Riot

~ ~ ~

from Lakshman’s journal

July 16, 1989

I look into her eyes, into those eyes so impossibly blue, eyes of a color I have never looked into before, and I know she cannot understand.

How could I, so well-read, so overeducated, so comfortable with her Western culture, have had an arranged marriage? We talk of Updike and Bellow and the Time magazine bestseller list, I play her my tapes of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and the Grateful Dead, she speaks of “Death of a Salesman” and I counter with “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and it is as if we so comfortably inhabit the same world. But even as I hold her white hand in my own dark one, I know that for her these cultural references go together with other things, with Saturday dates in oversized Chevrolets and dressing up for the prom, with love and romance and sex before marriage. Not with the way I got married: parents contacting parents through intrusive intermediaries, a brief visit to the others’ home for an elaborate tea, a glimpse of an overdressed girl and a conversation so stilted and artificial it could not possibly be the basis of a lifetime commitment, let alone one consecrated by matched horoscopes and gold jewelry and the gift of a house in Madras by her grateful father, proud to have an IAS officer for a son-in-law.

“But how could you?” Priscilla asks inevitably, when, in response to her questions, I tell her the story of my marriage to Geetha. We are in our favorite spot, the sunset room she calls it, at the top of the Kotli, and she is lying on me, the softness of her breasts pressed into my body, her face resting on my shoulder. We have just made love, and I feel she is entitled to anything, even an answer.

“It’s just the way it’s done,” I reply. “It is the way it’s always been done. It’s how my parents were married.”

“But you’re different,” she exclaims, half thumping me on the chest with her fists in mock exasperation. “You’ve been educated differently. You’re so — so Western.”

I imprison her fists in my hands, and it is as if I am praying, with her my votive offering. “I’m Indian,” I say simply. “I enjoy the Beatles and Bharata Natyam. I act in Oscar Wilde plays and I eat with my fingers. I read Marx, and I let my parents arrange my marriage.”

She raises herself a little to punctuate her reaction. “But didn’t you care at all? After all, this was the person you were going to spend the rest of your life with.”

I pull her down again, because I want to feel her body against mine, and because I don’t want to look into her eyes, not at this point. “I didn’t think of marriage that way,” I say quietly. “I thought of it as an extension of my obligations to my parents, part of the duties of a good son. You in America think of marriage as two people loving each other and wanting to be together. We in India see marriage as an arrangement between families, a means of perpetuating the social order.”

“But don’t Indian men and women love one another?” Her voice is muffled against my chest; her long slender finger idly traces a pattern on my rib cage.

“Of course we do,” I reply, “but love is supposed to come after marriage. How can you love someone until you know them, and how can you know them properly until after you’re married to them?”

She is silent now, but her fingernail moves on, to my side.

“That tickles,” I say.

“Shh,” she replies. “I’m writing something.” And her finger continues its elaborate curls and loops, stopping with a circled flourish. “Tell me what I wrote,” she says.

“I don’t know,” I respond. “I wasn’t aware you were writing till just now. The last letter was an O.”

She giggles. “It was a period, silly,” she says. “I’ll write it again.

Pay attention now.”

She props herself up on me, and I am dazzled by the gold of the sunlight in her hair. Her breasts are round and milky, their small nipples pinkly aureoled. It is difficult to concentrate on the letters she is now tracing across my trunk. But she is determined to make it easy for me, and her finger moves in exaggerated strokes, pausing after each letter to test my comprehension.

“I,” I say, and she nods delightedly. “L. O. U — no, V F? F?” She shakes her head, underscoring the third spoke of the E across my belly. “E. I love — V again. What’s this? I love Victor? Who’s Victor?” But I am laughing too much, and she tickles me mercilessly, so I am obliged to concede. “Y. Y. I get it.” Her exquisite finger draws a parabola that embraces my flabby belly, the hairs on my chest. “O.” And then she traces it again, beginning at my right shoulder blade, her finger gliding silken on my skin, rising to my left shoulder, failing only to complete the circle at the top. “U.”

“That’s right,” she says, and she is suddenly very serious, looking at me with that earnestness that struck me from the first as the hallmark of the expression with which she faced the world.

“I love you,” I conclude, with a smile.

“I thought you’d never say it,” she responds, but she is no longer looking so earnest. I bring her face down upon mine and kiss her so deeply that we are one body, one being, one breath.

“Wait — I have a message too,” I say at last. I roll her over on the mat so that she is on her back. The light illuminates her still-startling paleness. As I loom over her she stretches her arms, her fingers entwining behind my neck. “But I’m not going to use my finger.”

I bend and kiss each of her nipples. Then, slowly, gently, savoring each stroke, I trace the lines of my love with my tongue across the smooth velvet softness of her body. I cross the top and the bottom of my I, which confuses her at first, so I do it again, until she giggles with delight. My L begins with her right breast and ends at the bone above her left hip; my O takes in both nipples, now taut and redly rising; my V begins where my L had, descends till I have my nose buried in the soft blond down of her womanhood, then rises again, as she sighs, to end at her left breast; my E curves uninterruptedly like a Greek letter, my tongue a lambent caress, the middle prong of the letter quivering in her navel. By the time I am spelling out Y, O, U, she is moaning gently, her eyes closed, her legs parted beneath me, her breath shorter, but I am relentless, adding a T, its lower point plunging like a shaft into her moistness, and I have to do it again, because she is not expecting another word, and then she cries, “T,” with a purr of pleasure rarely associated with the enunciation of the alphabet, and I rush through the two Os that follow, because my need is urgent too, and we spell it out in unison, “I love you too,” our voices melding huskily with our bodies as I thrust myself into her.

