In Times of Siege

by Githa Hariharan

  Shiv would like to believe that it is Basava who links 1168 and 2000. Yet it seems it is not the dissident leader who is the critical link, but the hatemongers; the same manches that have sprouted in two times, centuries apart. Just as Shiv’s history manch has taken apart his world and challenged him to put the pieces together again, Basava’s manch set his city on fire. Reprisal upon reprisal followed dissidence. Taxes were increased to fatten temples. Merchants left in droves, unable to stand the strikes, the insecure streets and the fresh taxes. And the movement: reprisals meant that all those who had learnt to shed servility had to relearn it. Now even the washerman and the barber and the prostitute had become dangerous enemies of the state. Basava’s men and women began deserting the city; those who remained behind were on strike. Kalyana, hub of profitable trade, heart of Basava’s movement, was no longer recognizable. It lay mauled, torn apart, its golden hours under cover of darkness. The lamps were no longer lit as day passed into night, but flames attacked the city’s organs; smoke choked them. Its moving limbs, the low-caste and untouchable hovels, had caught fire.

  And the Hall of Experience, Basava’s great democratic experiment that gave a voice to so many low-castes, women, was never the same again. It no longer rang with voices in bliss or voices raised in protest—a change that must have been painful to Basava. And did he have an ominous surge of feeling that the worst hour had only just begun?

  What happened, then, to Basava’s Hall? Though no history book tells him what exactly happened to it, Shiv has, after all, a few signposts for guidance: his own eloquent, recent examples of vandalism. The mosques and churches desecrated or burnt or broken down in the last decade; and closer in time, closer home, his own little room at the university. Contemporary acts of war. Surely these are part of the puzzle, surely they can help him piece together what happened?

  …

  But it is not till he is in bed, in the grip of febrile dreams, that Shiv finds a picture or two unfolding for his terror and edification. And it is not so much a picture that he can view as something separate from him, outside him, but a brief space of time into which he has slipped, a time when the curtain between past and present loses some of its opaque quality.

  An image trickles through. Others follow. Shiv is in what appears to be a playground, a part of the campus he has never been to before. It can’t possibly be night; but it is dark, or darkened, as if the sky has bungled its way into the midst of a solar eclipse. Shiv squints to try and get the skyline into focus.

  How strange, he thinks, that building in the distance is so forlorn, like a proud orphan standing alone. It looks solid but empty. Its swollen old dome rides the back of the horizon, curves its spine into a gentle but distinct hump. Shiv stares unblinkingly at the building. He can almost see its loneliness float across, seep into his skin. It feels, this loneliness, like damp, unhappy mist.

  But it’s not mist; it’s smoke. His eyes draw back from the horizon and the building. It’s not dark either; and he’s not alone. He can hear running footsteps. Someone pushes him aside, rushes ahead. Then more running feet. The feet grow arms, a head. In the head speaks a voice he knows. He turns around sharply, sees Arya.

  Arya’s face is bulbous, swollen with excitement. His skin shines with sweat. “Here, you’ll need one of these,” he says, and hands Shiv a pickaxe. Shiv takes it from him.

  But what’s it for? What does Arya want him to do?

  “Wait for orders,” Arya barks.

  What orders?

  “The signal, stupid,” pants Arya, racing ahead like a bloodhound.

  Now Shiv is closer to the building, though he only senses this. All he can make out is the tight circle of bodies like a well-fitting ring round the structure.

  He stumbles, stops. He looks at the ground. What are these piles of ropes doing on the ground? And these iron rods and hammers and axes?

  But when he looks up he sees that there is someone in charge of it all; the Head is here, and he knows what it’s for. He’s handing out supplies, one portion per hand, all fair and in order. The Head sees Shiv standing there, puzzled and uncertain, and he smiles charitably. “Do you know how easy it is to put oil and rag together, or flame and wood?” he asks Shiv. “How easy it is to make a stick of fire?”

