“Oh, she’s teaching at an American university, Emory I believe. Lecturing on postmodernism and feminism. I’m told she has a green card, a tenure-track post, and the best music system on campus. She still contributes articles to the ‘Economic and Political Weekly’ here critiquing India’s dangerous compromises with the forces of global capital.”
“And you? Are you still leading demonstrations outside American imperialist institutions?”
“No.” It is Sarwar’s turn to laugh. “I gave that up a while ago. I’m a professor now.”
“A professor? In what subject?”
“A reader, actually, in the Department of History at Delhi University. What you’d call an associate professor.”
“History,” Hart murmurs. “You have a lot of that in this country.”
“Yes,” Sarwar agrees. “Unlike yours. When I was at college I wanted to take an optional course in American history. The head of the department dissuaded me. Americans, he said, have no history. We, of course, have both history and mythology. Sometimes we can’t tell the difference.”
“What sort of history do you teach?”
“I’m specializing in what we call Mediaeval Indian History. Also called by some the Muslim Period. The time when most of India was ruled by various Muslim dynasties, ending with the Mughals.”
“An odd choice, for a communist.”
“Oh, I gave that up a while ago too. It was a faith, really, and I soon discovered two other faiths that I realized meant more to me.” “And what were those?” Hart asks.
“Democracy,” Sarwar replies quietly “And Islam.”
“Sounds like a perfect segue,” I chip in. “This long-delayed reunion is marvelous, Rudyard, but do you think I could proceed with my interview with Professor Sarwar now?”
letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani
April 5, 1989
…
“How can you love me?” he asked me suddenly. “When you know nothing about my background — my parents, my village, my ancestral home, where I went to school, what I grew up eating, thinking, listening to, dreaming of?”
“But that’s the whole point, Lucky,” I replied. “I don’t care about your background. I don’t care whether you lived in a thatched hut with no running water or grew up in a mansion. I don’t care if your parents drove a Mercedes or brushed their teeth with twigs. I love you. Not your family, not your village, not your caste, not your background. I love you. And that’s all that matters to me.”
He seemed taken aback by this, as if it was a new idea. “I love you too, Priscilla,” he said, but there was a note of uncertainty in his words I had not heard before….
Did I tell you he’s a poet? Even published a few poems in Indian magazines. “The standards aren’t very high,” he said apologetically, and you can see the rough edges in his work. I’m copying one below that he gave me. “A bit on the earnest side, as Wilde might have said,” he joked, “but then you know why it’s important to be earnest.” He comes up with these dreadful one-liners when he’s nervous, which I find really endearing. Anyway, it is earnest, but he means it, I think. Here it is:
Advice to the World’s Politicians
How to Sleep at Night
Try to think of nothing.
That’s the secret.
Try to think of nothing.
Do not think of work not done,
of promises unkept, calls to return,
or agendas you have failed to prepare for meetings
yet unheld.
Think of nothing.
Do not think of words said and unsaid,
of minor scandals and major investigations,
of humiliations endured, insults suffered,
or retorts that did not spring to mind
in time.
Think of nothing.
Do not think of your forgotten wife,
of lonely children and their reproachful demands,
or the smile of the pretty woman
whose handshake lingered just a shade too long
in your palm.
Think of nothing.
Do not think of newspaper headlines,
of the insistent transience of the shortwave radio,
or the seductive stridency of the TV microphones
thrust so thrillingly
into your face.
Think of nothing.
Do not think of the waif on the foreign sidewalk,
her large eyes open in supplication,
her ragged shift stained by dirt and dust,
stretching her despairing hand towards you
in hope.
No, do not think
of the woman at the building site,
wobbling pan of stones on her head,
walking numb for the thousandth time
from pile to site and site to pile
as her neglected baby scrabbles in the dust,
eats sand and wails,
unheard.
Think of nothing.
Do not think of the starving infant,
parched lips mute in hunger,
sitting slumped in the mud,
his eyes fading before his heart.
