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CHAPTER 6

 Death of the Mother: Patna

The driver kept his hand on the horn. He drove like a demon, careering at high speeds around cycle rickshaws, ox carts, bicycles, pedestrians, the occasional motor rickshaws, or car. His assistant kept his head poked out the passenger window. His full-time job was to holler abuse at slower traffic in warning of the approaching juggernaut. In India, a truck is power. It stops for nothing, only veers to the side if a greater vehicle, say a packed bus, is bearing down on it, even then swerving only at the last second to avoid a head-on collision. We sped through the countryside back to Patna in an hour and a half, three hours less than the journey out to Vaishali had taken. Crossing over the kilometre-wide Ganges at the Patna bridge, the driver cursed and scowled as we found ourselves wedged into a traffic jam. We stopped moving altogether. After about fifteen minutes, Sabina and I decided it would be better for us to get out and walk. A concrete stairway from the side of the bridge led us down into an industrial section of the city.

The crowd seemed menacingly frenetic after the serenity of Vaishali. Thousands of people filled the streets, rushing in different directions, as if the communal heartbeat of the city had received a syringe full of adrenaline. Rickshaw drivers, their double seats empty, ignored our attempts to flag them down. When at last we cornered one, he told us he didn’t know where the Patna Tourist Guest House was. Instead, he dropped us at the train station, but not the one we knew. For the first time we realized we were on the far eastern side of town, ten or so kilometres from our hotel. Dusk was coming. By this time, people should have been returning to their homes and hovels. Instead the streets grew more and more crowded. We saw a newspaper shop swarming with Biharis shouting and struggling for a paper as if they were starving men fighting for rice. Smoke filled the air. Not the acrid curry-and-buffalo-chip scented smoke of cooking fires: it had a chemical odour, like burning paint.

Our eyes filled with dust and stung from the smoke. We were exhausted and filthy. Sabina looked drained, her face coated with dirt from the harrowing truck ride. A dozen lepers sitting in a row at the front of the station began wailing for alms when they saw us. We fled, unable to deal with the artificial urgency of their chorus. Though it would be expensive, we decided to take a motor rickshaw back to the security of our guest house, but couldn’t find a single one at the station. We ended up with another pedal-rickshaw driver who told us he could drop us at a motor-rickshaw stand. His eyes were bulging, his motions jerky and erratic as he pulled away from the station.

The area we cycled through seemed desperately poor. Shacks of tin sheeting and canvas lined the roadside. The few women we saw on the streets hurried by with pots and baskets balanced on their hips. Our driver pedaled madly as if afraid to stop, then jammed on the brakes and turned the vehicle around where a crowd had blocked the road ahead. A shop was on fire. Black smoke billowed form the windows and bright red flames licked upwards into the purple sky. The driver turned his head around and yelled something to us in Hindi.

“What does he say?” I tugged at Sabina’s sleeve.

“I don’t know, something about Indira Gandhi.”

She shook her head at him.

The driver reached into the breast pocket of his tattered shirt and brought out a piece of folded newspaper, which he handed to her. It was written in Hindi. Sabina carefully pronounced the phonetic script, squinting at it in the half-light.

“Indira Gandhi…something…I don’t know. Why is he giving me this?” She smiled at him and thanked him for showing it to her, offering it back.

The driver turned again, no longer watching where he was driving. He pointed his index finger at her, thumb raised in the air, and jabbed it at her.

“Ki, Ki!” he said ferociously.

She gripped the paper again, pressed it close to her eyes.

“Mein Gott!” she whispered, the blood draining from her face. “They’ve killed Indira Gandhi. I can read it now. It says here, three Sikhs shot her.”

The driver dropped us at an auto-rickshaw stand, where we were piled into the rear with six others heading for Gandhi Maidan near the western train station. It was dark now. The surging crowds had formed themselves into marching armies, chanting anti-Sikh slogans in unison. Again and again the driver had to turn his vehicle around in search of detours to avoid the angry mobs.

“Ah, Indira, I have lost my own mother!” the elderly man crammed next to me cried in his grief.

From the crest of a small hill, I looked back on the eastern half of the city and glimpsed three or four fires burning in the distance. The next day’s papers revealed that 47 people had been killed in Bihar State, though unofficial estimates put the number above 50 in Patna alone. In Delhi, 115 had died during the night. Scooters and buses were set on fire. Shops of Sikhs had been looted and set ablaze. So easily marked by their long beards and turbans, the men were beaten, murdered, the women raped. Nine Sikhs were pulled off a train by gunmen and shot on their way to Delhi. From all across the country Sikhs abandoned their homes and struck out for the Punjab, fearing that Hindu and Sikh would never live together in peace again.

