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Instead, their homes, their doors and windows, their makeshift roofs, their pots and pans, their plates, their spoons, their school-leaving certificates, their ration cards, their marriage certificates, their children’s schools, their lifetime’s work, the expression in their eyes, were flattened by yellow bulldozers imported from Australia. (Ditch Witch, they were called, the ’dozers.) They were State-of-the-Art machines. They could flatten history and stack it up like building material.
The passengers looked out of their car windows and saw only the new apartment they planned to buy, the Jacuzzi they had just installed and the ink that was still wet on the sweetheart deal they had just closed. They were calm from their meditation classes and glowing from yoga practice.
The summer of the city’s resurrection had also been the summer of scams—coal scams, iron-ore scams, housing scams, insurance scams, stamp-paper scams, phone-license scams, land scams, dam scams, irrigation scams, arms and ammunition scams, petrol-pump scams, polio-vaccine scams, electricity-bill scams, school-book scams, God Men scams, drought-relief scams, car-number-plate scams, voter-list scams, identity-card scams—in which politicians, businessmen, businessmen-politicians and politician-businessmen had made off with unimaginable quantities of public money.
He said that the caste system was India’s salvation. “Each caste must do the work it has been born to do, but all work must be respected.” When Dalits erupted in fury, a municipal sweeper’s little daughter was dressed up in a new frock and seated by his side with a bottle of water from which he sipped from time to time.
Industrialists who had been exposed in the scams donated money to his Movement and applauded the old man’s unwavering commitment to non-violence. (His prescriptions for hand-chopping, hanging and disemboweling were accepted as reasonable caveats.)
Several intellectuals and concerned citizens squatted on the pavement explaining farmers’ rights to farmers who had been fighting for their rights for years.
Occupying a substantial part of the pavement quite close to the bald men were fifty representatives of the thousands of people who had been maimed in the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal.
Next to the Bhopalis was the Delhi Kabaadi-Wallahs’ (Waste-recyclers’) Association and the Sewage Workers’ Union, protesting against the privatization and corporatization of the city’s garbage and the city’s sewage. The corporation that bid for and won the contract was the same one that had been given farmers’ land for its power plant. It already ran the city’s electricity and water distribution. Now it owned the city’s shit and waste-disposal systems too.
Gulabiya would lose his job in the morning. Thousands like him would line up hoping to replace him. (One might even be the street poet himself.) But for now, Gulabiya slept soundly and dreamed deep. In his dream he had enough money to feed himself and send a little home to his family in his village. In his dream his village still existed. It wasn’t at the bottom of a dam reservoir.
With his extra income he subcontracted his toilet-cleaning duties, which were unthinkable for a man of his caste and background to perform (he was a Brahmin), to Suresh Balmiki who, as his name makes clear, belonged to what most Hindus overtly, and the government covertly, thought of as the shit-cleaning caste.
Manipuri Nationalists asking for the revocation of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which made it legal for the Indian Army to kill on “suspicion”; Tibetan refugees calling for a free Tibet; and, most unusually (and most dangerously, for them), the Association of Mothers of the Disappeared, whose sons had gone missing, in their thousands, in the war for freedom in Kashmir.
Some of the Mothers, like some of the Bhopal gas leak victims, had become a little jaded. They had told their stories at endless meetings and tribunals in the international supermarkets of grief, along with other victims of other wars in other countries. They had wept publicly and often, and nothing had come of it. The horror they were going through had grown a hard, bitter shell.
Ironically both of them were on the pavement that night to escape their past and all that had circumscribed their lives so far. And yet, in order to arm themselves for battle, they retreated right back into what they sought to escape, into what they were used to, into what they really were.
Police patrol jeeps (With You, For You, Always) arrived with flashing lights and the Delhi Police special—maader chod behen chod maa ki choot behen ka lauda.*
See, here are Santhal tribals from Hazaribagh, displaced by East Parej coal mines, these are Union Carbide Gas victims who walked here all the way from Bhopal. It took them three weeks. That Gas-Leak company has a new name now, Dow Chemicals. But these poor people who were destroyed by them, can they buy new lungs, new eyes? They have to manage with their same old organs, which were poisoned so many years ago. But nobody cares. Those dogs just sit there on that Meridian Hotel windowsill and watch us die.
