Riot (3 page)

Actually, when I said goodnight and left him that night, I realized for the first time how lonely
I
was. I'd come prepared for the kind of experience I was having before I met him — lots of hard work, conversing with women through interpreters (though my Hindi's getting
much
better now), some solicitous attention from kindly, hopeless Mr. Das and the helpful if devious extension worker Kadambari (the ones I told you about in my last letter), but with all my spare time spent alone, reading and writing and putting down my notes. And because that's all I expected, that's what I quickly got used to. Until I met Lakshman.

Until I met Lakshman, and talked, and connected with his kindred spirit, and said goodnight, and I found myself flooded with the sense that I was missing something so bad I could taste it. Something I'd taught myself not to miss.

No, I'm not in love or anything like that, Cindy, don't worry. At least I don't think so, and it's all quite impossible, anyway. He's married, and I'm here for ten months, and we inhabit different worlds. But when I came back to my room, with no phone, no TV, with only a few books and erratic light to read them by, I realized how much I'd cut myself off from something I really did have before. Companionship. I could find it with him, I think.

And in the meantime, I'll learn a lot! He's had to educate me from scratch about the whole Hindu-Muslim question. Not just the basics — how the British promoted divisions between Hindus and Muslims as a policy of “divide and rule,” how the nationalist movement tried to involve everybody but the Muslim League broke away and called for a state of Pakistan, how the country was partitioned in 1947 to give the Muslims a separate state, etc etc — but on the more recent troubles. I suppose you know, Cin, that 12% of India's eight hundred million people are Muslim, against 82% who're Hindu (I think I've got the numbers right!). For decades since the Partition there've been small-scale problems in many parts of the country, riots pitting one group against the other, usually over some religious procession or festival intruding on the other religious group's space. The Indian government has apparently become rather good at managing these riots, and people like Mr. Lakshman are trained at riot control the way a student is trained to footnote a dissertation. They try to create networks between the two communities, he tells me, using “peace committees” to build bridges between leaders of the two religious groups. It's reassuring to listen to him talk about all this, because the atmosphere here isn't all good. There's a lot of tension in these parts over something called the Ram Janmabhoomi, a temple that some Hindus say was destroyed by the Mughal emperor Babar in 1526. Well, Babar (yes, just like the cartoon elephant!) replaced it with a mosque, apparently, and these Hindus want to reverse history and put the temple back where the mosque now stands. Though Lakshman tells me there's no proof there ever was a temple there. Not that a mere detail like that matters to the Hindu leaders who're busy organizing rallies and demonstrations all around the country and asking their followers to transport bricks to the site so they can build their temple there. …

But enough about this place. Cindy, how's your love life? Is Matt still acting as if what happened between you two never happened?…

 

from Priscilla Hart's scrapbook

February 14, 1989

…

“No, I'm not particularly young for this job. By the time Jesus Christ was my age, he'd been crucified.”

I laughed a little uncertainly, not knowing how to take this. “Do you see your role here as some sort of Messiah to the people?”

“No,” he said directly. “Do you?”

I was a bit taken aback at this. “Me? No! Why?”

“Well, you've come to this benighted place, leaving behind all your creature comforts, your microwave ovens and video stores and thirty-one flavors of ice cream, to live in the armpit of India and work in population control. Why do you do it?”

“Population-control
awareness
,” I corrected him. “I'm just teaching — I mean telling — people about their rights, about what's out there, what can help them. That's all,” I added, knowing as I said it that I was sounding more defensive than I should.

“Why? Are you pursuing some sort of missionary vocation?”

“Don't be silly. I mean, I am a believing Methodist, but my church didn't send me here. I'm here as a student anyway,” I replied, a little more spiritedly. “Doing my field research. It all fits in, and I'm glad to be useful.”

“Useful,” he murmured, his fingertips touching under his chin, an amused look in his eye. “I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that usefulness is the last refuge of the unappealing. But even a man of his proclivities would have to agree that that last adjective doesn't apply to you.”

