Part 9 (1/2)

32.

The Vengeance of the People of the Kali Grounds Not for the world would she have missed her meeting with the ordinary people of India. Every morning before leaving to perform her onerous duties as prime minister of the world's most populous democracy, Indira Gandhi received those who came to seek a darshan, a visual contact, with the woman who embodied supreme authority. The encounter took place in the rose- and bougainvillea-laden garden of her residence on Safdarjang Road, New Delhi. For the sixty-seven-year-old patrician who for seventeen years had ruled over a fifth of humanity, such morning gatherings were an opportunity to immerse herself in the multifaceted reality of her country. Draped in a sari, she would move from group to group, speaking first to peasants from the extreme south, next to a delegation of railway workers from Bengal, then to a group of young schoolgirls with long braids, and thereafter to a squad of barefoot sweepers who had come from their distant province of Bihar. The mother of the nation had a few words to say to each group. She read the pet.i.tions presented to her, responded with a promise and posed graciously for souvenir photographs. As in the days of the Mogul emperors, the most humble parts of India had, for a moment's interlude, daily access to the seat of power.

That morning of Wednesday October 31, 1984, promised to be a splendidly clear, bright autumn day. A soft breeze rustled the leaves of the neem trees in the vast garden where a privileged few waited to receive their morning darshan. They were joined by a British television crew who had come to interview the prime minister. On the previous evening, Indira had returned from an exhausting electoral tour of Orissa, the native state of most of the refugees in Orya Bustee. In the presence of the thousands of followers who had come to hear her, she had concluded her speech with surprising words. ”I don't have the ambition to live a long life, but I am proud to live it serving the nation,” she had said. ”If I were to die today, each drop of my blood would make India stronger.”

At eight minutes past nine, she walked down the three steps from her residence into the garden. She was wearing an orange sari, one of the three colors of the national flag. On pa.s.sing the two sentries on either side of the path, she pressed her hands together at her heart in a cordial namaste. The two men wore traditional Sikh beards and turbans. One of them, forty-year-old Beant Singh, was well known to her; for ten years he had formed part of her closest bodyguard. The other, twenty-one-year-old Satwant Singh, had been in her service only four months.

A few weeks earlier, Ashwini k.u.mar, former director general of the Border Security Force of India, had come to see Indira Gandhi to express his concern. ”Madam, do not keep Sikhs in your security service,” he had urged her. He had reminded her that Sikh extremists had sworn to get back at her for the army's bombardment and b.l.o.o.d.y seizure of the Sikhs' most sacred sanctuary, the Golden Temple of Amritsar. On June 6 of the previous year, the attack had killed 650 Sikhs. Indira Gandhi had smiled and rea.s.sured her visitor. Indicating the figure of Beant Singh in the garden, she had replied, ”While I'm fortunate enough to have Sikhs like him about me, I have nothing to fear.” Skeptical, the former police executive had insisted. Irritated, she ended their meeting. ”How can we claim to be secular if we go communal?” she demanded.

On that thirty-first of October, she had scarcely finished greeting the two guards when the elder pulled out his P-38 and fired three bullets point blank into her chest. His young accomplice promptly emptied the thirty rounds in the magazine of his Sten gun into her body. At least seven shots punctured her abdomen, ten her chest, several her heart. The mother of India did not even have time to cry out. She died on the spot.

Just as the a.s.sa.s.sination of Mahatma Gandhi thirty-six years previously had done, the news plunged the nation into painful stupor. By the middle of the afternoon, every city in India had become a ghost town. In Bhopal, a twelve-day period of mourning was decreed. All ceremonies, celebrations and festivities were canceled, while cinemas, schools, offices and businesses closed their doors. Flags were flown at half-mast. Newspapers published special editions in which they invited readers to express their despair. ”INDIA HAS BEEN ORPHANED,” proclaimed one of the headlines. Another paper wrote, ”In a country as diversified as ours, only Indira could guarantee our unity.”

”We will no longer hear the irresistible music of her eloquence ...” lamented Bhopal's people recalling her recent visit for the inauguration of the Arts and Culture building. ”The realization of this project will make Bhopal the cultural capital of the country,” she had announced to applause and cheers of ”Indira Ki Jai!” The city's companies, businesses and organizations filled the newspapers with notices expressing their grief and offering their condolences. One of the messages was signed Union Carbide, whose entire staff, so it declared, wept for the death of India's prime minister.