And as I enter her I forget the roughness of the mat on the stone ledge in the alcove, as we move to our own rhythm I forget my wife, my work, my world, as her pelvis rises to meet mine I forget myself, and as she gasps in climax I burst into her like a flood, a flood of forgetting.

For there is so much to forget, as I he embracing her afterwards, my fingers in her silken hair, my other hand softly caressing the hollow just above her hip, that curve which so delights me in her body. What must I forget? Geetha herself, my wife of nine loveless years, mother of my much-beloved Rekha; my work, waiting for me at my neglected desk, my driver pacing outside the gate, wondering what the Sahib could be doing for so long in the Kotli; and, harder still to ignore, the mounting communal tensions in this benighted town. Priscilla is consolation, she is escape, but she is more than that: she is a fantasy come true, the possibility of an alternative life, as if another planet had flung its doors open for me.

What benevolent God has brought her here to me, in irredeemable Zalilgarh? I could not have invented Priscilla if she did not exist: her luminous beauty, her intelligence and sincerity of purpose, her complete openness to me, the way she gives so fully of herself. She is that rare combination of innocence and sexual freedom that I now think of as peculiarly American. She has come to do good, to bring enlightenment to the poor women of the area, to convert this small corner of India to what she sees as the right way to live, and somewhere in her engagement with this place she has found me.

And I have found her. There is nothing more important in my life than our twice-weekly assignations. Twice weekly, every Tuesday and Saturday just before sunset, as the dusk gathers around the Kotli like a shawl, we meet at the little secret room I had first taken her to (and first taken her in). We have had to agree on specific days and times in advance to reduce the visible communication between us, the peons bearing awkward notes, the stilted phone conversations always within earshot of others. And I look forward to Priscilla with barely suppressed excitement. Yes, excitement; the word is consciously chosen, because I have to admit I feel my anticipation between my legs as much as anywhere. Love has blossomed, too, but do we mean the same thing when we use the word? I cannot stop thinking of her; my days on the job are illuminated by images of her face and body and the memory of her touch. When I am with her I am in a constant state of exhilaration. I greet her with glee as she runs into my arms; I exult as she disrobes for me; I am ecstatic as we make — that word again — love.

Until Priscilla I had never really known the pleasure of sex.

Geetha lies stiffly, unmoving, as I go about what she sees as my business; she neither initiates nor welcomes, making it clear that she understands her amatory role as being to endure rather than to enjoy. She is not one for much foreplay, and she is often still dry when I enter her, her eyes tightly shut, her face contorted in something approaching a grimace. When it is over I move quickly off her, lightened by no great sense of satiation. She turns away from me, her duty done. Not surprisingly, we make love less and less frequently. Since Priscilla entered my life, I have slept with Geetha just once. Neither of us misses it.

“Make love” — I used that compound verb again. And yet how absurd to describe sex with Priscilla with the same words I use for Geetha! Sex with Priscilla is joy, it is celebration; she gives as much as she takes; her body moves with as much rhythmic energy as mine. The process of carnal discovery is an endless delight. She is willing to try everything, and I find myself doing things I had only read about in books, only imagined in the daydreams of a masturbatory adolescence. Afterwards we talk, we idly envisage a long-term future, we share poetry, but for all that, our evenings together are suffused with a lingering lust. I think of her at the office, at the dining table, in the field, and I am instantly aroused.

As a good Hindu I should have an instinctive awareness of the power and the pitfalls of sexual pleasure. The Vedas, the Puranas, so many of the ancient sacred texts of my faith emphasize kama, sexual desire; it is the primordial urge, the first seed of human motivation, the progenitor of thought, the first of the four major goals of man — before wealth, religion, and salvation. Kama is even a god because desire is a sort of sacred energy. But it is precisely because Hinduism recognizes the power of kama that it teaches its adherents to suppress it, to store their energy by conserving their semen, to still their urges by turning to abstinence, meditation, and good works. Sexual desire, the old Hindu sages knew, was pleasurable but passing; it was a hindrance, not a help, in the great quest of man to break the eternal cycle of birth and rebirth.

And yet I have come to a point where I can no longer imagine a week without Priscilla, let alone a life. When I think of her returning to her unattainable homeland in October, as she is scheduled to do, and when I contemplate resuming the texture of my life before I knew her, I am seized with a wordless panic. And yet the alternative is equally unimaginable. Abandon my solemn responsibilities to my wife, my parents, my daughter, my extended family, her family, our caste? To run away with another woman? An American! And where will we go? To do what?

These are questions that I do not give voice to, but it is clear Priscilla is already contemplating the answers. I am beginning to worry that, like a careless paan eater, I may have bitten off more than I can chew. The paan eater spits out the residue in a long stream that looks like blood. In my case I am afraid to spit out what I have, and my blood churns inside me, thickening like quicksand.

birthday card for Lakshman

July 22, 1989

HAPY BRITHDAY TO THE BESTEST DADDY IN THE HOLE WORLD

I LOVE U XXX REKHA

letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani

July 25, 1989

Cin, I don’t want you to be alarmed or anything, but something a little disturbing happened to me today. You remember I mentioned a Muslim woman, Fatima Bi, who the extension worker from the Center took me to? The one with the seven kids, all scrawny and malnourished and wallowing in the dust, whose husband was refusing to let her use any protection? Kadambari, the extension worker, took me along to meet her so I could see at first hand the problems we’re facing. The woman’s exhausted from childbearing and child-rearing; she subsists in a hovel in the Muslim quarter — I nearly wrote “ghetto” — and she basically has no life. She’s shut up in this dank shuttered apartment in an enclosed building off a lane that’s basically an open sewer. (I thought I knew India from my years in Delhi, Cin, but to know India you’ve also got to come to a town like Zalilgarh and smell India.) Anyway, she’s covered from head to toe in traditional garb — a long robe leaving only her face bare, but she also wears a scarf over her head, and I bet she has to put on a burqa when she goes out, if she ever does, poor thing. Fatima Bi’s a thin, bucktoothed little woman with a prominent mole and an expression of chronic anxiety. She lives with her husband and seven kids in a two-room flat, cooks in the corner of one of the rooms on an open stove, uses a communal bathroom, washes their clothes at a public tap, and suffers the demands and the blows of her husband, to judge by a visibly bruised cheek.

