Riot

~ ~ ~

Ram Charan Gupta to Randy Diggs

(translated from Hindi)

October 12, 1989

You look at me politely enough, but I can see you are not convinced. You have doubtless been reading the opinions of these so-called secularists in Delhi who say there is no proof that the Ram Janmabhoomi temple stood where the so-called Babri Masjid now stands. What do they know about proof who only know what Western textbooks have taught them? It has been known for thousands of years that that is the Ram Janmasthan, the exact place of birth of our Lord Ram. Knowledge passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth is how wisdom was transmitted in India, Mr. Diggs. Ours is an oral tradition, and our tradition tells us that this is where Ram was born. In any case, does it not strike you as strange that Ayodhya is full of temples, but the most coveted spot, the most hallowed spot, the spot with the best site on a hill, is occupied by a mosque? Do these secularists think that was an accident, or a simple coincidence? Or might it be, instead, that Babar, the Mughal invader, demolished the biggest, the best, the most important temple of the Hindus and replaced it with a mosque named for himself, just to rub the noses of the conquered in the rubble of their faith?

This is not just supposition, Mr. Diggs. There is plenty of historical evidence for our claims. Joseph Tiffenthaler, an Austrian Jesuit priest who stayed in Awadh between 1776 and 1781, wrote about how the famous temple marking the birth of Ram had been destroyed 250 years earlier and a mosque built with its stones. A British court even pronounced judgment in 1886, and I quote: “It is most unfortunate that a masjid should have been built on land specially held sacred by the Hindus.… But as the event occurred 356 years ago it is too late now to remedy the grievance. All that can be done is to maintain the status quo.… Any innovation could cause more harm and derangement of order than benefit.” What does that mean, I ask you, Mr. Diggs? Does it not imply that the British acknowledged that a mosque had been built on the site of the temple, but they felt they could do nothing about it because they did not want to risk a law-and-order problem?

I have no doubt where the truth lies. What is more important, Mr. Diggs, is that millions of devout Hindus have no doubt either. To them this accursed mosque occupies the most sacred site in Hinduism, our Ram Janmabhoomi. Who cares what proof these leftist historians demand when so many believe they know the truth? Our faith is the only proof we need. What kind of Indian would support a structure named for a foreigner, Babar, over one consecrated to the greatest Indian of them all, that divinity in human form, Lord Rama?

And the Ram Janmabhoomi is not the only temple that was demolished by these marauding invaders and replaced with their filthy mosques. There are literally dozens more, all over our country. Do you know the story of the Kashi Vishwanath temple — or, as they prefer to call it, the Gyan Vapi mosque? No? Then listen: I will tell you.

It was just over three hundred years ago. The Kashi Vishwanath temple was one of the finest in Varanasi — what you call Benares, the city of temples, on the banks of the holy Ganga, the Ganges. It had been built as the result of a particularly auspicious dream — a dream by a princess, in which she was urged to consecrate this spot to Shiva, the god of destruction in our holy trinity. Inside the famed temple, which attracted millions of devotees from far and near, stood a magnificent shivalingam made of the purest emerald, a glittering phallic representation of the power of the godhead. Aurangzeb, the evil Muslim fanatic who reigned on the Mughal throne in Delhi, whose hatred for what he called idolatry was notorious, lusted for this prize. In 1669 he sent down one of his most feared generals with orders to smash the great temple, where he claimed “wicked sciences” were being practiced, and to bring the emerald lingam back to him.

The general he chose was an Abyssinian in his service who was known as Black Mountain. The name was apt in more ways than one. Black Mountain was a terrifying figure, immensely tall and broad-shouldered, black as the night, clad entirely in black, who always rode a black stallion. He marched on Varanasi with thousands of troops and something the defenders of the city had not faced before — dozens of cannons. And yet, despite this terrible adversary, how the Hindus of Varanasi fought! What a fearsome battle raged, Mr. Diggs! The Hindus defended their temple against impossible odds. Hundreds of Hindu soldiers and civilians were killed, but they could not indefinitely resist the overwhelming might of the invaders.

With defeat inevitable and the might of the Mughals about to descend on the temple, its purohit, the chief priest, made the supreme sacrifice. He seized the emerald lingam — which must have weighed much more than the priest himself— and dragged himself over to the temple well, known as the Well of Knowledge. There, with the forces of General Black Mountain almost upon him, the priest plunged into the waters of the well, clutching the lingam to his heart. Of course the weight of the precious object took him to the bottom, guaranteeing his death. His drowned body soon floated to the top, and was pulled out by Black Mountain’s men. But of the prized emerald itself there was no sign. A furious Black Mountain had the well dredged, but the lingam was never found. The Muslims said it must have slipped into an estuary and floated into the Ganges. But we Hindus know it was recovered by Shiva himself, taken out of the clutches of the invaders, who smashed his temple in their rage. It will return to Varanasi one day — but only when the vile mosque they have built in place of the fabled temple is replaced by a Shiva temple once again, and the princess’s original dream is once again fulfilled.

So you did not know about the Kashi Vishwanath, eh, Mr. Diggs? This time you will not hear those secularists cleverly decrying the lack of proof that there was ever a temple at that spot. For the proof is visible on the walls of the mosque itself — the back wall of the mosque is the wall of the ruined temple, complete with traces of its original Hindu carvings. You want more proof? In 1937, the British themselves examined the facts and concluded — officially, with a formal report — that the Gyan Vapi mosque stands upon the site of an ancient Hindu temple. Why should it have been any different with the Ram Janmabhoomi? You see, Mr. Diggs, it was very simple. Hindu temples were destroyed and replaced by mosques quite deliberately, as part of a conscious imperial strategy by the Muslim rulers to demoralize the local population and humiliate them. It was a way of saying, your Hindu gods are not so powerful, they had to bow before Muslim might, just as you too must subjugate yourselves to your new Mughal masters. That was the message of the Gyan Vapi mosque, and that was the message of the so-called Babri Masjid.

