Riot (20 page)

What benevolent God has brought her here to me, in irredeemable Zalilgarh? I could not have invented Priscilla if she did not exist: her luminous beauty, her intelligence and sincerity of purpose, her complete openness to me, the way she gives so fully of herself. She is that rare combination of innocence and sexual freedom that I now think of as peculiarly American. She has come to do good, to bring enlightenment to the poor women of the area, to convert this small corner of India to what she sees as the right way to live, and somewhere in her engagement with this place she has found me.

And I have found her. There is nothing more important in my life than our twice-weekly assignations. Twice weekly, every Tuesday and Saturday just before sunset, as the dusk gathers around the Kotli like a shawl, we meet at the little secret room I had first taken her to (and first taken her in). We have had to agree on specific days and times in advance to reduce the visible communication between us, the peons bearing awkward notes, the stilted phone conversations always within earshot of others. And I look forward to Priscilla with barely suppressed excitement. Yes, excitement; the word is consciously chosen, because I have to admit I feel my anticipation between my legs as much as anywhere. Love has blossomed, too, but do we mean the same thing when we use the word? I cannot stop thinking of her; my days on the job are illuminated by images of her face and body and the memory of her touch. When I am with her I am in a constant state of exhilaration. I greet her with glee as she runs into my arms; I exult as she disrobes for me; I am ecstatic as we make — that word again — love.

Until Priscilla I had never really known the pleasure of sex.

Geetha lies stiffly, unmoving, as I go about what she sees as my business; she neither initiates nor welcomes, making it clear that she understands her amatory role as being to endure rather than to enjoy. She is not one for much foreplay, and she is often still dry when I enter her, her eyes tightly shut, her face contorted in something approaching a grimace. When it is over I move quickly off her, lightened by no great sense of satiation. She turns away from me, her duty done. Not surprisingly, we make love less and less frequently. Since Priscilla entered my life, I have slept with Geetha just once. Neither of us misses it.

“Make love” — I used that compound verb again. And yet how absurd to describe sex with Priscilla with the same words I use for Geetha! Sex with Priscilla is joy, it is celebration; she gives as much as she takes; her body moves with as much rhythmic energy as mine. The process of carnal discovery is an endless delight. She is willing to try everything, and I find myself doing things I had only read about in books, only imagined in the daydreams of a masturbatory adolescence. Afterwards we talk, we idly envisage a long-term future, we share poetry, but for all that, our evenings together are suffused with a lingering lust. I think of her at the office, at the dining table, in the field, and I am instantly aroused.

As a good Hindu I should have an instinctive awareness of the power and the pitfalls of sexual pleasure. The Vedas, the Puranas, so many of the ancient sacred texts of my faith emphasize kama, sexual desire; it is the primordial urge, the first seed of human motivation, the progenitor of thought, the first of the four major goals of man — before wealth, religion, and salvation. Kama is even a god because desire is a sort of sacred energy. But it is precisely because Hinduism recognizes the power of kama that it teaches its adherents to suppress it, to store their energy by conserving their semen, to still their urges by turning to abstinence, meditation, and good works. Sexual desire, the old Hindu sages knew, was pleasurable but passing; it was a hindrance, not a help, in the great quest of man to break the eternal cycle of birth and rebirth.

And yet I have come to a point where I can no longer imagine a week without Priscilla, let alone a life. When I think of her returning to her unattainable homeland in October, as she is scheduled to do, and when I contemplate resuming the texture of my life before I knew her, I am seized with a wordless panic. And yet the alternative is equally unimaginable. Abandon my solemn responsibilities to my wife, my parents, my daughter, my extended family, her family, our caste? To run away with another woman? An American! And where will we go? To do what?

