Riot
Page 25
from Lakshman’s journal
October 4, 1989
I leaf through her scrapbook, and my grief blurs the lines on each page. I try not to imagine her death, but I cannot help myself.
The Kotli, at dusk, as the trees make a sieve of the fading light, and the air is still. She goes to our usual place, for the last time. Behind her, Zalilgarh is burning, but she is oblivious of it, forgetting the world in her desire to see me. Her body is full of sentences waiting to be spoken, of moments yet unlived, soft and heavy as if awakening from a sleep of lingering dreams. She waits, as the darkness gathers around her like a noose.
There is a scurry on the stairs, a stab of fear in her heart. Night falls on her like a knife.
Her assailant — assailants? — would not have had an easy time killing her. She would have fought furiously. She had one more reason to want to live.
I know now why it was so important for her to see me one last time. She had something to tell me, something that she thought might yet change my mind.
One more detail Gurinder had to suppress in the postmortem.
She was carrying my child.
continued from page 5
tempers dangerously.
“There was nothing we could do to stem the raging flood of communal hatred,” admitted V. Lakshman, 33, the district magistrate, or chief administrator, of the town.
As the seemingly endless procession wound its way slowly through the narrow lanes, Lakshman and his superintendent of police, a convivial Sikh named Gurinder Singh, patrolled the throng with their officers, hoping to head off violence before it erupted. The two men described a scene of stamping feet and shouted slogans, with processionists spewing vitriol and flashing blades in the hot sun. Twice the marchers came close to attacking the town’s main mosque, and twice they were headed off. Just when it seemed that the march would proceed without serious incident, a bomb attack occurred on the procession. Shooting followed, the crowd ran amok, and Zalilgarh soon had a full-scale riot on its hands.
Eight people were killed in the disturbances, forty-seven injured, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of property damaged. By the standards of some of the riots that have been sweeping northern India in the wake of the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, Zalilgarh’s was a modest affair. What made it unusually tragic was that it took an American life, one that was neither Hindu nor Muslim: Priscilla Hart’s.
Ms. Hart had friends in both communities, and they are united in expressing shock and grief at her killing. “She was so special,” said Miss Kadambari (who uses only one name), an extension worker at the project who worked closely with Miss Hart. “No one could have wanted to harm her.” Her project director, Mr. Shankar Das, recalled her as a “sweet person” who “made friends very easily.” No one in Zalilgarh could explain why anyone would want to kill Priscilla Hart.
“In riots, all sorts of things happen,” said Gurinder Singh, the policeman. “People strike first and ask questions later.”
For Priscilla’s parents, Rudyard and Katharine Hart, who traveled to Zalilgarh to understand the reasons for their daughter’s death, the questions will never cease. The Zalilgarh police have arrested a number of Muslim rioters, some of whom they suspect of involvement in Ms. Hart’s death, but they have no clues and no confession. As is often the case in riot-related killings, the real murderers of Priscilla Hart may never be apprehended.
“It is hard to escape the conclusion,” a U.S. embassy spokesman said, “that she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Mr. Lakshman, however, questions whether there is such a thing as the wrong place, or the wrong time. “We are where we are at the only time we have,” he said. “Perhaps it’s where we’re meant to be.”
AFTERWORD
On December 6, 1992, a howling, chanting mob of Hindu fanatics, armed with hammers and pickaxes, demolished the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, vowing to construct the Ram Janmabhoomi temple in its place. In the riots that followed across the country, thousands of lives, both Hindu and Muslim, were lost. These events marked the worst outburst of communal violence in India since Partition.
The consecrated bricks gathered in the Ram Sila Poojan program of 1989 are still gathering dust. Though, at this writing, the Hindutva-inclined Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is in power at the head of a coalition government in New Delhi and also runs the state government of Uttar Pradesh, the temple has not yet been built.
Various affiliates of the Sangh Parivar family of Hindu organizations have announced plans to proceed with the construction of a Ram temple on the site, in defiance of court orders. At the great Maha Kumbha Mela pilgrimage on the banks of the sacred river Ganga in Varanasi in January 2001, they displayed an impressive model of the temple they intend to build, and declared that they would commence construction on March 12, 2002, whether or not the government granted its consent. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, however, has declared that the matter can only be resolved in one of two ways: through the judicial process, or in a negotiated agreement between Hindus and Muslims. Neither method has made much headway in the last five decades.
We live, the late Octavio Paz once wrote, between oblivion and memory. Memory and oblivion: how one leads to the other, and back again, has been the concern of much of my fiction. History, the old saying goes, is not a web woven with innocent hands.
May 2001
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe a special debt of gratitude to my dear friend Harsh Mander, IAS, on whose hitherto unpublished account of a riot in Khargone, Madhya Pradesh, I have based some of the details of the Zalilgarh episode. As this book goes to press, I have learned that the story of the Khargone riot is being published in 2001 by Penguin India as part of a debut collection by Harsh Mander, Unheard Voices: Stories of Forgotten People, which I warmly commend. With Harsh’s permission I have used many of his basic facts about the management of the riot and, in a few places, his own words, and I remain deeply grateful. Readers should know, however, that no foreigner was killed in Khar-gone; all the key details as they relate to the characters in this novel — and in particular all the personal relationships, character elements, beliefs, and motivations depicted herein — are, of course, completely fictional.
The research by “Professor Mohammed Sarwar” on Ghazi Miyan is based on the actual work of Professor Shahid Amin of Delhi University, another old friend to whom I am grateful, though every other detail relating to the character, including the views expressed by him, are solely my responsibility. The efforts of “Rudyard Hart” on behalf of Coca-Cola in India were in fact undertaken by Kisan Mehta, for whose kindness, recollections, and insight I offer my thanks.
My friend and publisher in India, David Davidar, and my literary agent in New York, Mary Evans, offered valuable suggestions on the text, which have helped me improve it immeasurably. Jeannette and Dick Seaver at Arcade Publishing, and the diligent Ann Marlowe, have been terrific in their support for Riot and its author. My sisters, Shobha Srinivasan and Smita Menon, read the manuscript with devotion and insight; they have each left their mark on the characters and events of this novel in more ways than one. To them all I offer my thanks, and my love.
For help in various ways as this book was brought to completion, I am also grateful to Rosemary Colaco, Sujata Mehta, and Vikas Sharma. My thanks, too, to Sreenath Sreenivasan for creating a Web site for me and to Ambassador A. K. Damodaran, for a verse about John Knox.
This novel was completed during a difficult time in my life, when it would have been impossible without the maturity, large-heartedness and strength revealed by my sons, Ishaan and Kanishk. To them, for being themselves, I shall always be eternally grateful.
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