Free India by V. S. Naipaul Page A

their children to go to other houses to watch TV, and to be turned away. That can cause trouble.’
    ‘Why do you think so many of the dons in Bombay are Muslims?’
    ‘I’ve told you. There are few educated people among the Muslims. They go off the rails when they’re young.’
    ‘Are they religious people, these dons?’
    ‘They are all loyal adherents of Islam.’
    ‘Defenders of the faith?’
    ‘It is inevitable that they will fight for Islam. It is a contradictory role. They will continue their criminal activities, but at the same time they will read the Koran and do the
namaaz
five times a day. The community does not admire these people. But the people are enchanted by the way the dons behave with the common Muslims.’
    ‘They are the community’s warriors?’
    ‘They organize our underground.
Tanzeen-Allah-ho-akbar –
that’s what it’s called. It is organized by a don. It was created after the riots. We have meetings and decide strategy. We meet every month, even if there is no trouble.’
    ‘What do you think will happen to the children in your colony?’
    ‘The future is awful for them. All those children see murder, assaults.’
    ‘Have you seen murders?’
    ‘Yeh, yeh.’ It was an Indian affirmation, rather than American or English, and it was a spoken with a side-to-side swing of the head in the Indian way.
    The bar-owner had begun to talk loudly to the bar in general about the people at the far end – he meant us – who had been occupying a table for too long. I was going to leave a fair sum for him, but he wasn’t to know that. I had my back to him, and I thought I shouldn’t turn around to look at him; I thought that if our eyes met he might be driven to a deeper rage. Nikhil, who had been facing him all the time, and occasionally reporting on his mood, ordered
gulab jamun
for everybody; and Anwar, who had already worked his way through two tumblers of milk, began – appearing all the while to blow at it – to eat a portion of that rich milk sweet, steeped in syrup.
    He said, ‘I saw my first murder when I was ten. We were playing badminton in the colony. There was a hut close by, and there were two men who began to quarrel. These two men usually slept on the same hand-cart at night. They were both about thirty. They had begun to quarrel, and then I saw one of the men running away. We went to see what had happened, and we saw that the man on the hand-cart had had his head nearly severed. He wasn’t dead. He was in the throes of death.’
    ‘What clothes?’
    ‘Underwear. Shorts and a singlet. And the body in the throes of death caused the hand-cart to capsize.’
    ‘People ran up?’
    ‘Only children. About six or seven of us. And as the body fell to the ground, it spurted blood on us. I was very frightened.’ He began to laugh, eating his sweet, sucking at the thick syrup in his aluminium spoon. It was the first time he had laughed that evening. ‘We were still children. It didn’t occur to us that this was a police matter. Our first reaction was to go and wash the bloodstains off our shirt.’
    ‘How many murders have you seen since then?’
    ‘Ten or 12.’
    ‘Why do you laugh?’
    ‘It’s part of everyday life to us here. The reasons for those murders are very small. For instance, one day two men with umbrellas had a little collision. One man went to hit the other man, and the other man ran into a house, and the man chasing him ran in after him. I was talking to friend just there, and I saw it. The man doing the chasing pulled out a knife and killed the other man, just like that. Eighty per cent of people in this locality carry weapons.’
    The bar-owner hadn’t been pacified by the extra orders for gulab jamun; he had continued to complain. And when Anwar finished his sweet, we prepared to leave. My thoughts went back to the people with the big television set.
    ‘The people with the TV – are they very religious?’
    ‘They are devout people. They are more