Amitav Ghosh - Incendiary Circumstances - A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

I left Rangoon the next day, feeling discouraged. The business-class section of the plane was full to capacity, its seats occupied by trim men in suits. They all looked as if they had flown in from the great boom centers of Asia. They were in town to do a deal. I looked down on the receding city, and I thought of a comment that Suu Kyi had made at the end of our meeting. "I've always told you," she said, "that we will win… that we will establish a democracy in Burma, and I stand by that. But as to when, I cannot predict. I've always said that to you."

Once the plane had sliced through the dark blanket of Rangoon's monsoon sky, the cabin filled with the whine of laptops logging on — that familiar buzzing sound, not unlike that of mosquitoes feasting in midflight.

NOWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD did the year 1984 fulfill its apocalyptic portents as it did in India. Separatist violence in the Punjab; the military attack on the great Sikh temple of Amritsar; the assassination of the prime minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi; riots in several cities; the gas disaster in Bhopal — the events followed relentlessly on each other. There were days in 1984 when it took courage to open the New Delhi papers in the morning.

Of the year's many catastrophes, the sectarian violence following Gandhi's death had the greatest effect on my life. Looking back, I see that the experiences of that period were profoundly important to my development as a writer, so much so that I have never attempted to write about them until now.

At the time I was living in a part of New Delhi called Defence Colony — a neighborhood of large, labyrinthine houses, with little self-contained warrens of servants' rooms tucked away on rooftops and above garages. When I lived there, these rooms had come to house a floating population of the young and straitened — journalists, copywriters, minor executives, and university people like myself. We battened upon this wealthy enclave like mites in a honeycomb, spreading from rooftop to rooftop, our ramshackle lives curtained from our landlords by chiffon-draped washing lines and thickets of TV aerials.

I was twenty-eight. The city I considered home was Calcutta, but New Delhi was where I had spent all my adult life, except for a few years away in England and Egypt. I had returned to India two years before, upon completing a doctorate at Oxford, and recently found a teaching job at Delhi University. But it was in the privacy of my baking rooftop hutch that my real life was lived. I was writing my first novel, in the classic fashion, perched in a garret.

On the morning of October 31, the day of Mrs. Gandhi's death, I caught a bus to Delhi University as usual, at about half past nine. From where I lived it took an hour and a half: a long commute, but not an exceptional one for New Delhi. The assassination had occurred shortly before, just a few miles away, but I had no knowledge of this when I boarded the bus. Nor did I notice anything untoward at any point during the ninety-minute journey. But the news, traveling by word of mouth, raced my bus to the university.

When I walked into the grounds, I saw not the usual boisterous, Frisbee-throwing crowd of students but small groups of people standing intently around transistor radios. A young man detached himself from one of the huddles and approached me, his mouth twisted into the tight-lipped, knowing smile that seems always to accompany the gambit "Have you heard…?"

The campus was humming, he said. No one knew for sure, but it was being said that Mrs. Gandhi had been shot. The word was that she had been assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards, in revenge for her having sent troops to raid the Sikhs' Golden Temple of Amritsar earlier that year.

Just before stepping into the lecture room, I heard a report on All India Radio, the national network: Mrs. Gandhi had been rushed to hospital after an attempted assassination.

Nothing stopped; the momentum of the daily routine carried things forward. I went into a classroom and began my lecture, but not many students had shown up, and those who had were distracted and distant; there was a lot of fidgeting.

Halfway through the class, I looked out through the room's single, slitlike window. The sunlight lay bright on the lawn below and on the trees beyond. It was the time of year when Delhi was at its best, crisp and cool, its abundant greenery freshly watered by the recently retreated monsoons, its skies washed sparking clean. By the time I turned back, I had forgotten what I was saying and had to reach for my notes.

My unsteadiness surprised me. I was not an uncritical admirer of Mrs. Gandhi. Her brief period of semi-dictatorial rule in the mid-seventies was still alive in my memory. But the ghastliness of her murder was a sudden reminder of the very real qualities that had been taken for granted: her fortitude, her dignity, her physical courage, her endurance.

Yet it was not just grief I felt at that moment. Rather, it was a sense of something coming loose, of a mooring untied somewhere within.

The first reliable report of Mrs. Gandhi's death was broadcast from Karachi, by Pakistan's official radio network, at around 1:30 P.M. On All India Radio, regular broadcasts had been replaced by music.

I left the university in the late afternoon with a friend, Hari Sen, who lived at the other end of the city. I needed to make a long-distance phone call, and he had offered to let me use his family's telephone.

To get to Hari's house, we had to change buses at Connaught Palace, the elegant circular arcade that lies at the geographical heart of Delhi, linking the old city with the new. As the bus swung around the periphery of the arcade, I noticed that the shops, stalls, and eateries were beginning to shut down, even though it was still afternoon.

Our next bus was not quite full, which was unusual. Just as it was pulling out, a man ran out of an office and jumped on. He was middle-aged and dressed in shirt and trousers, evidently an employee of one of the nearby government buildings. He was a Sikh, but I barely noticed this at the time.

He probably jumped on without giving the matter any thought, this being his regular, daily bus. But as it happened, on this day no choice could have been more unfortunate, for the route of the bus went past the hospital where Indira Gandhi's body then lay. Certain loyalists in her party had begun inciting the crowd gathered there to seek revenge. The motorcade of Giani Zail Singh, the president of the republic, a Sikh, had already been attacked by a mob.

None of this was known to us then, and we would never have suspected it; violence had never been directed at the Sikhs in Delhi.

As the bus made its way down New Delhi's broad, tree-lined avenues, official-looking cars with outriders and escorts overtook us, speeding toward the hospital. As we drew nearer, it became evident that a large number of people had gathered there. But this was no ordinary crowd: it seemed to consist mostly of red-eyed young men in half-unbuttoned shirts. It was now that I noticed that my Sikh fellow passenger was showing signs of increasing anxiety, sometimes standing up to look out, sometimes glancing at the door. It was too late to get off the bus; thugs were everywhere. The bands of young men grew more and more menacing as we approached the hospital. There was a watchfulness about them. Some were armed with steel rods and bicycle chains; others had fanned out across the busy road and were stopping cars and buses.

A stout woman in a sari sitting across the aisle from me was the first to understand what was going on. Rising to her feet, she gestured urgently at the Sikh, who was sitting hunched in his seat. She hissed at him in Hindi, telling him to get down and keep out of sight.