1.13 National TV channel, Doordarshan (the only channel in the country at that time), used to incite ordinary people. The print media by and large collaborated with the state.
1.14 Hospitals like AIIMS refused to admit victims. The Fire Brigade refused to save Sikh homes and businesses.
2 The police were under the direct control of the central government. In November 1984 the Chief of astonishing Delhi Police was Shri S. C. Tandon, IPS. His actions (and non-actions) will outlast him. To this day he has never been held to account.
2.16 The police did not register most reports of murder, mass murder, rape, looting, attacks on photo-journalists.
2.161 The police spread vicious rumours about the Sikhs, and in certain zones actively encouraged the mobs to kill.
2.162 Sikh police officers (20 per cent of the force) were removed from active duty because they planned action against the arsonists.
2.163 Men in khaki directed mobs to houses where the Sikhs were hiding. You have three days, do whatever you want.
2.1631 The only people arrested by the police were the Sikhs. Or the police took away weapons from Sikh civilians and armymen trying to defend themselves, and paved way for mobs of trained killers to do their job seamlessly.
2.164 Low-ranking officers who defied the orders were immediately removed from duty and penalised.
2.165 Delhi Police’s astonishing slogan to this day gives most citizens goosebumps: With you, For you, Always.
3 This kind of coordination of the state apparatus to kill its own citizens in such large numbers was unsurpassed in Indian history after the 1947 Partition.
3.1 Anyone who happened to be a Sikh was the target, doesn’t matter if they were Independence fighters, industrialists, scientists, farmers, politicians, diplomats, journalists, soldiers, cooks, mechanics, teachers, taxi drivers and, ironically, ‘People who had voted for the Congress Party’.
3.11 The poor suffered more than the rich, and this is an understatement.
3.12 Women were raped and their children were forced to watch the rape. Human body parts were sliced off and left for the dogs.
3.13 Although this was ‘mass murder’, each Sikh body was dragged out of a house or a shack or a hiding place and burned individually.
3.14 A famous Sikh writer took refuge in the Swedish embassy. ‘I felt like a jew in Nazi Germany,’ he said.
4 Not one but two prime ministers enabled the pogrom. Narasimha Rao, the Home Minister, also became Prime Minister a few years later.
4.01 When the obituaries of these two chaps were composed (several years later), most editors simply forgot to mention mass murder.
5 Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi covered up the rapes and massacres, and rewarded the conductors of the pogrom. His is the beautiful face of extreme cruelty and injustice connected to November ’84.
…
Sikhs ought to be taught a lesson (continued Mr Gopal). Your father was part of this mindset. He and other senior officers in the police force colluded with the government and ordered the force to behave criminally, unconstitutionally. Your father was an overnight hero, and he was not alone. Son, schoolchildren, today, do not read about the glorious work of astonishing beauty performed by these men because the story is not part of their textbooks . . . The state has tried to wipe away this dark memory . . . When the parliament reconvened the government never once mentioned the horrific carnage directly. When schools and colleges reopened the headmasters and principals completely forgot to mention those four days the city had just witnessed. The state, like a true criminal, took further advantage of the carnage. The astonishing Congress Party spent millions on an ad campaign, which vilified the minorities. The subliminal message of that PR campaign was that the pogroms were ‘natural’, ‘spontaneous’, ‘legitimate’, ‘outbursts of anger’, ‘inevitable’, ‘logical’. An entire community with a deep sense of belonging to India and Indianness was constructed by the state as the ‘other’. Part propaganda, part justification, the ad campaign is largely forgotten today, but in ’84 the Congress milked the pogroms to win an important election and retain power. The ads portrayed Sikhs as the enemy from across the barbed-wire fence, and the ‘strong’ Congress Party as the country’s most trusted ‘saviour’. Soon afterwards our colonial-style justice system took it upon itself to protect the guilty. Calling a public inquiry is not prudent, ruled the High Court judges of ‘democratic’ and ‘secular’ India. They were promoted to the Supreme Court, one was made the Chief Justice. Names are important. Have you followed Justice Ranganath Mishra’s glittering career? Later, one farcical commission after another essentially gave the Congress Party a clean chit. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, he said.
