That was how it began, Randy. And it continued, madly, obsessively, everywhere I could contrive — in hotel rooms booked by the company for visitors who hadn’t yet arrived, on official trips where no secretary had been taken before, and of course at the office, mainly on the couch where I received visitors.
And once, thrillingly, on my desk. I came back one day from a particularly frustrating meeting with a smug functionary called the Controller of Capital Issues and Foreign Investments, having heard in tones of complacent arrogance that I was pushing what his government considered an “inessential product.” Furious and defeated, I stormed into my office. Nandini walked in behind me, concerned, and closed the door. “Bad meeting?” she asked, gently rubbing the nape of my neck, where a hard knot of tension throbbed.
In response, I turned around and kissed her full on the mouth, holding her so tightly that she almost gasped for breath as I prised her mouth open with an insistent tongue. Without a further word, I pushed her onto the desk, unzipping myself with one hand without releasing my grip on her, then lifting her sari and slip and thrusting myself into her. At that moment, her surrender was total, and for me, that was all that mattered. Her eyes were closed, her bare arms in that sleeveless blouse flung back, her legs splayed as they dangled from the desk, and I was on top, deep inside her, her conqueror. It didn’t last very long, but in those few minutes in which I forgot myself, I regained my sense of who I was, and why I was here, and what I had come to do.
I’m sorry, Randy. Do I sound like a shit? Sometimes when I relive those moments I feel I’m reminding myself that I really am the complete asshole Katharine portrayed in divorce court.
In hindsight it’s easy to see it inexorably coming to an end. At the time all I could think about was how to make it even better. Nandini was chafing at constantly having to watch out for noises at the office door, constantly having to hurry to vacate a hotel room, constantly having to avoid detection. She wanted, she said, to be alone with me without having to feel tense all the time. Her own place was impossible, not just because she was married, but because she lived with an aged mother who was always in the house. So it had to be mine.
I brought method to my madness. I took a greater interest in my wife’s and kids’ school schedules than I had ever done before, learning by heart her library hours, Kim’s bagpipe lesson schedule, the servants’ siesta times. Even allowing for a half-hour’s margin of error on either side, the house was completely empty from one to three-thirty on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons.
On those days I dismissed the driver and took Nandini home myself, confident it was absolutely safe. She loved being there, sinking into the American king-sized bed that Katharine and I had carried around the world with us, seeing us naked together in the full-length mirror, relishing the quiet efficiency of the air-conditioning. And what did I feel, thrashing about with my secretary on the bed in which my wife of twenty years would sleep, her back to me in a flannel nightdress, a few hours later? A twinge of guilt, I’d like to think, but mainly, if I’m honest with myself, excitement, a sense of having reclaimed the conjugal bed for its rightful purpose.
By the time we began trysting at my place, matters were coming to a head anyway. Kim was almost finished at school, and I was ready to admit failure to my bosses and accept a transfer somewhere else. Nandini was beginning to ask about our future and I had not even considered whether we had one. I had embarked on our relationship without thinking beyond the next day. It was clear she had gone much further. Nandini was seeing herself in my marital bed, and convincing herself that’s where she belonged. I was beginning to feel trapped.
One night Katharine noticed a suspicious scent on the sheet, and wondered if one of the servants were taking their siesta in her bed. Their injured protestations of innocence made it clear the idea was unthinkable to them. Before long Katharine began to think of another possibility she had considered unthinkable.
You find this embarrassing, Randy? Nah, you journalists have pretty thick skins. You’ve heard worse, I’m sure. But this is all off the record. You understand that. Fact is, when I’ve had a few I talk too much. Especially these days. It’s all I’ve got left, Randy. Words.
Yeah, pour the rest. There isn’t much left. Might as well finish the bottle.
So Katharine was beginning to get suspicious. But it wasn’t my wife who found out. It was Priscilla. And in the worst possible way.
