Every day when he would look into the mirror, he would be staring back, reminding him that he was the lowest of the low. The mirror oxidized and aged. On an unplastered brick wall, it hung next to a portrait of B R Ambedkar. Long ago was bought from Nauchandi Mela. Annual pilgrimage for the family and the only place he was not reminded of his low stature in the society.
Although, in all fairness, all UP Bhaiyyas look alike. Smell alike. Spit alike. Undernourished. Skin; desiccated and darkened, overexposed to the cold-hearted Indian sun. They all carried the same lightness in their pockets; penniless, yet the boundaries of inherited lines, they did not betray. But in the hustle and bustle of this legendary fair; one they say had begun long before the goras came to rule over the üntermenschen Indians, those lines of inheritance were unremembered.
Everyone ate the same adulterated food and the Brahmins, the OBCs, the Yadavs, the Muslims, the Shudras, Bhangis and Chamars perhaps a few Christians and an occasional Sikh rode the Ferris Wheel together. Stood side by side around the Maut ka Kuan (Well of death) in overcrowded circles. In that month, in that fairground, they were all egalitarian.
This was the first time I noticed him before he left for his village, Kanhaiya had caught the ball that Rinku had hit. Kanhaiya wasn’t playing although Rinku was declared out. The rules of Gully Cricket are rather elastic and length of the boundary, flexible. But the caste boundaries are rigid. Rinku started to badger him with the bat. He was not supposed to catch the ball. Rinku was out. And we allowed no do overs that day, so Kanhaiya paid the price.
That gully had two open drains. One lining each edge. In it flowed piss, shit, gobbar from the nearby dairy. When the sole latrine in the crowded houses was occupied, you carefully perched your feet on each side of the open nali and took a dump. When you gotta go, you gotta go. The only fear was tripping. Not the smell. Not the stench. Not the sight.
Every morning Kanhaiya wheeled his wheelbarrow and emptied the latrine trays from the back of the houses. It was a genius design. The Chamar would not enter your house, he would pull the metal box, empty the container into his wagon and slide it back. It fit. Like Lego.
When we played cricket, we would all pool in 25 paise each and give it all to Kanhaiya and his job was to fetch the ball from the drain whenever the ball found itself in the gutter. Shit job. Shit pay. But this is what you get when you are born a Chamar in Uttar Pradesh.
By the time Rinku was done Kanhaiya was drenched in blood and smelled funky of shit, sweat, dirt and blood. Why he did not fight back I don’t know. He was a big brawny fellow and could take him in a fair fight any day. I did not know then. Today in retrospect, I can chalk it up to the historically servile nature of Indians. We have more Uncle Toms than there are Uncle Toms in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But it wasn’t that. It was fear. It was fear of crossing caste lines, of breaching social barriers, of entering the temples he wasn’t supposed to, fear of drawing water from that forbidden well in his native village, Kavli.
Somewhere between Meerut and Muzaffarnagar, he had probably decided. The posters of the Tea Seller were all over the place. He was the next great hope everyone was talking about. He was to lead the nation further. A lower-class mensch like Kanhaiya himself. Kanhaiya wanted to be like him, and he knew exactly what he was going to do.
Darul Uloom Deoband is an Islamic seminary where they enlighten you on the ideal length of your beard that it should be the height of your fist and two fingers. They instruct you to keep your garments above ankles to avoid arrogance. The correct way to hit your woman – you cannot strike the face and cannot leave bruises or marks and must not break bones. How many of those you can have. And the righteous regulations and rulebook on prostitution, sorry, temporary pleasure marriages aka Nikah mut’ah.
Stuff like that.
Darul Uloom Deoband is also the place, where you would find motherloads of Muslims from all over the word, if you had decided to kill them – to catapult yourself into prominence. For nationwide prominence, one needs state level pogroms, but if you are just getting started, and you are baying for regional influence an odd bus would do.
And where would you find such a bus? In fact any bus plying from Delhi to Deoband would do. You just needed the means to do that. It wasn’t exactly a challenge for Kanhaiya to convince a few downtrodden Hindus to accompany him to the task. In India no one gets convicted for riots. Of course there is Police action and First Information Reports followed by committees and commissions. All of that but convictions. The system is designed as such.
The Goras wrote the laws to allow themselves to quash rebellions by any means necessary. Mostly death. Then those in power used them to avenge their fallen leader. More death. And then some used to avenge those who were burnt in train. Death.
It did not matter that the perpetrators and the punished were not related by blood or deed. But as long as the checked the same religion box in the government forms, they were fair game.
