Riot (10 page)

RD:
When you say “communal,” you mean—

VL:
Hindu-Muslim. At that time, Zalilgarh suffered a Hindu-Muslim clash even though in much of the country Hindus and Muslims were united in a joint campaign, the Khilafat agitation against the British. These clashes have been repeated with frightening regularity over the following decades.

RD:
What causes these communal clashes?

VL:
Oh, many things. The issues are mostly local, such as attacks on religious processions, desecration of shrines, illicit relationships between men and women of different communities, and so on. The two communities live separately but near each other in crowded shantytowns or bastis, and any small spark could set ablaze a bloody confrontation. Each skirmish would leave behind its own fresh trail of hostility and suspicion, which offered fertile ground for the next clash.

RD:
Knowing all this, wasn't there anything you could do to prevent what happened? You and the police?

VL:
I've asked myself a thousand times if I could have done more than I did. Guru — Gurinder — too. You know the superintendent of police?

RD:
Gurinder Singh. I'm interviewing him next. A friend of yours, I believe?

VL:
Yes. We were at college together. St. Stephen's, in Delhi, a couple of years apart. I didn't know him well there, but we've become very good friends here. A tremendous officer. But such an unlikely cop.

RD:
Why?

VL:
Oh, he studied history in college, you know. Played hockey and played hookey. Drank a lot, even then. Was known for cracking bad jokes. They called him “the Ab Surd” — Sikhs are “Surds,” you see, short for “Sardarji,” which is an honorific for them — oh forget it, like most cross-cultural jokes, it's just too complicated to explain. Anyway, he's absurd when he wants to be, especially with a glass in his hand — make that a bottle. And he swears a lot. As I fear you'll find out. “The story of my life,” he says, “begins with the words, 'Once a pun a time.'” Today he'd probably say “a fucking time,” so be prepared. He took the IAS exams, as so many of us did at St. Stephen's, largely to please his parents. He really wanted to be a farmer — a peasant, he said, but secretly his ambition was to be a big commercial farmer, mechanized agriculture, tractors, irrigation canals, the lot. Simple pleasures, as Wilde said, are the last refuge of the complex. So he didn't try hard enough in the exams. Couldn't get into the Administrative Service, but made it to the police service. He hoped his parents would credit him for the effort and let him go off and work for his grandfather, who had the land but still tilled it the old-fashioned way. But they were horrified at the prospect. The police, they said, was hardly a great career, but it was better than farming. What sort of status would they have in society if their son were a mere flogger of bullocks? It was one thing if he'd failed the exams altogether, but here he had the chance for a real job, with real power. They weren't going to let him waste his life farming. How much money could a farmer make anyway? He gave in. [Pause.] We all do. [Pause.] I wanted to be a writer. My parents had other ideas.

RD:
In America, parents have stopped trying to tell their kids what to do in life.

VL:
It'll be a long while before we get to be like America.

RD:
I'll say. So you were telling me about Zalilgarh. The demographics. The background. Whether there was anything more you could have done to prevent what happened.

VL:
Whether we could have done anything more? I honestly don't think so. We did everything. It started the same way, you know, in Zalilgarh as elsewhere. The pattern was the same — daily belligerent processions and slogans of hate. Gurinder and I responded by the book, doing everything we'd been taught to do in such situations — calling meetings of the two communities, advising restraint, registering strong criminal charges against the more rabid processionists, energizing the peace committees, preventive arrests and so on.

RD:
Peace committees?

VL:
It's something we set up pretty much everywhere where we have a history of communal trouble. Committees bringing together leaders of both communities to work together, sort out their problems. We used every mechanism we had, every trick we knew. These measures might have been enough in normal times.

RD:
But these weren't normal times?

VL:
No, these weren't normal times. As the Ram Sila Poojan campaign gathered momentum, there was nothing we could do to ebb the raging flood of communal hatred.

RD:
Sorry, I just need to change the tape here.

