Riot (18 page)

to the rest of the smoke-numbed city, we basked in an

oasis of privilege, our electricity connected to the

Alipore Jail, the Shambhu Nath Pandit Hospital, the lunatic asylum,

all too dangerous to be plunged into darkness. Hope like a lamp

glimmered on our desks. Luck (and good connections)

lit our way into the future.

 

At the corner of D. L. Khan Road sat the Victoria Memorial,

her marble skirt billowing with complacent majesty,

as potbellied boxwallahs took their constitutionals

in her shade. Young wrestlers performed their morning asanas

on the lawns, their contortions a widow's legacy. Traffic belched its way

across Lower Circular Road. The world muddled through.

 

In my building, the Asian Paints manager, cuckolded by his bachelor neighbor,

traveled often, leaving his gangling cricket-mad son to dream

of emigration to Australia. The bosomy nymphet four floors up

kissed me wetly on the lips one night, then took up with a boy

years older, a commerce student. They are now married.

Just above us was the executive who resembled a Bollywood star.

 

My mother's friends swooned if they passed him near the lift.

High up, kind Mr. Luthra, white-haired and gentle, went higher still

one night, his last words to his wife “I don't want to die.”

He always haunts the building in my mind, fighting to live.

 

Down the street, the muezzin wails, calling the Muslim faithful

to prayer. They must jostle past the bell-jingling Hindus

trotting to the Ganesh mandir in the middle of the street, their devotions

drowned out by the loudspeakers outside the domed gurudwara,

chanting verses from the Granth Sahib. My favorite Jesuit priest

cycles to jail, bringing succor to prisoners. The millionaire brewer's son

drives by in his open Sunbeam, racing noisily past the complacent cow

grazing idly at the corner. Peace flaps in the wind like washing.

 

The world we lived in was two worlds,

and we spoke both its languages. In the night

we dreamt of school, and exams, and life,

while the day burned slowly like a basti brazier,

blackening the air we breathed. Naxalites drew proletarian blood

while refugees poured into our streets,

children of a Bangladesh waiting to be born.

In the distance, the politicians' loudspeakers growled like tanks

rumbling across the border to craft another people's destiny.

The sun seared away our patience.

 

Behind the battlements, we slept, and lived, and studied,

never quite finishing the last drink, nor emptying the last dish.

Poor cousins from the country stayed with us

till shorthand classes and my father's friendships

won them jobs. We raised funds for Mother Teresa.

The future stretched before us like the sea.

 

At dawn the saffron spread across our fingers,

staining our hearts with light.

 

Lakshman to Priscilla

July 1, 1989

Isn't it lovely here? I could sit with you and look across the river at the sky as the sun sets completely, feel the darkness settle on our shoulders like a cloak, and forget everything, especially the hatreds that are slowly being stoked in the town even as we speak. It almost moves me to prayer.

Why do I pray? And how? And to whom? So many questions! Well, I'm a Hindu — I was born one, and I've never been attracted to any other faith. I'll tell you why in a minute. How do I pray? Not in any organized form, really; I go to temples sometimes with my family, but they leave me cold. I think of prayer as something intensely personal, a way of reaching my hands out towards my maker. I recite some mantras my parents taught me as a child; there is something reassuring about those ancient words, hallowed by use and repetition over thousands of years. Sacred Sanskrit, a language alive only in heaven and kept from dying here on earth so that we can be understood when we address the gods. But I often supplement the mantras with incantations of my own in Tamil or English, asking for certain kinds of guidance or protection for myself or those I love. These days I mention you a lot in my prayers.

Yes, I pray to Hindu gods. It's not that I believe that there is, somewhere in heaven, a god that looks like a Bombay calendar artists image of him. It's simply that prayer is a way of acknowledging a divinity beyond human experience; and since no human has had direct sight of God, all visual representations of the divine are merely crutches, helping flawed and limited human beings to imagine the unimaginable. Why not a corpulent elephant-headed god with a broken tusk? Why is that image any less real or inspiring of devotion than a suffering man on a cross? So yes, I pray to Ganapathi, and to Vishnu and Shiva, and to my memory of a faded calendar portrait of Rama and Sita in my parents' prayer room. These are just ways of imagining God, and I pray in order to touch those forces and sources of life that go beyond the human. Human beings, to me, are rather like electrical appliances that need to be charged regularly, and prayer is a way of plugging into that charge.