These are questions that I do not give voice to, but it is clear Priscilla is already contemplating the answers. I am beginning to worry that, like a careless paan eater, I may have bitten off more than I can chew. The paan eater spits out the residue in a long stream that looks like blood. In my case I am afraid to spit out what I have, and my blood churns inside me, thickening like quicksand.

birthday card for Lakshman

July 22, 1989

HAPY BRITHDAY TO THE BESTEST DADDY IN THE HOLE WORLD
I LOVE U XXX REKHA

letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani

July 25, 1989

Cin, I don't want you to be alarmed or anything, but something a little disturbing happened to me today. You remember I mentioned a Muslim woman, Fatima Bi, who the extension worker from the Center took me to? The one with the seven kids, all scrawny and malnourished and wallowing in the dust, whose husband was refusing to let her use any protection? Kadambari, the extension worker, took me along to meet her so I could see at first hand the problems we're facing. The woman's exhausted from childbearing and child-rearing; she subsists in a hovel in the Muslim quarter — I nearly wrote “ghetto” — and she basically has no life. She's shut up in this dank shuttered apartment in an enclosed building off a lane that's basically an open sewer. (I thought I knew India from my years in Delhi, Cin, but to know India you've also got to come to a town like Zalilgarh and
smell
India.) Anyway, she's covered from head to toe in traditional garb — a long robe leaving only her face bare, but she also wears a scarf over her head, and I bet she has to put on a burqa when she goes out, if she ever does, poor thing. Fatima Bi's a thin, bucktoothed little woman with a prominent mole and an expression of chronic anxiety. She lives with her husband and seven kids in a two-room flat, cooks in the corner of one of the rooms on an open stove, uses a communal bathroom, washes their clothes at a public tap, and suffers the demands and the blows of her husband, to judge by a visibly bruised cheek.

Her husband's some sort of government employee, believe it or not, a chauffeur or something in one of the municipal offices here in Zalilgarh. His name's Ali. The man's actually proud of his seven children and says they're a testament to his virility. When poor Fatima Bi suggested that they couldn't afford any more he took that as a personal insult and beat her up. The woman says that what Ali brings home isn't enough to feed and clothe three children properly, let alone seven. So, at my suggestion, Kadambari and I gave her some condoms last week from the Center's demonstration stocks.

Bad idea. Of course he won't wear them — in fact it made him so angry when Fatima offered the package to him that he beat her up again and called her a filthy whore for even knowing that such things existed. Of course he also asked where she'd got them from and when she told him, he forbade all contact between her and the Center. Remember, she's one of the women who'd never be caught dead coming to the Center — that's why the Extension Worker goes to her. But to reinforce the message he came to the Center and demanded to see Kadambari and me. It was Wery unpleasant, as poor Mr. Shankar Das put it. Ali shouted at us, the veins in his throat throbbing in his fury, and told us never to darken his door again. Kadambari was a little scared, I could see that, but I started to say that it was his wife's right to have as much information as she needed to decide how to conduct her life. Boy, was that a dumb thing to do! Ali hit the roof. “I decide how my wife conducts her life!” he screamed. “Not her! And certainly not you!” (adding a few choice epithets in Urdu about me that Mr. Das asked Kadambari not to translate). And then he flung the packet of condoms in my face and stormed out.

It was all very upsetting, Cin, even though Mr. Das and Kadambari and all the others did their best to help me calm down. Women like Fatima are the very reason population-control awareness is so important; it's the whole reason I do what I'm doing. But I think of that poor thin woman being beaten by her husband because of what I told her she could do. I haven't empowered her in any way, and I've probably made things worse for someone whose life is miserable enough as it is. And I haven't done myself any favors either. That look of pure hatred on Ali's face was frankly terrifying. In the instant that he flung those condoms at me, I knew he would have done the same thing if he'd happened to be holding a stone, or a knife.

Oh, don't worry too much, Cindy. I'm probably just being a little melodramatic — the hysterical foreign woman in India, one of the long line starting with E. M. Forster's Adela Quested. I wanted to talk to Lucky about it when I saw him tonight, but all he wanted was to make love! (Which was very pleasant, and helped me feel a lot better….)

transcript of Randy Diggs interview with
District Magistrate V. Lakshman (Part 2)

October 13, 1989

It was exactly as we'd feared. The crowd now began to fan out in every direction, and many rushed straight to the Muslim bastis. I immediately ordered curfew. As the mob was running past, I went onto the mobile wireless to instruct the police and the magistrates who were already on duty in pickets at all sensitive points in the town, to impose curfew with a firm hand in the shortest possible time.