Her husband’s some sort of government employee, believe it or not, a chauffeur or something in one of the municipal offices here in Zalilgarh. His name’s Ali. The man’s actually proud of his seven children and says they’re a testament to his virility. When poor Fatima Bi suggested that they couldn’t afford any more he took that as a personal insult and beat her up. The woman says that what Ali brings home isn’t enough to feed and clothe three children properly, let alone seven. So, at my suggestion, Kadambari and I gave her some condoms last week from the Center’s demonstration stocks.

Bad idea. Of course he won’t wear them — in fact it made him so angry when Fatima offered the package to him that he beat her up again and called her a filthy whore for even knowing that such things existed. Of course he also asked where she’d got them from and when she told him, he forbade all contact between her and the Center. Remember, she’s one of the women who’d never be caught dead coming to the Center — that’s why the Extension Worker goes to her. But to reinforce the message he came to the Center and demanded to see Kadambari and me. It was Wery unpleasant, as poor Mr. Shankar Das put it. Ali shouted at us, the veins in his throat throbbing in his fury, and told us never to darken his door again. Kadambari was a little scared, I could see that, but I started to say that it was his wife’s right to have as much information as she needed to decide how to conduct her life. Boy, was that a dumb thing to do! Ali hit the roof. “I decide how my wife conducts her life!” he screamed. “Not her! And certainly not you!” (adding a few choice epithets in Urdu about me that Mr. Das asked Kadambari not to translate). And then he flung the packet of condoms in my face and stormed out.

It was all very upsetting, Cin, even though Mr. Das and Kadambari and all the others did their best to help me calm down. Women like Fatima are the very reason population-control awareness is so important; it’s the whole reason I do what I’m doing. But I think of that poor thin woman being beaten by her husband because of what I told her she could do. I haven’t empowered her in any way, and I’ve probably made things worse for someone whose life is miserable enough as it is. And I haven’t done myself any favors either. That look of pure hatred on Ali’s face was frankly terrifying. In the instant that he flung those condoms at me, I knew he would have done the same thing if he’d happened to be holding a stone, or a knife.

Oh, don’t worry too much, Cindy. I’m probably just being a little melodramatic — the hysterical foreign woman in India, one of the long line starting with E. M. Forster’s Adela Quested. I wanted to talk to Lucky about it when I saw him tonight, but all he wanted was to make love! (Which was very pleasant, and helped me feel a lot better….)

transcript of Randy Diggs interview with

District Magistrate V. Lakshman (Part 2)

October 13, 1989

It was exactly as we’d feared. The crowd now began to fan out in every direction, and many rushed straight to the Muslim bastis. I immediately ordered curfew. As the mob was running past, I went onto the mobile wireless to instruct the police and the magistrates who were already on duty in pickets at all sensitive points in the town, to impose curfew with a firm hand in the shortest possible time.

“Do I use force if necessary?” one asked.

“You may take whatever measures involving the use of force you deem necessary,” I replied firmly, “including resort to firing, if need be.” I repeated that phrase a few more times to others.

Guru — the SP — and I jumped into the SP’s jeep and drove straight to the “communally sensitive” bastis, the Muslim quarters. Things were bad already. The SP himself fired several rounds. From reports at the end of the day I learned that the police resorted to firing at three other places. But it worked. Curfew was fully imposed in the town in the brief space of twenty minutes.

However, even in these twenty minutes, seven lives were lost and scores of people injured, about a hundred Muslim houses and commercial establishments set ablaze, three mosques desecrated. Six of the deaths were caused by the daggers and other weapons carried by the mobs assaulting the Muslim bastis, including a country-made rifle. These six dead were all Muslims. One of them was a boy who brought me my tea at the office sometimes. I would always complain that he put in too much sugar. The others used to call him Mitha Mohammed, Sweet Mohammed. He was always grinning, from ear to ear. They slit his throat with a dagger, and when I saw the body, the crooked line across his skin looked like a smile.

One Hindu died, too. He was killed by the bomb thrown by the Muslim extremists who fled, and who were largely arrested within minutes. Several dozen injured were rushed to hospitals.

Seven deaths in total. The figures had been much worse elsewhere; Zalilgarh had escaped relatively unscathed. I suppose I knew I would be congratulated for my handling of the situation. There were forty-seven injured, though, and lakhs of rupees of damaged property. I didn’t know about Priscilla yet. But I felt no relief at all at the end of the day.

Oh, there were moments of high drama. At one point Gurinder, the SP, spotted a frenzied young man brandishing a 12-bore rifle. I have no idea whether he was Hindu or Muslim. At that point neither of us cared where the violence was coming from; we just wanted to stop it. The SP jumped off his jeep and walked towards the young man. He screamed at us, pointed his rifle at the SP and threatened to shoot. Undeterred, the SP kept moving, slowly advancing towards him. The young man looked wildly about, and the rifle wavered in his hands, but he did not fire. Tears were streaming down his face as the SP advanced, tears of rage and fear and sorrow, and his hands were trembling, the rifle jerking uncontrollably in his grasp. When the SP reached him he was practically begging to be saved from himself. Gurinder overpowered him, snatched his rifle, and forced him into a nearby house, which he locked from the outside. I never found out who the young man was, or what his story was. I knew he had reason to be out of his mind with fear. We never prosecuted him.

