The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai [129]
Bruises. Blood.
It would never be uncovered who the culprits were, whose sinister plan this was—
Those hired by the police, said the marchers, so that the marchers might be goaded into returning the insult, throwing rocks back, thus giving the police an excuse to react.
Not true, said the police. The rioters, they claimed, had brought the stones with them to throw in the face of law and order.
However, all parties agreed that, in anger at this attack, the crowd began to throw the stones at the jawans all outfitted in their riot shields and batons. The missiles hit the police station roof, shattered the windows.
The police picked up the rocks and returned them. Who were they to be spiritually superior to the crowd?
And then, BAM BABAM, the air was full of stones and bottles and brickbats and screaming. The crowd began to collect rocks, raided a building site for more; the police began to chase the crowd; the stones came down; everyone was being hit, people, police; they jumped on one another, beating with sticks, bashing with rocks; began to slash with their sickles—a hand, a face, a nose, an ear.
A rumor spread that there were men among the protesters with guns…. Perhaps it was true. Perhaps it wasn’t.
But the more adamant the protesters were, the more they fought back, the more they refused to scatter, the more certain the police were that they were armed. Defiance like this could surely not exist unless supported by weapons. So, they suspected.
In the end, the police couldn’t bear the suspense of their suspicion and opened fire.
The marchers immediately to the front scattered, ran right and left—
Those who followed behind from beyond the Kanchan Cinema, pushed by the pushing of those still farther behind, were gunned down.
In a fast-forward blur, thirteen local boys were dead.
This was how history moved, the slow build, the quick burn, and in an incoherence, the leaping both backward and forward, swallowing the young into old hate. The space between life and death, in the end, too small to measure.
At this point, some of those running away turned back and relaunched themselves at the police, screaming vengeance. They pulled the guns from their hands, and the police, finding themselves suddenly, drastically, outnumbered, began to plead and whimper. One jawan was knifed to death, the arms of another were chopped off, a third was stabbed, and the heads of policemen came up on stakes before the station across from the bench under the plum tree, where the townspeople had rested themselves in more peaceful times and the cook sometimes read his letters. A beheaded body ran briefly down the street, blood fountaining from the neck, and they all saw the truth about living creatures—that after death, in final humiliation, the body defecates on itself.
The police ran backward like a film in reverse to get into the station but found that several of their colleagues, there before them, had locked the door and lay terrified on the floor, wouldn’t let the others in, no matter how they hammered and pleaded. Chased by the mob, the police who were barred from shelter by their own men, ran into private homes.
Lola and Noni, who had again hosted the GNLF boys the night before, found three policemen hammering on the back door of Mon Ami. They sat whimpering in the drawing room as the ladies drew the curtains around them.
“Pathetic,” Lola told them. “You are the police?!” Because now they were at her mercy and she wasn’t at theirs. “Didn’t help us all this time, and now see, need our help!”
“Ma,” they called her, “Ma, please don’t kick us out, we will do anything for you. We are as your sons.”
“Hah! Now you’re calling me Ma! Very fine and funny. This isn’t how you were behaving a week ago….”
In the bazaar they continued rioting. Jeeps were pushed into the ravine, buses were set on fire, the light from their burning reflected garishly on the settling mist of evening, and the fire spread to the jungles of bamboo. The air inside the hollow stems expanded and they burst and burned with the sound of renewed,