Durbar (32 page)

‘Is she dead?’ I asked him softly.

‘Yes,’ he whispered back, ‘but please don’t say anything yet, they want to keep it quiet till the evening when Rajiv comes back from his tour.’

‘Why?’

‘The President isn’t here and he will be needed to swear Rajiv in as prime minister.’

‘Prime minister?’

‘Yes.’ Others noticed us talking and he disappeared into the crowd that was now muttering and getting restive.

‘What did he say?’ someone asked me.

‘She is dead.’

The words were barely out of my mouth when the hospital’s gates opened and a cavalcade of white Ambassadors drove out at high speed.
In one of them I saw Sonia, weeping. There was another woman with her. I thought it was Nina. The gates closed immediately but by now the crowd was sure that Mrs Gandhi was dead and that she had been killed by Sikhs. Their reaction was not grief, but rage. The air filled with talk of revenge but none of us knew what this meant. Not even Kewal Sahib, who was always so prescient about these things. When I called to give him the news that Mrs Gandhi was dead he said there would be trouble and he was worried about what could happen to ordinary Sikhs. But, the way he said it, I sensed that he expected just a bit of violence. On that day of pale gold sunlight, with a hint of winter in the air and the sound of children playing in a garden near the Medical Institute I was among those who would have said, if asked, that there may be just a ‘bit of violence’. I would never have predicted that what we would see in Delhi in the next few days would be the worst violence since the Partition riots and that more than 3000 Sikhs would be killed in the carnage.

From the Medical Institute I went to Mrs Gandhi’s house on Safdarjang Road. Naveen lived at the time in Safdarjang Lane, directly behind Mrs Gandhi’s house, and I called him to ask if he had heard or seen anything.

‘Not a thing,’ he said, ‘but the servants heard some shots and thought they were Diwali crackers.’

In the street outside the house the neem trees were shedding their plump, yellow pods. Uneven sticky patches of yellow stained the pavements and the bitter smell of neem filled the air. When I arrived the street was empty, but other reporters soon arrived and from ‘sources’ inside the house we continued to try and piece together the story. This is what we knew by that evening. Mrs Gandhi had stepped out of her house at about 9 a.m. and was walking through her garden towards her office, in a bungalow that adjoined her house, when her Sikh bodyguard, Beant Singh, greeted her with his hands joined together. Then he shot her with his pistol. Another bodyguard, Satwant Singh, opened fire with his automatic weapon. She had barely fallen to the ground when Sonia, the only member of the family at home that morning, rushed out. Sonia told me, many days later when I finally got a chance to talk to her, that she had heard the shots and come out to scold the gardeners’ children for continuing to play with firecrackers when Diwali was over. That evening all we knew was that when she saw what had happened she looked for the ambulance that is always parked
in the prime minister’s house and found that the driver had gone for a cup of tea. So Sonia put her mother-in-law into a white Ambassador and took her to the Medical Institute.

I continued to wait with other reporters in the street outside the house for hours in the hope of gathering more details of the assassination and in the hope that we might be able to talk to Rajiv if he came home before being sworn in as prime minister. It got colder and darker and the smell of squashed neem pods mixed with cigarette smoke and the scent of hot tea. An enterprising chai-walla had set up shop on the pavement and offered us ‘ready-made’ tea in plastic cups and roasted chickpeas. Had there really been a third assassin who had disappeared? Why had Beant Singh and Satwant Singh been shot by the prime minister’s security men immediately after they were arrested? As they were the only people who could have given information about a wider conspiracy if there was one should they not have been kept alive? We got no answers. All we learned was that Satwant Singh was seriously wounded but still alive and Beant Singh was dead.

Rajiv arrived late that evening and drove straight to Rashtrapati Bhavan, where he was sworn in as prime minister of India in a ceremony that was hurried and private. I was in my sister’s house on Jantar Mantar Road when he made his first speech as prime minister. We watched him on television. In a calm, emotionless voice, he said India had lost a great leader. Someone who was not just his mother but the mother of the country, or words to that effect. Then he stopped and stared sadly at the camera while Doordarshan showed shots of H.K.L. Bhagat and his supporters beating their breasts and shouting, ‘
Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge
.’ Blood will be avenged with blood.

