(25 page)

Then too, Jaya gives off enough of a whiff of
possessiveness that it makes me feel constricted being in her
company, so that when I am around her my jokes get cruder and I am
louder, more expansive and boisterous. Sometimes, she laughs with the
others at one of my jokes. Most of the time she just peers at me from
behind those thick glasses, her thin lips stretched in a line that I
take to mean disapproval. Like many of the adults around me, Jaya
seems to think that I am better than who I am spending my time being,
and

there is always a faint air of disapproval around
her that sets my teeth on edge.

It is 1976. We are in ninth-grade, a year away
from graduation. The Emergency is almost a year old when Jaya comes
up to me one day and says she needs to talk to me in private.

Jaya has a boyfriend, I say to myself. Goddamn it,
who would've thought? Old Jaya has a boyfriend. And still so
serious and all, not even cracking a smile.

I fly off my chair and follow her into the
hallway. But she is still not smiling.

‘What is it?' Then, seeing that she's
about to cry, ‘Jaya, what's wrong, men?'

‘Nothing's wrong. It's just
that…nobody in school knows but…my mother's in
jail.'

I freeze. In my middle-class brain, jail is
forever associated with criminal behaviour. I don't know Jaya's
mother well but the dark-haired, petite, smiling woman in a white
kurta-and pants whom I'd seen at school on a few occasions, did
not look like a criminal to me. Still, one never knew…

Jaya looks shocked. ‘Crime? She committed no
crime. She was the head of the teachers' union. She was simply
organizing the other teachers at her school. But under the Emergency,
you know, the right to strike has been criminalized…'

Jaya continues to talk but I stop listening. I am
still in shock.

I have never known anybody who has had a relative
in jail.

The concept of going to jail for one's
beliefs is alien to me. I come from a resolutely apolitical family,
where the only ancestor who participated in the freedom struggle
against the British, was an object of derision in family lore. I come
from an ethnic community that has held itself aloft from the turmoil
of its adopted country, a minority that has thrived by not choosing
sides, by existing peacefully with its neighbours. All my history and
civics textbooks tell me that India is a democracy where the rule of
law prevails. When I was a kid, dad used to chuckle as I saluted
every traffic cop we passed. The hair on my arms stands up
involuntarily when I hear the national anthem and I love watching the
Republic Day parade on TV. And now Jaya is trying to convince me that
her mother is in jail just for trying to start a union. It makes no
sense. Jamal tried to start a union, too, and nobody threw him in
jail. No, Jaya is lying. Everybody knows how it goes: jail is for
criminals.

‘I don't know, baba, I don't
know,' I interrupt her. ‘All I know is, people don't
go to jail if they haven't done anything wrong. That's
just how the law works.'

Jaya's face crumbles as if I have landed a
punch on her jaw.

She stares at me open-mouthed. ‘But…I
swear…' she stammers.

I can't look Jaya in the eye. I am ashamed
of myself but then self-righteousness smothers my embarrassment and
makes me land the knockout blow. ‘If your mummy's in
jail, she probably deserves to be,' I say and then walk away.

I resolutely avoid looking at Jaya the rest of the
day.

Two weeks later, the edifice of my conformist,
middle-class existence lies in ruins at my feet. It begins innocently
enough with a bus ride to Homi Bhabha Auditorium to listen to a
recital by a visiting German orchestra. As always, Jesse and me catch
the double-decker bus from its terminal and scramble for the front
seats on the top deck. This is our favourite seat and often, we stick
our faces out of the

window to feel the wind against our faces. As
always, we talk about art, music, literature—or rather, Jesse
talks and I listen, storing up all the information she so casually
imparts, memorizing some of her funnier one-liners so that I can pass
them off as my own in school the next day. My heart swells with joy
and I feel the wild, mad, happy-drunk feeling that I always do when I
am in Jesse's company. Every conversation with Jesse affects me
the same way—I feel as if my brain has received a good
scrubbing, so that it is bright as brass. Nobody in my circle reads,
knows or thinks as much as Jesse does and even now, after several
years of being close friends, I am awed that she has overlooked the
five years that separate us—I am fifteen, she is twenty—and
sought out my friendship. I feel totally inadequate in this
relationship, as if I am doing all the taking but when I tell Jesse
this she always looks offended and tells me I am wrong.