Soon an uneasy calm fell over the city under curfew. Additional force was called from neighboring districts, and permanent pickets established at all sensitive points. I pressed all my executive magistrates into duty, and spent the whole night scouring the city in mobile patrols with the police.

Gurinder was a hero. He cursed, he swore, he joked, he grinned maniacally, but he was everywhere by my side. Together we ordered large-scale preventive arrests and searches: that first night alone, 126 persons were arrested. Forty houses were searched. I remember these facts vividly because this is what running a district is all about. Overkill, perhaps. But better overkill, Gurinder liked to say, than kill over. Over and over again.

We couldn’t forget the ones who had been killed — the ones we knew about, again excepting Priscilla. We had to contact their families, help control their grief, and above all ensure that each death didn’t lead to five more. Funerals are the perfect excuse for violence; all that grief and rage looking for an outlet. So we talked to the families of the deceased, and organized quiet cremations and burials in the presence only of close family members, and the magistrates and the police. They weren’t all that happy about it, but we took advantage of the fact that they were numbed by pain and grief, and we gave them no choice in the matter.

I decided there would be no relaxation of curfew for seventy-two hours. We kept things calm, except that four more mosques were extensively desecrated in the course of the night. The Muslim community leaders insisted that this could not have been possible without police complicity. Even Gurinder could not be sure that some of his own men hadn’t connived at what happened.

That had probably been during the brief moments that we finally got some sleep. I felt terribly guilty: if I had stayed awake, continued on patrol, perhaps this wouldn’t have happened. Gurinder and I snatched two hours of sleep in the police station that Saturday night. We slept on camp cots, fully dressed and ready to rush out at the report of any clash. In any case, after two hours’ rest, we got up and resumed our patrols. The people of Zalilgarh were to become deeply familiar with our white Gypsy and its flashing red light, endlessly prowling the shadowy and deserted lanes and by-lanes of the town.

But who could have had time for sleep, or been able to sleep if we found the time? The control room we established was deluged by a continuous barrage of complaints of mob assault, all of which had to be checked out. Most proved to be untrue; rumors were rife. The press was called in and briefed. We made arrangements for the distribution of newspapers throughout the city beginning the next day, in order to control the rumors and disinformation. The peace committee and responsible leaders of the two communities were called in and pressed into service. In the days to come, they helped keep the calm.

I’m not trying to avoid talking about Priscilla Hart. I just want to complete the picture of this riot for you, Mr. Diggs, so you understand what we were dealing with during those days. The damaged mosques were certain to cause more trouble as soon as the curfew was relaxed. So I mobilized the services of the Public Works Department to repair and restore the desecrated mosques, overnight. Overnight! I did so with the support of moderate Muslim leaders, who had to be present while the work was being done, to ensure that nothing sacrilegious occurred during the repairs. When it was done I was able to order the first relaxation of the curfew, for two hours. The Muslims wended their way straight to the mosques to offer prayers, but the fresh paint and mortar told their own story. The settlements that had suffered arson looked as if they had been bombed. But except for a solitary explosion just before curfew relaxation was to end — an explosion in which no one was injured — there were no major setbacks during this first easing of curfew.

One more thing, while I’m giving you this portrait of the riot. On the second morning of the curfew, I received a flash message on the mobile wireless that over two hundred women and children in a Muslim mohalla had poured onto the streets, defying the curfew. I got Gurinder and rushed there. There was a throng of women, most in veils or burqas, almost all accompanied by wailing children. Amidst the disconsolate weeping, one woman said: “There is now not a grain of food or a drop of milk in our homes. Our men have either been rounded up by the police or have run away and are in hiding. We earn and eat from day to day. It’s all very well for you to impose a curfew. But how long can we let our children starve?”

I didn’t have a good answer to the woman, but I promised her I would find one. In my heart I had to do something for the sake of Priscilla, who had worked so hard for the Muslim women of Zalilgarh. I went back to the police station and immediately sent for all the senior district officers. “Right,” I said. “You’ve kept the peace. Now you have an additional job. You’re in charge of ensuring civil supplies. Get the wholesale traders to open their godowns. Organize mobile vans with essential commodities for each mohalla. We’ve got to get food to families.”

“And what about the curfew?” one fellow asked. “If we lift it to distribute food, we’ll soon be back where we started.”

“No,” I replied. “We’ll lift the curfew only for women during the visits of the mobile vans to each mohalla. During this time they can make their purchases. Any man who ventures out will still be in violation of the curfew.” This one’s for you, Priscilla, I thought.

“What about those who can’t afford to make purchases?” another asked. “Many of them are day laborers. They eat when they work. They won’t have spare cash sitting around for food. Especially in some of the poorer bastis, and the Dalit areas.”

He had a valid point. So I ordered that ten kilograms of grain be distributed free to each poor family, and promised the traders that the district administration would make good the cost by donations later.

I beg your pardon? Of course. I’m sorry I got carried away. You’re not really doing a story on how we managed the riot. You’re doing a story about Priscilla. I’m sorry.

Of course, I shouldn’t have spoken of a total of just seven deaths, should I? There was an eighth one, neither Hindu nor Muslim.