“Do I use force if necessary?” one asked.

“You may take whatever measures involving the use of force you deem necessary,” I replied firmly, “including resort to firing, if need be.” I repeated that phrase a few more times to others.

Guru — the SP — and I jumped into the SP's jeep and drove straight to the “communally sensitive” bastis, the Muslim quarters. Things were bad already. The SP himself fired several rounds. From reports at the end of the day I learned that the police resorted to firing at three other places. But it worked. Curfew was fully imposed in the town in the brief space of twenty minutes.

However, even in these twenty minutes, seven lives were lost and scores of people injured, about a hundred Muslim houses and commercial establishments set ablaze, three mosques desecrated. Six of the deaths were caused by the daggers and other weapons carried by the mobs assaulting the Muslim bastis, including a country-made rifle. These six dead were all Muslims. One of them was a boy who brought me my tea at the office sometimes. I would always complain that he put in too much sugar. The others used to call him Mitha Mohammed, Sweet Mohammed. He was always grinning, from ear to ear. They slit his throat with a dagger, and when I saw the body, the crooked line across his skin looked like a smile.

One Hindu died, too. He was killed by the bomb thrown by the Muslim extremists who fled, and who were largely arrested within minutes. Several dozen injured were rushed to hospitals.

Seven deaths in total. The figures had been much worse elsewhere; Zalilgarh had escaped relatively unscathed. I suppose I knew I would be congratulated for my handling of the situation. There were forty-seven injured, though, and lakhs of rupees of damaged property. I didn't know about Priscilla yet. But I felt no relief at all at the end of the day.

Oh, there were moments of high drama. At one point Gurinder, the SP, spotted a frenzied young man brandishing a 12-bore rifle. I have no idea whether he was Hindu or Muslim. At that point neither of us cared where the violence was coming from; we just wanted to stop it. The SP jumped off his jeep and walked towards the young man. He screamed at us, pointed his rifle at the SP and threatened to shoot. Undeterred, the SP kept moving, slowly advancing towards him. The young man looked wildly about, and the rifle wavered in his hands, but he did not fire. Tears were streaming down his face as the SP advanced, tears of rage and fear and sorrow, and his hands were trembling, the rifle jerking uncontrollably in his grasp. When the SP reached him he was practically begging to be saved from himself. Gurinder overpowered him, snatched his rifle, and forced him into a nearby house, which he locked from the outside. I never found out who the young man was, or what his story was. I knew he had reason to be out of his mind with fear. We never prosecuted him.

Soon an uneasy calm fell over the city under curfew. Additional force was called from neighboring districts, and permanent pickets established at all sensitive points. I pressed all my executive magistrates into duty, and spent the whole night scouring the city in mobile patrols with the police.

Gurinder was a hero. He cursed, he swore, he joked, he grinned maniacally, but he was everywhere by my side. Together we ordered large-scale preventive arrests and searches: that first night alone, 126 persons were arrested. Forty houses were searched. I remember these facts vividly because this is what running a district is all about. Overkill, perhaps. But better overkill, Gurinder liked to say, than kill over. Over and over again.

We couldn't forget the ones who had been killed — the ones we knew about, again excepting Priscilla. We had to contact their families, help control their grief, and above all ensure that each death didn't lead to five more. Funerals are the perfect excuse for violence; all that grief and rage looking for an outlet. So we talked to the families of the deceased, and organized quiet cremations and burials in the presence only of close family members, and the magistrates and the police. They weren't all that happy about it, but we took advantage of the fact that they were numbed by pain and grief, and we gave them no choice in the matter.

I decided there would be no relaxation of curfew for seventy-two hours. We kept things calm, except that four more mosques were extensively desecrated in the course of the night. The Muslim community leaders insisted that this could not have been possible without police complicity. Even Gurinder could not be sure that some of his own men hadn't connived at what happened.