Now tell me, Mr. Diggs, is that a message that has any place in today’s free and independent India? Is it not time to restore the pride of the local people in their own traditions, their own gods, their own worth, by rebuilding the Ram Janmabhoomi temple?

These fancy-pants administrators you are going to meet, Lakshman and Gurinder Singh, want us to call off our agitation because of the riot. Call it off? We will never do that, Mr. Diggs. Never! Because if we do, the Muslims will proclaim victory. They will think they have won, they will crow about our humiliation, and then, believe me, they will come and slaughter us in our beds.

There is the old story of the trooper standing guard with two drawn swords, one in each hand. An enemy soldier comes to him and slaps him across the face. The trooper does nothing and the enemy sneeringly walks away. “Why didn’t you react when he slapped you?” asks a bystander. “But how could I?” replies the trooper. “Both my hands were occupied.”

That trooper, Mr. Diggs, is Hindu India. We have the swords in our hands but we do not use them even when we are repeatedly slapped. Well, those days are over. We know how to fight back now, with what is in our hands.

Guru Golwalkar, the longest serving Hindu leader this century said it very clearly, years ago: “The non-Hindu people in Hindustan must adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., they must not only give up their attitude of intolerance and ungratefulness towards this land and its age-old tradition but must also cultivate the positive attitude of love and devotion instead — in a word, they must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country wholly subordinate to the Hindu nation, claiming, deserving no privileges, much less any preferential treatment — not even citizen’s rights.” That is the message to these evil Muslims. As you say in your country, they better believe it.

No, the Ram Janmabhoomi temple will be built. No matter how many lives have to be sacrificed to ensure it. Our blood will irrigate the dusty soil, our sweat will mix the cement instead of water, but we will build the temple, Mr. Diggs. Mark my words. I have seen the light in the eyes of the young boys in our procession, even the very ones who were stabbed. It is not just religious fervor that makes their eyes shine, Mr. Diggs. It is the look of victory — as if some spark that has been stamped on for forty years has suddenly blazed again. This light will not be easily put out. It will shine, yes, and it will illuminate the whole of India with its flame.

from Randy Diggs’s notebook

October 14, 1989

Gurinder Singh: tough cop. Turban, fierce beard, Sikh. Smart. Honest? Talks straight. Curses (a lot). Drinks (a lot). “I’m Sikh enough not to smoke and Punjabi enough to drink like an Ambassador. I don’t mean the diplomatic piss-artist: I mean I guzzle like that steel behemoth of an Ambassador car we make here.”

GS and Lakshman make an odd pair at the helm of the district, but to all appearances a good one. They’re old buddies, sort of. This from an interview, unprintables deleted: “We weren’t exactly close friends in college. You can see the differences. Lucky’s an intellectual type with a sensitive soul. I’m down-to-earth, a man of action. He reads books in his spare time; I run. At college he studied English; I did history. He debated and edited the campus rag; I played [field] hockey. He’s vegetarian; I bunked [skipped] the mess hall the one day of the week they didn’t serve meat. He’s a teetotaler; I always had a bottle of rum under my bed. But I liked the fellow for two reasons: he’s smart and he’s honest. So when he ran for president of the College Union against one of my hockey teammates, a fellow with as much wood between his ears as in his hands on the field, I supported Lucky. Made me a bit unpopular with the rest of the hockey team. But he was the better candidate, and the better man. I’m glad to be working with him in bloody Zalilgarh.”

The pair seem to have made the same sets of enemies. Which suggests they must work well together.

from transcript of Randy Diggs interview

with Superintendent of Police Gurinder Singh

October 14, 1989

RD: So you and the district magistrate couldn’t stop the procession from going ahead even after the stabbing incident that night?

GS: You’re right. We did our damnedest, you know. Of course, the bloody perpetrators were absconding. But I spent the night arresting every Muslim troublemaker I could think of. If you owned a motorcycle and didn’t own a foreskin, I locked you up. Then Lucky and I–

RD: Lucky?

GS: Lakshman. Sorry. I call him Lucky. A college nickname. He calls me Guru. Except when he’s issuing orders. Anyway, Lucky and I called in the Hindu leaders at dawn. Buggers came in rubbing the sleep from their eyes. Only made them look more bloodshot and murderous, the bastards. Told them we’d made the arrests, pleaded for calm, asked them to forget their little procession. You’d have thought we’d asked them to sell us their daughters. One of them, a fat little runt called Sharma, got so hysterical I thought his eyes would pop right out of his fucking head. No, they were determined to go ahead.

RD: And you couldn’t stop them?

GS: Not really. Actually, Lucky had already asked for permission to ban the procession. Well before the bloody stabbing. But he’d been denied by Lucknow. So, without an okay from the state government, that really wasn’t an option. In any case, there were already some twenty-five to thirty thousand Hindutva volunteers assembled in Zalilgarh. Buggers were determined and as charged up as the batteries on their megaphones. Lucky and I realized that if we attempted to halt the procession by force at this stage we were doomed to fail. It was a pissing certainty that police action would lead only to large-scale violence and killings. Don’t forget that at that point I was also outnumbered — I had a few hundred cops to their thirty thousand motherloving zealots. So we tried persuasion.

RD: And it didn’t work.

GS: You’re right — it didn’t work. They were as stubborn a bunch of bastards as ever smeared ash on their foreheads. Want a refill on that drink?

RD: No, thanks. But you go ahead. So you gave up?