Of all of us, it was Priscilla who led the most Indian life. Kim had his high school friends and his exams; Lance had a small group of American friends with a shared addiction to comics, which they exchanged incessantly; Katharine had her teaching and the household; I had my work and Nandini. Priscilla was the one person with a genuine curiosity about Indians — not the handful of Americanized rich kids she met in her school, but what she called “real Indians.” Early on she decided to teach the alphabet to our servants, and was soon giving them reading lessons after dinner. One day she went with the gardener to his home and came back with a horrified account of his family’s poverty. I had no choice but to double his wage. Soon everyone who did any work for us wanted her to visit them too.
It was Priscilla who was the most active member of the school social service league, Priscilla who volunteered to read to blind children, Priscilla who helped Sundays at the Catholic orphanage. She didn’t know a single Indian with a college degree or a fancy job, but she really cared for the underside of this society.
So inevitably, when the dhobi’s young son, who carried the bundles of laundry for his father, came to our home looking feverish and ill one Wednesday, it was Priscilla who insisted he rest instead of continuing with his father’s rounds. I was already at the office; I only learned this later. When the father protested that he could not possibly take the boy back home with so many visits left to make, Priscilla declared the child could rest at our place, aspirined and blanketed, and be picked up by his father at the end of the dhobi’s day. And it was typical of Priscilla, of course, that she would decide to skip her regular afterschool commitments to come home early and make sure her patient had been properly fed by the servants and was doing well.
If I had paid more attention to my daughter, I would have realized all this. And I would not have been at home, buck naked and whooping as I took Nandini doggy-style, slapping her ample behind like a cowboy taming a mare, when Priscilla, puzzled by the noise, opened the door.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t slam the door. She didn’t run away. Instead, she just stood there, her baby blue eyes widening in bewilderment and hurt, not comprehending what was going on, not wanting to comprehend. And as I saw her, I stopped moving, frozen in shame and embarrassment.
“Ruddy, why do you stop?” Nandini clamored, kneeling on the bed on all fours, her breasts still swinging from the momentum of our coition, her eyes shut in ecstasy, oblivious of the intrusion.
That broke the spell in which Priscilla was imprisoned. A solitary tear escaped from one eye and rolled down her cheek. And then she began to sob.
“Priscilla,” I said, not knowing what to do. I pulled myself out of Nandini and tried to clamber off the bed while hiding myself, wanting to go to her but anxious to wear something, knowing that she had never seen me naked, let alone in these circumstances.
“Don’t come near me!” she screamed then. “I don’t want you to touch me! I hate you, Daddy!”
Everything is a blur thereafter. Nandini s little shriek, my pulling on a pair of pants, Priscilla running down the corridor crying, my setting off after her, Priscilla running blindly out of the house toward the street, my chasing her bare-chested and barefoot, trying to hold her in my arms, Priscilla struggling with me on the pavement, raining little blows on my shoulders with her fists, still sobbing. And then Katharine’s car screeching to a halt beside us and my wife, also returning early to test her suspicions, leaping out. And my marriage collapsing around me like a tent.
Lakshman to Priscilla Hart
Februar
y 27, 1989
I’m an administrator, not a political scientist, but I’d say there are five major sources of division in India — language, region, caste, class, and religion.
Very simply: There are thirty-five languages in India spoken by more than a million people each, fifteen spoken by more than ten million each. The Constitution recognizes seventeen. Take a look at this rupee note: you can see “ten rupees” written out in seventeen languages, different words, different scripts. The speakers of each major language have a natural affinity for each other, and a sense of difference from those who speak the other languages. Hindi is supposed to be the national language, but half the country doesn’t speak it and is extremely wary of any attempt to impose it on them. In my part of the country, Tamil Nadu, you’d do better asking for directions in English than in Hindi.
