The Ever After of Ashwin Rao

by Padma Viswanathan

  The best thing about the living arrangement was their children. Vivek and Jana had two, a boy and a girl a bit younger than Kritika’s kids. Their presence attracted others into the house, which throbbed with slamming doors and bell-like shouts, with childish vitality itself.

  Their favourite thing was to ask about Canada, and when they learned about Halloween, they begged for a dress-up party. They chattered all week about costumes; I was to provide sweets. I was thrilled about hosting a children’s party, to a degree that (the IRDS secretaries informed me) compromised my dignity and my public image as a curmudgeon. I planned to dress up as a bad-tempered female vegetable-seller: I had cajoled an old sari out of my mother and fitted a wig with a wooden tray to fill with candy instead of peppers or eggplants. For days already I had shooed youngsters from my door as I transformed my bedroom into a haunted house.

  The night before, I phoned Kritika and spoke to Asha. She and a gaggle of her friends were dressing up as characters from The Wizard of Oz. She would be the Tin Man. Anand got on the phone at his mother’s behest, cool and laconic. I asked him if he was too old to dress up. He didn’t answer, but seemed interested in my party plans.

  I recall ticking off the final arrangements on my commute to work that morning. I had three clients to see that day and a meeting with a subset of my colleagues to discuss a multidisciplinary research initiative on the descendants of Partition. Though still in early stages, we were gaining momentum, and already had the sense the project would be massive.

  When I think back now to the moment I entered the IRDS that morning, my memories are cinematically exaggerated. I could see no one, which was very unusual: the office was typically bustling by the time I got there, not with the senior fellows, who tended to keep later and more irregular hours the more senior they became, but with the office staff and junior academics, who were always ready to exchange a friendly word. Office doors were open as a policy: much of the point of the institute was to encourage dialogue and cross-fertilization. I only closed my door when seeing clients, and had been given a special room for this on a less-trafficked floor.

  I was whistling as I entered. I am competent at whistling, perhaps more so than at conversation, and was feeling jaunty. The sound, in my recollection, was sucked away from me in the emptiness of the corridors. I entered one of the conference rooms to find everyone huddled around a radio.

  Indira Gandhi: shot.

  Shot. The word in English is more onomatopoeic than ever we realize.

  Shhh. The smooth sailing of bullet through barrel, fricting iron against iron, joined and separated by the hastening oil.

  Ahhh. Iron against unresisting air, a fleshly sigh of admission.

  T. The consonant finality of the bullet coming to rest.

  We dispersed after some time and went about our business as slightly conflicting reports trickled in by radio and telephone: two men with turbans had assassinated the prime minister. There had been an attempted assassination on the prime minister and she was being rushed to hospital. Mrs. Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards had shot and killed her in apparent retaliation for her having ordered the storming of the Golden Temple in June.

  It was the last version that was borne out, exactly the sort of thing that many at the IRDS studied: communal conflict and cycles of revenge.

  In my case, I saw therapeutic clients. All made reference to the news, but then turned to their own problems, the intimate narratives and narratives of intimacy that were more under their power to direct than ever they had thought.

  Events in the democracy, however—the ones we as a nation had thought we had the power to direct—turned out to be beyond us.

  Early that afternoon, when we convened our meeting to discuss the post-Partition project, we spoke only of the assassination and the events that had led up to it. There must have been seven or eight of us around the table, some talking with excitement; others, including the two Sikhs, more circumspect. Opinions varied, but people seemed too shocked to clash outright. India’s current incarnation was less than forty years old. The assassination was a nadir in our young democracy’s history. That any Sikhs, whose community was famously loyal to the multiplicitous notion of modern India, could feel so marginalized as to resort to this act seemed as tragic as the act itself. None of us was a fan of the prime minister, which fact also saddened us. She’d increasingly played the paranoid autocrat, rather than the freedom fighter and democracy defender she had been in her youth. But even through her various national and local suspensions of civil liberties, it had been possible to maintain the idea that civil society would ultimately triumph. Somehow, this violent end seemed the final shattering of that dream. I don’t think any of us suspected that the final shattering was yet to come.

