The Solitude of Emperors (7 page)

The fabled humanity of whores is overrated. Abandoning any further attempts at seduction, the madam lifted me up and marched me across to a washbasin in the corner of the cubicle. ‘Don’t dirty my room, you useless bakra. That chutiya Deepak should know better than to bring me babies who haven’t outgrown their mother’s breasts.’ The warmth had gone from her eyes, they were hard little seeds of anger in her ravaged face. Quickly rinsing out my mouth I stumbled from the room.

After the fiasco at the brothel Deepak kept his distance from me, and my craving for company vanished for the moment. I was still at an age where I believed every setback should only be seen as a spur to advancement, so I attacked my work with a new ferocity. In time I might have tried to do something about my situation, but that was not to be. I and all the other inhabitants of the city were about to see our world rearranged in a way that would drive everything but fear from our minds.

4

City of Fear

In Mr Sorabjee’s cluttered and utilitarian office there was a single decorative object. The room faced east and on the wall opposite the window was an antique mercury wheel barometer. When the morning sun slanted in, it would kindle a deep caramel glow within the instrument’s satinwood finish. Catching me staring at it one day, Mr Sorabjee told me that he had bought it cheaply almost thirty years ago in Chor Bazaar. He had been advised to get it valued because it was a fine example of the work of Francis Pastorelli, a renowned maker of scientific instruments in the mid-nineteenth century, but as he had no intention of selling he had done nothing about it. When I remarked on the fact that the pointer seemed to indicate that it was stormy when it was in fact a fine day he said that a barometer told you what the weather was going to be, not what it was like at the present moment; then he smiled and said the needle had been stuck in that position for as long as he could remember.

A week after we’d had our conversation I would have occasion to think ruefully that my employer’s barometer may not have been very good at predicting the weather but that it was prescient when it came to the political situation in the country. The Hindu right-wing organizations bidding for political power had embarked on the final phase of their campaign and the stage was set for what Mr Sorabjee’s editorial later described as the fourth greatest tragedy to befall independent India since the partition riots, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi.

On 6 December 1992, as a supine government watched, hundreds of rioters demolished the mosque in Ayodhya that had been the object of their venom. Immediately, a long comet’s tail of violence swung across the country and tens of thousands of lives were affected.

In the past Bombay had always taken a sensible view of riots elsewhere in India. It believed that it was its own country, and if it was going to have riots and other disturbances it would manufacture them itself—it had its own crooked politicians and gangsters, it had no need to follow the lead of some politician from the Hindi heartland. Also, as the city’s riots were usually restricted to the poorer sections of town, nobody you knew, except perhaps the office peon or the dabbawallah who brought you lunch, was affected. Work went on as usual in the great steel and concrete canyons of Nariman Point and Dalal Street, the parties continued in Malabar Hill and Cuffe Parade, and the great ship of the city would rock briefly on the swells caused by the commotion and then continue to sail serenely on.

This time, the riots were different. Immediately after the mosque was demolished, there were reports of scattered cases of stabbing or assault by Muslims outraged by this insult to their faith. The reaction from Hindu mobs, egged on by fundamentalist political parties, was unimaginably savage. Muslims were sought out and killed wherever they could be found—in crowded tenement buildings, slums, mosques where they had sought shelter, trains and buses. They were burnt alive in their shops and places of work. If the victims were young and pretty and female they were raped before they were killed. Older women were merely beaten up before they were murdered. Milkmen and bakers, neighbours and people who had been part of the same local cricket team, no one was spared in an orgy of violence that was unlike anything the city had ever seen. To make matters worse, with some exceptions, the police either looked the other way or even encouraged the rioters. People had been killed in the past, often as a result of religious bigotry, but it was in December 1992 that Bombay lost its way.

