The Age of Shiva by Manil Suri Page A

secular state.”
    â€œWhat’s this country coming to?” Babuji asked aloud, as I finished reading him the article. I thought he was upset over the riot, but it turned out he was complaining instead that there weren’t enough of them. “How can people have forgotten the Partition so easily, forgiven the Muslims so soon?”
    Babuji took a puff from his hookah and started working on another knot in the charpoy turned upside down before him. Every morning, he came back for an hour, after checking on the signal token for the Punjab Mail. He liked me to read the newspaper aloud to him during this break, as he tightened the ropes of the charpoys. “You have to retie the knots every few days,” he would say as he pulled the ropes against the frame, “otherwise by morning, you’ll be scraping the ground with your back.” In the beginning, I sat veiled in the gunghat of my sari like Sandhya did in his presence, and he was careful not to turn to me directly. But now I kept my face uncovered, and he spoke as unself-consciously to me as he would to a daughter.
    Except Babuji was not my father, he couldn’t possibly be more different from Paji. Although I had learnt to look past his gruffness, even developed an appreciation for his directness, there were times when his views left me appalled.
    For instance, there was the day he solved the mystery of where Arya went at dawn. “It’s a shakha, in that building behind the post office—it’s one of the clubs run by the Hindu Rashtriya Manch. Arya works for them, you know—he’s their Nizamuddin branch treasurer. He’s been volunteering to lead the early morning exercises on the field for the new boys this year.”
    I was startled by the matter-of-fact way Babuji mentioned this association. “Communalists, thugs, murderers,” was how my father usually described the HRM, in his frequent rants against the organization. Although Paji’s choicest invective was reserved for the Muslim League, for spearheading the campaign to create a separate Pakistan, he had more than enough ire left to direct towards the other militaristic organizations that had joined in the Partition bloodbath. “They say they’ve reformed themselves, they’ve given up violence, they’re only interested in promoting a sense of worth among young Hindu men. But you don’t have to scratch very deep to expose the HRM’s unquenchable thirst for Muslim blood.”
    I felt myself echoing my father in my response to Babuji. “Weren’t they one of the groups banned by the government for killing Gandhiji?” I asked.
    â€œAll lies,” Babuji barked, his head snapping up as if I had questioned his personal integrity. “Politics and lies, that’s what. Nehru had to show the world he was doing something, to save face after such an embarrassing assassination. But the murder plot had nothing to do with the groups he accused—that’s why he was forced to lift his ban the very next year.”
    Babuji fixed me with a look so keen that I wished I still had the filter of my gunghat between us. “Let me ask you something, Bahu—since your family came to this country as refugees just like us. They keep trumpeting Gandhiji this and Gandhiji that, erecting statues of him everywhere, putting his face on stamps. But what did he do for the country anyway? This man whom we call the father of the nation. He got rid of the British, it’s true, but at what cost? A million people dead, so many millions like us turned into refugees. Why? So that we could have Pakistan carved out of our own flesh and sitting on our head? What kind of father is this, who hacks off the arms of his nation and gives them away?”
    I was stunned. This was such a vicious distortion of every fact I had ever been taught, that I felt tears spring up as if I had just been slapped. I wanted to scream at Babuji that Gandhiji was