  The head of the office staff, a former stenographer promoted repeatedly for her unusual acumen, looked in the open door. “I am sorry”—she frowned—“but I must advise you learned people to go home.” She rarely encountered disobedience from those she supervised or those she served. We left.

  My bus would take me right past the hospital where our prime minister lay dying. As we approached, government cars, with police motorcycles weaving and buzzing around them, overtook us. The crowds thickened—mourners, I supposed. The closer we got, however, the younger and more male the crowds appeared. Our bus slowed to walking pace, unable to get through; then a couple of young men stopped it, banging on the door until the driver opened it.

  “Show me the Sikhs!” the first shouted as he leapt up the steps. He started down the aisle, checking the empty seats to make sure no turbaned head was ducked below, out of sight. Several of his fellows appeared behind him. Their eyes were red—not from crying, my guess. They wore half-unbuttoned shirts, moustaches, shaggy hair. Bollywood villains.

  There were no Sikhs on our bus, but, as we arrived at the transit depot, I saw a tall gentleman dragged out of another bus by his shirt, spectacles askew. He was pushed down into the sweating, crushing sea of the crowd, where I lost him.

  My second bus home contained a number of wary-looking Sikhs. I knew none of them. We reached my neighbourhood. They went to their homes, I to mine.

  I found my father pacing in front of the radio. “Outrageous!” he said when he saw me, shaking his finger in the air. He had been a lifelong civil servant, dedicated to civility and servility. He liked a pendulum best when it was still. He had been piously regretful at the Golden Temple invasion, but extremists must bend or be bent to the rule of law.

  Vivek’s children had come home early from school. They were mainly worried about whether our Halloween party that evening would be cancelled. I told them that although I wasn’t much in a mood, I would go ahead with our plan if their friends showed up.

  Three did, surprisingly. Although I couldn’t bring myself to dress up, I gave them sweets and a tour of my Room of Doom, which included a disembodied hand that gripped their small necks and a ghost that popped out of my almirah. I had also strewn “poppers” on the floor so that their entry seemed to trigger gunfire. On other days, their screams would have been delightful.

  Rumours floated in that I was not the only one distributing sweets: some Sikhs were celebrating the assassination. My sister phoned from Canada to tell us they had seen images on TV of Sikhs in Vancouver and Toronto laughing, dancing bhangra, that Punjabi celebration dance made famous via Bollywood and weddings: arms aloft, shoulders shaking, wrists twisting to an infectious beat.

  “It’s just a handful behaving like this,” she said, “but that’s what makes the news, right? The rest of them are going about their daily business, but you can’t show that on TV. I saw a bunch at a vigil downtown.”

  By the time the children finished their candy, their parents were at the door, anxious to get them home. We expected a curfew to be called, and one was. We expected, if we woke in the night, to hear the buzz and wail of police and army making smaller and larger loops through the city, lacing it tight with invisible cords, tying the city down as if it w
ere a patient suffering a seizure, until tempers cooled and order restored itself. In some cities, this was what happened. In Delhi, things went differently.

  The next morning, the air smelled of smoke. As I descended to take my coffee, there was a rattle at the back gate. My mother went out. It was the wife from the Sikh family who lived next door. The husband, in his fifties, was already a little higher in the civil service than my father had been by the time of his retirement, but the families were roughly social equals. Relations between them were cordial but not friendly, and I had wondered if the question of their equality might be the main source of the careful distance, along with the usual strangeness between members of different communities, a gap easily overcome when both sides so desire.

  Now the wife was at the gate, pleading and sobbing. I went out into the garden but hung back to listen. Mrs. Singh was begging my mother to send my father to persuade her menfolk to come and hide in our house.

