Riot

~ ~ ~

from Lakshman’s journal

August 10, 1989

Gurinder just won’t let up. “You, quitting the IAS?” He let fly a choice expletive or two. “You can’t be serious, man! You’re made for the IAS. You’re doing great work, work that makes a real difference to the lives of real human beings. You’ve got a great career, a great future. I can’t believe you’re even contemplating such a damn-fool idea. You know what your problem is? You’re thinking with your cock.”

He brushed aside my feeble protestations. “You’ve seen the possibility of sexual paradise with this girl, all in Technicolor, and suddenly everything else in life seems prosaic black-and-white. You really think she’s worth giving up everything for — your wife, your kid, your job, your country?” He was really frothing now. “Look, however wonderful things have been with her, yaar, you can’t forget a few basic facts. Like, she’s an American, Lucky, a fucking Yank. They’re not like us. It’s a different country, a different culture, a different planet, man. You’ve lived all your life with a definite set of values. You know what’s right because it’s always been right. I know you’re not entirely happy with Geetha, what the hell, it’s never been a secret, but come on, yaar, she’s been a good wife to you. She runs a good house, serves a great table, gets the best out of the servants — so what if she gives them hell once in a while? — and spends a lot of time with your daughter. You can bring someone home for dinner at practically no notice and she adjusts to your needs. Your work takes you away unexpectedly, keeps you out till no one knows when, man, and she doesn’t complain.”

She doesn’t complain, I want to say, because she doesn’t care whether I’m there or not. But Gurinder won’t be interrupted; he plunges remorselessly on with his portrait of Indian domestic bliss.

“When you’re home she ensures you are served first and gives you the choicest portions before she eats herself. And you can be sure she’s never looked at another man and never will. If you die she will honor your memory, put a fresh garland round your fucking framed photo every day and do puja before it. These are not small things, man.” He thumped a hand into his palm for emphasis. “Not bloody small things. Take it from me, yaar. It’s a comfort to know these are things you can take for granted. As you grow older, you can rest assured there are some things you can always rely on.”

I nodded. He needed no further encouragement to go on: “What do you have with Priscilla? Sex. Fucking sex, if you’ll excuse the tautology. Sure that’s important: if my Bunty didn’t enjoy a good joust with my personal hockey stick I wouldn’t be a happy man. But you of all people know that isn’t enough.” He looked me evenly in the eye, as if weighing briefly whether to go on. It didn’t take him too long to decide. “And doesn’t it bother you that you’re not the only man who’s been in her bed?” He saw the glint of pain in my eyes and drove home his point with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. “Sex means much less to these Americans than it does to us, Lucky. Look, I’ll tell you something. Remember the time she reported her handbag stolen and we found the thief? We recovered the handbag and, as you know, we have to do an inventory of the contents. The thief had spent or sold what he could but there was at least one thing he hadn’t touched. The constable doing the inventory was at a total loss when he saw it, so he came to me to ask what it was. It was a vibrator, man. A fucking vibrator. I switched it on for him and burst out laughing at his expression. He asked me what it was for and I said it was an American hairdressing tool — a battery-operated hair curler, I explained solemnly. When Priscilla was given the inventory to sign she paused at that item, frowned, then smiled to herself and signed. She must have thought, what ignorant idiots these Indians are. Hair curler indeed. She had no idea of what disgrace I had spared her in the constable’s eyes. If I had told him what it really was, she would have been the talk of every male in Zalilgarh. And they would have treated her with contempt ever afterwards. Or worse, some hothead might have tried to act as a personal substitute for her vibrator, whether she’d wanted him to or not. I’m telling you this just so you know. My instinct was to protect her, Lucky. But don’t forget this — she’s used to a certain amount of physical pleasure and you happen to be the one she’s found here to provide it. At least you don’t need batteries.”

“Bugger off, Guru. You don’t know the first thing about this girl.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But look, yaar, all I’m saying is: don’t confuse bedding well with wedding bell. Look, screw her as much as you like. You’re doing it already. Why should you give up your job, your wife, your life, for that? As we say in Punjab, if you’re getting milk regularly, why do you need to buy the cow?” He grabbed me by the shoulders. “There’s a lot more to what you need in a woman than a good fuck. And there’s a lot more to your life than banging a moist you-know-what every once in a while.”

“Do you really think I don’t know that, Gurinder?” My tone was sad, but I wasn’t going to let him know how much his earthy candor had shaken me. “Of course I know what my responsibilities are, to Geetha, to my daughter, to my job, to my career, to this bloody district. But the point is precisely that Priscilla has come to mean so much to me that everything else pales in comparison.”

“Well, it damn well shouldn’t,” came Gurinder’s rejoinder. “Everything around you is real, dark, colored. She’s the only pale thing around in your life, Lucky. And you’re letting her cast a shadow she’s too bloody pale to cast.”

“Great metaphor, Guru.” I smiled tiredly. “And thanks for all your advice. I know it came from somewhere deep down that mudpit you call your heart. Now push off and interrogate some absconders. I need to think.”

As a parting gift I quote him the old ditty: “He who loves foolishly and well / Will meet Helen of Troy in Hell. / But she whose love is thin and wise / Will meet John Knox in Paradise.”

He’s not impressed. “Forget heaven and hell, yaar,” he says as he leaves. “It’s purgatory I’m concerned about. We call it Earth.”

from Lakshman’s journal

August 14, 1989

It’s midnight, and I can’t sleep. Tomorrow, though it’s a Tuesday, I won’t be seeing Priscilla, because it’s a public holiday: Independence Day. The day we threw off the yoke of the white man. The day I will be reminded, painfully, of my dependence on a white woman.

I can’t sleep because I’m thinking about her. And about myself. About whether I have a future with her. And about what that would mean for me.

What can I think about but the categories I know? We had a family friend, a friend of my parents, though closer to my mother’s age than my father’s. Uncle Sudhir, I called him, though of course he wasn’t really my uncle. He was an executive in a multinational firm, and I remember thinking of him as impossibly good-looking and glamorous, a fair, smooth-shaven demigod in sharp suits and glistening ties, his aquiline features always ready to break into a cheerful laugh. He had a gorgeous wife, too, whom he had met at university, a stunning woman in vivid saris and skimpy blouses. Over the years she became gradually more stately and less svelte, whereas Uncle Sudhir seemed to get younger and louder, favoring me with conspiratorial winks every time a pretty woman crossed his path at one of my parents’ parties. Then we moved to another city, and I didn’t see Uncle Sudhir for a while, until I heard, in my parents’ tones of shocked disapproval, that he’d got divorced. It was said that he was living with a younger woman, herself a divorcee.

