The Solitude of Emperors (8 page)

Gokul’s was almost deserted when we got there. Usually, at this time of night, the low-ceilinged main room and the mezzanine that you had to bend over almost double to negotiate would have been thick with a fug of smoke and noise, waiters careening past the densely packed tables with trays of whisky, rum, bowls of peanuts, ice buckets and soda, but today only three tables were occupied and most of the waiters were crowded together at the back of the room, gossiping. We were served as soon as we sat down, and our waiter lingered to chat.

‘They’re going from gully to gully slaughtering the Miyans, saab. I myself saw three dead last night and tonight there will be more.’

It did not matter whether the waiter had seen three or thirty dead, by the time these riots were finished, every one of Bombay’s residents, bar those too young to speak, would have their own impressions of a city gone mad. My imagination was now inflamed by the possibilities—a lead story in the magazine worthy of being nominated for the country’s highest journalism awards, anchored perhaps by the words of one of the victims, a man dying from sword cuts or blows from a lathi. I could almost see the article in my head now, but the final piece of the picture eluded me, the dying man, and I realized that I had no visual reference to fuel my imagination. Nothing I had seen of these riots in print or television portrayed images of the dying, all that they showed was the dead. No, there was no substitute for actually being present at the scene of a killing. Rao, who was very talkative, had been chatting to me while I had been lost in my thoughts, and now he shook my arm impatiently, almost upsetting my drink.

‘What are you thinking about, man, you’ve scarcely touched your drink?’

‘Oh, nothing really…’

‘See, I knew you weren’t listening, fucker, what’s the matter with you?’

The waiter had reappeared at our table, and I noticed Rao had finished his drink. I took a prolonged swallow at my own, gagging slightly as the rum flooded my throat. Although I had started having the occasional drink almost as soon as I arrived in Bombay, I was still in the process of acquiring a taste for the stuff.

‘Saab, we’re closing in fifteen minutes, manager saab says no more orders after this one.’

‘What’s wrong with you people? There have been riots before, nothing will happen to us here,’ Rao said irritably.

‘It’s not my rule, saab,’ the waiter said stubbornly.

‘OK, two large Old Monks each, jaldi,’ he said.

‘I can’t drink that much,’ I protested, ‘I’ll puke for sure.’

‘No problem, I’ll drink three, man—I need the buzz. This is bloody exciting.’

I was briefly sickened by his callousness, but I needed him, I couldn’t do this on my own. And besides, who was I to moralize? I wasn’t going out to save lives, I was hoping to use the riots for my own purposes.

Soon, the shutters were clattering down, and the waiter reappeared to tell us it was time to leave. But we lingered, now afraid to step into a world where the old certainties didn’t hold. I found my courage ebbing away and was fully prepared to walk back to the hostel but Rao, fuelled by four rums, urged me on. It took us a while to find a taxi, the black and yellows seemed to have vanished, and when we eventually managed to flag one down the driver refused to take us to where we wanted to go. Finally, we managed to strike a deal—we would pay him a hundred rupees more than the fare, and he would drop us off a safe distance from an area where riots had recently occurred.

The taxi driver was a large man, almost filling the front seat. As we got into his vehicle I was immediately struck by the absence of religious objects the dashboard would normally have been crammed with—depending on the faith of the driver or owner, verses from the Koran, small crucifixes, reproductions of a variety of Hindu gods and goddesses or pictures of Guru Nanak. Sometimes, if the driver was hedging his bets, you would have portraits of the syncretic saint Shirdi Sai Baba, or an assortment of artefacts from every faith, divine protection to guard against suicidal driving and a variety of other dangers that could hurtle out of the Bombay night. As we drove along, I found myself wondering about the faith of our driver. Was he Hindu or Muslim? Would he take to the streets later tonight to kill, or would he be in hiding?

We were dropped off as agreed, and began walking. As we went deeper into the maze of streets, heading away from the storm of light and noise of the main thoroughfare, there were fewer and fewer people. In my memory the streets of the neighbourhood we passed through are a bluish grey, burned a dusty gold here and there by the occasional street lamp that worked. Although it was still only slightly after ten, I had never walked streets so deserted in all the time I had lived in the city. I grew ever more excited. And nervous. Beside me, I could hear Rao breathing heavily. After we had walked for about fifteen minutes, the city still and watchful around us, the tension growing with every step, Rao’s rum-inspired courage began to give way.

