Riot (21 page)

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.