A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  Indian Express, January 1993

  Surat mobs strip women as camera unit films rapes.

  Indian Express, December 1992

  The enormity of what happened still escapes the city and its residents.

  There is Mr. D. A. Desai. A retired judge of the Supreme Court. A Surti by birth and inclination. He laments: “This year I simply could not bring myself to sending New Year greetings. The screams of women raped are still ringing in my ears.”

  An IPS officer. A veteran of riots in Ahmedabad and Baroda. He simply shudders: “I have never seen atrocities of this kind visited by one group of human beings on another.”

  At a primary school, the headmaster pretends to be puzzled about why the Muslim students have not returned to the classrooms.

  When the arsonists were done for the day, they had 32 victims to their credit. All first killed, then dumped in a nullah and torched. One school teacher recalled how a young girl was raped, then an iron rod shoved up her vagina, and, finally, killed.

  The Times of India, January 16, 1993

  Acid Bulbs, Ghalib, and Sweetmeats: The Homeland

  Paschim Express: New Delhi–Baroda

  A gentle rhythmic ride, the roll of the train, the rumble. One would not trade this for any plane trip. The compartment has four berths, with curtains, night lights…such palatial luxury after the night-marishly slow, crowded, and dirty Toofan Express I had to take from Calcutta, because the express route had been closed due to an accident. In the adjoining compartment men and women, young couples, chatting and laughing; an atmosphere of togetherness that for a group makes such a ride so memorable. I feel uncontrollably happy.

  The young couple with child, in the two berths across from me, are on their way to Bombay. The child is a boy, his name Aman Kumar. “All boys are kumars,” I say stupidly in a sentimental moment.

  In this AC compartment are young families, each with a child, speaking combinations of Hindi and English to their offspring: How are you? What is your name? Would you like a biscuit? Usko kaho, Thank you.

  Aren’t you afraid to go to Bombay? I ask the couple. Oh, it’s all right now, they say. Bombay can’t stay closed for long. What kind of family are they, I wonder, to feel so confident? The wife is a teacher. I can see my Calcutta friends sneering: Government-wallahs, rich folks, police and army connections—nothing happens to such as these. True, most likely. Yet I can’t help empathizing with this young couple with infant, can’t help wishing them well.

  With me is a bureaucrat from Canada. He is formerly from India. He has on a newly bought Indian-made leather jacket. A bargain, he says, you can’t beat local prices for leather goods. Four times cheaper than the same stuff in Canada. He makes sure everyone around knows where he is from. There is of course a practical advantage to this, it does make a difference wherever you go. Diligently he eats only the fruit and biscuits he’s brought with him, holds onto the bottled water as to dear life, doesn’t touch train food or tea. For him India is old hat, he is grateful to have escaped its strangling bureaucracy, which he experienced while teaching in a college; he feels no nostalgia. “A proud Canadian,” he now calls himself, “from the best country in the world.”

  I am going to the state of my ancestors, Gujarat, where people speak a language I speak. How do I feel? On the train I strain my ears for Gujarati. I see a man counting beads, tasbih. A Hindu or a Muslim, fundamentalist or just pious and tolerant? It is in that state that the violence has raged for the longest time, in a manner that defies reason, defies everything I thought Gujarat was: the land of Gandhi, of peaceful though clever shopkeepers. At the stations where we stop, I feel a tremor of discomfort, fear. How am I looked upon? Would people see me as something other than what I am and feel, what label would they put on me? There are reports of trains stopped, people being stripped to check if they were one or the other, circumcised or not, Muslim or Hindu; then slaughtered or let go.

  And so, in spite of my euphoria, I feel a trauma after all.

  In Baroda station I am received warmly by Mohamed and Raj Kumar, both of whom I had met in Orissa, a little more than two weeks before; we now meet like old friends. There had been some anxiety about my making it, ever since I got diverted from Trivandrum to Calcutta via Delhi.

