“I must go,” I said, and left him, letting myself out and tripping down his cracked steps to his yellow lawn, where I loved the bitter wind blowing away his thick smells.
I walked around the block, not ready to get back in my car. I pictured the scene: seventeen years ago, Venkat, fresh from his suicide attempt, is at Shivashakti’s ashram. Perhaps with his younger sister. He is ashamed. He is at loose ends. His mother is urging him to return to Canada and his job, but he is nervous. Perhaps sub-nervous. Numb.
His life back there is meaningless: Sita and Sundar were not merely his reasons for living. They were his reasons for earning. Now he has no one to feed and no one to come home to—no reasons to go home and no reasons ever to leave the house. He knows, in some inchoate way, that if he returns to Canada, he will attempt suicide again. It’s the only logical response to the conditions of his life.
He might still be on antidepressants; he might be forgetting to take them. Either way, the only true emotion he feels is anger. If he is on the drugs, the anger is blunted, but still present, palpable. Those bastards stole my life. They killed my family. They took meaning from me. They took belief. Sometimes he hears it, like this, in words. More often, his mind is a smoky blank, the anger its glowing embers.
Into this picture walks a man. A couple of men? They are at a satsang, at the Shivashakti ashram. They somehow walk out with Venkat and his sister. They strike up a conversation.
Venkat and his sister give their address, as well as quite a bit of other information. The men promise to visit, and Venkat feels eagerness in anticipation of seeing them. It’s a relief to feel an emotion other than anger, though it is chiefly his anger that attracts them. When the men come, they talk in ways that make sense to him, about how the Jews have a homeland, the Muslims have a homeland, the Sikhs want a homeland. India—which they call Bharat—is the Hindus’ homeland, but we are made to bow to minority rule here! The Christians, the Sikhs, even the Muslims, who have their own goddamned country—they are allowed to make the laws! India is a democracy—the majority must rule!
Venkat subscribes. He pledges his salary to this worthy cause: purify Mother India. The men continue to visit. They talk strategy, philosophy, finance.
Seth, encountering Venkat at his mother’s home, notices his renewed energy and cheer, even meets his new friends, though he mistakes them for actual friends, mistakes their interest as benign. Seth doesn’t know. Venkat never tells him.
I had wormed my way into Venkat’s mind. I wouldn’t have thought I could. He reminded me—here is where you get the full depths of my own neurosis, but—he reminded me a little of my mother. His irrationality, the ridiculous leaps of logic. How can you put someone like that together on paper?
Fiction is the practice of “if this, then what?” For all my pages of notes on the strange things my mother said and did—from her physical roughness with us children, which she would deny; to her vanity about my father, which he might have seen as affection; to her insistence on the pogroms’ non-occurrence, which became a wedge between my parents until Appa made it clear she was never to mention the subject—I could never extrapolate, or penetrate. Any guess I made as to her motivations, any prediction as to her next action, struck me as wrong. I knew her well enough to know that. I never knew her any better.
It probably helped that I didn’t know Venkat very well. And however he talked, his actions, were not, I must admit, wholly illogical. What do normal people do in life? They love, they work. He gave his parakeets his love, and he gave his salary to—
I got in my car, started it, let it stall and turned the engine off again.
You must change your life.
I am a man thrice-struck by lightning. The first strike, the pogroms, came close. The second, the bombing, struck home. Somehow I’d expected the third to come soon after and to kill me. Why think that way? It’s lightning—nothing personal, even if I seemed to attract it. I waited seventeen years. Finally, the third bolt had struck, but at a distance. It didn’t kill me, but it deadened me, for about fourteen months.
27 February 2002
I WAS ON A FIVE-MONTH LEAVE from the IRDS, as a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Management, in Ahmedabad. I had never taught before. They had sought me out, to teach on Organizational Behaviour, a leap from the work I was best known for, but not, it turned out, a long one. My lectures focused on social responsibility, corporate culture, conformity and change. The course had led me to idle musing on a new writing project, unrelated to my therapeutic practice, about the new business scene, outsourcing, globalization.
