This was their plan: a consummately modern ideal of a nation-state unified by an apocryphal identity resurrected for people who didn’t know the difference. A key tenet: elimination of the Muslims. The Hindu nationalists were more generous in this than others have been. The Muslims didn’t have to be killed. They could convert. They could leave. But those willing to do neither had to be exterminated, which task now devolved to the mob. Pakistan or Kabristan!
The boys and I left around midnight on the sixth day, by which time news reports suggested that the violence was no longer constant, even in the epicentres—but why would we trust the news? I was nervous for the boys. The dew-like sweat on their high, clear brows; the dilation of their eyes—they had lost everything but their lives, and gave off an eager, reckless air.
We had to drive for twelve hours through the desert, but the hardest part of our flight to Delhi would be the first twenty minutes. The boys insisted I drive them back through their old neighbourhood. True, this was the quickest way out of town. It was also the quickest way to get us killed, which may have been a motive. Both boys were alternately inscrutable and contradictory, so I didn’t ask their reasons. Perhaps I didn’t want to know.
They held hands in the back of the car. The campus itself was serene and impassive as always, its architectural unity tightly walled. I drove out the gates and toward the boys’ neighbourhood, as directed. The normal nocturnal rarity of human forms thickened into crowds until finally the car was surrounded by chanting Hindu hooligans.
I am stopped by a pounding on the hood and windshield of my car. I roll down my window. I argue. I show my ID. How can I be convincing when I don’t care if I live or not? But I do it, for the sake of the boys. The car is rocking a little and at first I think it’s the crowd, but the crowd is drifting away. It is Munir and Sohail, struggling in the back seat. Sohail has got his window down and shouts, “It’s me! Your miyabhai! Come! I’m here for killing!”
The man talking to me looks interested. I tell him, “We don’t like what you’re doing. My sons are calling themselves Muslim in protest.”
“Go,” he tells me, as Munir wrestles Sohail back inside the car and we do as we are told.
“Jai Shree Ram!” we hear someone shout as we drive off.
When we got to Delhi, I asked them, Where will you go?
Pakistan, they said, and left me. Terrorists in the making. Suicide bombers, ready-to-use.
This was six months after 9/11. Their career options couldn’t have been better advertised. I have looked for their faces ever since in newspapers, in pictures of the wanted and the dead.
How many well-intentioned colleagues urged me, back at the IRDS, You must write about this. You were a witness.
I wasn’t, I told them. I didn’t see anything. Though they didn’t believe me, they ultimately accepted this, all except one woman, the sort of lefty who acted as though communism was her wounded lover. “Oh, you probably voted BJP,” she hissed at me in the canteen, crowning days of direct and indirect harassment.
“Unlike you, I would not pretend to understand mass murder because I passed it in a moving car,” I told her. She was a pathologically thin woman with thick eyeliner and rouge. I took a repulsive satisfaction in seeing her cower as I rose. “Unlike you, I don’t believe I always have something of value to say.”
As good as it felt, my outburst did nothing to relieve my puzzlement and shame over my inaction. I started to pull away from my work, which was all I had. No close friends, no family. No work. No love. Limbo. Drift. And then I got word of the trial, and bought a ticket to Canada. You know the rest, dear reader. Deadened and then galvanized. This was the work of the third strike.
Why had Venkat not told Seth about his support for the Hindu nationalists? Because Seth would have been appalled? Hardly: I know these Tamil Brahmins—those back home are insular and defensive; those abroad, clouded by nostalgia and misinformation. Seth would have seen the violence against Muslims in Gujarat as the work of isolated extremists, nut-jobs, much the way 99.9 percent of Sikhs see the Air India bombers. Except that the Sikhs, in this regard, are right. Seth would probably not approve of Venkat sending money to the nationalists, but he would understand the impulse. His community believes itself to be under attack for its historical privilege; he would appreciate the Hindu desire to protect Bharat Mata. Up to a point.
