Dreaming in Hindi (42 page)

"It's so terrible, I worry all the time," she says. "During the earthquake last year, people could get help. But now people's homes have been burned with their insurance papers inside. The insurance companies will not reimburse them. The companies say, Where are your papers? But people were running for their lives."

Things, she says, are worse for the women. "They are being raped in public. How can human beings behave like animals? I mean, when I talk about this, people assign me all kinds of titles. They say, are you a Christian? I say yes, I'm a Christian, and a Muslim, and every religion." She's paraphrasing Gandhi, when he said, "I am a Muslim, I am a Hindu, I am a Christian, I am a Jew—and so are all of you."

Hers is one of the few Gandhian sentiments I've heard in a while. "I hate Muslims," a teenager spits out when we get to talking at a fair. His face had been boyish in the sideshow light. Now it looks mottled. As the killing continues, at a slower pace but steady, many people here have turned sharply against the Muslims. The complaints they make are the same: Muslims are breeders; they'll overtake Hindus. Muslims living here are not loyal to India; they root for Pakistan in cricket. Muslims think as one. But if that last charge were true, as the author Raj Kamal Jha and others have pointed out, it would, in India, be a supernatural feat. Not just because that would mean 150 million minds had melded, but because it would mean they'd discovered some kind of universal Esperanto. (The 150 million figure is for India alone. The number of Muslims who call India their home is greater than the entire population of Pakistan.)

"A Muslim in Rajasthan who speaks Urdu cannot speak to a Muslim in Tamil Nadu who knows only Tamil," says Jha, who wrote a novel called
Fireproof,
about the violence in Gujarat. "Muslims here don't have a pan-Islamic identity."

Two killed in Gujarat, three, four more. "India is a Hindu country now. Muslims need to leave," a man I've been talking to at a party says angrily, and I recall something else Gandhi said: "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." The country, for miles, is in a blind fury.

Dirty Muslims: you cannot trust them. It's horrifying when, in so many of the conversations I have, ugliness cracks veneers. I worry that masks are falling away. I worry that the masks were all along just inventions of mine—projections created in a fog; that my instincts could be this far off; that people I've come to love so deeply could turn out to be this hard.

The fury here is so thick, so very nearly palpable, it never occurs to me that what I'm picking up on is deceptive. There is, in fact, a piece of the puzzle missing, but it'll be years before I'll figure out what it is. I'm simply unable to see even the outlines. Not even the one time the piece appears right in front of me, adamantine, glinting, not even halfway hidden.

 

LUCKY SINGH PHONES
. She asks me over. "Oh, no, Kathy," she says on a terrace edged with flowering bushes. Their sweet scent condenses as the afternoon ebbs. "It has always been a very big problem, the Muslims." Her voice sounds weighted, vowels stretched to hold the sorrows of the world—"Noooo, Kaaathy"—though her voice always does. We stare at the lake across the road as we talk. One lone white bird, skimming the water, pulses with the last of the sun. Noooo, she says, contrary to what I've always heard, the Muslims never coexisted here peacefully. "But the world did not realize they were a problem till something happened in the U.S.," she says, meaning September 11.

"The Muslims are of one mind, to terrorize people," she says, in defense of what's happening in Gujarat. I stare harder, try to keep my tone agreeable. Certainly, Muslims in India have perpetrated terrorist acts, I say; three gunmen in Kashmir just shot thirty-four Hindus to death in an army camp. But she's from Gujarat, I point out. What about how the Muslims there are living: cowed, in squalid camps?

"These people complain about the camps," she says. "But the government is giving them free stay and food. During the day, the people are just playing. Meanwhile, how many Hindu women and girls are being cut up at night and left on the streets by Muslims?" Hindu women? But it's the Muslim women who are being sliced open—"This is not in the papers," Lucky Singh interrupts. Her tone is now frosty, clipped. It's the first time I've heard her sound imperial. "This is from people who were there."

From then on, we're through the looking glass. It's as if she's describing recent history, but with the religious designations reversed. "Kathy, just see how many innocent Hindu children have been tortured. We are angry," she says, even though, in every journalistic report I can come by, it's the Muslim children who've been killed, by Hindu mobs.

