The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (5 page)

And the police? The army? “Standing by the side of the road,” one of my colleagues told me on the phone, choking on tears or indignation. “Fully complicit!” Later, I heard that Sikhs had called the police and found themselves arrested for actions they had taken in their own defence and that the few officers or commanders who protected citizens and property were reprimanded. Pogroms. State-sanctioned. Not officially, but.

The smell of smoke on our street was growing thicker, the fires visibly closer. I went again to the Singhs’ back gate and this time was met by Mr. Singh with his wife, daughters-in-law, and a small horde of children.

“All right,” he said, with the habitual optimist’s stiffness in dire straits. “Let me deliver our womenfolk and children to you. I so hate them to be upset!” He seemed almost glad to be shed of his family’s distress.

“Sir,” I said, letting his family pass into our garden. “Please. If the crowd comes to your door, let me tell them you are not home. It will go easier for all of us. Please. For your family.”

He drew a heavy breath. We could hear shouts now and guessed they must have reached our street. He inclined his head briefly and was gone. I went along between the houses, to the front, where Vivek met me, iron pot-tongs in one hand, paring knife in the other. I recall pausing briefly to wonder whether he was ridiculous.

The mob arrived, going straight to the Singhs’ house. A number of them hopped the gate into the front garden and began to bang on the door.

“Hai!”
I screamed from our own garden. “No one is home there! They heard about you lot. They left yesterday. Shoo!” I, too, was brandishing something—I remember the feel of it in my hand, along
with the taste of acid in my throat—but I can no longer remember what it was.

Astonishingly, whatever we did was effective. The goons at the gate shouted to the goons at the door that there were other fish to fry, farther up the same road. Thankfully Mr. Singh and his sons were not tempted into confrontation.

Startled at how easy it had been to move the mob along, Vivek and I exited our garden into the road. My father followed us. There was a much bigger crowd at the end of the street, half-undone men in half-undone shirts. The smoke was thick and thicker, as were the crowds, but we caught a glimpse of a man being pulled from a house by his unbound hair, his turban also unbound and torn. We knew who lived there: two brothers, Singhs, no relation to those hiding in our house. They were about my age, owners of a motorcycle dealership a few blocks away, and lived with their father. Kritika and I used to joke about how we couldn’t tell them apart. Singh and Singh. Singh and sons.

The crowd parted to reveal the man, now on fire. Oh God—which brother was it? Or was it the father? I couldn’t tell.
I couldn’t tell
.

He held his arms out, shaking, reaching, staggering. A whole man alight. We reached toward him, we froze. What can you do? These are the smells of a man burned alive: kerosene smoke, burning hair, roasting flesh, but also something else, something green and wet—a near-anonymous martyr tied to wood where the sap still ran.

“Bhangra!” someone shouted, seeing the man shake in his own flames, and others shouted too, even laughed. “He’s dancing bhangra!”

In minutes, the street was empty. My father had run back to our house and fetched a quilt. He threw it over the now-fallen man and threw himself on top. The flames were doused, but there wasn’t enough flesh for a pulse. I checked. Another body lay at the far end of the street.

After, my father tried to phone our local police deputation. He could reach no one. He was in favour of going in person, but I told him, “Appa, surely you can tell that the police must be permitting this to happen.”

He looked insulted, angry. “Ridiculous. How dare you?”

“Then where are they? You think all this is somehow a secret from them?”

“Surely they are busy elsewhere—this must be happening all over the city.”

“Yes, because they have failed and are failing to prevent it. There is collusion, Appa.” I became more earnest as he stopped contradicting me, hopeful that I was wrong. “Come, I’ll go with you to the police station, come.” But now he sat, not meeting my eyes, looking drawn. I left him alone.