‘He should have said something about not resorting to violence,’ my brother-in-law said with a worried frown. As a Sikh and the owner of the Imperial Hotel on Janpath he had reason to worry.

‘Had Mrs Gandhi been in his place,’ my sister said angrily, ‘the first thing she would have said is if one Sikh is killed you will defile the memory of my mother or something like that. Why do you think he didn’t say anything? Why are they showing shots of those people shouting “
Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge
”?’

‘Because he wants revenge,’ said my brother-in-law quietly, ‘there are rumours that attacks on Sikhs have already started. A Sikh taxi driver
in our hotel arrived this evening with his hair shorn off. He said he was surrounded by a mob in East Delhi and they tore off his turban and forcibly cut his hair.’

‘There will be a bit of anger,’ my sister said, ‘that’s only natural. But I’m sure it won’t get out of hand because Rajiv is a decent man. He will definitely not allow innocent people to be killed. Right?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said uncertainly, ‘he is a good man but he will now be surrounded by Mrs Gandhi’s advisors and they are the sort of people who will tell him that he needs to show the Sikhs that they cannot get away with killing a prime minister. It worried me to see his party MPs among the people shouting those slogans on television just now. Why would they show that on Doordarshan unless they were trying to send a message?’

The killings did not begin immediately.

The day after Mrs Gandhi’s death was one of those especially beautiful days that you see in Delhi when summer ends and winter has not quite come. There was a light breeze that smelled of cold weather and dead leaves. The sky was the palest, most translucent blue flecked with gold. The menace I had sensed in the air the day before was so absent that when the
Sunday Times
, London, asked if I would go to Amritsar and write a piece on the mood there and how Sikhs were reacting to the assassination I readily agreed. Delhi seemed completely calm. But, as a precaution, I tried to get my mother to come and babysit Aatish, who would be alone with his ayah all day.

My mother refused to come and ticked me off for being paranoid. ‘I know this country better than you,’ she said, ‘and there may be a bit of anger but there will be no killings or anything like that.’

By that evening there were mobs trying to burn down my parents’ house in Panchsheel Park, where they now lived, and wandering about other exclusive residential enclaves of south Delhi looking for Sikhs to kill.

I took an early morning flight to Amritsar with the intention of returning late the same afternoon. Amritsar was so peaceful that I realized as soon as I got to the Golden Temple that nothing was going to happen here. Where there had been so much violence in the air four months ago there was now a tired sort of peace. I sought out a local politician who had once been in the Congress Party but had resigned when the army attacked
the Golden Temple. He lived in a tall, narrow house in a bazaar in the old city, so close to the temple that it was filled constantly with the sound of Sikh scriptures from the temple’s loudspeakers. His terrace had a view of the white marble concourse and the sacred tank that was now filled with clean, clear water. On this terrace we talked over a Punjabi breakfast of thick, milky tea and parathas lathered with butter.

He admitted that Sikhs were not unhappy about Mrs Gandhi being assassinated because they saw her death as retribution for desecrating the Golden Temple. He reminded me that anyone who had tried to desecrate this temple in the past had been punished. So were her assassins heroes, I asked. He hesitated for a moment, then admitted this but emphasized that the Sikhs he knew believed that justice had been done.

I met other Sikhs who confirmed this. From talking to Hindus in Amritsar that day I discovered that there were dangerous divisions between the two communities. Hindus were enraged by the assassination and wanted the Sikh community as a whole to be taught a lesson in some way. If this sentiment did not translate into violence in Punjab it was because in most Punjabi cities there are equal numbers of Sikhs and Hindus and in the villages it is Sikhs who are dominant.

