There were dozens of them, stretched all the way across the road. They had lit a fire in the middle of the road, with a few broken chairs and bits of wood. Some of them were squatting around the fire, others were leaning against the lamp-posts and the shop-fronts. Robi could tell from the way they were watching the road that they had been waiting for their car.
He knew then, because of the chill that was spreading outwards from the pit of his stomach, that trouble had come to him at last.
Every word I write about those events of 1964 is the product of a struggle with silence. It is a struggle I am destined to lose — have already lost — for even after all these years I do not know where within me, in which corner of my world, this silence lies. All I know of it is what it is not. It is not, for example, the silence of an imperfect memory. Nor is it a silence enforced by a ruthless state — nothing like that: no barbed wire, no check-points to tell me where its boundaries lie. I know nothing of this silence except that it lies outside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words — that is why this silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all; it is simply a gap, a hole, an emptiness in which there are no words.
The enemy of silence is speech, but there can be no speech without words, and there can be no words without meanings — so it follows, inexorably, in the manner of syllogisms, that when we try to speak of events of which we do not know the meaning, we must lose ourselves in the silence that lies in the gap between words and the world. This is a silence that is proof against any conceivable act of scorn or courage; it lies beyond defiance — for what means have we to defy the mere absence of meaning? Where there is no meaning, there is banality, and that is what this silence consists in, that is why it cannot be defeated — because it is the silence of an absolute, impenetrable banality.
So complete is this silence that it actually took me fifteen years to discover that there was a connection between my nightmare bus ride back from school and the events that befell Tridib and the others in Dhaka. And then, too, my discovery was the result of the merest accident, a chance remark. For a long time after I made that discovery it was difficult for me to forgive my own stupidity. But of course, in a sense, there was nothing to forgive. I was a child, and like all the children around me, I grew up believing in the truth of the precepts that were available to me: I believed in the reality of space; I believed that distance separates, that it is a corporeal substance; I believed in the reality of nations and borders; I believed that across the border there existed another reality. The only relationship my vocabulary permitted between those separate realities was war or friendship. There was no room in it for this other thing. And things which did not fit my vocabulary were merely pushed over the edge into the chasm of that silence.
I could not have perceived that there was something more than an incidental connection between those events of which I had a brief glimpse from the windows of that bus, in Calcutta, and those other events in Dhaka, simply because Dhaka was in another country.
One afternoon in 1979, soon after I began work on my PhD, I went to attend a lecture in the Teen Murti House Library in New Delhi. The speaker was an Australian specialist on Asian affairs, and he spoke on India’s war with China in 1962. He was not a particularly good speaker, and he had nothing new to say, but still, he jogged our memories, and when my friends and I went down to the canteen after the lecture, we found ourselves talking about our recollections of that time.
We were all surprised by how much we could remember of that month — October 1962. I, for one, remembered that we had only recently moved to our new house on Southern Avenue when the war began. It was soon after the Pujas. My mother and I had dressed up in our new Puja clothes one evening, and we were waiting for my father to come home so that we could go out visiting relatives. But he was very late, and when at last we heard the squeak of the front gate, my mother led me out into the garden at once so that we could glare at him. But when he stepped out he was not at all abashed by our frowns. His eyes were bleary and there was a huge smile on his face. He swung me up over his head, grinning (I could smell the whisky on his breath), and he said: Do you know what’s happened? Nehru’s told the army to drive those Chinkies back from our border. There’s going to be a war.
I leapt out of his arms and went running up to my grandmother’s room, cheering all the way. Tha’mma, I shouted. There’s a war, a war with China.
She laughed, I remember — it was a long time since she had laughed — and gave me a hug, and said: Let’s hope we teach them a lesson.
Over our half-pots of tea in the canteen, we recalled how quickly we had taught ourselves to distinguish the shapes of their aircraft from ours, how our mothers had donated bangles and earrings for the cause, how we’d stood at street-corners, taking collections and selling little paper flags. We could all remember how the euphoria had faded into confusion as we slowly realised that the Chinese had driven the Indian army back; how we had wondered whether they were going to occupy Assam and Calcutta.
One of us, a tall, bearded Marxist called Malik, told us how his father, who had been a Member of Parliament at that time, had opened the paper one morning, and shot straight out of the house, dressed in a lungi, and gone running down to the Foreign Secretary’s bungalow down the road.
Isn’t it odd, someone said, that we can remember it so well?
Why, no, said Malik. It’s not odd at all. It was the most important thing that happened in the country when we were children.
The others nodded in agreement, but I had my reputation for contrariness to preserve, so I shook my head and said: Oh, come on, it was just a stupid little skirmish somewhere in the hills. It wasn’t important at all. We wouldn’t even remember if it the Indian army hadn’t taken such a beating. It didn’t mean a thing to most people.
All right, said Malik, smiling. You tell us, then — what was more important than the ’62 war?
I was at a loss now that he had called my bluff. They watched me as I scratched my head, thinking hard.
Suddenly, for no reason that I can remember, I said: What about the riots …?
Which riots? said Malik. There are so many.
Those riots, I said. I had to count the years out on my fingers.
The riots of 1964, I said.
Their faces went slowly blank, and they turned to look at each other.
What were the riots of 1964? Malik said with a puzzled frown. I could tell that he really had no idea what I was talking about.
I turned to the others and cried: Don’t you remember?
They looked away in embarrassment, shaking their heads. It struck me then that they were all Delhi people; that I was the only person there who had grown up in Calcutta.
Surely you remember, I said. There were terrible riots in Calcutta in 1964.
I see, said Malik. What happened?
I opened my mouth to answer and found I had nothing to say. All I could have told them about was of the sound of voices running past the walls of my school, and of a glimpse of a mob in Park Circus. The silent terror that surrounded my memory of those events, and my belief in their importance, seemed laughably out of proportion to those trivial recollections.
There was a riot, I said helplessly.
There are riots all the time, Malik said.
This was a terrible riot, I said.
All riots are terrible, Malik said. But it must have been a local thing. Terrible or not, it’s hardly comparable to a war.
But don’t you remember? I said. Didn’t you read about it or hear about it? After all, the war with China didn’t happen on your doorstep, but you remember that. Surely you remember — you must remember?