That afternoon, the shattered voice of the governor of Madhya Pradesh resounded over the airwaves of All India Radio. ”The light that guided us has gone out,” he declared. ”Let us pray G.o.d to grant us the strength to remain united in this time of crisis.” A little later the inhabitants of the bustees gathered around the transistor belonging to Salar the bicycle repairman. Arjun Singh, chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, who had made them property owners by granting them their patta, was also expressing his sorrow. ”She was the hope of millions of poor people in this country. Whether they were Adivasis, harijans, inhabitants of the bustees or rickshaw-pullers, she always had time for them and a solution to offer to their problems... . May her sacrifice inspire us to continue to go forward ...”

It was not until the next day, however, when the funeral was held, that the residents of Bhopal along with all the people of India really became conscious of the tragedy that had befallen their country. For the first time in history, television was going to broadcast the event all over the nation. Anyone who had access to a set, whether through some zamindar, * organization or club would see the images relayed live. All at once an entire nation was to be joined together by media communion. At daybreak, at the behest of Ganga Ram, owner of the only TV in the bustees, Kali Grounds huts were empty of all occupants. Belram Mukkadam and the shoemaker Iqbal had stacked several of the teahouse tables on top of one another and covered them with a large white sheet, a symbol of purity and mourning, and then decorated their makes.h.i.+ft altar with garlands of yellow marigold and jasmine flowers. Then they had positioned the set high enough for everyone to see the screen.

Since the early hours of the morning, the crowd had been gathering in silence outside the teahouse: men on one side, women and children on the other. Before the ceremony started, they watched silently as representatives of the country's different religions succeeded one another, reciting prayers and appealing for forgiveness and tolerance.

Suddenly, a murmur rose from the a.s.sembly. Wide-eyed, the residents of the Kali Grounds were witnessing an historic event: the transportation to the funeral pyre of the woman, who, only the previous day, had ruled the country. The litter, covered with a bed of rose petals, jasmine flowers and garlands of marigolds, filled the screen. Indira Gandhi's face, with the veil of her red cotton sari set like a halo around it, emerged from an ocean of flowers. With her eyes closed and her features relaxed, she radiated an unusual serenity. The screen showed hundreds of thousands of Indians ma.s.sed along the funeral route leading to the sacred banks of the Yamuna River, where the cremation would take place. The cameras lingered on tearful faces, on people clinging to street lamps and branches of trees or perched on rooftops. Like waters coming together again in the wake of a s.h.i.+p, the crowd rushed in behind the funeral carriage-ministers, coolies, office workers, businessmen, Hindus, Muslims, even Sikhs in their turbans, representatives of all the castes, religions, races and colors of India, all united in shared grief. For three hours this endless river swelled with fresh waves of humanity. When, finally, the procession reached the place where a pyre had been built on a brick platform, the residents of the Kali Grounds watched as a groundswell surged through the hundreds of thousands of people gathered around their fallen leader. To Padmini, all those people looked like millions of ants in a nest. To old Prema Bai, who remembered seeing photographs of Mahatma Gandhi's funeral, it was the finest tribute to any servant of India since the death of the nation's liberator. Among the crowd of television viewers, a woman with short hair said her rosary. Sister Felicity had wanted to share the sorrow of her brothers and sisters in the bustees.

As soon as the funeral carriage stopped, a squad of soldiers carried the mortal remains of Indira Gandhi to the pyre. The people of the Kali Grounds saw a man dressed in white, wearing the legendary white cap of the Congress party and a white shawl lined in red over his shoulders. They all recognized Rajiv, Indira's elder son, her heir, the man the country had chosen to succeed her. According to tradition, it was his responsibility to carry out the last rites. The cameras showed him spreading a mixture of ghee, coconut milk, camphor essence and ritual powders over his mother's corpse. While the television set flooded the esplanade with Vedic mantras recited by a group of priests in saffron robes, Rajiv took hold of the cup containing the sacrificial fire. Five times India's new leader circled the pyre, from left to right, the direction in which the Earth revolves around the sun. The crowd saw his son Rahul appear next to him, together with his wife Sonia and their daughter Priyanka. Although traditionally women did not take part in cremations, they helped place firewood around the body. A camera focused next on the flaming cup, which Rajiv raised for a moment above the surrounding heads before plunging it into the pyre. When the first flames began to lick at the blocks of sandalwood, a voice intoned the same Vedic prayer that Belram Mukkadam had recited on the death of his father.

Lead me from the unreal to the real, From darkness to light From death to immortality ...

At that instant, a mighty howl broke forth from the crowd. The cry uttered over six hundred miles away acted like a detonator. Suddenly, the voice of Rahul drowned out the sound of the television. ”We must avenge Indira!” he yelled. His usually smiling mouth was twisted with fury. ”Rahul is right, Indira should be avenged!” numerous other voices took up the cry. ”This city's full of Sikhs. Let's go and burn down their houses!” someone shouted. At this cry, the entire group leaped to their feet, ready to rush to Hamidia Road and the area around Bhopal's main gurdwara, or Sikh temple.