GS: No, dammit, we didn’t give up. What the hell do you think we are, a bunch of pansies? We tried to get them to change their route, to avoid Muslim areas and in particular mosques. They wouldn’t agree to that either. Finally Lucky and I felt we had no choice. Our only option seemed to be to let the procession pass — but with intensive control and regulation.

RD: Meaning what exactly?

GS: Bloody soda’s flatter than a hijra’s chest. This is like drinking dog’s piss, if you ask me.Jaswinder! Soda hai? Anyway — sorry, what was it? Something else you asked me.

RD: What did your “intensive control and regulation” mean?

GS: Standard stuff, man. We imposed pretty stiff conditions on them. Oh, Lucky was stern and uncompromising that morning. The buggers could march, but they had to forget about beating drums or cymbals near the mosques. They wanted to carry stuff, fine — but they could carry placards, not weapons. None of this brandishing of swords and trishuls — you know, Shiva’s trident, which so many of these saffron-robed monks love to wave about the pissing place. And none of their anti-Muslim slogans of hate, calculated to insult the other motherlovers into rash retaliation.

RD: What sort of slogans?

GS: Pretty rabid ones. In fact, there had been a couple of weeks of sustained, offensive sloganeering before the stabbing incident, so we knew how words could inflame passions. Every day as the bastards prepared for their march, hundreds of young Hindu men would gather in the Muslim parts of town and shout slogans, abusing Muslims, taunting them, goading them. Sometimes they’d roar into the mohallas on motorbikes, revving their engines before shouting their provocations. “Mussalmaan ke do hi sthaan / Pakistan ya kabristan” — “There are only two places for a Muslim, Pakistan or the cemetery.” It got worse: “Jo kahta hai Ali Ali / Uski ma ko choddo gali gali” — “He who calls out to Ali, fuck his mother in every alley.” Of course the bastards did this during the day, when most of the Muslim men were away at work and the women and kids were cowering in their homes. Some of their slogans were aimed at bolstering the courage of the waverers among the Hindus. “Jis Hindu ka khoon na khaule / Khoon nahin hai pani hai” — “The Hindu whose blood doesn’t boil has water in his veins.” Or “Jo Janmabhoomi ke kaam na aaye / Woh bekaar jawaani hai” — “He who does not work for the Janmabhoomi is a useless youth.” And of course the usual affirmations that “Mandir wahin banayenge” — “The temple will be built right there.” That is, where the mosque stands. It may not sound like much, but when you hear these words in the throats of a hundred lusty young men on noisy motorbikes, revving their rage between shouts, you understand how maddened with fear the Muslims became. Whichever pissing Englishman wrote “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me” had never been within sniffing distance of a slogan-shouting Indian mob. Words can hurt you, my friend. These words did. I have no doubt they led directly to the stabbing incident the night before the procession.

RD: So Mr. Lakshman tried to ban the sloganeering?

GS: Along with all the other things I mentioned. Agree to the conditions, he said, or no march; my good friend the stern cop here will withdraw police permission for your procession. And I nodded, giving my sinister smile. It was a bluff, but they couldn’t take the chance that it mightn’t be. So they agreed. And then Lucky pulled out a sheet of paper and a pen and asked the leaders of all the main Hindu parties to give us these commitments in writing. Bugger-all good that did, as it turned out.

RD: So they didn’t keep their promises?

GS: Lucky seemed to think it would make a difference if they signed something. But frankly, I never thought it would amount to a pisspot full of spit. Someone who doesn’t intend to keep an oral promise doesn’t suddenly become more trustworthy because he puts it in writing. Their signatures weren’t worth a rat’s fart on a cold day, if you’ll pardon my Punjabi. So I planned an extensive police presence anyway. Throughout the route of the bleeding march — cops at every corner and crossing, more in front of the mosques and sensitive neighborhoods, plus pickets of the Provincial Armed Constabulary, called in from neighboring districts where they’d been dealing with the same sort of crap. We really did everything we fucking could, Mr. Diggs. But it wasn’t enough.

RD: Tell me what happened.

GS: Well, the procession began as scheduled. And it was bloody apparent that it was going to be a problem. I’d never seen anything like it myself–

RD: You mean in size?

GS: Size, passion, militancy. Lucky and I were there, of course. He was clutching the piece of paper these bastards had all signed. Bhushan Sharma, Ram Charan Gupta, the whole lot of them, bloody hypocrites to a man. All their written assurances weren’t worth the cost of that single sheet of paper. They weren’t worth the sweat on Lucky’s hand that dampened that sheet every time he disbelievingly reread the undertakings they were openly violating. Restraint in sloganeering? Forget it — the most vulgar and vicious slogans were screamed out by the marchers, initiated by some of our precious signatories. No weapons? The procession was swarming with trishuls and naked daggers, which they flashed and pumped up and down as if practicing for a fucking javelin-throwing contest. Tie those bastards to a hydel generator, and you could have powered the pissing town for weeks. All this was bad enough, but then the leaders suddenly tried to steer the procession into the heart of the Muslim bastis. Just to provoke a reaction. Mind you, this was something they had specifically promised not to do, the sons of bitches. But I hadn’t trusted their promise anyway, so my men were in place, and we stopped their little attempted detour. We firmly pushed the slimy sisterloving marchers back to the agreed route.

RD: So you were able to keep things under control for a while.

GS: Yeah, for a while. But how the fuck do you control thirty thousand people on a hot September day if they’re determined to make trouble? The sun was getting higher, and so was the temper of the mob. By noon our shirts were soaked with sweat.

Here, have another drink. I could certainly use one.

RD: Thanks.

GS: It was tense, man. Tense. Want me to paint a picture for you? A seemingly endless procession, winding its way slowly, tortuously damned slowly, through the narrow lanes. Dust swirling upwards from their tramping feet. Chauvinist slogans rending the bloody air. Get it? Imagine the scene: The heat. The noise. The confusion. The hatred being spewed. The bloody adrenaline flowing. Those blasted blades flashing in the sun. People pumped up, thirsty, hoarse. Shouting.

