India: A Million Mutinies Now, Page 5

  He did. He said, ‘1630 to 1680. I know all that. Shivaji saved the Maharashtrians from atrocities. But then the English came, and they committed atrocities on everybody else.’

  I could understand the larger communal mood here, the conflict between Hindus and Muslims. But I wondered about the meaning caste would have in an industrial area like this, where people lived so close together. What were the Sena’s relations with the Dalits? From the little I had seen, the Dalits had developed the beginnings of that self-confidence, the atma-vishwas, which had been part of Ganpati’s gift to Mr Patil. Did that touch some chord in him? Did his concern for Hinduism lead him to some fellow feeling for them?

  He was rigid. ‘We have no differences with them. They don’t consider themselves Maharashtrians or Hindus. They are Buddhists.’

  Hadn’t they been driven out of Hinduism by caste prejudice? Was there no sympathy for them? When he was a boy, his blood had boiled when he had heard his leader speak of the discrimination against Maharashtrians. Didn’t he think that Dalits had cause to feel like that too?

  He didn’t think so. Dalit anger was something the Dalit leaders and the people called the Dalit Panthers – in imitation of the Black Panthers of the United States – were encouraging for political reasons. They have no reason to be angry. They’ve not suffered as much as they say. And the present Dalit organizations are linked to Muslim groups.’

  I asked Nikhil whether that was so. He said yes. ‘Both those sections, the Dalits and the Muslims, are alienated. And someone thought it would be a good idea to bring them together.’

  Alienation: it was the common theme. Mr Patil was triumphant now; but his blood still boiled. Even now he felt that his group might sink, and that others were waiting to trample on them. It was as though in these small, crowded spaces no one really felt at home. Everyone felt that the other man, the other group, was laughing; everyone lived with the feeling of siege.

  The time had now come to go with Mr Patil to the Sena office. We said goodbye to his mother; and she, still sitting, lifted her head, her eyes lost below the concentric circles of her thick glasses, and brought her palms together again. Together with some of the people who had come to hear Mr Patil talk, we went out of the pink room to the verandah, past the taken-off slippers and shoes at the door.

  We went first to the end of the verandah to look at the view at the back: the brick sheds against the back wall, the abandoned structure next door, with rusty reinforcing iron rods coming out of the concrete. One of the men with us said in English, ‘Unauthorized.’ So, in spite of the apparent haphazardness all around, there was some kind of municipal regulation.

  We went down the steep staircase to the passageway between the two houses, and then out into the sunlight of the paved lane. A little way to the right was the local Sena office, Mr Patil’s domain. Structurally, it was a concrete box, a one-roomed shed; but it had been decorated on the outside to look like a fort, with a formal and very simple kind of crenellation at the top, and with the concrete wall painted to suggest blocks of grey stone with white pointing. It was quite startling in the dust and dirt and crumble of the lane. It looked like a stage set or like something from a fairground. But it was a reminder of the warrior past of the Marathas. The past was real; the present power and organization of the Sena was real.

  We hadn’t been asked to take off our shoes before we went into Mr Patil’s sitting room. But we had to take them off now before we stepped from the lane into the Sena office: this, though it was dustier than his sitting room, was Mr Patil’s true shrine. The inside walls were painted blue. The floor was paved with stone flags – the people of Maharashtra build naturally and well in stone.

  There was a desk against the far wall, with a high-backed chair, like a throne. As soon as we entered, Mr Patil went and sat on the high-backed chair, as though this was part of the formality of the place. In front of the desk were nine folding metal chairs; they were for visitors, and they were painted in the same blue colour as the wall. On the back wall, above Mr Patil’s chair, there was a picture of a tiger: the tiger was the Sena’s emblem. The only other picture on that wall was of the leader of the Sena. On the desk there was a bronze-coloured bust of Shivaji, and there was another, similar bust on a pedestal set at an angle in the corner away from the desk. The busts were of plaster of Paris, and each carried a fresh mark of sandalwood paste, which was a holy or sacred mark, on the forehead. There was a tall dark-green iron cabinet near the door, and the lighting was by fluorescent tube. A cuckoo clock on a wall – a reminder of Mr Patil’s sitting room – was the only decorative thing in the little cell.

