Riot

by Shashi Tharoor

  note from Priscilla Hart to Lakshman

  August 21, 1989

  I’ve read the poem you asked Mitha Mohammed to bring to me at the office. I don’t know why you sent it to me, except to make me see our relationship in a different light. Maybe you too need to see things differently, Lucky.

  You haven’t taken a risk in this relationship. At all. But I have. It was my risk to take, to fall in love with a married man, and I did, and I take full responsibility for it. I’m sorry about that ink splotch; I’m crying as I write this. But I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I want your love, not your pity.

  Your poem reduced me to a “smiling body” and a “warm embrace.” I thought I was more than that to you, Lucky. When you’re dealing with someone else’s life, you have to be a lot more careful with your words than that.

  I love you with all my heart and soul, but I don’t want a relationship with a man who doesn’t feel the same way as I do. I want a man who loves me, and a relationship where I can rely on the fact that he loves me. Not my body, not my embrace, ME.

  You write of your daughter needing you to be there. I need you to be there for me, too, Lucky. But you don’t see that, do you?

  You’re so good at understanding everyone else’s claims on you — your family’s, your daughter’s, your job’s. Do I have no claims on you, Lucky? Am I just a convenient outlet for your passion, your escape from humdrum reality? I know where I am in this relationship. You don’t really know where you are, do you?

  On Saturday night, I felt such pain for you, looking at your sad and confused face. I believe in us completely, but I don’t know what to do. I don’t want anything from you that you don’t want to give me. And I can’t show my needs to you if you don’t know how to respond, or if you believe you can’t respond because of your “prior creditor.”

  I know, as a woman, that I’ve got to do better than this. Your poem frightened me, Lucky. After six months of this relationship I should know where I am, and what I can expect from you. I love you very deeply, but I’m in pain too, Lucky. I’ll be at the Kotli tomorrow as I’ve always been, every Tuesday and Saturday, available at your convenience when your wife is away at the temple. But I’m no longer sure this is good enough for me, Lucky. When we meet, I’ll need some definite answers from you.

  Gurinder to Lakshman

  Monday morning, August 21, 1989

  Hey, lover-boy, since you keep going on and on about the pleasures of fucking sexual love — pardon my Sanskrit — do you know what I did last weekend? For your sake? I read the fucking Kama Sutra, that’s what. Indian civilization’s greatest tribute to the pleasures of sexual congress. In the classic translation by Sir Richard Burton and F. F. fucking Arbuthnot, no less. I never thought sex could be made so boring, yaar! Page after page of clinical detail — the nine types of sexual union, the sixty-four arts, the definitions of the different types of marks a woman can make with her bloody nails, the classifications of the female yoni as marelike or elephantine. How does it bugger-all matter, man, whether a woman’s embrace is like “the twining of a creeper” or “the climbing of a tree”? And have you ever heard anything more pissing ridiculous than Vatsyayana’s categories of the sounds women make when being stropped — Phut, Phat, Sut, Plat? Plat, I ask you! Anyway, the point I was going to make is, okay, I grant you that sexual love is a fine thing, and sexual pleasure may even be the finest of pleasures afforded to man, who am I to argue? But its greatest advocate, this third-century guru of sex, the immortal Vatsyayana, even he says, and I quote, “A girl who has already been joined with others, that is, one who is no longer a maiden, should never be loved, for it would be reproachable to do such a thing.” Look it up if you don’t believe me — part 2, chapter 1. Fucking reproachable, you understand?

  And that’s why I reproach you, Lucky I’ve always admired you, yaar. Admired you like hell. You’ve done great work in this town. You’re one guy who puts in all the hours at work you need to even if your bloody wife is waiting for you to go out to a party. You’re a man who stands up for principle, against politicians, contractors, bosses, staff. You believe in the job you’re doing and you do it honestly and effectively and well. Okay, so you’ve found something you didn’t have before — so what? Enjoy it while you have it, and then move on, man! The way you move from posting to posting. You don’t turn your life upside down for sex, man. Or even sexual love, if that’s what you think it is. You don’t give up everything you’ve spent your life living for because your cock tells you it’s having a great time.

  Don’t just take it from me, Lucky. Take it from the bloody Kama Sutra.

  letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani

  August 22, 1989

  Cin, dear Cin, how I wish you were here in Zalilgarh! I don’t know how I can cope with all that’s going on without you to talk to, to give me a hug and tell me I’m going to be all right. I’m seeing Lucky tonight and I’m scared it’s all going to go wrong, that I’ve asked him for something he’s not going to be able to give me. And I don’t want to lose him, Cin. He’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a man — doesn’t that sound ridiculous? But it’s true, and I do love him, Cin, I love him so much it hurts. And I don’t know if he loves me enough to risk everything he knows for a life with me.…