Priscilla’s.

from Lakshman’s journal

August 3, 1989

He lies back and feels her peel the layers off him. His nakedness is a discovery, a baring of the self. She explores him with her long fingers, her touch opening him like a wound. He stirs. Her tongue caresses him now, a soft furriness on the inside of his thigh. He is in pain but the pain is exquisite and profound. He opens his eyes, seeing her move above him, her hair cascading around her face like a golden cloudburst. Her tongue scurries over his midriff and he makes an involuntary sound, an unfamiliar sound, half gratitude, half interrogation. The air around him seems to crackle with her charge. She has taken possession of him now, drawing his fullness into her mouth. He moves instinctively under her, but her fingers on his hip are firm as she continues, stilling all but the center of his being. He does not think any more of thrust and counterthrust but lets her take him in, her each breath a whisper to his heart. She is moving faster now, her lips surrounding him like the embrace of the ocean, and he is barely conscious of the tremors in his body, the piercing sweet pain of each stroke, until he trembles and gasps into her from every pore of his body. She does not stop as he shudders, feeling his soul empty into her like a confession.

Afterwards the air is quiet, and her cheek rests against his chest. He feels his heartbeat in her hand. Into the emptiness of his body floods a great happiness, a tsunami of joy that sweeps away all the debris in his mind, till he is cleansed of everything but the certitude that this is truth, this is right, this is what was meant to be.

“I love you,” she says softly, and his pain is gone.

“Pornography,” Gurinder would say if I showed this to him, which is one more reason I never will. “It’s a fucking blow job, man. You can’t make poetry out of a blow job.” That would be authentic Gurinder. I know, because I’ve tried to talk to him about Priscilla — I had to, not just because I had to talk to someone and he’s my closest friend in Zalilgarh, but because I had to ask him to ensure the cops stayed away from the Kotli when the DM was there.

But I took it too far. I tried to tell him how much Priscilla had begun to matter to me, how I was beginning to think I could not live without her. He was horrified: to him the one thing that matters is our jobs, our noble calling, our role in society. Try telling Gurinder about the power of sexual love. He just doesn’t understand.

“Fuckin’ hell I understand, yaar,” he’d said. “There are ten-rupee rundis on GB Road who’ll give you the same, plus a paan afterwards. Don’t tell me you’re making a philosophy out of that.”

I saw no point in wasting my existential crisis on him. “Bugger off, you philistine” was all I could muster.

“Look, I don’t know what the hell’s got into you, Lakshman. You can fuck the brains out of this blonde for all I care. But don’t let it become so important, yaar. Don’t forget who you are, where you are, what you’re here to do.”

“How can I forget?” I asked, surprising myself with the bitterness in my voice. “How can I possibly forget?”

letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani

August 5, 1989

You know what Guru, the cop here, Lucky’s friend, said to me last night? We were at dinner at Lucky’s place, half a dozen of us, and he’d clearly had too much to drink, but in the middle of a conversation about colonialism he announced, “The Brits came to exploit us, took what they wanted and left, and in the process they changed us.” Then he turned to me quite directly and added, “You come to change us but in the process you also take what you want. Isn’t that just another form of exploitation?”

I was so astonished I didn’t know how to react, but Lucky cleverly made it sound as if Guru was making a general point about foreign nongovernmental aid projects. I wasn’t fooled. I sensed he was trying to convey something quite specific to me, and I burned with shame at the thought that it might be about Lucky.

And yet it couldn’t be, Cin. There’s no way Lucky would betray our secret to anyone. So it must be about my work here. Like so many Indians, Guru’s suspicious of my motives in doing what I do.

What do I want? I want to change the lives of these women, the choices they believe they have. I want to see them one day, these women of Zalilgarh and of a thousand other towns and villages like it in India, standing around the well discussing their own lives and hopes and dreams instead of complaining about their mothers-in- law. I want to hear them not say, with a cross between pride and resignation, “My husband, he wants lots of children,” but rather, “I will decide when I am ready for a child.” I want them, instead of planning to arrange their teenage daughter’s marriage, to insist on sending her to high school. I want all this for them, and that’s why I’m here. Is that exploitation? How can it be exploitation to make women more aware of what they can be?

“Population-control awareness” seems more and more of a misnomer to me. I see myself as trying to make women aware of their reproductive rights, not just to control population but to give them a sense of their rights as a whole, their rights as women. Being forced to have babies is just one more form of oppression, of subjugation by men. I’d rather die than have an abortion myself, but I want to help these women understand that control of their bodies is a rights issue, it’s a health issue, and if they can improve their health and assert their rights, they will have a real future, and they’ll give their daughters a real future. Is this all so difficult to understand, Cin?

And yet, whether Guru meant it or not, I can’t help being conscious of a terrible irony. I care about Indian women in general, and yet I don’t allow myself to think about one Indian woman in particular — Lucky’s wife. I sit at her table and eat her rice and sambar, and I know all along that I am wronging her, that what I want will come at her expense, that Lucky’s and my true love can only hurt her in the end. You’re right, Cin, to remind me of that. And yet, she doesn’t love him, and he doesn’t love her. What he feels is the tug of duty, especially from his little daughter. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if Lucky and I had a daughter, a nut-brown baby with America in her eyes. She’d be so beautiful, Cin. And then Lucky would see me as family….

But at the end of the day, I’m not all that inconsistent, am I? Because my life and my work are both about the same thing. It’s all about women — about our control of our bodies, our right to sleep with the man we choose, with the protection we choose, for an outcome we choose. I want every woman to have that right. Even me.

from transcript of Randy Diggs interview

with Superintendent of Police Gurinder Singh

October 14, 1989

RD: I’ve been interrupting too much. Go ahead and just tell me the story. In your own words. Take your time.

GS: Hell, man, of course I’ll tell it in my own words. Whose damned words do you expect me to use? Look, the police force in those days was stretched almost to the breaking point, like the rubber on a Nirodh, the bloody government-made condom. Ever since the Ram Sila Poojan program had been announced a fortnight earlier, the provincial armed constabulary — we call them the PAC — had been on continuous vigil in the neighboring districts. The riot at Zalilgarh meant that they had to be hastily bundled onto buses and trucks and driven overnight to this frigging town. We immediately deputed them to man every tense enclave. They weren’t a pretty sight, I can tell you, with bloodshot eyes and three days’ growth on their strained faces. It’s a miracle they didn’t start a riot themselves.

