Riot

by Shashi Tharoor

  Rudyard marched right in and took in the room — the bed, the rudimentary table that served as her desk, the Indian cupboard, or almirah, the solitary chair, the Grateful Dead poster nailed to the wall, the two pieces of luggage on the floor. She lived simply, my daughter, as we had expected. Half a dozen books were stacked on the table. There was a shortwave radio against the sole window, its antenna extended as far as it would go, straining, I imagined, for news and music from home. It was her only luxury: there was no television set, no telephone. A pedestal fan, signs of rust beginning to show on its casing, stood unplugged in a corner; it was all that Priscilla had to keep off the heat whenever Zalilgarh’s erratic electricity supply allowed her to run it. The bathroom was tiny, with an Indian-style squatting toilet, and a tap and a bucket on the floor to bathe at. How had she coped, my baby? Never once had she complained about her living conditions.

  Rudyard’s eyes alighted on the two framed photos on the desk. One was of me, alone, taken a year previously in New York, by her. The other was a much older picture, taken at the Red Fort in Delhi back in 1978, of the five of us as a family. The children are grinning and squinting at the camera and Rudyard has his arm around me. An innocent tourist moment, but I could imagine Priscilla looking at it over the years, seeing it as an icon of what she had cherished and lost.

  Rudyard averted his eyes from the photos and walked to the almirah. Once again, Kadambari produced a key and opened the door. Rudyard almost recoiled from the sight of himself, red-eyed and perspiring, in the mirror on the inside of the door. A few cotton dresses hung limply from wooden hangers. Rudyard pulled open a drawer and found himself holding Priscilla’s underthings. He withdrew his hands as if scalded.

  A fly buzzed around the room. The sounds of the street were fainter here, filtered by the stillness in our hearts.

  I got up from the bed and began to look at everything in the room, touching each of her dresses, searching the pockets, emptying the drawers. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Clues, perhaps, but to what? The Zalilgarh authorities weren’t looking for anything; they knew she’d been killed in a riot, like seven other people, and that was good enough for them. Clues to her life, perhaps, were what I needed, rather than to her death. Something that would help me understand what she was experiencing here in Zalilgarh, something that would help me hear the stories she would never be able to tell me again.

  Rudyard, still perspiring, looked numbly at our daughter’s personal possessions, the final legacy of her short life. I could see him struggling to contain something within himself, something he had never felt and did not know how to express. It was there in his strained and sweating face, in the way his brow seemed knit in perplexity and pain. He was staring at each book, each garment, as if unable to comprehend what it was doing there, what he was doing with it. We had to pack, of course, take her things away. Where would we take them? For what purpose? Her clothes, in particular, would be pointless to carry to America. Better to give most of them away here, where others would be glad to have them.

  But packing gave us something concrete to do. When I supplanted him at the almirah Rudyard sat silently in the chair, staring vacantly at the wall, and Kadambari stood at the door chewing her paan and watching us. As I struggled with Priscilla’s suitcase, though, Rudyard got up and heaved it onto the bed. It was half full of papers, research notes, and a few souvenirs she was no doubt planning to bring to America — a decorative brass plate, a hand-carved wooden box, two embroidered cushion covers. These were simple things, pleasing to the eye, bought cheaply at the local bazaar. They would, I decided, travel back with us as Priscilla had intended them to.

  We worked in silence. Neither Rudyard nor I could say a word, at this time, in this place, to each other. I did not trust myself to speak and, as always, tried to find strength in focusing on the practical. Housework and relocation had saved my sanity when my marriage ended; packing and sorting would see me through my pain today.

  I looked through the contents of Priscilla’s drawers before putting them away, and found nothing unusual. I took the bedspread, with its distinctively Indian paisley pattern, but left the coarse white sheet. The clothes Priscilla would never wear I folded into the second piece of luggage. I might have offered them to Kadambari except that she showed not the slightest interest in what I was doing, and I could not imagine her in a dress anyway. I would ask the kind Mr. Das of HELP-US whether he could think of people to give them to. Fortunately Rudyard paid no attention to Priscilla’s toilet bag, because he would have been horrified by two things inside it. A vibrator. And a partly used strip of birth-control pills.

