Durbar (31 page)

After the opposition leaders finished their tea we drove in a convoy past police barricades to the Jhelum where we got into small boats to cross the river to the decrepit medieval buildings and crowded bazaars that make up the old city of Srinagar. As soon as Farooq was spotted, a huge crowd gathered and started shouting slogans of support. This inspired him to launch into one of his more passionate speeches, but within minutes a Kashmiri journalist, Yusuf Jameel, who worked for my newspaper as its Srinagar correspondent, took me aside to tell me that the Indian Airlines flight to Delhi had been hijacked to Lahore.

My first reaction was panic because I thought it was the flight that my family was on that had been hijacked. But it was the second flight, the one Raghu Rai and I would have been on, that had been forced to land in Lahore. On it was my bag in which there was a diary in which I recorded ‘off-the-record’ conversations that said things like ‘RG said “I talked to
Mummy but she doesn’t listen to me”’. Pakistani intelligence would have a lot of fun reading my diary, I thought.

‘Kashmiris?’ I asked Yusuf.

‘Sikhs,’ he whispered. ‘I just got a call from a friend who works at the airport. The governor has rushed there. The flight has already landed in Lahore and the four hijackers have sought asylum in Pakistan.’

‘Anyone killed? Injured?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘We should tell Farooq.’

‘He knows. His intelligence people have told him but he doesn’t want to say anything before this meeting is over.’

‘Should we go to the airport?’

‘There is no point now that we know that the aeroplane is already in Lahore. Apparently the Pakistanis are making sure that it leaves for Delhi as soon as possible. But maybe it’s a good idea to head for Raj Bhavan after this meeting and see what the governor has to say.’

Word about the hijacking spread quickly, and Chaitanya and Raghu said they would like to come to the governor’s house with Yusuf and me. The sound of speeches followed us as we drove up the steep hill at the top of which was the governor’s house. A lone sentry guarded the closed white gates of the Raj Bhavan.

‘Do you have an appointment with the governor?’

‘No. Press.’

‘Let me check,’ he said disappearing from his box. A few minutes later the gates were opened and we found ourselves in a long drive at the end of which was an old-fashioned Kashmiri house with sloping roofs, glazed verandas and a terraced garden beyond which we could see the lakes of Srinagar.

A butler in a white uniform led us down a long, sunless corridor whose walls were covered in portraits of governors past. At the end of the corridor, behind a thick door of polished teak, was the governor’s office, an enormous room decorated with Kashmiri carpets and carved Kashmiri walnut wood furniture. Sunlight poured in through a picture window that opened on to a vista of Srinagar’s lakes. The governor was almost submerged behind the huge desk at which he sat. He greeted us with an unsmiling namaste and indicated that we should sit on the stiff-backed
carved chairs that stood beside a carved coffee table some distance from his desk.

He joined us after a few moments of appearing to be very busy and we went through stilted pleasantries. The governor was clearly not in the mood to see us and spent most of his time glowering into his teacup or gazing out at the view. We asked about the hijacking and who the hijackers were, and he said that initial information indicated they were Sikhs. We then turned to the local situation and asked if he expected instability in Kashmir as a result of the toppling of Farooq’s government. The question annoyed him. Why should there be instability, he said curtly, when it was a political crisis that had been caused by the defection of 13 legislators, and as governor all he had done was facilitate a new government to avoid another election so soon after the last one.

We mentioned that there was unrest in the city because people believed that the government had been toppled at the behest of Delhi. Was he worried? Was he going to arrest Farooq? He did not like our questions or the tone in which we asked them and dismissed us after saying that he had no plans to have Farooq arrested unless he chose to break the law. Farooq was never arrested but Kashmir slid slowly into a mood of anger and defiance. Memories of secession flooded back from some long forgotten recess in the public mind and a slide began into chaos and violence that would a few years later turn into a full insurgency.

