I wasn’t sure at all how the conversation with Rosslyn should go. I had recently made an offer on a flat. I wasn’t entirely unhappy staying with my parents, but would be more content to live alone again—one of the ways I had become Western, or had always been different from my countrymen.
My stay with my parents had been congenial enough, though. They had a large house, which we had moved into some twenty-five years earlier. I had continued to attend high school across town and then left for university, so I never formed attachments to the place. My parents were by now quite settled here, however, and I had met a few neighbours through them.
My cousin, Vivek, his wife and their children were also staying with us. His parents, down south, were unhappy about his unemployability and his indifferent attempts to renounce alcoholism. They had appealed to my father, the family patriarch, who obliged by taking their son in and trying to find him a job. Vivek’s wife had started vending saris and nightgowns out of the house, which brought in a little cash, though she also had to tolerate cracks from my mother about the hoi polloi tramping through the main hall. Vivek himself was forever running after pyramid schemes. He had recently cornered me in my room on his return from a revival meeting on expanding one’s potential. I don’t even think he had been drinking; he just had some questions.
“Where is mind?” he inquired, aflame with insight. “Is it here?” he wanted to know, pointing at his temple. He pointed at his chest. “Here?” At the heavens. “Here?” I resisted the urge to point at my elbow, my ass, my open door.
The best thing about the living arrangement was their children. Vivek and Jana had two, a boy and a girl a bit younger than Kritika’s kids. Their presence attracted others into the house, which throbbed with slamming doors and bell-like shouts, with childish vitality itself.
Their favourite thing was to ask about Canada, and when they learned about Halloween, they begged for a dress-up party. They chattered all week about costumes; I was to provide sweets. I was thrilled about hosting a children’s party, to a degree that (the IRDS secretaries informed me) compromised my dignity and my public image as a curmudgeon. I planned to dress up as a bad-tempered female vegetable-seller: I had cajoled an old sari out of my mother and fitted a wig with a wooden tray to fill with candy instead of peppers or eggplants. For days already I had shooed youngsters from my door as I transformed my bedroom into a haunted house.
The night before, I phoned Kritika and spoke to Asha. She and a gaggle of her friends were dressing up as characters from The Wizard of Oz. She would be the Tin Man. Anand got on the phone at his mother’s behest, cool and laconic. I asked him if he was too old to dress up. He didn’t answer, but seemed interested in my party plans.
I recall ticking off the final arrangements on my commute to work that morning. I had three clients to see that day and a meeting with a subset of my colleagues to discuss a multidisciplinary research initiative on the descendants of Partition. Though still in early stages, we were gaining momentum, and already had the sense the project would be massive.
When I think back now to the moment I entered the IRDS that morning, my memories are cinematically exaggerated. I could see no one, which was very unusual: the office was typically bustling by the time I got there, not with the senior fellows, who tended to keep later and more irregular hours the more senior they became, but with the office staff and junior academics, who were always ready to exchange a friendly word. Office doors were open as a policy: much of the point of the institute was to encourage dialogue and cross-fertilization. I only closed my door when seeing clients, and had been given a special room for this on a less-trafficked floor.
I was whistling as I entered. I am competent at whistling, perhaps more so than at conversation, and was feeling jaunty. The sound, in my recollection, was sucked away from me in the emptiness of the corridors. I entered one of the conference rooms to find everyone huddled around a radio.
Indira Gandhi: shot.
Shot. The word in English is more onomatopoeic than ever we realize.
Shhh. The smooth sailing of bullet through barrel, fricting iron against iron, joined and separated by the hastening oil.
Ahhh. Iron against unresisting air, a fleshly sigh of admission.
T. The consonant finality of the bullet coming to rest.
We dispersed after some time and went about our business as slightly conflicting reports trickled in by radio and telephone: two men with turbans had assassinated the prime minister. There had been an attempted assassination on the prime minister and she was being rushed to hospital. Mrs. Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards had shot and killed her in apparent retaliation for her having ordered the storming of the Golden Temple in June.
It was the last version that was borne out, exactly the sort of thing that many at the IRDS studied: communal conflict and cycles of revenge.
In my case, I saw therapeutic clients. All made reference to the news, but then turned to their own problems, the intimate narratives and narratives of intimacy that were more under their power to direct than ever they had thought.
Events in the democracy, however—the ones we as a nation had thought we had the power to direct—turned out to be beyond us.
Early that afternoon, when we convened our meeting to discuss the post-Partition project, we spoke only of the assassination and the events that had led up to it. There must have been seven or eight of us around the table, some talking with excitement; others, including the two Sikhs, more circumspect. Opinions varied, but people seemed too shocked to clash outright. India’s current incarnation was less than forty years old. The assassination was a nadir in our young democracy’s history. That any Sikhs, whose community was famously loyal to the multiplicitous notion of modern India, could feel so marginalized as to resort to this act seemed as tragic as the act itself. None of us was a fan of the prime minister, which fact also saddened us. She’d increasingly played the paranoid autocrat, rather than the freedom fighter and democracy defender she had been in her youth. But even through her various national and local suspensions of civil liberties, it had been possible to maintain the idea that civil society would ultimately triumph. Somehow, this violent end seemed the final shattering of that dream. I don’t think any of us suspected that the final shattering was yet to come.
The head of the office staff, a former stenographer promoted repeatedly for her unusual acumen, looked in the open door. “I am sorry”—she frowned—“but I must advise you learned people to go home.” She rarely encountered disobedience from those she supervised or those she served. We left.
My bus would take me right past the hospital where our prime minister lay dying. As we approached, government cars, with police motorcycles weaving and buzzing around them, overtook us. The crowds thickened—mourners, I supposed. The closer we got, however, the younger and more male the crowds appeared. Our bus slowed to walking pace, unable to get through; then a couple of young men stopped it, banging on the door until the driver opened it.
“Show me the Sikhs!” the first shouted as he leapt up the steps. He started down the aisle, checking the empty seats to make sure no turbaned head was ducked below, out of sight. Several of his fellows appeared behind him. Their eyes were red—not from crying, my guess. They wore half-unbuttoned shirts, moustaches, shaggy hair. Bollywood villains.
There were no Sikhs on our bus, but, as we arrived at the transit depot, I saw a tall gentleman dragged out of another bus by his shirt, spectacles askew. He was pushed down into the sweating, crushing sea of the crowd, where I lost him.
My second bus home contained a number of wary-looking Sikhs. I knew none of them. We reached my neighbourhood. They went to their homes, I to mine.
I found my father pacing in front of the radio. “Outrageous!” he said when he saw me, shaking his finger in the air. He had been a lifelong civil servant, dedicated to civility and servility. He liked a pendulum best when it was still. He had been piously regretful at the Golden Temple invasion, but extremists must bend or be bent to the rule of law.
Vivek’s children had come home early