  The latter surprised me more than the former. I had assumed Priscilla would be alone here, and I knew she had broken up with her last boyfriend before coming to India. I could not imagine why she would need to use birth control in Zalilgarh.

  I found no clues among her papers, though I knew I would need to go through them carefully again. There were two letters from me, but none from any of her friends. A couple of sheets of half-done drawings, some scribbled lines of verse: that was all. Everything else was related to her work for HELP-US or her thesis research. I was sure there was more, somewhere. Priscilla would have made jottings, sketched, kept a diary, written poetry. I knew my daughter well enough to be sure there was something else.

  Kadambari took the smaller bag and left the room. Rudyard moved to close the suitcase on the bed. I picked up the old photograph on the desk, intending to put it in my handbag along with the picture of myself that had kept my daughter company for the last ten months. But before I could put it away, Rudyard’s hand, oddly unfamiliar, fell upon mine.

  “Can I have that?” he asked, his voice thickening.

  You have no right, Rudyard, I thought. You’re the one who destroyed the world that photo depicts.

  But I didn’t say that. I said, “Of course, Rudyard.”

  As I gave it to him he slumped onto the bed, and I found myself holding him as he sobbed uncontrollably, his head hot and wet against my ribs, his body racked with regret. I realized then that, in all the years I had known him, and in all the years of our marriage and its collapse, I had never seen him cry.

  from Lakshman’s journal

  May 3, 1989

  We meet every Tuesday and Saturday at the Kotli, just before dusk. She comes on her bicycle, through the gate I showed her; I have slipped her a copy of the key to the padlock. She always arrives first, wheels her cycle in, and hides it where I have shown her, behind some shrubbery. When I arrive in my official car, there is no sign that anyone is there. This is a sensible precaution, because though I usually let the driver off, sometimes I have no choice but to keep him and I don’t want him putting two and two together and coming up with 22. Sometimes my work delays me; Saturday is a working day for me, ostensibly half-time, but half-time can stretch well into the afternoon. Fortunately, on Saturdays Geetha always goes with Rekha for an early evening puja to the Shiva Mandir and never notices what time I return home.

  At one time I had begun to disapprove of Geetha’s pujas: there is a swami resident at the Shiva Mandir who has an unsavory reputation for dabbling in tantric practices and other activities on the wrong side of the law. Before I got to Zalilgarh there were rumors of human sacrifices that could never be proven, and the swami has henchmen — he calls them disciples — who look as though they would not think twice before devoutly slitting your throat on his orders. But tantra is hardly Geetha’s thing and the DM’s wife can scarcely be in any danger, so I didn’t put a stop to her regular visits. And now it’s convenient. With Geetha at the temple, I don’t have to worry so much about the time. When I am held up at the office and arrive at the Kotli later than promised, Priscilla is always there, in the room at the top of the stairs, reading or writing in her scrapbook, or simply looking out at the river and the sky turning inky as dusk descends.

  She always rises to greet me, with a smile that warms my soul. We embrace, we kiss — long, cool, lin
gering kisses unlike any I have ever had — and sooner or later we fall onto the makeshift bed and make love. We find more and different ways to make love, experimenting not because we are jaded but because of our delight in discovering new ways of knowing each other. Afterwards we talk, lying side by side or more often on top of each other.