‘Let’s get back to civilization, man, this is creeping me out,’ he whispered.

‘Come on, yaar, we can’t go back now, just when things are getting interesting.’

‘Two more streets and I’m out of here.’

‘Fine.’

That was when we heard the scream, faint and muffled, but quite clearly that of a human being in distress. Grabbing Rao’s arm I headed in the direction of the sound. We went down street after empty street but found nothing. It was difficult to pinpoint exactly where the noise had come from and it didn’t help that the screams had stopped.

‘Poor bugger’s probably dead,’ Rao said to me in a voice in which excitement and fear vied for supremacy.

We wandered down a few more streets, and just as we were about to give up and go home, I stumbled over something on the pavement. I hadn’t been looking down but around, trying to figure out where we were, and in the dim light I hadn’t noticed what seemed to be a pile of rubbish. But now, as my eyes adjusted to the light cast by a single street light about thirty feet away, I saw something that was to burn brightly in the nightmares I suffered in the aftermath of the riots.

He was a presentable young man, you could tell that from the lower half of his face, but something had gone terribly wrong with the rest of his features. The left eyeball had been gouged out of its socket, and the right eyeball had been slashed by a knife, and was cloudy and occluded by blood. These injuries hadn’t killed him; below the chin, there was a surgically clean cut that had finally extinguished his life. In the few seconds that had passed since we had come upon the dead body, Rao finally found his voice.

‘Ah fuck, oh fuck, let’s get out of here, man, is he still living, let’s call the cops, come on let’s get out.’

We ran from there, and then slowed down when we realized we had no idea where we were going.

The very next street we turned down, we came upon what we had been searching for and were now desperate to avoid. Beside an old four-storey building propped up by scaffolding we saw fifteen or twenty men pounding away at something that lay at their feet. Off to one side, there was another figure lying in the street, legs curled up towards his chest, arms splayed out. I didn’t feel fear so much as a heightened clarity of vision and perception. The dead man’s kurta had been torn from his body and he had been sliced open, the flesh neatly peeled back from his stomach and the internal organs visible as if in a urology lab demonstration. Perhaps because of the position in which he was lying, nothing had spilled out, except a rope of blood that secured him to the dusty pavement.

It’s hard for me to describe with absolute precision what happened next, although I learned from the counsellor I saw in the aftermath of the killings that this is a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder—victims almost always blank out the most extreme aspects of the violence they are witnessing in order to protect themselves.

The mob beating the man suddenly stopped as though they were reacting to some unspoken command. One of them picked him up with something of an effort as his body was limp—he may well have been already dead—and his arms and legs flopped all over the place. Another man approached the pair; then, as if they had practised the manoeuvre, the first attacker crouched down into a semi-recumbent position, acting as a support to keep the victim upright, while reaching up and pulling the victim’s head back by the hair. The second man took up a comfortable stance and raised the weapon he was holding, a four-foot-long-sword. The first man let go of the head and, in the same instant, the swordsman whipped his weapon down and across with blinding speed, cleanly severing the victim’s head from his body. It is here that my actual witnessing of the incident grows fuzzy. In the nightmares I was prone to afterwards, I would see the head flying off and the gush of blood, but on the day I saw none of this, only something more obscene than anything else I would witness that night—the neck abruptly collapsing on itself like a flaccid rubber tube.

Next to me I heard Rao muttering obscenities beneath his breath as he took in the scene, and then before I could do or say anything he yelled, ‘Come on, let’s go,’ and began to run back the way we had come.

To this day, I can’t tell you why I didn’t follow him. Maybe it was some survival instinct telling me that if I ran I would seem guilty, and would therefore be killed, whereas if I stood my ground I might be able to reason with them. Or perhaps the thought had surfaced, no matter how foolhardy it may seem in retrospect, that here was my story, the one that I had come on to the streets to look for.

A couple of men at the fringes of the mob looked up when Rao yelled, caught sight of me, and alerted the rest of the group to my presence. Instantly, all the men turned their eyes on me, including the one holding the sword.

