Riot

by Shashi Tharoor

  “No, of course not,” I said, kissing her this time on the forehead. “Go on.”

  “I was disappointed, too, in how little he saw of the India I loved. He knew the air-conditioned offices and the five-star hotels and the expatriate party-circuit, and he complained about the incompetence of the government and the inefficiency of the postal system and the unpredictability of the water supply, but he never set foot in a bazaar, he never visited the servants’ quarters, he never saw the inside of a temple or a mosque, he never saw an Indian movie, he never made a real Indian friend. He thought he was going to conquer India with his Coke, but all he ended up conquering was a pathetic slut on the make.”

  I held her tightly. “Let it be, Priscilla,” I said softly. “It was a long time ago.”

  “I know that.” She shook herself free of my embrace: this was important. “But I can’t forgive him. Not just for doing what he did, hurting Mom, destroying the family I’d always taken for granted. But also for being careless enough and thoughtless enough to do it there, in Mom’s and his bed, on that afternoon, and letting me find him. I hated finding him like that. For years I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, let a boy touch me. I would shudder remembering my father, seeing him naked like that, moving in and out of that woman, slapping her behind, I’d remember the noises they made, his whoops, her moans — it was awful.”

  “I understand,” I said, holding her, and this time she did not shake herself free of me.

  “But then I decided I couldn’t let him ruin the rest of my life too. Mom had brought us back to the States — we were in New York — and you have no idea what the peer pressure is like, if you’re halfway decent-looking and not obviously crazy. Every boy in my grade and one or two grades up wanted to take me out, carry my books home, invite me to the movies. When I resisted at first, or when I agreed but wouldn’t do anything they wanted me to, it was awful. Kids in school were beginning to whisper that I was a freak, that I wouldn’t even let a boy kiss me, that maybe I was a lesbian. I couldn’t stay sealed up like that. And then I wanted — I wanted a pair of strong male arms around me again. I wanted to be thrown up in the air again, and caught as I came down. I wanted so much to find someone who’d help me forget Dad, someone who was as different from him as possible so that he couldn’t possibly remind me of him.”

  And then you ended up with me, I couldn’t help myself thinking. Another married man cheating on his wife with an exotic foreigner.

  But that was not where she was leading: not yet.

  “So in my senior year at high school I got involved with a kid in my class. Well, I may as well say it, a black kid in my class. Darryl Smith. He was an athlete, the captain of the basketball team, not particularly bright or anything, but a really nice guy. And God, was he tall: the thing I’ll always remember about my first kiss was having to stand on tiptoe like a ballerina to reach his lips, even though he had to bend down a long way to reach mine.” A light shone in her eyes like a distant star, pulsing through the clouds. “People started talking at school, of course, and I suppose I should have felt I was doing something daring, something risky. But in fact with Darryl I felt completely safe, completely free of the shadow of my father. When he took his clothes off for the first time, I couldn’t keep my eyes off his lean and well-muscled body It was as if I was soaking every detail into my memory, registering another set of images over the ones of my father that had haunted me for so long.” She looked at me, suddenly, as if she was conscious for the first time that it was me she was talking to. “Does this bother you, Lucky? I’ll stop if you want me to.”

  “No,” I lied, my voice thickening, because it was beginning to bother me a great deal. “I want to hear what you have to say.”

  She hugged me tightly. “It’s important, for us, don’t you see? I want you to know everything that matters to me. I want you to understand.”

  “I know,” I said. “Go on.”

  “When my parents found out, they were both upset with me. My father was back in Atlanta, working at Coca-Cola headquarters, so I saw him just three or four times a year. But he was furious, just because Darryl was black. ‘They’re not like us,’ he kept saying. And, ‘How could you?’ To which I couldn’t always resist replying, ‘That’s a question you ought to answer first, don’t you think, Dad?’ And of course he refused to meet Darryl, not that I particularly wanted him to, anyway. Mom disapproved, too, in that dry way she has, never raising her voice, never even mentioning his color, just saying, ‘Priscilla, you know you can do better. What about that nice boy on the debate team? He wanted to take you out, and you never—’ And of course the boy on the debate team was smart, and rich, and white, and Darryl fell short on all three counts. Which made me love him all the more.” Her voice lightened, as if to take the drama out of her next sentence. “Love in the face of impossible odds. I began to convince myself that Darryl and I would be together forever.” She laughed a little, as if at her own naiveté. “But of course it wasn’t going to last. And our problem was not that he was black and I was blonde, not even that he was a jock and I was a straight-A student. It was that we didn’t talk to each other. Darryl was uncomplicated, and affectionate, and pretty straight with me, but again unlike my father, he was a man of few words. And he didn’t particularly want to listen to mine, either. If I tried to tell him about my family, or about India, or about a book I was reading, he would simply smile a big, gleaming smile and shut me up with a kiss. Which would go on to more than a kiss. And afterwards, he’d want to go get a bite, or a drink, or go dancing; but he wouldn’t particularly want to talk.