  Whereas Delhi seems to run on the tiny Indian-made Maruti cars, Baroda seems to run in large part on scooters. I am taken to my room in an auto-rickshaw.

  Baroda

  Mohamed takes me to a shopping centre to meet a young man who is a Khoja Ismaili like me. It is late afternoon, and the three of us head by rickshaw towards the khano, the prayer hall. We pass through a busy street, apparently the most prone to riots, first the Hindu section and then the Muslim section. It is difficult not to feel a twinge of nervousness, imagine being attacked, when told that Baroda, known for its excellent university, is one of the cities most prone to communal violence.

  In the Khoja community of Surat, the young man says, some eighty people were killed: a pregnant woman made to watch her entire family being slaughtered, then left alive with her two arms hacked off; a boy of five, head smashed with a field-hockey stick; and so on with the horrors…

  I ask him what they actually do if they see a mob approach. Do they simply pray? Watch? What? Surely the young men have provisions for defence, as young men would everywhere?

  He could understandably have refused to answer, but he tells me.

  We make acid bulbs, he says, bottles filled with acid and topped with a wick, and we throw them when the mobs approach. If that doesn’t work, then about four or five of the young men go out with knives and swords. It has been a miracle so far, he adds, that four or five youths have been able to defend their area.

  The khano is modest—a grey concrete square block of a place. It is Thursday, the poorest members of the community are present. A girl recites a ginan, in Gujarati. I notice that it is sung to a different tune from the one I am familiar with, though it does not sound completely strange. A young man stands up to offer a prayer in Gujarati—O Lord, bring peace and prosperity to this nation—a prayer almost identical to one we recited in East Africa. Finally a prayer in Arabic, in a peculiarly Gujarati accent, recited by a girl while the people sit cross-legged on the floor.

  The mukhi, the leader of the congregation, invites Mohamed (who waited outside the khano, being from another sect) and me to his khano. It is a modest bungalow in a housing colony behind the grey khano. Both the khano and the colony face an open side street that leads to the main thoroughfare on which we came.

  This area is safe, says the mukhi to Mohamed, who of course knows the city and its ways. Behind the colony is an entirely Muslim area. Behind that is a Hindu area. But the area is so open, says Mohamed, you could be attacked from the street; which is exactly what I am thinking. They can’t do it, says the mukhi, and I wonder at his confidence. His wife brings water, but Mohamed cautions me against drinking it—not from a bottle, it might be unsafe for a visitor. But how to refuse a drink of water, and from a mukhi? I drink some.

  One always deplores violence, one shudders, but one has also become cold to it. It happens there, on the other side of the television screen, to other people. To see it so close, however, among people so close, is different…Can I not shrug off this kind of bestiality, this brutalization of innocents, as something happening there, without involving my feelings in it? But after all I did come here, saw it as a kind of return, could identify with so many things: so do I simply shun, reject as not mine, what I cannot cope with, while accepting gratefully what I can? Aren’t we at some level connected, this mukhi, this other young man, and I? If my family had stayed here, what would I have become, a victim or a thug? A defender with acid bulbs and swords?

  I say as much at a seminar I have come ostensibly to give here in Baroda. Let me tell you something about myself. I was brought up Gujarati, to some degree. We spoke the language, we played dandia raas during festivals. Sure, we had communal fights, but at the level of fisticuffs, or co
mpetition in business, cricket, academic achievement. This is the first time I have been in a place where Gujarati is the main language. I came here expecting to take back mithai, sweetmeats, with me, this being the traditional way, when you would upon your return present a little of the mithai to neighbours and relatives. But I came to Gujarat actually feeling afraid. This in the land of Gandhi?

  Perhaps I get a bit carried away.

  Is it possible to sound boorish talking about senseless violence and butchery? I think in India it’s possible. Such barbarity as I have read and heard about seems part of accepted life. Don’t worry, someone told me my first day here, the violence is elsewhere, a couple of miles away…Mobs burning homes, mobs setting people aflame; rape and hacking of limbs; smashing children to death. Not violence in the abstract or at a distance, not a bullet or a rocket, but atrocity inflicted at the individual level, while making eye contact. Cannibalism seems more civilized. Horror: Conrad didn’t know the full meaning of the term.