~

I was working harder than ever because Mr Sorabjee had decided to put out a special issue of the magazine to decry the demolition and the sectarian violence it had unleashed everywhere in the country. On the third day after riots broke out in the city, I came home from work a little earlier than usual and noticed that the reception area and the courtyard in front of the hostel were unusually full of people. At any other time I might have stopped to see what was going on, but I was very tired so I continued on to my room. Just as I was walking up the stairs I heard a familiar voice call out my name. It was Rao, my elusive room-mate, who was at the centre of one of the groups animatedly discussing the riots. It rapidly became clear why there was such a crowd. In the evenings most of the residents of the hostel would go out as was to be expected of single men in a big city, but now no one was sure that it was safe to do so. The night belonged to the rioters, and although so far most of the victims had been Muslim, there was always the likelihood that the flames could reach out to others, especially those who belonged to other minority communities or were newcomers to the city. As a sizeable percentage of the residents of the hostel were non-Hindu or from outside Bombay, few of them wanted to find out if that was indeed going to happen.

Rao was part of a gang listening to Deepak, who was describing a killing he had witnessed from his office. A window in his firm’s building overlooked a Muslim slum and he was telling the group how it had been ransacked by a mob frustrated by its inability to find anyone to kill.

‘I could see them milling around, with lathis and choppers, trying to figure out what to do next. The streets were so deserted it was eerie. The last time I saw something like that was years ago when there was a total solar eclipse over the city and no one would venture out because it was considered inauspicious.’

‘What happened next? Come on, yaar, get on with it,’ Rao cut in.

Deepak looked irritated by the interruption but didn’t remonstrate. ‘The rioters set a couple of buildings on fire, but it was clear they didn’t have too much petrol or other weapons; they had just rushed out on to the street to kill as many Muslims as they could, and now they couldn’t find any. The leaders of the mob were arguing amongst themselves about what to do next when their prayers were answered. A taxi came pelting down the deserted road, obviously driven by a Muslim—the stupid fellow hadn’t bothered to take off his topi or shave his beard. I don’t know what the poor fucker was thinking. If I had been him, I would have put the car in reverse and made a run for it, but maybe he thought he could ram his way through the crowd. He didn’t stand a chance, a couple of stones were flung at the windscreen, and the car veered off the road. After that there wasn’t a whole lot left to see.’

‘Did you actually see the guy die?’ someone in the audience asked, sounding hopeful.

‘Of course I did,’ Deepak said, and then reluctantly corrected himself: ‘We couldn’t see very much; there were about a hundred men trying to get their hands on the taxi driver. I think they beat him to death, and then set him on fire. We called the cops, it took us a long time to get through, and when we finally managed to speak to them they promised to come but no one did.’ Deepak had little more to add, and his audience began to drift away, eager to soak up more information about the riots.

~

Back in my room, I let my satchel drop to the floor and lay down on my bed fully dressed, not even bothering to take off my shoes. I took in my surroundings—two iron cots with thin, skimpy mattresses, mine made up and Rao’s in a mess as usual, the large unwieldy chest of drawers, its wood scarred by former residents of the room, the oxidized mirror on the nail, the peeling paint, the clothes hanging on pegs driven into the wall—and a feeling of desolation swept over me. I thought about the taxi driver who had been murdered. Deepak hadn’t said whether he was young or old, but I imagined him to be as young as I was, and there was a good chance that he, like me, was a recent immigrant to the city, perhaps from Hyderabad, or some smaller place that did not have enough work or resources to hold on to its young. He would have come here hoping to make his fortune, and maybe in time he would have.

Why had he worn the badges of his faith to the very end, I wondered. Even when his life was at stake, why hadn’t he thought to take them off? Maybe they were so much a part of him, he hadn’t even seen them as symbols to be discarded. They would have helped him link himself to a community, of course, until he had saved enough to bring his family over from his home town because it was likely he had married young. Until this fateful day, his religion would have saved him from the loneliness of the room in the chawl or slum. He would go to the mosque, meet others as lonely as he was. They would do their namaz together, celebrate the great festivals of Id and Ramzan with feasts of biryani on Mohammed Ali Road. Yes, his religion had been good to him, until the day it had devoured him. Just like that. What did others like him feel, to be singled out for no reason other than having been born into a different faith? I wanted to find out just as I wished to understand how faith drove the agents of persecution.

