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horrible things. The skinny man trembled, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Gurdwaras on fire, Guru Granth on fire. He said he didn’t want to come, but it was Sahib’s order and his duty. Those days my parents lived in a mansion on Amrita Sher-Gil Marg (the road named after the ‘mother of modern Indian art’), and I lived in the hostel on the IIT campus.
     

     
    After this there are lapses in my memory. And moisture in my eyes. There was too much going on. Too many exams. What conversations I had with my father and classmates I have little recall. Were they equally shocked? Soon afterwards toxic methylisocyanide gas leaked from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal. Back at the campus I stood in front of Nelly’s house and noticed that almost a quarter of it was badly damaged. Charred is the right word. There was a yellow padlock on the chestnut-coloured front door. The brick wall behind the house, between the campus and the village, was broken. According to rumours, she had survived the attacks.
    Classes resumed and someone else replaced Professor Singh, and what made his death more unbearable was an empty chair; it was not his chair, but the chair of another Sikh boy in our class. He, too, had disappeared. When I had joined IIT there were two Sikh students in my class. Only one of them managed to survive and he was heavily traumatised; now he was the only one left and he seemed to have been transformed into silence itself.
    Soon afterwards, maybe a couple of weeks later, we were all asked to assemble outside the hostels and form a line, and the new warden ordered the Sikh boys to form a separate line. At first I thought this was for their own safety, they were being sent elsewhere, this is the time before YouTube and Facebook and fearless bloggers, we didn’t know what was really going on, media was state-controlled, people turned on short-wave BBC to find out what really happened or what was happening in the country. But soon we found out. A Dalit woman had been molested on the IIT campus and she had complained to the authorities. A Sikh boy had molested her – she knew this because he had entered her tent in a turban. The student in our class was also in the line-up (along with nine or ten others). It is to that woman’s credit she didn’t point a finger at those who were innocent, but whenever she stood in front of a turbaned and bearded face my heart leaped out of my body. Not one of them was guilty; we all knew who had done it. A Hindu boy had tied a turban on and had entered the Dalit construction workers’ tent, but no one had the guts to report him.
    After the incident the Sikh boy in our class came to me and urged me to accompany him to the market, and he told me to take him to the barber’s shop and the first barber refused to cut his hair, and the second one confirmed with him several times if he was sure. ‘Of course I am sure’, he said. And I remember that day clearly when his hair was being cut. He had shut his eyes tight, and the crackling of the transistor radio could be heard in the barber’s shop and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s voice: when a big tree falls the Earth shakes . I say this in hindsight; when I heard the crackling radio I was too young to process the lack of shock, and the force field of hate, in the new PM’s words. My classmate’s hair had piled up in the barber’s shop. We paid. He was slightly shorter than me, and it was windy, the city still smelled of burning rubber and I asked him how does it feel. He stopped on the pavement. And then God knows what got into him, he lifted his hand and slapped me. And I was so shocked I didn’t know what to do. By the time I processed this it was too late to slap him back and I simply laughed.

Chapter 2.
     
    Drops
     
    ‘Dystopia’ is a word I learned in 1983 while preparing for my GRE exams to apply for higher studies in the US. A compound made up of two ancient Greek words. Dys = ill, bad, wretched. Topos = place, land. A