, the car, the servants are all she cares about. “The supreme vice,” he quotes Wilde again, the disillusioned Wilde of “De Profundis” (go on, look it up, Cin!), “is shallowness.” And Geetha is irremediably shallow. Lucky thinks she should have married the batchmate who drank himself into oblivion the day he got his IAS results, singing “Meri zindagi ban gayee!” (“I’m made for life!”) at the top of his voice in the street. There are eight million civil servants in India, if Lucky’s right (and he usually is!). The few hundred members of the IAS are the top of that heap, and in places like Zalilgarh they ARE the government. Ordinary people are so dependent on the government here for everything — from food rations to maintaining law and order — that Lucky really has power over the terms of their daily survival. He gave me a sardonic little poem about his own elitism:

I Am an Indian

I am an Indian, dressed in a suit and tie;

The words roll off my lucid tongue in accents long gone by;

I rule, I charm, protest, explain, know every how and why.

What kind of an Indian am I?

I am an Indian, with a roof above my head;

When I’ve had enough of the working day, I fall upon my bed;

My walls are hard, my carpets soft, my sofa cushions red.

What kind of an Indian? you said.

I am an Indian, with my belly round and full;

When my kid gets up in the morning she is driven to her school;

And if she’s hot, the a/c’s on, or she’ll splash into the pool.

What kind of an Indian, fool?

I am an Indian, with friends where friends should be;

Wide are the branches of my extensive family tree;

Big businessmen and bureaucrats all went to school with me.

I’m the best kind of Indian, you see.

from Katharine Hart’s diary

October 12, 1989

The HELP-US extension worker, Kadambari — I didn’t get the rest of her name, a rather plain woman with a dark sallow face, wearing a white cotton sari with a navy-blue border, her hair severely pulled back and plaited — took us to Priscilla’s place today.

Zalilgarh is just as bad as I feared. The heat radiates toward you in waves, as if some celestial oven is being opened and stoked in your face. The traffic is a torrent, raging rivers of vehicles and bodies in constant motion, streams of bicycles wending their way past thin cows, their ribs showing through their dirty skin, carts creaking past drawn by skeletal buffaloes, clangorous buses blaring their horns as they rattle and belch their way across town. And everywhere, people: half-dressed beggars with open sores clamoring for money, ash-smeared sadhus in saffron waist-cloths and matted hair, men in dhotis and men in pants and men in kurta-pajamas, and most strikingly the women, in multicolored saris of cotton and nylon, glittering with golden bangles and silver anklets. Vendors hawk their wares on the street — savories served on dried palm leaves, peanuts in cone-shaped packets made of old newspapers, sugarcane juice pressed into grimy tumblers — as flies buzz around everything. A listless gust of air blows a couple of sheets of paper at us from a hawker’s basket, and they turn out to be exam papers, still unread and unmarked, sold by impoverished teachers for the few pennies they will bring, the dreams of schoolchildren reduced to encasing a few grams of spicy fried lentils. Everything is recycled in India, even dreams. Street urchins gambol amid the refuse; a man relieves himself against a wall daubed with the campaign slogans and election symbols of two competing political parties. Above us, a vision of the infinite, as a murder of crows, cawing and wheeling in the brilliantly blue sky, points our way to Priscilla’s last home.

We had to walk down a narrow side-street, a gully they call it, to get there. The sidewalk was strewn with moldering rubbish and it was all we could do to avoid stepping on the trash. The stench was unbearable. Stray dogs nibbled at the scattered refuse. The road was no better, its paving cracked and pitted. Dust rose from every passing vehicle, mainly bicycles and reckless yellow-and-black auto-rickshaws, though a couple of bullock carts rolled past too, their riders idly flogging the tired beasts who were pulling them. Loud noise constantly assailed us, the jangling of bicycle bells, the shouting of male voices, the phut-phut-phut of the auto-rickshaw engines, the blaring of Hindi film music from various storefronts. We walked past groceries, their spices impregnating the air; provision shops, with brightly colored plastic buckets on display; photo developers, testimony to Zalilgarh’s ascent to modernity. At the entrance to what had been Priscilla’s building, Kadambari stopped at a tiny tin shed housing a paan counter, where a grimy little man sat cross-legged in front of an aluminum table as flies buzzed around his wares. He seemed to recognize her, and without much ado expertly daubed lime paste on a bright green leaf before dropping betel nuts and multicolored supari masalas onto it while Rudyard and I watched. The paanwallah folded the bursting leaf into a triangle that Kadambari wedged into her cheek. I refused her offer to have one too, and we trudged up an exterior staircase behind her.