So I'm not embarrassed to say I'm a believing Hindu. But I don't have anything in common with these so-called Hindu fundamentalists. Actually, it's a bit odd to speak of “Hindu fundamentalism,” because Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals: no organized church, no compulsory beliefs or rites of worship, no single sacred book. The name itself denotes something less, and more, than a set of theological beliefs. In many languages — French and Persian amongst them — the word for “Indian” is “Hindu.” Originally “Hindu” simply meant the people beyond the river Sindhu, or Indus. But the Indus is now in Islamic Pakistan; and to make matters worse, the word “Hindu” did not exist in any Indian language till its use by foreigners gave Indians a term for self-definition.

My wife's in the Shiva temple right now, praying. In all the chants she's hearing, the word “Hindu” will not be uttered. In fact, Priscilla, “Hinduism” is the name others applied to the indigenous religion of India, which many Hindus simply call Sanatan Dharma, the eternal faith. It embraces an eclectic range of doctrines and practices, from pantheism to agnosticism and from faith in reincarnation to belief in the caste system. But none of these constitutes an obligatory credo for a Hindu: there are none.

You know, I grew up in a Hindu household. Our home (and my father moved a dozen times in his working life) always had a prayer alcove, where paintings and portraits of assorted divinities jostled for shelf and wall space with fading photographs of departed ancestors, all stained by ash scattered from the incense burned daily by my devout parents. Every morning, after his bath, my father would stand in front of the prayer alcove wrapped in his towel, his wet hair still uncombed, and chant his Sanskrit mantras. But he never obliged me to join him; he exemplified the Hindu idea that religion is an intensely personal matter, that prayer is between you and whatever image of your maker you choose to worship. In the Hindu way, I was to find my own truth.

Like most Hindus, I think I have. I am, as I told you, a believer, despite a brief period of schoolboy atheism — of the kind that comes with the discovery of rationality and goes with an acknowledgement of its limitations. And, I suppose, with the realization that the world offers too many wondrous mysteries for which science has no answers. And I am happy to describe myself as a believing Hindu, not just because it is the faith into which I was born, but for a string of other reasons, though faith requires no reason. One is cultural: as a Hindu I belong to a faith that expresses the ancient genius of my own people. Another is, for lack of a better phrase, its intellectual “fit”: I am more comfortable with the belief structures of Hinduism than I would be with those of the other faiths of which I know. As a Hindu I claim adherence to a religion without an established church or priestly papacy, a religion whose rituals and customs I am free to reject, a religion that does not oblige me to demonstrate my faith by any visible sign, by subsuming my identity in any collectivity, not even by a specific day or time or frequency of worship. There's no Hindu pope, Priscilla, no Hindu Sunday. As a Hindu I subscribe to a creed that is free of the restrictive dogmas of holy writ, that refuses to be shackled to the limitations of a single holy book.

Above all, as a Hindu I belong to the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. I find it immensely congenial to be able to face my fellow human beings of other faiths without being burdened by the conviction that I am embarked upon a “true path” that they have missed. This dogma lies at the core of religions like Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Take your faith: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me,” says the Bible. Book of John, right? chapter 14, verse 6; look it up, I did. Or Islam: “There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet,” declares the Koran — denying unbelievers all possibility of redemption, let alone of salvation or paradise. Hinduism, however, asserts that all ways of belief are equally valid, and Hindus readily venerate the saints, and the sacred objects, of other faiths. There is no such thing as a Hindu heresy.

