The train was still at platform number one, the neon sign SECOND CLASS RETIRING ROOM flickered randomly. Where I stood I noticed tracks of birds permanently embedded in cement. Two silverish-hued pigeons were fluttering about completely oblivious to the human mass. The platform was definitely not a good site for a group shot because we were surrounded by a high concentration of men, waiting chaotically, elbowing women, ogling. Nelly volunteered to take the photo. We flocked together, all boys. Time was on our side then, most smiles filled with optimism, or rather entitlement. As I said before there were no female students in our group. On my laptop I have a scanned copy of that overexposed photo. Behind us the flickering neon sign. Professor Singh in the middle. One hand visible. His tie, black and narrow and angled, so unlike the symmetry of his turban. Nelly included Father in the photo, even though she could have kicked him out of the frame.
We urged her to join us in the second shot, but she looked baffled, and insisted on occupying the space behind the camera.
Several years later I wrote about the photo and the handshake and my stoic-faced father. I wrote about Nelly. No other images haunt me more. But for some reason memory fails me here, I have little recall of the onward train journey.
On 30 October we visited the pharmaceutical plant in Kasauli. (In colonial times the building served as a TB sanatorium.) On 31 October we visited the Mohan Meakin Brewery in the Solan Hills. (In colonial times it was called the Dyer–Meakin Brewery. Dyer was the father of General Dyer who ordered the Amritsar Massacre in 1919.) I still remember the enzymes, the smell of fermentation reactors and the hum of giant crushers, centrifuges and heat exchangers. Stage 3 washing with excess CO2 to remove harmful gases from the liquid, the Bengali quality-control officer (a ‘teetotaller’ and a Brahmin) who tasted the ‘thing’ after it ‘matured’. Because I was exactly six feet tall, Professor Singh made me stand next to the inebriated fermentation reactors and commanded the camera-wallah to take a shot. No one asked why. For we understood the implicit reasoning. The dimensions of my body (height in this case) a most convenient way to estimate the dimensions of the reaction vessel! ‘Back home you will list the design variables and calculate the safety factors. How safe are the “safety factors”?’ Alcohol was pumped like water from a muddy brown river to the bottling zone of the plant. In my ears I still carry an echo of the strange music the pasteurised glass bottles produced on the conveyor belt. Fifty thousand bottles a day.
During our return journey Professor Singh told us about the writer Kipling, who supported General Dyer even after the massacre of innocent Indians. Kipling contributed twelve pounds to the mass murderer’s retirement fund, and called him ‘brave’. Professor Singh also spoke about Gandhi with some admiration. ‘But,’ he said, ‘Mahatma Gandhi was plain wrong about certain things. I cannot get used to the idea that he opposed the railways! Where would we be without the railways? There– ’ I heard a scream. Someone discovered two rats in the bogie. Perhaps it was the sheer insane energy of youth that made me pick them up. Something was definitely strange about the rats, they had not yet started decomposing. Two rust-coloured bodies, freshly dead, hooked to my fingers, dangled in front of everyone. Abe pagal ho gaya hai kya? teased the chorus of voices. Another whisper: Professor ki pagri main dal de, saleh! Put them inside the professor’s turban, saleh! The rats spun and wobbled when I dropped them out of the moving window. For a brief second I felt I was in my school biology lab about to begin dissections. Odour of formaldehyde. Smell of an anatomy experiment. I don’t recall now my exact state of mind when after a brief pause the professor regaled us with stories about his great-grandfather. When just fifteen, great-grandfather, a self-taught chemist, joined the Maharajah’s court. One day musicians came to the court claiming their music possessed the power to light up all the lamps in the palace. Demonstrate it, ordered the Maharajah. Lots of sitars were strummed and resonant ragas and raginis sung, but the lamps refused to ignite. The Maharajah, more embarrassed than the celebrity musicians, turned to the fifteen-year-old, who knew exactly what to do. In his spare time the kid, the boy, had taught himself the sciences. He dissolved white phosphorus in carbon disulphide and refilled the lamps with this magical ‘oil’. The enchanted musicians kept playing their ragas and the royal audience kept swooning (and murmuring). Soon carbon disulphide evaporated in the lamps and the phosphorus caught fire. In a flash the wicks lit up high with a strange glow to dazzle everyone. There was a loud cheer in the court. And a stunned silence in the train. I don’t know when exactly one of us (pretending to be drunk) came up with the bright idea to transform ‘bad odours’ into fragrance. (The toilet in our bogie lacked a door, and there was an ensemble of houseflies on human vomit. Someone said a new bride had been throwing up.) Professor Singh very playfully massaged the student’s idea and they discussed the experimental procedure . . . He had a smile. To this day I cannot forget his sardonic smile. As engineers you are expected to be ‘ingenious’, he said seriously. In our country we end up becoming ‘one-dimensional’ and ‘obedient’. We must learn to pose the right questions, and question what is considered right. Soon some of you might get involved with the three most important questions. What are they? The origin of the universe. The origin of life. The origin of mind.