Lucky was magnificent. He and I made it a point during our own night-long rounds to stop at each of the PAC pickets. We’d speak to the men about how difficult, and how important, their mission was. And occasionally share with them a hot cup of tea. Our cops weren’t used to the DM-sahib coming to keep their morale up like this. Most of them had never directly spoken to a DM in their frigging lives. As they stood erect and alert at their watch posts, he would pass amongst them, talking to them in his Tamil-inflected Hindi, and the weary faces of the men would light up like Diwali lamps. You know, before the PAC buggers left for the next riot-torn city last week, the DM persuaded the eminent citizens of Zalilgarh to organize a bada khana of thanksgiving for the men. The buggers sat and ate as the city elders served them. Hasn’t happened before, I can tell you.

I don’t want to pretend my policemen are all piss-perfect. Hell, we know they’re not. But when they screw up, we deal with them. The DM received a lot of complaints about excesses committed by the police during the house-to-house searches in the Muslim bastis. We visited some of the houses. It was true. It was as though a frigging cyclone had swept through them. Everything in those houses had been smashed, torn, or burnt by the search teams — the TV and radio, mattresses, furniture, artifacts, everything. An old Muslim woman aged around seventy took off her kameez and salwar to show us deep lathi marks across her body. From the shoulders down to the ankles. I couldn’t bear to look. The DM ordered strong action against the guilty policeman. I ensured that it was taken. Such complaints will not recur on my watch.

In riots, all sorts of things happen. People strike first and ask questions later. It’s tough to be a cop in a riot.

You can tell I’m a Lakshman fan. Our partnership was natural, and necessary. The policing challenge was intertwined with the administrative challenge. Intimately, like one of those couples in the temple sculptures at Khajuraho. I’ll give you an example. The day after the bomb attack, the DM got a telephone call. One of the seriously injured riot victims, a young bugger, a Muslim called Mohammed, Sweet Mohammed they used to call him, had died on the way to the medical college hospital. They’d slit his throat and he’d bled to death in the ambulance. It was the middle of the frigging curfew, and what does the bloody hospital want? To get the district administration to arrange for the disposal of the body double-quick. So Lucky sent for the young man’s father, and the sadr or leader of the Muslim community, a humane and gentle old bugger known universally as Rauf-bhai, “Brother Rauf.” Rauf-bhai sat there, unblinking behind his thick glasses, his yellowing beard stretching out like a shield, a white cap on his head. But you know what? His bloody presence alone seemed to quiet the distraught father. Thanks to Rauf-bhai, the father agreed to a quiet funeral. After midnight. It was the only way we could prevent a fresh upsurge of violence. If they’d held the bloody funeral during the day, there would have been another fucking riot.

I arranged for the morgue van carrying the body from the medical college hospital to halt at a rural police thana on the outskirts of Zalilgarh, to wait till midnight. Lucky and I went there. You know, to offer solace to the bereaved family. The DM was very quiet the whole way, which meant he was either exhausted or thinking, or both. Either way, I spared him my jokes for once. Sad bloody scene, Randy. Mohammed’s mother was weeping desolately near the body of her son. The father and the sadr, Brother Rauf, were grieving nearby. Lucky walked up to them and quietly said: “We cannot bring back your son. But tell us who was responsible for your loss and we will ensure that justice is done.”

The mother replied in angry bitterness. “There is no point in telling you the names of the killers. Every time in Zalilgarh when there are riots, the same men lead the mobs, looting and burning and killing, but nothing ever happens to them. During the last riots, we were hopeful because the police even noted down our statements. We waited for four days, but nothing happened. In the end the police did come, but it was we who were arrested. So this time we have nothing to say.”

The DM turned to me and then back to them. “I promise you,” he said in that quiet way of his, “that this time justice will be done. I was not here during the last riots. This time I am here. Please give me the names.”

And they did finally give the frigging names — of some of the most powerful and prestigious men of the bloody district. The DM turned to me and said very calmly, “Let us round them all up before the body of this boy is lowered into the dust.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied. No “Lucky” this time, not even “Lakshman”; this was an order from the DM. I left the thana immediately in my jeep, roaring out of there like a blast from a buffalo’s behind. I broke my own fucking speed limit several times that evening. I knew the DM would also have to leave on his incessant patrols. It was after midnight when I returned to the graveyard. They’d finished digging the boy’s grave. I followed the beam of my torch across the cold moonless dark of the cemetery to the burial spot. The DM was back. The body had not yet been lowered into the dust.

I marched up to the DM, who was standing with the bereaved family. “Sir,” I said, “they have all been arrested.”

You should have seen the expressions on the frigging faces of those Muslim mourners. They didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

It was around three o’clock in the morning when the DM and I returned to our camp cots in the police station. We wearily stretched out, fully dressed, to catch a little sleep. Two hours later, as dawn was breaking, we were awakened by an uproar at the thana gates. “What the hell is going on?” I demanded of the constable on duty. “It sounds like a pair of hippos making babies on a tin sheet.” Lucky was still rubbing the sleep from his eyes when we found that it was indeed a hippo in human shape. The local MLA from the ruling party, member of the state legislative assembly, a generously endowed and utterly charmless specimen of the tribe called Maheshwari Devi, had arrived. She was with a group of her supporters, all banging pots and pans and shouting motherloving slogans. And frigging hell, they were all holding curfew passes.

“Injustice, injustice!” she was crying out, dutifully echoed by her eunuch supporters. “We will not put up with this injustice. We will not allow the arrest of innocent people.”