  Shiv drops his pickaxe and flees. He races ahead, in the direction Arya went, running headlong into the jumble of flashing yellow and orange clothes, flags, banners.

  He is now in the belly of the crowd. An army so thick that he can no longer see. He can only hear and smell and feel, and how exaggerated, how cruelly vivid these heightened sensations are! From somewhere in the navel of the crowd, voices rise ceaselessly, exhorting the crowd to do their duty. The crowd roars, getting more restless every minute. It sways, one gigantic body with too many limbs. Shiv can smell the heat of this creature all around him, too close to him, sickly sweet sweat and incense robbing him of even the smoky, torch-lit air. But then a voice howls “Follow the front ranks!” And the crowd surges forward, screaming slogans, a roaring, hungry, single-minded sea.

  Shiv claws his way out of the monster’s belly, scratching, biting, using his head like a battering ram, till he finds he is grabbing empty air. The crowd has left him behind; he can breathe now, though what he takes in, in large grateful mouthfuls, tastes stale.

  He must look for Menon, he thinks. And there, like magic, Menon is lurking in the fringes as always. He must have Rekha with him. And Meena. Shiv stumbles forward.

  But before he can get there, Shiv can see his father walking toward him. Shiv retreats. But the skeletal frame comes closer; now he can see the face, a skull’s grimace within hissing distance: “Look!”

  Shiv turns around, looks. Through the ghostly haze of fire and smoke he sees a dozen men brandishing rods and flags on the building roof. Then the dome comes down.

  His head swings around, he looks indignantly into his father’s prophetic face. But all he gets is a mocking, merciless taunt from the death-head: “How many more times?”

  Shiv shudders, backs away, wakes up.

  The light streaming in through the window is fresh, blissfully ignorant of troubled dreams. In the wholesome light of day, what went before is nothing more than a nightmare. Only a natural side effect of hobnobbing with the world’s bloodthirsty munchies.

  Shiv emerges from his room, strips, pours cold, purifying mugs of water on his head. He washes and scrubs, brushes and rinses, hawks phlegm and gloom into the bathroom sink till he feels himself again. The day waits ahead, with its glib promise that the night’s fitful visions can be easily forgotten.

  It was only a nightmare. But the nightmare has an undeniable aftertaste: a nagging fear that the night’s ugly secrets will not stay within bounds. That if Shiv is not careful, the hatred he witnessed, the scenes of destruction, may leak into the day that waits downstairs for him. The unbridled chaos he left behind in sleep may catch up with him; demand that he return, relive it all once more. He has passed the night unharmed for the present. But who knows when it may come back again, play itself over in other places, other times?

  TEN

  OCTOBER 4–6

  What does it matter one way or the other? It all happened long ago, didn’t it? Only professors are obsessed with details. The rest of us only need to know enough to be proud of our past.” His daughter Tara’s message remains consistent to her principled indifference to making a fuss over principles. Rekha’s most recent e-mail is equally short but more to the point: she has a confirmed ticket for October 28th, but she is also waitlisted for an earlier date. The brevity and matter-of-factness of her message remind Shiv that the rest of the world continues to go about its business; that normalcy is still alive. Its ability to survive will have to be his talisman against the dangers of the munchies’ world—and perhaps Meena’s as well.

  But in the garden (Rekha’s bamboo about Shiv) a howling fills the moonlit night. A jackal bays. A jackal whose cry seems to have sought out Rekha’s garden, then broken into th
e wilderness of Shiv’s heart, a scavenger’s paradise.

  In his study (the word now a misnomer), a conqueror of another sort, a conqueror of vandals, has been holding court. Meena has been in a peculiar mood since the broad-front rally to protest what she calls “the attack.” There is something bubbling in her, a simmering brew of excitement, impatience, and to Shiv’s surprise, a wariness.