 

from Lakshman's journal

March 26, 1989

“I suppose I never forgave my father,” she said somberly. “Just seeing him — doing it, doing that, with that awful woman from his office. I was barely fifteen, and I felt personally hurt, as if it was me he'd betrayed, and not my mother. He tried to talk to me, to explain, even to beg forgiveness, though he was too proud a man to use the word. I'll never forget the contempt with which, in my fifteen-year-old superiority, spouting some Freudian wisdom I'd picked up God knows where, I told him witheringly, ‘You're pathetic, Dad. Don't you realize you were just trying to make up for not being able to penetrate the Indian market?'?

She laughed, quietly, at the recollection of her own words. “I was known in the family as precocious Priscilla,” she said. “Dad was particularly fond of the phrase. He stopped using it after I said that.”

I stroked her hair, then kissed her tenderly on the cheek. “Precious Priscilla,” I said.

“Oh, I prefer that,” she replied, kissing me quickly on the lips. But then she turned serious again.

“I was
very
upset about what happened,” she went on. “It sort of crystallized a whole lot of half-formed feelings I'd developed about my father. What was he doing in India, after all? Trying to sell Coke. For God's sake, it's not as if he was bringing in medicines, or new technology, or clean drinking water, or electrification. It was Coke, for crying out loud.”

“Indians do drink Coke, sweetheart.”

“Well, some Indians do. But it hardly struck me as a noble endeavor. You know, in school there were the kids of diplomats, but there were also the kids of missionaries working in the tribal districts, others whose fathers were in India to construct dams or power stations or even an underground railway — useful things, necessary things. How I used to wish my dad was doing something like that, and not just selling Coke.” She shook her head, and her hair fell across her eyes, a curtain across her regret. I gently pushed it aside as she went on. “The irony is that these other kids actually envied me. ‘Your Dad works for Coke? Coo-oool.' You know the kind of thing. They thought their parents' professions were boring, while my dad was glamorous because he sold a product they all knew and valued. Strange, huh?”

I nodded, not wanting to contradict her.

“And then when he didn't do so well, and the government threw Coke out, and he was reduced to spending his time trying to explore schemes to get it back into the Indian market, I began to feel really conflicted about him, you know? On the one hand a part of me thought of him as a bit pathetic, and on the other I was kinda glad he was doing it because this meant we could stay on in India, and I loved India. For years I'd worshipped him, you know, the perfect father figure, tall and strong and handsome, with an easy laugh and a habit of throwing me up in the air when I was a little girl and catching me before I fell. And then I got too big to be thrown in the air, and too wise to see perfection in him, and too intelligent not to question what he was doing. Am I boring you?”

“No, of course not,” I said, kissing her this time on the forehead. “Go on.”

“I was disappointed, too, in how little he saw of the India I loved. He knew the air-conditioned offices and the five-star hotels and the expatriate party-circuit, and he complained about the incompetence of the government and the inefficiency of the postal system and the unpredictability of the water supply, but he never set foot in a bazaar, he never visited the servants' quarters, he never saw the inside of a temple or a mosque, he never saw an Indian movie, he never made a real Indian friend. He thought he was going to conquer India with his Coke, but all he ended up conquering was a pathetic slut on the make.”

I held her tightly. “Let it be, Priscilla,” I said softly. “It was a long time ago.”

“I know that.” She shook herself free of my embrace: this was important. “But I can't forgive him. Not just for doing what he did, hurting Mom, destroying the family I'd always taken for granted. But also for being careless enough and thoughtless enough to do it there, in Mom's and his bed, on that afternoon, and letting me find him. I hated finding him like that. For years I wouldn't, I couldn't, let a boy touch me. I would shudder remembering my father, seeing him naked like that, moving in and out of that woman, slapping her behind, I'd remember the noises they made, his whoops, her moans — it was awful.”

“I understand,” I said, holding her, and this time she did not shake herself free of me.

