Rahul was wide awake late into the night. O.P. was just across the room in his bed against the far wall. He couldn’t fall asleep either, but neither spoke. It was a noiselessness neither had the strength to shatter. A few steps down the hall was Sapam’s room where he’d been living just four days ago.
At that moment, Sapam’s bloated body lay in town at the mortuary of the Mahatma Gandhi Hospital. How must his sweet, round face look now? The mortuary wasn’t even air-conditioned; dead bodies were laid out on ice blocks. The word was that the hospital workers pocketed even the money set aside for the ice.
SEVENTEEN
The next day — the seventh of September — was declared a day off. This was the routine and formality the university followed when mourning the death of a student, in this case one named Sapam Tomba, from Manipur, who was in the first year of his MSc.
At ten o’clock, Rahul and Hemant Barua decided for no particular reason to leave the hostel and take a walk toward campus. It was dead quiet and the department buildings were closed. Dogs and crows hovered in front of the canteen. The entire area felt uninhabited.
“Sapam used to say that the young generation of Manipuris were quickly dropping the Hindu last names once affixed to the end of their own,” Hemant said. “They want to get back to their tribal roots. We’re ashamed at the idiocy of our forefathers, who were made the fools for so long. The same winds of change are blowing in Assam, too. We have to ask ourselves, ‘Are we really Indian?”’
“Who is really Indian then?” Rahul asked. “The professional politicians, con men, criminals, corrupt bureaucrats, middlemen, and businessmen who live in Delhi, U.P., and Bihar — are they the only Indians?” Rahul was getting wound up. “They’ve hijacked our independence. Since India’s not a proper nation-state, how can anyone say they’re Indian?”
“But don’t forget, my dear, about Indian nationalism. Didn’t you see it happening just now during the Kargil War — what else do you think it was! Our boys coming from our very own Guwahati, Silchar, and Dibrugarh gave their lives up there, don’t you know.”
Rahul began to laugh, and Hemant Barua followed suit.
“Sponsored nationalism! Now explain this to me, Hemant, have you ever heard of a kind of nationalism that exists only in terms of another country?” Rahul asked.
“What do you mean?” Hemant asked.
“What I mean is, why is it that whenever the flag of nationalism is raised, it’s always in terms of Pakistan? Why don’t feelings of nationalism get stirred up when faced with a certain other very powerful country? One that made us slaves and sent fleets of ships full of arms in order to destroy our country — and those arms, once here, killed countless people. When it comes to them, we just wag our tails like a good little lapdog.” Rahul was now animated.
Rahul wondered if it’s true that all former frames of reference are now immaterial, and if it’s true we’ve reached the end of history? Have the memories of this nation’s rulers and ruled been destroyed? Or maybe these times are simply ones of total change. This is a new world, a new world order where the entire terrain of the past is irrelevant. If this is true, how come so much “nationalism” of the past is stirred up when atomic bombs explode in Pokharan, or as a reaction to the Kargil War, or to violence in Kashmir? Is this nationalism the real thing, or just some brand of foul hate among religious communities — a hate intentionally awakened? Given the entire historical context, think of how utterly changed our relationship is now with England and America. So why are ancient matters from Babar and Aurangzeb’s time continually stirred up? If the Mughal emperor Babar’s mosque, the Babri Masjid, should never have been built in Ayodhya, as some Hindu extremists allege it was constructed over the birthplace of Ram, why isn’t it considered just as wrong to have built Lutyens’s Viceroy House, where the president of this country lives? And why isn’t India Gate just as wrong, the place where just a few years ago, fifty years of India’s independence was celebrated with great pomp and circumstance, and where A. R. Rahman sang “Ma, Tujhe Salaam”? If those British-built structures haven’t been torn down, then why that one in Ayodhya?
Rahul’s thoughts were taking him to a strange place. It was that night, the fifteenth of August, 1997, and as the TV broadcast songs sung in celebration of the Golden Jubilee of independent India, Rahul watched and listened, shivering with excitement, his eyes brimming with tears for his country, when, all of a sudden, he began to experience the moment in a different sort of way. He’d heard that the song sung in the temple in Bankimchandra’s Bengali novel Anandamath by the holy ascetics who lived there was sung against the “Yavanas,” or Muslim rulers at the time. The name of the song was “Vande Mataram,” by Bhavananda. This song is considered practically the second national anthem of India. At the time, to sing this song signified opposition to British rule and was considered seditious. Maybe this had been Bankimchandra’s intention all along. The holy ascetics of Anandamath who sang this song wore the typical saffron-colored robes.
Rahul instantly remembered the photographs in newspapers and magazines of the people who’d climbed atop the dome of the Babri Masjid in 1992. The people sitting atop that dome wore the same saffon-colored clothes. So was it Bhavananda and the same holy ascetics who climbed out of Bankimchandra’s novel and, on December 6, 1992, climbed up the dome and tore it down? And was it the same group who in 1997 had that song translated into Hindustani and had it sung by A. R. Rahman in Delhi, at India Gate, on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee of India’s independence? But those people were characters in a novel created by Bankimchandra in opposition to British rule! So why were these people singing that song — in what seemed to be a demonstration that they are the new rulers of India — standing beneath a Lutyens-built monument dating from the colonial era? Hidden inside the “nationalism” expressed by the song was hatred of Babar’s mosque from the Mughal Raj and slavery to Lutyens’s buildings from the British Raj. So they weren’t the revolutionary religious ascetics from Bankimchandra’s Anandamath at all, but others in disguise, whose nationalism was founded on the principles of malice toward Muslims and kissing English ass. And isn’t that why this brand of nationalism takes up arms exclusively against Pakistan, but when confronted with the new colonial powers of the West, lifts its tail and begins wagging it? Atta boy! Good doggie!
“Hemant, do you know what Lutyens, the man the great Indian middle-class elite are so proud of and the man who built the Viceroy House in Delhi and all sorts of other buildings of time, used to say about Indians?”
“No, what?” Hemant asked eagerly.
“He used to say that the dirtiest, ugliest, most barbarous race in the world were the natives of India. He subscribed to the theory that Indians were Darwin’s ‘missing link’ between apes and humans. To him they were semi or half human or, at most, a ‘developed’ orangutan,” Rahul said.
“Really? Where did you read that?” Hemant asked.
“Pick up a copy of William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns. Dalrymple wrote that one evening as the sun was going down he stood at India Gate and looked at Rashtrapati Bhavan, the Luytens-built Viceroy House, and while looking at the building with the sun setting behind, a chill went up his spine. The architectural style of this building reminded him of two others, images of which flashed through his mind. The first was of architecture in Milan during the time of Mussolini, and the second was of Hitler’s Berlin. All three styles shared the same bewildering majesty, meant to keep man under control, with a style of architectural menacing as if cursed. Dalrymple wrote that the British Empire, Nazi Germany, and Italian Fascism all maintained a balance between secrecy and intimidation.” Rahul’s voice trembled as if it were coming from inside a deep well. In that well, on the water’s surface, floated Sapam’s sandal after his suicide.