Climbing onto the platform, Ganga Ram addressed the mult.i.tude. ”No need to go to Hamidia. It would be enough ...”

He had no time to finish his sentence. Ratna Nadar had jumped on the platform. ”Friends, Nilamber has just been found dead. He hung himself from a beam of his hut. On his charpoy, there is a picture of Indira and a garland of flowers.”

Nilamber, the sorcerer whom everybody loved because he only predicted good fortune! The news of his suicide bewildered all those present. Death was a familiar enough event in the bustees but this time it was different. Nilamber had been overcome by grief. It was Belram Mukkadam's turn to mount the stage.

”Ganga's right,” he cried. ”It isn't worth going all the way to Hamidia Road to set fire to the Sikh houses, it would be enough to set fire to the moneylender's, the man who sucks us dry. Everyone to Pulpul Singh's house!”

By setting fire to Pulpul Singh's house they would be making a Sikh pay for the horrible murder perpetrated by two of his brothers in religion, but they would also be avenging all the crimes committed by the loan shark who had, at one time or another, humiliated each and every one of them. His safe already contained several property deeds mortgaged against pitiful loans. Pulpul Singh was the ideal scapegoat. By setting fire to his house, obliging him to flee, perhaps even killing him, they would be avenging Indira, avenging Nilamber, avenging all the injustices of life.

At the first cry for vengeance Sister Felicity slipped away from the crowd. She felt it was her duty to prevent her brothers' and sisters' anger from ending in tragedy. Spotting the dark silhouette hurrying away, Padmini joined her. Preempting her question, the nun took the young Indian girl by the arm and swept her along with her.

”Come with me quickly to Pulpul Singh's. We must warn him so he has time to get away.”

Together they ran to the two-story house at the entrance to Chola.

Pulpul Singh was surprised by the arrival of the two women. Neither the nun nor young Padmini belonged to his usual clientele.

”What wind of good fortune blows you this way?” he asked.

”Get out of here! For the love of G.o.d, leave immediately with your family!” the nun begged him. ”They want to take vengeance on you for Indira Gandhi's a.s.sa.s.sination.”

She had scarcely finished speaking when the front-runners of the crowd arrived. They were armed with iron bars, pickaxes, bricks, bolts and even Molotov c.o.c.ktails.

”For the first time I saw a sentiment on their faces that I had thought not to find in the poor,” Sister Felicity later remembered. ”I saw hatred. The women were among the most over-wrought. I recognized some whose children I'd nursed, even though their contorted features made them almost unrecognizable. The residents of the Kali Grounds had lost all reason. I realized then what might happen one day if the poor from here were to march on the rich quarters of New Bhopal.”

Terrified, Pulpul Singh and his family fled out of the back of their house but, not before wasting precious time trying to push the safe to the back of the veranda and hide it with a cloth. In the meantime, the rioters had thrown their first bottle of flaming petrol. It hit the ground just behind Sister Felicity and Padmini who had remained outside. The explosion was so powerful that they were thrown toward each other. Dense smoke enveloped them. When the cloud cleared, they found themselves in the middle of the rampaging crowd. The shoemaker Iqbal had brought a crowbar to force open the gate. Suddenly someone shouted, ”Get them! They've escaped out the back!” A group took off in pursuit of the fugitives. Their Amba.s.sador automobile had failed to start, so they were trying to get away on foot. Restricted by their saris, the women had difficulty running. Soon the family was caught and brought roughly back to the house. In his flight Pulpul Singh had lost his turban.

”We're going to kill you,” Ganga Ram declared, caressing the man's throat with the point of his dagger. ”You're sc.u.m. All Sikhs are sc.u.m. They killed our Indira. You're going to pay for that.” With his shoulder, he shoved the moneylender up against the bars on the terrace. ”And you can open up your s.h.i.+t hole of a house at once, otherwise we'll set fire to it and you.”

Scared, the Sikh took a key from his waist and unlocked the padlock to the grille. Cowering together, Sister Felicity and Padmini observed the scene. The nun recalled something an old man from Orya Bustee had explained to her one day: ”You keep your head down, you wear yourself to a frazzle, you put up with everything, you bottle up your bitterness against the factory that's poisoning your well, the moneylender who's bleeding you dry, the speculators who are pus.h.i.+ng up the price of rice, the neighbors' kids who stop you sleeping by spewing up their lungs all night, the political parties that suck up to you and do d.a.m.n all, the bosses that refuse you work, the astrologer who asks you for a hundred rupees to tell you whether your daughter can get married. You put up with the mud, the s.h.i.+t, the stench, the heat, the mosquitoes, the rats and the hunger. And then one day, bang! You find some pretext and the opportunity's given to you to shout, destroy, hit back. It's stronger than you are: you go for it!” Sister Felicity had often marveled that in such conditions, there were not more frequent and more murderous outbreaks of violence. How many times in the alleyways had she seen potentially b.l.o.o.d.y altercations suddenly defused into streams of verbal insults, as if everyone wanted to avoid the worst.