RD: Then what happened?

GS: As it passed the main mosque, the procession paused, as if to attack. Lucky’s executive magistrates and my police had to physically push the frenzied young buggers onward. In case they forgot they were here to march and turned on the mosque instead.

RD: And the Muslims of the town? Where were they while this was going on in their neighborhood?

GS: At this point, they were all barricaded in their bloody homes. No Muslim was seen out of doors. Not even a circumcised mouse.

RD: Go on. What happened next?

GS: By midafternoon about two-thirds of the procession had passed by the Muslim bastis. Lucky and I began to believe we were going to get away with it. Without the explosion we’d both feared. We should have known we were as likely to escape untouched as a whore at a stag party. Ah! — some fresh soda at last.

Where were we? Yes, we were standing at the crossroads before one particular mosque. Not the main one. A smaller mosque, which had been the site of several communal battles in the past. The Mohammed Ali Mosque, I think it’s called. Doesn’t matter. In fact that was the mosque where we predicted the frenzy of the procession would reach its climax. That’s why we were both there. Bloody DM and twice-bloody SP. Pushing the crowd forward. Acutely alert for a clash. That’s the damnedest bloody thing, Mr. Diggs. We were there, prepared for the worst. We weren’t even taken by surprise.

RD: You can call me Randy.

GS: Only when I’ve seen you with a woman. But go on, have another. Soda’s okay now. You can’t let me drink alone.

RD: Thanks. Actually, it’s short for Randolph. But please go on.

GS: As I said, we were prepared. We had prevented an attack on the main mosque. We thought we were seeing this through. Then, suddenly, a bunch of young men came running, in absolute panic. Running from the opposite direction, that is, towards our part of the procession. They were shouting. At first we couldn’t hear what they were saying. I even thought they might be Muslims charging the marchers. But they were Hindu all right. And the agitation on their faces suggested something else. They were screaming, “They’re attacking us! Bomb maar rahen hain!” — they’re bombing us. Who? we asked, and of course the answer came, the Muslims. The Muslims had thrown a bomb into the crowd and a Hindu processionist had been killed. Shit — this was it, the moment we’d feared. Lucky and I ran immediately to the spot. It was barely a hundred meters away. The enraged crowd had gathered round a young man who was lying bleeding on the ground. His chest had been torn open by a crude bomb. His life was quickly ebbing away. People were screaming their fear and rage. The mood was uglier than a hijra’s crotch. Lucky quickly lifted the youth into his car, which was waiting nearby, and told the driver to rush him to hospital. He died before he got there.

RD: The first victim.

GS: You’re bloody right. The first victim. Lucky and I had a job to do. We were confronting an infuriated mob screaming for bleeding vengeance. We knew that if we didn’t act immediately, we’d have a lynch mob on our hands. They’d be running wild through the Muslim bastis. We had to deal with the provocation before it got out of control.

RD: Sounds like it already had.

GS: Look, it was one death so far. We were fearing hundreds. It was pretty clear to me, after a couple of questions, where the bomb had been hurled from. There was a small double-storied house in a very narrow by-lane. This lane branched off, as crooked as a beaten mongrel’s leg, from the main lane of the Muslim quarter through which the procession was passing. The idiots who’d thrown it had clearly made a stupid little calculation in those twisted little minds they keep up their ass somewhere. They figured the first bomb would bring the procession to a halt. Then the enraged mob would rush the house. Once the crowd was near the house, these stupid buggers would throw their little collection of homemade bombs from above. Kill a lot of the marchers — that was their only thought. If “thought” isn’t too strong a word for their stinking little scheme. And they’d have accounted for a few Hindu fanatics, I have to grant them that.

RD: But they’d have been killed too. Their house could have been burned down.

GS: You’re right. Though it wasn’t their own house. But don’t look for rational thinking in communal riots, Randy. These buggers had been at the receiving end of insults and slogans and petty offenses of all sorts for days leading up to the Ram Sila Poojan. They were maddened like a chained animal that’s been regularly prodded. Of course the poor bastards felt it was time to retaliate.

RD: But the Muslims had already taken action, right? With the motorcycle assault? Was there any connection?

GS: Different buggers. But it was the same sort of attitude that prompted the Muslims on the motorcycles the previous night to stab those Hindu boys. You don’t think as far as the next step. You just want to do something, now.

RD: Was the crowd already at the house when you got there?

GS: No, Lucky and I had run to the spot as soon as we heard of the incident. People were still in shock, focusing on the wounded boy. Once we got him off in the DM’s car, though, we knew the crowd would become a mob. And mobs want only one thing. Revenge.

from Lakshman’s journal

June 2, 1989

We speak, inevitably, about writing. I picked up her scrapbook once without asking her, and she snatched it away with a little scream. These Americans and their exaggerated sense of privacy! I paraphrased Wilde: “Everyone should keep a diary — preferably somebody else’s.” She wouldn’t budge. So I needled her enough to get her to show me some things in it. Not the very personal stuff — about me, perhaps? — but her creative musings, poems, sketches. She’s not a bad poet. There’s one on Zalilgarh, written last Christmas, that’s probably good enough to be published. I tell her so, and she blushes. She doesn’t write for publication, she tells me, only for herself. Everything in her scrapbook is for herself, and no one else.

“What’s the point, then?” I demand. “Ever since college I’ve been struggling to find the time to write because I have something to say to the world, and here you have the time to write and you want no one to read it.”

