Riot

by Shashi Tharoor

  September 19, 1989

  Dearest Cin, what am I to do? It’s over now, he’s written me this awful letter, and I’ve been crying all night. I suppose Mom was right when she said that I see things in people that they don’t see in themselves. I saw so much in Lucky — a good man in a bad marriage, someone capable of love who had no opportunity to love until I came along, a man who hadn’t seen his own unhappiness fully until he met me. With me I think he realized for the first time that he hadn’t truly known love in his life and that he could find happiness loving and being loved. Happiness, of course, at a price. A price that in the end he was not prepared — with his upbringing, his sense of his responsibilities, his inability to escape from Indian society — to pay.

  On one level I feel bitterly angry with him. I feel used. And I can’t believe a man of his intelligence would be so blind and conventional. And cowardly. In my tears last night, there were moments of deep rage at the way he dumped me. “You two-faced jerk!” I screamed at the letter he’d written me.

  And yet, I can’t bring myself to hate him, Cin. There’s a part of me that wants to, but I can’t, I still love him so much. I’m in terrible pain, but I don’t want to regret a minute of the seven months we had together. “Had together” — I don’t even know if I can say that of a relationship where we were only together two evenings a week, except for those occasional dinners at his home where I was beginning to feel more and more uncomfortable. But yes, “together.” Because I loved being with him, Cindy. I saw in him all the things I wanted in a man — not just his looks or his voice, but his earnestness about the world, his desire to make a difference, his easy confidence in his own authority, and his command, quite simply, of India. The India I’d come back to rediscover as an adult, the India that had changed my life so profoundly a decade ago. Loving Lakshman filled every pore of my being; it gave me a sense of attachment, not just to a man, but to this land. Does this sound hokey to you, Cin? I hope not, because I can’t explain it any better.

  What hurts is that it must have meant so much less to him. I suppose at the beginning he just thought of me as an easy lay. Our relationship must just have been a sexual adventure for him those first few weeks. I know he came to love me afterwards, but I realize now that I’m not someone he would have started off falling in love with. He was attracted to me, sure, but he began it all, that first evening at the Kotli, as just an affair. Through sex he found love, and in love he found confusion, uncertainty, fear. Whereas I loved him from almost the first moment and felt nothing but certainty about him. The sex was just a means of expressing my love, a way of giving myself to the man I loved. I’m not sure that he ever understood the difference.

  He used to quote Wilde about hypocrisy being just a way of multiplying your personalities. That was part of Lucky’s problem — he had multiple personalities, and they didn’t match. The district administrator, the passionate lover, the traditional husband and father, the closet writer who fantasized about a masterpiece he could write one day on an American campus — all of those were him. I couldn’t hold on to all of them at the same time. And so I lost him.

  But then I borrowed a copy of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” from him, and I came across the actual quote. And guess what, Wilde wasn’t talking about hypocrisy at all, you know, but about insincerity! Was Lucky trying to warn me that his love was insincere? I think about these things and it drives me crazy!

  It’s strange, isn’t it, Cin? Ever since Darryl it’s been I who walked away from relationships, I who ended every one of them. Poor Winston could never understand why I wouldn’t marry him. Nor could my mother. Instead I fell for someone completely unsuitable by Mom’s standards — married, foreign, tied to another life — and I’ve allowed him to dump me. Mom would probably blame it on India. You were overwhelmed by it all, dear, she’d say, this big, hot, foreign, oppressive, unfamiliar place, and you attached yourself to this man as a port in the storm. Once you come home you’ll realize he didn’t really mean that much to you. You’ll get over it.

  And that’s why I’ve never been able to tell Mom about Lucky. She’d never understand.