In the course of the past few days, as our work at the magazine had grown feverishly busy, I had become aware of vague feelings of discontentment that had swiftly crystallized. I did not want to merely rehash the reports that had appeared in the dailies; I wanted to do more than sub-edit eloquently worded editorials. I wanted to go out on to the front line where the battle was being fought and report on it. That was what I had imagined myself doing when I had first thought of becoming a journalist, and never before had it seemed more important. I thought of my father telling me about his dreams for me, for himself. I thought of his cousin, the distance runner who had lacked the requisite ‘kick’ when it mattered, and the feeling grew in me that the time had come to make my move. My job at the magazine did not involve reporting on events but surely, I argued to myself, Mr Sorabjee would not mind me writing a piece for ‘View from the Front Line’ about what was happening in the city.

Outside my room, the pigeons who made their home in the eaves settled in for the night. Footsteps approached the door. For someone so small, Rao walked with a heavy tread. ‘Hey, this is really a bummer, you know all this shit going on in the city—it’s putting a dent in my party scene…’

I wasn’t paying much attention, I was still thinking about how I might get to cover a riot, but Rao didn’t seem to need me to participate in the conversation.

‘Apparently the rioting is going to get worse, the Sena and others have just got started, they’ll be going house to house soon, the cops are with them, the ministers are with them, they are going to play Holi again this year, only with blood instead of colour.’

I could detect no sympathy for the victims in his voice, perhaps my room-mate thought riots were the same as his parties only a little more high concept. As I half listened, an idea began to form in my mind. Although I wanted to witness a riot, I wasn’t sure I had the nerve to go it alone, but if I could persuade Rao to accompany me it would be perfect.

‘Hey, Rao, want to see if we can find some action?’

‘You mean, like, babes?’

‘No, riots, I’m a reporter, remember.’

That’s a brilliant idea, man.’

‘Do you know where Deepak is?’

‘The mad fucker said he was off to Shuklajee Street. Riots or no riots the man needs to get his rocks off.’

‘Oh well.’

‘Drink in Gokul’s first?’

~

We left the hostel slightly before nine. There was no breeze, and the night was warm but not unpleasantly sticky as it could be during the summer and the monsoon. We walked briskly down Wodehouse Road, and emerged on to Colaba Causeway, which was inscribed like a great glittering whip on one of the busiest areas in the city. The Causeway was usually humming with people, traffic, light and noise until very late at night but today its vigour was sapped. No crowds gathered in the lobby of the Regal theatre, spilling out on to its steps; the restaurant next to Sahakari Bhandar was deserted, and even the dense throngs that filtered past the pavement stalls filled with counterfeit and stolen foreign goods were noticeably thinner. There was light and music from Leopold’s Cafe as the sailors, druggies and whores continued to party—it would take a nuclear explosion to shut the place down—but otherwise there was no noise. We could actually hear our heels on the pavement, and individual explosions of sound—the receding rumble of a BEST bus, the clanking as a restaurant downed its shutters, a beggar hawking and spitting on the pavement.

I was filled with a nervous exhilaration, afraid yet tense with anticipation at what we might encounter. This was what war correspondents and cops and soldiers must feel, I thought: the rush of adrenalin. At the same time, I felt vulnerable, stripped of the anonymity a city confers upon its inhabitants. I was not Muslim, my penis was not circumcised, I still wore my sacred thread and I could recite the Gayatri mantra, but the thought that my identity could be put to the test by some thug made me nervous. I remembered stories about South Indian and Gujarati immigrants being targeted by mobs in Bombay a few decades earlier, when they were accused by opportunistic politicians of taking jobs away from native-born people of the state, and I worried briefly about these riots losing their focus, turning from one target to another, and then let the thought go. I wondered what Rao was thinking about, he seemed a bit subdued, although I could sense that he continued to be excited by the prospect of witnessing a riot; I had no doubt that it would go down well as party talk. But did it bother him that he was South Indian and therefore at some slight risk? It probably hadn’t even occurred to him, I thought, he floated in the bubble that encased the city’s elite, far above the netherworlds where the less privileged lived and, from time to time, killed each other.