Years later, when I was already working and had come to visit my parents on holiday, I met Sudhir again. He came to call on my father, and I saw a slightly jowlier, lower-shouldered version of the Uncle Sudhir I remembered. He was received in an awkward and uncomfortable manner. My mother barely greeted him before disappearing into the kitchen, and my father, who had if anything become garrulous in retirement, was much more taciturn than usual. I tried to make polite conversation but Uncle Sudhir could sense how things were; he made a couple of valiant attempts at joviality before giving up and leaving. When the front door shut behind him my father’s first words were: “Sad case.”

“Why?” I demanded in my mid-twenties innocence. “He doesn’t seem to be doing badly at all.”

“So that’s what you think,” my father said. “This was a man who had everything: a good salary, a beautiful wife, three healthy children, a wonderful home. Then he gave that all up to pursue his lust. He has suffered the diminishment of his status, lost the respect of friends and family, abandoned the sweet familiar comforts of home life, borne the stigma of social shame, and endured court-ordered financial impoverishment. Above all, he knows that in doing what he did he has spurned those in relation to whom he recognized himself. And you think he’s doing well?”

Later that week my father suffered the stroke that would kill him. This was almost the last thing he said to me, and it has stayed in my mind ever since, seared into my synapses.

Gurinder to Randy Diggs, over a drink

Saturday night, October 14, 1989

You want to know why I’m a cop? I’ll tell you why I’m a bloody cop.

Not why I first became a policeman, because that had more to do with my parents’ wishes. I really wanted to be a successful peasant, a modern peasant. But my parents convinced me that taking the IAS exams was the right thing to do, and I didn’t do well enough to get into the pissing IAS, so they offered me the IPS, the police service. And I took it. It was a job: it came with a decent salary, perks, buggers saluting me left and right, social status, that extra swagger in my dad’s step when he took me to the club on my weekends home. That’s why I first became a cop, but that’s not why I’m still a cop today.

How long’ve you been in this bloody country? Two years, huh? So you weren’t here for the really big story of the decade. The assassination of Indira Gandhi. And all that preceded it. And all that followed.

Nineteen eighty-four. Orwell’s big bad year. It all went buggering smoothly for the rest of the world, didn’t it? No great horrors, no Big Brother, no fucking Third World War. Lots of smug frigging articles about how Orwell?s dreadful vision of the future of the world had been belied by bloody reality. But not here. Our 1984 was as sisterloving awful a year as we’ve had since Independence. It’s right up there with the worst — with 1947, when the country was fucking ripped apart, and 1962, when the Chinese hammered the crap out of us in the Himalayas. Our 1984 was a bad shit year, all right, a terrible year for the bloody national vintage.

It began with the Punjab troubles going — as the Chandigarh whore said to the poet — from bad to worse. Some of my fellow Sikhs, stupid buggers to a man, were to blame. We had a mad preacher, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, holed up in the holiest Sikh shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, surrounded by assholes with rifles and Kalashnikovs and bombs, ranting about creating a new Sikh state called Khalistan. Motherloving idiots: one of the greatest of Sikh journalists, Khushwant Singh, wrote that if Khalistan were ever created it would be a “duffer state.” Bhindranwale was actually a creature of Indira Gandhi and her cronies, who wanted to undermine the moderate Sikh party, the Akali Dal, by encouraging a rival who was more fucking Sikh than they were, and then he’d gone out of control. But what do you care about all that, huh?

Anyway, Bhindranwale and his thugs were sending out goons to assassinate anyone they didn’t like, especially Sikhs who’d cut their hair or smoked cigarettes or disagreed with the separatists’ frigging agenda. And they were killing newspaper editors who criticized them, government officials, cops, you name it, nobody was safe, and because the killers were in a sacred sanctuary they were beyond the fucking reach of the long arm of the law. A Sikh cop I sort of knew and greatly admired, a deputy inspector general of police, A. S. Atwal, senior man, able, honest, came out of the temple after praying there with his eight-year-old son and was shot in the back. Killed just like that, outside the Golden Temple. Murdered in cold fucking blood, with his boy wailing in uncomprehending grief at his side. I’m a Sikh who’s never taken so much as a bloody trimmer to my nasal hair, I’ve prayed a hundred times at the Golden Temple, but even I could see we couldn’t just let them go on like this, in motherloving impunity. Law and order were going down the pissing tubes in my own bloody home state, man. People generally, Sikh and Hindu, didn’t feel safe anymore; something had to fucking well be done.

For two years after Atwal’s murder — a time when she would have found no shortage of Sikhs from the police and the army ready to volunteer to go in and arrest the murderers — Mrs. Gandhi did bugger-all. She was too busy playing politics, while Bhindranwale and his sisterloving goons continued on their rampage. Then, in 1984, she finally did something. Indira bloody Gandhi, the only man in the cabinet, sent the army into the Golden Temple. She could have besieged the place, cut off the water supply, prevented food from reaching the terrorists, starved them into surrender. But no, she sent in the frigging army and tried to — what’s the bullshit word they used? — to extirpate the terrorists from there. That was the term of art. Extirpation. Isn’t it wonderful how the English language manages to bureaucratize the savagery out of bloody human violence? And the army did extirpate the terrorists — at a price. Say what you like about that madman Bhindranwale, and I’ve said a few things myself, but he was a proud Sikh and he wasn’t going to cave in at the first whiff of grapeshot. They had to pound the place with artillery. Hundreds of innocent Sikhs, pilgrims, ordinary frigging worshippers, who happened to be in the temple at the time, lost their lives. Bhindranwale fought back like all hell; he and his people went down in the finest bloody Sikh tradition, all guns blazing. And at the end of the army assault the temple stood pockmarked and bloodied, many of its priceless treasures damaged or destroyed, Sikh pride in ruins.

Yes, man, our pride. It wasn’t just the masonry of the temple that was shattered that day by the assault they called Operation Bluestar. It was unbearable even for those Sikhs who had despised Bhindranwale and all his works. I mean, if some Mafia gang had taken shelter in the Vatican, would anyone have aimed howitzers at Saint Peter’s bloody Cathedral? We felt personally, intimately violated. The same Khushwant Singh who had been so critical of the Khalistanis that he was on the terrorists’ hit list himself, Khushwant Singh returned his civilian honors to the government in protest. If he felt that way, you can imagine what the rest of the buggered Sikh community was going through.

No, I didn’t immediately think of doing anything similar, resigning or anything. Not at that time. Because I told myself I was on the side of the law enforcers. And the government had made an honest bloody mistake. They had done the right frigging thing in the wrong way — they had ended the Bhindranwale terror, but they had done too much damned damage in the process. It was unjustifiable, but excusable. They had to be forgiven. That was my view, and that of others like me, educated Sikhs, people in the establishment. But feelings were running bloody high in the Sikh community generally, even though the president of India, Giani Zail Singh, was himself a Sikh, and he went on television to explain what the government had had to do and why. The preening bastard had had a hand himself in spawning the frigging Frankenstein’s monster that Bhindranwale became, but that’s another story.