The weather is pleasant in October, cool by Indian standards, but Rudyard was perspiring as we climbed. The whitewashed steps were dirty, the wall splotchy with red stains from the paan juice that the building’s inhabitants casually spat on their way up, as Kadambari proceeded to do. Back in the ’70s, when I first came across those stains in Delhi, I assumed they were blood, and wondered whether the homicide rate was greater than reported or, worse, whether tubercular Indians were coughing up blood all over the city. The discovery that it was merely a combination of a national addiction and poor hygiene had come as a relief. But today, the red stains made me think again of blood, Priscilla’s blood, spilled by an unknown rioter with a knife, and I stumbled, suddenly blinded.

We reached a landing, two floors up, and entered the interior of the building. The corridor was dingy, lit by a single naked bulb dangling from a wire cord. Four identical wooden doors led off it to the apartments within; they were painted a garish blue, though the garishness was dimmed by dirt and assorted scratches visible even in the poor light. Two of the blue doors were closed but not bolted; one was open and a small child, milk dribbling down his chin, stared out at us round-eyed from the doorway until his sari-clad mother swished up from within and dragged him away. The fourth door, bolted and padlocked, was Priscilla’s. Kadambari pulled out a large key and let us in.

It was a small room, sparsely furnished, with a stone floor on which my daughter had placed a small throw-rug, and a single bed. It wasn’t really a bed in the American sense of the word, but a string-cot, a charpoy, its white strings sagging noticeably in the middle, with a thin cotton mattress on top. The bed was neatly made, with a stiff white cotton sheet, and a gaily colored Indian bedspread on top. I sat down heavily on it, imagining the impress of my daughter’s body, and ran a hand over the bedspread, resting it on the lumpy pillow, feeling the lump in my own throat.

Rudyard marched right in and took in the room — the bed, the rudimentary table that served as her desk, the Indian cupboard, or almirah, the solitary chair, the Grateful Dead poster nailed to the wall, the two pieces of luggage on the floor. She lived simply, my daughter, as we had expected. Half a dozen books were stacked on the table. There was a shortwave radio against the sole window, its antenna extended as far as it would go, straining, I imagined, for news and music from home. It was her only luxury: there was no television set, no telephone. A pedestal fan, signs of rust beginning to show on its casing, stood unplugged in a corner; it was all that Priscilla had to keep off the heat whenever Zalilgarh’s erratic electricity supply allowed her to run it. The bathroom was tiny, with an Indian-style squatting toilet, and a tap and a bucket on the floor to bathe at. How had she coped, my baby? Never once had she complained about her living conditions.

Rudyard’s eyes alighted on the two framed photos on the desk. One was of me, alone, taken a year previously in New York, by her. The other was a much older picture, taken at the Red Fort in Delhi back in 1978, of the five of us as a family. The children are grinning and squinting at the camera and Rudyard has his arm around me. An innocent tourist moment, but I could imagine Priscilla looking at it over the years, seeing it as an icon of what she had cherished and lost.

Rudyard averted his eyes from the photos and walked to the almirah. Once again, Kadambari produced a key and opened the door. Rudyard almost recoiled from the sight of himself, red-eyed and perspiring, in the mirror on the inside of the door. A few cotton dresses hung limply from wooden hangers. Rudyard pulled open a drawer and found himself holding Priscilla’s underthings. He withdrew his hands as if scalded.

A fly buzzed around the room. The sounds of the street were fainter here, filtered by the stillness in our hearts.

I got up from the bed and began to look at everything in the room, touching each of her dresses, searching the pockets, emptying the drawers. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Clues, perhaps, but to what? The Zalilgarh authorities weren’t looking for anything; they knew she’d been killed in a riot, like seven other people, and that was good enough for them. Clues to her life, perhaps, were what I needed, rather than to her death. Something that would help me understand what she was experiencing here in Zalilgarh, something that would help me hear the stories she would never be able to tell me again.

Rudyard, still perspiring, looked numbly at our daughter’s personal possessions, the final legacy of her short life. I could see him struggling to contain something within himself, something he had never felt and did not know how to express. It was there in his strained and sweating face, in the way his brow seemed knit in perplexity and pain. He was staring at each book, each garment, as if unable to comprehend what it was doing there, what he was doing with it. We had to pack, of course, take her things away. Where would we take them? For what purpose? Her clothes, in particular, would be pointless to carry to America. Better to give most of them away here, where others would be glad to have them.

But packing gave us something concrete to do. When I supplanted him at the almirah Rudyard sat silently in the chair, staring vacantly at the wall, and Kadambari stood at the door chewing her paan and watching us. As I struggled with Priscilla’s suitcase, though, Rudyard got up and heaved it onto the bed. It was half full of papers, research notes, and a few souvenirs she was no doubt planning to bring to America — a decorative brass plate, a hand-carved wooden box, two embroidered cushion covers. These were simple things, pleasing to the eye, bought cheaply at the local bazaar. They would, I decided, travel back with us as Priscilla had intended them to.

We worked in silence. Neither Rudyard nor I could say a word, at this time, in this place, to each other. I did not trust myself to speak and, as always, tried to find strength in focusing on the practical. Housework and relocation had saved my sanity when my marriage ended; packing and sorting would see me through my pain today.