It didn’t take long for Lucky to wake up and figure out what the hell had happened. I’d never seen him so furious. “Tell me,” he asked her, “are you the representative of just one community, and not of this whole town? The last few days, when hundreds of Muslims were arrested, beaten, dragged by their beards, and placed behind bars, often on mere suspicion, even though many had no criminal records, no complaint against them, I never heard even a whimper of protest from you. But last night, because ten men have been arrested, after complaints in which they were directly named as guilty of murder, you march here within two hours and shout of injustice? How dare you!”

The hippo was so pissing startled by this outburst you could have heard her veins pop. No mere government official had ever dared to address her this way. She was as much at a loss how to respond as a blind nympho to a wink. “Get out,” the DM said, though if you asked him, he’d fucking say he “directed her to leave the premises of the police station immediately and refused to discuss the issue any further.” I escorted her out.

Don’t give up on me just yet, Randy. Come on, have another drink. You see, that was not the end of the story. The MLA’s demonstration was only the beginning — political foreplay. The whole day witnessed more pressure on the DM than he had experienced, he tells me, in a single day on any issue during his career. The chief minister of the state telephoned to inquire why there was so much outrage. The DM replied that it was a matter of basic justice, and he would not change his decision. He was relieved that the CM did not get back to him again. But from the state capital downwards, the pressure continued to mount like a bad case of wind. Then, just as perceptibly, it eased in the afternoon. Once again, we thought we’d weathered the bloody storm.

Late that night — in keeping with our daily pattern since the tension in the town had arisen — we sat together at police headquarters. We were reviewing the arrests and releases of the day — our scorecard, we used to call it. Lucky noted that some of the numbers didn’t add up. He summoned the station house officer and asked him to explain.

The bugger was more tight-lipped than a Hindi film actress who’s been asked to kiss the villain. But finally the station house officer revealed that the ten men arrested the previous night had been released. By the frigging courts. Late the same bloody morning.

Lucky looked like a cow that had been hit on the head with a trishul. “Released?” he asked incredulously. “But how could they release them?”

Further questioning revealed that the police — my own men, goddamn them — had framed the weakest possible charges against the sisterlovers. Not of murder, arson, and rioting, but of the most minor bloody offense possible: violation of curfew. So the courts had let the detainees off with a fine of fifty rupees each. Just under three dollars at current exchange rates, Randy. No wonder we hadn’t been bothered by the screaming politicians all afternoon.

I told you that earlier that morning I’d never seen the DM so furious. This time he exceeded himself. You’ve seen Lucky; he’s a soft-spoken, thoughtful, calm, and restrained individual. Now everyone was stunned to see him explode with all the unpredictable velocity of a soothli bomb. He shouted at the men in the station house. “You’re crooks, not police!” he ranted. “You’re deceitful, communal-minded bigots, not fit to wear your uniforms!” He was working himself into quite a state. “Go and find the murderers you’ve released. Go now! I’ll personally chase you right up to the gates of hell if the ten released men are not rounded up again within the hour.”

“Lucky,” I murmured, “I couldn’t have done better myself.” I took the best of my police officers and rushed back into town. You should have seen the expressions on the faces of some of the ten accused men when they were rearrested. Like society matrons finding a horny hand up their saris. This time Lucky and I personally supervised the filing of the charges — the preparation of documents for the courts.

The charges may or may not stick when they come to trial. But you should know that the Sessions Court released the accused Hindus on bail within a frigging week. The Muslims who had been rounded up in the bomb case are still being refused bail. The DM went to see the fucking district judge and said, “I have never tried to interfere with the judicial process. But here — the same riot, the same offenses, the same sections of the Penal Code — how can there be two such openly different standards for people of two communities? It is not an ordinary case,” he added. “It is a question of the faith of a whole community in the system of justice in our country.”

But the motherloving district judge refused to even discuss the issue with the DM. We do our job, Randy. I just wish everyone would do theirs as well.

Let me tell you something about these bloody riots — ours, and the others across northern India. They’re like a raging flood. When the stormy waters recede, all you will see left behind are corpses and ruins. Corpses, Randy, and fucking ruins.

Priscilla Hart. I knew you wanted to talk about Priscilla. I’m just trying to get you to understand why we don’t know much about what happened to her. We had enough on our minds at the time. But I’ll tell you what I know, Randy. Let’s have another drink first.

from transcript of Randy Diggs interview

with Professor Mohammed Sarwar

October 12, 1989

Look, I’m a historian, not a political activist. Though if you asked me, as a Muslim historian, whether I was a Muslim first or a historian first, I would have to tell you that depended on the context. But your question deserves a reply.

Isn’t it amazing how these Hindu chauvinist types claim history on their side? The precision, the exactness, of their dating techniques are enough to drive a mere professor like me to distraction. People like me spend years trying to establish the veracity of an event, a date, an inscription, but the likes of Ram Charan Gupta have not the slightest doubt that their Lord Rama was born at the Ram Janmabhoomi, and what’s more, at the precise spot they call the Ram Janmasthan — not ten yards away, not ten feet away, but right there. Their own beliefs are that Rama flourished in the treta-yuga of Hindu tradition, which means that their historical exactitude goes back, oh, about a million years. What is a mere historian like me to do in the face of such breathtaking knowledge?