  The Sena office was a Sena fort, and there were 40 like it in Thane. In one way, it was martial make-believe; in another way, it was perfectly real. There were constant group fights in the locality. Some of the fights were between the Sena and the Dalits, especially those of the Dalits who called themselves Panthers; and there were also fights between the Sena and some Congress groups. The fights were serious, and sometimes deadly, with swords and acid-bulbs as weapons. The Sena also fought to protect its supporters against criminals and thugs. Some of the Sena supporters were stallholders such as we had seen on the way from the railway station; there were always people trying to extort money from them.

  While we were talking in the office, Mr Patil leaning back in his high-backed chair, Nikhil and I leaning forward on our blue metal chairs (the blue scratched down to rust at the edges), there was a sound of tramping in the lane. It sounded almost like a little aproaching disturbance, a little event. And we saw, passing in the sunlight in front of the door, a number of handcuffed young men, roped together with what looked like new rope, roped together upper arm to upper arm. The roped-up men were in two files, and they were being marched or led, without shouts or haste or roughness, by a squad of policemen in khaki uniform.

  Nikhil said, ‘But that’s unconstitutional. People can’t be handcuffed just like that. The Supreme Court has handed down a ruling.’

  The men being led away seemed to have dressed for Sunday. Their shirts were clean and stylish; the shirt of one man had broad vertical black and silver stripes. They were very young men, all slender, some thin.

  The man who had said, of the unfinished concrete structure at the back of the Patil house, ‘Unauthorized’ – that man now again spoke one word, with the Indian affirmative shake of the head, to explain what we had seen. He said, ‘Without.’

  Without what?

  Railway tickets – everyone around me knew, everyone was ready to explain.

  What did Mr Patil think of what we had seen?

  He was easy about it. ‘It’s an everyday occurrence. They are being taken to prison, and they will have to stay there for three or four days. Some are poor people. But some do it for the kicks.’

  We went out of the office into the lane. The policemen and their prisoners had almost gone out of sight. The little disturbance had passed; the life of the lane was closing over it.

  In a canal (or worse) off the lane I saw an animal of some sort parting the dark green-brown water. A dog? A cow – one of the small Indian variety of cow? A calf? It was hard to see the dark creature against the dark water. But then a round snout rose flat and pink above the surface: a pig. And, vision established now, I also saw, paddling on ahead, their irregular white markings looking from a distance like light on the dark canal, or foam, a number of little black-and-white piglets, paddling and bucking about in the murky water.

  The man who had said ‘Unauthorized’ and ‘Without’ now said, ‘Dalit pigs.’

  What did he mean by that? Many Indians, Hindus and Muslims, considered the pig unclean; some could hardly bear the sight of the animal. Was there some Dalit intention to provoke – in these pigs (that few dared touch) being turned loose in a crowded area?

  That wasn’t so.

  The man who had said ‘Dalit pigs’ said, ‘The Dalits eat them on Sundays.’ So the pigs were not only part of the Dalit separateness; there was
also a formality about Dalit pig-eating. The man added, ‘They also sell pigs.’

  Just a little way up the lane – where the policemen had passed – many small boys were playing cricket with an old, smooth, grey tennis ball. The Sena fort; the slender young men in their nice shirts handcuffed and roped up; the cricket, the gentlemanly, stylish game from halfway across the world – everything was open for inspection here. And so much more was innocently on view: just below the surface, human emotions and needs, and ideas of mystery and glory, ran riot.

  On a white wall somewhere near Mohammed Ali Road in downtown Bombay I had seen this slogan painted in tall black letters: LIBERATE HUMANITY THROUGH ISLAM.