He would have thought Venkat was being imprudent, though, that he should save his money, give it to his nephews and nieces. Better yet, give it to Shivashakti.
Or perhaps Venkat kept it secret in unseen rebellion against the way Seth infantilized him, a private proof that his decisions were still his own.
All of the above? It didn’t matter. I didn’t think about it even as long as it took for you to read about me thinking about it.
Why did Venkat choose me to tell? He saw in me his reflection. They wrecked his life; they wrecked mine. This is what he was doing about it. What was I doing?
I needed badly to get back to my apartment. I turned the key, again, started the car, drove.
I had laid in whisky the night before, knowing I was going to Venkat’s house today. I congratulated myself on my foresight, but now hesitated at the bottom of the fire escape, knowing the fire water waited above. It was barely noon, and I thought at first that was why I stopped, feeling the gods of decorum tugging at my sleeve.
No, it wasn’t that. I stopped because I didn’t want to deaden my self-analysis, the way I had for nearly twenty years.
Why dredge all this up?
Because I needed to understand it. Understand what?
This: what happened to me?
This: could it have been stopped?
I didn’t mount my iron stairs. I turned away, up my alley, and began to walk.
Alone. Always alone. I needed a guide, a hand-holder, a Krishna to my Arjuna. Who?
Seth would have been happy to listen as I talked this through, but I wasn’t yet close enough to him to ask. My old adviser, Marie Chambord? Perhaps, had she not died. But she wouldn’t have been the right person for this either.
I wanted my Appa.
A teddy bear man with a porcupine son. My prickliness, as I grew, was a disappointment to him. But whose doing was that? By the time my father came to realize what my mother’s bitterness had wrought, he couldn’t have done much to correct it. Or maybe the way I am is simply innate.
After the disaster, my mother’s health worsened. Cancer came. Appa cared for her, fed her, his gestures almost paternal. Indian women transfer their dependence from parents to their husbands; it is encouraged. My mother had entered marriage at sixteen, much younger than my father. Lakshmi once said Seth had been like a mother to her, in their early years in Canada, when she was so young and feeling abandoned by her family. I might have characterized my father’s care for my mother as maternal, except my experience of maternal care didn’t include such tenderness.
I didn’t look after my mother when she was dying. I looked after my father as he looked after her. I fixed his meals, went to the pharmacy, sat with him as he sat with her. I had never made her happy; Kritika was the child she would have wanted at her bedside.
When my mother died, in 1993, I asked Appa whether he wanted to move in with me, but he said he didn’t want to be trapped in an apartment complex, meeting other old people who lived in their grown children’s extra rooms. If I had had a wife and children, we would have made more of an effort. As it was, neither of us wanted him too close to my arid life.
He stayed in our old neighbourhood, with his old friends, and some young ones: two of the neighbours had small children he enjoyed; he even babysat, from time to time.
I visited him, once or twice a week. We would eat ice cream, take walks, drop in on his chums. He never spoke of Kritika and the children except to recall their brilliance. Once, he talked of my mother. He had first seen her bitterness when we children were young. She would criticize the flat, which was small and not nice, criticizing my father,
by extension, for not yet being able to afford more, though he was still young. She went frequently to her mother’s. We got our first house when I was six, and moved into the second and final one when Kritika and I were in our teens. It was large and airy. We had always had an ayah and a maid, and now there was a cook, and eventually a driver. Still, my mother only grew more bossy, and no less resentful.
“I often wished she were happier,” Appa said. His voice was hoarse, in age, something obstructing its passage from the cavity of his chest. “But I could accept, at least, that her unhappiness was not my fault. It was something she couldn’t identify.” He had never told me this before. Would it have helped if he had? He surprised me, then. “I always thought you saw this. She was the enigma that drove you to study the human mind.”
His housecleaner found him one morning, fully stiffened in a living room chair, a fatal stroke, or so the doctors told me.