Anyway, the end of Bhindranwale did bugger-all to end the terrorism — in fact it simply worsened it. A whole new bunch of angry Sikhs were recruited by the motherloving thugs as a result of the Golden Temple tragedy. And a lot of Sikhs vowed revenge on those who had done this, this thing, to their holiest of holies. The prime minister, Mrs. Indira bloody Gandhi, was their primary target.

Now, I was no great fan of Mrs. G, I can tell you, but I’ll grant her one thing — she didn’t have a bigoted bone in her body. She’d married a Parsi, and her daughters-in-law were an Italian Catholic and a Sikh. So when people told her she should remove the Sikhs from her security detail, she dismissed them with a glare. She had this patrician Kashmiri glare that instantly shriveled your balls, so they didn’t dare suggest it again. “Remove my Sikh security men? Nonsense!” She believed in the pissing professionalism of her protectors, and she thought anyway that she had not acted against Sikhs, just against terrorists, so she had nothing to fear. Unfortunately for her, some Sikhs saw it differently. So one cold morning she was walking briskly in her own back garden, heading for a TV interview with Peter bloody Ustinov, when two of her fucking Sikh bodyguards opened fire on her. A dozen bullets each, I’ve heard it said; some say they emptied their magazines into her, this sixty-seven-year-old woman they had taken an oath to protect. She died instantly, riddled with the exit wounds of their maddened rage. One of her killers was mown down instantly by the other security fuckers, and the other bugger was overpowered, but they’d had their revenge. Sikh honor had been restored.

Hmph. What do they know of honor who have to kill an old widow to restore it?

Unfortunately, revenge is a game any number can play. The reprisals started the same pissing day: some innocent Sikh bugger standing in the crowd outside a newspaper office when the news about Mrs. G was announced — some poor idiot who didn’t see any difference between himself and any of his fellow Indians in the same throng, equally shocked by the headlines — well, this poor idiot got beaten up, his shirt ripped, just for being Sikh. He was the first victim of the backlash to the assassination, but he survived with a few bruises. There were similar incidents here and there in scattered parts of Delhi. Spontaneous bursts of anger directed at the most obvious target, the first available bloody Sikh. And initially, that was all. Until the evil bastards took over.

There were enough of those around, man. The thugs, the odious enforcers, the petty motherlovers of Congress Party politics, Indira’s fucking foot soldiers, the rent-a-mob sloganeers who had shouted, “India is Indira and Indira is India.” They’d been kept under control so far, but this was their chance to have a go. They too had a thirst for revenge. Only Sikh blood could slake it.

Even I cannot describe to you the full horror of what happened thereafter, Randy. I’ve been trained to deal with riots, but this was mass bloody murder in the nation’s capital. The frigging bastards organized mobs of violent lumpens and set them loose on Delhi’s Sikhs. There was an orgy of slaughter, of arson, of looting. Sikh neighborhoods were destroyed, families butchered, homes torched. Some of the mobs had lists of addresses showing which homes and businesses were owned by Sikhs. Can you imagine? In other parts of town, any Sikh unlucky enough to be in the wrong fucking street at the wrong fucking time was killed in the most merciless way possible.

I’ll tell you something I haven’t talked about in years. I had a ten- year-old nephew, my sister’s son, Navjyot. He was returning home from a cricket match with his father. He was a great Gavaskar fan, but Gavaskar was playing in Pakistan at the time. Anyway, what could be more bloody bourgeois, more fucking normal, than a man and his son at a game of cricket on a sunlit October in Delhi? They were driving back home in the family’s Ambassador car, the frigging epitome of solid Indian middle-class respectability, when they ran into a mob looking for Sikh blood to spill.

The bastards surrounded the car, howling and baying their hate for the assassins of the prime minister. “Khoon ka badla khoon,” they chanted. “Blood in revenge for blood.”

My brother-in-law quickly rolled up the windows and locked the doors from the inside. What could he do? There were no bloody police in sight: it was as if they had taken a pissing holiday when they were most needed. He had no means to call for help, no CB radio like some of you Yankee buggers have in your cars. I’m sorry; I know I’m shouting. Randy, I try not to think of my little nephew, his mind still full of cricket, suddenly seized with an unutterable panic at a mob of grown motherfucking men trying to hurt him.

The mob pounded on the door, the roof, the thick glass panes, with their accursed fists.

Then someone brought a can of petrol. Or two. I wasn’t there, but I have relived that horrible scene a thousand times, so that it is more vivid in my imagination than most things I have actually seen. I can imagine the faceless bastard, his features twisted in hatred and excitement, eyes bloodshot, swinging the can, the colorless liquid pouring out from it, splashing the metal, the glass, the windshield wipers, the rubber of the tires, the fucking petrol flowing in a graceful arc until the car was thoroughly doused with it. And then someone screaming for a match, a match, a motherloving match, and setting the car alight.

The flames must have soared instantly, and these unspeakable motherfuckers watched, cheering, as a decent man and his little boy were roasted alive in their seats. They must have tried to escape, my brother-in-law would have preferred to face the mob than to burn to death, but the locks on the doors must have fused together with the heat of the blaze, and they remained trapped inside, asphyxiating, burning, choking to death.

Ever since that day I have been haunted by the thought of little Navjyot, his hair tied on the top of his head under a navy blue kerchief, a bright little boy whose greatest ambition was to open the batting for India one day like his hero Gavaskar. I was not there, Randy, I was not there, but I imagine his round eyes widening in horror and bewilderment as the mob surrounded his car, I imagine his father trying to reassure him, calmly locking the damned doors, and I imagine his little face pressed to the window, staring in disbelief as the flames consumed him.

When his mother, my sister, heard the news, she quite literally lost her mind.

When I found out what had happened, I was beside myself with grief and rage. That was when I wanted to resign: I could not bear to serve a system that had allowed this to happen. The Delhi police had claimed they were overwhelmed. It took the bloody government three days to bring out the army and suppress the riots; in the meantime hundreds of Sikhs had lost their lives, thousands had lost everything they possessed. Rajiv Gandhi, the new prime minister, even condoned the violence by declaring that “when a mighty tree falls, the earth shakes.” The earth of Delhi was soaked in Sikh blood, and it was the bosoms of the Sikh widows that were shaking in grief and despair. I felt that all my training, all my faith in the country and its bloody institutions, had been futile.

But no, I didn’t resign. My father, Navjyot’s grieving grandfather, the man who was proudest to see me a cop, stopped me.

