But no, I didn’t resign. My father, Navjyot’s grieving grandfather, the man who was proudest to see me a cop, stopped me.
“Don’t be a fool, Gurinder,” he said to me, holding me by the shoulders as if he wanted to shake some sense into me. “Sikhs have lost so much already this year; let us not lose more. Your staying on will help prevent such tragedies in the future. What is the point of throwing away your ability to pursue the criminals, to uphold the law, to ensure that some other mob doesn’t murder someone else’s favorite nephew?”
I wept, I raged, I argued with him, I spoke of the Sikh soldiers who’d mutinied, I told him about a brilliant senior cop, Simranjit Singh Mann, who had quit the fucking police and joined the Khalistanis, and how I wanted to do the same thing. But he kept holding me, his sad brown eyes looking into the depths of my despair, and he shook his head. “Where do you think this will lead them?” he asked. “Will they achieve anything for their community, or for their country, except to cause more destruction and more unnecessary suffering? Do you want to throw away your future? Do you want to throw away India’s future?”
I don’t care, I said, and he looked at me as if he’d been shot. But you’ve got to care, he said. You’ve got to care about this country the way you care about your mother or me.
I don’t know, I replied, I don’t know if I can think of this country as mine anymore, after what has happened. I told him of overhearing a Hindu officer saying, “Damned good thing, it’s time we taught those Sikhs a lesson.”
He didn’t flinch, my old man. “There will always be people like that,” he said, and for the first time I felt the difference in our ages, in what we had lived through, what we had learned. “If I brought you up to believe everything would be easy, that the whole world would act with integrity and honesty and decency and fairness, then I have failed you,” he said. “You can only be true to yourself, and to the soil from which you have sprung, and to the oath you have taken.” He looked at me then, looked into me. Thirty-seven years earlier he had lost everything in the massacres of Partition: his home, his ancestral lands in what had become, by the scratching of a careless British pen, the foreign country of Pakistan. He had worked hard to rebuild, to build himself the life he now led: the car, the servants, the club, the son in the Indian Police Service. He had sweated to build his share of India; he was not going to let me throw it away for bugger-all. “You say you do not know if this country is yours anymore? Don’t be a fool, Gurinder. Whose country is this if not yours? Since the days of Gandhi, we have tried to build a country that is everyone’s and no one’s, a country that excludes nobody, a country that no one group can claim is exclusively theirs. When Jinnah and the Muslim League wanted to create a country for Muslims, their Pakistan, did the Congress leaders say fine, we will create a country for Hindus? The whole point about India is that this is a country for everybody, and everybody has the duty, the obligation, to work to keep it that way. To fight to keep it that way. I did not bring you up to give up so easily, Gurinder. You have a job to do. You have sworn an oath of office to do it. A Sikh’s oath is his sacred duty, Gurinder. You don’t have the right to give up on your country.”
And Navjyot, I asked, but feebly, because he had won me already. And because I realized I had wanted him to.
Because of Navjyot, he replied without hesitation. Because that should never have happened, and because you have a share of the responsibility to ensure that it never happens again.
He turned me to the photograph of Navjyot that stood on the dresser, a picture of an innocent little face, tender parted lips, shining eyes that had not yet seen the horror that would shut them forever. “That boy will always live in my heart,” he said softly. “But somewhere in India there is another grandfather like me whose only hope for the safety of his grandson lies in the trust that he places in you and the policemen under your command. Do not, Gurinder, do not ever betray that trust.”
And so I stayed. And that’s why I’m still a cop: because a sad, quiet, neatly dressed man in a white beard, my blessed father, had more fucking faith in me than I had in myself. And because, for all the corruption and venality and inefficiency that assails this bloody profession, it is still the last bastion of civility and order in our racked and torn society. And because I want to ensure that, as far as I can help it, no other family has to endure what my sister had to.
And because I am haunted by the face of a little ten-year-old boy enveloped in flames, a boy who loved cricket and called me Uncle.
I want to save that boy. I want to save other children like him. I want to put out the fires.
letter from Priscilla Hart to Cindy Valeriani
August 15, 1989
Cindy dear, it’s Independence Day today. India’s. I’m sitting at my desk in my loosest cotton shift as my rickety fan totters on its pedestal and blows hot air into my face. August is murderous in Zalilgarh, but it’s not as bad as May or June, before the monsoon, when you step into the street and think you’ve walked into an oven. It’ll start cooling down in October, but as it gets colder you’ll have the pollution to cope with — the smoke from hundreds of charcoal braziers on the sidewalks, thousands of buses and cars and autorickshaws, and God knows how many factories, all rising to be trapped under the winter mist rising from the river. Gurinder said the other day that just breathing Zalilgarh’s air is the equivalent of smoking a pack of Charminars a day. And he picked an unfiltered brand to make his point!
I’m alone at home today, the office is closed, Lucky’s probably officiating at some flag-raising ceremony this morning, surrounded by self-important functionaries. I imagine him stiff in his safari suit, saluting a foreign flag, a flag without stars or stripes — heck, I don’t even know if they salute the flag at these things — and I tell myself, he’s a foreigner. But Cin, the word doesn’t mean anything to me anymore when I think of him. I know him so well — the strength of his long arms around me, the two crooked front teeth when he smiles, the slightly spicy smell of his sweat when we’ve made love, the little tilt at the corner of his mouth when I lie on his chest and look up at his face. He’s no foreigner. He’s more familiar to me, more intimate to me, than any American I’ve ever known.
Here I am, on Independence Day, wanting to give up my independence for him, knowing he has to win his own independence first. I can’t believe he’s even hesitating to leave a loveless marriage he hates for the woman he says he loves. It’s when he talks about his conflicted feelings, his obligations, that I begin to believe he really is a foreigner after all. …
Anyway, speaking of foreigners, I’ve just had another reminder that I’m one. I went to the bazaar on the weekend, just to see what I could pick up to bring home, you know? It’s crazy, these places, stores spilling out on the sidewalks, the shopkeepers openly importuning you to come and buy their wares, the flies buzzing about, the heat so oppressive that you think of going to the nearest Bollywood movie just for the air-conditioning. Anyway, I spotted a couple of embroidered cushion covers I thought you’d like. How much? I asked. “Two hundred each, but for you, three hundred the pair,” said the greasy man in the shop. Now, I’ve been here long enough to know about bargaining, so I promptly said, “No, two hundred for the pair.” I was appalled at the alacrity with which he accepted my offer. Sure enough, I show the cushion covers to the wretched Kadambari, and she says, “How much did you pay? Sixty?” Even making allowances for her bitchy nastiness, it’s clear I’ve been ripped off again. I guess it’s part of the price you’ve got to pay for being a foreigner in India. But why must I, of all people, have to pay that price? I’m not some tourist in a five-star hotel — I’m me! And that ought to count for something. …