Durbar (10 page)

Nobody talked about books. These were people who had been to the best schools in India and gone on to the best universities abroad and it was as if they had remained impervious to the fine institutions of learning they had passed through. It was as if they had never even tried to look beyond the banality of their own lives to discover the larger canvas of existence with its drama, newness and constantly changing realities.

By the second year of the Emergency, Delhi’s newsrooms had become accustomed to the rules of censorship. We devised ways to pass our censored time. One of these was to do ‘human interest’ stories.

Raghu Rai, who worked for the
Statesman
, and was already India’s most famous photographer, became for me a handy accomplice in these exercises. In the summer of 1976 we went off on an excursion with some Americans who wanted to go white-water rafting on the Ganga. It was easy to forget the Emergency once we got to Devprayag, where the dark and treacherous Alaknanda meets the bubbly, dancing Bhagirathi to become the Ganga. Having gone to school in Dehra Dun, I felt a little as if I were on a mid-term trip. We followed the river up beyond Tehri, where its colour became that of the clearest emerald, and we camped at night on the cold white banks of the Bhagirathi.

In September that year we drove from Srinagar to Leh where the Dalai Lama was going to deliver his sixth Kalachakra sermon. This is a Tantric rite of initiation into Buddhist practice that is so special that most Dalai Lamas only give one in a lifetime. The strange circumstances of the fourteenth Dalai Lama’s exile from Tibet altered this tradition. This sermon was all the more special because Ladakh had once been a part of Tibet.

A glass temple was built in Leh on the banks of the rust-coloured waters of the Indus for the Dalai Lama to preach from and thousands of devotees gathered from all over Ladakh. The riverbank teemed with monks in maroon and saffron robes and ordinary Ladakhis in their traditional clothes. Raghu took wonderful pictures and I would have stuck to writing a human interest story full of descriptions of moonlight and monasteries if Mao Tse Tung had not died on the day the sermon ended. My interview with the Dalai Lama happened to be on the day that news of Mao’s death reached Leh. We met in the sunny garden of the local army commander’s residence. Throughout the interview, the General stood behind me to
make sure I did not disobey his injunction to not ask political questions. Mrs Gandhi was celebrating a moment of friendship with China and the General appeared to believe that it would embarrass the Government of India if the Dalai Lama made a political remark at this time.

As the interview began I said, ‘Your Holiness, the General who is standing behind me has warned me not to ask you any political questions so we will have to talk about religion despite the news …’

The Dalai Lama spoke almost no English then but when his interpreter told him what I had said he laughed and replied, ‘Mao Tse Tung’s death has just been announced, but if you want to talk about religion then that’s all right.’

By early 1977 Delhi was beginning to boil over with anger and rebellion. After the violence in Turkman Gate the old city became a place where small explosions of rage occurred at regular intervals mostly due to the compulsory sterilization programme which continued although Rukhsana Sultana became less visible. Every time I went to Karim’s for lunch I would hear more stories, from ordinary residents of the old city, of people being compulsorily sterilized. It was clear to most people I spoke to that tensions were building towards a violent explosion and the night it finally came happened to be a night on which I was on late duty in the
Statesman
’s reporters’ room.

As a woman reporter I was assiduous about fulfilling my late-duty obligations. It was a new practice in Delhi’s newspaper offices for women to be allowed to stay late at work. Because of the general hostility and disdain from our male colleagues, we made it a point to prove that we could do everything that they did, and late duty was one of these things because refusing to do it meant that some male reporter had to do double his share.

It was a particularly hot and sticky night and I had spent most of the evening fanning myself with a magazine. I was about to go home at around 10 p.m. when one of my contacts in the old city called to say that there had been police firing near the Jama Masjid and that he had seen some bodies lying near the steps of the mosque. It took me no more than ten minutes to drive through Daryaganj and get to the road that led to the main entrance of the mosque. A worrying silence hung over what
was usually a noisy, bustling place and I noticed that the rickshaw-wallas who slept on the pavement opposite the Zenana Women’s Hospital were missing. They could usually be found chatting and smoking late into the night. There were lights on in the hospital, but nobody was around. I left my car on the main road and walked to the Urdu Bazaar, stumbling over broken bricks. The street was covered with them. When I got close enough to be able to see the sandstone steps that led up to the mosque, I noticed a group of policemen standing beside two dark patches. One of them was outlining the patches with chalk in the dusty, yellow light of a street lamp.

When I met my contact, who had been waiting in one of the dark by-lanes near the mosque, he said the riot started because of the sterilization drive. A young rickshaw-walla had been taken away by men in a white van and sterilized although he was unmarried and only twenty years old. When he was dropped back to the rickshaw stand he told everyone what had happened to him and said he had seen other victims in the clinic. It did not take long for an angry crowd to gather and turn violent. The next morning I returned to the old city and met victims of the sterilization drive. They were mostly very poor rickshaw-wallas from distant villages in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and so frightened of what could happen to them that they were planning to go back to their villages. Their stories could not be told during the Emergency because of censorship.

This is one reason why later, when there were commissions of inquiry into the Emergency, it became almost impossible to establish that there had been a compulsory sterilization drive under Sanjay Gandhi’s direction. The victims were not the sort of people who could come forward at an inquiry commission and give evidence. They were too poor and too powerless to dare to take on officials of any kind.

In politics, perception matters more than reality and the perception of the Emergency towards its last months was one of repression and brutality. Matters got so serious that a vaccination programme in Delhi’s schools could not go ahead because parents were convinced that it was a secret programme to sterilize their children. No amount of official reassurance dispelled this idea. When school principals insisted that the vaccinations had to go ahead, terrified parents started withdrawing their children from municipal schools.

