Prelude to a Riot

by Annie Zaidi

The king cannot do without me. This means, it is I who deserve to be king.

The white man disliked confusion. 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.

Now the thing is, even though people might bow to the zeal of a new king, they do not easily revert to their old identity once that ruler dies, or is deposed. Why? Is it because people have discovered that there is something of value in the new faith? Or is it that they no longer need to crawl for the crumbs of approval from the old establishment? Or maybe, they discover that it’s all the same, this identity or that.

You think you inherited your land because of your talents? How many of you would pass a farming test?

When you love, you don’t just scratch the surface. You dig deep, gently uncover.

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.

We have a long and glorious history of every colour and shape of homicide.

Ever heard the story of why children are born without Language? It is so that they may not reveal the truth Of God and the angels to mere mortals Very little of God remains by the time language snags our lips

Three hundred years’ worth of stories, clogging up the arteries of our men. Sitting tight around their hearts, slimy and thick with half-truths.

If one feels like a winner, he will make sure the other fellow feels like a loser. People change, but only to suit their convenience. Nobody submits to any new thing easily—king, custom, science. Not unless they are faced with fear, or favour. A king conquers a place and all the people become his people. They can take his faith and his favour, or they can rebel. Rally behind a new candidate. And if they choose to rebel, that too is for selfish reasons. What is there to feel proud about killing for the sake of faith? It is not a great act of peace or charity.

Only illegals are so desperate. They come so far, they don’t speak the language, don’t have a roof, not even a ditch to piss and shit in, but they stay and work at half the government rate.

Oh dear lord, the photography! Twenty-four hours, they’re at it. They get up, brush their teeth and they have to take a photo of their face in the mirror. Ant, bee, spoon, plate, donkey, car, leaf, moon. Grown-ups, mind you! They look at normal things and point a camera at it. Oh, look at that leaf! Oh, that moon! As if they’ve come here from outer space and their moon was square instead of round. They’re like toddlers. What do they want? Attention. Someone! Look at me. Someone!

The nature of desire is very tricky. Delicate, like a butterfly’s wing. Love always catches you unawares. It’s like being out by the lake, seeing a ripple in the water, and perhaps the sun glints in a particular way and a tiny fish leaps up in that moment when your eye is unprepared for it. It captivates you. But the same water, the same ripple, the same sun, and the same fish may not touch your heart on another day. Love is that landscape. If someone points to a beautiful picture and says, look! So much beauty! You see the beauty but you cannot feel it. Your heart is not warmed by it. But when nobody is asking you to observe, then you may suddenly feel it. On its own, it comes.

The trouble with the British was not just their fear of ‘savage’ or ‘native’ culture, which was a complex, syncretic, and always shifting form. They wanted to grasp it rather than flow with it. They were scared of a river-like flow of culture and ideas, since they were uprooted themselves and desperately needed to hold on to the familiar. 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. We must not forget that anybody who seeks to block the flow of ideas, or people, creates artificial hurricanes.

What is the meaning of indigenous if you don’t even stay in one place?

People like us are born to move the heaviest mountains. We move them, we always have, for those who sit on peaks and think themselves the lord. Some day, maybe we will learn to move the mountain in such a way that when we let go of our burden, it is standing upside down and there is nobody sitting on top of our heads.

Whichever way you tell the story, memory should not become a millstone around your neck.

When a king acts in the name of God, or various gods, then it is useful for his opponents to counter him by aligning with a different faith. This causes a split in the public mind. Distancing yourself from existing power structures while simultaneously making a grab for power. These are old tricks. If it is not God, then it is skin colour. Two sides of the same coin: decision-making based on identity.

In the human species, we need to justify wars over territory. In the name of God, or righteous conduct, or free trade. Kings, elected representatives, armies. Police. Imam. Pundit. Pope. It’s like a chessboard.

If you walk long enough, you’ll find a place that’s not got anybody’s name on it, and no fences around.

There’s sauce enough in that girl to set up a bottling plant.

Human is not the same as humane.

tourists in the bylanes of love.

No big colonial sword needs to come down and slash the fabric of the nation. Muscle by muscle, atom by atom, we are being torn from within. We are our own bomb.

Angels are those who are innocent, unmarked by life.

Life is nothing without love and faith. Guard the most helpless thing inside you, with everything you have. Do not let the beasts of memory trample it. And do not keep your heart hungry for too long, or it will end up eating itself.

Who could I hurt without damning my soul? Who in this world is not my own?