  And to add to everything, as if I don’t have enough to deal with, you’ll never believe what happened this morning. A little fellow who I know because he delivers tea and takes messages to and from Lucky’s office, a boy known to everyone as Sweet Mohammed, came to the Center today. Turns out he’s a neighbor or nephew or something of the Muslim woman I’ve told you about, Fatima Bi, remember? The one with the seven kids. Anyway, they all live on top of each other in the Muslim basti, and he said Fatima Bi had called him and given him an important message for me — she wanted to see me urgently. This from the same woman who’d been beaten up by her husband and told never to contact the Center again! Kadambari, the extension worker, was very nervous about venturing there again (she’s Hindu, by the way, which doesn’t help in the present charged circumstances, and of course I stick out like a sore thumb wherever I go, so there was no question of going to see Fatima Bi unnoticed). Kadambari was all for saying we couldn’t do anything, but that made me mad. “This is what we’re supposed to be here for,” I said, rather shrilly I’m afraid. “If this woman has the courage to ask us to help, despite the terrible risks she’s running, how can we let her down? We have to go!” So we went, and guess what? Poor Fatima Bi, mother of seven, which is about six more than she can handle, had just discovered she’s pregnant again. For the eighth blessed time.

  She was beside herself, but she had found a certain steely determination. She asked us what she could do. Kadambari and I explained her options, and told her about the abortion services at the government hospital. “You mean, remove the child? Destroy it?” She flinched slightly as she asked, and when we answered yes, she closed her eyes tightly for a minute. But when she opened them again it was to ask a practical question: Did she need her husband’s consent to go to the hospital for an abortion?

  No, we told her. She was a free and responsible adult. Under the law, it was her body, and her decision. She didn’t need anyone’s permission.

  Then, she said, she was going to do it.

  She looked at us, and it was a new woman I saw, Cin. Not the scared and beaten woman of the previous encounters. Her face was calm. This worm had turned.

  Could we help, she asked. Kadambari was about to answer no, that all we could do was to provide the address and telephone number of the abortion clinic, but I interrupted. I knew Fatima’d never be able to get to a telephone, let alone go to the clinic in person to set things up. “We’ll make the appointment for you,” I said. It was stretching our mandate a bit, but I felt that Fatima Bi had gone so far toward taking control of her own body, her own life, that we needed to give her just that little extra bit of support.

  Kadambari didn’t like it one bit. The woman’
s got no real commitment to the cause; for her it’s just a job. She looked at me, with her inscrutably dark and sallow face, the black hair pulled tightly back from her forehead, and I knew she thought I was a foreign busybody interfering in something that was none of my business, making things more difficult for her. But I was having none of it. “You’re an extension worker,” I reminded her. “It’s time to extend yourself and work.” I don’t think she’ll ever forgive me for that.

  Of course I asked Fatima if she wasn’t afraid of her husband’s reaction to our visit. Surely he might hear from the neighbors, from someone in this promiscuously crowded basti, that we’d come calling? And when she finally went to the clinic, might he not hear of it? I didn’t want Fatima to go ahead without having thought it all through.

  It turned out that her husband, Ali, had gone out of town for three days. By the time he was back, she wanted it to be over.

  “And then?” I asked. “Won’t he be angry?”

  “He’ll be angry,” Fatima replied, her voice flat in the noontime stillness. “But by then it’ll be too late. It won’t matter anymore.”

  Lakshman and Priscilla

  August 22, 1989

  — I love you.

  [Silence.]

  — I said I love you.

  — I heard you.

  — Is that all you have to say?

  — What does it mean?

  — What do you mean, what does it mean?

  — I know what I mean when I say I love you. I don’t say it often. I don’t say it lightly. What does it mean when you say it?

  — It means I love you. I love the sound of your voice. I love the way your hair tumbles down your face. I love the way you move, the way you arrange your limbs when you sit, or lie, or stand. I love your habit of writing poetry and hiding it away in your scrapbook. I love making love to you. I love the way your face looks when I am moving inside you. I love the sounds you make on our little mat in this magical room. I love being loved by you.

  — I know you love me. I just don’t know how much.

  — I love you! Isn’t that enough? I don’t think it’s possible to love anyone more than I love you.

  — Those are just words. Words are just words until you act on them.

  — I am acting on them. I’m with you, aren’t I?

  — Yes, but that’s for now. You’ll be gone in an hour, more or less. Back to your wife, your daughter. To a home you don’t share with me.

  — You know what my situation is. I have never misled you.

  — I know your situation. But that doesn’t make it any easier.

  — I know it’s not easy for you. It’s not easy for me.

  — It’s easy enough. A woman who’s available at your convenience, two evenings a week. You don’t have to give up anything. Your work, your social life, your family, your official commitments. You have it all. Including me.

  — You make it sound so simple. As if there were no effort, no commitment involved in carving out the you-shaped space in my life, a space that has grown and spread through every part of my being. I didn’t have room for you in my life, Priscilla. I didn’t need you in my life. I had trained myself to live without love. I told you when we first became involved: This is crazy. For you. For me. Do you remember my words, the second time we met at the Kotli, when you sent me that note and I came here? I said, “I’m overworked, overweight, and married.” And you said, I don’t care.

  — I still don’t care.

  — But you do. You do care. And you’ve reminded me of it again today.

  — How can I not remind you of it? I live with it every day With knowing that the man I love has no room for me in his day, unless it happens to be a Tuesday or Saturday. That he will leave an evening with me for a dinner with his wife. That if he’s with me, it’s for an hour, at most two, and then he’ll be off, leaving me to hug my own loneliness.

