Shashi Tharoor - Riot

Continued on Page 266

October 9, 1989

I cannot believe I am sitting next to him, yet again, on a plane. How many times we have done this, how many flights, transfers, holidays, my passport and ticket always with him, even my boarding card: he was the man, the head of the family, he held the travel documents. And when it was all over, that was among the many rights I had regained, the right to be myself on an airline. Not an appendage, not a wife, not Mrs. Rudyard Hart, no longer resigned to his determination to have the aisle seat, no longer waiting for him to pass me the newspaper when he’d finished it, no longer having to see the look of irritated long-suffering on his face when I disturbed him to go to the washroom, or asked him to catch the stewardess’s attention to get something for the kids.

The kids. It’s been years since we’ve all traveled together, as a family. He enjoyed travel, he often told me, but on his own. He was self-sufficient, he didn’t need things all the time like we, the rest of us, did — juice, or entertainment, or frequent trips to the bathroom. He made it obvious that being accompanied by us was not his preferred mode of travel. But we did it often enough, till the kids began to rate airlines and hotels and transit lounges the way other kids compared baseball teams. And because of Rudyard’s postings, the kids had an unusually exotic basis for comparison. “Emirates is cool,” Kim would say, because that airline had video monitors on the backs of the seats and a wide range of channels to choose from. “But they make you fly through Dubai,” Lance would retort, pronouncing it Do-buy, “where it’s just shops, shops, shops everywhere. Schiphol is cooler!” At Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, his own favorite, Lance would pray for our connecting flights to be delayed so that he could have even longer in the arcade, shooting down monsters and dragons with no regard for jet lag.

How wonderful it is to have your monsters and dragons on a screen in front of you, to be destroyed by the press of a button, and not inside your heart as mine are, hammering away at your soul. Monsters and dragons, not just at an airport arcade between weary flights, but on the plane, in your seat, in the seat next to you.

In the seat next to me sits my monstrous ex-husband. Here we are again on a plane, Rudyard and me together, not husband and wife, merely father and mother. Father and mother with no kids in sight. Kim couldn’t get away from work, where he tells me junior stockbrokers are lucky if they can take Thanksgiving weekend. And Lance — Lance, who could never understand why I had to leave his father, Lance is in a world of his own and has no need of other worlds. But I’m not going to worry about Lance today. I’ve got too much else to think about.

Priscilla.

Priscilla with the baby blue eyes and the straight blond hair and that look of trusting innocence with which she greeted the world. Priscilla with her golden skin, her golden smile that lit up the eyes of anyone she was with. Priscilla with her idealism, her earnestness, her determination to do some good in the world. Priscilla who hated her father because of what he had done to me.

I look at him now, trying to read a magazine and not succeeding, his eyes blurring over the same page he has been staring at since I began writing these words. I look at him, and I see Priscilla: she had his eyes, his nose, his lips, his hair, except that the same features looked so different on her. Where his good looks are bloated by self-indulgence, hers were smoothed and softened by gentleness.

And that sullen set of his jaw, that look of a man who has had his own way too easily for too long, set him completely apart from his daughter. There was nothing arrogant or petulant about Priscilla, not even when she was upset about some flagrant injustice. She was just a good human being, and no one would say that about Rudyard.

I look at him, trying to focus on the page, mourning the daughter whose loss he cannot come to terms with. Cannot, because he had already lost her when he lost me, lost her while she was still living. Despite myself, I feel a tug of sorrow for him.

It hurt so much to use the past tense for Priscilla. My baby, my own personal contribution to the future of the world. I would give anything for it to have been me, and not her. Anything.

cable to Randy Diggs

October 9, 1989

FOR DIGGS NY JOURNAL NEW DELHI FROM WASSERMAN FOREIGN DESK. HAVE BEEN USING MAINLY AGENCY COPY ON HART KILLING. GRATEFUL YOU LOOK INTO STORY IN GREATER DETAIL FOR LONGER FEATURE PIECE. WHO THE GIRL WAS, WHAT SHE WAS DOING, HOW SHE WAS KILLED, WHY. SUGGEST YOU ALSO MEET PARENTS RUDYARD AND KATHARINE HART ARRIVING ON AIR INDIA FLIGHT 101 TOMORROW AND TRAVEL WITH THEM TO ZALILGARH. SHALL WE SAY 1200 WORDS IN A WEEK? AND GET THAT FAX FIXED THESE CABLES ARE COSTING US A FORTUNE.

from Randy Diggs’s notebook

October 10, 1989

Delhi airport. Crowded as usual, even at 4 bloody a.m. Curse of this New Delhi job is that everyone lands and takes off in the middle of the effing night. Engines droning, lights flashing, cars roaring, all at 2-3-4 o’clock. It’s only in the 3d World that residents near the airport would take this crap. But then they don’t have a choice, do they?

Harts emerge from Customs, escorted by clean-cut consular type from the embassy. Good PR, that. What every traveler needs in India is an escort through Customs and Immigration. Bad enough to lose your daughter without having to lose your patience as well in those interminable queues.

Hart’s a striking-looking fellow. Tall, with smooth good looks now going to seed. Sort of Robert Redford plus thirty pounds, some of it on his face. Eyes blue, gaze steady, firm handshake. But there’s a weariness there that goes beyond the exhaustion of the journey.

Mrs. Hart: maternal/intellectual type. Short, heavy-set, with wiry brown hair and skin too dry and lined for her age. Glasses on a chain around her neck. Sensible, drab clothes that’ll be far too warm in this heat. (And she’s lived in India before: doesn’t she remember the climate?)

She’s distinctly unfriendly. Hart seems happy to see me, utters the predictable thoughts (need to see where it happened — meet the people who knew and worked with Priscilla — trying to understand — etc) and welcomes the idea of my traveling to Zalilgarh with them. Mrs. Hart objects: “This is a private visit, Mr. Diggs. I don’t think …” But he brushes her aside, as if from habit. They’re divorced, of course.