Authors: Suketu Mehta
Amol’s procession features men dressed as Shivaji, Saibaba of Shirdi, and Lokmanya Tilak standing on top of the truck. All around them and swarming over the truck are about fifty other boys and men; three of them on top have caps and bandannas on their heads with the colors of the Union
Jack, like early videos of the Spice Girls. The floats creep toward the mosque on the main road leading toward the station. “We’ll take an hour going to the masjid, and then to pass in front of the masjid it will take three hours. Fifty feet after we pass the masjid almost everybody will go home,” Amol tells me.
As we approach the mosque, the procession slows almost to a halt. The drummers are in a frenzy, and the entire crowd is dancing with abandon. It helps that many of the boys have bottles of liquor in their pockets. Although there is a small contingent of women in the back (one young woman is waving a large saffron flag, the Sena banner), the men are all dancing with men. One boy has his legs between another’s; as they dance, the one bends backward and the other bends over him, wriggling, humping. A child has his hand over his face; then he too begins jerking automatically to the drumbeats. Clouds of red gulal powder are thrown over the dancers. Then the explosions begin. Atom bombs. Looms. All the firecrackers the crowd has are let off in front of the mosque, and the air is thick with the smell of explosive, the stench from the open gutters, and, most of all, human sweat. It is an act of God that the fireworks don’t set people on fire, set off in the middle of the dense mob as they are. Then Amol gets on top of the truck, grabs the mike, and shouts out slogans in praise of Hindu kings and the Hindu country:
“Chattrapati Shivaji Maharaj ki jai!”
The crowd responds with vigor.
“Bharat Mata ki jai!”
Saffron flags are waved in wide arcs on tall poles.
“Jai Bhavani! Jai Shivaji!” This is the Sena slogan.
Amol gets down from the truck, but the slogans are still ringing out. The other two icons—Saibaba and Tilak—are forgotten in front of the mosque. Only Shivaji the warrior is invoked. A few Muslims are watching silently, from behind the ranks of policemen lining the road. It is an infernal din. As the drums pound, as the fireworks burst, as the flags wave, as the bullhorns blare, I realize what this is: It is a victory march.
Ganesha is an unlikely god for such provocation. In the Hindu legends, he is a pleasure-loving gourmand, not an angry god bent on slaughter. But in the Jogeshwari float, he is sitting on a throne; instead of the mouse that is his usual mascot, the throne is flanked by four ferocious plaster lions. From
the back of the truck people are handing out prasad—coconut pieces—and little plastic bags of sheera. At the end of the block, true to Amol’s prediction, the crowd disperses, and the trucks speed on toward the swift sea to immerse their idols. The strutting past the masjid was the high point, the purpose, of the Ganapati procession: to show the Muslims that the Sena had won. This is where most riots in the country begin, in these aggressively public celebrations of a tribal, exclusive God rubbed in the face of those who would follow his rivals.
The amplified notes of the namaaz now begin coming out of the mosque. The police security cover has been excellent. Dhawle, the senior inspector and the man in charge of the Jogeshwari police station, is sitting down on a chair outside the police post, enjoying the cooling evening. The cops moved us on past the masjid in record time. A horde of plainclothes-men were constantly pushing us forward, urging the truck on. Uniformed cops were massed on both sides of the road, not allowing anybody to get too close to the building. Over the open gutters stood Muslim volunteers, a human guard against an unwary reveler falling into them in the dark.
It was not always this fraught. Before the 1993 riots, Arfin Banu, a member of the Mohalla Ekta Committee, remembers that the procession would stop making noise and bursting crackers on the block in front of the masjid and pass by quickly and silently, in deference to Muslim sentiments. This noisy display had only started in the years after the riots; some years it got very bad. Stones were thrown at the procession by the Muslims, and the possibility of a new riot was always looming. The police guard was much stronger in former years, as was the crowd. Amol would get up on top of the truck and whip the crowd up with his slogans; this year the police requested that he get down from the truck before it passed in front of the masjid, and he obeyed. So, provocative as tonight’s procession was—the invoking of Hindu warriors, the bursting of explosive crackers, the profane dancing—it was, in the Bombay of today, a best-case scenario. Nobody shouted invectives against the Muslims, no pigs were flung at the mosque, and four Muslim men came forward to dance with Amol and his friends, the Hindus who had slaughtered their families five years ago.