  She loves me, she says, and she means it. This is not love as my parents spoke of it, an emotion anchored in family, in a sense of one’s place in the world, in bonds of blood so thick one cannot conceive of snapping them. It is instead love as I have read of it in Western books or seen in Western movies, an individual attraction between a man and a woman, a feeling that is independent of social context or familial connections. I cannot explain to Priscilla that I have been brought up to mistrust this kind of love, because it is so difficult to tell apart from lesser emotions of infatuation or lust. My father spoke to me of this before I went off to the University. “You will face many temptations,” he said, “and sometimes you will find yourself developing feelings for a girl that you might mistake for love. Such feelings are normal, but do not confuse them with real love, which comes only from the commitment of marriage and the experience of sharing life’s challenges together. The West believes that love leads to marriage, which is why so many marriages in the West end when love dies. In India we know that marriage leads to love, which is why divorce is almost unknown here, and love lives on even when the marital partner dies, because it is rooted in something fundamental in our society as well as our psyche. You are going to college to study, to make your future. But if ever you find yourself distracted by other thoughts, remember what I have said to you.”

  I never forgot.

  I do not know what she sees in me, what the kindred spirit is that ignites such a spark of recognition in her. I believe I know, though, what I see in her. I see it in our trysting place, at our favorite hour, as the twilight seeps into our room and illuminates the colors of our bodies, the spreading crimson of dusk soft upon the black and white of our skin. I see it in her body as we are about to make love, her limbs light with unspoken whispers. I see it in her eyes at night, the moonbeams playing with her hair, the shadows across her hips like a flimsy skirt. In the darkness, I raise her chin in my hand and it is as if a flame has lifted itself onto the crevices of her smile. I let myself into her and my spirit slips into her soul, I feel myself taking her like nothing else I have ever possessed, she moans and my pleasure lies upon her skin like a patina of dewdrops, she is mine and I sense myself buckling in triumph and release, and then she trembles, a tug of her pelvis drawing me into the night. And I know that I love her.

  But afterwards, as I lie by her side, our hearts full of fragmentary phrases, I look at the little mirror on the wall and see the darkness encroach like a stain across our love. I love her, but what does it mean once we have arisen? She dreams of holding hands on Broadway and rubbing noses on the honeymooners’ bench at the Taj Mahal. I think of Geetha and her parents and mine, and of little lost Rekha calling bewildered for her Appa, her eyes wet with unwiped tears. There are moments, of course, when I too fantasize about a new life with a new wife, a new honey-blond wife with skin the color of peaches-and-cream and eyes like diamonds dancing in the sunlight, and I forget, momentarily, my responsibilities, the burdens of guilt and obligation that shackle me to the present.

  Sometimes I dream, and the dreams are curious ones, of an America I have never seen, even in the movies, wide and open and inviting and definitely America, but strange, populated by fast cars and large women, or perhaps large cars and fast women, I am unsure which when I awake. The dreams are oddly precise, too, in the ways only dreams can be, so that in one Priscilla beckons me — I know it is Priscilla but in the dream she looks like Marilyn Monroe, like pictures of Marilyn Monroe I have seen in old magazines — this Priscilla/Marilyn beckons me into an estate wagon, and I think, clearly precisely, I must get in, this is a very safe car, it is famous for being safe, and my mind’s eye studies the manufacturer’s name on the back of the hatch, and it reads VULVA. Seriously — for in my dream I see nothing odd about this, reading it as another famous Swedish brand name. Or another dream, in which I am teetering at the top of a skyscraper with Geetha and Rekha trying to hold on to me, they are afraid and crying and I am shouting out to them to hold on, but somehow it is I who leans too far off the edge and then I am falling from a great height, falling falling falling with my wife’s and daughter’s wailing in my ears, and I always wake up before I hit the ground. Of course I can never go back to sleep.

  I haven’t read much Freud, but it doesn’t take a shrink to interpret this kind of dream. And it gets worse. Once I awake from another dream of falling, except this time I have splashed into a great briny foaming brown sea, and as I rise to the surface, choking and spluttering, I feel the unmistakable taste of Coca-Cola in my nose and mouth. I plunge again, flailing, and choke on the liquid. I am drowning in a sea of Coke! When I surface again I see, just out of my reach, my daughter on a raft, absurdly shaped like an Ambassador car. She is dressed in white, the color of mourning, and her limpid eyes are sadly downcast, seemingly unaware of me drowning just beyond her reach. In my dream I call out to her but find myself sinking again, knowing this plunge is the third and final descent into the depths, that as I go under my lungs will be full of that brown-black liquid and my voice will be stilled. I swear I awake with the taste of Coca-Cola on my tongue.