It took me a second to get his meaning, and then I blushed. So help me God, I blushed.

“I didn't know Indian administrators were required to read Oscar Wilde,” I ventured a little lamely, to cover up my confusion.

“God, we read everything,” he replied. “What else is there to do in these godforsaken places they post us to? But Wilde, actually, I performed in college. St. Stephens. ‘The Importance of Being Earnest.' My friends and I loved his use of language. ‘Arise, sir, from that semirecumbent posture!' ‘Truth is rarely pure, and never simple.' ‘Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?' For months after the play we went around talking in Wildeisms, some of which we made up ourselves. It got to the point where I could no longer tell the authentic Oscar epigrams from the ones I'd invented on the spur of some particularly opportune moment. I'm afraid the one I just came up with may well have been one of my own. A mere Lakshmanism.” He laughed, lightly, softly, and that was the moment I knew I wanted him to kiss me.

“That's an India I've never known,” I said.

“The India that performs ‘The Importance of Being Earnest'? That makes up Wildean epigrams? That considers the pun to be mightier than the sword? You haven't met many Stephanians, then. The products of St. Stephen's College, the oldest college in Delhi University and the best institution of higher education in India— just ask any Stephanian. The one place where you could actually have a classmate saying, ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my silk kurtas.' Mind you, we produce all sorts of Stephanians. I should put you in touch with our chief cop here, Gurinder. No Wildean — quite the opposite, in fact — but in his own way, he's far worse than me.” He smiled, dazzlingly, a perfect set of white teeth against the darkness of his face. “Priscilla, my dear, we're just as Indian as the pregnant women in your population-control proawareness programs. Unless you think you're somehow less authentically American than the welfare queen from Harlem.”

I grimaced inwardly at the last stereotype but saw the point he was making, so just nodded.

A little grinning boy brought in tea. “Ah, Mitha Mohammed,” Lakshman greeted him. “His tea is always too sweet. He has a heavy hand with the sugar, which is why we call him Sweet Mohammed. You don't have to drink it if you don't want to.” He took a large gulp from his own cup anyway as the boy, still grinning, salaamed and left. “But how come you haven't met many Stephanians? Didn't you say you'd lived three years in Delhi?”

“Yes, but I was a kid then,” I replied. “Just fifteen when I — we — left. I was at the American International School the whole time. The only Indians I knew were kids whose parents were working for American companies, or who'd already studied abroad for one reason or another before coming here and so couldn't go back to an Indian school. My parents didn't know that many Indian families, and those who came to the house didn't bring kids. So the only Indians I really got to know were our servants.”

“That sounds awful,” he said with a grim expression on his face, and I thought I'd caused some terrible offense. But he laughed again. “What a deprived childhood you've had, Priscilla. My poor little rich American kid.”

As he said it, he leaned over to pat my hand, which was on my lap, and I felt myself blushing again, a deep shade of crimson this time, I was sure. “We were hardly
rich
,” I retorted. “Middle-class, maybe. My mother taught school.”

“Look, Priscilla, by Indian standards an American janitor's rich,” he said. “Do you know what salaries are like here? You may think I live like a king here, and in many ways I suppose I do, but my take-home pay would put me below the poverty line in the United States. I'd be eligible for food stamps!” He seemed delighted to be able to make a cultural reference few in India would have understood.
He's pretty clued up
, I found myself thinking, and then —
But that's what he's trying to show me.

“Speaking of food, are you getting hungry?” he asked. “Do you have dinner plans? Because if not, I'm sure Geetha and Rekha would be very happy to see you again.”

I began to protest that I couldn't possibly impose, but he waved away my objections. “Look, the servants always cook more than we can eat, so it's really no extra trouble,” he said. “But the one thing I should do is to let Geetha know you're coming, so she's not taken by surprise.”