Do not think
of the stark ribs of skeletal cattle,
unable to provide milk, or hope,
in drought-dried lands of which
you know nothing.
Think of nothing.
Do not think
of the dead-eyed refugee, dispossessed
of everything he once called home.
Do not think
of the unsmiling girl whose once-sturdy thigh
now ends at the knee, the rest blown off
by a thoughtless mine on her way
to the well.
No, do not think
of the solitary tear, the broken limb,
the rubble-strewn home, the choking scream;
never think
of piled-up bodies, blazing flames,
shattered lives, or sundered souls.
Do not think of the triumph of the torturer,
the wails of the hungry,
the screams of the mutilated,
or the indifferent smirk
of the sleek.
Think of nothing.
Then you will be able
to sleep.
What do you think, Cindy? He’s genuinely earnest, discontented with the state of the world. He was telling me one day about this elite cadre he belongs to, the Indian Administrative Service, the IAS. We’ve got nothing like it Stateside. You won’t believe what it takes to get in: hundreds, thousands of young men and women studying sixteen hours a day so 150,000 of them can take an annual exam from which 400 are selected for all the top national government jobs that year — and maybe 25 of those for the IAS. Lucky says he had to wake up at 4:30 each morning to “cram,” to learn zillions of facts and figures about all sorts of things, not because you need to know them to do your job properly but just to prove you’re smart enough to do the job. To many guys, the exams are the be-all and end-all of their lives; getting through is a passport to power, privilege, clout, and lifetime job security.
Lucky had had hopes of becoming a writer, but he couldn’t afford to support himself on his writing, and his family put a lot of pressure on him to take the civil service exams. He says it seemed a noble aspiration to him: he did the exams because he wanted to make a difference. “Like Wilde, I’ve put my genius into my life and merely my talent into my writing,” he says. It’s odd to hear him constantly quoting Wilde, because you can’t imagine anyone less like an apostle of aesthetics. He’s not at all the stereotyped Victorian dandy with a lily in his hand and a book of verse in the other. He’s a bureaucrat, for Chrissake, a government official. And he’s an idealist about his work, as well as a traditionalist culturally and socially, the product of a middle-class professional Indian upbringing. The Oscar Wilde part of him is just in his intellect, I think, something from his education that h
asn’t fully seeped into his life. And look at his life. He has a job with no room for the Wildean witticisms and quips he learned to enjoy at college. Maybe these allusions are a kind of refuge for him, giving him some distance from the daily realities he has to deal with. Maybe I’m another kind of refuge too?
I don’t know, Cindy But the guy’s an idealist, and there aren’t too many idealists around in the government. “I didn’t spend a year of my life sharing a tiny room with three other guys all swotting for the IAS in order to serve slum dwellers,” one of his batchmates (colleagues from the same entry year) told him at the training academy in Mussoorie. “I did it so I could be set for life, look after my parents in their old age, and get myself a good wife.” I’m not kidding, Cin; all these guys become instantly more desirable marital prospects the moment they pass the IAS exams. In many parts of India a government job is the ultimate accomplishment, and being in the IAS is the government job to end all government jobs. So fathers of eligible daughters double the dowries on offer when an IAS candidate heaves into view. Listen to one story: Lucky tells me a couple of his college friends fell in love and wanted to get married. Problem was, the girl was from a well-off Brahmin family, and the boy was a Naga from the Northeast, a Christian and a “tribal.” The girl’s father ranted and raved, made the poor girl’s life hell, and forbade any further contact between them. The guy then got into the IAS on the Scheduled Tribe quota, a kind of affirmative action program for India’s underprivileged, and suddenly the father’s objections melted away. They’re now married, and the same father who railed against an “accursed [expletive deleted!] tribal” now boasts of his “IAS son-in-law.”
But Lucky’s really conflicted about his work. On the one hand, he says, he can do good; as district magistrate he has real power here.