“But then I decided I couldn't let him ruin the rest of my life too. Mom had brought us back to the States — we were in New York — and you have no idea what the peer pressure is like, if you're halfway decent-looking and not obviously crazy. Every boy in my grade and one or two grades up wanted to take me out, carry my books home, invite me to the movies. When I resisted at first, or when I agreed but wouldn't do anything they wanted me to, it was awful. Kids in school were beginning to whisper that I was a freak, that I wouldn't even let a boy kiss me, that maybe I was a lesbian. I couldn't stay sealed up like that. And then I wanted — I wanted a pair of strong male arms around me again. I wanted to be thrown up in the air again, and caught as I came down. I wanted so much to find someone who'd help me forget Dad, someone who was as different from him as possible so that he couldn't possibly remind me of him.”

And then you ended up with me, I couldn't help myself thinking. Another married man cheating on his wife with an exotic foreigner.

But that was not where she was leading: not yet.

“So in my senior year at high school I got involved with a kid in my class. Well, I may as well say it, a black kid in my class. Darryl Smith. He was an athlete, the captain of the basketball team, not particularly bright or anything, but a really nice guy. And God, was he tall: the thing I'll always remember about my first kiss was having to stand on tiptoe like a ballerina to reach his lips, even though he had to bend down a long way to reach mine.” A light shone in her eyes like a distant star, pulsing through the clouds. “People started talking at school, of course, and I suppose I should have felt I was doing something daring, something risky. But in fact with Darryl I felt completely safe, completely free of the shadow of my father. When he took his clothes off for the first time, I couldn't keep my eyes off his lean and well-muscled body It was as if I was soaking every detail into my memory, registering another set of images over the ones of my father that had haunted me for so long.” She looked at me, suddenly, as if she was conscious for the first time that it was me she was talking to. “Does this bother you, Lucky? I'll stop if you want me to.”

“No,” I lied, my voice thickening, because it was beginning to bother me a great deal. “I want to hear what you have to say.”

She hugged me tightly. “It's important, for us, don't you see? I want you to know everything that matters to me. I want you to understand.”

“I know,” I said. “Go on.”

“When my parents found out, they were both upset with me. My father was back in Atlanta, working at Coca-Cola headquarters, so I saw him just three or four times a year. But he was furious, just because Darryl was black. ‘They're not like us,' he kept saying. And, ‘How could you?' To which I couldn't always resist replying, ‘That's a question you ought to answer first, don't you think, Dad?' And of course he refused to meet Darryl, not that I particularly wanted him to, anyway. Mom disapproved, too, in that dry way she has, never raising her voice, never even mentioning his color, just saying, ‘Priscilla, you know you can do better. What about that nice boy on the debate team? He wanted to take you out, and you never—' And of course the boy on the debate team was smart, and rich, and white, and Darryl fell short on all three counts. Which made me love him all the more.” Her voice lightened, as if to take the drama out of her next sentence. “Love in the face of impossible odds. I began to convince myself that Darryl and I would be together forever.” She laughed a little, as if at her own naiveté. “But of course it wasn't going to last. And our problem was not that he was black and I was blonde, not even that he was a jock and I was a straight-A student. It was that we didn't talk to each other. Darryl was uncomplicated, and affectionate, and pretty straight with me, but again unlike my father, he was a man of few words. And he didn't particularly want to listen to mine, either. If I tried to tell him about my family, or about India, or about a book I was reading, he would simply smile a big, gleaming smile and shut me up with a kiss. Which would go on to more than a kiss. And afterwards, he'd want to go get a bite, or a drink, or go dancing; but he wouldn't particularly want to talk.

“I just accepted that as part of how we were. I would talk instead with my girlfriends, especially Cindy, who's the closest friend I have, someone I'd known since grade school, since before we went to India. And I thought, well, he doesn't talk much, but I know he cares about me, and that's what matters. I didn't mind his laconic ways till the day he told me, in that happy, direct way he had, that he had received a basketball scholarship from Gonzaga. In the state of Washington, for God's sake. And he was planning to take it.