That gets us onto my own writing — my erratic, disorganized, unfocused writing, my whenever-I-can-fmd-the-time-and-the-mood writing, my escaping-from-Geetha writing. I am defensive, almost embarrassed, about my poetry; I do not mention my journal. But I think aloud about fiction.

“I’d like to write a novel,” I tell her, “that doesn’t read like a novel. Novels are too easy — they tell a story, in a linear narrative, from start to finish. They’ve done that for decades. Centuries, perhaps. I’d do it differently.”

She raises herself on an elbow. “You mean, write an epic?”

“No,” I reply shortly, “someone’s done that already. I’ve read about this chap who’s just reinvented the Mahabharata as a twentieth-century story — epic style, oral tradition, narrative digressions, the lot. No, what I mean is, why can’t I write a novel that reads like — like an encyclopedia?”

“An encyclopedia?” She sounds dubious.

“Well, a short one. What I mean is, something in which you can turn to any page and read. You pick up chapter 23, and you get one thread of the plot. Then you go forwards to chapter 37, or backwards to 16, and you get another thread. And they’re all interconnected, but you see the interconnections differently depending on the order in which you read them. It’s like each bit of reading adds to the sum total of the reader’s knowledge, just like an encyclopedia. But to each new bit of reading he brings the knowledge he’s acquired up to that point — so that each chapter means more, or less, depending on how much he’s learned already.”

“What if she,” Priscilla asks in pointed feminism, “begins at the end?”

“It won’t matter,” I respond excitedly. “The beginning foretells the end. Down with the omniscient narrator! It’s time for the omniscient reader. Let the reader construct her own novel each time she reads it.”

Priscilla bites her lip, as she always does before saying something she’s afraid I won’t like. “I don’t know if this can work,” she says slowly.

“Maybe not,” I reply with cheerful defiance. “But you know what Wilde said about form being more important than content. But of course I’d have all the classic elements of the novel in it. You know, the ancient Sanskrit text on drama, the Natya Shastra, prescribes the nine essential emotional elements that must go into any work of entertainment: love, hate, joy, sorrow, pity, disgust, courage, pride and compassion. They’d all be there. Every single one of the nine tenets of the sages would be included. But why bother to do it conventionally? Can’t you write a novel about, say, religion without describing a single temple or mosque? Why must you burden your readers with the chants of the priests, the orations of the mullahs, the oppressive air of devotion? Let your readers bring themselves to the book they’re reading! Let them bring to the page their own memories of love and hate, their own feelings of joy and sorrow, their own reactions of disgust and pity, their own stirrings of courage and pride and compassion. And if they do that, why should form matter? Let the form of the novel change with each reading, and let the content change too.”

“But how will any reader understand the truth?”

“The truth! The singular thing about truth, my dear, is that you can only speak of it in the plural. Doesn’t your understanding of the truth depend on how you approach it? On how much you know?”

She bites her lip. “Either something is true, or it’s not,” she says at last.

“Not so, my darling,” I declare. “Truth is elusive, subtle, manysided. You know, Priscilla, there’s an old Hindu story about Truth. It seems a brash young warrior sought the hand of a beautiful princess. Her father, the king, thought he was a bit too cocksure and callow. He decreed that the warrior could only marry the princess after he had found Truth. So the warrior set out into the world on a quest for Truth. He went to temples and monasteries, to mountaintops where sages meditated, to remote forests where ascetics scourged themselves, but nowhere could he find Truth. Despairing one day and seeking shelter from a thunderstorm, he took refuge in a musty cave. There was an old crone there, a hag with matted hair and warts on her face, the skin hanging loose from her bony limbs, her teeth yellow and rotting, her breath malodorous. But as he spoke to her, with each question she answered, he realized he had come to the end of his journey: she was Truth. They spoke all night, and when the storm cleared, the warrior told her he had fulfilled his quest. ‘Now that I have found Truth,’ he said, ‘what shall I tell them at the palace about you?’ The wizened old creature smiled. ‘Tell them,’ she said, ‘tell them that I am young and beautiful.’ ”

from Priscilla’s scrapbook

June 22, 1989

He gave me another poem today. “You know so little about me,” he said. “This is something about my high school years, in Calcutta, the building where my parents lived. It’s a bit all over the place, but then so was I at that time.”

Another self-conscious one-liner. The poem must mean a lot to him.

Minto Park, Calcutta, 1969–71

The road bends still in my outstretched mind

into the narrow lane bounded by grey battlements

looming castle-like above the ground,

disguising their true function

as “servants’ quarters,” to which

cooks and houseboys would retire

after the last drink was drunk, the last dish washed.

Behind the battlements stood my building — one of two, both grey

and stately — set on manicured asphalt,

with the luxury of a garden beneath, where frangipani and bougainvillea wafted scents into the air

like the shuttlecocks of the badminton players

next door, launched with the confidence that sent cricket balls

blazing from adolescent bats through the wire fence

into another exclusive address, the Bhowanipore Cemetery.

I would search for the balls there, amongst weed-littered graves,

stumbling across a crumbling tombstone to a little English boy

taken away by malaria, aged nine, a hundred years ago;

or hear the jackals cry at night, their howls a faint echo

of the processions down the road from the maidan,

spewing fear and political anger into the sultry air.

We kept them out, behind the fence, outside the battlements.

When power cuts came (“load-shedding” the favored euphemism)

to the rest of the smoke-numbed city, we basked in an

oasis of privilege, our electricity connected to the

Alipore Jail, the Shambhu Nath Pandit Hospital, the lunatic asylum,

all too dangerous to be plunged into darkness. Hope like a lamp

glimmered on our desks. Luck (and good connections)

lit our way into the future.

At the corner of D. L. Khan Road sat the Victoria Memorial,

her marble skirt billowing with complacent majesty,

as potbellied boxwallahs took their constitutionals

in her shade. Young wrestlers performed their morning asanas

on the lawns, their contortions a widow’s legacy. Traffic belched its way

across Lower Circular Road. The world muddled through.