I looked through the contents of Priscilla’s drawers before putting them away, and found nothing unusual. I took the bedspread, with its distinctively Indian paisley pattern, but left the coarse white sheet. The clothes Priscilla would never wear I folded into the second piece of luggage. I might have offered them to Kadambari except that she showed not the slightest interest in what I was doing, and I could not imagine her in a dress anyway. I would ask the kind Mr. Das of HELP-US whether he could think of people to give them to. Fortunately Rudyard paid no attention to Priscilla’s toilet bag, because he would have been horrified by two things inside it. A vibrator. And a partly used strip of birth-control pills.

The latter surprised me more than the former. I had assumed Priscilla would be alone here, and I knew she had broken up with her last boyfriend before coming to India. I could not imagine why she would need to use birth control in Zalilgarh.

I found no clues among her papers, though I knew I would need to go through them carefully again. There were two letters from me, but none from any of her friends. A couple of sheets of half-done drawings, some scribbled lines of verse: that was all. Everything else was related to her work for HELP-US or her thesis research. I was sure there was more, somewhere. Priscilla would have made jottings, sketched, kept a diary, written poetry. I knew my daughter well enough to be sure there was something else.

Kadambari took the smaller bag and left the room. Rudyard moved to close the suitcase on the bed. I picked up the old photograph on the desk, intending to put it in my handbag along with the picture of myself that had kept my daughter company for the last ten months. But before I could put it away, Rudyard’s hand, oddly unfamiliar, fell upon mine.

“Can I have that?” he asked, his voice thickening.

You have no right, Rudyard, I thought. You’re the one who destroyed the world that photo depicts.

But I didn’t say that. I said, “Of course, Rudyard.”

As I gave it to him he slumped onto the bed, and I found myself holding him as he sobbed uncontrollably, his head hot and wet against my ribs, his body racked with regret. I realized then that, in all the years I had known him, and in all the years of our marriage and its collapse, I had never seen him cry.

from Lakshman’s journal

May 3, 1989

We meet every Tuesday and Saturday at the Kotli, just before dusk. She comes on her bicycle, through the gate I showed her; I have slipped her a copy of the key to the padlock. She always arrives first, wheels her cycle in, and hides it where I have shown her, behind some shrubbery. When I arrive in my official car, there is no sign that anyone is there. This is a sensible precaution, because though I usually let the driver off, sometimes I have no choice but to keep him and I don’t want him putting two and two together and coming up with 22. Sometimes my work delays me; Saturday is a working day for me, ostensibly half-time, but half-time can stretch well into the afternoon. Fortunately, on Saturdays Geetha always goes with Rekha for an early evening puja to the Shiva Mandir and never notices what time I return home.

At one time I had begun to disapprove of Geetha’s pujas: there is a swami resident at the Shiva Mandir who has an unsavory reputation for dabbling in tantric practices and other activities on the wrong side of the law. Before I got to Zalilgarh there were rumors of human sacrifices that could never be proven, and the swami has henchmen — he calls them disciples — who look as though they would not think twice before devoutly slitting your throat on his orders. But tantra is hardly Geetha’s thing and the DM’s wife can scarcely be in any danger, so I didn’t put a stop to her regular visits. And now it’s convenient. With Geetha at the temple, I don’t have to worry so much about the time. When I am held up at the office and arrive at the Kotli later than promised, Priscilla is always there, in the room at the top of the stairs, reading or writing in her scrapbook, or simply looking out at the river and the sky turning inky as dusk descends.

She always rises to greet me, with a smile that warms my soul. We embrace, we kiss — long, cool, lingering kisses unlike any I have ever had — and sooner or later we fall onto the makeshift bed and make love. We find more and different ways to make love, experimenting not because we are jaded but because of our delight in discovering new ways of knowing each other. Afterwards we talk, lying side by side or more often on top of each other.

She loves me, she says, and she means it. This is not love as my parents spoke of it, an emotion anchored in family, in a sense of one’s place in the world, in bonds of blood so thick one cannot conceive of snapping them. It is instead love as I have read of it in Western books or seen in Western movies, an individual attraction between a man and a woman, a feeling that is independent of social context or familial connections. I cannot explain to Priscilla that I have been brought up to mistrust this kind of love, because it is so difficult to tell apart from lesser emotions of infatuation or lust. My father spoke to me of this before I went off to the University. “You will face many temptations,” he said, “and sometimes you will find yourself developing feelings for a girl that you might mistake for love. Such feelings are normal, but do not confuse them with real love, which comes only from the commitment of marriage and the experience of sharing life’s challenges together. The West believes that love leads to marriage, which is why so many marriages in the West end when love dies. In India we know that marriage leads to love, which is why divorce is almost unknown here, and love lives on even when the marital partner dies, because it is rooted in something fundamental in our society as well as our psyche. You are going to college to study, to make your future. But if ever you find yourself distracted by other thoughts, remember what I have said to you.”