It was dusk when my plane landed in Delhi. I remember that it was a typical early winter dusk with grit in the air and the scent of open fires. But there was something else as well and it took me a few moments to realize that what was different was the smoky haze that seemed to have found its way even into the airport’s arrivals lounge. Passengers sniffed the air nervously. It could be a short circuit, I heard someone say. But when we came out it became clear that the smoke came from real fires. Big fires.

Outside the terminal was the longest taxi queue I had ever seen. Taxis came and went at such infrequent intervals that when one came I saw people begging each other to be allowed to share it. Some had given up and were standing on the highway flagging down private cars.

‘Why are there no taxis?’ I asked the pleasant-faced south Indian gentleman in the queue ahead of me.

‘They say it’s because most of the taxi drivers are Sikhs and they are not leaving their homes because there is violence in the city. They are burning Sikh properties is what my wife told me this morning when she called me in Bombay.’

‘As they should, as they should,’ said a small, weasel-faced man. ‘They must be taught a lesson. Who do they think they are?’

After queuing for an hour I realized it was pointless waiting any longer. I walked to the main road and started walking towards the city. I was desperate to get home and see if Aatish and the rest of my family were safe. My patriotic mother had misunderstood not just the country but even the city she had grown up in. After several cars sped by an elderly gentleman in a black Fiat stopped and asked where I wanted to go.

‘Anywhere in the city.’

‘I am going to Rajouri Gardens,’ he said.

‘You can drop me anywhere on the way. Near Teen Murti House. Wherever.’

‘Are you a Sikh?’

‘No,’ I lied.

‘Even if you are don’t say you are if we get stopped. I was stopped five times on the way to the airport. I came to drop my daughter.’

‘Who stopped you?’

‘The mobs. They’re all over the city.’

The smoke got thicker as we got closer to the city. The streets were empty. The old gentleman drove slowly, hunched forward over the wheel and looking out of the window to see through the smoke. At the Ashoka Hotel, not far from the prime minister’s residence, we were stopped by the first mob. There were young men and small boys. The youngest would have been no more than ten. They carried cans of kerosene in their hands and oily rags, and seemed to think they were playing a game. They swarmed all over the little black Fiat, thumping on the bonnet and banging at the windows.

‘Any Sikhs here? Any Sikhs? Are there any Sikhs in here? Any Sikhs?’

My elderly companion smiled and pointed to his clean-shaven face saying it should be clear that he was not a Sikh and I was his daughter.

Disappointed, they waved us on. A few minutes later there was another mob and then another and another. On the streets were the remains of smouldering cars. Many of them were taxis with burned bodies slumped over the steering wheel.

‘I better drop you home,’ my benefactor said. ‘I don’t think you’ll find a taxi anywhere in the city. Where do you live?’

‘Golf Links…thank you.’

You can live in a city all your life and not know it at all. I was to discover this in the next three days. The people who lived in the Delhi in which I spent my childhood and growing years were old families of the city, mostly old Sikh families. I remembered the city from winter holidays because in the summer everyone went to Mussoorie or Simla. In winter Delhi was cold, but in a wonderful sort of way. Fires would be lit in the evenings and there would be hot water bottles in our beds and thick quilts made of silk and satin. The days were nearly always sunny and we would spend them in the garden soaking in the sun and eating pine nuts that came from Afghanistan and Kashmir. In this Delhi of big houses and sunny gardens there was not the smallest hint of violence.

So that evening when I got home and heard that the house of Amarjit and Amrita, friends of my sister, had been burned down and that their little girl had barely escaped with her life because her nursery was set on fire while she was asleep in it, I was not so much shocked as overcome by a sense of unreality. It did not seem possible. The story must be an exaggeration, I told my sister when she called. She said she had tried calling Amrita all day and had not been able to get through. One of Amrita’s servants later turned up at her house to tell her what happened. Then someone else called to say that a retired general had died of a heart attack when a mob burned down his house in Greater Kailash. Then there were my own stories. My parents had been unable to leave their house because mobs had come hunting for Sikhs from both sides of the street in which they lived. If they had not been saved by a Hindu friend, who tore down the board on the gate with my father’s name on it before the mobs arrived, who knows what may have happened.