“Today I forgive my daughters,” Olga Volga announced, caressing India’s hair while they both cried. “It don’t matter no more what they done.”
11
At San Quentin State Prison, a thirty-nine-year-old man named Robert Alton Harris was put to death in the gas chamber. Pellets of sodium cyanide wrapped in cheesecloth were lowered into a small vat of sulphuric acid and Harris began to gasp and twitch. After about four minutes he became still and his face turned blue. Three minutes later he coughed and his body convulsed. Eleven minutes after the execution began Warden Daniel Vazquez declared Harris dead and read out his last words: “You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.” This was a line paraphrased from the Keanu Reeves movie Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.
Everywhere was a mirror of everywhere else. Executions, police brutality, explosions, riots: Los Angeles was beginning to look like wartime Strasbourg; like Kashmir. Eight days after Harris’s execution, when India Ophuls a.k.a. Kashmira Noman flew out of LAX, heading east, the jury returned its verdict in the trial of the four officers accused of the beating of Rodney King in the San Fernando Valley Foothill Police Division, a beating so savage that the amateur videotape of it looked, to many people, like something from Tiananmen Square or Soweto. When the King jury found the policemen not guilty, the city exploded, giving its verdict on the verdict by setting itself on fire, like a suicide bomber, like Jan Palach. Below India’s rising aircraft drivers were being pulled from their cars and chased and beaten by men holding rocks. The motionless body of a man called Reginald Denny was being savagely beaten. A huge piece of cinder block was thrown at his head by a man who did a war dance of celebration and made a gang sign at the sky, taunting the news helicopters and airline passengers up there, maybe even taunting God. Stores were looted, cars were torched, there were fires everywhere, on, for example, Normandie, Florence, Crenshaw, Arlington, Figueroa, Olympic, Jefferson, Pico and Rodeo. What was burning? Everything. Auto repair shops, Launderlands, Korean eateries, limo services, Rite Aids, mini-marts and Denny’s all over the city. L.A. was a flame-grilled Whopper that night. The lizard people were rising up from their subterranean redoubts; the sleeping dragon had woken. And India, flying east, was on fire also. There is no India, she thought. There is only Kashmira. There is only Kashmir.
She would not be India in India. She would be her mother’s child. As Kashmira, then, Kashmira in a baseball cap and jeans, she walked into the Press Club in Delhi and with American daring asked the old India hands for guidance and help, and was warned that she might have trouble getting press accreditation to go up into the valley with a documentary film crew, or even without one. When these old hands patted her on the back and also on the derrière and counseled her not to even think of going up there, where things were worse than ever, the killings were at an all-time high and foreign backpackers were showing up headless on the hillsides and there was fury in the air, she exploded with rage herself. “Where do you imagine I’ve just come from,” she bellowed, “fucking Disneyland?” The vehemence of her outburst made sure she had their attention, and a few hours later that hot night, sitting in a deck chair on the lawn of another exclusive club near the Lodi Gardens, she drank beer with the most senior member of the foreign press corps and, after establishing that she was speaking one hundred percent off the record, told him her story. “This isn’t journalism,” the Englishman told her. “It’s personal. Forget about the camera and sound equipment. You want to get in? We’ll get you in. As to safety, however, it’s at your own risk.” Three days after this conversation took place she was in a Fokker Friendship bound for Srinagar with papers and introductions and phone numbers and a new name whose meaning she needed to learn. The need didn’t feel like excitement. It felt like pain. As the plane crossed the Pir Panjal she felt as if she had passed through a magic portal, and all at once the pain intensified, it clutched at her heart and squeezed hard, and she wondered in sudden terror whether she had come to Kashmir to be reborn, or to die.
Sardar Harbans Singh passed away peacefully in a wicker rocking-chair in a Srinagar garden of spring flowers and honeybees with his favorite tartan rug across his knees and his beloved son, Yuvraj the exporter of handicrafts, by his side, and when he stopped breathing the bees stopped buzzing and the air silenced its whispers and Yuvraj understood that the story of the world he had known all his life was coming to an end, and that what followed would follow as it had to, but it would unquestionably be less graceful, less courteous and less civilized than what had gone. On that last evening Sardar Harbans Singh had been speaking with nostalgia about the glories of the so-called Khalsa Raj, the twenty-seven-year-long period of the nine Sikh governors of Kashmir that followed the conquest of the valley by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1819, during which, as he told his son, “all agriculture blossomed, all crafts flowered, all gurdwaras, temples and mosques were cared for, and everything in the garden was lovely, and even if people criticized Maharaja Ranjit Singh for falling prey to the charms of women, wine and Brahminical practices, what of it? These are not grave failings in a man. You, my son,” he continued, changing tack, “may or may not know much about Brahminical practices or wine, but you had better find yourself a woman before too long. I don’t care how full your warehouses are or how fat your bank balance is. A full godown and a bulging wallet do not excuse an empty bed.”
These were his last words, and so, when a woman calling herself Kashmira presented herself at the house of mourning carrying a letter of introduction from his father’s friend the famous English journalist, when she arrived on the ninth day after the cremation, when the complete reading of the Guru Granth Sahib was one day away from being finished, Yuvraj considered it as a sign from the Almighty and welcomed her like a member of the family, offering her the hospitality of his house, insisting upon her staying, even though it was a time of sadness, and allowing her to take part in the Bhog ceremony with which the rituals ended on the tenth day, to listen to the hymns of passing, to partake of the karah parsad and langar, and to watch him being presented with the turban that made him the new head of the family. Only when his relatives had dispersed, without wailing or lamentation, as was the preferred way among Sikhs, did he have the time to talk to her about the reason for her visit, and by this time he already knew the real answer, namely that she had come to his house so that he could fall in love. In short, she was his father’s dying gift.
“You have come into our story at the end,” he told her. “If my dear father were still with us he could answer all your questions. But maybe the truth is that, as he used to say, our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can’t hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets. Maybe too much time has passed for you and you will have to accept, I’m sorry to say it, that there are things about your experience you will never understand. My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains’ nobility, the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind. Such was his credo. I myself have spent my life in business pursuits, dirtying my hands with money, and only now that he is gone can I sit in his garden and listen to him talk. Only now that he has sadly departed but you have gladly come.”