  Do you remember, Cin, when we were little and you used to tease me about the amount of tender loving care I gave my Barbie doll? How I’d sit with my little nylon brush and gently smooth down her golden mane, over and over again? “Give it a rest, Prissy,” you’d say. “She’s a doll. She can’t tell whether you’ve brushed her hair three times or two.” And I’d be shocked. “But I’m all she’s got!” I’d reply. “If I don’t do it for her, who will?” Which of course was totally beside the point you were making. But that’s the way I was! And I wonder if I wasn’t doing the same thing with Lakshman — stroking him over and over again, oblivious to his reaction? Telling myself I was all he’d got — the only true love he’d ever know? Was I projecting onto him the needs I imagined he must have? Oh Cindy, have I been a fool?

  But I have to see him once more. There’s something I’ve got to tell him. And I have to look into his eyes when I say it. Only then will I know if he really ever loved me.

  Kadambari to Shankar Das

  September 20, 1989

  Sir, I am so scared, I am so upset, I don’t know what to do, sir. Yes, sir, I will calm down, sir, I just wanted to tell you that that man Ali, sir, the chauffeur, Fatima Bi’s husband, he caught me in the street, sir, when I was going to visit one of our IUD cases, and he threatened me, sir. He said he would cut off my — cut off my breasts, sir, because I had told his wife to get an abortion. Sir, I was so scared, I told him it wasn’t me, sir, it was the American girl, it was all her idea, and she would be leaving the country soon, so please leave me alone. And he said, sir, you tell that American whore that if I ever lay my hands on her, she won’t be catching that plane to America. Sir, I don’t know what to do, if I tell her she will just be frightened, but he seems to mean it, sir. What should I do?

  Yes, sir, of course, sir. You are right, sir. He is a government driver, he has a job and a family, he will never do such a thing, it is all just talk. Yes, sir, you are right, sir. I will try to forget about it, sir. But sir, please do not ask me to visit those Muslim bastis for a while. Please, sir, let me have another caseload until I am sure he has calmed down. Thank you, sir. You are my mother and my father, sir. Thank you very, very much, sir… .

  from Katharine Hart’s diary

  October 13, 1989

  Kadambari, who seems to have been assigned by Mr. Das as our guide to the town, took me today to the women’s ward of the Zalilgarh hospital. It was just as well that Rudyard couldn’t come — he was told it would not be appropriate — because I don’t think he could have handled what I saw.

  The hospital is a large, run-down building, dating from somewhere after the turn of the century, though buildings age so rapidly in this country that it could be a lot more recent than that. Decay and rot are everywhere — the bits of chipped-off masonry visible as you enter, the peeling yellow paint on the walls, the rusty carts on which dirty orderlies in stained uniforms wheel their antiquated supplies, the pervasive odor of waste matter and ammonia. A public hospital in small-town India is a far cry from the luxury hospital in Delhi in which Lance had his appendix removed; the only thing the two places have in common appears to be the profusion of people — people waiting to be seen, people bustling about the corridors, people standing around aimlessly, people lining up outside the dispensary and the lab. But they’re a different class of people. I knew before I stepped into the hospital that this was where the really poor came; the somewhat better-off would frequent one of the two private “nursing homes” that have sprung up in the town, while the rich would simply go to Delhi. But even then I was not prepared for the horror of the women’s ward.

  We entered it from a dank corridor, dimly lit by a flickering neon tubelight. The ward was essentially a single long room, and I was drawn short by the sight as soon as I stepped in. The narrow metal cots were all occupied, and there were women on the
floor as well, some on thin beddings, some stretched out on their own faded cotton saris. Overflowing refuse-bins spilled onto the floor, where bloodstained rags already lay, so that I had to pick my way over garbage while avoiding stepping on bodies, and vice versa. It was hot, and there was no fan; perspiration dripped down my arms, and the stale smell of sweat from dozens of bodies mingled with the chemicals in the air to make me gag. Many women moaned in pain; only a few seemed to have IV’s on their arms, dripping morphine into their veins. Some stared emptily at the ceiling, where darting lizards and geckos provided the only distraction.

  I was there because Mr. Das thought I would be interested to see some of the kinds of women Priscilla was trying to help: women who had had difficult childbirths, women whose ill health did not permit them to bear or look after more children, women recovering from botched self-induced abortions, the whole female chamber of horrors in this overcrowded and desperately poor country. But after a few perfunctory minutes with such women, exhausted figures who responded listlessly to my inarticulate questions, I moved numbly on. Kadambari wanted me to meet someone else altogether, someone whom my daughter had had nothing to do with.