We sit here like caged animals, and the government feeds us useless little pieces of hope through the bars of this iron railing. Not enough to live on, but just enough to prevent us from dying.
They had already registered one thousand one hundred and forty-six similar cases in the city that year. And it was only May.
In a part of the city they oughtn’t to be in. No signs said so, because everything was a sign that any fool could read: the silence, the width of the roads, the height of the trees, the unpeopled pavements, the clipped hedges, the low white bungalows in which the Rulers lived.
People crowded the counters of the all-night chemists, playing Indian Roulette. (There was a 60:40 chance that the drugs they bought were genuine and not spurious.)
Servants wearing their employers’ expensive cast-offs are being walked by even better-dressed dogs—Labradors, German shepherds, Dobermans, beagles, dachshunds, cocker spaniels—with wool coats that say things like Superman and Woof!
The maid was obviously a Gond or a Santhal from Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh, or perhaps one of the aboriginal tribes in Orissa.
Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labors and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we are continue to coexist—continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the center holds, as long as the yolk doesn’t run, we’ll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view.
If you’ll pardon me for making this somewhat prosaic observation—maybe that’s what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes.
Behind her plain, unfashionable spectacles, her slightly slanting cat-eyes had the insouciant secretiveness of a pyromaniac. She gave the impression that she had somehow slipped off her leash.
traditionally dispense with inconveniences such as these. Tilo’s mother was sent away until the baby was born and placed in a Christian orphanage. In a few months she returned to the orphanage and adopted her own child. Her family disowned her.
He had that chameleon-like quality that good actors have—the ability to alter his physical appearance, not superficially, but radically, depending on who he had decided to be at that particular moment in his life. When we were young, it was all very entertaining and exhilarating. Everybody looked forward to what Naga’s newest avatar was going to be. But as we grew older it became a little hollow and tiresome.
She said, “I’m not marrying anybody.” When I asked her why she felt that way, she said she wanted to be free to die irresponsibly, without notice and for no reason.
I wondered whether it was her way of staging a subtle version of a teenage rebellion against her father. But that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Over the last ten years or so the field of human rights has become a perfectly respectable and even lucrative profession.
Like many noisy extremists, he has moved through a whole spectrum of extreme political opinion. What has remained consistent is only the decibel level.
The one thing I will say for Naga is that not a rupee ever changed hands. About that he was—and continues to be—honest to a fault. Since his idea of professional integrity requires him to live by his principles, in order to remain a person of integrity, he has changed his principles, and now believes in us almost more than we believe in ourselves.
Today, as the saffron tide of Hindu Nationalism rises in our country like the swastika once did in another, Naga’s “foolish faith” schoolboy speech would probably get him expelled, if not by the school authorities, then certainly by some sort of parents’ campaign.
(We were well into the Troubles by then. The civilian government had been dismissed; it was 1996, the sixth straight year of Governor’s Rule in the State.)
It made one feel that Kashmir really belonged to those creatures. That none of us who were fighting over it—Kashmiris, Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese (they have a piece of it too—Aksai Chin, which used to be part of the old Kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir), or for that matter Pahadis, Gujjars, Dogras, Pashtuns, Shins, Ladakhis, Baltis, Gilgitis, Purikis, Wakhis, Yashkuns, Tibetans, Mongols, Tatars, Mon, Khowars—none of us, neither saint nor soldier, had the right to claim the truly heavenly beauty of that place for ourselves.