  Mohammed Ali Road had a reputation. It was the main thoroughfare of the Muslim area of downtown Bombay. The area was spoken of as a ‘ghetto’, and it was so often in the news, in such worrying ways, that people tended to use newspaper language to describe it. It was ‘volatile’, a ‘flashpoint’; it was where communal riots could begin and, having begun, could spread like fire.

  It was dreadfully crowded, with every kind of smell and noise. The brown-black smoke from cars using kerosene-adulterated fuel was like a hot fog in the sunlight. It burned the skin and felt jagged in the lungs. It was part of the general feeling of oppression; and the slogan about Islam, seen through this smoke, had the effect of a scream. The slogan was in letters as high as the wall on which it was painted, and it was in English. It wasn’t for the people of the ghetto; it was for people outside, people like the Shiv Sena, who might think of making trouble.

  Nikhil knew a young man who lived in the Mohammed Ali Road area. The young man’s name was Anwar. Early one evening, after he had finished his work, Anwar took us to see where he lived. Anwar was very small and frail, with a suggestion of some inherited debility. But he had a compensating passion about his Muslim faith, and he was full of fight.

  The early evening traffic on Mohammed Ali Road was very slow. The shops and the pavements were as jammed as the road. The electric lights created the effect of a ceiling or canopy and appeared to press down on everything, adding, with the hot smoke, to the feeling of crowd and abrasion and life lived at an extremity. It was too noisy to talk in the taxi.

  At a certain point we got out of the taxi, and then we followed Anwar away from the lights and the smoke to an area of sudden smallness. Narrow lanes opened into narrower, and they were lined with little low houses. Some way off, Mohammed Ali Road glowed and roared; but the lights here were dim, the lanes were full of shadows, and the near noises were domestic and subdued. We were not in unregulated slum. The lanes were straight and paved, and – though the scale was very small – there was a regularity of lay-out and building that suggested an official housing project. Anwar said that this was so; we were in a municipal settlement.

  His house was a narrow section of a wire-netting and concrete row. For two or three feet from the ground the walls of the front room were concrete; above that they were wire netting. A white sheet stretched over the wire netting screened the front room of Anwar’s house from his neighbour’s on one side; the screen was on the neighbour’s side of the wire netting. Anwar’s house, his section of the row, was perhaps no more than nine feet wide. The wire netting and concrete were painted blue. The front room might have been six feet deep. It had a passageway on one side, with shoes and slippers on shelves built into the concrete wall. This passageway led to the main, middle room. Beyond that, Anwar said, was the kitchen.

  Somewhere in the upper space of the middle room was a sleeping loft. The sleeping loft was important. Without it houses like this wouldn’t work, wouldn’t be able to provide space for whole families. This was the first I had heard of the Bombay sleeping loft. I heard a good deal more about it in the days that followed; and I began to understand how large families – not always slum-dwellers or pavement-sleepers – managed to live in one small room. At night all over Bombay sitting rooms changed their function; the various portions of a house like Anwar’s (essentially that main middle room) became simply a place for sleeping in. A sleeping loft utilized to the full the space, the volume, of a room.

  We had been talking in the lane outside Anwar’s house. We hadn’t yet gone inside the house. Our talk encouraged a young man from the adjoining house or section to come out to have a look at us. He was of medium height, with a good physique, and he was freshly dressed, as if for relaxation, in a singlet and khaki shorts. It was momentarily astonishing to me that someone of normal size and so reasonably turned out should have come out of such a restricted space. We fell silent when he came out and stood in the lane in the dim light, in his patch of territory, saying nothing; and, as though we felt we had been indiscreet or discourteous talking in the open about the houses of the settlement, we went then, almost as if for the privacy, into the wire-netted front room of Anwar’s house. The young man came back into the front room of his own house and stood about for a while. In the dim light there he or his pale shadow, changing size, could be seen against the white-sheet divider or screen – the sheet fixed to the wire netting on his side – like a figure in a puppet play.

  Someone in Anwar’s family had made preparations for our visit. A clean sheet had been spread on the string bed in the front room, as a courtesy to Nikhil and me. At Anwar’s invitation, we sat there. Anwar’s father then came out from somewhere in the middle room. He was our host now; and Anwar was sent to buy cold lemonade.