No one should be assassinated, but assassinations don’t change how one lived one’s life, continued Mr Gopal. Mrs Gandhi more than anyone else corroded the institutions of our democracy. The reason the violence against the Sikh citizens took place so efficiently, in such a coordinated fashion, is proof that she left the institutions rotten to the core.
In 1981 Mrs G refused to implement the recommendations of the National Police Commission. The commission after many years of hard work proposed a method to reduce the grip of the party in power on the police force. A thick report was presented to Madam, which also covered reforming police training, so as to inculcate the ‘supremacy of law’ and ‘human dignity’. Madam treated the report like crap.
She started the mess in Punjab. That is a complex and tragic story, topic for a thick book, a separate one. The book would also narrate the lives of Sikh leaders, some of them no better than self-serving pigs . . . Anyway . . . Let us not digress. We must learn from the damaged pages of history. How central this one thing is to that entire era. Mrs Gandhi, the so-called saviour of India, bought into her own ‘great leader’ myth: Indira is India and India is Indira. Myths can be dangerous. That one ruined her and millions of others. I hear a film is being made on her life and on her death. Soon they will worship her as a devi in temples.
The silence between us grew louder and, perhaps to forget it all, we began dozing and fell asleep for an hour. In my dizzy state I noticed a slightly peeved Mrs Gopal, in a green sari and chappals, clearing the table. I stood up and wished her namaste. She didn’t hug me her usual way. The years had created an enormous gulf between us. Before you go away there is something I must say. She didn’t sit down, but spoke candidly. It might comfort you. Something about your mother. I listened to your conversation with my husband (from the kitchen) and that is why decided to tell you. Under normal circumstances this is not the stuff an aunt tells her nephew. Mrs Gopal literally stammered as she called me her nephew. This might provide you some comfort, she repeated. I turned towards Mr Gopal. He was fast asleep, snoring mildly. On a certain day and at a certain hour, she said, your uncle and your father stopped their friendship and they asked us, the women, to act likewise. Did you? I asked. Well, we tried, but we couldn’t and we didn’t. Both of us, your mother and I, found a way around the closed doors and continued seeing each other. We stopped sharing confidences for a while, but it started again. If this comforts you to hear then you must know that your mother ‘denied’ your father after November ’84. Denied what? I asked. She denied him sex. This continued for several months. I can’t tell you more. And don’t ask me for more. Mrs Gopal returned to the kitchen with her eyes moist. Later, when he woke up, Mr Gopal dropped me at the train station.
We were on platform number 1, waiting. I can’t forget the operatic cacophony of birds. Tens and thousands of them perched right under the corrugated-metal roof. Perched on trussed structures right above the tracks, diminishing the evening light. Hundreds of them on electric wires and distant carriages and water pipes . . . The station felt like a grand bustling chiriaghar, each one of those creatures emitting sounds as if hopelessly lost and disorientated, with no sense of distance or direction or purpose. A loss incomprehensible to me, and it hurt my ears, the out-of-tune orchestra, wave after
amplified wave assaulting my ears, showing no signs of dampening. The chorus: much larger than the sum of its parts. Why were they there? Why were they indifferent to those thousands of mango and guava groves in the vicinity? Perhaps they were simply waiting for food. Perhaps a railway station is the safest place to roost. No predators. It was all a deafening mystery. What birds are these? I asked. Have you forgotten? he said. Mynahs, the common hill mynahs. Mr Gopal put his courageous arm around my shoulder. He smiled. Thank you, I said. He didn’t hear me. Forgot to mention something. His voice louder now. Have you heard of Ved Marwah? IPS? He is still alive, a fine man, but he missed a beautiful chance to become a hero. Ved Marwah, several years ago, after pressure from human rights organisations, was brought in to conduct an inquiry by the authorities, and suddenly he was asked to stop. Ved, you see, had made no attempt to save the guilty. He was not allowed to table the report. Your father and other senior officers and bureaucrats and senior Congress leaders concerned, including that failed aeronautical engineer Rajiv Gandhi (Mr Clean), and all the ethnic cleansers, simply wrecked the inquiry. It would raise issues which are really dead, emphasised Mr Clean. He, for his special talents and exemplary deeds, was showered with the highest civilian awards, including the Bharat Ratna, whereas Ved has been hounded for the last twenty-five years. A number of cases have been filed against Ved on flimsy grounds.