I never forgot.

I do not know what she sees in me, what the kindred spirit is that ignites such a spark of recognition in her. I believe I know, though, what I see in her. I see it in our trysting place, at our favorite hour, as the twilight seeps into our room and illuminates the colors of our bodies, the spreading crimson of dusk soft upon the black and white of our skin. I see it in her body as we are about to make love, her limbs light with unspoken whispers. I see it in her eyes at night, the moonbeams playing with her hair, the shadows across her hips like a flimsy skirt. In the darkness, I raise her chin in my hand and it is as if a flame has lifted itself onto the crevices of her smile. I let myself into her and my spirit slips into her soul, I feel myself taking her like nothing else I have ever possessed, she moans and my pleasure lies upon her skin like a patina of dewdrops, she is mine and I sense myself buckling in triumph and release, and then she trembles, a tug of her pelvis drawing me into the night. And I know that I love her.

But afterwards, as I lie by her side, our hearts full of fragmentary phrases, I look at the little mirror on the wall and see the darkness encroach like a stain across our love. I love her, but what does it mean once we have arisen? She dreams of holding hands on Broadway and rubbing noses on the honeymooners’ bench at the Taj Mahal. I think of Geetha and her parents and mine, and of little lost Rekha calling bewildered for her Appa, her eyes wet with unwiped tears. There are moments, of course, when I too fantasize about a new life with a new wife, a new honey-blond wife with skin the color of peaches-and-cream and eyes like diamonds dancing in the sunlight, and I forget, momentarily, my responsibilities, the burdens of guilt and obligation that shackle me to the present.

Sometimes I dream, and the dreams are curious ones, of an America I have never seen, even in the movies, wide and open and inviting and definitely America, but strange, populated by fast cars and large women, or perhaps large cars and fast women, I am unsure which when I awake. The dreams are oddly precise, too, in the ways only dreams can be, so that in one Priscilla beckons me — I know it is Priscilla but in the dream she looks like Marilyn Monroe, like pictures of Marilyn Monroe I have seen in old magazines — this Priscilla/Marilyn beckons me into an estate wagon, and I think, clearly precisely, I must get in, this is a very safe car, it is famous for being safe, and my mind’s eye studies the manufacturer’s name on the back of the hatch, and it reads VULVA. Seriously — for in my dream I see nothing odd about this, reading it as another famous Swedish brand name. Or another dream, in which I am teetering at the top of a skyscraper with Geetha and Rekha trying to hold on to me, they are afraid and crying and I am shouting out to them to hold on, but somehow it is I who leans too far off the edge and then I am falling from a great height, falling falling falling with my wife’s and daughter’s wailing in my ears, and I always wake up before I hit the ground. Of course I can never go back to sleep.

I haven’t read much Freud, but it doesn’t take a shrink to interpret this kind of dream. And it gets worse. Once I awake from another dream of falling, except this time I have splashed into a great briny foaming brown sea, and as I rise to the surface, choking and spluttering, I feel the unmistakable taste of Coca-Cola in my nose and mouth. I plunge again, flailing, and choke on the liquid. I am drowning in a sea of Coke! When I surface again I see, just out of my reach, my daughter on a raft, absurdly shaped like an Ambassador car. She is dressed in white, the color of mourning, and her limpid eyes are sadly downcast, seemingly unaware of me drowning just beyond her reach. In my dream I call out to her but find myself sinking again, knowing this plunge is the third and final descent into the depths, that as I go under my lungs will be full of that brown-black liquid and my voice will be stilled. I swear I awake with the taste of Coca-Cola on my tongue.

And Priscilla, I wonder what she dreams. She always says she can never remember a single dream; she awakes refreshed from her slumber, her mind blissfully cleansed of the night’s wanderings. I envy her unencumbered sleep, the happy transience of her memory.

I have acquired her memories now, and they torment me. I think of her previous lovers, the basketball jock first, and imagine his dark hand on her pale thigh, much like mine, and something dies a little in me. I ask her, with studied casualness, about her old boyfriends, and she replies quite unselfconsciously, in as much detail as I want. And I always want more than is good for me. Sometimes I stop myself in time, preventing my mind from acquiring a detail that I know will come back to haunt me, to diminish my sense of my own worth as her lover. But then the most innocuous details have that power. She itemizes her menagerie at my request, and they tumble out in her recounting like an amatory United Nations — an Argentine, a Finn, a Chinese. Am I, I find myself wondering, merely the latest in a long line of exotics who have shared Priscilla’s bed, the beneficiaries of some missionary urge to bring succor to the underprivileged? But then I remember she has been in WASP arms too, and consider her progression from Boston Brahmin to Tamil Brahmin. Perhaps her predilection is for minorities.