  Anwar’s father, a small man, though not as small as Anwar, looked frail and unwell; and I thought that some of the son’s apparent debility would have come from the father. He was very dark, with a very thick, silver beard. That beard was like the old man’s only physical vanity: it was expertly trimmed and combed, and it rippled and shone. And more than physical vanity was therein India different groups wear different styles of beard, and Anwar’s father’s spade-shaped beard was a Muslim beard. That was the beard’s forthright message.

  He said he was sixty-four. And before Nikhil and I could say anything, he said he knew he looked much older – and that was true: I had thought of him as close to eighty. Europeans didn’t look as old as Indians, he said. He knew; he had once worked in an Italian firm, and he had seen Europeans of seventy looking healthy and working hard. Indians aged as they did because of the conditions they lived in. Here, for instance, they didn’t just have traffic fumes; they also had mill smoke, from a cloth mill. Still, he was sixty-four. That was something; his father had died at forty.

  Anwar came back with some chilled bottles of lemonade. This was formally offered, bottle by bottle. We drank a little – the lemonade was very sweet, and seemed to have some chemical tincture – and we tried to make general conversation, though we were really too many in the space, and voices and sounds came to us from all directions, and that white screen (pinned to the other side of the wire-netting divider) began to seem ambiguous in its intention, not wholly friendly.

  I asked the old man whether there were thieves in the settlement. It had occurred to me that the very openness of life there, and the communality of it (as of a commune), might have offered people a kind of protection.

  The old man said there were thefts every day. And there were quarrels every day. The quarrels were worse. A lot of the quarrels came about because of the children. People hit other people’s children, and the parents became angry.

  He had lived under every kind of pressure. So had Anwar. Perhaps – if, in circumstances like these, there could be said to be a scale in such matters – it had been harder for Anwar, who was more sensitive, better educated, and, in the outside world, had a harder fight in the technical field he had chosen.

  Playing with the lemonade, considering the old-fashioned courtesies of father and son in that setting, the humanity that remained to them, the old man’s calm acknowledgement of the better health and strength of others, the better conditions of life of others, I began to feel an affection for them both. I felt that if I had been in their position, confined to Bombay, to that area
, to that row, I too would have been a passionate Muslim. I had grown up in Trinidad as a member of the Indian community, a member of a minority, and I knew that if you felt your community was small, you could never walk away from it; the grimmer things became, the more you insisted on being what you were.

  With the old man as our host in the front space of his house, the wire-netted enclosure, and with Anwar being only his father’s son there, our talk could only be formal. I didn’t feel that difficult questions could be pressed. For the talk to go beyond the part-time job the old man had been lucky enough to find, for Anwar to talk more freely, and without the worry about being overheard, we had to go somewhere else.

  So, gently, trying to avoid accident, we laid our lemonade bottles down on the blue concrete wall against the wire netting; and the old man, who had been getting a little restless himself, read the sign well. He stopped talking, created a pause, and we said goodbye.

  We went out again to the narrow lanes, where dim lights threw big shadows. Around the corner, a child was defecating in a patch of light. In somebody’s front room a big colour television set on a low stand flickered and flashed away, without anyone watching. Anwar said they had no television in their own house. His father said that television was against Islam.

  We came to where the low-roofed settlement ended, and Bombay proper began again. Beyond a boundary lane or road was a tall block of flats. The enemy were there. That was a Shiv Sena building, Anwar said. When there was trouble the people who lived in those flats threw bottles at the people who lived below.

  Past that building, we came to the roaring main road. We went to a small milk bar Anwar knew: fluorescent tubes, ceramic tiles, grey marble, a sink, tumblers of glass and stainless steel.

  I said to Anwar, ‘So you live constantly on your nerves?’

  Nikhil interpreted the reply. ‘It plays havoc with his nerves.’

  As worn-away as his father, his dark face thin and tremulous, he sipped at the milk he had ordered.