The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (36 page)

Pakistan or Kabristan!
I heard the 150,000 squawking in chorus, as I tried again, still in front of Venkat’s house, to start the car.
Pakistan, land of the pure—or Kabristan, land of the dead!

Get out, they meant, or go to hell.

Now, in 2002, ten years after the mosque’s destruction, some pilgrims were returning from paying tribute to that temple yet to come. Their train paused at a station next to a neighbourhood overwhelmingly poor and Muslim.

Pilgrims stretched and peed. Pilgrims bought snacks and chai. Maybe pilgrims threw a Muslim chai-seller’s tea back at him. Maybe pilgrims threw him off the train. Maybe a Muslim insulted a pilgrim. Maybe pilgrims forced him and others to profess devotion to Hindu Gods. Maybe pilgrims molested his daughter. Maybe it was the other way around.

Maybe it was a five-minute pause, maybe it was twenty-five. The train started to leave the station, then stopped, the emergency cord pulled. Maybe pilgrims pulled it themselves, inside the train, because other pilgrims had been left on the platform and Muslims were gathering there, attracted by their fellows’ cries. Almost undisputed is that the fight then began in earnest. The railroad right-of-way is paved with stones and these stones began to fly.

But did the Muslims manage to dodge the stones, petrol-douse the inside of a compartment
and
throw flaming rags through the windows? Or did one of the stones, or even one of the pilgrims, knock a kerosene
cookstove toward another cookstove-chiffonsari-oilynewspaper and did this domino into the conflagration that spread through the state?

Coach S-6. Fifty-eight dead by burning.

The Muslims were blamed,
post hoc ergo propter hoc
, as they say in the local lingo. A fight on the platform followed by a train-car fire—how could they not be responsible? It has since been alleged (post hoc again, but perhaps more propter hoc) that Chief Minister Narendra Modi and others mobilized, that same night, a spontaneous outpouring of grief and violence over the Hindu pilgrims’ deaths. The personnel were ready to
Click!
into mob formation.

The train pulled into Ahmedabad exactly twenty-four hours late. Colonial legacies: tick-tock trains; communal riots. Relatives met the remains, carried into the station on the train: bodies heat-shrunk, faces fire-grimaced, eye sockets singed and empty.

The burning train car was merely the head of the match, struck and held to a fuse. Riots sparked, burned, sparked, burned, spread throughout the state.

I didn’t leave my apartment that week. I barely left my sofa.

Some of my students organized a rally at the state legislative assembly and asked me to join. When I refused, they looked at me as though I were a coward. I did ask them not to go, it’s true. I thought it dangerous for them. But I laughed when they suggested I wasn’t coming because it was dangerous for me. “Me? I have nothing to live for!” I wheezed. I never saw them again.

One scattershot colleague worked up a delegation to Chief Minister Modi. He thought I might ornament his squad, me with my book on the Delhi pogroms, the one that made me famous among the few who cared. “Modi doesn’t want to meet me,” I informed him. “He doesn’t know who I am. And if he does, he definitely doesn’t want to meet me.” I hung up without waiting for his counter-arguments.

It was midday, in the middle of that week. I hadn’t locked the door since the last time I entered, and they walked in without knocking: Munir, a student of mine, his arm around a teenaged boy I didn’t know.

“This is my brother, Sohail,” Munir told me. “You have to hide us.”

I liked Munir, difficult as he was in class, something hair-trigger about him. Very bright. He had to be: he was the only Gujarati Muslim on the IIM campus that year, a travesty he could classify in various ways. Still, he was not unreachable, then.

I gestured for them to sit, and brought them lime-water. The boys smelled of iron-carbon-nitrogen, blood-smoke-piss. Their eyes were flat and small. I had seen accounts of the atrocities on the news, though nothing yet like the full accounting that is still emerging: unborn children cut from bellies, systematic rape of Muslim women, throats slit and bodies burned.

“You are going to drive us to Delhi.” That was the first thing Sohail said.