“Don’t be a fool, Gurinder,” he said to me, holding me by the shoulders as if he wanted to shake some sense into me. “Sikhs have lost so much already this year; let us not lose more. Your staying on will help prevent such tragedies in the future. What is the point of throwing away your ability to pursue the criminals, to uphold the law, to ensure that some other mob doesn’t murder someone else’s favorite nephew?”

I wept, I raged, I argued with him, I spoke of the Sikh soldiers who’d mutinied, I told him about a brilliant senior cop, Simranjit Singh Mann, who had quit the fucking police and joined the Khalistanis, and how I wanted to do the same thing. But he kept holding me, his sad brown eyes looking into the depths of my despair, and he shook his head. “Where do you think this will lead them?” he asked. “Will they achieve anything for their community, or for their country, except to cause more destruction and more unnecessary suffering? Do you want to throw away your future? Do you want to throw away India’s future?”

I don’t care, I said, and he looked at me as if he’d been shot. But you’ve got to care, he said. You’ve got to care about this country the way you care about your mother or me.

I don’t know, I replied, I don’t know if I can think of this country as mine anymore, after what has happened. I told him of overhearing a Hindu officer saying, “Damned good thing, it’s time we taught those Sikhs a lesson.”

He didn’t flinch, my old man. “There will always be people like that,” he said, and for the first time I felt the difference in our ages, in what we had lived through, what we had learned. “If I brought you up to believe everything would be easy, that the whole world would act with integrity and honesty and decency and fairness, then I have failed you,” he said. “You can only be true to yourself, and to the soil from which you have sprung, and to the oath you have taken.” He looked at me then, looked into me. Thirty-seven years earlier he had lost everything in the massacres of Partition: his home, his ancestral lands in what had become, by the scratching of a careless British pen, the foreign country of Pakistan. He had worked hard to rebuild, to build himself the life he now led: the car, the servants, the club, the son in the Indian Police Service. He had sweated to build his share of India; he was not going to let me throw it away for bugger-all. “You say you do not know if this country is yours anymore? Don’t be a fool, Gurinder. Whose country is this if not yours? Since the days of Gandhi, we have tried to build a country that is everyone’s and no one’s, a country that excludes nobody, a country that no one group can claim is exclusively theirs. When Jinnah and the Muslim League wanted to create a country for Muslims, their Pakistan, did the Congress leaders say fine, we will create a country for Hindus? The whole point about India is that this is a country for everybody, and everybody has the duty, the obligation, to work to keep it that way. To fight to keep it that way. I did not bring you up to give up so easily, Gurinder. You have a job to do. You have sworn an oath of office to do it. A Sikh’s oath is his sacred duty, Gurinder. You don’t have the right to give up on your country.”

And Navjyot, I asked, but feebly, because he had won me already. And because I realized I had wanted him to.

Because of Navjyot, he replied without hesitation. Because that should never have happened, and because you have a share of the responsibility to ensure that it never happens again.

He turned me to the photograph of Navjyot that stood on the dresser, a picture of an innocent little face, tender parted lips, shining eyes that had not yet seen the horror that would shut them forever. “That boy will always live in my heart,” he said softly. “But somewhere in India there is another grandfather like me whose only hope for the safety of his grandson lies in the trust that he places in you and the policemen under your command. Do not, Gurinder, do not ever betray that trust.”

And so I stayed. And that’s why I’m still a cop: because a sad, quiet, neatly dressed man in a white beard, my blessed father, had more fucking faith in me than I had in myself. And because, for all the corruption and venality and inefficiency that assails this bloody profession, it is still the last bastion of civility and order in our racked and torn society. And because I want to ensure that, as far as I can help it, no other family has to endure what my sister had to.

And because I am haunted by the face of a little ten-year-old boy enveloped in flames, a boy who loved cricket and called me Uncle.

I want to save that boy. I want to save other children like him. I want to put out the fires.

letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani

August 15, 1989

Cindy dear, it’s Independence Day today. India’s. I’m sitting at my desk in my loosest cotton shift as my rickety fan totters on its pedestal and blows hot air into my face. August is murderous in Zalilgarh, but it’s not as bad as May or June, before the monsoon, when you step into the street and think you’ve walked into an oven. It’ll start cooling down in October, but as it gets colder you’ll have the pollution to cope with — the smoke from hundreds of charcoal braziers on the sidewalks, thousands of buses and cars and autorickshaws, and God knows how many factories, all rising to be trapped under the winter mist rising from the river. Gurinder said the other day that just breathing Zalilgarh’s air is the equivalent of smoking a pack of Charminars a day. And he picked an unfiltered brand to make his point!

I’m alone at home today, the office is closed, Lucky’s probably officiating at some flag-raising ceremony this morning, surrounded by self-important functionaries. I imagine him stiff in his safari suit, saluting a foreign flag, a flag without stars or stripes — heck, I don’t even know if they salute the flag at these things — and I tell myself, he’s a foreigner. But Cin, the word doesn’t mean anything to me anymore when I think of him. I know him so well — the strength of his long arms around me, the two crooked front teeth when he smiles, the slightly spicy smell of his sweat when we’ve made love, the little tilt at the corner of his mouth when I lie on his chest and look up at his face. He’s no foreigner. He’s more familiar to me, more intimate to me, than any American I’ve ever known.

Here I am, on Independence Day, wanting to give up my independence for him, knowing he has to win his own independence first. I can’t believe he’s even hesitating to leave a loveless marriage he hates for the woman he says he loves. It’s when he talks about his conflicted feelings, his obligations, that I begin to believe he really is a foreigner after all. …

Anyway, speaking of foreigners, I’ve just had another reminder that I’m one. I went to the bazaar on the weekend, just to see what I could pick up to bring home, you know? It’s crazy, these places, stores spilling out on the sidewalks, the shopkeepers openly importuning you to come and buy their wares, the flies buzzing about, the heat so oppressive that you think of going to the nearest Bollywood movie just for the air-conditioning. Anyway, I spotted a couple of embroidered cushion covers I thought you’d like. How much? I asked. “Two hundred each, but for you, three hundred the pair,” said the greasy man in the shop. Now, I’ve been here long enough to know about bargaining, so I promptly said, “No, two hundred for the pair.” I was appalled at the alacrity with which he accepted my offer. Sure enough, I show the cushion covers to the wretched Kadambari, and she says, “How much did you pay? Sixty?” Even making allowances for her bitchy nastiness, it’s clear I’ve been ripped off again. I guess it’s part of the price you’ve got to pay for being a foreigner in India. But why must I, of all people, have to pay that price? I’m not some tourist in a five-star hotel — I’m me! And that ought to count for something. …

from Lakshman’s journal

August 19, 1989

Can’t sleep, so am up at 3 a.m. writing this. Geetha is sleeping soundly as usual, her face swollen in unwitting complacency. I can’t bear to see that face every time I wake up, and I always wake up before she does. How the hell did I like that face enough to agree to marry her?