Of course I know these are unworthy thoughts, and the hot flashes of jealousy always pass, sooner or later, cooled by the refreshing candor of her love for me. I sometimes defuse my discomfort by recalling Wilde: “I like men who have a future and women who have a past.” So Oscar would have liked us, on both counts. At other times the words of the old song, learned as a callow teenager, come back to me: “Yesterday belongs to someone else, today belongs to me.”

And what about tomorrow? Sometimes we speak of the future as if we have one. As if we have one together. I speculate idly about resigning from the service — are you mad, my mother would certainly ask, to give up the IAS career tens of thousands can only dream about? — to accompany her to her American campus, perhaps to do a doctorate myself, perhaps to write. My mother would disapprove thoroughly of her; my father, were he alive, would disown me. She is innocent of such considerations: she speaks of staying on in India, establishing HELP-US projects wherever I should happen to be posted. I forbear from telling her that the service regulations would almost certainly prohibit an official’s spouse from undertaking any such activity. The conflict of interest… But something always stops me from entering into the practical details. Priscilla is an escape from reality; her magic cannot survive too much realism.

And so I go along as she spins these glorious schemes in the gossamer of her illusions….

from transcript of Randy Diggs interview

with Professor Mohammed Sarwar

October 12, 1989

You should know what Maulana Azad said when he became president of the Indian National Congress at Ramgarh in 1940. I’d give you a copy of the speech, Mr. Diggs, but I don’t have access to a photocopier in Zalilgarh. It doesn’t matter; I know the words by heart. There is no greater testament of the faith of a religious Muslim in a united India.

The Maulana was a religious scholar, born in Mecca, educated in the Koran and the Hadith, fluent in Persian, Arabic, and Urdu, an exemplar of Muslim learning and culture in India. Yet he confessed that “every fiber of my being revolted” against the thought of dividing India on communal lines. “I could not conceive it possible for a Musulman to tolerate this,” he declared, “unless he has rooted out the spirit of Islam from every corner of his being.” Remember that his principal rival for the allegiance of India’s Muslims was Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, an Oxbridge-educated Lincoln’s Inn lawyer who wore Savile Row suits, enjoyed his Scotch and cigars, ate pork, barely spoke Urdu, and married a non-Muslim. There was no question in the Maulana’s mind as to who was the better Muslim; yet Jinnah claimed to speak for India’s Muslims and to assert their claims to being a separate nation, while the Maulana worked in the secular (Jinnah said Hindu-dominated) Indian National Congress to remind his fellow Muslims where their homeland really was.

“I am a Musulman and proud of the fact,” he said in that great speech. Shall I go on? Is your tape recorder working? “Islam’s splendid traditions of thirteen hundred years are my inheritance. I am unwilling to lose even the smallest part of this inheritance. In addition, I am proud of being an Indian. I am part of that indivisible unity that is Indian nationality.” And then he added — this is the key part — “I am indispensable to this noble edifice. Without me this splendid structure of India is incomplete. I am an essential element which has gone to build India. I can never surrender this claim. It was India’s historic destiny that many human races and cultures and religions should flow to her, and that many a caravan should rest here…. One of the last of these caravans was that of the followers of Islam. They came here and settled for good. We brought our treasures with us, and India too was full of the riches of her own precious heritage. We gave her what she needed most, the most precious of gifts from Islam’s treasury, the message of human equality. Full eleven centuries have passed by since then. Islam has now as great a claim on the soil of India as Hinduism.”

It took courage to say this. The Maulana was dismissed by Jinnah as a “Muslim showboy,” a token elected by the Congress to advertise its secular credentials. But the Maulana was not immersing his Islam in any woolly notion of Indian secularism, still less was he uncritically swallowing Hindu professions of tolerance and inclusiveness. He was, instead, asserting his pride in his religious identity, in the majesty and richness of Islam, while laying claim to India for India’s Muslims. He dismissed talk of partition by arguing that he was entitled — just as any Hindu was — to a stake in all of India, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from the Khyber Pass to Khulna; why should he accept the Pakistani idea of a narrower notion of Muslim nationhood that confined Indian Muslims to a truncated share of the heritage of their entire land? He was a far more authentic representative of Indian Islam than Jinnah, and it is part of the great tragedy of this country’s Muslims that it was Jinnah who triumphed and not Azad.

Triumph? Partition was less a triumph for Indian Muslims than an abdication. In fact, most of the country’s Islamic leaders, and especially those whom you might think of today as “fundamentalists” (people like Maulana Maudoodi, who was to spend years in Pakistani jails), were bitterly opposed to the movement for Pakistan. They felt that Islam should prevail over the world at large and certainly over India as a whole, and they thought it treasonous — both to India and to Islam itself — to advocate that the religion be territorially circumscribed as Jinnah and the Muslim Leaguers did. Pakistan was created by “bad” Muslims, secular Muslims, not by the “good” Muslims in whose name Pakistan now claims to speak.