  “I just accepted that as part of how we were. I would talk instead with my girlfriends, especially Cindy, who’s the closest friend I have, someone I’d known since grade school, since before we went to India. And I thought, well, he doesn’t talk much, but I know he cares about me, and that’s what matters. I didn’t mind his laconic ways till the day he told me, in that happy, direct way he had, that he had received a basketball scholarship from Gonzaga. In the state of Washington, for God’s sake. And he was planning to take it.

  “ ‘Gonzaga?’ I practically yelled. ‘You never told me you’d applied to Gonzaga. I thought we were going to stay here, near the City.’ And none of the colleges I’d applied to were anywhere near the Pacific Northwest. Well, it turned out that a Gonzaga talent scout had come around to one of the high school games, liked him in action, and arranged the scholarship. We’d gone to a movie that very evening, and he’d forgotten to tell me about the encounter. So I was completely stunned. ‘What about us?’ I asked at last. And then I realized the question hadn’t even crossed his simple mind, that basketball was what, at that point in his life, he lived for, and I was completely incidental. I had spent so much time in his arms, but I had no idea what was going on inside his head.”

  She turned to me then, looking directly into my eyes. “He was the first boy who’d really kissed me, you know, kissed properly, not just pecked on the cheek after a date, and of course the first man I’d ever slept with. And in all the ten, eleven months we were together, he never once told me he loved me.”

  “Because he didn’t, Priscilla,” I said, pricked by jealousy. “He didn’t love you.”

  “He could have said the words,” she replied. “They’ve been said to me by so many guys who never meant them. But Darryl was too honest to mislead me. I’d merely misled myself.

  “I turned to Mom after this, and she was there for me, you know? She was patient and loving and nonjudgmental, and she helped me get over the pain. And she said one thing I never forgot. She said my problem was that I saw things in people that they didn’t see in themselves.

  “But Darryl did one thing for me. He cured me of my father. He went off to Gonzaga, and I wept for a week, and when I stopped weeping I realized he’d freed me. From himself, but also from the distaste and the fear that the thought of sex had evoked in me since the time I saw my father with that — that whore. Through Darryl, I’d sort of become n
ormal again. You know what I’m saying?”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  “After Darryl, it was easier to be a normal, red-blooded American woman,” she said matter-of-factly. “I went out with a lot of guys in college, dated a couple of them quite seriously, even, but they just weren’t right for me, you know? One of them, a guy from Boston, Winston Everett Holt III, even wanted to marry me. It was in my junior year of college; he was a senior. Win was a Boston Brahmin, very preppy, with that accent only people with his sort of breeding have, y’know, ‘cah pahk’ and all that — no, of course you don’t know, how could you know — anyway, he had it all, name, family, wealth, good looks, good connections, good prospects. This was what my mother wanted for me. And I turned him down.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t love him. Or maybe I should say that I couldn’t love him. He was too much like my father.”

  “This father of yours has a lot to answer for,” I said, lightly, but it was not lightness I felt at her revelations. I was troubled, even hurt, strangely, even though intuitively I had known all along that her life must have been something like this, an American life. I tried to gloss over my own feelings, but they would not be contained, and I found myself blurting: “These guys you went out with, did you sleep with them?”

  “Some of them,” she replied, and then she looked at me curiously, realizing that the question was not a casual one. “Oh Lucky, does it matter to you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, only half untruthfully, because I really didn’t know how much it did, though I could scarcely be oblivious to the emotions seething inside me.

  “Lucky, I’m twenty-four,” she said, holding me by both shoulders. “You didn’t expect me to be a virgin, did you?”

  “No,” I replied honestly.

  “When you made love to me, here, that first time after the sunset …”

  “I wasn’t thinking then,” I said defensively.

  “Well, you must have been pretty glad I wasn’t a virgin then, right?”

  “Right,” I said in the same tone, but my cheerfulness was strained, unconvincing. “It’s not important, Priscilla. Forget it.”

  She looked at me quizzically, then nestled herself into my body, her head upon my chest. I was silent. “Can I ask you something?” she said at last.

  “Of course.”

  “Your wife. When you met her — was she a virgin?”

  “Does the Pope’s wife use birth control pills?” I asked in mock disbelief. “Are you kidding? An Indian woman in an arranged marriage? Of course she was a virgin. Forget sex, she hadn’t kissed a boy, she hadn’t even held hands with one. That’s how it is in India. That’s what’s expected.”

  “Expected?”

  “Expected,” I asserted firmly. “If she wasn’t a virgin, no one would have married her. No decent woman from a good family would be anything else.” I had surprised myself by my own vehemence.

  She was very silent, very still, and I realized I’d hurt her by my choice of words. “I’m sorry, Priscilla. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

  “What did you mean, then?”

  “Just that things are very different here, in India. I guess we’re repressed, after centuries of Muslim rule followed by the bloody Victorians. And of course there’s a lot of hypocrisy involved. But as Wilde would have said, is hypocrisy such a terrible thing? It’s merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.” I tried to lighten my tone. “But sex simply isn’t something that’s acceptable or even widely available outside of marriage. There’s still a great deal of store placed on honor here. Women don’t sleep around. And if they did, no one would marry them.”