  He can sense her watchfulness all the time. He can sense that she is waiting for a critical moment. When he will break and she can swoop down, one-legged, one-crutched, to put the pieces together again. She seems to have summoned all the force at her command, concentrating it. Willing him to vault over some invisible trial of a hurdle to land on his feet, safe on the other side.

  Sometimes he catches her staring at him as if her eyes can tell her what he is thinking. What he will do next. What he is worth. Once or twice he meets her look steadily. Their eyes hold each other in a no-man’s-land of possibilities. Two pairs of eyes locked together, two walls leaning against each other, neither willing to give way and crumble.

  For a moment Shiv pretends they are evenly matched.

  Thursday morning. Kamla and her family have taken two days off to go to a wedding. Shiv and Meena are alone—or almost. There is the baby-faced security guard the university has recently employed to keep its historians alive. Meena has already made friends with him; he has told her that this is only his second assignment. He has also told her that if Shiv were a real VIP, there would have been two guards and he would have had company. As it is he keeps boredom at bay by standing outside Meena’s window and watching television through the torn mosquito screen. He prefers film song-and-dance shows; his secret desire (which Meena of course knows) is to make it as a hero, or at least a villain, in a Bollywood movie.

  For the moment Babyface is in his makeshift tent on the front lawn, pottering around, performing domestic chores without self-consciousness. He seems to think Rekha’s garden has grown walls that protect him from the public eye. His gun—which Shiv would like to believe is unloaded, merely a potent symbol—lies casually on the grass, a clump of beedi and cigarette stubs nearby.

  Meena is bathed and radiant; the plump black snake of her hair glistens with water. She sits in bed, propped up against fresh pillowcases, newspaper open at the edit page. Shiv can see a cluster of beads that her towel has missed, little globules of moisture on the curve of her neck. Every time her head moves, the swollen beads tremble. Shiv’s fingertips covet their glitter. Their diaphanous spots of skin.

  “Shiv!” she exclaims, her head jerking up with excitement. The beads shiver, then trickle down her neck. “There’s an edit about the attack!” The beads are gone but her eyes have inherited their sparkle.

  “Listen,” says Shiv’s young mentor, an unlikely reincarnation of his father.

  Shiv makes himself look away from her neck, her eyes. He forces his attention back to her words as she reads aloud.

  “It’s called ‘Whither History?’ ” she announces, rolling her eyes to tell him what she thinks of the title. “But the edit’s not bad at all.”

  “There are several lessons to be learnt from the recent ransacking of a professor’s room in K.G. Central University in Delhi.”

  (Meena’s lush eyebrows rise in appreciation.)

  “About thirty young men claiming to be students took the University authorities by surprise when they stormed into the History Department on the twenty-fifth of this month. The incident has been ‘explained’ by the Itihas Suraksha Manch as ‘a spontaneous protest by students against the distortion of heroic historical figures and the anti-Hindu bias’ of a lesson on medieval history written by the professor in question.”

  (“I don’t know why they’re so coy about mentioning your name,” grumbles Meena.)

  “What makes this an ominous development is that there seems to be tacit sanction from the powers that be for any lunatic fringe that does its dirty work.”

  (“Not bad, huh,” asks Meena, looking cheerful again. “Raj Choudhry must have written the edit—something to be said for these old-fogy liberals.” Then she remembers she is talking to a similarly afflicted audience, and quickly returns to the edit.)

  “Even despots have fought shy of openly declaring they are rewriting history. But what used to be secretive has become respectable government policy, with textbooks being ‘rewritten’ to give them a certain slant.”

  (“H’mm, he could have spelt it out, don’t you think? Watch out, I think he is about to speechify now.”)

  “All this has to be viewed as part of a larger process to deny the composite nature of Indian culture. We have been witness to several crude attempts to go back in time, hundreds of years, to deny that non-Hindu traditions, or ‘little’ traditions that are critical of the mainstream tradition, have also contributed to the country’s social, cultural and political life. We seem condemned to endless replays of the demolition mindset. The Babri Masjid was first marked as a ‘disputed structure,’ then demolished ‘to set right historical wrong.’ This time round, what is being marked as disputed territory, what is being assaulted with a view to demolition, is not just academic freedom.”