You can understand why some Indian Muslims are more viscerally anti-Pakistan than many Hindus, especially North Indian Hindus with their romanticized nostalgia for the good old days before Partition. Indian Muslims know what they have lost, what burdens they have to bear as the result of the Jinnah defection, the conversion of brothers into foreigners. Mohammed Currim Chagla, who was India’s foreign minister during the 1965 war with Pakistan, made a speech in Parliament during the Bangladesh war of 1971 in which he said that “Pakistan was conceived in sin and is dying in violence.” Do you know M. J. Akbar, the editor of the Telegraph? India’s brightest young journalist, a real media star, and a Muslim. Well, he famously denounced Jinnah as having “sold the birthright of the Indian Muslims for a bowl of soup.” Some of us feel that our birthright cannot be so easily sold, but it is precisely that sense of loss that drives so many of us to rage and sorrow — the feeling that, since the country was divided in our name, we are somehow less entitled to our due in what remains of it. That a part of our birthright has indeed been given away.

Which leads some of my fellow Muslims into a sort of self-inflicted second-class citizenship, a result of our guilt by association with the original sin of Partition. “If you don’t like it here in India,” say the crassest of the Hindu bigots, “why don’t you go to Pakistan?” How can you reply, “Because this is my home, I am as entitled to it as you are,” when Jinnah and his followers have given the Hindu bigots their best excuse? When they acted, in the name of all Indian Muslims, to surrender a portion of our entitlement by saying that the homeland of an Indian Muslim is really a foreign country called Pakistan?

These are the feelings that are played upon by the Hindu chauvinists. They build their case on our own concession of failure. And I’m not talking about the extremist crackpots who claim the Taj Mahal was really a Hindu palace, but the seemingly reasonable ones who call on Muslims to “assimilate” properly, to “acknowledge” our Hindu origins and subordinate ourselves to their notion of the Indian ethos. There are always some Muslims who’ll submit to this nonsense, who’ll accept a notion of the Indian ethos that doesn’t include them. But for every Indian Muslim who’s vulnerable to such feelings of guilt, there are two who have outgrown it — who assert, like the Maulana, that India is not complete without us, that we are no less Indian than the most chauvinist Hindu.

But who owns India’s history? Are there my history and his, and his history about my history? This is, in many ways, what this whole Ram Janmabhoomi agitation is about — about the reclaiming of history by those who feel that they were, at one point, written out of the script. But can they write a new history without doing violence to the inheritors of the old?

Once, when I was in college, a fellow got into an argument with me and lost his temper. “You partitioned the country!” he yelled. I interrupted him. “If I’d partitioned the country, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be in Pakistan,” I said. “If you mean I’m a Muslim, I plead guilty to the charge of being Muslim. But to no other charge. Muslims didn’t partition the country — the British did, the Muslim League did, the Congress Party did. There are more Muslims in India today than in Pakistan. This is where we belong.” I said it quietly, but the fight died in him then. He spluttered and walked away. I stood my ground. All Indian Muslims must, or they will soon have no ground to stand on.

Pakistanis will never understand the depth of the disservice Jinnah did us, Indian Muslims as a whole, when he made some of us into non-Indians. There are still so many Indians who — out of ignorance as well as prejudice — think of us as somehow different from them, somehow foreign, “not like us.” I was on a train once, with my wife and children, dressed as you see me, in a shirt and trousers, smoking a Wills and reading the Statesman, when my neighbor struck up a conversation about something in the paper — I can’t remember what it was, but it had nothing to do with the communal question. Anyway, towards the end of the conversation, which we had both enjoyed, he introduced himself and asked me my name. “Mohammed Sarwar?” he repeated incredulously. “A Muslim?” As if Mohammed Sarwar could be anything but a Muslim! “Yes,” I replied, tightly, defensively. He waved a sheepish hand, the gesture taking in my garb, my wife in a floral-patterned salwar-kameez, my little boys in shorts and tee-shirts reading Amar Chitra Katha comics. “But you’re not like them at all!”

Not like them at all. I began to say something, but was suddenly overcome by the sheer futility of the attempt. It was bad enough that he had labeled me, consigned his erstwhile conversational partner to the social ghetto of minority status. But I had surprised him, perhaps even disappointed him, by failing to conform to his stereotype of my minority- hood. As a Muslim, I had to look different; perhaps my forehead should bear the indentation of banging it on the floor five times a day in namaz; my wife should no doubt be in a burqa, shielded from infidel eyes; my boys should wear the marks of their circumcisions like a badge. Instead there we were, indistinguishable from any other middle-class Indian family on the train. I looked him directly in the eye till he became uncomfortable enough to avert his gaze. I am a Muslim, I wanted to say to him, but I will never allow your kind to define what kind of Muslim I am.

Yes, there’s prejudice in this country. I know I’ve had a privileged upbringing, an elite education, and I’m now in a position of intellectual authority. I’ve been conscious of how important it is for me never to forget that isn’t that way for millions of my fellow Muslims. Indian Muslims suffer disadvantages, even discrimination, in a hundred different ways that I may never personally experience. If I’m ever in danger of forgetting that, there’ll be someone like that man on the train to remind me.

