Riot (32 page)

I suppose I can understand why he feels he can't afford to admit it. I wonder how much she meant to him. Or he to her, since she was leaving India, after all. The last love of her life … It doesn't bear thinking about.

I'll never know what happened to my poor baby. Perhaps it's just as the officials said it was, and she was surprised by criminals, or surprised them in the act. They must have thought it was her life or theirs. But what was she doing there? It doesn't make sense.

Except, perhaps, in the terms India believes in: Destiny. Fate. Karma.

Maybe it was God's will, and all one can do is to accept it. She died where she would have wanted to have lived.

 

Gurinder to Ali, at Police Thana Zalilgarh

October 5, 1989

Come on, you misbegotten sonofabitch, tell me the truth. What happened at the Kotli?

Don't give me that shit. You were there, you know it. You and your fucking friends, with your stupid bloody soothli bombs. Go on, turd-eater, tell me. You made the bombs, took them to town, tried to use them. Then I came along and started firing and you crapped in your pants and ran. We caught the young bugger, but you'd made it out by then, you and your cohorts. You didn't know where to hide in the middle of a fucking riot, so you buggered off back to the Kotli, expecting to spend the night with the rest of your frigging bombmaking ingredients. And what did you find when you got there? A bloody American woman, that's who.

And not just any bloody American woman, right, Ali? Somebody you had a fucking strong reason to dislike. Somebody you'd threatened more than once. There she is, you're fucking scared, your adrenaline is pumping like crazy, she recognizes you, you know you're done for, so you go at her, don't you, Ali? Don't you? Tell me, sisterlover! There's worse for you if you don't talk! What did you do with the fucking knife, you sonofabitch?

Forget him, Havildar. This bastard won't talk.

Maybe he's telling the truth. Maybe he didn't do it. But he did enough to get him put away for a long time. He won't be beating his pissing wife for a while.

 

Ram Charan Gupta to Makhan Singh

October 3, 1989

I don't want to know. Don't tell me anything, Makhan. Perhaps you went there after your bath, your prayers fresh in your mind, looking for the DM to teach him a lesson. But he was in Zalilgarh, putting down the riot. Instead, perhaps you found his woman, sitting there, waiting for him. Perhaps she started running away from you, and you caught her, and perhaps she fought too hard and you used your knife. Perhaps you thought of Arup, scarred and disfigured for life because this woman's special friend won't let us deal with these Muslims once and for all. It doesn't matter. I don't want to know.

After all, perhaps you didn't go there at all. Perhaps you finished your prayers and found the curfew made movement impossible, so you stayed at home. Don't say a word! Or perhaps you went there and found the Muslim criminals already there, and you found discretion the better part of valor and turned back. So many possibilities … But I really don't want to know, Makhan.

Sometimes, when you are in the position I am in, ignorance is bliss, Makhan. And I am a blissful man tonight.

 

Rudyard Hart to Katharine Hart at the PWD
guest house, Zalilgarh

October 15, 1989

Katharine, Kathy, goodnight. No, wait. I don't know how to say this but I must. When we went to that Kotli place and saw the room where she was killed I thought I would burst in pain. But then something miraculous happened. I saw you. I saw the strength in you, the inner calm you've always had. When you knelt to touch that bloodstain on the floor of the alcove, the screaming inside my heart stopped. And a sort of peace descended on me.

Wait, I haven't finished. I don't know what exactly I was looking for when I decided to come here and talked you into coming too. Closure, I guess. Some way to come to terms with the finality of Priscilla's — of the knowledge that she was gone. I don't know if I've found that. I've found something else, though. A way of seeing into myself.

Coming back to India has taught me a lot about my first time here. When I was here last, Kathy, I saw a market, not a people. At my work, I saw a target, not a need. With Nandini, I saw an opportunity, not a lover. I took what I could and left. And now India has taken from me the one human being who mattered most to me in the world. Except that she didn't know it. And I didn't fully realize it myself until it was too late.…

There are a lot of other things it's too late for. But there's one thing I should have said to you a long time ago. A very simple thing: I'm sorry

It's never too late to say you're sorry, is it, Kathy?

 

Geetha at the Shiva Mandir

October 7, 1989

Every Saturday I have come here to pray with my daughter, and I have sought your blessings and your advice, Purohit-ji, as well as that of the Swamiji.

I want to tell you this evening that my prayers have been answered.

Here is my offering for a special puja. That's right. For my husband's health, happiness, and long life.

from Lakshman's journal

October 4, 1989

I leaf through her scrapbook, and my grief blurs the lines on each page. I try not to imagine her death, but I cannot help myself.

 The Kotli, at dusk, as the trees make a sieve of the fading light, and the air is still. She goes to our usual place, for the last time. Behind her, Zalilgarh is burning, but she is oblivious of it, forgetting the world in her desire to see me. Her body is full of sentences waiting to be spoken, of moments yet unlived, soft and heavy as if awakening from a sleep of lingering dreams. She waits, as the darkness gathers around her like a noose.

There is a scurry on the stairs, a stab of fear in her heart. Night falls on her like a knife.

Her assailant — assailants? — would not have had an easy time killing her. She would have fought furiously. She had one more reason to want to live.

I know now why it was so important for her to see me one last time. She had something to tell me, something that she thought might yet change my mind.