I saw a man on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Muslim or a non-Muslim?” He said, “A Muslim.” I said, “Shia or Sunni?” He said, “Sunni.” I said, “Me too! Deobandi or Barelvi?” He said, “Barelvi.” I said, “Me too! Tanzeehi or Tafkeeri?” He said, “Tanzeehi.” I said, “Me too! Tanzeehi Azmati or Tanzeehi Farhati?” He said, “Tanzeehi Farhati.” I said, “Me too! Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Uloom Ajmer, or Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Noor Mewat?” He said, “Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul
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The only thing that keeps Kashmir from self-destructing like Pakistan and Afghanistan is good old petit bourgeois capitalism.
(Irresponsible, virulently anti-India dailies that exaggerated body counts and got their facts wrong had their uses too—they undermined the local media in general and made it easier for us to tar them all with the same brush. To tell you the truth, we even funded some of them.)
This was different, this Kashmiri chant. It was more than a political demand. It was an anthem, a hymn, a prayer. The irony was—is—that if you put four Kashmiris in a room and ask them to specify what exactly they mean by Azadi, what exactly are its ideological and geographic contours, they would probably end up slitting each other’s throats. And yet it would be a mistake to chalk this down to confusion. Their problem is not confusion, not really. It’s more like a terrible clarity that exists outside the language of modern geopolitics. All the protagonists on all sides of the conflict,
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Her mother’s death (she died in the winter of 2009) had released Tilo from an internment that nobody, including she herself, had been aware of because it had passed itself off as something quite the opposite—a peculiar, insular independence.
The barefaced lie hung in the air unchallenged. That was its purpose—to test the air.
To refuse to show pain was a pact the boy had made with himself. It was a desolate act of defiance that he had conjured up in the teeth of absolute, abject defeat. And that made it majestic.
“No. I was trained here. In Kashmir. We have everything here now. Training, weapons…We buy our ammunition from the army. It’s twenty rupees for a bullet, nine hundred for—” “From the army?” “Yes. They don’t want the militancy to end. They don’t want to leave Kashmir. They are very happy with the situation as it is. Everybody on all sides is making money on the bodies of young Kashmiris. So many of the grenade blasts and massacres are done by them.”
It was herself she was exhausted by. She had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete—a skill that many consider to be the cornerstone of sanity. The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights. The result was incessant noise, a few bad crashes and eventually gridlock.
Another guest, a retired, geriatric army general, all mustache and medals, who was trundled out regularly by TV studios to supply venom and stupidity to all discussions on national security, laughed and applauded.)
Naga noticed that in all the newspaper articles, the paragraph concerning Tilo was always a set piece: “Sister Scholastica called me to say that a coolie woman had left a newborn baby in a basket outside the Mount Carmel orphanage. She asked if I wanted to take her. My family was dead against it, but I thought that if I adopted her I could give her a new life. She was a jet-black baby, like a little piece of coal. She was so small she almost fitted in the palm of my hand so I called her Tilottama, which means ‘sesame seed’ in Sanskrit.”
She looked it up. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. The nurses told Tilo it was a disease that could give harmless old grandmothers the manners of brothel-owners and make bishops swear like drunks.
She sat on a chair by her mother’s bed with a notebook and her mother dictated endless notes to her. Sometimes they were letters: Dear Parent comma next line…it has been brought to my notice that…did you put a comma after Dear Parent? Mostly they were pure gibberish. Somehow the idea of dictating things, Tilo said, seemed to make her mother feel that she was still the captain of the ship, still in charge of something, and that calmed her down considerably.
When you look out behind those curtains, do you feel there’s a crowd of people? I feel there is. There’s definitely a smell. A crowd smell. A bit rotten, like the sea.
Even though he had lived most of his life abroad, his speech did not bear even a trace of an American accent, which was remarkable, because in Kerala people joked that applying for a US visa was enough for people to affect an American accent.
“Your mother is a remarkable woman. You must understand that it isn’t she who is uttering those ugly words.” “Oh. Who is it, then?” “Someone else. Her illness. Her blood. Her suffering. Our conditioning, our prejudices, our history…” “So to whom will I be apologizing? To prejudice? Or to history?”
She scribbled a line on a piece of paper and stuck it on the window, facing outwards for the owl to read: Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.