When I got back to Delhi almost the first thing that happened was that I got a call from someone in the Central Bureau of Investigation saying that they needed to ask me a few questions.

‘What about?’ I asked.

‘About the recent hijacking of the Indian Airlines plane from Srinagar.’

‘What? What can I know about it?’

‘Well, madam, Mr Rajiv Gandhi has made a statement in the Lok Sabha referring to a woman journalist, close to the former chief minister of Kashmir, whose bag along with that of a well-known photographer were on the hijacked plane.’

‘Has he?’

‘Yes.’

I am not sure if I was seriously investigated as a hijacker but when I called Rajiv to find out whether he had mentioned me in his Lok Sabha speech he laughed and said, ‘It’s just politics. Don’t worry about it.’ It was Farooq Abdullah who was his target and not me. But it worried me that Rajiv could have drawn me into his political game so casually, knowing that it might cause problems for me. This was the first glimpse I got of Rajiv Gandhi the politician and I did not take it seriously at the time. But an incident that occurred some weeks later got me more worried.

My cousin Himmat Sandhu, an idle young man with nothing more serious on his mind than going to the next party, got arrested one night near Safdarjang’s tomb. He was on a motorcycle and may have had a few drinks and talked rudely to the policemen who stopped him at a barricade. Nothing he could have said can justify what followed. He was taken to Tughlak Road police station and beaten brutally all night. The police wanted him to confess to being a terrorist involved in a plot to blow up the Bhakra Dam. Himmat identified himself before the torture began and told the policemen that they could verify his identity from our uncle who lived two minutes away in 17 Tughlak Road but they continued to beat him to within an inch of his life. And, in a gesture typical of Indian policemen when they are in torture mode, they forced him to drink their urine.

Luckily for Himmat a domestic servant from the house next to our uncle’s on Tughlak Road happened to be in custody that night on some minor charge. When he was released the next morning he took the trouble to go and tell our uncle that someone from his family was being tortured in the police station. It is horrifying to think what could have happened to my cousin had this man not considered it his duty to inform my uncle. Nobody would have known where he was since there had been no official arrest. My uncle used his influence to have Himmat released and the first thing he did was to make up his mind to leave India for good. He migrated to the United States as soon as he could and has never come back to India again, not even for family weddings and funerals.

What happened to my cousin disturbed me enough for me to tell Nina and Sonia about it. I mentioned it in the hope that the information would reach Rajiv, or even Mrs Gandhi, to make the point that if something like this could happen to my cousin in the most exclusive part of Lutyens’s Delhi it was terrifying to think of what could be happening to ordinary
Sikhs elsewhere. I thought Sonia would be shocked by the story and have to admit that it worried me that it did not bother her even slightly. She said that Himmat had been arrested because after Operation Blue Star security around the prime minister’s house had been intensified and he had been rude to the policemen who stopped him outside Safdarjang’s tomb. Perhaps torture in police stations was outside the realm of her comprehension, or perhaps she really was so deeply apolitical that she could not understand the significance of an instance of torture in a police station in Lutyens’s Delhi.

It made me wonder about the kind of person she really was. She had an incredibly warm and friendly side to her that I had seen often. Having returned to Delhi with young Aatish to raise on a very meagre salary I found myself needing to depend on my parents for financial help. On what I earned I could not have afforded the rent of a small flat in Delhi so my mother agreed that she would pay the rent of a barsati in Golf Links that consisted of one large room, a toilet, a kitchen and a very nice terrace. It was here that Sonia would come, often with Nina, and always bearing gifts for Aatish. The smartest clothes he had as a small boy came from her. She would pretend that they had been bought for Feroze (Maneka’s son) but had been too small.