So language divides. And this is compounded by the fact that, within a decade after independence, the government reorganized the states on linguistic lines, so most language groups have their own political entities to look toward to give expression to their linguistic identity. The people of Punjab speak Punjabi, of Bengal Bengali, of Tamil Nadu Tamil, and so on. So we have the twenty-five states in the Indian Union becoming ethnolinguistic entities, helping give rise to strong regional feeling going beyond the states themselves. The “Hindi belt” in the North — overpopulated, illiterate, poor and clamorous — is resented by many in the better-educated, more prosperous South. And both are seen as distant and self-obsessed by the neglected Northeast. There’s a real risk of disaffection here, especially as long as power remains concentrated in Delhi and the outlying states find themselves on the periphery, paying tribute to the north.
Next, caste. That’s basically a Hindu phenomenon, but caste is hardly unknown amongst converts to other faiths, including egalitarian ones like Sikhism, Christianity, and Islam. There are hundreds of castes and subcastes across the country, but they’re broadly grouped into four major castes — the Brahmins, who’re the priests and the men of learning (which in the old days was the same thing); the Kshatriyas, who were the warriors and kings; the Vaishyas, who were the farmers and merchants; and the Sudras, who were the artisans and manual workers. Outside the caste system were the untouchables, who did menial and polluting work, scavenging, sweeping streets, removing human waste, cleaning toilets, collecting the ashes from funeral pyres. Mahatma Gandhi tried to uplift them and called them Harijans, or children of God; they soon found that patronizing and now prefer to call themselves the Dalits, the oppressed. One interesting detail that’s often overlooked: the top three castes account for fewer than twenty percent of the population. There’s a source of division to think about.
Class comes next. It’s not the same as caste, because you can be a poor Brahmin or a rich Vaishya, but as with caste, the vast majority of Indians are in the underclass. The privileged elite is, at best, five percent of the country; the middle class accounts for perhaps another twenty percent of the population; the rest of India is lower class. You can understand why the communist parties thought the country was ripe for revolution. Of course they were wrong, and one of the main reasons they were wrong (I’ll come to the other main reason in a minute) was the extent to which they underestimated the fatalism of the Indian poor, their willingness to conform to millennia of social conditioning.
This was because of the fifth great source of division in India, religion. Hinduism is great for encouraging social peace, because everyone basically believes their suffering in this life is the result of misdeeds in a past one, and their miseries in this world will be addressed in the next if only they’d shut up and be good and accept things as they are, injustices included. So Hinduism is the best antidote to Marxism. It’s interesting, in fact, how many of the leading communists before Partition were Muslims, because of their natural predisposition to egalitarianism. And Brahmins, because they had a natural affinity for dictatorships, even of the proletariat. But religion also breeds what we in this country call “communalism” — the sense of religious chauvinism that transforms itself into bigotry, and sometimes violence, against the followers of other faiths. Now we have practically every religion on earth represented on Indian soil, with the possible exception of Shintoism. So we’ve seen various kinds of clashes in our history — Hindu-Muslim, Muslim-Sikh, Sikh-Hindu, Hindu-Christian.
Now, you might be forgiven for thinking that with so much dividing us, India was bound to fall apart on one or several of these cleavages. But in fact it hasn’t, and it’s belied every doomsayer who’s predicted its imminent disintegration. The main reason for that is the other thing I said the communists were wrong about. It was that they also underestimated the resilience of Indian democracy, which gave everyone, however underprivileged or disaffected, a chance to pursue his or her hopes and ambitions within the common system. In Tamil Nadu in the South, in Mizoram in the Northeast, yesterday’s secessionists are today’s chief ministers. Agitations in defense of specific languages or specific tribal groups? No problem, deal with them by creative federalism: give the agitators their own units to rule within the federal Indian state. Naxalites chopping off the heads of landlords in Bengal? No problem, encourage the commies to go to the polls instead, and today the pro-Chinese Communist party celebrates a dozen years in power in Bengal. The untouchables want to undo three thousand years of discrimination? Fine, give them the world’s first and farthest-reaching affirmative action program, guaranteeing not just opportunities but outcomes — with reserved places in universities, quotas for government jobs, and even eighty-five seats in Parliament. The Muslims feel like a threatened minority? Tsk tsk, allow them their own Personal Law, do not interfere in any way with their social customs, however retrograde they may be, and even have the state organize and subsidize an annual Haj pilgrimage to Mecca.