Several times I have tried to recall the train journey. Every attempt a failure. Every attempt a mere fucking iteration (if I am still allowed to use that word). I recall most of us disappointed (and terribly thirsty) because the managers at the brewery had refused to gift us bottles of Mohan Meakin. ‘Company policy.’ This detail is perhaps the most insignificant from that journey.
The catering-wallah passed by and we ordered twenty-one lunches, eight veg and thirteen non-veg, dal and chawal and dahi and oily parathas with achar. Non-veg thalis had fish curry or mutton with gravy. I ordered fish and this detail for some reason is stuck. The fish is stuck inside me. Some chutiya mentioned surrogate mothers and then a bad joke, ‘Do female mannequins have pubic hair?’ and Professor Singh stared at our silliness and there was a stunned silence. Then someone suggested antakshari and we sang old film songs and Michael Jackson and Prince, and even David Bowie, until someone turned on the radio, first All India Radio, and immediately afterwards the short-wave BBC Radio, which confirmed that Mrs Gandhi had been assassinated by her own bodyguards.
Good, the bitch is dead, a class fellow said, and Professor Singh stood up and raised his voice. ‘You should not talk like this. So many bullets have been emptied into the poor woman, no one deserves to die like that. To disagree with someone doesn’t mean you assassinate them.’
The slow-moving train got more and more delayed, and perhaps it was one of the most difficult nights for the entire country. The delay was a tense six-hours.
Early in the morning we saw people defecating by the railways tracks, Subzi Mandi passed by, and then New Delhi station. Even before it came to a complete halt we saw traces of violence on the platform, but there were cops stationed there, and because the cops were armed with guns and lathis we thought the situation was under control. We spontaneously formed a circle around Professor Singh (for he was the only Sikh in our group) and stepped out of the bogie. I wish my father had been there to receive us, then there would have been no need to worry, but in those days cellphones didn’t exist. Suddenly an angry mob, armed with the most elementary weapons (metal rods and rubber tyres), crossed the railway line and climbed up the platform. ‘Khoon ka badla khoon say. Give us that traitor sardar.’ We started to run. ‘Blood for blood.’ What broke the circle was a Vespa scooter on the platform. Sudden screeching of brakes, tyre marks, rubber smell. A photojournalist in a yellow windcheater started snapping pictures of the mob, which had fished out our professor. ‘Stop taking pictures,’ said one of the thugs, ‘otherwise we kill you.’
The thug points at Professor Singh. ‘This traitor Sikh is going to take pictures. Those who want to save him, we kill you.’ He kicks the ‘sister-fucker’ journalist in the balls, snatches the camer
a, destroys the roll. I remain paralysed on my spot. He snatches our professor’s suitcase. ‘Sardar-ji, our mother is dead and you are not crying? Cry, behnchod. Gadar kay londay, beat your chest.’ He unzips the suitcase, rummages through the contents, old and new, pulls out something that looks like a souvenir for Nelly, and a Pahari doll (most likely for his daughter) and a Himachali achkan (most likely for his son). ‘Nice wristwatch.’ Then the thug gestures for other lumpens to go ahead; the lumpens spray gasoline from the journalist’s scooter on our teacher, slip a rubber tyre around his neck. ‘Let me go. What have I done?’ I can hear Professor Singh shout. The tyre constrains his arms. ‘Sardar, you sister-fucker, you killed our mother. Gadar, now we kill you.’