As I crossed the campus that day, following my twice-weekly seminar, the shadows made me stop. Long shadows, late afternoon. The seminar was going marvellously. I had always thought my native impatience would scupper any attempt at teaching, but this was the Indian Institute of Management, and my students were no dimbulbs. True, many gained admission largely on their skills with test-taking and teacher-pleasing, and so were bewildered when obsequiousness and regurgitation got nothing out of me but thunder. Underneath their eager veneers, though, real thoughts often lurked, and as they relaxed with me, these kids began to reveal the fascinations of their minds. Their company was rejuvenating.
In a couple of hours, two of my favourite students were to arrive at my on-campus quarters to talk about a joint research project, from which their theses would be drawn. Amita was brash and mouthy; she had worked two years in Bangalore, in the tech centre of an American bank, before entering grad studies with an eye toward microfinance. Jaggi, her batch-mate, was more reserved, an electrical engineer with more conventional career aspirations. I was guiding their research on a local Internet start-up, but our conversations often ballooned.
My thoughts were circling pleasantly as I crossed the campus, when the light—did I say shadows?—the majesty of the campus brought me to a halt. Particularly with the sun on the cusp of a rapid descent, the red brick arches framing views of red clay paths and green grass lawns and peacocks strutting across it all. When I started walking again, the direction of my thoughts had shifted: how little I knew of architectural magic. Were good minds attracted to beautiful places, or were the shapes of the buildings themselves conducive to deep thought? If it was the latter, what did it mean for the thinking of the poor that they so rarely lived and worked in places designed for aesthetic enrichment? What about the brains of the main run of the capitalist classes, to whom aesthetic value was typically sentimental or profitable, preferably both?
I had been given a large townhouse in professors’ row, rather good. I lived here ten days at a stretch, going back to Delhi four days each fortnight to maintain my therapeutic practice, though I had reduced my client load to accommodate the leave. It was this rhythm, in combination with the relatively light load at IIM, that had let me finish a book: case studies and reflections on narrative therapies with Indian army personnel and their families. I hadn’t heard back from my publisher yet, and as I turned on the TV news, was wondering whether to call him.
My students found me sitting in the dark. I had left the large sitting-room door open to the common lawns; otherwise, they said, they might have thought I was not home. They had seen the news, too, and thought to cancel our meeting, but had badly wanted to talk to me.
In Godhra, two hours west of us, a train load of Hindu pilgrims had had a rest stop, that morning, about 7:45. This much is agreed upon. They were returning from a mission that may have been devotional but was equally political: visiting the site of a proposed temple to baby Rama at the place of his apocryphal birth. The site had been cleared ten years earlier by 150,000 “volunteers.” I prefer “fall-on-spears.” Many of them couldn’t agree even on who Lord Rama was, but reached a consensus long enough to tear down a mosque that had been on their chosen site since the time of Babur.
Pakistan or Kabristan! I heard the 150,000 squawking in chorus, as I tried again, still in front of Venkat’s house, to start the car. Pakistan, land of the pure—or
Kabristan, land of the dead!
Get out, they meant, or go to hell.
Now, in 2002, ten years after the mosque’s destruction, some pilgrims were returning from paying tribute to that temple yet to come. Their train paused at a station next to a neighbourhood overwhelmingly poor and Muslim.
Pilgrims stretched and peed. Pilgrims bought snacks and chai. Maybe pilgrims threw a Muslim chai-seller’s tea back at him. Maybe pilgrims threw him off the train. Maybe a Muslim insulted a pilgrim. Maybe pilgrims forced him and others to profess devotion to Hindu Gods. Maybe pilgrims molested his daughter. Maybe it was the other way around.
Maybe it was a five-minute pause, maybe it was twenty-five. The train started to leave the station, then stopped, the emergency cord pulled. Maybe pilgrims pulled it themselves, inside the train, because other pilgrims had been left on the platform and Muslims were gathering there, attracted by their fellows’ cries. Almost undisputed is that the fight then began in earnest. The railroad right-of-way is paved with stones and these stones began to fly.