Think on what you know, Ashwin, I heard now as I walked, his voice booming as though from behind the distant mountains, a voice Marlon Brando might have used to play a Bollywood don. Not why it was you never married. You have plenty of theories on that. Not about that troll, Venkat.
The breezes across Lohikarma’s slopes were bracing. My cheeks chapped in the dry winter air.
Think back, my son. Appa’s voice gained strength and intimacy in my mind, sounding increasingly like Seth’s. Not about yourself.
Ah.
I began, tentatively:
The Air India bombing was not simply the result of some limited if collective murderous rage. That rage was fed by a larger sense of outrage, resulting from the under-noticed, under-reported Delhi pogroms.
The pogroms? The doing of overzealous party functionaries, using the Dragon Lady’s assassination as an excuse to wage an intimidation campaign against Sikhs.
The assassination? A reprisal for her having ordered the invasion of the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
Keep going. Amritsar?
I had circled my neighbourhood to land at the Chinese restaurant downtown. Thirty tables at least, no more than six occupied at any given time. Red carpet, stained near the door. A tank of carp I stood and watched until a bobbing-frowning waiter reminded me that I should seat myself.
Sikhdom’s holiest shrine rises as a lily from a pool; the city is named for that water—amrit, the Sikhs’ holy nectar, drunk by the devoted when they are baptized. The generals had been told not to destroy the temple. “We entered with humility in our hearts and prayers on our lips,” said one, in the true spirit of Indian secularism, which means not that the state governs without God, but rather that every god governs at once.
The Dragon Lady upturned that bowl of amrit, drowned fleeing fighters and praying pilgrims, blew fiery breath ahead of the spreading nectar, drenched Sikhs around the world. They tasted ash in it; they tasted blood. They burned the Dragon Lady in effigy, and hung her, and stomped upon her. Prominent Sikhs in India returned their government awards, resigned their parliamentary seats, and so found themselves allied with a movement whose aims and leadership they had never admired.
The government’s response was to pull out the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities Act—TADA! No need to steal your neighbour’s apples; if you wanted his tree, all you needed to do was accuse him of being a Khalistani sympathizer. “Suddenly there was no crime in Punjab,” said a former police officer, “only terror.” Thus began the long summer that led up to the Dragon’s slaying.
But again, said my father, as I twirled a noodle that seemed to have no beginning and no end, think. There comes a time to act, but …
Not for me?
Do not put words in my mouth. You eventually must act, but for now you must think.
To act is to do violence.
Bullshit, my son.
That was me putting words in his mouth—Appa never would have said that. The expression suited him, though, and it made me smile to hear him use it.
You fool yourself, that your life is something done to you, that you live but don’t act. You left Rosslyn.
Did I tell him about her?
You are stringing that poor Vijaya along.
I most definitely did not tell him about the widow.
You counsel people daily to change their lives. He was thundering at me. You will act!
I looked around the restaurant, a little unnerved, but the other patrons—two men, gazing shyly at each other as if on a second date; an Asian businessman steering noodles away from his lapels; a drab threesome of college girls—were in their own little worlds. I love that old saw: their own little worlds. The world in my head seemed neither small nor mine, but that was why I became a therapist.
My father was growing impatient. Think! What came before?
The Emergency.
In 1975, a resolution was introduced by the government of Punjab—a state poor in cash but rich in resources—suggesting a devolution of power into the hands of the states. The young P.M., Indira Gandhi, did not take kindly to it. And she was having other problems: on trial for election hanky-panky. She took care of all of it by declaring a national State of Emergency.
I was in Canada, then. My father wrote me letters throughout, so that the Emergency happened, for me, in the measured, regretful voice of his reportage. At that time, he thought the prime minister did what had to be done, no more, no less.
I don’t think that anymore, he interjected gruffly.
I always thought you were fooling yourself.
So you say.
Mass demonstrations followed. The first? In Amritsar. Yes, the Sikhs of Punjab were the first to raise the cry, and after twenty-one months, as protests were squashed and silence spread, the Sikhs were the last men standing, even if behind bars: 33 percent of the Emergency’s nearly 150,000 detainees were said to have been Sikhs, who make up 2 percent of the Indian population.