And yet, Mr. Diggs, I love this country. I love it not just because I was born here, as my father and mother were, as their parents before them were, not just because their graves have mingled their bones into the soil of this land. I love it because I know it, I have studied its history, I have traveled its geography, I have breathed its polluted air, I have written words to its music. India shaped me, my mind, my tastes, my friendships, my passions. The fact that I bow my head towards the Kaaba five times a day — after years in college when I did not pray even three times a year — does not mean I am turning away from my roots. I can eat a masala dosa at the Coffee House, chew a paan afterwards and listen to Ravi Shankar playing raag durbari, and I celebrate the Indian-ness in myself with each note. I hear the Muslim Dagar brothers sing Hindu devotional songs, and then I attend a qawwali performance by one of our country’s greatest exponents of this Urdu musical form, who happens to be a Hindu, Shankar Shambhu, and I am transported as he chants the long list of Muslim pirs to whom he pays devotional tribute before his rendition. This is India, Mr. Diggs!

I was a student in 1971 when the Pakistani generals proclaimed a jihad, a holy Islamic war, against India. This was in the war that would create Bangladesh, another Muslim state in what had been East Pakistan. A jihad, they said, but my chest swelled with pride that the Indian Air Force commander in the northern sector was my classmate’s father, Air Marshal Latif, later Air Chief Marshal. What sort of jihad would the Pakistanis conduct against this distinguished Muslim?

I take my children to the latest Bollywood blockbuster and laugh as the Muslim hero chases the Hindu heroine around the tinsel tree. I avidly follow Test cricket and cheer for my hero, perhaps the best batsman in the world, Mohammed Azharuddin, and I cheer for him because he is on my team, the Indian team, not because he is Muslim — or at least, not only because he is Muslim. I cannot tell you how much it meant to me when he scored a century for India against Pakistan, in Pakistan. One day he will captain India, Mr. Diggs, and he will make every Indian proud because no one will notice, despite his name, that he is a Muslim.

Or so I hope. In recent years, Mr. Diggs, there’s been a change in the dominant ethos of the country, in the attitudes of mind that define what it means to be Indian. We’re seeing more and more the demonization of a collectivity. Look at the things they are saying! Muslims are “pampered” for political ends, they say: look at the Shah Banu case and Muslim Personal Law. Muslims have four wives, they exclaim, and are outbreeding everyone else; soon they will overtake the Hindus! Muslims are disloyal: they set off firecrackers whenever Pakistan beats India at cricket or hockey. I tried to argue the point at first with those Hindus who were willing to raise it with me, but found it almost too simple to do so. The Rajiv Gandhi government’s action on Shah Banu was pure political opportunism; it was a sellout to Muslim conservatives, but a betrayal of Muslim women and Muslim reformers. Why stigmatize the community as a whole when many amongst them too lost out in the process? In any case, Personal Law covers only marriage and inheritance and divorce: how does it affect those who are not subject to it? If Muslims have four wives — and not many do — how does that increase the number of reproductive Muslim wombs, which still remains four whether by one husband or many? And by what statistical projection can 115 million Muslims “overtake” 700 million Hindus? If a handful of Muslims are pro-Pakistani, how can one label an entire community? Surely the families of my hero Mohammed Azharuddin, or, for that matter, of the nation’s numerous Muslim hockey stars, aren’t setting off firecrackers to commemorate Indian defeats by Pakistan? But it doesn’t matter — this is not about logic or reasoning. The national mind has been afflicted with the intellectual cancer of thinking of “us” and “them.”

Where do Indian Muslims like myself fit in? I’ve spent my life thinking of myself as part of “us”— now there are Indians, respectable Indians, Indians winning votes, who say that I’m really “them”!

But I’m determined to resist this minority complex that the Hindu chauvinists want to impose upon me and others like me. What makes me a minority? Is it a mathematical concept? Well, mathematically Muslims were always a minority in India, before Partition, even in the mediaeval Muslim period I spend my life researching and teaching. But when the Great Mughals ruled on the throne of Delhi, were Muslims a “minority” then? Mathematically no doubt, but no Indian Muslim thought of himself as a minority. Brahmins are only ten percent of the population of India today — do they see themselves as a minority? No, minorityhood is a state of mind, Mr. Diggs. It is a sense of powerlessness, of being out of the mainstream, of being here on sufferance. I refuse to let others define me that way. I tell my fellow Muslims: No one can make you a minority without your consent.

