Riot

by Shashi Tharoor

  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 cra
p 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?

  Anyway, Bhindranwale and his thugs were sending out goons to assassinate anyone they didn’t like, especially Sikhs who’d cut their hair or smoked cigarettes or disagreed with the separatists’ frigging agenda. And they were killing newspaper editors who criticized them, government officials, cops, you name it, nobody was safe, and because the killers were in a sacred sanctuary they were beyond the fucking reach of the long arm of the law. A Sikh cop I sort of knew and greatly admired, a deputy inspector general of police, A. S. Atwal, senior man, able, honest, came out of the temple after praying there with his eight-year-old son and was shot in the back. Killed just like that, outside the Golden Temple. Murdered in cold fucking blood, with his boy wailing in uncomprehending grief at his side. I’m a Sikh who’s never taken so much as a bloody trimmer to my nasal hair, I’ve prayed a hundred times at the Golden Temple, but even I could see we couldn’t just let them go on like this, in motherloving impunity. Law and order were going down the pissing tubes in my own bloody home state, man. People generally, Sikh and Hindu, didn’t feel safe anymore; something had to fucking well be done.

  For two years after Atwal’s murder — a time when she would have found no shortage of Sikhs from the police and the army ready to volunteer to go in and arrest the murderers — Mrs. Gandhi did bugger-all. She was too busy playing politics, while Bhindranwale and his sisterloving goons continued on their rampage. Then, in 1984, she finally did something. Indira bloody Gandhi, the only man in the cabinet, sent the army into the Golden Temple. She could have besieged the place, cut off the water supply, prevented food from reaching the terrorists, starved them into surrender. But no, she sent in the frigging army and tried to — what’s the bullshit word they used? — to extirpate the terrorists from there. That was the term of art. Extirpation. Isn’t it wonderful how the English language manages to bureaucratize the savagery out of bloody human violence? And the army did extirpate the terrorists — at a price. Say what you like about that madman Bhindranwale, and I’ve said a few things myself, but he was a proud Sikh and he wasn’t going to cave in at the first whiff of grapeshot. They had to pound the place with artillery. Hundreds of innocent Sikhs, pilgrims, ordinary frigging worshippers, who happened to be in the temple at the time, lost their lives. Bhindranwale fought back like all hell; he and his people went down in the finest bloody Sikh tradition, all guns blazing. And at the end of the army assault the temple stood pockmarked and bloodied, many of its priceless treasures damaged or destroyed, Sikh pride in ruins.

  Yes, man, our pride. It wasn’t just the masonry of the temple that was shattered that day by the assault they called Operation Bluestar. It was unbearable even for those Sikhs who had despised Bhindranwale and all his works. I mean, if some Mafia gang had taken shelter in the Vatican, would anyone have aimed howitzers at Saint Peter’s bloody Cathedral? We felt personally, intimately violated. The same Khushwant Singh who had been so critical of the Khalistanis that he was on the terrorists’ hit list himself, Khushwant Singh returned his civilian honors to the government in protest. If he felt that way, you can imagine what the rest of the buggered Sikh community was going through.

  No, I didn’t immediately think of doing anything similar, resigning or anything. Not at that time. Because I told myself I was on the side of the law enforcers. And the government had made an honest bloody mistake. They had done the right frigging thing in the wrong way — they had ended the Bhindranwale terror, but they had done too much damned damage in the process. It was unjustifiable, but excusable. They had to be forgiven. That was my view, and that of others like me, educated Sikhs, people in the establishment. But feelings were running bloody high in the Sikh community generally, even though the president of India, Giani Zail Singh, was himself a Sikh, and he went on television to explain what the government had had to do and why. The preening bastard had had a hand himself in spawning the frigging Frankenstein’s monster that Bhindranwale became, but that’s another story.

  Anyway, the end of Bhindranwale did bugger-all to end the terrorism — in fact it simply worsened it. A whole new bunch of angry Sikhs were recruited by the motherloving thugs as a result of the Golden Temple tragedy. And a lot of Sikhs vowed revenge on those who had done this, this thing, to their holiest of holies. The prime minister, Mrs. Indira bloody Gandhi, was their primary target.