  She lay wrapped like some grotesque mummy on a cot in the darkest corner of the room, moaning involuntarily with every second breath. “Sundari,” she said briefly. “My sister. She has burns over seventy-five percent of her body. She is not yet nineteen years old.”

  Sundari opened pain-wracked eyes when she heard her name, and smiled weakly to acknowledge her visitors. “Sundari, you know, means beautiful,” Kadambari said. “She is very beautiful, my sister.” And indeed, what I could see of her face seemed quite unlike Kadambari’s, with a delicately lovely nose and lips, but from under the swathed bandage, I caught a glimpse of the warped dry burned skin of her neck.

  “Tell her your story, Sundari,” Kadambari said, her voice ungentle, commanding.

  “No, it’s all right, don’t bother her,” I protested, but Kadambari was insistent. Sundari looked at me without moving her face, her eyes raking me with a regard that combined defeat with yearning, as if she wished I could reach out to her and pull her out of the quicksand into which she was sinking.

  “I got married last year,” she said in a feeble voice, her bluish lips barely moving. “Kadambari helped arrange it. My father had to take a loan to pay for the wedding. He gave the boy a Bajaj scooter. Rupesh. That is his name. He is — he had a job, as a peon in an office. A few months after the wedding, he lost his job.

  “We were living with Rupesh’s parents. His father is old and sick. His mother ran the house. I had to do whatever she told me to do. Help her cook the food, chop the vegetables, clean the kitchen, empty the garbage. And more. Massage the old man’s feet. Help clean him. He could not even get up to go the bathroom. It was disgusting.

  “I had never done some of these things before. Rupesh seemed to like me. He kept telling me at night how beautiful I was. So I asked him, couldn’t we go away? Live by ourselves somewhere. He was shocked. He said his duty was to his parents and so was mine, as his wife. His mother overheard us and slapped me. I looked to Rupesh to protect me but he just turned his back and let her slap me again. From that day I realized I was alone in that house.

  “Every day the beatings got worse. Nothing I did around the house was good enough for my mother-in-law. She was screaming at me all the time. If the floor wasn’t clean, she beat me. If anything was unsatisfactory about the food, the plates, the way the bed was made, it was my fault. If I didn’t run to my father-in-law every time we heard him hawking and spitting in the next room, I would be called a lazy and ungrateful witch and beaten again. Rupesh learned to turn his eyes away from me. He told me I had to obey his mother at all times.

  “When he lost his job they treated me even worse. They said I had brought bad luck upon my husband and his family. They said I was born under an evil star, and that my parents had bribed the jyotishi to alter my horoscope so that it seemed to match Rupesh’s. Then they started complaining about my dowry. How little it was, how it was less than my father had promised when the marriage was arranged. None of this was true, but if I said so they screamed at me for talking back to them and beat me more.”

  I looked around for some water to give the poor girl, whose dry lips barely moved as she spoke, but I could see none. She struggled on. “I was miserable, crying all the time, unable to sleep. When Rupesh came to me at night he no longer said I was beautiful. He did not stroke my cheek as he used to. He took me by force, very roughly and very quickly, and turned away.

  “One day I threw up in the morning and was beaten for that too. But in a day or two it became clear I was not sick, but pregnant. For a few days the beatings stopped. Rupesh’s mother even began talking of the son her son was going to have. Then a new nightmare began.

  “Rupesh’s mother had a relative who worked in one of those new clinics that do amniocentesis. He slipped me in without my in-laws having to pay anything. The doctor inserted a big needle into me. It hurt a lot. A few days later Rupesh came to the house looking as if he had been whipped. My sample had tested positive. The baby was going to be a girl.

  “The beatings started again. My pregnancy was no longer an acceptable excuse not to do the chores they wanted me to. Rupesh looked more and more woebegone by the day. And his mother started saying, ‘What use is this woman who does no work around the house and cannot even produce a son?’