  “And men?”

  “What about them?”

  “Were you a virgin when you had your precious arranged marriage?”

  “Practically,” I said.

  “What kind of an answer is that?”

  “I hadn’t had a girlfriend or anything like that. There were some guys in college who did, but they were a tiny minority, and I’m not even sure how many of their girlfriends actually slept with them. I mean, it wasn’t easy — girls and boys weren’t allowed into each other’s hostels, no one in college could afford a hotel room, you couldn’t even hold hands in public without stirring up trouble. But yes, I did lose my virginity the way many of my friends did. We all had the same normal urges as anyone in America, after all, but none of the same opportunities. So, one night, a group of us from college paid a visit to a brothel.”

  “No,” Priscilla breathed, sitting up. “That’s disgusting.”

  “It’s the time-honored way,” I replied. “Men have to learn what it’s all about, and no decent girl will show them, and in the normal course you only meet decent girls. That’s why red-light districts exist. A hundred rupees, I think it was, for a dark chunky woman with betel-stained teeth and too much powder on her face. It lasted two minutes: she never took off her blouse, just lifted a crumpled petticoat and let me in. I never went back.”

  “I hope not,” she breathed.

  “Oh, some of the fellows did, the ones who could find a hundred bucks from time to time. I couldn’t, but I didn’t want to. My curiosity was satisfied. And I was repelled.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Do?”

  “For sex, of course.”

  I laughed. “My dear woman,” I said in my most Wildean voice, “have you never heard of the sin of Onan?”

  She blushed then. This lovely woman, who had just told me so matter-of-factly of having experienced the touch-and-thrust of sex with God knows how many men, was blushing at the thought of my having given myself a helping hand.

  “So you understand why, when my parents wanted to arrange my marriage, I didn’t protest too much.” I smiled. “I was ready. Boy, was I ready!”

  “Well, I hope you weren’t disappointed,” she said, a bit cuttingly, returning her head to my chest.

  “Actually, I was,” I said very quietly. “Geetha wasn’t just a virgin, she was horrified by what I wanted to do to her. Her mother, it seems, had given her the most basic instruction in what to expect. She refused to disrobe completely — she thought the very idea was disgusting. She showed no desire for my body either. So yes, I guess you could say I was disappointed.”

  Priscilla looked directly at me with those amazing eyes. “I’m sorry, Lucky,” she said softly “That couldn’t have been easy for you to tell me.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’ll tell you something, too, that I haven’t told anyone. There’s one thing I’ve never done. In bed, I mean. I’ve never let anyone make love to me the way my father was doing it with that woman. From behind.”

  I looked at her, and she looked back, unblinking, and I was overwhelmed by the desire to seize her in my arms, to turn her around, to do to her exactly what she’d said she’d never do. I touched her gently on the cheek.

  “I understand, Priscilla,” I said.

  from Randy Diggs’s notebook

  October 12, 1989

  Muslim professor I’d met in Delhi, Mohammed Sarwar, came to see me here at the guest house. He said he was staying with relatives in Zalilgarh while doing historical research, and it would be more convenient if he came to me. Unusual for an Indian — they’re always inviting you home. From which I surmise not just that this isn’t his home, but that the people he’s staying with are very poor. Or conservative. Or both? Mustn’t ask.

  Sarwar arrives, young, slim, moustache, thinning hair, while I’m sitting on the verandah with Rudyard Hart. There’s my first surprise.

  “Don’t I know you?” asks Hart, his eyes narrowing. “I’m sure we’ve met before.”

  “We have, Mr. Hart,” Sarwar replies, as he mounts the steps and shakes his hand. “Over ten years ago.”

  “Ten years ... of course! I remember you now. You were — what did they call you? A student leader.” He pronounces the words with exaggerated care, as if they
were a rare species of butterfly. Or an exotic disease.

  “That’s right.” Sarwar is unabashed.

  “With the commie student union, if I remember right.”

  “With one of the commie student unions, Mr. Hart. There are two at the university.”

  “Only in India.” Hart is cheerful. “Communism is fading away everywhere else in the world, but in India it sustains two student unions.” He wags a finger at Sarwar. “And you were leading a demonstration outside my office.”

  “Down with American imperialism,” Sarwar recites. “U.S. capitalist exploiter murdabad. Coke is a joke on India’s poor.”

  “I liked that one particularly. Coke is a joke. You must have had great fun making those up.”

  “Not really. We took ourselves very seriously.”

  “Of course you did. I invited you into my office to discuss your demands.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And,” Hart adds with satisfaction, “I offered you Coke.”

  “Which I declined.”

  “Which, as I recall, you accepted. And drank two.”

  “No, that wasn’t me. I refused. I was from the SFI. It was the girl who was with me, from the AISF. Her father was an extremely rich landlord from Calcutta, a member of Parliament for the Communist Party of India. She had grown up on the stuff. She told me later that it wasn’t thirst that led her to accept; drinking your Coke was a way of exploiting the exploiter. She was extremely good at rationalizing the indefensible.”

  Hart laughs. “What’s she doing now?”