The train started rolling as if on Teflon, and soon it began to rain. The mynahs far away now, absolutely silent. Who in this bustling world would be cast to play the role of the great leader Indira Gandhi? I thought. How will the poor woman prepare for her role? If I ever write a book on this topic I will send the actress (my character) to the Indira Memorial in Delhi. She will go there and pay special attention to the polished surfaces, and all the missing bits, all the silences, loud and not so loud. What is absent will teach more about the so-called great leader than what is present, I thought. The great leader’s actions and the actions and inactions of her sons will teach my actress more than those four or five hagiographies, categorised as biographies. She will soon realise that her body is not passing through a Memorial, but really a Forgetorial. She will notice the conspicuous absence of certain citizens and question the state’s guided tour, and reject all the propaganda pamphlets. She will question the definitive versions of ‘What to remember’ and ‘How to remember’.
She will pose tons of questions about the Indian state, which organised, incited and carried out the genocidal violence.
The train was moving faster than the front of clouds. Outside, a woman was sitting on a fence scrutinising an undulating green field, tall pampas grass. All I could see (and still see) is a beautiful vortex of hair. She’s watching. She is watching a house. She is watching a house that is burning. She is watching a house that is burning in the rain. She draws cold water from a well (and it is still raining) and washes her sultry face. The image has deep subconscious striations, and this is a problem. Emblindened, she washes her hair with a dark textured substance that resembles henna . . . Who is this person?
The Russian actress, Margarita Terekhova, would be ideal for the role. She is a proof-reader running towards the printing press in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Breathless, in a state of panic, she runs in her unbuttoned overcoat; the dirt road is covered with crunchy autumn leaves. She enters the building through heavy security and runs to her office . . . The evening edition . . . The special edition . . . No edition should have misprints. The supervisor rushes the proof-reader to the printing zone amidst a loud hum of machinery, the two women in such a scurry as if paper unspooling out of a giant cylinder . . . She checks the proofs . . . Outside the window gusty, watery turbulence . . . No, she has made no error, and she starts crying . . . Her supervisor warms to her, lights a cigarette.
But what was the word? I asked the grown-ups over and over while watching the film. Why did the woman whisper the word? Why were we in the audience not supposed to know? My mother put a finger on her lips. Shh! It was 1975. After the film we ate in the International Centre tea room. T. Gopal had just returned from an official trip to Russia. He ordered goulash for all of us, including his daughter Gul. During the middle of our meal he noticed we six were the only ones in the place, and at that precise moment he explained the ‘whisper’: the misprint ‘S(r)alin’ means ‘shit’.
Mrs Ghandi imposed her Emergency in 1975 and Tarkovsky’s Mirror was also released in 1975. She claimed she was a mirror that allowed dishevelled India to take a peek at itself. She was India. So she screwed and embogged India extravagantly. During those days of censorship my father read five newspapers, and they all read like exact copies of each other. Perhaps that is why he used them to kill mosquitoes.
In Delhi, go to Jantar Mantar, and then the Lodhi Gardens, said Nelly on the phone, when I called her from Chandigarh. Stand in front of neem and tamarind and peepul and blood-red semal, gulmohar, amaltas and a purple jacaranda, and recite Ghalib and Paz. Then go to Bangla Sahib and Sis Ganj gurdwaras and listen to Gurbani. You will hear more verses there, and if you are lucky you will hear them recited in thirty-one ragas. Only a gesture will allow you to express your true feelings. Sometimes I miss the old city, its walls and exaggerations, its smells, its 12 million people. Those narrow fissured lanes of Chandni Chowk. For my sake: take the train to Delhi. For I have forgotten what it means to travel by a train.
In Delhi, go to my favourite bookstores, especially in the maze of Khan Market.
Your presence helped a lot, she said. After Maribel moved back to Mexico I thought I would fail to make it on my own, she said . . . Our walks through Shimla during a particularly difficult time also reminded me of my walks with my father when I was a girl. How keen he was that I learn my ‘mother tongue’ properly, and I don’t know why I resisted then. I see myself listening to Darwin, Partition stories and God, and I see myself asking him questions while watching Nanak Naam Jahaz Hai, the film in which a man’s blindness is cured by miraculous force.