‘Stop it,’ I say, ‘you can’t do this, he is our teacher.’ ‘Khoon ka badla khoon say . . . saala sardar ki aulad . . . gadar ki aulad.’ Although it is early morning, his breath stinks of rum. Half of my class fellows disappear, others repeat the same thing over and over: ‘This is madness.’ I urge the cops to help, I tell them that I happen to be the son of a senior police officer, the most senior. At this point the chief lumpen laughs and spits in Professor Singh’s face, douses the tyre with more hydrocarbons and strikes a match. A senior Congress leader, his Nehru – Gandhi khadi clothes fluttering in the wind, is standing close to the station master’s office on the platform, guiding the mob like the conductor of a big orchestra. Khatam kar do sab sardaron ko. Khatam kar do saanp kay bacchon ko. Finish them, children of snakes. Destroy them all. He is not very tall and wears black glasses. I will never forget that Congress-wallah’s black glasses. I feel like confronting him, but stand on my spot, paralysed. ‘This is the way to teach the Sikhs a lesson,’ says a bystander. I take a deep breath. The black glasses are gone. The photojournalist is still trembling; they spare his Vespa, and we keep hearing the screams. I still hear those screams. I can’t hear enough. We couldn’t do a thing. I could do nothing. The only thing I was able to save was a shoe and that too was lost in the commotion that followed.
It was sickening, you had to see the horror to believe the horror and it was so unreal I almost didn’t believe my own sense organs. But the fire and the smoke were so absolutely real, different from the way they are done in the movies. During the combustion I could not use my knowledge of chemistry and physics to extinguish the flames. How fast they engulfed his entire body. I could do nothing. I was a mere onlooker. In the end all that remained along with the ashes were a few bones and a steel bracelet. Black like a griddle.
If Primo Levi had witnessed the moment he would have written the chapter called Sulphur differently. Sulphur is used to vulcanise rubber that is used in tyres.
Primo Levi survived the German Nazis and Italian Fascists because he helped them prepare Buna rubber during the war. In India my compatriots slipped rubber around Professor Singh’s neck and set him on fire.
My father had sent an official jeep to pick me up at the station and drop me at the IIT campus. Two of my classmates accompanied me.
As the jeep passed Tolstoy Marg I saw dozens of Sikh bodies on fire. Smell of burning wool and rubber tyres and human flesh. I saw taxis being smashed. And the black cloud of smoke touched the sky. This was our Eiffel Tower. This was our carnival. Our periodic table of hate.
We passed by the church. The Bishop was standing by the giant black-painted cast-iron gates, preventing the mob from entering the church. Thousands of children, women and men had taken refuge inside.
It was a Thursday. The jeep driver was in tears, he had seen horrible things. The skinny man trembled, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Gurdwaras on fire, Guru Granth on fire. He said he didn’t want to come, but it was Sahib’s order and his duty. Those days my parents lived in a mansion on Amrita Sher-Gil Marg (the road named after the ‘mother of modern Indian art’), and I lived in the hostel on the IIT campus.
After this there are lapses in my memory. And moisture in my eyes. There was too much going on. Too many exams. What conversations I had with my father and classmates I have little recall. Were they equally shocked? Soon afterwards toxic methylisocyanide gas leaked from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal. Back at the campus I stood in front of Nelly’s house and noticed that almost a quarter of it was badly damaged. Charred is the right word. There was a yellow padlock on the chestnut-coloured front door. The brick wall behind the house, between the campus and the village, was broken. According to rumours, she had survived the attacks.