  I feel enraged because I cannot detach and disinfect myself from this horror.

  My last two hours in Baroda. I have been treated well, with love and respect, and with sympathy and understanding at the gut response I displayed at the seminar.

  Gujarat is a “dry” state, meaning you cannot buy alcohol. My friend Raj Kumar wants to quench his “thirst” and read from his poetry. And so, in his living room, as a child struggles with a Lego set, a few of us sit around, watching the clock for my departure time, listening to Raj first reciting Ghalib. They are in love with Ghalib, those who know his poetry, can recite it by heart: Arré what is mere Shakespeare compared to Ghalib, they will say. Raj then recites a poem he wrote the other day about the current violence wracking parts of India. Another person recites Ghalib, and Raj recites a second poem, another of his compositions, in Hindi. And then, on three motorbikes, I behind Raj on his twenty-five-year-old Czech-designed Java, we race to the railway station for me to catch the Rajdhani Express back to Delhi.

  It is an emotional send-off. So much had been expected of this visit, but it’s too short. This has been a meeting of minds, but even more a meeting of hearts. This was India’s embrace, its kiss, to an Indian however many times removed.

  And yes, someone gave me a box of mithai to take back with me.

  On the train intercom, a taped voice says, “Laugh and let the world laugh with you.” The tape is a tribute to the legendary film actor Raj Kapoor, who always played the part of the oddball, the man of the people. A song comes on:

  We live in this land

  on which the Ganges flows

  in which honesty flows from lips

  and purity lives in souls…

  Ah, poor Raj Kapoor, always the innocent idealist, the anari.

  Horn Please!

  Marriage season in New Delhi. Every block it seems has a wedding on. Buildings strung with coloured lights, marquees set up on lawns with softly glowing fluorescent-lit interiors, for the wedding ceremonies of the rich. We see one about the size of a large hall—almost a block wide—which Krishan Chander parks his car to contemplate. The wedding must be of a minister’s daughter, he concludes. Look at the cars outside.

  We make our way to a wedding reception. A very middle-class crowd. The bride and groom sit looking lost and alone on one side, all around them people milling about, getting introduced.

  “We would like our daughter to marry abroad,” says a woman. “She is educated, na. Boys over there like girls from India who are educated. They like to dominate.” Perhaps the wrong word? I press with a query. “Women need men,” she says. “All women need the assistance of men. And husbands wouldn’t eat, they can’t take care of themselves. They need their wives, too.” I ask if the girls bred in the Western countries wouldn’t resent this—Indian boys going out with them and then turning around and marrying girls from India. “They don’t like Indian boys,” she says categorically of such girls. “They think they are too orthodox. They marry the others—white boys. And Indian boys like to marry girls from India only.”

  “I would like one family member to be abroad,” says her husband, to whom another man has just revealed a modern miracle: a pocket electronic diary.

  Later, another home, this one waiting to say goodbye to its daughter, recently married, on her way in a few hours to join her husband in Toronto.

  The men sit in the front living room. The scene is a little reminiscent of a wake. They look sombre, dejected, martyred, but liven up when we arrive with my jolly host. The father of the girl: sitting with a shawl around him, morose, making one-line statements that one doesn’t quite know how to respond to, indulging the many younger children with tender reminders to go to sleep, finally taking a boy under his shawl. He’s almost a child himself, with a daughter going away: and daughters are often called “mother” by their fathers.

  In the other room the women are more relaxed and jovial. The bride appears in the front room once, can’t be more than twenty-two; she wears a red shalwar-kameez and is very beautiful. B.A., M.Sc., Krishan Chander tells me. He borrows ten Canadian dollars from me to give her as a present. She is his niece.