The next morning, a couple of my colleagues phoned to tell me of a protest meeting coming together in the compound of a relief agency. I was not inclined to go. I dreaded the rhetoric, the sense of mass action. I knew that it was necessary to show opposition, and that such protests might even succeed in dispersing a mob or two, but I have a near-pathological aversion to collectives. It goes against my grain to join any mob, even one forming to march and chant for something I believe in.

But Appa overheard the conversations. “This is it, Ashwin. We will make ourselves heard.” Perhaps my resistance would have broken down even if he had not insisted we go.

It was a small group, perhaps 150 people. I think it could have been much larger if they had been able to spread the word more effectively. If I had not been staying with my father, he never would have known about that gathering of concerned fellow citizens. If I had been living in my own flat by then, they would not have been able to reach me, since it would be years before I got a telephone.

I remember very little of that day. Generic details, such as the detestable mass-shouting of slogans expressing admirable sentiments. We marched together to a neighbourhood that we had heard was among the most badly affected, a Sikh-majority enclave. We confronted mobs and were mostly successful, simply with shouting, in getting them to stop, if temporarily. I don’t really remember. After the critical, desperate confrontations of the day prior, I think my brain’s ability to form memories with any specificity was topped.

My father, however, would talk about it for years as a seminal moment in his life. He had awoken to a new reality. He wasn’t sure whether it had been hidden from him or he had been hiding from it. Now that he had seen it, though, he would never turn away.

My mother’s reaction would have been strange for anyone else, but was typical of her. She stayed in the house and, somehow, after the neighbours left, came to insist that practically none of what we had experienced had happened. She had seen nothing, she said. When we asked why she thought the neighbours were hiding in our house, she said it was because they were afraid, which proved nothing. When we asked if she didn’t see what was happening on the street, she said we had told her to stay away from the windows. None of it was false, but all was incomplete, and inarguable. She objected to the protests, said we were agitators, that we should let the authorities handle it. My anger at her made it easier for me to stomach the marches, though I imagine her behaviour made it all harder for my father.

By the evening of November 3, the army and police had rediscovered their role as keepers of the peace. The mobs evaporated as quickly as they had formed. Official estimates range upward of 2,700 Sikhs killed; unofficial ones reach past five figures. Undisputed is that thousands more had lost their homes and livelihoods, were made instant refugees in their own city. Relief workers, sociologists, psychologists and lawyers dedicated themselves to the needs particularly of the women and children whose husbands and fathers had been killed.

I was not involved in the organization of tents and cooking pots. Making people comfortable? I wouldn’t know where to start. But a former IRDS fellow contacted me to say that she would like to see whether my therapeutic skills could help these bereaved and traumatized women take up the work of heading their families.

I made no guarantees, but she took me on anyway. “I’m pretty sure you can do no harm,” she said. I thanked her for the vote of confidence.

All in all, I saw a dozen or so families. I tried to help them in redefining and accepting their new circumstances, a task hundreds more
managed without my help. They were usually referred to me because of some particular or extreme problem—guilt, debilitating anger, mental illness—that was preventing them from making the necessary adjustments and pursuing what little compensation was beginning to dribble forth from tightly shut government coffers.

The government claimed, much like my mother, that we had not seen what we saw. They set up “Commissions of Inquiry”
—omissions
of inquiry would have been more apt—whose main purpose seemed to be to shield those to blame for the atrocities. And our crown prince, Rajiv Gandhi, unexpectedly and uncomfortably inheriting the throne of what we had thought to be a democratic nation, passively voiced this summary of the three days of mayhem that his party had willed into being: “Some riots took place in the country following the murder of Indiraji. We know the people were very angry and for a few days it seemed that India had been shaken. But when a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.”

He may not have been responsible for the violence, but he was grateful to those who did what he lacked the cojones to do. And after he washed into office a few months later on a tsunami of sympathy, he kept on protecting the perpetrators.