In my building, the Asian Paints manager, cuckolded by his bachelor neighbor,

traveled often, leaving his gangling cricket-mad son to dream

of emigration to Australia. The bosomy nymphet four floors up

kissed me wetly on the lips one night, then took up with a boy

years older, a commerce student. They are now married.

Just above us was the executive who resembled a Bollywood star.

My mother’s friends swooned if they passed him near the lift.

High up, kind Mr. Luthra, white-haired and gentle, went higher still

one night, his last words to his wife “I don’t want to die.”

He always haunts the building in my mind, fighting to live.

Down the street, the muezzin wails, calling the Muslim faithful

to prayer. They must jostle past the bell-jingling Hindus

trotting to the Ganesh mandir in the middle of the street, their devotions

drowned out by the loudspeakers outside the domed gurudwara,

chanting verses from the Granth Sahib. My favorite Jesuit priest

cycles to jail, bringing succor to prisoners. The millionaire brewer’s son

drives by in his open Sunbeam, racing noisily past the complacent cow

grazing idly at the corner. Peace flaps in the wind like washing.

The world we lived in was two worlds,

and we spoke both its languages. In the night

we dreamt of school, and exams, and life,

while the day burned slowly like a basti brazier,

blackening the air we breathed. Naxalites drew proletarian blood

while refugees poured into our streets,

children of a Bangladesh waiting to be born.

In the distance, the politicians’ loudspeakers growled like tanks

rumbling across the border to craft another people’s destiny.

The sun seared away our patience.

Behind the battlements, we slept, and lived, and studied,

never quite finishing the last drink, nor emptying the last dish.

Poor cousins from the country stayed with us

till shorthand classes and my father’s friendships

won them jobs. We raised funds for Mother Teresa.

The future stretched before us like the sea.

At dawn the saffron spread across our fingers,

staining our hearts with light.

Lakshman to Priscilla

July 1, 1989

Isn’t it lovely here? I could sit with you and look across the river at the sky as the sun sets completely, feel the darkness settle on our shoulders like a cloak, and forget everything, especially the hatreds that are slowly being stoked in the town even as we speak. It almost moves me to prayer.

Why do I pray? And how? And to whom? So many questions! Well, I’m a Hindu — I was born one, and I’ve never been attracted to any other faith. I’ll tell you why in a minute. How do I pray? Not in any organized form, really; I go to temples sometimes with my family, but they leave me cold. I think of prayer as something intensely personal, a way of reaching my hands out towards my maker. I recite some mantras my parents taught me as a child; there is something reassuring about those ancient words, hallowed by use and repetition over thousands of years. Sacred Sanskrit, a language alive only in heaven and kept from dying here on earth so that we can be understood when we address the gods. But I often supplement the mantras with incantations of my own in Tamil or English, asking for certain kinds of guidance or protection for myself or those I love. These days I mention you a lot in my prayers.

Yes, I pray to Hindu gods. It’s not that I believe that there is, somewhere in heaven, a god that looks like a Bombay calendar artists image of him. It’s simply that prayer is a way of acknowledging a divinity beyond human experience; and since no human has had direct sight of God, all visual representations of the divine are merely crutches, helping flawed and limited human beings to imagine the unimaginable. Why not a corpulent elephant-headed god with a broken tusk? Why is that image any less real or inspiring of devotion than a suffering man on a cross? So yes, I pray to Ganapathi, and to Vishnu and Shiva, and to my memory of a faded calendar portrait of Rama and Sita in my parents’ prayer room. These are just ways of imagining God, and I pray in order to touch those forces and sources of life that go beyond the human. Human beings, to me, are rather like electrical appliances that need to be charged regularly, and prayer is a way of plugging into that charge.

So I’m not embarrassed to say I’m a believing Hindu. But I don’t have anything in common with these so-called Hindu fundamentalists. Actually, it’s a bit odd to speak of “Hindu fundamentalism,” because Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals: no organized church, no compulsory beliefs or rites of worship, no single sacred book. The name itself denotes something less, and more, than a set of theological beliefs. In many languages — French and Persian amongst them — the word for “Indian” is “Hindu.” Originally “Hindu” simply meant the people beyond the river Sindhu, or Indus. But the Indus is now in Islamic Pakistan; and to make matters worse, the word “Hindu” did not exist in any Indian language till its use by foreigners gave Indians a term for self-definition.

My wife’s in the Shiva temple right now, praying. In all the chants she’s hearing, the word “Hindu” will not be uttered. In fact, Priscilla, “Hinduism” is the name others applied to the indigenous religion of India, which many Hindus simply call Sanatan Dharma, the eternal faith. It embraces an eclectic range of doctrines and practices, from pantheism to agnosticism and from faith in reincarnation to belief in the caste system. But none of these constitutes an obligatory credo for a Hindu: there are none.

You know, I grew up in a Hindu household. Our home (and my father moved a dozen times in his working life) always had a prayer alcove, where paintings and portraits of assorted divinities jostled for shelf and wall space with fading photographs of departed ancestors, all stained by ash scattered from the incense burned daily by my devout parents. Every morning, after his bath, my father would stand in front of the prayer alcove wrapped in his towel, his wet hair still uncombed, and chant his Sanskrit mantras. But he never obliged me to join him; he exemplified the Hindu idea that religion is an intensely personal matter, that prayer is between you and whatever image of your maker you choose to worship. In the Hindu way, I was to find my own truth.