On the other hand, he says he’s frequently disillusioned with the cynicism he sees around him in government, especially the corruption. A lot of his colleagues are on the take — official salaries are modest, and the way they see it, since all their college classmates are busy making money as businessmen, engineers, whatever, why shouldn’t the smarter ones, the guys clever enough to get into the IAS, make money too? India’s so full of rules and regulations that government officials can make a fortune from the way they exercise their power to permit — the building of a factory here, the grant of a loan there. And then there’s the political interference, from the local legislator, the MLA, or from ministers higher up in the state capital, Lucknow. Some of it is for petty favors — hire this person, authorize this action, expedite that approval — and he does it as part of the way things are. But when the politicians ask him to favor a dubious contractor or promote an undeserving officer or improperly allocate government funds, he refuses, and then they make their displeasure clear, even start threatening to transfer him. That’s one good thing about his job: he can’t be fired, the worst they can do is transfer him if he won’t do their bidding. He doesn’t, of course, and so one day he may really get to be too much of a pain for the bigwigs in Lucknow and might find himself suddenly made Deputy Commissioner of Inland Waterways or whatever. I can’t bear the thought.
Neither can his wife, of course. Lucky tells me that she keeps asking him why he makes such a point of his principles, why can’t he just let well enough alone? Why rock the boat? Doesn’t he care about her convenience, and the child’s? Lucky says rather bitterly that the rank, the house, the car, the servants are all she cares about. “The supreme vice,” he quotes Wilde again, the disillusioned Wilde of “De Profundis” (go on, look it up, Cin!), “is shallowness.” And Geetha is irremediably shallow. Lucky thinks she should have married the batchmate who drank himself into oblivion the day he got his IAS results, singing “Meri zindagi ban gayee!” (“I’m made for life!”) at the top of his voice in the street. There are eight million civil servants in India, if Lucky’s right (and he usually is!). The few hundred members of the IAS are the top of that heap, and in places like Zalilgarh they ARE the government. Ordinary people are so dependent on the government here for everything — from food rations to maintaining law and order — that Lucky really has power over the terms of their daily survival. He gave me a sardonic little poem about his own elitism:
I Am an Indian
I am an Indian, dressed in a suit and tie;
The words roll off my lucid tongue in accents long gone by;
I rule, I charm, protest, explain, know every how and why.
What kind of an Indian am I?
I am an Indian, with a roof above my head;
When I’ve had enough of the working day, I fall upon my bed;
My walls are hard, my carpets soft, my sofa cushions red.
What kind of an Indian? you said.
I am an Indian, with my belly round and full;
When my kid gets up in the morning she is driven to her school;
And if she’s hot, the a/c’s on, or she’ll splash into the pool.
What kind of an Indian, fool?
I am an Indian, with friends where friends should be;
Wide are the branches of my extensive family tree;
Big businessmen and bureaucrats all went to school with me.
I’m the best kind of Indian, you see.
from Katharine Hart’s diary
October 12, 1989
The HELP-US extension worker, Kadambari — I didn’t get the rest of her name, a rather plain woman with a dark sallow face, wearing a white cotton sari with a navy-blue border, her hair severely pulled back and plaited — took us to Priscilla’s place today.