The problem was logistics. Every riot meticulously accompanies the gear. Tyres. Kerosene. Sharp weapons. Kanhaiya was resourceless. He had men, who probably thought this was their way out of shit cleaning. And that job will make a murderer out of anyone. I am surprised why we never hear of a scavenger losing his shit and drowning an entitled middle class women in a pile of human excreta. It is always men with white collar jobs murdering their wives on account of an unaccountable lover. This world is weird that way.
Some Desi Kattas, few knives, an old machete and swords stolen from a bridegroom shop. For that group of seven. Sufficient it had seemed. They stopped a bus a few kms outside Deoband next to a sugarcane field. With a gun on his head the bus driver obeyed without much protest drove the bus into an empty field in the nearby village. He knew he was safe. He was not a Muslim. But how could they tell a katua from not?
In all fairness, all UP Bhaiyyas look alike. Smell alike. Spit alike. Undernourished. Skin; desiccated and darkened, overexposed to the cold-hearted Indian sun. It was the penis. Those cuts would not betray your faith. The killers knew and the men knew. They accepted their fate in lieu of the lives women and children, who were invariably killed after the men.
‘I am Jacob not Yakub,’ a man protested.
After helping India win the 1971 war Lieutenant General J. F. R. Jacob chose to retire to Israel. He had fought against Erwin Rommel’s Afrikan Corps and defeated General Niazi. Highly decorated. He chose to retire in Israel. But the Jagirs granted by the Indian government are not easily forsaken, and to that end had sent his son to settle the matter.
If Jacob Jr. was a Mossad agent, the newspapers never say, but he surely was interested in Darul Uloom Deoband, where thousands of Arab scholars came to be schooled in the matter of beards, clothing and beating of wives. Killing infidels, especially Jews and Americans, but mostly Jews.
And Jews and Arabs have long standing centuries-old disagreements about some piece of land. Not so different these desert people are from the rest of us when it comes to property and inheritance rights.
Whatever the gripe maybe. Jacob jr. had found himself in a pickle; naked and circumcised in an empty field of Western Uttar Pradesh trying to convince Kanhaiya that he was not a Muslim and must be spared. And that his leader were friends of their leader. His name was Jacob and not Yakub and he was son of a highly decorated Army officer.
Killings happen swiftly. You do not give time for the victims to react. The screams must die. Suffering may continue. There was not much time for debate or education or learning of new type of people who were from desert, visiting an Islamic seminary, with a Muslim sounding name, circumcised but were not the same as others who were from the desert, visiting the Islamic seminary, with Muslim names and circumcised.
Kanhaiya was committed and slaughtered Jacob jr. just as he had slaughtered thirty four others – eighteen men, ten women, six children and a Jew.
All deaths are equal, some deaths are more equal than others.
Uttar Pradesh Police is a strange beast. It is not entirely ineffective. Although always callous towards the sufferings of those who queue for justice at their footsteps. The probability that a rape survivor would be sexually assaulted when she visits a police station in certain districts is never zero. Just like every other state police of India. Our police and our politicians are reflections of our society. We may not admit to it, but it holds true.
Unsurprisingly, or surprisingly the state action was swift and definitive and decisive.
This was not an official riot. Most riots have a subtle state sanction to it and the administration are always-always made aware of the nonactions they had to take. This was different. Kanhaiya had acted as a lone wolf and he was of the lowest of class, whose subjects had already voted and were expendable for another four years.
And there was a new sherif in town, the Saffron Clad CM, Capo di tutti capi and reckoning he demanded. The Police did not know Kanhaiya but they knew who manufactured kattas, illegal they might well be. They know who sells and then they know who buys. Old school policing. It works and it worked.
And it wasn’t long that Kanhaiya was hauled in and justice served. You could not kill a Jew in India. India isn’t antisemite. India isn’t Semite either. We had proved to the world that you could not kill a Jew in India and go unpunished. You could kill Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, agnostics, atheists and rationalists. But not a Jew. At least not that one.
Fast, a fast track court convened and justice pronounced. Jacob’s family petitioned the court to not impose the death penalty, which was duly accepted and met with quiet disappointment by Kanhaiya’s family. A loved one serving a life-sentence is grotesquely more expensive than a loved one hanged till death. These upper middle class social workers are seldom in touch with reality.
If you were untouchable on the other side of the bars; you were untouchable inside them. The jailors and fellow convicts did not treat you any differently. In the jail, Kanhaiya cleaned shit, as he had done outside.
I went to meet him when I had heard the news about the Jew who was murdered in India. We spoke of our common past the open drain that connected my life with his. But more importantly we commiserated over his failed attempt at emancipation. Perhaps he should have stayed untouchable. This compulsory life behind bars was worse than the water of that forbidden well.