Despite myself, I looked in on Rekha in her room. I didn’t switch on the light but the moon was bright enough for me to see her angelic face, calm in repose on the oversized pillow. I gently brushed away a curling strand of hair that had fallen over one eye. In her sleep, she smiled at me.

It’s Rekha, of course, that I think about all the time now. Priscilla’s supposed to leave Zalilgarh in less than two months, and she thinks it’s decision time. Do I want to go with her? She has to return to the States, at least for now, and the prospect of escaping with her has its temptations. She showed me, only half jokingly, an ad in an American magazine: “Unemployment is lower in Switzerland. Owning a home is easier in Australia. Going to college is more likely in Canada. Vacations are longer in Denmark. And crime rates are lower in England. But more dreams come true in America.”

An alluring prospect, if I had those dreams. But do I, really? Is it freedom I want, or Priscilla? I know I could get her to change her plans and stay on in India, for me. She’ll do it — but only on one condition. Only if I tell her I’m leaving my wife for her. That’s what she wants. And she wants it now. I can understand her impatience, but I’m not sure I’m ready for anything quite so … cataclysmic. How can I explain to her that I’m not even sure I have the right to do that to Geetha, to abdicate my husbandhood? I didn’t choose to start my marriage in the first place; how can I choose to end it? My role as a husband and father is central to who I am; it concerns my rootedness in the world; it is inextricably bound up with my sense of my place in the cosmos. I have been brought up to believe that such things — marriage, family — are beyond individual will, that they transcend an individual’s freedom of action. Priscilla’ll never understand that.

And what about little Rekha, who did not ask to be born into my life but who is there, whose world is circumscribed by the pairing of Geetha and me? How can I ever explain what she means to me to Priscilla? “What’s the matter, Lucky?” Priscilla asked me this evening.

You ask, my love, what the matter is.

Why do I sound fatigued? stressed? torn?

The matter is that I am as I sound.

I, who have accepted your soul’s gift of love,

Am a soul in torment, fearing as I love.

I give you, my darling, the best part of myself:

The part that feels most profoundly as a man,

That knows the warm rush of passion

At every sight of your smiling body,

That rejoices in your warm embrace,

And belongs to you in total surrender.

That part is yours, my love, forever:

It can never know again the exaltation,

The exultation, the poignant sweetness of

Such flooding love as I bear for you.

That part is yours; but it is a part,

For I am, in rendering it, rent;

Having your love, yet not having it;

Giving my love, yet not parting with it;

Withholding, as I give, for a prior creditor.

I have, as you know, an earlier love,

One for a little soul, first glimpsed

Tadpole-like in a nurse’s arms,

Pink, precious, and premature:

The child I had prayed for, who did not seek

To be mine, but is, and whose life

Ennobles mine. I have loved her

Without reservation, without selfishness,

Without condition, as I could never

Love a woman. Even you.

Now I look at her each day,

Wake her in the morning, give her breakfast,

Do homework with her, take her to the library

And the movies, and I know I fear nothing more

Than I fear not being there for her.

When she cries out, “Daddy, am I as tall

As you were when you were six?”

I am there in the evening to confirm it;

When she tells me of news from school,

Or asks about God, or geography,

I am there as the question occurs to her.

I teach her Tamil songs, passing on a heritage

She traces in her genes; I trim her hair,

Cut her nails, quiz her over breakfast

On the oceans of the world.

Now I look at her and I ask myself,

Can I deny her that?

Can I deprive myself of her?

Can I absent myself from the rest of her childhood?

When she first meets a boy whose easy charm

Starts flutters in her heart,

Will Daddy be the one she tells of her confusions?

Can I ever be happy knowing that I

Have pulled from under the secure carapace of her life

The struts that held her up?

But can I be happy either,

Knowing that you are no longer mine,

That you have returned to America,

That I have shut my eyes to the one true glimpse of happiness

I have ever had as a man?

You ask, my love, what the matter is.

And I can only say, everything is the matter.

Deep emotion and lack of sleep make for unconvincing poetry. Fifteen lines a stanza: is there such a form anywhere in the canon? I know I should thrust it aside; in an hour now dawn will break across my torment like a twig. But this is what I feel, and it’s at a level quite different from what Guru was trying to make me feel. Truth, Wilde wrote, is just “ones last mood.” Is this mood of tormented despair the one truth that counts now? How will Priscilla understand that my agonizing is not about her, not about us? But if she loves me, mustn’t I help her understand? Perhaps I ought to give her this poem. I’d title it “The Heart of the Matter.” Or perhaps “A Matter of the Heart.” Or, more originally, both?

I’m too tired to think. And too full of thoughts to sleep.

Rudyard Hart to Mohammed Sarwar

October 14, 1989

You know, I stopped at a cold-drink place this morning. Guess what they’re selling? Pepsi. Bloody Pepsi. Except that they call it Lehar Pepsi here. Some Indian rule against foreign brand names.

Despite myself, I bought it. Took a swig. And tasted defeat. Pepsi didn’t exist in the Indian market when I was here last. Now they’re here and we’re not. We could have been ten years ahead of them if we’d played our cards right.

You know, when we see a population without Coke we see an untapped market for the finest beverage invented by man. Not being here is an indescribable waste all around. Indians are being deprived of a wonderful product, and we’re being deprived of a chance to lead in this country too, as we do in so many countries.

We’ve got to come back to India. And we will. It’s the way the world is going. You’ll have American products, American ideas, American values all spreading throughout the land. And you’ll have to have Coke.

I’ll tell you what your problem is in India. You have too much history. Far more than you can use peacefully. So you end up wielding history like a battleaxe, against each other. Whereas we at Coke don’t care about history. We’ll sell you our drinks whatever your history is. We don’t worry too much about the past. It’s your future we want to be a part of.

My daughter believed in your future too. You know, I went through hell asking God why she had to be killed in a quarrel she had no part of. But now I realize it was her choice to be caught up in this country’s passions. She wanted to change India for the better. She was working for the future when she was struck down by the past.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Can’t say it makes me feel a whole lot better, though. But I now think I’ll ask Coke to send me back to India. Give it another try. I think Priscilla would have wanted me to.

note from Priscilla Hart to Lakshman

August 21, 1989

I’ve read the poem you asked Mitha Mohammed to bring to me at the office. I don’t know why you sent it to me, except to make me see our relationship in a different light. Maybe you too need to see things differently, Lucky.

You haven’t taken a risk in this relationship. At all. But I have. It was my risk to take, to fall in love with a married man, and I did, and I take full responsibility for it. I’m sorry about that ink splotch; I’m crying as I write this. But I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I want your love, not your pity.