How can such a religion lend itself to “fundamentalism”? That devotees of this essentially tolerant faith want to desecrate a shrine, that they're going around assaulting Muslims in its name, is to me a source of shame and sorrow. India has survived the Aryans, the Mughals, the British; it has taken from each — language, art, food, learning — and grown with all of them. To be Indian is to be part of an elusive dream we all share, a dream that fills our minds with sounds, words, flavors from many sources that we cannot easily identify. Muslim invaders may indeed have destroyed Hindu temples, putting mosques in their place, but this did not — could not — destroy the Indian dream. Nor did Hinduism suffer a fatal blow. Large, eclectic, agglomerative, the Hinduism that I know understands that faith is a matter of hearts and minds, not of bricks and stone. “Build Ram in your heart,” the Hindu is enjoined; and if Ram is in your heart, it will matter little where else he is, or is not.

Why should today's Muslims have to pay a price for what Muslims may have done four hundred and fifty years ago? It's just politics, Priscilla. The twentieth-century politics of deprivation has eroded the culture's confidence. Hindu chauvinism has emerged from the competition for resources in a contentious democracy. Politicians of all faiths across India seek to mobilize voters by appealing to narrow identities. By seeking votes in the name of religion, caste, and region, they have urged voters to define themselves on these lines. Indians have been made more conscious than ever before of what divides us.

And so these fanatics in Zalilgarh want to tear down the Babri Masjid and construct a Ram Janmabhoomi temple in its place. I am not amongst the Indian secularists who oppose agitation because they reject the historical basis of the claim that the mosque stood on the site of Rama's birth. They may be right, they may be wrong, but to me what matters is what most people believe, for their beliefs offer a sounder basis for public policy than the historians' footnotes. And it would work better. Instead of saying to impassioned Hindus, “You are wrong, there is no proof this was Ram's birthplace, there is no proof that the temple Babar demolished to build this mosque was a temple to Ram, go away and leave the mosque in place,” how much more effective might it have been to say, “You may be right, let us assume for a moment that there was a Ram Janmabhoomi temple here that was destroyed to make room for this mosque four hundred and sixty years ago, does that mean we should behave in that way today? If the Muslims of the 1520s acted out of ignorance and fanaticism, should Hindus act the same way in the 1980s? By doing what you propose to do, you will hurt the feelings of the Muslims of today, who did not perpetrate the injustices of the past and who are in no position to inflict injustice upon you today; you will provoke violence and rage against your own kind; you will tarnish the name of the Hindu people across the world; and you will irreparably damage your own cause. Is this worth it?”

That's what I've been trying to say to people like Ram Charan Gupta and Bhushan Sharma and their bigoted ilk. But they don't listen. They look at me as if I'm sort of a deracinated alien being who can't understand how normal people think. Look, I understand Hindus who see a double standard at work here. Muslims say they are proud to be Muslim, Sikhs say they are proud to be Sikh, Christians say they are proud to be Christian, and Hindus say they are proud to be … secular. It is easy to see why this sequence should provoke the scorn of those Hindus who declaim, “Garv se kahon hum Hindu hain” — “Say with pride that we are Hindus.” Gupta and Sharma never fail to spit that slogan at me. And I
am
proud of my Hinduism. But in what precisely am I, as a Hindu, to take pride? Hinduism is no monolith; its strength is found within each Hindu, not in the collectivity. As a Hindu, I take no pride in wanting to destroy other people's symbols, in hitting others on the head because of the cut of their beard or the cuts of their foreskins. I
am
proud of my Hinduism: I take pride in its diversity, in its openness, in religious freedom. When that great Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda electrified the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, he said he was proud of Hinduism's acceptance of all religions as true; of the refuge given to Jews and Zoroastrians when they were persecuted elsewhere. And he quoted an ancient Hindu hymn: “As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O lord, the different oaths which men take … all lead to thee.” My own father taught me the Vedic sloka “Aa no bhadrah kratvo yantu vishwatah” — “Let noble thoughts come to us from all directions of the universe.” Every schoolchild knows the motto “Ekam sad viprah bahuda vadanti” — “Truth is one, the sages give it various names.” Isn't this all-embracing doctrine worth being proud of?