  “One day last week I was working in the kitchen rolling the dough for chapatis which my mother-in-law was making at the stove. I remember Rupesh coming in with a can of kerosene for the stove, and my mother-in-law picking up a box of matches. I turned back to my dough when I felt a splash on my sari. The next thing I knew my whole body was on fire. I screamed and ran out of the kitchen and out the front door. People came running. If I had run the other way, into the house, I wouldn’t be here today.”

  Her dry lips parted in a sad and bitter grimace. “Perhaps that would have been better for me than — than this.” Her eyes, the only mobile part of her face, took in the room, the bed, the other patients, Kadambari, and me. “Why did my neighbors bother to save my life? What did they save me for?”

  I turned to Kadambari. “And Rupesh and his mother? Have they been arrested? What are the police doing about this?”

  “They say it was a kitchen accident,” Kadambari replied. “There are a few dozen ‘kitchen accidents’ like this every year in Zalilgarh. What can the police prove? It is her word against theirs.”

  I looked sadly at the young girl, knowing she will be disfigured for life, and worse, that she will either have to go back to live a pariah’s existence in the very family that tried to kill her, or return to her own parents, who will feel the disgrace of her broken marriage and face a mountain of unpaid debts from the wedding and the hospitalization of their daughter.

  “The baby?” I asked. Sundari closed her eyes; it was the only way she could avert her gaze.

  “She miscarried, the day after the burning,” Kadambari said. Kadambari spoke into my silence. “She was a good student and wanted to go to college,” Kadambari said. “But my parents felt she had to marry before she became too old to find a good husband.”

  “A good husband,” Sundari whispered from the bed.

  When we left the ward Kadambari was strangely more communicative than she has been so far. “You see, Mrs. Hart,” she observed, “this is the real issue for women in India. Not population control, but violence against women. In our own homes. What good are all our efforts as long as men have the power to do this to us? Your daughter never understood that.”

  I wheeled on her then. “You’re wrong, miss,” I said in my most schoolteacherly manner. “Priscilla did understand. Her whole approach was based on her belief that women need to resist their own subjugation. That when they are empowered, they will no longer have more babies than they can look after. She wrote that to me very clearly. I am surprised you could have worked so closely with her and
not understood what my daughter believed in.”

  Kadambari looked unabashed, even defiant. “A lot of people,” she said slowly and softly, “did not understand what your daughter believed in.”

  She would not explain what she meant, and the rest of our journey back to the guest house passed in a strained silence. When we arrived I thanked her for having introduced me to her sister. Rudyard emerged at that point and insisted she stay for a cup of tea. He always had a tin ear for my signals. In the circumstances, I could scarcely excuse myself. So I sat down in one of the rattan chairs in the guest house’s verandah, and while the tea was being made, I told him what had happened.

  “God, that’s terrible,” he said. Then he turned to Kadambari. “Tell me, this sister of yours. Will she get well?”

  “The burns will take a long time to heal,” Kadambari replied, “but the doctors say she will live.”

  “She won’t have much of a life, Rudyard,” I began. “Her—”

  “I understand all that,” he interrupted me. “My question to you, Miss Kadambari, is: Would she be able to go to college?”

  “My parents can’t afford to send her to college,” Kadambari said. “They live on what I earn at the HELP project.”

  “That wasn’t my question,” Rudyard said with that note of impatience that executives so often mistake for efficiency “If she could go, would she want to? Would she get in? Would she be able to cope?”

  “She was the top student in her high school class,” Kadambari said.

  “Great,” Rudyard said. “Now here’s what we’ll do. I’m going to sign over a thousand dollars worth of traveler’s checks to you tomorrow. That should be more than enough to cover your family’s expenses while she’s in hospital. And for every year that she’s in college, I’ll set aside money for her tuition fees, books, and living expenses.”

  Kadambari seemed stunned, but even she could not have been as stunned as I felt. This was not a gesture I would have thought Rudyard capable of.