The taxi driver carrying me home has a little shrine of Saibaba of Shirdi enclosed in an illuminated arch, next to a verse from the Koran in Arabic script. “What is that?” I ask, pointing, as I’m about to leave the cab.
“This?” he asks, touching the arch. He thinks I want to ask about the colored lights.
“That.” I point to the Arabic text.
“This is Muslim.”
“And you have Saibaba also?”
“Yes.” He has turned around. He is smiling. I am joyous. There is still hope.
I
GO TO VISIT
Amol in his family’s room in the slum. He comes out of his bath, clad only in his towel, broad-chested, brawny-armed. He works in the big dairy on the highway. His sister-in-law brings me a cup of hot sugared milk. It is rich thick buffalo milk, and I find it difficult to swallow. There is a large black speck on the milk and a solidified lump on the inside of the cup. But it is hospitality, and so I drink it. Amol asks if I would like to stay for dinner. I decline. The sister-in-law laughs and says to him in Marathi, “He saw the room and got frightened.”
It is an even tinier room than his neighbor Girish’s, but with the requisite array of electronics: a fridge, a TV, a phone. There is a stair leading to another room upstairs. An adorable seven-month old, Amol’s niece, crawls about on the ground, reaches for a whiskey bottle filled with water, can’t hold it, and starts crying. Soon enough, she is picked up. Here there is no aloneness. Amol can sleep through babies crying and TVs blaring. These days he roams about at night and sleeps in the day; he has got a friend to take over his duties at the dairy for him, and he gives him his salary. This leaves the night free for strife.
Amol, like Sunil, thrives on strife; they cannot imagine a world without it. They owe their positions, the respect they are accorded, and the living they make to strife. Alliances must shift constantly to ensure that strife continues, so the definitions of friend, enemy, and human being are relative terms. Theirs is a constant scrambling for place on a ladder of allegiances: who is in whose group, who will be given a ticket for the legislative elections, who gets what cut of the constant flow of payments—to unions, to the police, to the government, to your enemies in return for not extracting vengeance.
The Bombay word for strife is lafda (which can also mean an affair or
romantic entanglement). People flock wherever there is a lafda; you’ll notice a large group of men, watching intently, unblinking, as near as possible to the lafda, so as not to miss a single second of it. “In Bombay there must be ten to fifteen lafdas a day,” Amol guesses. The foot soldiers of the lafda are the taporis: the street punks. The bhais—dons—and the netas—politicians—need a constant pool of taporis to maintain their positions. Amol is at heart a tapori: too passionate to be a shooter, too undiplomatic to be a neta, too stupid to be a bhai. He gets drunk and fights with his bare hands or with readily available weapons: glass jars from a roadside shop, swords, pieces of train track. He has a loyal following among the taporis, but he can never reach the heights that Sunil has. Sunil would never get hurt in a lafda. Amol leads out in front, but the back is where the real action is; in the back, smarter people are plotting the next move. When the time came to choose a divisional leader for the party, the shakha pramukh, Bhikhu Kamath put forward Sunil’s name. Angered, Amol entered the next legislative election as an independent. Sunil got Amol’s campaign workers drunk, and Amol lost out to the BJP—Sena combine.
Sunil, says Amol to me over dinner at a nearby restaurant, has a politician’s mind. “Even today he thinks he is an MLA,” a member of the legislative assembly. These are not words of praise from Amol, who is essentially a foot soldier, though he is a Brahmin and Sunil is a Maratha. But then, in today’s Bombay, it is the Marathas who are ruling, not the Brahmin Peshwas of old. Sunil generally decides how the spoils from their various illegal ventures are split and settles the ratio to his advantage. Amol is aware that Sunil cheats him. At some point, their rivalry will boil over into blood. But still, Amol feels obliged to beat up anyone who insults Sunil. “I believe Sunil is superior to me. He is the big man in my group.”