Zalilgarh is just as bad as I feared. The heat radiates toward you in waves, as if some celestial oven is being opened and stoked in your face. The traffic is a torrent, raging rivers of vehicles and bodies in constant motion, streams of bicycles wending their way past thin cows, their ribs showing through their dirty skin, carts creaking past drawn by skeletal buffaloes, clangorous buses blaring their horns as they rattle and belch their way across town. And everywhere, people: half-dressed beggars with open sores clamoring for money, ash-smeared sadhus in saffron waist-cloths and matted hair, men in dhotis and men in pants and men in kurta-pajamas, and most strikingly the women, in multicolored saris of cotton and nylon, glittering with golden bangles and silver anklets. Vendors hawk their wares on the street — savories served on dried palm leaves, peanuts in cone-shaped packets made of old newspapers, sugarcane juice pressed into grimy tumblers — as flies buzz around everything. A listless gust of air blows a couple of sheets of paper at us from a hawker’s basket, and they turn out to be exam papers, still unread and unmarked, sold by impoverished teachers for the few pennies they will bring, the dreams of schoolchildren reduced to encasing a few grams of spicy fried lentils. Everything is recycled in India, even dreams. Street urchins gambol amid the refuse; a man relieves himself against a wall daubed with the campaign slogans and election symbols of two competing political parties. Above us, a vision of the infinite, as a murder of crows, cawing and wheeling in the brilliantly blue sky, points our way to Priscilla’s last home.
We had to walk down a narrow side-street, a gully they call it, to get there. The sidewalk was strewn with moldering rubbish and it was all we could do to avoid stepping on the trash. The stench was unbearable. Stray dogs nibbled at the scattered refuse. The road was no better, its paving cracked and pitted. Dust rose from every passing vehicle, mainly bicycles and reckless yellow-and-black auto-rickshaws, though a couple of bullock carts rolled past too, their riders idly flogging the tired beasts who were pulling them. Loud noise constantly assailed us, the jangling of bicycle bells, the shouting of male voices, the phut-phut-phut of the auto-rickshaw engines, the blaring of Hindi film music from various storefronts. We walked past groceries, their spices impregnating the air; provision shops, with brightly colored plastic buckets on display; photo developers, testimony to Zalilgarh’s ascent to modernity. At the entrance to what had been Priscilla’s building, Kadambari stopped at a tiny tin shed hou
sing a paan counter, where a grimy little man sat cross-legged in front of an aluminum table as flies buzzed around his wares. He seemed to recognize her, and without much ado expertly daubed lime paste on a bright green leaf before dropping betel nuts and multicolored supari masalas onto it while Rudyard and I watched. The paanwallah folded the bursting leaf into a triangle that Kadambari wedged into her cheek. I refused her offer to have one too, and we trudged up an exterior staircase behind her.
The weather is pleasant in October, cool by Indian standards, but Rudyard was perspiring as we climbed. The whitewashed steps were dirty, the wall splotchy with red stains from the paan juice that the building’s inhabitants casually spat on their way up, as Kadambari proceeded to do. Back in the ’70s, when I first came across those stains in Delhi, I assumed they were blood, and wondered whether the homicide rate was greater than reported or, worse, whether tubercular Indians were coughing up blood all over the city. The discovery that it was merely a combination of a national addiction and poor hygiene had come as a relief. But today, the red stains made me think again of blood, Priscilla’s blood, spilled by an unknown rioter with a knife, and I stumbled, suddenly blinded.
We reached a landing, two floors up, and entered the interior of the building. The corridor was dingy, lit by a single naked bulb dangling from a wire cord. Four identical wooden doors led off it to the apartments within; they were painted a garish blue, though the garishness was dimmed by dirt and assorted scratches visible even in the poor light. Two of the blue doors were closed but not bolted; one was open and a small child, milk dribbling down his chin, stared out at us round-eyed from the doorway until his sari-clad mother swished up from within and dragged him away. The fourth door, bolted and padlocked, was Priscilla’s. Kadambari pulled out a large key and let us in.
It was a small room, sparsely furnished, with a stone floor on which my daughter had placed a small throw-rug, and a single bed. It wasn’t really a bed in the American sense of the word, but a string-cot, a charpoy, its white strings sagging noticeably in the middle, with a thin cotton mattress on top. The bed was neatly made, with a stiff white cotton sheet, and a gaily colored Indian bedspread on top. I sat down heavily on it, imagining the impress of my daughter’s body, and ran a hand over the bedspread, resting it on the lumpy pillow, feeling the lump in my own throat.
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