  My last impressions of India, in New Delhi in the wedding season, are fleeting. I have seen so much in the last four weeks, I feel numbed. I visit the Gandhi memorial and the tombs of the great Sufi Nizamuddin Auliya and his disciple, the poet and musician Amir Khusrau. I walk through Old Delhi and realize that here is another world I have not seen. But I know I am going to return, India has taken me back.

  At a reception given by the British Council, finally I meet that institution of a man, the writer Khushwant Singh, who had written glowingly and generously of my first novel when it appeared in India. He gives me a warm embrace. Here I also meet the writer and journalist M. J. Akbar, who has written of these recent and previous occurrences of ethnic violence. He compares it to Bosnia. It is now that Krishan Chander becomes aware of the extent of what has been going on in Surat and Bombay. So busy has he been organizing Canadian-studies affairs, he has not had time to look at the papers. I didn’t know, he says. He tells me of an incident he witnessed on his street after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, when the Sikhs of Delhi were victimized. He saw a corner store belonging to a Sikh being torched. And it turns out, he himself is a refugee from some part of current Pakistan.

  Krishan Chander and his wife drive me to the airport in their white Maruti. He tells me that he now awaits a relation of his who is coming from England on the express purpose of going to his village and having a twenty-year-old curse lifted from his daughter, also in England. Indians are tribal, says Krishan Chander’s wife, a school principal; all except the educated ones, she adds.

  Ahead of us, a commercial vehicle. On its back a decorated sign: “Horn please!”

  Delhi: The Burden of History

  Think now

  History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

  And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

  Guides us by vanities. Think now

  She gives when our attention is distracted

  And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions

  That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late

  What’s not believed in, or if still believed,

  In memory only, reconsidered passion.

  T. S. ELIOT, “Gerontion”

  Enigmas to Uncover

  Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai

  Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,

  How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp

  Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.

  EDWARD FITZGERALD, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

  BECAUSE DELHI WAS THE FIRST CITY where I landed, I have always returned to it; from here I have departed for various places, and here I always return, before heading back to Canada. I am unsettled by nature, and yet I am a creature of habit. I abhor changes and moving, yet I long to get away. My continual returning to India through Delhi reflects perhaps, in so
me convoluted way, this dual nature.

  Bombay, which was the traditional landing place for my people and synonymous with India in my childhood, and the setting of many a popular film and song, has an infectious rhythm and colour; it is a city cluttered with life and a pleasure to walk in; much is written about it. Delhi, on the other hand, more open and expansive, is not the stuff of movies; it is both older and newer, has been so for at least a thousand years. And the more recent newer Delhi has all the character of a suburban sprawl. But Delhi in its traditional sense, said the right way, evokes the mystique of history, and old poetry, reminders of empires rising and falling; it carries images of wars and marauding armies, echoes dimly with the clash of steel, the roll of cannon, the thunder of horses. It was the seat of the so-called Muslim rule in India and, recently, of a modern right-wing nationalist government drawing much rhetorical strength, if not the poison of communal hatred, from allusions to that rule. Not only were the last Mughals defeated here by the British, the last emperor exiled ignominiously to faraway Burma and his family destined to live in poverty, but thousands of Muslims fled Delhi during the partition of India (called, simply, “Partition,” all its horrors implied), headed for the newly formed nation of Pakistan. Hindus travelled the opposite way, bringing the bitterness of exile and loss and violence with them into the new developments of Delhi. Up to half a million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs are said to have perished in the slaughter that accompanied Partition. Every monument here therefore gives pause for thought, a squirm of the mind: How does one respond? Does that put a label on one? Isn’t there a neutral, intellectual, dispassionate way to respond to the history? Delhi, for me, always raises questions. Once, upon telling a taxi driver to take me to the Mughal emperor Humayun’s tomb, a grand monument amidst a splendid garden, all of it recently renovated, he lied, “Why go there, there’s nothing there but an empty roundabout.” Immediately I craned my neck to identify the telltale markers of his faith in the stickers on his dashboard, the hangings on his mirror. And felt guilty afterwards for my suspicion.