Your poem reduced me to a “smiling body” and a “warm embrace.” I thought I was more than that to you, Lucky. When you’re dealing with someone else’s life, you have to be a lot more careful with your words than that.

I love you with all my heart and soul, but I don’t want a relationship with a man who doesn’t feel the same way as I do. I want a man who loves me, and a relationship where I can rely on the fact that he loves me. Not my body, not my embrace, ME.

You write of your daughter needing you to be there. I need you to be there for me, too, Lucky. But you don’t see that, do you?

You’re so good at understanding everyone else’s claims on you — your family’s, your daughter’s, your job’s. Do I have no claims on you, Lucky? Am I just a convenient outlet for your passion, your escape from humdrum reality? I know where I am in this relationship. You don’t really know where you are, do you?

On Saturday night, I felt such pain for you, looking at your sad and confused face. I believe in us completely, but I don’t know what to do. I don’t want anything from you that you don’t want to give me. And I can’t show my needs to you if you don’t know how to respond, or if you believe you can’t respond because of your “prior creditor.”

I know, as a woman, that I’ve got to do better than this. Your poem frightened me, Lucky. After six months of this relationship I should know where I am, and what I can expect from you. I love you very deeply, but I’m in pain too, Lucky. I’ll be at the Kotli tomorrow as I’ve always been, every Tuesday and Saturday, available at your convenience when your wife is away at the temple. But I’m no longer sure this is good enough for me, Lucky. When we meet, I’ll need some definite answers from you.

Gurinder to Lakshman

Monday morning, August 21, 1989

Hey, lover-boy, since you keep going on and on about the pleasures of fucking sexual love — pardon my Sanskrit — do you know what I did last weekend? For your sake? I read the fucking Kama Sutra, that’s what. Indian civilization’s greatest tribute to the pleasures of sexual congress. In the classic translation by Sir Richard Burton and F. F. fucking Arbuthnot, no less. I never thought sex could be made so boring, yaar! Page after page of clinical detail — the nine types of sexual union, the sixty-four arts, the definitions of the different types of marks a woman can make with her bloody nails, the classifications of the female yoni as marelike or elephantine. How does it bugger-all matter, man, whether a woman’s embrace is like “the twining of a creeper” or “the climbing of a tree”? And have you ever heard anything more pissing ridiculous than Vatsyayana’s categories of the sounds women make when being stropped — Phut, Phat, Sut, Plat? Plat, I ask you! Anyway, the point I was going to make is, okay, I grant you that sexual love is a fine thing, and sexual pleasure may even be the finest of pleasures afforded to man, who am I to argue? But its greatest advocate, this third-century guru of sex, the immortal Vatsyayana, even he says, and I quote, “A girl who has already been joined with others, that is, one who is no longer a maiden, should never be loved, for it would be reproachable to do such a thing.” Look it up if you don’t believe me — part 2, chapter 1. Fucking reproachable, you understand?

And that’s why I reproach you, Lucky I’ve always admired you, yaar. Admired you like hell. You’ve done great work in this town. You’re one guy who puts in all the hours at work you need to even if your bloody wife is waiting for you to go out to a party. You’re a man who stands up for principle, against politicians, contractors, bosses, staff. You believe in the job you’re doing and you do it honestly and effectively and well. Okay, so you’ve found something you didn’t have before — so what? Enjoy it while you have it, and then move on, man! The way you move from posting to posting. You don’t turn your life upside down for sex, man. Or even sexual love, if that’s what you think it is. You don’t give up everything you’ve spent your life living for because your cock tells you it’s having a great time.

Don’t just take it from me, Lucky. Take it from the bloody Kama Sutra.

letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani

August 22, 1989

Cin, dear Cin, how I wish you were here in Zalilgarh! I don’t know how I can cope with all that’s going on without you to talk to, to give me a hug and tell me I’m going to be all right. I’m seeing Lucky tonight and I’m scared it’s all going to go wrong, that I’ve asked him for something he’s not going to be able to give me. And I don’t want to lose him, Cin. He’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a man — doesn’t that sound ridiculous? But it’s true, and I do love him, Cin, I love him so much it hurts. And I don’t know if he loves me enough to risk everything he knows for a life with me.…

And to add to everything, as if I don’t have enough to deal with, you’ll never believe what happened this morning. A little fellow who I know because he delivers tea and takes messages to and from Lucky’s office, a boy known to everyone as Sweet Mohammed, came to the Center today. Turns out he’s a neighbor or nephew or something of the Muslim woman I’ve told you about, Fatima Bi, remember? The one with the seven kids. Anyway, they all live on top of each other in the Muslim basti, and he said Fatima Bi had called him and given him an important message for me — she wanted to see me urgently. This from the same woman who’d been beaten up by her husband and told never to contact the Center again! Kadambari, the extension worker, was very nervous about venturing there again (she’s Hindu, by the way, which doesn’t help in the present charged circumstances, and of course I stick out like a sore thumb wherever I go, so there was no question of going to see Fatima Bi unnoticed). Kadambari was all for saying we couldn’t do anything, but that made me mad. “This is what we’re supposed to be here for,” I said, rather shrilly I’m afraid. “If this woman has the courage to ask us to help, despite the terrible risks she’s running, how can we let her down? We have to go!” So we went, and guess what? Poor Fatima Bi, mother of seven, which is about six more than she can handle, had just discovered she’s pregnant again. For the eighth blessed time.

She was beside herself, but she had found a certain steely determination. She asked us what she could do. Kadambari and I explained her options, and told her about the abortion services at the government hospital. “You mean, remove the child? Destroy it?” She flinched slightly as she asked, and when we answered yes, she closed her eyes tightly for a minute. But when she opened them again it was to ask a practical question: Did she need her husband’s consent to go to the hospital for an abortion?

No, we told her. She was a free and responsible adult. Under the law, it was her body, and her decision. She didn’t need anyone’s permission.

Then, she said, she was going to do it.

She looked at us, and it was a new woman I saw, Cin. Not the scared and beaten woman of the previous encounters. Her face was calm. This worm had turned.

Could we help, she asked. Kadambari was about to answer no, that all we could do was to provide the address and telephone number of the abortion clinic, but I interrupted. I knew Fatima’d never be able to get to a telephone, let alone go to the clinic in person to set things up. “We’ll make the appointment for you,” I said. It was stretching our mandate a bit, but I felt that Fatima Bi had gone so far toward taking control of her own body, her own life, that we needed to give her just that little extra bit of support.