  Now, I was no great fan of Mrs. G, I can tell you, but I’ll grant her one thing — she didn’t have a bigoted bone in her body. She’d married a Parsi, and her daughters-in-law were an Italian Catholic and a Sikh. So when people told her she should remove the Sikhs from her security detail, she dismissed them with a glare. She had this patrician Kashmiri glare that instantly shriveled your balls, so they didn’t dare suggest it again. “Remove my Sikh security men? Nonsense!” She believed in the pissing professionalism of her protectors, and she thought anyway that she had not acted against Sikhs, just against terrorists, so she had nothing to fear. Unfortunately for her, some Sikhs saw it differently. So one cold morning she was walking briskly in her own back garden, heading for a TV interview with Peter bloody Ustinov, when two of her fucking Sikh bodyguards opened fire on her. A dozen bullets each, I’ve heard it said; some say they emptied their magazines into her, this sixty-seven-year-old woman they had taken an oath to protect. She died instantly, riddled with the exit wounds of their maddened rage. One of her killers was mown down instantly by the other security fuckers, and the other bugger was overpowered, but they’d had their revenge. Sikh honor had been restored.

  Hmph. What do they know of honor who have to kill an old widow to restore it?

  Unfortunately, revenge is a game any number can play. The reprisals started the same pissing day: some innocent Sikh bugger standing in the crowd outside a newspaper office when the news about Mrs. G was announced — some poor idiot who didn’t see any difference between himself and any of his fellow Indians in the same throng, equally shocked by the headlines — well, this poor idiot got beaten up, his shirt ripped, just for being Sikh. He was the first victim of the backlash to the assassination, but he survived with a few bruises. There were similar incidents here and there in scattered parts of Delhi. Spontaneous bursts of anger directed at the most obvious target, the first available bloody Sikh. And initially, that was all. Until the evil bastards took over.

  There were enough of those around, man. The thugs, the odious enforcers, the petty motherlovers of Congress Party politics, Indira’s fucking foot soldiers, the rent-a-mob sloganeers who had shouted, “India is Indira and Indira is India.” They’d been kept under control so far, but this was their chance to have a go. They too had a thirst for revenge. Only Sikh blood could slake it.

  Even I cannot describe to you the full horror of what happened thereafter, Randy. I’ve been trained to deal with riots, but this was mass bloody murder in the nation’s capital. The frigging bastards organized mobs of violent lumpens and set them loose on Delhi’s Sikhs. There was an orgy of slaughter, of arson, of looting. Sikh neighborhoods were destroyed, families butchered, homes torched. Some of the mobs had lists of addresses showing which homes and businesses were owned by Sikhs.
Can you imagine? In other parts of town, any Sikh unlucky enough to be in the wrong fucking street at the wrong fucking time was killed in the most merciless way possible.

  I’ll tell you something I haven’t talked about in years. I had a ten- year-old nephew, my sister’s son, Navjyot. He was returning home from a cricket match with his father. He was a great Gavaskar fan, but Gavaskar was playing in Pakistan at the time. Anyway, what could be more bloody bourgeois, more fucking normal, than a man and his son at a game of cricket on a sunlit October in Delhi? They were driving back home in the family’s Ambassador car, the frigging epitome of solid Indian middle-class respectability, when they ran into a mob looking for Sikh blood to spill.

  The bastards surrounded the car, howling and baying their hate for the assassins of the prime minister. “Khoon ka badla khoon,” they chanted. “Blood in revenge for blood.”

  My brother-in-law quickly rolled up the windows and locked the doors from the inside. What could he do? There were no bloody police in sight: it was as if they had taken a pissing holiday when they were most needed. He had no means to call for help, no CB radio like some of you Yankee buggers have in your cars. I’m sorry; I know I’m shouting. Randy, I try not to think of my little nephew, his mind still full of cricket, suddenly seized with an unutterable panic at a mob of grown motherfucking men trying to hurt him.

  The mob pounded on the door, the roof, the thick glass panes, with their accursed fists.