Prelude to a Riot

by Annie Zaidi

Brown people, we are more complicated. We don’t mind chaos. Crowds and noise. Not just on festival days. We thrive on chaos. No traffic rules. Cows, donkeys, monkeys. Everything is tolerated. What we do not tolerate is movement. Social mobility.

Dada smiled. This was his favourite topic. A book is a book. It does not hurt to read stories and poems. They give you knowledge of people’s hearts, which is the most precious knowledge of all.

If those guys were fighting, fighting with the strength of their arms, winning wars for one thousand years, north-south, east-west, then they deserved to be kings. No? Then who is the more deserving martial race? Obviously! If being a martial race entitles you to keep guns, then those guys, these descendants of Mughals and Pathans, should have the right to drive around in military tanks! Logic and common sense, isn’t it?

I hide in the kitchen. I water the plants in the garden. I iron clothes with headphones in my ears. But no matter how far I retreat, Appa’s voice finds me. Hissing, spitting. Us. Them. Them. Us. Nothing blossoms in my garden.

I used to read books after dinner, in bed. I didn’t wait for him to leave for work in the morning before picking up a book. These days, I worry. He might say, You read too bloody much. And then I will not be able to touch books in this house. I will feel like I am soiling the book.

Phish! Marriage is such a thing. It knocks the steel out of a woman’s spine. Look at her now. Twisting her fingers around her saree. Now her father is thick with her husband, she’s done for. Where will she escape to?

Sometimes I believe that this is the colonizer’s true legacy: an inability to look at other humans as being capable of, and deserving of, fluidity—to flow as free as a river while simultaneously being as self-possessed as the ocean.

One does not always miss what one knows. Sometimes the thing you miss most is the thing you never had. But God willing, you will never lack for anything.

Now all of you have a dung heap inside your heads. This king, that king, battle number one, two, three. But you don’t understand consequence. Real world consequence.