The scent from the bushes has grown so sweet it's cloying, is coating the back of my throat. She tells me about the Muslim boy in Gujarat who asked his father for 60 rupees but wouldn't say for what. To buy a dagger, it turned out: "At school, they were learning how to kill Hindus."

"In my father's place, we had Muslims," She says. "As a child, I had a Muslim driver. They are very sweet. These are not Indian Muslims doing this; they are terrorists. They are people who've come across the border." But it's the sweet Indian kind—the good Muslims, let's call them—who are being slaughtered, I start to argue, look over to see her staring at me coldly. Lucky Singh's tender heart is, right now, frozen. What friendship we've had has already cooled on her side. On mine, Lucky Singh's tender heart now seems badly calcified.

 

HOW COULD SHE
—how could so many people there—have believed those things? I'd contemplate that for years. Then I learned Lucky Singh was right about one thing. The reports she was giving me had come from someone who was there: the government. The killings in Gujarat were, by and large, apparently state-sponsored.

Days after the train attack, the newspapers there began running stories about Hindus suffering atrocities at the hands of Muslims. These are the stories that, in some version, had reached Lucky: how Muslim men had snatched Hindu women from the Sabarmati Express and later discarded their horribly mutilated bodies; how the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence agency, had slipped across the border to arm and incite local Muslims.

All hell was breaking loose, the stories implied, and all hell immediately did: the result the government would have had in mind when it likely planted the fabricated articles. The government, in concert with various right-wing groups—the RSS, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal—then allegedly helped engineer the carnage that followed. Within a day of the train going up in flames, thousands of Hindu villagers were being trucked into the cities and, evidence strongly suggests, equipped with tridents, the symbol of Shiva; with iron rods and rifles and tear gas canisters; with the locations of Muslim homes and businesses; with reminders of the invented atrocities.

"
Hanuman went for a walk that day,
" a speaker at a rally cried in the days following the fire on the Sabarmati Express. Hanuman, the monkey god, was Rama's majordomo, as everyone in the crowd knew. "
Hanuman got his tail burned. The train was the burnt tail of Hanuman,
" the speaker thundered. "
And who burned it?
"

"Ravana," the crowd shouted. In the Ramayana, Ravana is the demonic king who kidnaps Rama's wife and whom Rama then vanquishes. It was now time, the speaker said, for the Hindus to do the same against their own nefarious Ravana—the Miyan. "Miyan" is a slur for Muslim: roughly, "niggers." It was time, the speaker cajoled, for them to slay Ravana: to kill the Muslims and to dispense with ahimsa, the nonviolence that Gandhi preached. "
Terror was unleashed at the Godhra station because this country follows Gandhi,
" he cried. "
We have to abandon Gandhi.
" In truth, they already had.

"We have no orders to save you." The police refrain to the many Muslims who pleaded for help was allegedly made on the orders of the state's chief minister, Narendra Modi, an unsavory character and longtime member of the hate-mongering RSS. In 2005, the United States rejected his request for a visa, citing as the reason his handling of the violence in Gujarat—violence that Modi insists never happened. "It is false propaganda to say that people have died in communal violence. Some one hundred died and all due to police firings," he maintains.

If language is a virus, as one linguistic theory holds, then in Gujarat, it turned malignant. Rhetoric was like contagious prions. It was the external knowledge the neuroscientist Arturo Hernandez had described to me made dangerous. When I read over the reports a human rights organization, the People's Union for Democratic Rights, had filed, which called the events in Gujarat "a systematic attempt to terrorize Muslims," I recalled the point he'd made: "There's language in your head and there's language in the environment. We think of language as ours, but it's not. It's on the news and we speak it with people. We use other people's language all the time. It all makes you question, what is knowledge? What about that—is it in our heads or in our environment?"

If one were to flip through the tenth-grade social studies textbook used in Gujarat schools today, that question takes on a whole other dimension—becomes, for the many Muslims who still live there in reduced circumstances, an urgent one.

"Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government," the textbook reads. "He instilled a spirit of adventure in the common people."