Do I make it sound too easy? Believe me, it isn’t. Skulls have been broken over each of these issues. But the basic principle is simple indeed. Let everyone feel they are as much Indian as everyone else: that’s the secret. Ensure that democracy protects the multiple identities of Indians, so that people feel you can be a good Muslim and a good Bihari and a good Indian all at once.
It’s worked, Priscilla. We have given passports to a dream, a dream of an extraordinary, polyglot, polychrome, polyconfessional country. Democracy will solve the problems we’re having with some disaffected Sikhs in Punjab; and democracy, more of it, is the only answer for the frustrations of India’s Muslims too.
But who, in all of this, allowed for militant Hinduism to arise, challenging the very basis of the Indianness I’ve just described to you?
from Priscilla Hart’s scrapbook
February 14, 1989
The car stopped where the road ended, at a rusting gate with a sign forbidding entry to unauthorized visitors. The driver took a long stainless steel flashlight out of his glove compartment and got out to open the gate. It creaked painfully. Ahead, there was an overgrown path heading toward the river.
“It’s okay,” Lakshman told the driver. “You wait at the car. We’ll be back soon. Give me the torch.” The driver looked relieved, even though Lakshman took the flashlight from him, leaving him alone amid the lengthening shadows.
“He’ll probably sleep until we get back,” Lakshman assured me cheerfully.
“Tell me more about this place,” I said. “Did you say Koti?”
“Kotli,” Lakshman replied. “No one quite knows where the term comes from. A ‘kot’ is a stronghold, a castle; a ‘kothi’ is a mansion. This wonderful old heap we are about to visit is something in between. People have been calling it the Kotli for generations. It’s been a ruin for somewhat longer than anything else that’s standing in the Zalilgarh area.”
“How old is it?”
“Who knows?” he replied disarmingly. “Some say it goes back to the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and there’s probably an Archaeological Survey of India finding that confirms that, though I haven’t seen it. But it’s old, all right. And
deserted.”
“Why is it all closed up? Shouldn’t you open it for tourists to visit?” I asked.
“Tourists?” Lakshman laughed. “Tourists? In Zalilgarh? My dear girl, I don’t think we’ve had a tourist here since 1543, when Sher Shah Suri camped here while building the Grand Trunk Road. Why would a tourist come to Zalilgarh? Even you don’t qualify as one.” Suddenly his hand was on my upper arm again. “Watch your step here — there’s a lot of rubble on this path. I don’t want you twisting an ankle.”
But he released his grip almost instantly as we walked on.
“What happened was that the Kotli sat here undisturbed for generations, like so many ruins elsewhere in India,” Lakshman explained. “The land from here to the river belonged to the old nawab and then to the government, so nobody could build here, and nobody wanted to, either. It’s quite an isolated place, far away from the town, near nothing. Plus there was a rumor that it was haunted.” “Haunted?”
“The story goes that the owner of the Kotli was murdered in his bed by his wife and her lover. But he never let them enjoy the fruits of their villainy. He haunted the house, wailing and shrieking and gnashing his teeth, until he had driven them away in terror. No one would live there after that, so it just fell into disuse.”
“Do people still think it’s haunted?”
“In India, myths and legends are very slow to die, Priscilla.” “Unlike the human beings,” I found myself saying. I was just trying to be clever, in keeping with his mood, but as soon as I said it I wished I hadn’t.
“Unlike the human beings,” he repeated slowly. “Now why would you say a thing like that, Priscilla? Have you seen so much of death and dying here? I’d like to think Zalilgarh has been a pretty peaceful place in recent years. Haven’t had so much as a riot since I’ve been here. And our infant mortality rates are dropping too.”
Riot Page 4
