He pulled his mouth away then, but his hands were still holding me, holding me tight.
“Priscilla,” he said huskily, as if he did not know what else to say.
“Lakshman,” I replied, tasting the unfamiliarity of those two syllables, as unfamiliar and intimate as the taste at the tip of my tongue.
“I — we — I shouldn’t be doing this,” he said, and I suddenly felt it was as if a page was being turned back in a book I wanted to continue reading.
I leaned forward then, intending to muzzle my face in his chest, but I never got there. A look crossed his eyes then, a look of both longing and desperation, and I felt his hands seize my face and raise it to his lips, and then I closed my eyes, and let myself be loved.
from Randy Diggs’s notebook
October 12, 1989
Met local Hindu chauvinist leader to check out the politics behind the riot. Man called Ram Charan Gupta.
Indeterminate age — I’d say sixtyish, but could be ten years off either way. Olive skin, shiny, taut, not much loose flesh about him. Strong head, topped by a crown of closely cropped white hair around a sallow bald pate. White kurta-pajamas. Sandals reveal gnarled toes, but the soles of his feet are smooth: not a man who has walked much.
Spoke only Hindi, but I suspect understands more English than he lets on.
Said to be highly respected for his “moderate” and “reasonable” views and the patience with which he expounds them.
Unsuccessful parliamentary candidate in the last elections; it’s expected that he’ll do better next time.
Ram Charan Gupta to Randy Diggs
(translated from Hindi)
October 12, 1989
Yes, that was a glorious day. I remember it well. I can tell you the exact date — it was September fifteenth. That was the day that our leaders launched the Ram Sila Poojan program.
Do you know about our god Ram, the hero of the epic Ramayana? He was a great hero. A king. But because of a scheming stepmother, he suffered banishment in the forest for fourteen years. Such injustice. But Ram bore it nobly. While he was in the forest, his wife Sita was kidnapped by the evil demon Ravana and taken to Lanka. But Ram, with his brother Lakshman and with the help of a monkey army led by the god Hanuman, invaded Lanka, defeated the demon, and brought his wife back. A great hero. I pray to him every day.
Now Lord Ram was born in Ayodhya many thousands of years ago, in the treta-yuga period of our Hindu calendar. Ayodhya is a town in this state, but a bit far from here, more than four hours’ journey by train. In Ayodhya there are many temples to Ram. But the most famous temple is not really a temple anymore. It is the Ram Janmabhoomi, the birthplace of Ram. A fit site for a grand temple, you might think. But if you go to Ayodhya, you will see no Ram Janmabhoomi temple there. In olden days a great temple stood there. A magnificent temple. There are legends about how big it was, how glorious. Pilgrims from all over India would come to worship Ram there. But a Muslim king, the Mughal emperor Babar, not an Indian, a foreigner from Central Asia, he knocked it down. And in its place he built a big mosque, which was named after him, the Babri Masjid. Can you imagine? A mosque on our holiest site! Muslims praying to Mecca on the very spot where our divine Lord Ram was born!
Naturally our community was very much hurt by this. Is that so surprising? Would Muslims be happy if some Hindu king had gone and built a temple to Ram in Mecca? But what could we do? For hundreds of years we suffered under the Muslim yoke. Then the British came, and things were no better. We thought then that after independence, everything would change. Most of the Muslims in Ayodhya left to go to Pakistan. The mosque was no longer much needed as a mosque. Then, a miracle occurred. Some devotees found that an idol of Ram had emerged spontaneously in the courtyard of the mosque. It was a clear sign from God. His temple had to be rebuilt on that sacred spot.
But would the courts listen? They are all atheists and communists in power in our country, people who have lost their roots. They forgot that the English had left. It was English law they upheld, not Indian justice. They said no, neither Hindus nor Muslims could worship there. They refused to believe the idol had emerged spontaneously; they claimed someone had put it there. They put a padlock on the gates of the mosque. I ask you, is this fair? Do we Hindus have no rights in our own country?
For years we have tried everything to undo this injustice. The courts will not listen. The government does nothing. My party leaders finally said, we have had enough. It is the people’s wish that the birthplace of Ram must be suitably honored. If the government will not do what is necessary, the people will. We will rebuild the temple.
With what, you may ask? With bricks — sila. Bricks from every corner, every village, of our holy land. Bricks bearing the name of Ram, each brick consecrated in a special puja, worshipped in its local shrine, and then brought to Ayodhya. This was the Ram Sila Poojan, the veneration of the bricks of Ram. The building bricks of a great new temple, to commemorate the birth of our great and divine king.
What excitement we all felt that day! The announcement of the Ram Sila Poojan was greeted with pride and joy across the country. All of India burst into a frenzy of activity. In every village, young men came out to bake the bricks, to write or carve or paint the name of Ram on them, to venerate them at their local temples. A thrill was in the air. It was a thrill that comes from the prospect of the imminent fulfillment of a long-cherished dream. When the bricks were ready, they were carried through each village in a sacred procession, then to be taken to Ayodhya to rebuild the Ram Janmabhoomi there.
In Zalilgarh too, we were busy with the Ram Sila Poojan. We are not such a small-small town as you people from Delhi may think. Zalilgarh is the district capital, after all. So after days of doing our Ram Sila Poojan in each village of the district, we had planned a big procession in Zalilgarh town on Saturday the thirtieth of September. It was intended to be the climax of all our Ram Sila Poojan work throughout the area. Volunteers from each village in the district would bring their bricks, those from each neighborhood in the town would do the same, and we would all march together in one glorious procession, shouting slogans of celebration. From there we would proceed all the way to Ayodhya, to take the bricks to the spot near this usurper’s mosque, where they were being collected for this holy purpose. At last, after centuries of helplessness, we were about to right a great wrong.
We were going to rebuild the temple.
What preparations we made for that day! Young men worked so hard, making flags, printing posters, preparing pennants in holy saffron that we would string along our route. Our women sewed bunting, painted placards for the men to carry. The tailors of Zalilgarh toiled overtime to make shirts and kurtas in saffron for us. And the bricks! They were perfect: red like the blood we would so gladly have spilled for our Lord, with the name of Ram painted on them in bold white Devanagari script. We were going to make it such a great occasion. What do you call it in English? A red-letter day.
But these Muslims are evil people, Mr. Diggs. You have to understand their mentality. They are more loyal to a foreign religion, Islam, than to India. They are all converts from the Hindu faith of their ancestors, but they refuse to acknowledge this, pretending instead that they are all descended from conquerors from Arabia or Persia or Samarkand. Fine — if that is so, let them go back to those places! Why do they stay here if they will not assimilate into our country? They stay together, work together, pray together. It is what you Americans, I know, call a ghetto mentality.
Now these Muslims have already divided our country once, to create their accursed Pakistan on the sacred soil of our civilization. Some of the greatest sites of Hindu civilization — the ancient cities of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, the world’s oldest university at Takshashila, even the river Indus from which India gets its name in your language — are all now in a foreign country. It galls me to say this, but we have swallowed our pride and accepted this vile partition. But is this enough for them? Oh no! The Muslims want more! And we had Muslim-loving rulers, like that brown Englishman Jawaharlal Nehru who was our first prime minister, to give it to them. Muslim men want four wives, whom they can divorce by chanting a phrase three times — so Nehru gives them the right to follow their own Personal Law instead of being subject to the civil code of the rest of the country. Muslims want to go abroad to worship at their Mecca, so the government pays for the ships and planes to take them there every year and the hotels and lodges for them to stay in on the way. I ask you, why should my tax money go to helping Muslims get closer to their foreign god?