Riot (23 page)

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.

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?