Riot

~ ~ ~

from Lakshman’s journal

October 4, 1989

I leaf through her scrapbook, and my grief blurs the lines on each page. I try not to imagine her death, but I cannot help myself.

The Kotli, at dusk, as the trees make a sieve of the fading light, and the air is still. She goes to our usual place, for the last time. Behind her, Zalilgarh is burning, but she is oblivious of it, forgetting the world in her desire to see me. Her body is full of sentences waiting to be spoken, of moments yet unlived, soft and heavy as if awakening from a sleep of lingering dreams. She waits, as the darkness gathers around her like a noose.

There is a scurry on the stairs, a stab of fear in her heart. Night falls on her like a knife.

Her assailant — assailants? — would not have had an easy time killing her. She would have fought furiously. She had one more reason to want to live.

I know now why it was so important for her to see me one last time. She had something to tell me, something that she thought might yet change my mind.

One more detail Gurinder had to suppress in the postmortem.

She was carrying my child.

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tempers dangerously.

“There was nothing we could do to stem the raging flood of communal hatred,” admitted V. Lakshman, 33, the district magistrate, or chief administrator, of the town.

As the seemingly endless procession wound its way slowly through the narrow lanes, Lakshman and his superintendent of police, a convivial Sikh named Gurinder Singh, patrolled the throng with their officers, hoping to head off violence before it erupted. The two men described a scene of stamping feet and shouted slogans, with processionists spewing vitriol and flashing blades in the hot sun. Twice the marchers came close to attacking the town’s main mosque, and twice they were headed off. Just when it seemed that the march would proceed without serious incident, a bomb attack occurred on the procession. Shooting followed, the crowd ran amok, and Zalilgarh soon had a full-scale riot on its hands.

Eight people were killed in the disturbances, forty-seven injured, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of property damaged. By the standards of some of the riots that have been sweeping northern India in the wake of the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, Zalilgarh’s was a modest affair. What made it unusually tragic was that it took an American life, one that was neither Hindu nor Muslim: Priscilla Hart’s.

Ms. Hart had friends in both communities, and they are united in expressing shock and grief at her killing. “She was so special,” said Miss Kadambari (who uses only one name), an extension worker at the project who worked closely with Miss Hart. “No one could have wanted to harm her.” Her project director, Mr. Shankar Das, recalled her as a “sweet person” who “made friends very easily.” No one in Zalilgarh could explain why anyone would want to kill Priscilla Hart.

“In riots, all sorts of things happen,” said Gurinder Singh, the policeman. “People strike first and ask questions later.”

For Priscilla’s parents, Rudyard and Katharine Hart, who traveled to Zalilgarh to understand the reasons for their daughter’s death, the questions will never cease. The Zalilgarh police have arrested a number of Muslim rioters, some of whom they suspect of involvement in Ms. Hart’s death, but they have no clues and no confession. As is often the case in riot-related killings, the real murderers of Priscilla Hart may never be apprehended.

“It is hard to escape the conclusion,” a U.S. embassy spokesman said, “that she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Mr. Lakshman, however, questions whether there is such a thing as the wrong place, or the wrong time. “We are where we are at the only time we have,” he said. “Perhaps it’s where we’re meant to be.”