Kadambari didn’t like it one bit. The woman’s got no real commitment to the cause; for her it’s just a job. She looked at me, with her inscrutably dark and sallow face, the black hair pulled tightly back from her forehead, and I knew she thought I was a foreign busybody interfering in something that was none of my business, making things more difficult for her. But I was having none of it. “You’re an extension worker,” I reminded her. “It’s time to extend yourself and work.” I don’t think she’ll ever forgive me for that.

Of course I asked Fatima if she wasn’t afraid of her husband’s reaction to our visit. Surely he might hear from the neighbors, from someone in this promiscuously crowded basti, that we’d come calling? And when she finally went to the clinic, might he not hear of it? I didn’t want Fatima to go ahead without having thought it all through.

It turned out that her husband, Ali, had gone out of town for three days. By the time he was back, she wanted it to be over.

“And then?” I asked. “Won’t he be angry?”

“He’ll be angry,” Fatima replied, her voice flat in the noontime stillness. “But by then it’ll be too late. It won’t matter anymore.”

Lakshman and Priscilla

August 22, 1989

— I love you.

[Silence.]

— I said I love you.

— I heard you.

— Is that all you have to say?

— What does it mean?

— What do you mean, what does it mean?

— I know what I mean when I say I love you. I don’t say it often. I don’t say it lightly. What does it mean when you say it?

— It means I love you. I love the sound of your voice. I love the way your hair tumbles down your face. I love the way you move, the way you arrange your limbs when you sit, or lie, or stand. I love your habit of writing poetry and hiding it away in your scrapbook. I love making love to you. I love the way your face looks when I am moving inside you. I love the sounds you make on our little mat in this magical room. I love being loved by you.

— I know you love me. I just don’t know how much.

— I love you! Isn’t that enough? I don’t think it’s possible to love anyone more than I love you.

— Those are just words. Words are just words until you act on them.

— I am acting on them. I’m with you, aren’t I?

— Yes, but that’s for now. You’ll be gone in an hour, more or less. Back to your wife, your daughter. To a home you don’t share with me.

— You know what my situation is. I have never misled you.

— I know your situation. But that doesn’t make it any easier.

— I know it’s not easy for you. It’s not easy for me.

— It’s easy enough. A woman who’s available at your convenience, two evenings a week. You don’t have to give up anything. Your work, your social life, your family, your official commitments. You have it all. Including me.

— You make it sound so simple. As if there were no effort, no commitment involved in carving out the you-shaped space in my life, a space that has grown and spread through every part of my being. I didn’t have room for you in my life, Priscilla. I didn’t need you in my life. I had trained myself to live without love. I told you when we first became involved: This is crazy. For you. For me. Do you remember my words, the second time we met at the Kotli, when you sent me that note and I came here? I said, “I’m overworked, overweight, and married.” And you said, I don’t care.

— I still don’t care.

— But you do. You do care. And you’ve reminded me of it again today.

— How can I not remind you of it? I live with it every day With knowing that the man I love has no room for me in his day, unless it happens to be a Tuesday or Saturday. That he will leave an evening with me for a dinner with his wife. That if he’s with me, it’s for an hour, at most two, and then he’ll be off, leaving me to hug my own loneliness.

— Wouldn’t you have been lonelier without me? Look, I know how you feel. I live with my own guilt.

— I know you do. But what have you had to give up for me?

— My peace of mind.

— That comes with the territory. If you want peace of mind, don’t fall in love.

— I didn’t intend to fall in love. When I try and juggle the hundred things in my life, when I feel the guilt of neglecting my daughter, of letting my work pile up in my in-tray, of putting a couple of hours with you ahead of going to the temple with my family, of fearing I will be missed precisely when I cannot explain my absence, I feel that falling in love was the most irresponsible thing I could possibly have done.

— What a curious word to use about love. Irresponsible! So you’re suffering guilt about being irresponsible. That doesn’t sound much like sacrifice. Other men would give up worlds to have the woman they love. You’ve given up nothing.

— Why must it be necessary to have given up something?

[Silence.]

— Anyway, I have. I’ve given up my certitudes.

— Your certitudes.

— I have. I’ve given up the carefully circumscribed order of my life, with its assumptions, its compromises, its predictabilities. I’ve given up the sense a Brahmin strives all his life to attain, the sense of being anchored to the world. Loving you, I’m adrift. Everything around me is turbulence. I do not know whether I’ll sail to a new and sunny paradise with you or crash foundering on the rocks. To me, at my stage in life, that’s a lot to give up.

— I’ve given up a few things too. Do you know what it’s like to have a man you can’t speak to when you need him? To feel the ache of needing you and knowing you’re beyond reach? To not be able to acknowledge you in public, not to go out openly together, not to be able to see you across a crowded room and know that we belong together and I’m leaving with you?

— Do you think I don’t feel the same need? Don’t you think that every fiber of my being is clamoring to shout to the world, “She’s mine, I love her, she loves me”?

— But you can’t. You’ve got too much to lose.

— Yes.

— Or perhaps you just aren’t sure enough of your love.

— That’s nonsense. You know I love you.

— There’s a French saying, “There is no love, there are only proofs of love.”

— You’ve had plenty of proofs of my love.

— What proof? In our lovemaking? I’ve been made love to just as passionately by men who did not love me.

— You don’t have to remind me of that.

— Lucky, you can never prove your love enough. Until you really give up your comfortable other life for me. Until you say to me, “Be mine forever. In the eyes of the world.”

— You’re mine forever. In my eyes. In my heart. You know that.

— I don’t know that I do. Sometimes I think I’m just some romantic fantasy for you. You say I’m in your heart. But you have really no idea where that is. Your heart is just a compartment of your mind. I occupy a space in it, walled off from your work, your writing, your family. When you’re with me, you live in that space. I have no reality outside it.

— That’s simply not fair. I think of you, love you, breathe you, wherever I am. You accompany me in my heart to meetings, to official dinners, to encounters with ministers. You join arguments you haven’t even heard. I imagine you sitting next to me at places you’ve never been to. You’re not just in some compartment of my mind. You permeate my life.

— As I told you. I’m a fantasy.

— I promise you you’re not.

— You’ve promised me nothing, Lucky. You expect my love, unconditionally, but you give me nothing in exchange.

— Nothing?

— I didn’t mean that. You give me your affection, you give me your poems, you give me little gifts, you give me dinners, you help me here in all sorts of ways. But you haven’t given me the assurance of a future. Sometimes you talk about us being together in America, in India, and it is fantasy, that’s all it is, except that I’ve been slow in catching on.

— That’s not fair. I’ve meant it every time we’ve talked about the future. I’ve contemplated turning my life upside down. I’ve agonized over the pain and disruption this would cause, to my family, my daughter, my work, my place in the world. But I’ve also told myself that all this would be worthwhile because you love me and I love you and I would have a new chance of “being beloved in the world” — something I had felt I would never experience in my life. And then, I think of my daughter, the most vulnerable and innocent victim of my future happiness, and I can’t go on.