“You will take us, Professor Rao. I know you will, because I read that book you wrote,
Who Are the Victims?
” Munir reached for my cigarettes. He drew one out of the pack and across his moustache-fuzz, smelling the unburnt tobacco. “Our family is dead. Killed by Hindus, Professor Rao. Like you.”

I tried to drive away from Venkat’s house, leaving him inside with his parakeet, mouthing the same slogans as the mobs that had killed Munir’s family. My car kept stalling, starting, stalling.

I thought of my father, of how he was galvanized by the Delhi pogroms. He had been in his late sixties at the time, retired, contented. A good career, a life well lived, service to his country, his country as a cause. He had always voted for Congress. These were his beliefs.

The pogroms gave this life the lie. So he changed his life. He joined peace organizations; he helped Sikh widows fill out forms as they sought reparations; he volunteered in slum schools. If he had not seen what he had, on our street, and others, perhaps he would have, like Venkat, blamed the murders of our loved ones on “the Sikhs.” Losing Kritika and the children slowed him down, it’s true. But then he plunged in once more.

I have mentioned here only two books about the Delhi pogroms and their aftermath, including my own.
Who Are the Guilty?
And
Who Are the Victims?
There are practically no others—why?

Some ten years after the violence, Amitav Ghosh, a novelist of extraordinary scope, wrote a piece for an American magazine, asking the same question. He had been living in Delhi at the time. His neighbourhood was attacked, though he didn’t witness the burnings. He, too, was reluctant to march, though he did, in the same protests as I. “Writers don’t join crowds,” he writes. “But what do you do when the constitutional authority fails to act? You join and in joining bear all the responsibilities and obligations and guilt that joining represents.” And yet, he says, “Until now I have never really written about what I saw in November of 1984. Nobody, so far as I know, has written about it except in passing.” Why silent for so long? “As a writer,” he says, “I had only one obvious subject, the violence. From the news report, or the latest film or novel, we have come to expect the bloody detail or the elegantly staged conflagration that closes a chapter or effects a climax.” He is a writer mostly of fiction; I suppose those temptations are particularly present for them.

Ghosh’s article has three climaxes: a busload of people protecting a Sikh fellow commuter; a Hindu serving her Sikh neighbour tea in the muffled hush of her parlour while the mob sieges their street; and a moment I must have seen but which is effaced from my own memory: a group of thugs approached us, “brandishing knives and steel rods … A kind of rapture descended on us, exhilaration in anticipation of a climax … all the women in our group stepped out and surrounded the men; their saris and
kameezes
became a thin, fluttering barrier, a wall around us. They turned to face the approaching men, challenging them, daring them to attack. The thugs took a few more steps toward us and then faltered, confused. A moment later, they were gone.”

Part of the reason he didn’t write about the bloodshed is that he was spared the trauma of witnessing it. “What I saw at first hand,” he said, “was not the horror of violence but the affirmation of humanity … the risks that perfectly ordinary people are willing to take for one another.”

His representation is honest and necessary. Still, it doesn’t fully unlock my understanding of that time. The key, for me, was more ephemeral, less dramatic than either the violence or the resistence. Something in the middle, something about surviving and shifting. About seeing. The critical moment, the thing I remember and want to record, was my father’s transformation: one citizen awakened to his own blindness, his own complicity; my father’s hands held to his eyes in pain as the scales fell.

Those who alter the course of history by being party either to violence or resistance are, in my experience, a minority. History happens
to
most people, not because of them. As for me, Ashwin Thrice-Struck. Or perhaps, more accurately, Thrice-Missed.

I hid the boys for a few days, waiting for the streets to cool down. The cook, who had continued to come and go, said it was good I was eating again. I asked her to bring extra. “Making up for lost time,” I told her. I didn’t trust the mood on campus any more than the boys did.

I smoked and watched them eat, watched them hate themselves, their appetites, their impotence, me.

“You going to write a big book about this?” Munir asked at one point.

“No—” I said, but he stopped me before I could elaborate.

“I don’t care. Why did I ask? Why am I asking why I asked? Curiosity is an old habit.”

You can see why I liked him.

At the time, I was ashamed of not participating in any of the public acts of resistance, yet I continued to refuse. This was the third strike, and I had been spared. What for?