Amol has lost faith in the Saheb. “I used to respect Balasaheb more than God. Now he is sitting in Matoshree with a girl in one hand and a drink in the other, while we are getting beat up in jail. I am going to remove Balasaheb’s picture from my wall and put up my own. What the Congress didn’t eat in forty years the Sena ate in three.” He has noticed that big companies are leaving Bombay; he has seen the jobs cut down in his own area. Men such as Amol are not dreaming of moving to Malabar Hill. Their dreams are more limited in scale. Amol has marked out the small open space in front of his house; he would like to expand the house there, build a balcony. Pleasure is taken at the beer bar. They are not especially devout,
although they will follow the rituals readily enough. Most of them are loyal to the concept of the Indian nation, but they won’t go into the army.
Amol is thoughtful. He is eating his food with a fork and spoon. His head lowered, he says, “There are very dangerous days ahead.”
“Why?”
“People don’t have jobs. The boys have no work, nothing to do all day. And everything’s expensive. Now if a young man wants to go to a ladies’ bar and have a couple of drinks, he won’t have money to give to his people at home. You can get boys used to going to ladies’ bars, to the lifestyle, and then they’ll do anything for money.”
“What will be the effect of this?” I ask Amol.
“Murders will cost two hundred rupees.”
“How can a man kill?” I ask Amol. “How can he bring himself to do it?”
“You are a writer. After drinking you will say to yourself, now I must write a story. If you are a dancer, after drinking you will feel like dancing. If you are a killer, after drinking you will think, Now I must kill somebody.” Amol flexes his arms. It’s what you do; it’s in your nature.
T
O KEEP FROM LOSING
his boys to the underworld gangs, Bal Thackeray has constantly to channel their violent energy. He has to invent new enemies. The easiest to attack are people in the arts, ill understood by the Sena’s rabble. In 1998, the Sena storms onto the stage at a concert by Ghulam Ali, the Pakistani ghazal maestro. “We can also sing,” they proclaim. And they have their boys recite “Jai Maharashtra.” The Saheb’s diktat comes down: No Pakistani entertainers can stage a concert in their city, no Pakistani sportsmen can play. The gentry of Mumbai suffers the shutting down of the concert without a peep. The police commissioner tells the newspapers that no crime has been committed, as the organizers have not registered a complaint. After all, this is the city where murderers walk free in the streets and sit in the highest legislative chambers of the city. They have powertoni.
The Saheb also strongly objects to an art film made by a Canadian-Indian filmmaker,
Fire
, which shows a love affair between two sisters-in-law in New Delhi. “Has lesbianism spread like an epidemic that it should be portrayed as a guideline to unhappy wives not to depend on their hus
bands?” he demands. Indian society could not tolerate the “so-called progressive culture of the West where they marry in the morning and take divorce in the evening.” Accordingly, his thugs destroy theaters showing the film, and it is taken off screens throughout the country. There are the usual editorials against Thackeray—in the English newspapers. Sunil and Amol and the boys in the Sena do not read the English newspapers.
But in January 1999, the Sena makes a big mistake: It takes on Sachin Tendulkar, the country’s most idolized cricketer. A mob of Sainiks storms into the offices of the Board of Cricket Control of India, angered by the board’s invitation to the Pakistani cricket team to tour India. They destroy the office, including the World Cup that had been brought home to India in 1983. Tendulkar is put under police protection, and the party’s leaders speedily distance themselves from the incident. By this point it has just become mob frenzy; the tiger Thackeray rides is now out of his control. This latest foray is not about a particular leader or even ideology; it is all about power and about feeding the imagination of Thackeray’s hordes. The vandals are young men, who, after working twelve-hour days as peons in some office where they endure humiliation and even a slap or two from men who are richer and less Maharashtrian than they are, take the train home. Inside the train, they bathe in perspiration; the air is fetid with sweat and farts. When they get home to the slum, their mothers and their fathers and their grandmothers will ask them what income they have brought home. Such a man lives with a constant sense of his own powerlessness, except when he is part of a mob, part of a contingent of seventy patriots fighting for the country’s honor, walking unmolested into movie theaters, posh apartments, and the offices of the cricket lords of the country, smashing trophies, beating up important people who drive fine cars. All the accumulated insults, rebukes, and disappointments of life in a decaying megalopolis come out in a cathartic release of anger. It’s okay to be angry in a crowd; the crowd feeds on your anger, digests it, nourishes your rage as your rage nourishes it. All of a sudden you feel powerful. You can take on anybody. It is not their city anymore, it is your city.