But did the Muslims manage to dodge the stones, petrol-douse the inside of a compartment and throw flaming rags through the windows? Or did one of the stones, or even one of the pilgrims, knock a kerosene cookstove toward another cookstove-chiffonsari-oilynewspaper and did this domino into the conflagration that spread through the state?
Coach S-6. Fifty-eight dead by burning.
The Muslims were blamed, post hoc ergo propter hoc, as they say in the local lingo. A fight on the platform followed by a train-car fire—how could they not be responsible? It has since been alleged (post hoc again, but perhaps more propter hoc) that Chief Minister Narendra Modi and others mobilized, that same night, a spontaneous outpouring of grief and violence over the Hindu pilgrims’ deaths. The personnel were ready to Click! into mob formation.
The train pulled into Ahmedabad exactly twenty-four hours late. Colonial legacies: tick-tock trains; communal riots. Relatives met the remains, carried into the station on the train: bodies heat-shrunk, faces fire-grimaced, eye sockets singed and empty.
The burning train car was merely the head of the match, struck and held to a fuse. Riots sparked, burned, sparked, burned, spread throughout the state.
I didn’t leave my apartment that week. I barely left my sofa.
Some of my students organized a rally at the state legislative assembly and asked me to join. When I refused, they looked at me as though I were a coward. I did ask them not to go, it’s true. I thought it dangerous for them. But I laughed when they suggested I wasn’t coming because it was dangerous for me. “Me? I have nothing to live for!” I wheezed. I never saw them again.
One scattershot colleague worked up a delegation to Chief Minister Modi. He thought I might ornament his squad, me with my book on the Delhi pogroms, the one that made me famous among the few who cared. “Modi doesn’t want to meet me,” I informed him. “He doesn’t know who I am. And if he does, he definitely doesn’t want to meet me.” I hung up without waiting for his counter-arguments.
It was midday, in the middle of that week. I hadn’t locked the door since the last time I entered, and they walked in without knocking: Munir, a student of mine, his arm around a teenaged boy I didn’t know.
“This is my brother, Sohail,” Munir told me. “You have to hide us.”
I liked Munir, difficult as he was in class, something hair-trigger about him. Very bright. He had to be: he was the only Gujarati Muslim on the IIM campus that year, a travesty he could classify in various ways. Still, he was not unreachable, then.
I gestured for them to sit, and brought them lime-water. The boys smelled of iron-carbon-nitrogen, blood-smoke-piss. Their eyes were flat and small. I had seen accounts of the atrocities on the news, though nothing yet like the full accounting that is still emerging: unborn children cut from bellies, systematic rape of Muslim women, throats slit and bodies burned.
“You are going to drive us to Delhi.” That was the first thing Sohail said.
“You will take us, Professor Rao. I know you will, because I read that book you wrote, Who Are the Victims?” Munir reached for my cigarettes. He drew one out of the pack and across his moustache-fuzz, smelling the unburnt tobacco. “Our family is dead. Killed by Hindus, Professor Rao. Like you.”
I tried to drive away from Venkat’s house, leaving him inside with his parakeet, mouthing the same slogans as the mobs that had killed Munir’s family. My car kept stalling, starting, stalling.
I thought of my father, of how he was galvanized by the Delhi pogroms. He had been in his late sixties at the time, retired, contented. A good career, a life well lived, service to his country, his country as a cause. He had always voted for Congress. These were his beliefs.
The pogroms gave this life the lie. So he changed his life. He joined peace organizations; he helped Sikh widows fill out forms as they sought reparations; he volunteered in slum schools. If he had not seen what he had, on our street, and others, perhaps he would have, like Venkat, blamed the murders of our loved ones on “the Sikhs.” Losing Kritika and the children slowed him down, it’s true. But then he plunged in once more.