The driver seemed lost in the confusion. He turned down blind alleys and unlit back streets. One of the passengers shouted something towards the front.

“Stay on the main road. This is a bad area,” Sabina translated for me.

It took another two hours to cross town to Gandhi Maidan, the wide circular park named in honour of Mahatma Gandhi. We found a rickshaw driver willing to take us the last three kilometres to the guest house. Sabina pumped the pedalling Bihari for more information on the assassination. He merely wobbled his head indifferently.

“What, your leader has been murdered, and you don’t care?” she said.

“We are poor people here in Bihar,” he replied. “What does it matter to us who lives and who dies at the top?”

The tourist guest house was located in the centre of a government office district. The streets were nearly deserted, in eerie contrast to the raging crowd in the east end of town. A shoot-on-sight curfew had been imposed on Patna, we later learned, and it seemed the government offices were the first places the police had moved in to protect. A mournful young man with dark circles under his eyes unlocked the front door of the guest house and told us he had no vacancies.

“But you must have a place for us,” said Sabina, marching into the lobby and dropping her bag on the carpet. “Where else are we to go?”

“No room.”

“Look, you can’t be full,” I said. “This place was almost deserted just three days ago. You have a single room?”

Shake of the head.

“Anything?”

Two waiters from the guest house restaurant came out. They had served us dinner every night of our stay and took apparent delight in our under-the-table hand-holding. I hailed them, making deliberately friendly conversation, just to prove to the front desk clerk we had indeed stayed in the guest house before. This would have made no difference had the rooms been full, but I had learned to discard logic in dealing with Indian paper shufflers.

“Well, there is a room,” the clerk blurted out suddenly. “But it’s got no bed sheets.”

“I have a sheet in my bag. We’ll take it,” I said.

“And no pillowcases.”

I marvelled that the man was prepared to turn us out into the insanity of the night rather give us a room with no pillowcases. Most likely, he too was terrified by the assassination. Two more tourists in the hotel would only complicate a life that had already turned frighteningly unpredictable. The clerk simply wanted us to go away. But by proving we were old customers, I had, so it seemed, obliged him to accept us as if we were family. From a cabinet behind the front desk, he suddenly produced a pair of clean linen sheets and handed them across the counter to me without a word. An hour later, pillowcases were sent up to the room.

We spent the night in shock and exhaustion, unable even to touch or hold hands, and I grieved silently that all too soon I would lose her. In the morning the streets were deathly quiet. The hotel restaurant was out of everything but rice, sugar and butter, which made a strange breakfast. We scoured the morning papers for details of the assassination. The killers were Sikh members of Mrs. Gandhi’s personal guards. It was betrayal as well as murder. A twenty-four hour shoot-on-sight curfew was in force throughout Patna in an effort to control mob violence and the torching of Sikh shops and homes. Sikh families had gathered in their community temples for protection, surrounded by police patrols. The iron gates of the hotel remained locked. The desk clerks requested that we not go outside the building. Several guests of the hotel told us we would not be permitted to ride the trains even if we were able to make it to the station.

“But are the trains still running?” Sabina asked, her memsahib voice sharp.

“Yes, of course. But why take a chance?” advised the betel-chewing politician, still ensconced in his plush seat in the lobby. He was perhaps the sole aspect of Patna that remained unchanged. “You want to risk your life for what? To rush to New Delhi where the violence is worse? No.” He turned to me. “Sir, you should not permit your wife to make such a dangerous journey!”

I nodded grimly. “But she’s not an Indian wife. I can’t tell her what to do.”

The politician scowled. Sabina vacillated and at length decided to wait another day. She could catch a very early train and still make it to the airport in time to meet her friend. Through the afternoon we wrote letters and embraced lightly.

Rested, we were able to begin to say goodbye. We went to the roof to watch the sunset. Cooking fires smouldered in the alleyways near the hotel. The families who lived in canvas shelters on the streets had no way to abide by the curfew order, so the armed soldiers at the nearby intersection ignored them. Cows and goats still wandered freely across the main thoroughfares. The gaudy pink, orange and purple Day-Glo paint sprayed across their bony flanks seemed incongruously festive. The blaze of the setting sun appeared equally indifferent to the nation’s loss. The god continued to bestow its blessings just as the Vaishali’s villagers had beseeched of it only forth-eight hours previously. The pink ellipse widened as it sank through the haze of cooking fires. We followed its stately decline until it hid behind a huge government complex in the next block. A moment later Venus emerged, a single white light in the fading sky.

