Anjum’s old friend D. D. Gupta had returned from Baghdad, or what was left of it, with horror stories of wars and massacres, bombings and butchery—of a whole region that had been deliberately and systematically turned into hell on earth. He was grateful to be alive and to have a home to return to. He no longer had the stomach for blast walls, or for that matter for any kind of business enterprise, and was delighted to see how the desolate, ravaged specter that he had left behind when he went to Iraq had blossomed and prospered. He and Anjum spent hours together, shooting the breeze, watching old Hindi films on TV, and overseeing new plans for expansion and construction (it was he who supervised the construction of the swimming pool). Mrs. Gupta, for her part, had also retreated from worldly love and spent all her time with Lord Krishna in her puja room.
Hell was closing in on the home front too. Gujarat ka Lalla had swept the polls and was the new Prime Minister. People idolized him, and temples in which he was the presiding deity began to appear in small towns. A devotee gifted him a pinstriped suit with LallaLallaLalla woven into the fabric. He wore it to greet visiting Heads of State. Every week he addressed the people of the country directly in an emotional radio broadcast. He disseminated his message of Cleanliness, Purity and Sacrifice for the Nation, either with a fable, a folk tale, or an edict of some sort. He popularized the practice of mass yoga in community parks. At least once a month he visited a poor colony and swept the streets himself. As his popularity peaked, he became paranoid and secretive. He trusted nobody and sought no advice. He lived alone, ate alone, and never socialized. For his personal protection, he hired food-tasters and security guards from other countries. He made dramatic announcements and took drastic decisions that had far-reaching effects.
The Organization that had brought him to power took a dim view of personality cults, and a long view of history. It continued to support him, but quietly began to groom a successor.
The saffron parakeets that had been biding their time were set loose. They swooped into university campuses and courtrooms, disrupted concerts, vandalized cinema halls and burned books. A parakeet committee of pedagogy was set up to formalize the process of turning history into mythology and mythology into history. The Sound and Light show at the Red Fort was taken into the workshop for revision. Soon the centuries of Muslim rule would be stripped of poetry, music and architecture and collapsed into the sound of the clash of swords and a bloodcurdling war cry that lasted only a little longer than the husky giggle that Ustad Kulsoom Bi had hung her hopes on. The remaining time would be taken up by the story of Hindu glory. As always, history would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past.
Small gangs of thugs, who called themselves “defenders of the Hindu Faith,” worked the villages, gaining what advantage they could. Aspiring politicians jump-started their careers by filming themselves making hateful speeches or beating up Muslims and uploading the videos on to YouTube. Every Hindu pilgrimage and religious festival turned into a provocative victory parade. Armed escort teams rode beside pilgrims and revelers on trucks and motorcycles, looking to pick fights in peaceful neighborhoods. Instead of saffron flags they now proudly waved the national flag—a trick they had learned from Mr. Aggarwal and his tubby Gandhian mascot in Jantar Mantar.
The Holy Cow became the national emblem. The government backed campaigns to promote cow urine (as a drink as well as a detergent). News filtered in from Lalla strongholds about people accused of eating beef or killing cows being publicly flogged and often lynched.
Given his recent experiences in Iraq, the worldly Mr. D. D. Gupta’s considered assessment of all this activity was that in the long run it would only end up creating a market for blast walls.
Nimmo Gorakhpuri came over one weekend with a (literally) blow-by-blow fourth-person account of how the relative of a neighbor’s friend had been beaten to death in front of his family by a mob that accused him of killing a cow and eating beef.
“You had better chase out these old cows that you have here,” she said. “If they die here—not if, when they die—they’ll say you killed them and that will be the end of all of you. They must have their eyes on this property now. That’s how they do it these days. They accuse you of eating beef and then take over your house and your land and send you to a refugee camp. It’s all about property, not cows. You have to be very careful.”
“Careful in what way?” Saddam shouted. “The only way you can be careful with these bastards is by ceasing to exist! If they want to kill you they will kill you whether you are careful or not, whether you’ve killed a cow or not, whether you have even set eyes on a cow or not.” It was the first time anybody had ever heard him lose his temper. Everybody was taken aback. None of them knew his story. Anjum had told nobody. As a keeper of secrets, she was nothing short of Olympic class.
On Independence Day, in what had grown to be a ritual, Saddam sat next to Anjum on the red car sofa with his sunglasses on. He switched channels between Gujarat ka Lalla’s bellicose speech at the Red Fort and a massive, public protest in Gujarat. Thousands of people, mainly Dalit, had gathered in a district called Una to protest the public flogging of five Dalits who had been stopped on the road because they had the carcass of a cow in their pickup truck. They hadn’t killed the cow. They had only picked up the carcass like Saddam’s father had, all those years ago. Unable to bear the humiliation of what was done to them, all five men had tried to commit suicide. One had succeeded.
“First they tried to finish off the Muslims and Christians. Now they’re going for the Chamars,” Anjum said.
“It’s the other way around,” Saddam said. He did not explain what he meant, but looked thrilled as speaker after speaker at the protest swore on oath that they would never again pick up cow carcasses for upper-caste Hindus.
What didn’t make it to TV were the gangs of thugs that had positioned themselves on the highways leading away from the venue of the gathering, waiting to pick off the protesters as they dispersed.
—
Anjum and Saddam’s Independence Day TV-watching ritual was interrupted by wild shrieks from Zainab, who was outside, hanging up some washing. Saddam raced out, followed by a slower, worried Anjum. It took them a while to believe that what they saw was real and not a specter. Zainab, her gaze directed skyward, was transfixed, terrified.
A crow hung frozen in mid-air, one of its wings spread out like a fan. A feathered Christ, hanging askew, on an invisible cross. The sky swarmed with thousands of agitated, low-flying fellow crows, their distraught cawing drowning out every other city sound. Above them in an upper tier, silent kites circled, curious perhaps, but inscrutable. The crucified crow was absolutely still. Very quickly a small crowd of people gathered to watch the proceedings, to frighten themselves to death, to advise each other about the occult significance of frozen crows, and to discuss the exact nature of the horrors that this ill-omen, this macabre curse, would visit upon them.
What had happened was not a mystery. The crow’s wing feathers had snagged mid-flight on an invisible kite string that was laced across the branches of the old Banyan trees in the graveyard. The felon—a purple paper-kite—peeped guiltily through the foliage of one of them. The string, a new Chinese brand that had suddenly flooded the market, was made of tough, transparent plastic, coated with ground glass. Independence Day kite-warriors used it to “cut” each other’s strings, and bring each other’s kites down. It had already caused some tragic accidents in the city.