It was a superfast Shatabdi train, meals on board. Tomato soup saturated with salt and pepper. Samosas and ketchup. Fish curry was the only dish I liked. The mineral-water bottle on my seat smelled of organo-chlorines. Not far from me sat two obese and expressionless Wisconsin tourists and an army general in a thinking-man pose. To this day I don’t know what his pensiveness was all about; he seemed to be enduring a bunch of college students, whirling around, exuding incessant silliness. Cellphones kept ringing, and people kept consuming spicy thalis, and cockroaches kept doing their work. At Panipat station two banias entered the carriage and their chatter and petty business deals overwhelmed the whole vibrating compartment. Wire ki length ki lambai kitni hai. I was retracing a journey that has haunted me all these years. But on that train it really meant nothing. Half an hour before Delhi most passengers clogged the aisle, unafraid of injury to themselves and others. Then a high-pitched pre-recorded voice announced ‘You are requested to destroy the mineral-water bottles’ and a chill went right through me.
I was the last one to disembark the train at New Delhi station. Platform number 1. Flickering soot-coated neon signs. UPPER CLASS WAITING ROOM. Smell of human shit, peanuts and marigolds. There I felt a burning sensation. On the train the coffee had burned my tongue and my upper palate. Nothing else. I bought a couple of papers from Pankaj Bookstall, and instead of heading towards the station exit, on the spur of the moment decided to get a haircut from the station barber. Military-style crew cut. The barber made me repeat my request, sensing a disconnection between my words and thoughts. Towards the end his strong fingers massaged my bare head with coconut oil. During the haircut a chill went through my spine, and I thought about my Sikh classmate at IIT. That entire time came back like hard foam and slapped me. It was the 18th or 19th of November in 1984 when his hair was being removed; 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 was too young to
process the lack of shock, and the force field of hate, in the new PM’s words. The massacre didn’t raise a single hair on the PM’s body. Limited vocabulary of a pogrom, and equally bad physics: when a big tree falls the Earth shakes. Slowly my feet dragged me automatically to the waiting room. Only one bench was free, but I decided not to occupy that tiny space. Don’t know why I stood paralysed in one corner with my luggage until I heard those seventeen-year-olds playing antakshari . . . At first the loud singing and clapping annoyed me . . . but listening to ‘Chingari Koi Bhadke’ I felt they were the only lyrics that Bombay cinema had minted which understood my inner turmoil. Kishore Kumar’s melancholic, mildly inebriated voice kept running through my mind, majhi hi jo nav duboyeh usay kaun bachayeh. Then someone sang an A. R. Rahman song and my eyes became moist.
Only once have I seen my father cry. After the wedding of his younger sister. That day he wore a mint-coloured safari suit, male fashion of the seventies, and right after the sister’s car took off he created a rare spectacle by sobbing uncontrollably. Only once have I cried for him. Because I thought we had lost him. Until the age of seven I slept on the same bed with my parents, in the middle, more towards my father. I loved his smell. Sometimes he would mutter nonsense in his sleep. But that gibberish only increased my resolve to become someone big and significant. Like him. I wanted to dance. Like him. Sometimes he would break into a foreign dance in his uniform. In his khaki uniform he took me to Tihar jail once, and showed me a ‘thief’, a ‘murderer’, an ‘arsonist’. In the wing for women he showed me a prostitute. She had small hands, the smallest hands I ever encountered. To this day I remember the shape and size. I stood close to the iron bars and she threw a hand outside and quickly touched my brow. This is real life, he said. You are ‘oversensitive’. Sonny boy, acquire a thick skin, he said. Other people’s children are different. He was so much more articulate than me, so much more judgemental. But he knew how to listen, analyse, suspect. How to enjoy. Spin around . . . Most of my memories of Father are pale vortices, overshadowing love. And the objects he gifted me . . . Did they speak of his everlasting love? That old metallic camera of his, my first real introduction to the magic and science of photography. How excited I was to receive the gift that would help me freeze the order and disorder of time. Just before we set out on the journey to the highest mountains. Rohtang Pass. Mount Affarwat. Nanga Parbat. Back home I took the camera and the rolls to the developing shop, and that technician of a man very hesitantly delivered bad news. That I had basically shot pictures of NOTHING. Because on the left side of the camera a tiny cavity had exposed the film, damaging it irreversibly due to leakage of light, whereas the film should have been wrapped and sealed by perfect darkness. My father cares about me, but I am afraid of him.
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