The poor professors, alas, have not been able to establish with any certitude whether Lord Rama was born at all or simply emerged, wholly formed, from the creative and devout mind of the sage Valmiki, the putative author of the great religious epic the Ramayana. But if he was born, as the epic claims, in Ayodhya, there is no certainty that it was the place we today know as Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh — just as we can’t be sure if the Lanka he conquered to retrieve his kidnapped wife Sita is the Sri Lanka of today, rather than somewhere in Central India. The Vedas, the old Hindu scriptures, mention Rama as a king of Varanasi, or Benares, not of Ayodhya. One of the Jatakas, the Dasaratha Jataka, also says that Dasaratha and Rama were kings of Varanasi. There’s more. The Ramayana actually mentions the Buddha, who lived around 500 B.C., but at that time the capital of the kingdom of Kosala, Rama’s kingdom, was Sravasti, not Ayodhya, and the Ayodhya described in the Ramayana could not possibly have existed before the fourth century B.C. There are other inconsistencies, but you get the picture.

Now to the date of his birth. Simple fact: neither the seven-day week nor the division of the months into thirty days was included in the Hindu calendar, the Panchang, until the fourth century A.D. So even if Rama was a historical rather than a mythological figure, you have to get into a lot of guesswork before you date him. The Ramayana has suggestions that Rama lived in the dwapara-yuga, about five thousand years ago, rather than the treta-yuga of traditional belief. There is a Hindu pundit, a learned man, though without a degree in history as far as I know, a man called Sitanath Pradhan, who goes so far as to declare that the great climactic battle for Lanka was fought in 1450 B.C. and that Rama was exactly forty-two years old at the time. On the other hand, historians dating the existing texts of the Ramayana pretty much agree that it was composed sometime between 400 B.C. and A.D. 200, which is also the period in which that other great epic the Mahabharata was written, give or take a couple of hundred years. Confused enough? Your Hindutva types are presuming to know the exact place of birth of a man whose birthdate is historically unverifiable.

I know there are people who’ll say, Ignore these pettifogging historians, how does it matter? All that matters is what people believe. But there too, my historian’s inconvenient mind asks, when did they start believing it? The Ramayana existed as a text, as an epic, for about a thousand years before anyone began treating it as sacred. There is no evidence of any temple being built to worship Rama anywhere in India before the tenth century A.D. It’s ironic, when you see the passions stirred around Rama’s name in northern India today, that it was first in the South that Rama became deified. The Tamil Alvars, who were poets and mystics, started idealizing the god-king from around A.D. 900; it was a Tamil poet, Kamban, who started the cult of Ramabhakti, the divinity of Rama. The first community of Rama worshippers, the Ramanandins, came into existence in Kashmir between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. And then the great poet of these parts, Tulsidas, wrote his brilliant, moving Ramcharitmanas in the sixteenth century, sanitizing the deeds of Rama, removing all those aspects of his conduct that had been questioned as less than godlike in the earlier Puranas, and elevating Rama to his present unchallenged supremacy in the Hindu pantheon. Actually Tulsidas’s Ramayana, with all its idealizing of Rama as the ideal man and its barely veiled anxieties about women as the objects of lust in need of protection, owes more than a little to the Muslim invasions of India at the time. The Rama cult, and its offshoot the Bhakti movement, rose during the period of the Muslim conquest of North India and the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, when Hinduism was on the defensive and where the position of women, who had traditionally been quite free, changed for the worse. Women were put into purdah, away from the prying eyes of the Muslim conquerors; Islamic attitudes towards sexuality and male dominance, emerging from a nomadic warrior society, directly influenced the softer, more liberal and tolerant but now effete Hindu society. Someone ought to do a Ph.D. on the role of Islam in the sanctification of Rama, but I wouldn’t take a life insurance policy out on him these days.

I know the Hindutva types believe that the temples of Ayodhya precede Babar and that he must have destroyed the biggest one because it was the best located. But the problem with this is that there’s a lot of evidence for the opposite — for the building of temples in Ayodhya under Muslim rule, well after Babar built his masjid. I don’t want to bore you with all the details of the tax-free land grants given by rulers like Safdar Jang, who ruled from 1739 to 1754, but they document support for temple building. It was land that the Muslim nawab provided to a Hindu abbot that led to the construction of the Hanumangarhi, the most important Hindu temple in today’s Ayodhya. Many historians, not just me, argue that Ayodhya filled up with temples as a direct result of support from the Muslim nawabs of the area, and that as the nawabi realm expanded, so did Ayodhya gain as a major Hindu pilgrimage center in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was two hundred years after the Babri Masjid was built.

So that’s my historian’s answer to your question: There’s no evidence for the historicity of the Ram Janmabhoomi claims. Again, does that matter? Isn’t this all about faith, not history? Well, the fact is that the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation is profoundly antihistorical. The bigots who spearhead it want to reinvent the past to suit their aspirations for the present. If we allow them to do it now, here, they will turn their attentions to something else, and the whole orgy of hate and violence will start again. If they get away with attacking Muslims today, they’ll hit Christians tomorrow. And at a fundamental level, intolerance is the real enemy; intolerance can always shift targets. We’ve seen it happen in Bombay, where the Shiv Sena was born in the 1960s as a rabid bunch of Marathi chauvinists trying to drive South Indian migrants out of the city. “Sons of the soil” was their slogan in those days; they looted and burned stores with signs in South Indian languages. That worked for a while, made them popular with some of the local Tukarams, but its appeal was limited; so the Shiv Sena suddenly turned into a Hindu chauvinist party and started denouncing Muslims, a far better target for their brand of homegrown bigotry.

The Shiv Sena leader says his hero is Hitler. And you know what happened under Hitler. As the German theologian Pastor Martin Niemoeller put it: “At first they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

They are coming for the Muslims now, and I must speak out. But not because I am a Muslim. Only because I am an Indian, and I do not want them to come for any other Indians. No group of Indians must be allowed to attack another group of Indians because of where they are from, or who they worship, or what language they speak.

That’ s why your Ram Charan Guptas have to be stopped. Here. Now. Before they set all of India alight.