  (Eyes shining, a fleck of saliva glinting at the corner of her mouth, Meena mouths the blaring of trumpets—ta-da-daah!—before she reads the next sentence with the emphasis befitting a climax.)

  “It is the right of a people to a complex, pluralistic history. It is true that history is not an indisputable body of knowledge. But history itself shows us that attempts to ‘rectify’ it have all too often been camouflage for the doctoring of history.”

  Meena races through the last couple of sentences; too obvious, she says, to be interesting. Then she tosses the paper to Shiv, gloating. “See? There are all kinds of people on our side.”

  Shiv notes the our in place of your. He tries to smile in appreciation as he takes the paper from her. But he feels his stomach muscles tighten by reflex as if Meena—and the absent Amar—are appraising his fitness.

  Later, alone in bed, the projector in Shiv’s head plays its latest home movie to a captive audience of one. Several screens flicker to life simultaneously. In the screen at the very center, Meena fills the frame for an instant. Then her full, generous body shifts to make room for Amar. They sit on the same bed; his foot rests close to her cast. Shiv can see Amar’s toes, their nails overgrown and dirty, brushing the plaster on her thigh. She holds out her half-eaten bowl of ice cream; Amar helps himself to a spoonful. They finish the bowl together, both using the same spoon. Amar leans forward to take the draft she has prepared of the new leaflet. His hand moves toward hers. His arm—is that her breast it grazes so casually?

  The mind is the snake; the body is the basket. They live together, the snake and the basket. You don’t know, though, when it may kill you; you don’t know when it will bite! Shiv turns to the other side, impatient with himself. Impatient and sick at heart.

  Meena is still there on the screen, but Amar has moved out of the frame. Now it is Babli who runs in, excited, calling Meena Didi to come look at what she has found outside. She hands Meena her crutch and hurries her out of the room. Just outside the front door of the house, Rekha’s jasmine plants bristle with swollen green caterpillars. Babli picks up one with a stick and throws it to the ground. It wriggles in protest, then crawls back to the plants. Babli stamps on it; the squashed caterpillar leaves a gray sticky mess on the ground. Meena calls from the door, “Wait, that will take too long. We have to do it properly. Go to the kitchen and get some matches, then help me out of the house.”

  Babli has left with the last of the caterpillars. Meena is back in her room; it is late in the night. Meena takes a bottle of water to her mouth. Shiv can see her throat stretched back in an arc as she drinks. As always she drinks too fast; some of the water spills on her chin, trickles down and wets her neck and T-shirt. She puts the bottle down, yawns, blinks. She reaches under the pillows, pulls out one of the booklets she has earlier persuaded Shiv to re
ad. The Politics of Hate perhaps. Onward United Action. Or Women’s Voices and the Communalist Agenda. Meena reads a few pages, yawns again. She drops the booklet on the floor, reaches once more under the pillow and finds Shiv’s indulgent tribute, Asterix and the Normans. She settles down on the pillows to read about Justforkix who needs to be made a man of, and the fierce Normans who don’t know the meaning of fear but are hoping to find out. Meena’s eyes close; the comic slips out of her hands, falls to the floor.

  Meena, at the very heart of things. But there are also the other screens on display tonight, not to be wished away because they are in the background. Shiv ignores the images of crowd scenes; he pauses at the frame that holds hungry Amita, groping at anything that will help her lose herself in a moment of excitement. Shiv sees the hope on her face; once more she is pretending she need never return home again. Shiv moves away, edges his way gingerly past the screen with two larger-than-life silhouettes, the whispering, discontented ghosts of his father and Basava. (Like a monkey on a tree it leaps from branch to branch: how can I believe or trust this burning thing, this heart?)