Given this, how could some of them not start to imagine a Sikh nation?
They had taken on several strange bedfellows (are bedfellows always strange?): Hindu nationalists, who, since they oppose Congress, are natural allies for any other opposition. Thus they opposed the storming of the Golden Temple. Thus they in fact helped Sikhs during the post-assassination riots of 1984.
But they also, later, encouraged destruction of mosques and churches, professed expulsion or forced conversion. And, earlier, they encouraged the killing of that much more famous Gandhi—no dragon, no lady—in the service of this abhorrent idea: India for Hindus.
I left the restaurant pondering Venkat. What’s with that strange light in his eyes? I asked my father. Or the patterns on his face, like time-lapse immigration maps.
Hardly were those words out when Venkat himself faced me on the sidewalk. The temperature was dropping and his putty-like breath mingled visibly with mine in the brief space between us. He carried a large birdcage with a couple of blankets over it, and I glanced at the door he had emerged from: a vet’s office. This was one of Lohikarma’s shabbier streets, studded with dormant storefronts, their windows soaped over and signs inverted.
“Ah,” Venkat said. Would he ask me why I had bolted from his house a few hours earlier? But he didn’t seem to have found it strange. “You must join us,” he said, summoning an odd heartiness that queered my stomach. He leaned to envelop me in a thin, warm miasma of damp down-fill and vet’s office. “A group of young persons, white Canadians, have asked me to lead them in learning about Vedic practices. You would have much to say. Come, this afternoon, two p.m., at the Lutheran church, not six blocks from here.”
Say yes, say no, but walk away, my son! Walk away!
“What?” I asked.
Venkat’s fleshy lips seemed isolated in his otherworldly face. “Sacrifice. Soma. A revival of our original order …”
I backed away from him, feeling a strange grin on my face. I waved effeminately and scurried off, slipping and sliding over icy patches in my inappropriate shoes until finally I scrambled up my fire escape, exhilarated, chuckling aloud.<
br />
I put the kettle on for tea, looking guiltily at my bottle of whisky, as we do in the presence of our parents.
Ah, what the hell, he said, I’ll join you.
I smiled and poured two shots. We toasted. I drank.
So, carry on.
The Mahatma’s assassination. I was eight. The man who had killed him thought that Gandhiji and Nehru were Muslim-lovers, that this (and not the longstanding British policy of divide and rule …) had led to the creation of Pakistan, a Muslim state lopped off India’s northwest and northeast corners, like ears on that sacred cow’s face. West Pakistan was cut from the Sikhs’ holy land, Punjab, with a double-edged sword. The Sikhs were balanced on the blade. Forced, they jumped toward India, a self-proclaimed secular democracy, where their rights would exist on paper, at least.
Sikhs had served in the British army through multiple generations, multiple wars, but this had become tougher as they came to realize that was all the white man wanted them for. Second-generation Sikh Canadians, receiving Second World War conscription notices from Ottawa, asked why they got soldiers’ uniforms but not the vote. First-class fighters; second-class citizens. Sure, we’ll battle the Krauts and Japs; let’s see you open the doors to your white-collar world.
In 1919, they had endured another Amritsar massacre, when General Dyer’s troops opened fire on peaceable, picnicking Punjabis, part and parcel of the period’s paranoia. After the First World War, Canada, Australia and New Zealand gained greater sovereignty, the Empire’s thanks for so many donated lives. India? Not. There, His Majesty’s forces had been put to much trouble, quelling a nascent independence movement. They were wiping their brows, just having publicly executed nearly a hundred such violent dreamers, supporters of the Ghadars—a party started by North American Sikhs for a United States of India, a free, secular, democratic nation for all Indians. Plainly, this was a ridiculous notion, of which the inferior races needed to be disabused.
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Page 25