Like most Hindus, I think I have. I am, as I told you, a believer, despite a brief period of schoolboy atheism — of the kind that comes with the discovery of rationality and goes with an acknowledgement of its limitations. And, I suppose, with the realization that the world offers too many wondrous mysteries for which science has no answers. And I am happy to describe myself as a believing Hindu, not just because it is the faith into which I was born, but for a string of other reasons, though faith requires no reason. One is cultural: as a Hindu I belong to a faith that expresses the ancient genius of my own people. Another is, for lack of a better phrase, its intellectual “fit”: I am more comfortable with the belief structures of Hinduism than I would be with those of the other faiths of which I know. As a Hindu I claim adherence to a religion without an established church or priestly papacy, a religion whose rituals and customs I am free to reject, a religion that does not oblige me to demonstrate my faith by any visible sign, by subsuming my identity in any collectivity, not even by a specific day or time or frequency of worship. There’s no Hindu pope, Priscilla, no Hindu Sunday. As a Hindu I subscribe to a creed that is free of the restrictive dogmas of holy writ, that refuses to be shackled to the limitations of a single holy book.

Above all, as a Hindu I belong to the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. I find it immensely congenial to be able to face my fellow human beings of other faiths without being burdened by the conviction that I am embarked upon a “true path” that they have missed. This dogma lies at the core of religions like Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Take your faith: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me,” says the Bible. Book of John, right? chapter 14, verse 6; look it up, I did. Or Islam: “There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet,” declares the Koran — denying unbelievers all possibility of redemption, let alone of salvation or paradise. Hinduism, however, asserts that all ways of belief are equally valid, and Hindus readily venerate the saints, and the sacred objects, of other faiths. There is no such thing as a Hindu heresy.

How can such a religion lend itself to “fundamentalism”? That devotees of this essentially tolerant faith want to desecrate a shrine, that they’re going around assaulting Muslims in its name, is to me a source of shame and sorrow. India has survived the Aryans, the Mughals, the British; it has taken from each — language, art, food, learning — and grown with all of them. To be Indian is to be part of an elusive dream we all share, a dream that fills our minds with sounds, words, flavors from many sources that we cannot easily identify. Muslim invaders may indeed have destroyed Hindu temples, putting mosques in their place, but this did not — could not — destroy the Indian dream. Nor did Hinduism suffer a fatal blow. Large, eclectic, agglomerative, the Hinduism that I know understands that faith is a matter of hearts and minds, not of bricks and stone. “Build Ram in your heart,” the Hindu is enjoined; and if Ram is in your heart, it will matter little where else he is, or is not.

Why should today’s Muslims have to pay a price for what Muslims may have done four hundred and fifty years ago? It’s just politics, Priscilla. The twentieth-century politics of deprivation has eroded the culture’s confidence. Hindu chauvinism has emerged from the competition for resources in a contentious democracy. Politicians of all faiths across India seek to mobilize voters by appealing to narrow identities. By seeking votes in the name of religion, caste, and region, they have urged voters to define themselves on these lines. Indians have been made more conscious than ever before of what divides us.

And so these fanatics in Zalilgarh want to tear down the Babri Masjid and construct a Ram Janmabhoomi temple in its place. I am not amongst the Indian secularists who oppose agitation because they reject the historical basis of the claim that the mosque stood on the site of Rama’s birth. They may be right, they may be wrong, but to me what matters is what most people believe, for their beliefs offer a sounder basis for public policy than the historians’ footnotes. And it would work better. Instead of saying to impassioned Hindus, “You are wrong, there is no proof this was Ram’s birthplace, there is no proof that the temple Babar demolished to build this mosque was a temple to Ram, go away and leave the mosque in place,” how much more effective might it have been to say, “You may be right, let us assume for a moment that there was a Ram Janmabhoomi temple here that was destroyed to make room for this mosque four hundred and sixty years ago, does that mean we should behave in that way today? If the Muslims of the 1520s acted out of ignorance and fanaticism, should Hindus act the same way in the 1980s? By doing what you propose to do, you will hurt the feelings of the Muslims of today, who did not perpetrate the injustices of the past and who are in no position to inflict injustice upon you today; you will provoke violence and rage against your own kind; you will tarnish the name of the Hindu people across the world; and you will irreparably damage your own cause. Is this worth it?”

That’s what I’ve been trying to say to people like Ram Charan Gupta and Bhushan Sharma and their bigoted ilk. But they don’t listen. They look at me as if I’m sort of a deracinated alien being who can’t understand how normal people think. Look, I understand Hindus who see a double standard at work here. Muslims say they are proud to be Muslim, Sikhs say they are proud to be Sikh, Christians say they are proud to be Christian, and Hindus say they are proud to be … secular. It is easy to see why this sequence should provoke the scorn of those Hindus who declaim, “Garv se kahon hum Hindu hain” — “Say with pride that we are Hindus.” Gupta and Sharma never fail to spit that slogan at me. And I am proud of my Hinduism. But in what precisely am I, as a Hindu, to take pride? Hinduism is no monolith; its strength is found within each Hindu, not in the collectivity. As a Hindu, I take no pride in wanting to destroy other people’s symbols, in hitting others on the head because of the cut of their beard or the cuts of their foreskins. I am proud of my Hinduism: I take pride in its diversity, in its openness, in religious freedom. When that great Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda electrified the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, he said he was proud of Hinduism’s acceptance of all religions as true; of the refuge given to Jews and Zoroastrians when they were persecuted elsewhere. And he quoted an ancient Hindu hymn: “As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O lord, the different oaths which men take … all lead to thee.” My own father taught me the Vedic sloka “Aa no bhadrah kratvo yantu vishwatah” — “Let noble thoughts come to us from all directions of the universe.” Every schoolchild knows the motto “Ekam sad viprah bahuda vadanti” — “Truth is one, the sages give it various names.” Isn’t this all-embracing doctrine worth being proud of?