He picked up the phone, spoke to an assistant in Hindi, smiled at me as he waited and then spoke again in Hindi, this time, I guessed, to a servant at home. I looked around his office a little uncomfortably: shabby walls, government-issue furniture with musty files tumbling off the shelves, a calendar with a garish picture of some Hindu gods hanging crooked and forlorn on one side. This was a man blissfully unaware of the importance of appearances. Then his wife came on the phone and any embarrassment I might have felt at intruding on their privacy disappeared, since he spoke to her in a rapid-fire southern language of which I did not know a word. There was a bit of an exchange between them; he seemed insistent, and after a few minutes hung up with a wry smile.

“Look, I really don't want to be any trouble,” I began. “Why don't we do this some other time?”

“It's no trouble at all,” he assured me. “I just caught Geetha on her way to the temple. I'd forgotten Tuesday is one of her usual temple evenings. But dinner's fine — it'll just be a bit later. Would you mind very much if we had dinner, say, in two hours from now?”

I was still hesitating — not because I didn't want more of his company, but because of the apparent awkwardness of the situation, and also because I wasn't sure how I could put the intervening time to good use — when he spoke again. “Have you seen the Kotli?” he asked suddenly.

I shook my head.

“Then you must!” he replied, grinning with delight. “Zalilgarh's only authentic historic sight. You've been here two months and still haven't seen it?” He tut-tutted theatrically while rising from his desk. “I must take you there. And dusk is the perfect time. You'll see the sunset over the river.” He briefly gripped my upper arm as if to lift me from the chair. His grasp was strong, firm, yet light; I didn't want him to remove his hand. “Come. It'll fill the time very nicely until Geetha is ready for us.”

He rang a bell. A chaprassi came in to carry his briefcase to the waiting car.

“My bike?” I asked, uncertainly.

“You can leave it here,” he said. “My driver will drop you home after dinner, and you can pick up your cycle again in the morning.”

Well, I thought, getting into his official Ambassador car, here's a man who thinks of everything.

 

from Randy Diggs's notebook

October 11, 1989

Of course there's no real hotel in Zalilgarh. Why would they need one? Just a few “lodges” for traveling salesmen and whores, dingy rooms above fly-infested restaurants. But the embassy has managed to get the government to give the Harts the use of the official Public Works Department guest house, which is where visiting officials stay when they're touring the district. There is a bit of confusion when it turns out the staff only prepared one bedroom for Mr. and Mrs. Hart. Word of their divorce has apparently failed to penetrate down to the PWD caretakers. Nor have they been told about me. But the guest house is empty except for us. So, after a bit of to-do and some anxious hand-wringing on the part of the main uniformed attendant, not to mention the two twenty-rupee notes I slipped into his folded hands, a couple of additional locked rooms are opened up for our use. They're musty and haven't been dusted in weeks, and the once-white sheets on the beds are rough and stained, but I've no doubt they're better than the alternatives in town. Hart seems glad enough to take my word for it.

After a government-issue dinner (atmosphere strained, soup not), Mrs. Hart retires to her room. Hart must be exhausted too — the jet lag, the courtesy meetings at the embassy, the slow and bumpy ride down from Delhi. His face, his eyes especially, tell the story: he hasn't slept in days. But he wants to talk. We sit on the verandah in reclining wooden chairs whose woven-cane seats have begun to sag, and the mosquitoes buzz around our ears. Hart swats at them irritably until I produce a can of insect-repellent spray. “Thanks. Didn't have the time to think about this stuff,” he says shamefacedly.

I always think about this stuff, of course. And also about booze. Hart looks almost pathetically grateful when I extract a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black from my bag and get a couple of plain glass tumblers from the attendant. No ice. Hart doesn't seem to mind. He clutches his glass so hard I'm grateful it's thick PWD issue — a finer glass would have left him with crystal embedded in his palm. So we sit there, the gloom barely dispelled by the dim light of a solitary bulb in a metal lampshade (dipping and flaring alarmingly with the inevitable voltage fluctuations), the buzzing mosquitoes — maddened and repelled by our proximity and our chemicals — swirling around us. And we talk. Or rather, Hart talks, and I listen, letting the tape recorder run discreetly, scrawling the occasional note.