 

IN THE HAVELI, MRS
. Singh and I continue to exempt each other. But then one evening, after I've heard too many bits of stories, I make a caustic remark about Gujarat, can't help it. Neither can she—she shoots her head up, corrects me. "
Those Muslims have to leave,
" she says. "
Since Partition, India is a Hindu country. They need to get out. This is not their country.
" Her voice is shot through with iron, like the rough growl a street dog makes if you surprise it. She's unmasked. So is my face, I can feel. After that, whatever friendship had started silently falls away.

The tourists have returned. The trickle of them that started in the spring is some days now a flood. "No, no, five minutes," one of the young guys who mans my cybercafe says when I stop by late one night and find videshis lined up out the door. "Read the paper. Just five minutes. They will be through then," he says and pushes
Dainik Bhaskar
across the counter. For the next fifteen minutes, I make him translate the parts I can't get. "Heartly," he says—"they celebrated in a heartly way," and I can't even remember the Hindi word now, the next day the concept remains, and how am I going to give this up? I don't care if I'm stiff in this language. It's ozone to the brain, the rarest delight, to be sitting in a late-night cybercafe with a kid who's as amused as you to be reading a newspaper in Hindi together, in the most heartly way.

 

RUBY AND I DREAM ABOUT
how it'll be when we win. "Bring your swimsuits, girls!" I tell her and Priyanka. "There is a swimming pool at Kumbhalgarh," Ruby clarifies for Priyanka. "And we're going to be in it," I say. Though the truth is, as the date of the contest approaches, any handicapper of videshi competitions would not be laying great odds on our team.

The speech, succinct when Ruby first wrote it, now takes years to say. She can't stop adding to it; neither can half the town. Her latest improvement is a showboating extender, the Hindu New Year's greeting she composed two months ago, which she's realized she can get people to listen to now if I say it. This will come right before the ghazal she recently inserted. The man who runs Ashok Fabrics—our personal Harry Winston, since he's supplying the outfit—has thought of a few lines he thinks would be nice. Even Swami-ji has gotten in on the act. He's proposed the riveting "
I have enrolled in this contest because I am a student at the institute in Sector Eleven and because I have seen films there.
" Now when I try to say the speech, it has so many twists and turns, I'm like a folk dancer with ten water pots on his head and an untied shoelace. I trip, and on the same lines every time.

"
Udaipur, in my next birth I would like to be born here,
" I'm supposed to declare. The word for "birth" is
janm,
easy enough. But I'll be flying along, then hit that line and find myself saying, "
Udaipur, I want to have my next birthday"—janmdin—"here.
" I no sooner get up than I skid on the unpronounceable
duahuan-ka:
"by your grace."

"You have not been practicing," Ruby decides whenever she calls my cell phone to demand a run-through, which she does most nights. But I have, I have, I tell her. It's just that
janmdin
has become a compulsion: I have to say it.

At a week and a half to go, other complications set in. The tourism board revises the rules. From that date on, no female competitor will be allowed onstage without a male escort. "Maybe Piers will?" Ruby says hopefully, but Piers won't, even when I beg. Finally, he comes around when I tell him that Ashok Fabrics will throw in a maharaja outfit for free. "Okay," he says, "so long as I don't have to say anything," necessitating more rewrites of the speech. "
My humble name, so small and of no consequence, is Kathy Rich, and this guy over here on my left is named Piers Helsen,
" it now begins, after which, it bumps along for another two miles through ghazals, New Year's greetings, and protestations of fervent love for Udaipur.

At one week left, the gods smile, all third of a million. When Ruby calls to demand, "You have been practicing?" I glide through the speech, smoothly, expertly, like a guest with charisma holding forth at a dinner party, a guest who can pronounce
duahuan-ka.
The hours of practice have paid off. I already have the shine of a medalist. "Very good," she says with gruff admiration, and hangs up. Pleased, I start again—"
My humble name, so small and of no consequence
"—when it occurs to me the Singhs don't know anything about the contest, that from downstairs, it must sound like I've been mumbling feverishly to myself for days in my room. Perhaps they think the guy I was sneaking upstairs has thrown me over, and I'm having a fit up here.