I
n the second week of January 1977, underworked and bored, like every other Indian journalist during the Emergency, I went to the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad for want of anything better to do. Little did I know on that bitterly cold night, as I took the Prayag Express from the old Delhi railway station, that what I thought was going to be yet another human interest story would turn out to be the biggest political story I had covered in my short career as a journalist. I was lucky to have a cold but cosy coupé to myself. I wiped the grit and dust off the green Rexine bunk, looked underneath for hidden cockroaches and ordered tea for 5 a.m. Then I laid out my sleeping bag and fell instantly asleep.

It was still dark when a sleepy attendant brought me tea in a plastic thermos the next morning. I noticed that we were on a bridge over a wide river and took this to mean we were approaching Allahabad. The tea was too sweet and too milky and had a thermosy taste, nowhere near as delicious as the railway tea I remembered from my childhood which tasted of spices and the terracotta cup in which it was served. As the first light of dawn broke, I saw wretchedly poor villages built along the edge of pools of stagnant water. As we got closer to Allahabad, shanties appeared where the fields had been. At least the hovels were ‘pukka’, I thought. In Indian government language this meant that they were made of brick and cement, which made the residents of these shanties count as relatively prosperous compared to villagers who lived in mud huts.

Allahabad railway station was crowded with sadhus of all manner and description. Ash-covered sadhus, saffron-robed sadhus, sadhus with strange objects twisted into their filthy dreadlocks and naked sadhus impressively unaffected by the freezing weather. They were unwashed
and unattractive but old ladies collapsed before them in obeisance and young brides bowed their veiled heads and stretched their bangle-covered arms to touch their feet. The real India, I thought, getting into the first autorickshaw I could find, the real India of superstition, blind faith, wretchedness and misery.

We rattled off at an alarming pace through grubby bazaars and a city that seemed to have grown organically without any thought to aesthetics or town planning, no different from other cities of socialist India. Mrs Gandhi’s fundamental economic principle was that the ‘poorest of the poor’ must be helped before money could be spent on luxuries. Town planning was considered a luxury, as were properly constructed roads and modern airports. Consequently, beautiful towns and cities from India’s colonial and princely times crumbled into ruin.

The autorickshaw driver seemed to have guessed that I was a reporter because without any instructions from me he dropped me at the entrance of the press enclave. It was a cordoned-off area just below the ramparts of the old Mughal fort that towers over the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati, which Hindus revere as the
sangam
. Every foreign correspondent in India, as well as an unusually large number of Indian journalists, seemed to be eating breakfast in the press enclave’s tented dining room. I spotted Raghu Rai, Mark Tully from the BBC and American journalists from
Time
and
Newsweek
whom I vaguely knew. As I helped myself to hot tea, toast and a spicy omelette, I asked a colleague from one of the other Indian newspapers why every journalist in Delhi seemed to have made the effort to come to the Kumbh Mela and he said, with a furtive look around, that there were rumours that Mrs Gandhi was going to come to the mela and make an important announcement. ‘Elections,’ he whispered, ‘they say that elections are about to be announced and she will make the announcement here.’

After breakfast I wandered down to the river. The press enclosure was at the top of a slope at some distance from the pilgrims and to get to the river I had to walk down a dirt path that had become squelchy and embedded with rose petals, marigold flowers and other offerings that pilgrims had dropped on their way to the river. On both sides of the path stretched the tents of the pilgrims. The sound of prayers rose above the din of voices and the smell of dirty toilets overpowered the aroma of incense.

Accommodation at the mela was arranged in accordance with the rigid hierarchy of the Hindu caste system. Rich pilgrims and wealthy gurus were given luxury tents at the top of the slope where the press enclosure was, while the poor were left to fend for themselves in clusters of dormitory tents lower down and closer to the river. Cheap rugs were laid out on dirt floors and whole families huddled together to keep warm. The tents smelled of unwashed clothes and kerosene oil.

Over the sound of prayers, on a crackly public address system, came the announcements for lost children. They were all for lost girls. ‘Meena, aged five, wearing red frock is in tent number two. Parents are requested to please come forward. Sonia, aged three, wearing white frock. Divya, aged six …’ It was always little girls that got lost at the Kumbh, often because their parents wanted to get rid of them. I found myself outside the tent for lost children and went in to see if there was a single boy among them. There were none. A row of little girls with tear-stained cheeks and frightened eyes sat on a wooden bench. They were barefoot and none of them wore warm clothes. Their hair was tangled and unwashed and they had the confused look children get when they sense something bad is about to happen. They looked sad and frightened.

I approached the officials in monkey caps and woolly sweaters who sat sipping tea and warming their hands in front of an electric heater. They had not bothered to feed the girls or helped them keep warm, and I asked if it would be all right for me to give the girls some biscuits.

The two men in monkey caps stared at me for a minute as if they thought I was mad, then one of them said, ‘Suit yourself. It’s not our job to feed them. But if you want to…go ahead.’

I had a packet of biscuits in my bag which I distributed among the little girls. They ate them hungrily and I think it shamed the officials into paying more attention to the lost children because one of them sent for some tea and breakfast. ‘We were going to give them breakfast a little later,’ he said with a surly look in my direction ‘but they may as well get it now.’

When I asked him what would happen to the girls if their parents did not come looking for them he said with a sneer, ‘They will not come for them. They never do. We will have to send them to a children’s home. It is their kismet…’ I thought of the children’s homes in Delhi with their squalid dormitories that smelled of urine and were filled constantly with the sound of crying. A children’s home in Allahabad would be much worse.
If the girls were lucky they would find someone to adopt them, if not they could end up in brothels.