Now she is talking about some obscure Pacific
island and suddenly, I can't wait another minute. ‘But
Jesse,' I interrupt.

‘How do you
know
so much?' There
is a lifetime of deprivation, awe and admiration in the question but
Jesse shakes her head impatiently, brushing off my overly-eager,
fawning question as if it were a fly. She looks embarrassed and then
mumbles something about my talking nonsense.

We talk about other things, poke fun at the
strange business names—Rassiwalla Rope Company; Chimneywalla
and Sons—and signs—Stick No Labels Here; Horn OK Please;
No Spitting or Sitting on Grass—that we pass. We also go past
several of the giant billboards that have sprung up overnight during
the Emergency: Work More, Talk Less; Indira is India, and the
omnipresent family planning slogan, Hum Do, Hamare Do: We two, Our
two.

And then Jesse mentions a name I've heard
before: Karl Marx. I vaguely know that Marx was a Communist and that
Communists are enemies of the state and silly people to boot, because
everybody knows that without a profit motive people will never work.

‘Yeah, he was a Communist, right?' I
say. ‘Like those people in China? Ae, did you know that those
Chinamen don't get to vote or anything? That's why Nehru
went to war with them—they hated us for our freedom.'

I am blithely repeating what I've always
heard and so I'm unprepared for Jesse's reaction. ‘Don't
talk shit,' she says abruptly, in a tone harsher than any she
has ever used. ‘Who do you think is free in our country? The
people living in the slums?

The servants in our houses? And we all see what
freedom of speech even we actually have, with all the media cowards
running scared of the Emergency.'

I stare at Jesse in amazed silence. This is a side
of her I have never seen before. What was she getting so angry about?
And was she angry at
me
?

‘Well, anyway, the Communists want to
distribute money equally,' I attempted, repeating what I'd
heard at school. ‘But if everybody makes the same, what is the
incentive for people to work? It sounds nice but it would never work,
na, if people could just sit at home and all?'

She looks at me directly for the first time since
we've started on this subject. ‘Do you know what the
basic principle of Communism—rather, I should say, Socialism
is?' she says rhetorically. ‘It's, “To each
according to his ability; to each according to his need.” Do
you understand what that means?'

I don't. She explains. I ask more questions.
She answers them. She tells me about Mao in China and Lenin in the
Soviet Union and the various grassroots movements that she claims are
going on in India.

While Jesse is talking, I think back on those
childhood dreams about the city's poor. After years of being
told by the adults that the poor would always be with us, that the
poor were poor because they were lazy and didn't want to work,
that nothing could be done about poverty so it was better not to
think about it—at last someone is telling me something
different. And to hear Jesse say it, entire countries had reorganized
themselves according to these revolutionary principles. To each
according to his need. It is the most life-affirming thing I've
ever heard. Everything that I've always believed about
people—that people usually only did mean things when they were
deprived, that given a choice they'd do the right thing—all
of those beliefs are boiled into that line.

The adults around me are wrong, wrong, wrong.

I had boarded the B.E.S.T bus that day an ordinary
schoolgirl, self-indulgent and self-absorbed, occupied with my own
changing body and its pleasures. When I threw around words like youth
revolution and revolution, I was thinking Wood-stock, not Russia.

I disembark from the bus that day, baptized in a
new faith.