  And Priscilla, I wonder what she dreams. She always says she can never remember a single dream; she awakes refreshed from her slumber, her mind blissfully cleansed of the night’s wanderings. I envy her unencumbered sleep, the happy transience of her memory.

  I have acquired her memories now, and they torment me. I think of her previous lovers, the basketball jock first, and imagine his dark hand on her pale thigh, much like mine, and something dies a little in me. I ask her, with studied casualness, about her old boyfriends, and she replies quite unselfconsciously, in as much detail as I want. And I always want more than is good for me. Sometimes I stop myself in time, preventing my mind from acquiring a detail that I know will come back to haunt me, to diminish my sense of my own worth as her lover. But then the most innocuous details have that power. She itemizes her menagerie at my request, and they tumble out in her recounting like an amatory United Nations — an Argentine, a Finn, a Chinese. Am I, I find myself wondering, merely the latest in a long line of exotics who have shared Priscilla’s bed, the beneficiaries of some missionary urge to bring succor to the underprivileged? But then I remember she has been in WASP arms too, and consider her progression from Boston Brahmin to Tamil Brahmin. Perhaps her predilection is for minorities.

  Of course I know these are unworthy thoughts, and the hot flashes of jealousy always pass, sooner or later, cooled by the refreshing candor of her love for me. I sometimes defuse my discomfort by recalling Wilde: “I like men who have a future and women who have a past.” So Oscar would have liked us, on both counts. At other times the words of the old song, learned as a callow teenager, come back to me: “Yesterday belongs to someone else, today belongs to me.”

  And what about tomorrow? Sometimes we speak of the future as if we have one. As if we have one together. I speculate idly about resigning from the service — are you mad, my mother would certainly ask, to give up the IAS career tens of thousands can only dream about? — to accompany her to her American campus, perhaps to do a doctorate myself, perhaps to write. My mother would disapprove thoroughly of her; my father, were he alive, would disown me. She is innocent of such considerations: she speaks of staying on in India, establishing HELP-US projects wherever I should happen to be posted. I forbear from telling her that the service regulations would almost certainly prohibit an official’s spouse from undertaking any such activity. The conflict of interest… But something always stops me from entering into the practical details. Priscilla is an escape from reality; her magic cannot survive too much realism.

  And so I go along as she spins these
glorious schemes in the gossamer of her illusions….

  from transcript of Randy Diggs interview

  with Professor Mohammed Sarwar

  October 12, 1989

  You should know what Maulana Azad said when he became president of the Indian National Congress at Ramgarh in 1940. I’d give you a copy of the speech, Mr. Diggs, but I don’t have access to a photocopier in Zalilgarh. It doesn’t matter; I know the words by heart. There is no greater testament of the faith of a religious Muslim in a united India.

  The Maulana was a religious scholar, born in Mecca, educated in the Koran and the Hadith, fluent in Persian, Arabic, and Urdu, an exemplar of Muslim learning and culture in India. Yet he confessed that “every fiber of my being revolted” against the thought of dividing India on communal lines. “I could not conceive it possible for a Musulman to tolerate this,” he declared, “unless he has rooted out the spirit of Islam from every corner of his being.” Remember that his principal rival for the allegiance of India’s Muslims was Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, an Oxbridge-educated Lincoln’s Inn lawyer who wore Savile Row suits, enjoyed his Scotch and cigars, ate pork, barely spoke Urdu, and married a non-Muslim. There was no question in the Maulana’s mind as to who was the better Muslim; yet Jinnah claimed to speak for India’s Muslims and to assert their claims to being a separate nation, while the Maulana worked in the secular (Jinnah said Hindu-dominated) Indian National Congress to remind his fellow Muslims where their homeland really was.