I have mentioned here only two books about the Delhi pogroms and their aftermath, including my own. Who Are the Guilty? And Who Are the Victims? There are practically no others—why?
Some ten years after the violence, Amitav Ghosh, a novelist of extraordinary scope, wrote a piece for an American magazine, asking the same question. He had been living in Delhi at the time. His neighbourhood was attacked, though he didn’t witness the burnings. He, too, was reluctant to march, though he did, in the same protests as I. “Writers don’t join crowds,” he writes. “But what do you do when the constitutional authority fails to act? You join and in joining bear all the responsibilities and obligations and guilt that joining represents.” And yet, he says, “Until now I have never really written about what I saw in November of 1984. Nobody, so far as I know, has written about it except in passing.” Why silent for so long? “As a writer,” he says, “I had only one obvious subject, the violence. From the news report, or the latest film or novel, we have come to expect the bloody detail or the elegantly staged conflagration that closes a chapter or effects a climax.” He is a writer mostly of fiction; I suppose those temptations are particularly present for them.
Ghosh’s article has three climaxes: a busload of people protecting a Sikh fellow commuter; a Hindu serving her Sikh neighbour tea in the muffled hush of her parlour while the mob sieges their street; and a moment I must have seen but which is effaced from my own memory: a group of thugs approached us, “brandishing knives and steel rods … A kind of rapture descended on us, exhilaration in anticipation of a climax … all the women in our group stepped out and surrounded the men; their saris and kameezes became a thin, fluttering barrier, a wall around us. They turned to face the approaching men, challenging them, daring them to attack. The thugs took a few more steps toward us and then faltered, confused. A moment later, they were gone.”
Part of the reason he didn’t write about the bloodshed is that he was spared the trauma of witnessing it. “What I saw at first hand,” he said, “was not the horror of violence but the affirmation of humanity … the risks that perfectly ordinary people are willing to take for one another.”
His representation is honest and necessary. Still, it doesn’t fully unlock my understanding of that time. The key, for me, was more ephemeral, less dramatic than either the violence or the resistence. Something in the middle, something about surviving and shifting. About seeing. The critical moment, the thing I remember and want to record, was my father’s transformation: one citizen awakened to his own blindness, his own complicity; my father’s hands held to his eyes in pain as the scales fell.
Those who alter the course of history by being party either to violence or resistance are, in my experience, a minority. History happens to most people, not because of them. As for me, Ashwin Thrice-Struck. Or perhaps, more accurately, Thrice-Missed.
I smoked and watched them eat, watched them hate themselves, their appetites, their impotence, me.
“You going to write a big book about this?” Munir asked at one point.
“No—” I said, but he stopped me before I could elaborate.
“I don’t care. Why did I ask? Why am I asking why I asked? Curiosity is an old habit.”
You can see why I liked him.
At the time, I was ashamed of not participating in any of the public acts of resistance, yet I continued to refuse. This was the third strike, and I had been spared. What for?
Mostly, in those days, I was musing on how limited the catalogue is of horrors people have perpetrated on one another through history. Unless they were Nazis. They, it has to be admitted, took the possibilities of ethnic warfare to a new level—managing nearly to eliminate the role of emotion from their methods. Most organizers of similar projects have not had the Nazis’ resources and imagination. Fear and greed flow close to the surface and are easily tapped, but an oily slick of ignorance has greased the machines from Turkey to Nazi Germany to Bosnia to Rwanda to here.
The BJP: the Hindu nationalists’ political party. The VHP: their cultural wing. The RSS: their paramilitary volunteers. Whoever you consider to be behind the Godhra attacks, whoever Venkat was supporting, did not have the Nazis’ ingenuity, and they had the task of convincing an astonishingly diverse people of their essential homogeneity. But they did take the Nazis’ lessons to heart. Sparky youth camps full of chanting and games; a plan of national assimilation and standards by which to judge it. They controlled education, so that school history books told a story of a past India remarkably similar to the India they wanted to create: valorous, prosperous, unitary, Hindu.
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 24