In addition to the victimized families, I saw people in the course of my regular therapeutic work who had been implicated in the violence, and were haunted. Three or four police officers, at least two of whom were on stress leave because they had been held back from acting as duty and morals demanded. Whether the leave was imposed by their superiors as punishment or given to them as time to accept the drowning of their innocence is not clear in my recollection; perhaps it is somewhere in my notes.

I saw a few of the relief workers, whose overexposure to others’ grief was beginning to addle them. I saw some middle-class people from middle-class neighbourhoods, stalwarts like my father, whose guilt and disillusion were eating into their livelihoods and relationships, particularly in cases of obvious disparity between their feelings and those of their family members and colleagues.

I wrote the stories they told me. I gave them back. The stories intersected and informed one another. Seeing this, one family asked for a meeting. I put it to the others, most of whom accepted eagerly. Two Sikh families, all women; several Hindus from the affected areas; a single Muslim police officer; and my Appa, who, when I described the meeting, asked to attend. For several hours, they compared their experiences of betrayal and trauma and spoke to one another across religion and class. Our puny-yet-potent effort at truth and reconciliation.

Their individual narratives, and the story of their meeting, formed my first book. It is mostly about treating individual survivors of a sudden incident of extreme, state-sponsored violence, but it also provided me a chance to talk about secrecy and hypocrisy and the ways they wear on the psyche.

Who Are the Guilty?
asks a well-known exposé on the riots produced by the People’s Union of Civil Liberties, but the title is rhetorical. I called my little book
Who Are the Victims? Narrative Therapy in the Aftermath of the Delhi Riots
. I thought my question better than the one of the pamphlet on blaming, because mine could not so readily be answered.

My book included my father’s experience, though I had half wanted to keep it out. His life had been premised on a sense of order and justice. Its course was altered by what he had seen, not just the violence but the failure of the state—his nation—to prevent it. I wanted to talk about all this, but not about my mother’s denials, and yet these, too, were intrinsic to his difficulties. He was, by this time, working with victims, helping with paperwork and shopping and so on, over my mother’s objections. He directed me to change his name, but put his story in. He had attended the meeting; he wanted his perceptions recorded. He was right, and I obeyed.

At the time, I couldn’t bring myself to write my own story. Now, writing it here, finally, I am obliged to say that the pogroms had brought on in me a visceral, almost debilitating, longing for Rosslyn. When I closed the door on our burnt neighbour, I closed my eyes to see her sepia-smooth hair by the reading lamp, her look of irritation when I interrupted her. After each phone call urging me out to the demonstrations, I sat thinking of the faint blue veins in her breasts, the way a slim hand
had so neatly fit around the back of my neck. The way I had failed to let myself know her, or failed to let myself believe I knew her.

When I recalled her lemon-leaf scent, I would also, inexplicably, think of a white-painted swing, dangling, empty, from a tree in a green meadow. Her hair was the colour of a chestnut horse I patted once, as a child, on a visit to an apple orchard in Kashmir.

When the streets began to calm, I wrote her a letter, telling her what had happened, saying again how I was missing her. I may have been more emphatic than before, though I did not press her to come—how could I, in the wake of these horrors?—nor did I pretend I could leave my work in Delhi to return to Ottawa in any permanent way.

The day I sent it, a letter arrived, her response to mine of a month earlier, when I had talked abstractly of restlessness and usefulness, of belonging and non-belonging, and asked when I might come see her to talk more concretely. Her letter was straightforward and firm. She understood how I felt, but said I had entirely failed to take account of her shock. She was involved with someone else now, someone who, like her, longed for stability; someone who, like her, had no reason to leave. She did not encourage me to come.

I didn’t respond. A month later, I received her response to my letter about the pogroms, expressing regret at the violence—she had heard little about it—and sympathy for me.

How could I properly despair? I missed her bitterly by this time, but my loss was nothing compared to the losses of those around me.
Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances
.

When I finally wrote her back, in the spring, I spoke of my book-in-progess. She responded, saying it sounded like a book she would like to read. She further—farther—said that she was engaged, and expecting a child.