It was too late to move. A man detached himself from the group and ran towards me. He stood no higher than my shoulder for I am reasonably big, just under six feet tall. As he came up he took a clumsy swipe at me with the lathi he was carrying. The blow wasn’t well aimed and didn’t hurt. I caught hold of the weapon and said firmly, ‘I’m Hindu. Don’t touch me.’ I was speaking in English, and the man, struggling to release his weapon, swore to his colleagues in Marathi, ‘Behenchod says he is Hindu.’

The same survival instinct that had rooted me to the spot now told me that I couldn’t let go of the lathi and that things would go badly for me if my assailant managed to free himself. It sounds as if I was fully in control of the situation, weighing my options and acting in a measured manner, but it wasn’t so at all—everything I did was automatic, controlled by some little-used part of my mind.

A man, evidently the leader of the mob that now surrounded me, came up and slapped me so hard that I almost fell. I relaxed my grip on the length of bamboo that my first assailant was wielding and it was wrenched free. As I staggered back, determined to stay upright no matter how often I was hit, because to go down would be to die, the man who had slapped me said, ‘Gaandu, you aren’t Muslim, are you?’

I shook my head and murmured, ‘Hindu.’

‘Behenchod, everyone in Bombay says the same thing. How do I know you’re not lying?’ My horror deepened when I noticed the man with the sword standing just behind my interrogator, listening to every word.

‘Ask him to drop his pants, then we’ll see if the maderchod is telling the truth…’ someone shouted.

The one clear part of my brain that was fighting for my survival impelled me to say, in the pidgin Hindi I’d acquired since I’d moved to Bombay, ‘Why should I drop my trousers, will you drop yours?’

I was rewarded with another bone-rattling slap, another hand reached for me and I could hear my shirt tearing.

A voice piped up from within the mob, ‘Madrasi lagta hai…’

And then another, ‘Behenchod, he’s wearing a thread…’

The tearing of my shirt spared me from further damage. As soon as my attackers saw the sacred thread I wore and realized I was Hindu, they began turning away. Later I would feel ashamed that I had taken refuge in my Hindu identity when my life was at stake—it didn’t seem the right way to stand up to terrorism committed in the name of God—but in the moment I felt only unadulterated relief.

‘Mind you, don’t tell anyone about what you saw here. Remember we can find you no matter where you hide. Chalo, let’s forget this pitiful chuthiya…’

And then they moved away, leaving me in the street with two dead men. Suddenly, one of the mob turned back. It was the little man who had first attacked me. Raising the lathi he carried, he brought it down on me in a fury. I hadn’t been expecting this and could do nothing to defend myself. The blow landed on my head and I staggered back from the force of it. Mustn’t fall, mustn’t fall, was the only thought that went through my mind. He struck me a couple more times and I remember thinking for one so small he seemed tremendously strong, but I felt no pain, that would come later; all I was aware of was the encroaching darkness.

‘Behenchod, this is for you to remember us by,’ he hissed, spittle flecking his beedi-blackened lips. These last blows, I would later realize, had very little to do with religion. The man probably earned a meagre daily wage in a factory or godown, enduring the myriad humiliations of the blue-collar worker without any means of getting his own back. Until now.

‘Eh, bewda, come on, let’s go,’ one of his friends shouted back, noticing his absence. ‘We’ve got a couple of juicy Muslim women for you to play with on the next street.’

My attacker glared at me for a minute more, then turned away. It was over.

~

My experience of the riots was as nothing compared to the hundreds who died or were tortured and maimed, not to mention their families and friends who would remember the days the evil on the city’s streets had invaded their pathetic shelters. There were two major spells of rioting: the first when I was attacked, and the second a few weeks later when gangs of rioters owing their allegiance to fundamentalist Hindu organizations began to kill Muslims even more systematically, aided by sections of the police force. I saw none of this for I was immured in Jaslok Hospital, where I was treated, at Mr Sorabjee’s insistence and expense, for a mild concussion and a high fever brought on, according to the doctor, by the shock I had suffered as a result of the attack. There were other symptoms that any victim of trauma would recognize—memory loss, insomnia, stomach aches and depression—as I retreated into a personal darkness, away from a world I couldn’t handle. When I was discharged from the hospital, Mr Sorabjee wanted to send me home to K—, but I pleaded with him not to, afraid that if my parents discovered what had happened, they would not allow me to return to Bombay. He came round in the end, but arranged for me to have counselling, and virtually placed me under house arrest in the hostel for nearly two months.