  — Wouldn’t you have been lonelier without me? Look, I know how you feel. I live with my own guilt.

  — I know you do. But what have you had to give up for me?

  — My peace of mind.

  — That comes with the territory. If you want peace of mind, don’t fall in love.

  — I didn’t intend to fall in love. When I try and juggle the hundred things in my life, when I feel the guilt of neglecting my daughter, of letting my work pile up in my in-tray, of putting a couple of hours with you ahead of going to the temple with my family, of fearing I will be missed precisely when I cannot explain my absence, I feel that falling in love was the most irresponsible thing I could possibly have done.

  — What a curious word to use about love. Irresponsible! So you’re suffering guilt about being irresponsible. That doesn’t sound much like sacrifice. Other men would give up worlds to have the woman they love. You’ve given up nothing.

  — Why must it be necessary to have given up something?

  [Silence.]

  — Anyway, I have. I’ve given up my certitudes.

  — Your certitudes.

  — I have. I’ve given up the carefully circumscribed order of my life, with its assumptions, its compromises, its predictabilities. I’ve given up the sense a Brahmin strives all his life to attain, the sense of being anchored to the world. Loving you, I’m adrift. Everything around me is turbulence. I do not know whether I’ll sail to a new and sunny paradise with you or crash foundering on the rocks. To me, at my stage in life, that’s a lot to give up.

  — I’ve given up a few things too. Do you know what it’s like to have a man you can’t speak to when you need him? To feel the ache of needing you and knowing you’re beyond reach? To not be able to acknowledge you in public, not to go out openly together, not to be able to see you across a crowded room and know that we belong together and I’m leaving with you?

  — Do you think I don’t feel the same need? Don’t you think that every fiber of my being is clamoring to shout to the world, “She’s mine, I love her, she loves me”?

  — But you can’t. You’ve got too much to lose.

  — Yes.

  — Or perhaps you just aren’t sure enough of your love.

  — That’s nonsense. You know I love you.

  — There’s a French saying, “There is no love, there are only proofs of love.”

  — You’ve had plenty of proofs of my love.

  — What proof? In our lovemaking? I’ve been made love to just as passionately by men who did not love me.

  — You don’t have to remind me of that.

  — Lucky, you can never prove your love enough. Until you really give up your comfortable other life for me. Until you say to me, “Be mine forever. In the eyes of the world.”

  — You’re mine forever. In my eyes. In my heart. You know that.

  — I don’t know that I do. Sometimes I think I’m just some romantic fantasy for you. You say I’m in your heart. But you have really no idea where that is. Your heart is just a compartment of your mind. I occupy a space in it, walled off from your work, your writing, your family. When you’re with me, you live in that space. I have no reality outside it.

  — That’s simply not fair. I think of you, love you, breathe you, wherever I am. You accompany me in my heart to meetings, to official dinners, to encounters with ministers. You join arguments you haven’t even heard. I imagine you sitting next to me at places you’ve never been to. You’re not just in some compartment of my mind. You permeate my life.

  — As I told you. I’m a fantasy.

  — I promise you you’re not.

  — You’ve promised me nothing, Lucky. You expect my love, unconditionally, but you give me nothing in exchange.

  — Nothing?

  — I didn’t mean that. You give me your affection, you give me your poems, you give me little gifts, you give me dinners, you help me here in all sorts of ways. But you haven’t given me the assurance of a future. Sometimes you talk about us being together in America, in India, and it is fantasy, that’s all it is, except that I’v
e been slow in catching on.

  — That’s not fair. I’ve meant it every time we’ve talked about the future. I’ve contemplated turning my life upside down. I’ve agonized over the pain and disruption this would cause, to my family, my daughter, my work, my place in the world. But I’ve also told myself that all this would be worthwhile because you love me and I love you and I would have a new chance of “being beloved in the world” — something I had felt I would never experience in my life. And then, I think of my daughter, the most vulnerable and innocent victim of my future happiness, and I can’t go on.

  — You can’t go on. And you keep saying you love me.

  — Of course I love you. I’ll love you as long as I live.

  — But you won’t give me any assurances we’ll be together.

  — I don’t want to lie to you. I want only to give you a certainty I myself feel. I feel certain of my love. I don’t feel certain that I can risk destroying my daughter to fulfil my love. Don’t you see?

  — Aren’t you afraid you could lose me?

  — More afraid of it than of anything else, except losing my daughter.

  — But you don’t have to lose either of us. Your daughter’ll always be your daughter, Lucky. And you don’t have to lose me. You could have me so easily. Just by committing yourself, clearly, now.

  — I can’t. Not now.

  — I understand you’re scared. About your daughter.

  — I am scared. But not only about my daughter. About you too.

  — About me? Why?

  — Look, this is difficult to say without hurting you, and I don’t intend to hurt you.

  — Go on.

  — It’s not easy. You’re from a different world, Priscilla. There are a lot of adjustments I’d have to make to be part of that world as your — husband.

  — It’s not that difficult, Lucky. You’re more Western than you think you are. You’ll adjust pretty easily.