But that’s not what Mr. Gupta is proud of when he says he’s proud to be a Hindu. He’s speaking of Hinduism as a label of identity, not a set of humane beliefs; he’s proud of being Hindu as if it were a team he belongs to, like a British football yob, not what the team stands for. I’ll never let the likes of him define for me what being a Hindu means.

Defining a “Hindu” cause may partly be a political reaction to the definition of non-Hindu causes, but it is a foolish one for all that. Mahatma Gandhi was as devout a Rambhakt as you can get — he died from a Hindu assassin’s bullet with the words “Hé Ram” on his lips — but he always said that for him, Ram and Rahim were the same deity, and that if Hinduism ever taught hatred of Islam or of non-Hindus, “it is doomed to destruction.” The rage of the Hindu mobs being stoked by the bigots is the rage of those who feel them-selves supplanted in this competition of identities, who think that they are taking their country back from usurpers of long ago. They want revenge against history, but they do not realize that history is its own revenge.

from transcript of Randy Diggs interview

with Superintendent of Police Gurinder Singh

October 14, 1989

RD: I’ll accept that drink now, thanks. What happened next?

GS: Lucky and I quickly realized that the only way the mob could be prevented from assembling below the house — the house from which the fucking bomb was thrown — was by getting there first ourselves. I grinned, and said to Lucky: “DM-sahib, time for us to take charge.”

RD: They could have thrown their bombs at you.

GS: That was the risk, clearly. But it was an acceptable risk. To prevent a far bigger tragedy.

RD: And did the mob give way?

GS: We had to keep shouting to the pissing processionists that they should stay back. That we were taking charge of the situation. Fortunately their more rabid leaders, people like Bhushan Sharma or Ram Charan Gupta, were not in that part of the crowd. They were in the front of the motherloving procession, leading it for glory, and word had not reached them yet from where we were. Most of the crowd listened to us and stayed at bay. Inevitably, though, some bloody idiots with the brains of a squashed cockroach edged forward behind us as we headed towards the house.

RD: I’ve met Ram Charan Gupta.

GS: Our next member of Parliament for Zalilgarh. Or so the pissing political pundits tell me. Ironically, considering what we think of each other, he publicly praised my handling of this particular incident.

RD: What did you do?

GS: I opened fire.

RD: What?!

GS: Look, you’ve got to understand. We not only had to take control of a situation that was on the verge of getting out of control. We also had to be seen by the bloodthirsty mob as taking effective action. What do you think we should have done? Knocked politely on the door and asked them to serve us some tea with their bombs? Once we’d got to the damned house from which the bomb was thrown, the choice was clear. Assert ourselves, or allow the mob to assert themselves. I ordered the ASI — the Assistant Sub-Inspector who accompanied me — to fire a couple of rounds at the house, and I let loose a burst or two myself. This served several purposes. First, the crowd was satisfied that effective action was being taken. So the bloody idiots understood that they did not need to take the law into their own hands. Second, the stream of bullets also intimidated the hotheads in the procession. Nothing like a volley from a good police-issue revolver to make an asshole think twice. This ensured that the crowd did not venture below the house and present easy targets for further bomb-throwing. And last but not least, as we always used to say in our high school debates, the firing also deterred the bombers themselves. Here they were, all poised and ready to throw more bombs, and my bullets come screaming in. What do they do? They were amateurs, Randy, and the first instinct of a frigging amateur when things get too hot is to drop everything and run. It’s one thing to plan to chuck some bombs at a howling mob armed with knives and tridents. Quite another to take on policemen with guns.

RD: So what did they do?

GS: They ran away. They ran for their bloody lives. The bombers were so frightened by our firing they were pissing in their pants as they tried to get the hell out of there. I sent a couple of my men to the rear of the house. They caught one of the young idiots. Took him down to the thana. I’ll spare you the details, but soon he was singing like a mynah bird. Don’t look so fucking shocked, Randy. I’ve seen enough of your American cop movies. Whatever they did to him to get the full story, it was a good deal less than the Hindu mob would have done. So I figure justice was served all around. And thanks to him my police case was very quickly closed.

RD: What was his story?

GS: The story? Very simple, very stupid. A small bunch of young Muslims — eight youths, two of them petty government servants, a municipal driver and a patwari — decided that they had to retaliate against the insults and provocations flung their way by the Hindu extremists. Sisterloving idiots, of course. But they felt alienated from the system — none of them was important enough to serve on any of our bloody peace committees, for instance. And they felt equally alienated from the mainstream of their own frigging community, which they felt was too passive. “Don’t we have pride?” one of them asked me in the interrogation room. “Don’t you have brains?” I replied. I mean, just think about their brilliant plan. They collected whatever money they could, which was not very much, a few hundred rupees between them. Then one of them went off to purchase gunpowder from a firecracker factory in the neighboring district, where firecrackers are a frigging cottage industry. Place isn’t even a real factory. It’s a factory the way Zalilgarh’s a town. Half their bloody phatakas fizzle out at Diwali time. Anyway, this is their great arsenal. The night before the major procession, Friday night, they stayed up in an abandoned ruin by the riverside. We call it the Kotli. No one uses it. They ground the gunpowder with pieces of broken glass and old rusted nails, tied these in newspaper with a string, and made seventeen of what are known in local parlance as “soothli bombs.” They figured that would account for a few dozen Hindus, and they hoped to run away in the confusion. They hadn’t given any pissing thought at all to what would happen to the house they’d have bombed from, to the basti, to the neighborhood. Frigging idiots.

RD: Anyway, your tactic worked. Congratulations.

GS: Worked? For about five minutes. We defused one crisis, but we couldn’t prevent the riot itself. Mobs were soon running rampant through the town, especially the Muslim quarter. Save your congratulations. I could use another drink.