Rahul Bhatia

[I wrote this chapter three years ago for the book, but it didn’t fit anywhere so we discarded it. This is a first draft, and therefore filled with all kinds of terrible errors.]

“Let’s go to the graveyard, sir,” O said as we strolled through Okhla’s alleys one October night. Sure, I said. I wanted to see everything.

He turned left or right at some junction, walked down some alley, and took some more turns. We were silent, but pebbles crunched beneath our feet, rickshaws and motorcycles roared long after they passed us, and distant shop shutters crashed down, marking the end of the day. The narrow corridors between buildings were nearly empty, and even the lovers had left. Only small groups of boys sat around on their bikes, looking to be adored. Buildings with tiled surfaces almost touched, and cables dangled like joyless decorations. If the place was scrutinised for broken laws, they would be found in every unauthorised structure, every uneven step, every open drain.

When we came to one edge of the ghetto, O clutched his camera tight and leaped across the busy lane in his flip-flops. (He went with it everywhere in case something unusual happened.) The graveyard was unlit, and the gravekeeper, who was preparing to sleep on a khatiya in the open air, was startled by our silhouettes. He jerked up and cried, with no trace of sleep in his voice, “Who are you? Why are you here?” We told him about ourselves in soothing tones, and he relaxed. He explained that men arrived at night to break graves. His eyes were large and set in a frightened state. We meant him no harm, we said; although it was late, we wondered if we could see an old friend. He knew the person, and led us there in the dark, telling us his life’s story on the way to the burial site, leaving out no detail, including his brother’s scheming. The qabristaan was not large, and I was surprised by how little of the noise outside penetrated it.

A plot in Okhla Qabristaan was a final reward for teachers at Jamia Millia Islamia, which bordered the graveyard. We lit phone torches to avoid stepping on the former staff. But time had eroded where they lay, and we must have stepped on their toes or hands. In any case, just in case, I apologised quietly with each step. Earlier that year, Jamia made an exception for Danish Siddiqui, a graduate of the university. A cloth lay over the grave into which he had been lowered just three months earlier, in July. Siddiqui had been travelling with soldiers in Afghanistan when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded outside his car. It was the sort of close encounter that an editor could have used as justification to order he return. Siddiqui believed it was safe enough for him to keep working, and his editors at Reuters agreed. But a journalist is at once the best person and the worst to calculate personal risk. Siddiqui had moved from danger to danger in recent years, from the Myanmar border to the protests in Hong Kong, to covering mobs in Delhi to recording the virus’s devastation. By the time he left for Afghanistan, the world was wilder. After a gunfight the next day, as Siddiqui had his wounds dressed, Talibani fighters overran the neighbourhood, and the soldiers with whom Siddiqui had been embedded retreated without him. Siddiqui was found and shot.

People who hadn’t met him said they took days to get over their grief. Within hours of his death, anonymous supporters of the government, thoughtless as always, sent pictures of his body to anyone who remembered him fondly. The act was vengeful, full of mocking and glee, for Siddiqui had pointed his camera at a cremation ground from a rooftop, and the wire service he worked for sent images of little fires burning in every part of the frame across the world. It exposed the lie that the pandemic had been managed well in India. And then it was Siddiqui on the ground, and they, the men and women who derived their strength from being faceless and nameless, called it karma, and took pleasure in seeing him in that state: this is what happens when you don’t respect the dead was their general tone. Journalistic work set them on edge, for they thrived in the twilight between information and rumour, and journalism cut right through. They preferred official numbers to the evidence of their eyes, to their own lived experiences. They demanded evidence for claims contrary to the government’s assertions, and if this was provided they found something else to moan about. Siddiqui’s pictures in India set them on edge. His work, especially his pictures of mass cremations, was irrefutable evidence of disquiet and a loss of control, in contrast to the government’s claims of peace and competence. Worse still, in their eyes, he was Muslim.

Punjabi music played beyond the walls. “A girl came here a few days ago,” the gravekeeper said when we arrived at the grave. “She said she was a reporter. She kept something on his stone.” He had sprinkled red chilli powder on the mound’s perimeter to keep rats from desecrating the grave.

“There was a yellow cloth here. Who put a red one?” O wondered.

“This I don’t know, sir,” he replied. “Why don’t you stay here? I’ll go off to one side.”

When the digger left, O pointed to a distant gate. “That’s where they brought the body from. The place was filled with media. This man, who attended hundreds of thousands of funerals… I never imagined his funeral would be like this. How many assignments he did. I’ve come here five or six times in three months. The body must have dissolved by now. You know, he had worked on a story on a doctor in Bihar, and even though the doctor was a supporter of the BJP, he came to see him here and cried.”

I stood above his grave, uncertain about what to do, but stilled myself and thought of him. We had first met in 2016, after the lynchings began, and at our desk in the wire service where he was a man reporters clearly loved, he spoke about creating a visual record of the trail of Muslims who had been killed. My memory is unreliable here, but he spoke of creating a poster with their faces forming a composite picture; the thought was unusual, more so in an agency that assessed its reporters’ performance by the seconds they saved. But Siddiqui did not ask for editorial permission to linger on people, he went where they were. And in following people in this country, and finding them where they lived, Siddiqui found ordinary people in stretchers, bandaged, crouched on roads while sticks landed on them. His eye was on the present, of what was important at that moment—that was why pictures of his body were circulated, I thought.

O looked down, and then away. The gravedigger was nearby, babbling.

“Take care of this one,” O said to him.

“I take care of all of them very much,” the gravedigger said.

O looked about and saw pristine stone covers over some mounds. Their shine was dimmed by dust. “I want to do that for him,” he said. The gravedigger dissuaded him. There was no use, he said, for the stones would be stolen. Men often arrived at night to take away what was not nailed down. He told us about a recent encounter. “They took out a knife this long,” he said, his left hand placed high up on his right forearm, “we struggled.”

“Did you get hurt?” I asked him.

He looked surprised. “I was a wrestler. Look, they even fired a bullet at me,” he said, undoing his kurta buttons to show us a dark spot on his chest. “Thanks to my locket half the bullet went in but half stayed out. I haven’t gotten an operation done because I don’t have enough money. No sir, I haven’t done it, sir. I don’t have a single rupee, sir,” his voice grew louder and more distressed. “The people who run this place don’t give me anything, sir. I get by with the twenty-thirty that people give me, sir.”

We thought he would ask for money, but he walked with us toward the graveyard gate quietly. Just as I thought we were free, the gravedigger stopped at a wild thicket that had some significance for him. “Every year there’s a snake that comes here, drinks the milk I leave for her, and goes away. Her time is coming soon. I have to clean the bushes,” he said, and walked back to his bed.

It was late, but people were reluctant to let go of their city. Religious songs rang out of e-rickshaws, there were muffled Punjabi beats from passing cars. Electronic carts lit in purple lights played unfamiliar music on the roadside. I followed O past Freedom Fighter Fountain, a local landmark. The promise of spectacle is implicit in a memorial for freedom fighters, but this was part of a government beautification drive, intended only to daub some green on to a landscape of unending grey and dust, and the result was a spectacular eyesore. It stood at the corner of busy lanes below a train station, with buses rushing past and rickshaws squeezing into impossible spaces. A barbed wire fence surrounded the fountain’s dry jets, and above this stab at grandiosity was a large backlit hoarding that displayed headshots of Muslim freedom fighters and Mahatma Gandhi. Even further above them loomed a larger picture of Arvind Kejriwal. His face had been blackened. O pointed to the chief minister’s photograph with a smile. “Kejriwal put his picture above theirs,” he said, shaking his head.