— You can’t go on. And you keep saying you love me.

— Of course I love you. I’ll love you as long as I live.

— But you won’t give me any assurances we’ll be together.

— I don’t want to lie to you. I want only to give you a certainty I myself feel. I feel certain of my love. I don’t feel certain that I can risk destroying my daughter to fulfil my love. Don’t you see?

— Aren’t you afraid you could lose me?

— More afraid of it than of anything else, except losing my daughter.

— But you don’t have to lose either of us. Your daughter’ll always be your daughter, Lucky. And you don’t have to lose me. You could have me so easily. Just by committing yourself, clearly, now.

— I can’t. Not now.

— I understand you’re scared. About your daughter.

— I am scared. But not only about my daughter. About you too.

— About me? Why?

— Look, this is difficult to say without hurting you, and I don’t intend to hurt you.

— Go on.

— It’s not easy. You’re from a different world, Priscilla. There are a lot of adjustments I’d have to make to be part of that world as your — husband.

— It’s not that difficult, Lucky. You’re more Western than you think you are. You’ll adjust pretty easily.

— It’s not that kind of adjustment I’m talking about. I mean adjusting within myself. Look, let me explain. It’s something that troubled me from the start, but I kept pushing it aside, telling myself it didn’t matter. In my culture, no man with any self-respect gives his mangalsutra, his ring, his name, to a woman who’s been with other men before. I never thought that in my life I would ever be in a position where another man could even think, “I have slept with his wife. I have seen his wife naked. His wife has pleasured me.”

— You’re sick.

— I’m Indian. As far as I know, that’s the way the vast majority of the world thinks: The woman you marry is the repository of your honor.

— I don’t believe I’m hearing this, from an educated man in 1989.

— That’s the point. I learned. I became an educated man of 1989. I trained myself not to let it matter. I learned to love you without letting the shadows of the others fall between my love and your body. Oh, I suppose that, without thinking about it, I had sort of shared the general belief here that there are the women you sleep with, and the women you marry. I’ve grown out of that belief, quite consciously. I had started off sleeping with you, not even thinking of anything permanent, let alone marrying you. Then I fell in love. Now I found myself wanting to marry the woman I was sleeping with.

— How convenient.

— Spare me the irony, Priscilla. My knowledge of your past has tormented me far more than I let on. But I told myself I had to understand the culture you came from. That by the standards of your peers you’re practically virginal. And above all, that what mattered was that you loved me.

— Yes.

— I told myself, how does it matter who she’s been with before? What matters is that she’s with me now. I have her. These other men don’t.

— Exactly.

— I want so much for it not to matter, don’t you see? But can you blame me for being scared? How can I know that a woman who has slept with six men will never contemplate sleeping with a seventh? Can I afford to sink myself emotionally into a love that might be withdrawn from me as it has been from others? Or should I tell myself, love her while she loves you, love her while you can, let the future take care of itself?

— What does that mean? The future never takes care of itself. You have to take care of your own future if you want one.

— I’m just trying to explain my torment to you. I have a career where I try to make a difference to my own people. I have a daughter whom I want to see make her way in the world. And I have you. Or at least I think I do, but I’m scared.

— You can only have me if you want me, Lucky. If you truly love me.

— I love you, Priscilla. But …

— But?

— But there’s too much involved. I’m wondering whether I can find the strength to accept that I have to love you enough to let you go.

— How can you say that? That’s nonsense. How can you love me and let me go?

— I don’t know. I only know it would be as painful as amputating a limb. It would mean going round for years afterwards haunted by the ghost of what might have been. And yet, old Oscar put it best: “In love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others.” I guess I’ve deceived myself; I had no intention ever of deceiving you. But the more I think of it, the more it seems to me it would be the right thing to do.

— Right by whom? Not by me.

— Right by my family, by Rekha, and by you. You have a wonderful future awaiting you in America. I shouldn’t presume to deprive you of it. If I were to say, darling Priscilla, I do not know about our future, I am full of doubt and uncertainty, I love you but I am in torment, I do not want to inflict this on you, take your freedom if you want it — what would you do? What is best for you? Think about it. But please don’t doubt my love. Everything I’ve said comes out of my love for you. Even my willingness to let you go.

— I can hardly believe all that I’ve heard. Are you saying you want me to be involved with you but you can’t leave your wife and daughter? Are you saying you might leave them for me if I hadn’t been with other men before? Are you saying you love me but not enough to disrupt your life to be with me? You sound terribly confused.

— I am. When we got involved I began to think nothing else mattered. Not my wife, not my job, not my child, not your past. But I’ve discovered it all does. That I can’t just walk away from it all.

— But you can just walk away from me.

— No, I can’t! Don’t you see how terrible my torment is?

— But don’t you see that I can’t wait forever for you to end your confusion?

— I know you can’t.

— You’ve come to mean more to me than anyone I’ve ever known. I thought we had a future together.

— Please don’t cry. Here, take my handkerchief.

— I don’t understand, Lucky. You tell me I’m the woman you’ve always dreamed of, I fulfil every desire you have as a man, and when I tell you I feel the same way and I want us to be forever, you withdraw?

— I’m not withdrawing, Priscilla. I love you. I just can’t break up my family, destroy my daughter—

— I’d never ask you to destroy your daughter. Can’t you take her away from that dreadful wife of yours?

— I doubt a court would give her to me. And with my life, my work, how could I take care of her?

— I’d help.

— But you’re not her mother, Priscilla. With all her faults, Geetha is.

— Please remove your arm, Lucky. I’m leaving.

— I don’t want you to go.

— No, you want me to stay, so that you can fuck me and then you can go, to your wife. Thanks, but I’ve had enough of that scenario.

— Priscilla, don’t get up, please.

[Silence.]

— Priscilla, I love you.

[Silence. A long silence, followed by the creaking of a door, a sibilant sniffling retreating down the stairs, the rattle of a bicycle chain, and the squeaking crunch of thin tires on the twig-strewn ground, fading into the distance.]

from Lakshman’s journal

August 22, 1989

Words, old Oscar would have said, mere words — but how terrible, how vivid, how cruel. And is there anything so real as the words we use to define our lives?

I remember an old sadhu my parents took me to once, a wizened bare figure whose skin hung impossibly in folds, the hair on his head sparse and unruly, his white beard his only adornment. We sat at his feet for what seemed to me the longest time, but when I began to speak he raised an aged finger to his white-shrouded lips. “Whatever you have to say, my son,” he said, “say it in silence.”

It is a prescription I forget too often: Whatever you have to say, say it in silence.

With Priscilla now, silence is all I have.