The group was pitifully small by the standards of a city where crowds of several hundred thousand were routinely mustered for political rallies. Nevertheless, the members rose to their feet and began to march.
Years before, I had read a passage by V. S. Naipaul that has stayed with me ever since. I have never been able to find it again, so this account is from memory. In his incomparable prose, Naipaul describes a demonstration. He is in a hotel room somewhere in Africa or South America; he looks down and sees people marching past. To his surprise, the sight fills him with an obscure longing, a kind of melancholy; he is aware of a wish to go out, to join, to merge his concerns with theirs. Yet he knows he never will; it is simply not in his nature to join crowds.
For many years I read everything of Naipaul's I could lay my hands on; I couldn't have enough of him. I read him with the intimate, appalled attention that one reserves for one's most skillful interlocutors. It was he who first made it possible for me to think of myself as a writer, working in English.
I remembered that passage because I believed that I too was not a joiner, and in Naipaul's pitiless mirror I thought I saw an aspect of myself rendered visible. Yet as this forlorn little group marched out of the shelter of the compound, I did not hesitate for a moment: without a second thought, I joined.
The march headed first for Lajpat Nagar, a busy commercial area a mile or so away. I knew the area. Though it was in New Delhi, its streets resembled the older parts of the city, where small, cramped shops tended to spill out onto the footpaths.
We were shouting slogans as we marched, hoary Gandhian staples of peace and brotherhood from half a century before. Then, suddenly, we were confronted with a starkly familiar spectacle, an image of twentieth-century urban horror: burned-out cars, their ransacked interiors visible through smashed windows; debris and rubble everywhere. Blackened pots had been strewn along the street. A cinema had been gutted, and the charred faces of film stars stared out at us from half-burned posters.
As I think back to that march, my memory breaks down, details dissolve. I recently telephoned some friends who had been there. Their memories are similar to mine in only one respect: they too clung to one scene while successfully ridding their minds of the rest.
The scene my memory preserved is of a moment when it seemed inevitable that we would be attacked.
Rounding a corner, we found ourselves facing a crowd that was larger and more determined-looking than any other crowds we had encountered. On each previous occasion we had prevailed by marching at the thugs and engaging them directly, in dialogues that turned quickly into extended shouting matches. In every instance we had succeeded in facing them down. But this particular mob was intent on confrontation. As its members advanced on us, brandishing knives and steel rods, we stopped. Our voices grew louder as they came toward us; a kind of rapture descended on us, exhilaration in anticipation of a climax. We braced for the attack, leaning forward as if into a wind.
And then something happened that I have never completely understood. Nothing was said; there was no signal, nor was there any break in the rhythm of our chanting. But suddenly all the women in our group — and the women made up more than half the group's numbers — stepped out and surrounded the men; their saris and kameezes became a thin, fluttering barrier, a wall around us. They turned to face the approaching men, challenging them, daring them to attack.
The thugs took a few more steps toward us and then faltered, confused. A moment later they were gone.
The march ended at the walled compound where it had started. In the next couple of hours an organization was created, the Nagarik Ekta Manch, or Citizen's Unity Front, and its work — to bring relief to the injured and the bereft, to shelter the homeless — began the next morning. Food and clothing were needed, and camps had to be established to accommodate the thousands of people with nowhere to sleep. And by the next day we were overwhelmed — literally. The large compound was crowded with vanloads of blankets, secondhand clothing, shoes, and sacks of flour, sugar, and tea. Previously hardnosed, unsentimental businessmen sent cars and trucks. There was barely room to move.
My own role was slight. For a few weeks I worked with a team from Delhi University, distributing supplies in the slums and working-class neighborhoods that had been worst hit by the rioting. Then I returned to my desk.
In time, inevitably, most of the front's volunteers returned to their everyday lives. But some members — most notably the women involved in the running of refugee camps — continued to work for years afterward with Sikh women and children who had been rendered homeless. Lalita Ramdas, Veena Das, Mita Bose, Radha Kumar: these women, each one an accomplished professional, gave up years of their time to repair the enormous damage that had been done in a matter of two or three days.
The front also formed a team to investigate the riots. I briefly considered joining but then decided that an investigation would be a waste of time, because the politicians capable of inciting violence were unlikely to heed a tiny group of concerned citizens.
I was wrong. A document eventually produced by this team — a slim pamphlet entitled "Who Are the Guilty?" — has become a classic, a searing indictment of the politicians who incited the riots and the police who allowed the rioters to have their way.
Over the years the Indian government has compensated some of the survivors of the 1984 violence and resettled some of the survivors. One gap remains: to this day, not one instigator of the riots has been charged. But the pressure on the government has never gone away, and it continues to grow; every year the nails hammered in by that slim document dig just a little deeper.
The pamphlets and others that followed are testaments to the only humane possibility available to people who live in multiethnic, multireligious societies like those of the Indian subcontinent. Human rights documents such as "Who Are the Guilty?" are essential to the process of broadening civil institutions: they are the weapons with which society asserts itself against a state that runs criminally amok, as this one did in Delhi in November of 1984.
It is heartening that sanity prevails today in the Punjab. But not elsewhere. In Bombay, local government officials want to stop people from painting buildings green — a color associated with the Muslim religion. And hundreds of Muslims have been deported from the city's slums — in at least one case for committing an offense no greater than reading a Bengali newspaper. It is imperative that governments ensure that those who instigate mass violence do not go unpunished.
The Bosnian writer Dzevad Karahasan, in a remarkable essay called "Literature and War" (published last year in his collection Sarajevo, Exodus of a City), makes a startling connection between modern literary aestheticism and the contemporary world's indifference to violence: "The decision to perceive literally everything as an aesthetic phenomenon — completely sidestepping questions about goodness and truth — is an artistic decision. That decision started in the realm of art, and went on to become characteristic of the contemporary world."
When I went back to my desk in November of 1984, I found myself confronting decisions about writing that I had never faced before. How was I to write about what I had seen without reducing it to mere spectacle? My next novel was bound to be influenced by my experiences, but I could see no way of writing directly about those events without creating them as a panorama of violence—"an aesthetic phenomenon," as Karahasan was to call it. At the time, the idea seemed obscene and futile; of much greater importance were factual reports of the testimony of the victims. But these were already being done by people who were, I knew, more competent than I could be.