I beg your pardon? Yes, I’ve been to Pakistan. Once. For an academic conference, in fact. Where a Pakistani scholar stood up and spoke about the importance, indeed the centrality, of Islam in his country’s national identity. “If the Turks cease to be Muslim, they are still Turks,” he said at one point, bringing his peroration to a climax. “If the Egyptians cease to be Muslim, they are still Egyptians. If the Iranians cease to be Muslim, they are still Persians. But if we cease to be Muslim, what are we? We’re Indians!” I went up to him afterwards. “My name is Mohammed Sarwar,” I said, “and I’m Indian.” And I simply walked away from his outstretched hand.

Later, back in India, whenever I tell this story to my Muslim friends, I add something: “For me it’s the opposite. We’re Muslim, but there are Muslims in a hundred countries. If we’re not Indian, what are we?”

The danger is that Hindus like Ram Charan Gupta will get Muslims like me thinking differently. This is why the change in the public discourse about Indianness is so dangerous, and why the old ethos must be restored. An India that denies itself to some of us could end up being denied to all of us. This would be a second Partition: and a partition in the Indian soul would be as bad as a partition in the Indian soil. For my sons, the only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts. An India neither Hindu nor Muslim, but both. That is the only India that will allow them to continue to call themselves Indians.

Mrs. Hart and Mr. Das

October 12, 1989

“I don’t know how to ask you this, Mr. Das, but it’s really important to me. You see, I’m trying so hard to understand the circumstances of my daughters death.”

“Of course, Mrs. Hart, of course. Please be asking anything you want. Anything you want. If I am knowing the answer, I shall of course be telling you vithout any hesitation. Any hesitation.”

“Well. [Deep breath.] Did Priscilla have a special friend here in Zalilgarh?”

“Miss Priscilla was so much popular, Mrs. Hart. Ve were all being her special friends. Special friends.”

“No, you don’t understand. I mean I haven’t made myself clear. Did she have a special personal friend? An intimate friend?”

“I am regrettably not understanding you, Mrs. Hart. Not understanding.”

“Did she have a boyfriend here, Mr. Das?”

“Oh dear, Mrs. Hart, what question you are asking! Miss Priscilla was a weritable angel. She was helping poor women, vorking wery hard. Wery hard. Where from she was to find the time for boyfriend-shoyfriend? Chhi!”

“Mr. Das, I have no doubt she worked very hard, but I assume she had some spare time for herself. I found these among her things. They’re birth-control pills, Mr. Das, as I’m sure you know. Why was she taking them?”

“Ah, I see. I see. But why must you assume she was taking them herself, Mrs. Hart? You are knowing we are population-control awareness project. Awareness project. She may have been having them to show the poor women. To show the poor women. Please do not imagine the worst of your poor daughter, Mrs. Hart. The worst.” “Oh, for God’s sake…. Never mind, Mr. Das. Thank you.”

“Mrs. Hart, I am understanding wery veil your anxiousness to be knowing more about this great tragedy Great tragedy. And to have reminders of your lovely daughter. Lovely daughter. Alas, this is all I am being able to find for you in the office.”

“What is it?”

“A briefing paper, Mrs. Hart. Briefing paper. On population awareness and women.”

“It’s not exactly what I was looking for, but I do appreciate your kindness, Mr. Das. Thank you.”

“You are being most welcome, Mrs. Hart. Most welcome.”

“You haven’t come across anything of a more personal nature in her desk, have you?”

“You are meaning? Excuse me, I don’t follow. Don’t follow.”

“I’ve always known Priscilla to keep a sort of scrapbook, with her impressions, poems, sketches. It wasn’t at the apartment — the room she rented. No one seems to have seen it.”

“Scrapbook? Hmmm — I am not recalling any such thing, Mrs. Hart. Any such thing. If she had a scrapbook, she was not producing it at the office, isn’t it? I am truly sorry I am being unable to help, Mrs. Hart. Miss Priscilla was not really having the facilities here to keep anything, only project files. Project files. But we will certainly look again, Mrs. Hart. You are also being most welcome to look anywhere in this office by your goodself. Meanwhile, you are wishing to take this paper of Miss Priscilla’s? This paper?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to deprive you of something you need for your work, Mr. Das.”

“Oh, that is perfectly all right. It is a spare copy. Spare copy. And so well-written. What a wonderful writer Miss Priscilla was, Mrs. Hart. Here, you must listen:

“ ‘The case for the HELP-US population-control awareness projects is founded on the clear and demonstrable relationship between high fertility rates and the subjugation of women. This is particularly apparent in India, where women are placed under considerable social and family pressure to bear more children, which in turn reduces their autonomy as decisional agents in society. The fact is that women who are largely confined to, and in a real sense shackled by, the repeated bearing and full-time raising of children suffer a loss of freedom and agency that restricts their abilities to fulfil their life potential. Young women must be a particular target of HELP-US because raising their consciousness can have a much wider impact on their families and on society as a whole. Women who resist repeated childbearing will exercise greater authority within their family units which, in turn, will reduce fertility rates and thus reduce the strain on the limited economic and environmental resources of a developing country like India…

“You see, Mrs. Hart? What a vision your daughter was having? What a vision!”