  “They are killing Sikhs, you understand? They are going to each and every Sikh house, they are killing the men, they take the girls, they are setting the houses on fire.”

  Her Hindi was heavily accented and my mother’s only functional, but still, my mother understood. She was hesitating to open the gate when the woman looked past her, and me. My father had come out to stand behind me.

  “Please, sir. My husband, my sons. They will not go.” Mrs. Singh’s voice rose as she approached hysteria. “Sir, he says he is as loyal to India as the sun is loyal to the dawn. He won’t believe they will attack our house.”

  “He must be right, of course,” responded my father. He hadn’t moved from his spot near the house.

  Beyond the gate, Mrs. Singh stopped crying. She wiped her cheeks with her dupatta and turned to go.

  “Please,” I said. “Let me see what I can do.”

  She gave a slight nod but did not pause.

  I went to our rooftop first and looked out across the colony. At its fringes, fires were burning, not a general conflagration but isolated posts of smoke rising around the periphery as though to make a fence. I descended to the front door and found Vivek on the street, talking with a neighbour. “It’s true,” said the man. He had one crossed eye, and it was difficult to tell what he thought about what he was saying. “There are mobs moving in from the Ring Road. They are going after Sikh homes and businesses, but they will destroy Hindu-Muslim too, anyone who hides Sikhs. No macho hero stuff, uh? Look after your family.”

  I went next door, but there was no answer when I rang, so I ran back through our house and shouted over their back gate. This time, Mr. Singh came out.

  “My dear chap, why so distressed?” he asked in English. He was hale-looking, with a wide, sunny face and a tightly bound beard above a dress shirt and tie. “My wife has infected you with her anxiety!”

  “Sir, I think you really would be very well advised to—that is, our doors are open to you and your family.” I wanted to speak more forcefully (really, I wanted to drag him into our house just as those goons had dragged that poor gentleman down the bus steps), but could not make him seem subject to my instruction, or pity, or fear. Singh means “lion”; it is the name of the pride. “You are in grave danger.”

  “There are miscreants on both sides,” said Mr. Singh. He patted my shoulder. “Everyone is in terrible shock. Let the police do their duty. I’m sure they will have matters well in hand very shortly.”

  I left him and began phoning friends and colleagues, who passed on to me still-tentative information, since confirmed. It appeared someone, possibly in the ranks of the ruling party, had supplied lists—census? voters? ration cards?—of Sikh-occupied homes, Sikh-owned businesses. The mobs were not rampaging randomly; those batons of smoke were rising only from the addresses on the lists. The streets were unusually quiet, and when we heard any vehicle, we imagined it was one of these organizers, shaping and directing the mobs, avenging sheepdogs herding wolfish sheep. The rumour was that the Congress party had hired otherwise unemployed young men to enlarge the mobs, 500 rupees a pop. To employ professional mourners is no new thing; to direct them to express their grief for their dear, departed leader with gleeful barbarism—this we had not seen before.

  And the police? The army? “Standing by the side of the road,” one of my colleagues told me on the phone, choking on tears or indignation. “Fully complicit!” Later, I heard that Sikhs had called the police and found themselves arrested for actions they had taken in their own defence and that the few officers or commanders who protected citizens and property were reprimanded. Pogroms. State-sanctioned. Not officially, but.

  The smell of smoke on our street was growing thicker, the fires visibly closer. I went again to the Singhs’ back gate and this time was met by Mr. Singh with his wife, daughters-in-law, and a small horde of children.

  “All right,” he said, with the habitual optimist’s stiffness in dire straits. “Let me deliver our womenfolk and children to you. I so hate them to be upset!” He seemed almost glad to be shed of his family’s distress.

  “Sir,” I said, letting his family pass into our garden. “Please. If the crowd comes to your door, let me tell them you are not home. It will go easier for all of us. Please. For your family.”