Meanwhile, Aatish had learned to say his first full sentence and of all things it was, ‘Indira Gandhi, hai, hai.’ Death to Indira Gandhi. If he was happy he would say it cheerfully, if he was sad mournfully and if he was angry sulkily. When I told Sonia about this she laughed and said she could not believe that he said this spontaneously and that I must have tutored him to say it. I explained that his first word had been ‘hi’, his second word ‘die’ and the first full sentence came from a slogan he had heard from protesters in the street. She did not believe me, so when she came to lunch next I tried to get Aatish to perform. It should have been easy, since he said nothing else all day. But either because he has a sycophantic gene embedded in him or because his two-year-old brain understood the situation he decided not to perform. When I prompted him by saying, ‘What does Indira Gandhi do?’ he smiled sweetly up at Sonia and said, ‘
Kaam
.’ Work.

It was hard for me to reconcile the Sonia of those lunches with the Sonia who could so casually accept police brutality. And I put it down to her inability to understand political things.
By the time the rainy season ended that year an ugliness was creeping into the political atmosphere, an ugliness that was almost tangible. I sensed a certain menace in the air. But even I could not have dreamt that the last few months of 1984 would bring unimaginable horror into our lives.

The season changed, as it always does at the end of September in north India, and cooler weather came. Before Diwali there were the usual card parties and long evenings of revelry. Naveen Patnaik won a lot of money from Akbar Ahmed one evening, and my sister, Udaya, had her usual luck. They played for small stakes and the card games were unserious but we heard that there were card parties at which the scions of rich business families lost hundreds of thousands of rupees. We did not know these people.

If there is one thing I have learned from my long years in journalism it is that history usually sneaks up on you when you are least expecting it. It gives journalists insufficient time to be good writers of that first draft of history that is supposed to be their job to write. This is what happened on 31 October 1984, the day after Diwali that year.

As usual, everyone had eaten and drunk too much on Diwali. The windows of my bedroom were open and I remember the air still smelled of fire crackers. I was dozing rather than asleep that morning when the telephone rang. It must have been ringing for a while because when I picked it up my bureau chief sounded annoyed.

‘Mrs Gandhi has been shot,’ Kewal Sahib said, ‘they’ve taken her to the Medical Institute. Get there as soon as you can, before they close the gates.’

‘What? When?’

‘About fifteen minutes ago. We’re not sure if she is dead and we’re not sure who it was. Go immediately.’

‘I can’t believe it… God, I hope it wasn’t Sikhs.’

‘So do I…’

My first reaction was to open the window of my room wider and stare into the public park outside to see if the news had spread. It was a luminous, sunny early winter morning. Ayahs with their small charges gossiped on benches, toddlers tumbled around in bright sweaters and office-goers went by on bicycles and scooters. Nobody seemed to have heard yet. I threw on some clothes, raced downstairs and hopped into an auto-rickshaw. It would have taken less than ten minutes for me to get to
the All India Institute of Medical Sciences but by the time I got there its black, wrought-iron gates were locked from the inside. A single armed policeman stood guard and I joined the small group of reporters gathered outside the closed gates. The enormity of what had happened sunk in and we stared at each other without speaking. More reporters came and like us they stared silently at the closed gates. When two foreign TV crews appeared they attracted enough attention for passersby to stop and ask questions. Television crews were a rare sight in those days. Someone said, ‘The prime minister’s been shot.’ The news spread fast and before long a large crowd gathered behind us. They were mostly middle-class office-goers in badly stitched pants and terylene shirts. They parked their scooters by the hospital wall and stood with grim expressions on their faces. They murmured among themselves about ‘consequences’ and seemed more certain than us that Mrs Gandhi was dead.

Every reporter there that morning had heard something of what had happened. We tried piecing together the story as we waited. There were three men, we heard, of whom two were Sikhs. The Sikhs had been shot dead afterwards by Mrs Gandhi’s security guards. The one who was not a Sikh disappeared before they could get him. There was a lot of shooting. She could not have survived.

We waited outside the closed gates of the hospital for hours without anyone officially confirming what had happened. Then, just as I was about to try and find another way into the hospital, I noticed an intelligence man I knew quietly coming up and joining the crowd.