One more detail Gurinder had to suppress in the postmortem.

She was carrying my child.

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tempers dangerously.

“There was nothing we could do to stem the raging flood of communal hatred,” admitted V. Lakshman, 33, the district magistrate, or chief administrator, of the town.

As the seemingly endless procession wound its way slowly through the narrow lanes, Lakshman and his superintendent of police, a convivial Sikh named Gurinder Singh, patrolled the throng with their officers, hoping to head off violence before it erupted. The two men described a scene of stamping feet and shouted slogans, with processionists spewing vitriol and flashing blades in the hot sun. Twice the marchers came close to attacking the town's main mosque, and twice they were headed off. Just when it seemed that the march would proceed without serious incident, a bomb attack occurred on the procession. Shooting followed, the crowd ran amok, and Zalilgarh soon had a full-scale riot on its hands.

Eight people were killed in the disturbances, forty-seven injured, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of property damaged. By the standards of some of the riots that have been sweeping northern India in the wake of the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, Zalilgarh's was a modest affair. What made it unusually tragic was that it took an American life, one that was neither Hindu nor Muslim: Priscilla Hart's.

Ms. Hart had friends in both communities, and they are united in expressing shock and grief at her killing. “She was so special,” said Miss Kadambari (who uses only one name), an extension worker at the project who worked closely with Miss Hart. “No one could have wanted to harm her.” Her project director, Mr. Shankar Das, recalled her as a “sweet person” who “made friends very easily.” No one in Zalilgarh could explain why anyone would want to kill Priscilla Hart.

“In riots, all sorts of things happen,” said Gurinder Singh, the policeman. “People strike first and ask questions later.”

For Priscilla's parents, Rudyard and Katharine Hart, who traveled to Zalilgarh to understand the reasons for their daughter's death, the questions will never cease. The Zalilgarh police have arrested a number of Muslim rioters, some of whom they suspect of involvement in Ms. Hart's death, but they have no clues and no confession. As is often the case in riot-related killings, the real murderers of Priscilla Hart may never be apprehended.

“It is hard to escape the conclusion,” a U.S. embassy spokesman said, “that she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Mr. Lakshman, however, questions whether there is such a thing as the wrong place, or the wrong time. “We are where we are at the only time we have,” he said. “Perhaps it's where we're meant to be.”

AFTERWORD

On December 6, 1992, a howling, chanting mob of Hindu fanatics, armed with hammers and pickaxes, demolished the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, vowing to construct the Ram Janmabhoomi temple in its place. In the riots that followed across the country, thousands of lives, both Hindu and Muslim, were lost. These events marked the worst outburst of communal violence in India since Partition.

The consecrated bricks gathered in the Ram Sila Poojan program of 1989 are still gathering dust. Though, at this writing, the Hindutva-inclined Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is in power at the head of a coalition government in New Delhi and also runs the state government of Uttar Pradesh, the temple has not yet been built.

Various affiliates of the Sangh Parivar family of Hindu organizations have announced plans to proceed with the construction of a Ram temple on the site, in defiance of court orders. At the great Maha Kumbha Mela pilgrimage on the banks of the sacred river Ganga in Varanasi in January 2001, they displayed an impressive model of the temple they intend to build, and declared that they would commence construction on March 12, 2002, whether or not the government granted its consent. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, however, has declared that the matter can only be resolved in one of two ways: through the judicial process, or in a negotiated agreement between Hindus and Muslims. Neither method has made much headway in the last five decades.

We live, the late Octavio Paz once wrote, between oblivion and memory. Memory and oblivion: how one leads to the other, and back again, has been the concern of much of my fiction. History, the old saying goes, is not a web woven with innocent hands.

May 2001

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe a special debt of gratitude to my dear friend Harsh Mander, IAS, on whose hitherto unpublished account of a riot in Khargone, Madhya Pradesh, I have based some of the details of the Zalilgarh episode. As this book goes to press, I have learned that the story of the Khargone riot is being published in 2001 by Penguin India as part of a debut collection by Harsh Mander,
Unheard Voices: Stories of Forgotten People,
which I warmly commend. With Harsh's permission I have used many of his basic facts about the management of the riot and, in a few places, his own words, and I remain deeply grateful. Readers should know, however, that no foreigner was killed in Khar-gone; all the key details as they relate to the characters in this novel — and in particular all the personal relationships, character elements, beliefs, and motivations depicted herein — are, of course, completely fictional.

The research by “Professor Mohammed Sarwar” on Ghazi Miyan is based on the actual work of Professor Shahid Amin of Delhi University, another old friend to whom I am grateful, though every other detail relating to the character, including the views expressed by him, are solely my responsibility. The efforts of “Rudyard Hart” on behalf of Coca-Cola in India were in fact undertaken by Kisan Mehta, for whose kindness, recollections, and insight I offer my thanks.

My friend and publisher in India, David Davidar, and my literary agent in New York, Mary Evans, offered valuable suggestions on the text, which have helped me improve it immeasurably. Jeannette and Dick Seaver at Arcade Publishing, and the diligent Ann Marlowe, have been terrific in their support for
Riot
and its author. My sisters, Shobha Srinivasan and Smita Menon, read the manuscript with devotion and insight; they have each left their mark on the characters and events of this novel in more ways than one. To them all I offer my thanks, and my love.