  He drew a heavy breath. We could hear shouts now and guessed they must have reached our street. He inclined his head briefly and was gone. I went along between the houses, to the front, where Vivek met me, iron pot-tongs in one hand, paring knife in the other. I recall pausing briefly to wonder whether he was ridiculous.

  The mob arrived, going straight to the Singhs’ house. A number of them hopped the gate into the front garden and began to bang on the door.

  “Hai!” I screamed from our own garden. “No one is home there! They heard about you lot. They left yesterday. Shoo!” I, too, was brandishing something—I remember the feel of it in my hand, along with the taste of acid in my throat—but I can no longer remember what it was.

  Astonishingly, whatever we did was effective. The goons at the gate shouted to the goons at the door that there were other fish to fry, farther up the same road. Thankfully Mr. Singh and his sons were not tempted into confrontation.

  Startled at how easy it had been to move the mob along, Vivek and I exited our garden into the road. My father followed us. There was a much bigger crowd at the end of the street, half-undone men in half-undone shirts. The smoke was thick and thicker, as were the crowds, but we caught a glimpse of a man being pulled from a house by his unbound hair, his turban also unbound and torn. We knew who lived there: two brothers, Singhs, no relation to those hiding in our house. They were about my age, owners of a motorcycle dealership a few blocks away, and lived with their father. Kritika and I used to joke about how we couldn’t tell them apart. Singh and Singh. Singh and sons.

  The crowd parted to reveal the man, now on fire. Oh God—which brother was it? Or was it the father? I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t tell.

  He held his arms out, shaking, reaching, staggering. A whole man alight. We reached toward him, we froze. What can you do? These are the smells of a man burned alive: kerosene smoke, burning hair, roasting flesh, but also something else, something green and wet—a near-anonymous martyr tied to wood where the sap still ran.

  “Bhangra!” someone shouted, seeing the man shake in his own flames, and others shouted too, even laughed. “He’s dancing bhangra!”

  In minutes, the street was empty. My father had run back to our house and fetched a quilt. He threw it over the now-fallen man and threw himself on top. The flames were doused, but there wasn’t enough flesh for a pulse. I checked. Another body lay at the far end of the street.

  After, my father tried to phone our local police deputation. He could reach no one. He was in favour of going in person, but I told him, “Appa, surely you can tell that the police must be permitting this to happen.”

  He looked insulted, angry. “Ridiculous. How dare you?”

  “Then where are they? You think all this is somehow a s
ecret from them?”

  “Surely they are busy elsewhere—this must be happening all over the city.”

  “Yes, because they have failed and are failing to prevent it. There is collusion, Appa.” I became more earnest as he stopped contradicting me, hopeful that I was wrong. “Come, I’ll go with you to the police station, come.” But now he sat, not meeting my eyes, looking drawn. I left him alone.

  The next morning, a couple of my colleagues phoned to tell me of a protest meeting coming together in the compound of a relief agency. I was not inclined to go. I dreaded the rhetoric, the sense of mass action. I knew that it was necessary to show opposition, and that such protests might even succeed in dispersing a mob or two, but I have a near-pathological aversion to collectives. It goes against my grain to join any mob, even one forming to march and chant for something I believe in.

  But Appa overheard the conversations. “This is it, Ashwin. We will make ourselves heard.” Perhaps my resistance would have broken down even if he had not insisted we go.

  It was a small group, perhaps 150 people. I think it could have been much larger if they had been able to spread the word more effectively. If I had not been staying with my father, he never would have known about that gathering of concerned fellow citizens. If I had been living in my own flat by then, they would not have been able to reach me, since it would be years before I got a telephone.

  I remember very little of that day. Generic details, such as the detestable mass-shouting of slogans expressing admirable sentiments. We marched together to a neighbourhood that we had heard was among the most badly affected, a Sikh-majority enclave. We confronted mobs and were mostly successful, simply with shouting, in getting them to stop, if temporarily. I don’t really remember. After the critical, desperate confrontations of the day prior, I think my brain’s ability to form memories with any specificity was topped.