I feel as if I had been given a pair of X-ray
glasses because I can suddenly see the inside structure of things.
‘Distribution, not production, is the problem,' Jesse had
said and isn't she right? Can't I see evidence of that
all around me—the skyscrapers growing up from the armpits of
the slums, the hungry children sleeping on the pavement in front of
the dazzling jewellery stores, the belching Share Bazaar traders
ignoring the one-eyed beggar at their side? Bombay does not seem
depressing any more. I will no longer be able to see it as a dirty,
crowded, bankrupt city on the brink, on the edge of falling into the
void. Instead, every beggar, every impoverished worker, every
domestic servant, every new immigrant suddenly seems made of
stardust, bursting with unrealized power, untapped potential and
infinite possibility. Brother, I want to say to the next person I
see, if only we could see what we are truly made of…

I go back to school on Monday, a new person. One
of the first things I do is go up to Jaya. ‘Hey, I've
been thinking about our conversation the other day. Sorry, men, I was
a total bitch.

But actually, I want to learn what happened to
your mother. You know, with the Emergency and all, stuff like this is
happening a lot.'

Jaya eyes me suspiciously. ‘But I thought
you wrote an essay praising the Emergency just a few months ago.'

So she remembers that. ‘I know. I was a
total idiot. But I understand more now. And, well, I was wrong, you
know.

And I'm very sorry I was so mean to you.'

Jaya comes to school the next day with a crudely
printed pamphlet detailing the abuses under the Emergency. I take it
from her silently, not asking her any questions and tuck it inside a
book. Later, I read it in the hallway after I am kicked out of
physics class. I am shocked by what I read: political prisoners being
mercilessly tortured, beggars being rounded up and chased out of the
city, slum colonies being razed, the press being gagged, union
officials being imprisoned, the constitution being revised, the
police being given absolute powers. This is happening in the country
where I live and until last week the only thing I knew about the
Emergency was that the buses were running on time.

Indira Gandhi has been Prime Minister most of my
life. My generation had grown up automatically applying the female
pronoun when talking about that office. Like many middle-class
Indians, my family worshipped her, believing what Indira herself
insinuated on several occasions—that without her, India would
disintegrate into chaos, that the country needed a Nehru to rule it.
The Nehrus were India's Kennedys—urbane, charming,
sophisticated, good-looking, charismatic. My aunt Freny often spoke
with pride about a foreign news conference where Indira had answered
questions in fluent French. My dad had been excited as a schoolboy
when she had inaugurated one of the government housing projects that
he had been a contractor for. Unlike many of the bald, paunchy,
dhoti-clad, heavily-accented Indian politicians, the light-skinned,
sharp-featured Indira spoke fluent English, dressed smartly when she
went abroad, and seemed at ease among Western leaders. For a country
still recovering from the national inferiority complex that was a
leftover from British colonial rule, watching Indira flirting with
Lyndon Johnson and going toe-to-toe with Richard Nixon and Pakistani
President General Yahya Khan, was better than winning a test match
against the Aussies. Unlike the other paan-chewing, pot-bellied
doddering leaders, Indira was the kind of politician you could dress
up and take out. At cocktail parties, businessmen spoke of how much
easier life was under the Emergency, now that the union troublemakers
had had their balls cut off; office workers returning wearily to
their homes in the suburbs each evening were thankful that the trains
were running more efficiently; ordinary citizens were just plain
grateful that the constant bickering between politicians had ceased.
And if that meant that a few fundamental rights had to be temporarily
given up, well, one couldn't have everything. Perhaps India was
too large, too diverse a country to support democracy anyway. Look
how efficiently those generals ran Pakistan. And if Indira's
familiar face—with the famous white mane running through her
dark hair—graced every magazine cover and chastized us from
every billboard, so much the better. After all, we needed Mother
Indira to look over us and keep us from chaos and self-destruction.
If there were rumours of her son, Sanjay, siphoning off money and
rewarding his corrupt cronies, well, the guy was a technocrat and
wasn't a pragmatic, dynamic technical guy just what India
needed at a time like this? And after all, Sanjay was a Nehru, the
grandson of the great Jawaharlal Nehru. How bad could he be?