A series of explosions shook the Sikh's house. Immediately afterward the veranda went up in flames. There were shouts of, ”Death to Pulpul Singh!” And others of, ”We're avenging you, Indira!”

Salar appeared, brandis.h.i.+ng a knife. ”Prepare to die!” he shouted, and advanced toward the terror-crazed Sikh. Another second and Salar would have lunged at Singh. But the moment he raised his arm, someone intervened.

”Put down your knife, brother,” ordered Sister Felicity, seizing the young man firmly by the wrist.

Stunned, Salar's friends did not dare interfere. Ganga Ram stepped forward, accompanied by his wife Dalima. She still walked unsteadily. Nevertheless she had managed to catch up with the crowd. She had just seen the nun throw herself between Salar and the moneylender.

”Killing that b.a.s.t.a.r.d wouldn't do any good!” Dalima cried, turning on the rioters. ”I've a better idea!” She pulled from her sari a small pair of scissors. ”Let's chop this Sikh's beard off! That's a far worse form of vengeance than death!”

Ganga flashed his wife a smile of admiration. ”Dalima's right, let's cut the s.h.i.+t's beard off and throw it on the flames of his house.”

Salar, the tailor Ba.s.si and Iqbal grabbed the usurer and pinned him against the trunk of a palm tree. Dalima handed the scissors to Belram Mukkadam. After all, it was only right that the manager of the teahouse should have the honor of humiliating the man who had exploited him for so many years. Resigned to his fate, the usurer did not protest. The process took a while. Everyone held their breath. The scene was both pathetic and sublime. When there was not a trace of hair left on Singh's cheeks, neck or skull, a joyful ovation went up into a sky obscured by the smoke from his flaming house.

Then Mukkadam's deep voice was heard to say, ”Indira, rest in peace! The poor of the Kali Grounds have avenged you.”

The vengeance wrought by the occupants of the slums on the Sikh moneylender was a tiny spark in a terrible explosion that erupted throughout India against the followers of Guru Nanak. The flames of Indira Gandhi's funeral pyre had scarcely gone out before violence was unleashed in the country's princ.i.p.al cities. Everywhere Sikhs were brutally attacked, their houses, schools and temples were set on fire. Soon the fire department, hospitals and emergency services were overwhelmed by the flare-up of violence, which reminded many people of the horrors that surrounded the country's part.i.tion in 1947. Despite a rigorous curfew and the intervention of the army, more than three thousand Sikhs were immolated on the altar of vengeance.

On the morning of November 2, this murderous frenzy hit the City of the Begums in a particularly horrible fas.h.i.+on. Forty-five-year-old Gurcharan Singh Khanuja, the Sikh officer in command of the electrical and mechanical engineering corps stationed in Bhopal, came out of his barracks accompanied by an escort to go to the train station. Several members of his family-his two brothers, his brother-in-law and nephews-were returning from a pilgrimage to the Golden Temple of Amritsar. When Khanuja opened the door to the compartment reserved for his family, he found nothing but charred corpses. a.s.sa.s.sins had stopped the train between Amritsar and Bhopal, slit the throats of all the Sikh pa.s.sengers and set fire to their corpses.

Five days later, a special train decorated with flags and garlands of flowers pulled in at the same platform in Bhopal station. It was bringing the population one of the thirty-two urns with the ashes of the dead prime minister that were making their way around the country. An honor guard of uniformed soldiers carrying inverted rifles, and a bra.s.s band playing a funeral march, waited to take the precious relic to an altar that had been erected in the middle of the parade ground where the city's poetry evenings were usually held.

The entire city had gathered along the route. Belram Mukkadam, Ganga Ram, Dalima and Dilip, Padmini and her parents, Salar, all the occupants of the Kali Grounds, including old Prema Bai and the legless cripple Rahul on his wheeled plank, were there to pay their respects to the woman who had one day proclaimed that the eradication of poverty should be India's first priority. For two days thousands of Bhopalis of all castes, religions and origins came to throw flowers at the foot of the altar decorated with the flags of the country and of Madhya Pradesh. Banners identified the various groups: Congress party members, a.s.sociations for businessmen, or the unemployed.