Classes resumed and someone else replaced Professor Singh, and what made his death more unbearable was an empty chair; it was not his chair, but the chair of another Sikh boy in our class. He, too, had disappeared. When I had joined IIT there were two Sikh students in my class. Only one of them managed to survive and he was heavily traumatised; now he was the only one left and he seemed to have been transformed into silence itself.
Soon afterwards, maybe a couple of weeks later, we were all asked to assemble outside the hostels and form a line, and the new warden ordered the Sikh boys to form a separate line. At first I thought this was for their own safety, they were being sent elsewhere, this is the time before YouTube and Facebook and fearless bloggers, we didn’t know what was really going on, media was state-controlled, people turned on short-wave BBC to find out what really happened or what was happening in the country. But soon we found out. A Dalit woman had been molested on the IIT campus and she had complained to the authorities. A Sikh boy had molested her – she knew this because he had entered her tent in a turban. The student in our class was also in the line-up (along with nine or ten others). It is to that woman’s credit she didn’t point a finger at those who were innocent, but whenever she stood in front of a turbaned and bearded face my heart leaped out of my body. Not one of them was guilty; we all knew who had done it. A Hindu boy had tied a turban on and had entered the Dalit construction workers’ tent, but no one had the guts to report him.
After the incident the Sikh boy in our class came to me and urged me to accompany him to the market, and he told me to take him to the barber’s shop and the first barber refused to cut his hair, and the second one confirmed with him several times if he was sure. ‘Of course I am sure’, he said. And I remember that day clearly when his hair was being cut. He had shut his eyes tight, and the crackling of the transistor radio could be heard in the barber’s shop and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s voice: when a big tree falls the Earth shakes. I say this in hindsight; when I heard the crackling radio I was too young to process the lack of shock, and the force field of hate, in the new PM’s words. My classmate’s hair had piled up in the barber’s shop. We paid. He was slightly shorter than me, and it was windy, the city still smelled of burning rubber and I asked him how does it feel. He stopped on the pavement. And then God knows what got into him, he lifted his hand and slapped me. And I was so shocked I didn’t know what to do. By the time I processed this it was too late to slap him back and I simply laughed.
Chapter 2.
Drops
‘Dystopia’ is a word I learned in 1983 while preparing for my GRE exams to apply for higher studies in the US. A compound made up of two ancient Greek words. Dys = ill, bad, wretched. Topos = place, land. A government that harms its own citizens. A state in which life is sometimes extremely wretched as a form of deprivation or oppression or genocidal pogroms. In the land where Orwell was born, 1984 was never imaginary. In India it was real, 1984 is burned fully into my retina; it recurs every day, every month, every year with its own chilling periodicity.
My memories are scalded memories. Remains of a fire. Dense black smoke flows through my veins. Delhi is a singed postcard. Smell of fungus, actinomycetes, just before rain. We waited. But it didn’t rain the first week of November. That is why human ash still coats my lungs. I have given up trying to comprehend the madness that overtook the city. I summon images, try to plot them with words and numbers on a 3D graph, but words don’t live up to their reputation, each one a failure. All I can do is listen to the pain of others. Perhap
s it is more than my own.
Twenty-five years after the Event, on a night like this, I took the train to Shimla to see my professor’s wife. Something keeps me from calling her a widow. As the narrow carriage picked up speed, I thought about the remaining days of my sabbatical, and the possibility of closure. But the past refused to become past. Outside, a thin forest of chir pines and oaks with serrated leaves, although I could not see a thing. Only a faint reflection of spiral tracks and my own face in tinted glass. There exist only two ways to deal with time, and I, several years ago, chose the wrong way. More than once I thought of standing by the open, rattling door, but I was afraid of myself.
Shimla or ‘Simla’ was colder than I had expected. A porter moved my luggage along the rough cobbled path to the hotel on the upper mall. I had a booking for six nights at the Peterhof (a fossil left behind by the Empire). The hotel clerk had warned me of an upcoming Hindu Party convention, a ‘brainstorming’ session, a so-called chintan baithak. But the event hadn’t seemed to matter when I made the reservation.
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