Mainstream Weekly[(Indira Gandhi would have completed 90 years on November 19 had she been alive. While remembering her we are reproducing the following pieces.
)]
She rode into Death unharmed
Chand Joshi
He did not die
– Riddled with bullets
– At the door of the hacienda
– That day in April
– When the soldiers
– At the bugle’s last note
– Twice emptied their rifles
– Those who saw him say
– He withstood the bullets,
– Men and time,
– And on a white horse
– At full gallop
– Rode into death unharmed.
– (From the Exaltation of Light by Homero Aridjis)
There were no tears—just a strange silence punctuated by whispering, almost like the chirping of birds before the nervous moments of dawn.
There were no tears, just the feeling of a cracked mirror suddenly throwing up jagged images which were hard to believe.
’It’s over,’ a doctor at the AIIMS told us at 11.20 this morning (October 31, 1984) and hardened newsmen refused to accept the fact… The infallible had fallen.. the one had merged into nothingness…
Then the news spread like whirlpools in a pond where exuberant children had thrown pebbles to create ripples…
SHE IS DEAD… and he world seemed to stop for a moment frozen between the antiseptic walls of the hospital as the frenzy germs were let loose as crowds stoned everything in sight in an outburst of anger directed at a particular community…
“Haven’t you alienated the entire Sikh community,” a foreign journalist had asked her a few weeks ago.
She had merely raised her eyebrows and pointed to Sub-Inspector Beant Singh standing by her side. “My personal security is in the hand of Sikhs,” she had told him with a confident smile. Beant was one of the two who shot her dead-emptying his .32 revolver into her body…
Take the other conspirator—the young constable born in 1963 who emptied his sten-gun on the Prime Minister even as she fell… “I have become a martyr,” he said. Judas Iscariot, are you listening?
Late at night they took the body embalmed, touched up—to put on view for the people. But they had gone before not with wreaths of marigold and roses but hastily gathered withered leaves and flowers.
Her blood-splattered orange saree had been changed and she seemed once again the leader in repose.
There were no tears, just spasms and shudders with the sounds of sorrow in the silence.
No. 1 Safdarjung Road was guarded once again—by the same system which had killed her... the same computerised insensitivity.
On Aurangazeb Road a sweeper woman stood by our jeep and asked: “Who will fight for us….?”
We had no answer, no tears, only the sudden feeling of a vaccum for what was always accepted as ‘IS’ was now “WAS’.
Or is it?
(Courtesy: Hindustan Times, November 1, 1984)
(Reproduced in Mainstream, November 3, 1984)
__3__
to Indira Gandhi
Sumit Chakravartty
a year has passed
– without you;
– tears dry up
– on the surface,
– but the pain persists
– down below
– where my heart writhes
– like a wounded fawn
– as it dawns on me
– with every passing day:
– how much we lost
– by losing you.
New Delhi October 31, 1985
– (Mainstream, November 16, 1985)
__3__
Silence is Great
This is a letter which the Mainstream editor received from his friend and colleague in the profession, Som Benegal:
You ask for a thousand words after the slaying of Indira Gandhi. I can barely summon ten.
I want to be far from those indulging in “the vomiting from the eyes and the weeping from the entrails”, and even further away from those who with froth and foam at their mouth or with acid and bile in their pens spewed their venom and hatred at Indira Gandhi till the very last moment of her life, but now utter unctuous words of praise in her death.
Rather with Alfred de Vigny I would only say: Seul le silence est grand; tout le reste est faiblesse. Only silence is great; all the rest is weakness.
November 5 Som
(Mainstream, November 3, 1984)