“Let’s lie naked together,” said Sabina, touching my arm.

Back in our room, curled together like spoons, only half-undressed, we rocked slightly on our bed until I gently climaxed. Then we stripped away the rest of our clothes. She kissed me and pulled me down on top of her. The strange energy began rising within me once again. Now aware of its course, I began at once to breathe deeply, moving with its flow and giving myself over to it.

“Christ, let it break me now,” I prayed silently.

Yet the image that arose was that of the great stone lingam thrusting up out of the earth, and then of Shiva dancing on burning corpses. It was Shiva I yielded to, and I felt the god’s blessing blow through me like wind rattling through a half-open window. It tore like a whirlwind. I struggled to keep my breath slow, afraid that if all control was lost, I’d be destroyed. Arms, legs, hands and feet filled with electric fire. My head burned with it. I hyperventilated, then passed through into a calm and tingling awareness, an eye in the centre of the storm. Dimly I sensed Sabina next to me, breathing with the same rapid rhythm. She held my limp penis tightly between her legs. The energy had not yet reached it, but was moving. Her arms caressed my back, stroking me as if to guide the power downward past my belly to my loins. She groaned. Spasms shook her hips. She grabbed the hair of my head and pulled my face hard against her cheek. I quickened, then fought for control of the rhythm.

Sweat drenched us both. How long had it been? An hour? Two? I had no way to measure. Sabina climaxed a second time and sent a jolt through me that triggered my own orgasm. I came without ejaculating, my penis barely stiff. Instead a current shot inside through my body, shaking it violently. My legs arched high behind my back like a scorpion. I reared and became the motion, the rhythm itself. Still the power burned and gathered within, the charge building like lightning, ready to crack me open as it shot inside her. Slowly it forged itself while we rocked faster and faster. Energy throbbed between my thighs. I could feel myself stretching, growing hard against Sabina’s skin. My shaft felt like a mould being filled with incandescent metal. Consciousness flickered briefly, rose like a whale surfacing for air before a dive to the black ocean floor. I released a silent prayer.

“O God, split me open, destroy me. This very act, now, I give to you.”

From the midst of the heat and fire and pounding of blood came a familiar cool voice inside my head that said, “Then stop.”

“What are you saying?”

“Stop.”

Shiva, Christ, Buddha, Mara, my own delusion, I didn’t know the source of the voice, but I felt afraid of it, for a second hated it and what it was saying. I tried to lose myself again in the fire. But the voice held me.

“Stop.”

It drew me back to full consciousness, gave me clear-headed choice. Slowly I eased back on the rhythm, let the current gradually dissolve between us. Some twenty minutes later I lifted my head shakily from her shoulder and looked into the blue of her eyes.

“Can you read my mind?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But do you know what happened?”

“I think I feel something is changing…Tell me.”

“I hope you feel it. Because I think if we continue this to where it could go, to whatever sex is at the end of this, it will bond us deeply. Too deeply for what either of us want or need right now. It would have dissolved us. So…”

“I’m afraid.”

“Don’t. There’s no reason. Oh, Sabina, it’s good to be alive with you.”

“I had two orgasms. Without contact, without touching, with you limp between my legs. How is it possible?”

“I had an orgasm without an ejaculation or an erection. How is that possible?”

“I felt my breasts fill with milk—no, how could it be?”

“I know. I feel you would have gotten pregnant no matter how many pills you’d taken, if we had continued to the end.”

I rolled on my side as if to get up, then looked down on her wet, open body. Quickly I rolled back and embraced her again.

“I know,” she said, holding me. “It seems so empty.”

I cried a bit. She stroked my hair.

At four in the morning we rose. Sabina packed and I carried her bag downstairs. We walked undisturbed through the cool night to the train station. The sleeping bodies of passengers and station beggars covered the floor of the dark waiting room. Their white clothing gave off a ghostly glow. They lay motionless, as if victims of some deadly sleeping gas. The train was two hours late. Standing in the midst of the bodies, like archeologists in a giant communal tomb, Sabina and I went through the painful banalities of exchanging addresses, in case our rendezvous in Bodhgaya did not work out. I laughed feebly at the thought that I should have no expectations for the future. My heart was dead set on meeting her again. The train came. I boarded with her.

“Take good care of you in Nepal,” she said like an elder sister.

“Nepal’s a lot less dangerous than New Delhi these days. I’ll be glad to get out of India. Crazy days ahead.”

She nodded. A whistle blew. The train lurched. I leaned forward to kiss her goodbye. Mindful of the two dark-skinned men eyeing us across the compartment, Sabina offered me her cheek.