Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

The words of Tulsidas, long known by heart, came back to her:

Devoted to duty, the people walked in the path of the Vedas, each according to his own caste and stage of life, and enjoyed perfect happiness, unvexed by fear, or sorrow, or disease.

‘Let us at least wait till the procession has reached Ayodhya,’ Mrs Mahesh Kapoor pleaded with her husband.

‘Stay if you want. I’m going,’ snapped Mahesh Kapoor; and, forlornly, she followed. But she decided that tomorrow she would not persuade him to come for Rama’s coronation. She would come alone and, not subject to his whims and commands, she would see it from beginning to end. She would not be prised away yet again from a scene that her soul thirsted for.

Meanwhile the procession wound its way through the labyrinthine alleys of Misri Mandi and the contiguous neighbourhoods. Lakshman stepped on one of the burnt-out bulbs from the Jawaharlal Light House, and yelped in pain. Since there was no water to be had immediately, Rama picked up some rose petals that had been strewn in his path and crushed them against the burn. The people sighed at this sign of brotherly solicitude, and the procession moved on. The chief of fireworks now set off a few green-flared rockets that soared into the sky before exploding in a chrysanthemum of sparks. At this, Hanuman rushed forward, waving his tail, as if reminded of his own incendiary activities in Lanka. He was followed by the monkey throng, chattering and shouting with joy; they reached the marigold stage a couple of hundred yards before the three main swaroops. Hanuman, who today was even redder, plumper and jollier than he had been yesterday, leapt on to the stage, hopped, skipped, and danced for a few seconds, then jumped off. Now Bharat understood that Rama and Lakshman were approaching the river Saryu and the city of Ayodhya, and he too began to move towards the stage along the lane from the other side.

And then suddenly Rama’s procession stopped, and the sound of other drums was heard together with cries of terrible grief and lamentation. A group of about twenty men accompanied by drummers was trying to cut across the procession in order to get to the Imambara with their tazia. Some were beating their breasts in sorrow for Imam Hussain; in the hands of others were chains and whips tipped with small knives and razor blades with which they lashed themselves mercilessly in jerky, compulsive motions. They were an hour and a half behind time — their drummers had turned up late, they had got into a scuffle with another tazia procession — and now they were trying to push forward as fast as they could, desperate to get to their destination. It was the ninth night of Moharram. In the distance they could just make out the spire of the Imambara lit up with a string of lights. They moved forward, tears coursing down their cheeks—

‘Ya Hassan! Ya Hussain!’ ‘Ya Hassan! Ya Hussain!’ ‘Hassan! Hussain!’ ‘Hassan! Hussain!’

‘Bhaskar,’ said Veena to her son, who had grabbed her hand — Go home at once. At once. Where’s Daadi?—’

‘But I want to watch—’

She slapped him once, hard, across his monkey-face. He looked at her unbelievingly, then, crying, backed out of the lane.

Kedarnath had moved forward to talk to the two policemen accompanying the tazia procession. Not caring what her neighbours might think, she went up to him, caught his hands in her own, and said:

‘Let’s go home.’

‘But there’s trouble here — I’d better—’

‘Bhaskar’s ill.’

Kedarnath, torn between two anxieties, nodded.

The two policemen accompanying the tazia-bearers tried to clear a path for them, but this was too much for the people of Misri Mandi, the citizens of the holy city of Ayodhya who had waited so long and devotedly for a sight of Lord Rama.

The policemen realized that what would have been a safe path an hour previously was no longer safe. They ordered, then pleaded with the tazia procession to change its route, to halt, to go back, but to no avail. The desperate mourners thrust forward through the joyous celebrators.

This atrocious and violent interruption — this lunatic mourning that made a mockery of the enactment of Shri Ramachandra ji returning to his home, his brothers, his people, to establish his perfect reign — was not to be borne. The monkeys, who had just been leaping about in uncontrollable joy, angrily threw flowers on to the tazia, shouted and growled aggressively, and then stood threateningly around the intruders who were attempting to force themselves across the path of Rama, Sita and Lakshman.

The actor playing Rama himself moved forward in a motion that was half aggressive, half propitiatory.

A chain lashed out, and he staggered back, to lie gasping in pain against the ledge of a shop. Upon his dark-blue skin a red stain formed and spread.

The crowd went berserk. What all the forces of Ravana had not succeeded in doing these bloodthirsty Muslims had managed to do. It was not a young actor, but God himself who lay wounded there.

Crazed by the sight of the wounded Rama, the man with the fireworks seized a lathi from one of the organizers and led the crowd in a charge against the tazia procession. Within seconds, the tazia, many weeks’ work of delicate glass and mica and paper tracery, lay smashed on the ground. Fireworks were thrown on to it and it was set alight. The maddened crowd stamped on it and beat it with lathis until it was charred and splintered. Its horrified defenders lashed out with their knives and chains at these kafirs, leaping about like apes on the very eve of the great martyrdom, who had dared to desecrate the holy image of the tomb.

The sight of the crushed and blackened tazia made them mad.

Both sides now were filled with the lust to kill — what did it matter if they too suffered martyrdom? — to attack pure evil, to defend what was dear to them — what did it matter if they died? — whether to recreate the passion of Karbala or to re-establish Ram Rajya and rid the world of the murderous, cow-slaughtering, God-defiling devils.

‘Kill the bastards — finish them off — the spawn of Pakistan—’

‘Ya Hassan! Ya Hussain!’ It was now a battle cry.

Soon even the crazed cries of the time of Partition—‘Allah-u-Akbar’ and ‘Har har Mahadeva’—were heard above the screams of pain and terror. Knives and spears and axes and lathis had appeared from the neighbouring houses, and Hindus and Muslims hacked at each other’s limbs, eyes, faces, guts, throats. Of the two policemen, one was wounded in the back, the other managed to escape. But it was a Hindu neighbourhood and, after a few terrifying minutes of mutual butchery, the Muslims fled down side lanes, most of them small and unfamiliar. Some were hunted down and killed, some escaped and rushed back in the direction from which they had come, some ran forward towards the Imambara by circuitous routes — guided from far off by its illuminated spire and festoons of light. They fled towards the Imambara as one would flee towards a sanctuary — where they would receive protection among those of their own religion and would find hearts that could understand their own fear and hatred and bitterness and grief — for they had seen their friends and relatives killed and wounded — and be inflamed by them in turn.

Soon Muslim mobs would be roaming around other parts of Brahmpur setting fire to Hindu shops and murdering any Hindu they could find. Meanwhile in Misri Mandi, three of the Muslim drummers who had been hired for the Bharat Milaap, who were not even Shias, and who did not care much more for the tazias than they did for the divinity of Rama, lay murdered by the wall of the temple, their drums smashed in, their heads half hacked off, their bodies doused in kerosene and set alight — all, doubtless, to the greater glory of God.