Digging out memory capsules from time
By Manohar Malgonkar

WHEN someone prominent in public life dies a violent death, that moment gets stamped on our minds with a vividness that no photograph or video film can match.We create an instant memory capsule of total recall: We remember the setting, the people, the surroundings, the quality of light, the smells; we remember the expression on the faces of people and their gut-reactions as they recover from that momentary plunge into silence as though everything in the cosmos had been halted in mid-stride.

That silence. How long did it last? Five seconds? Ten seconds? And then, unbelieavably, life resumes its beat and everything goes on as though nothing out of the way has happened.

Remember that moment in John Updike’s novel Couples, which is a portrait of affluent, small-town America turned on by the advent of the permissive society? Ten, thirty-something years-old couples are testing out the freedoms made possible by what the author calls ‘The Post-pill Paradise’, meaning all-the -sex-you-can-handle-without-fear-of-pregnancy. Freddy Thorne, a dentist, is in his surgery and Foxy Whitman, his patient to whom he has just administered a Novocain shot, is in the dentist’s chair. The radio is playing soft music when, "in mid-melody, the radio music stopped." A male voice came on:

A special bulletin... shots heard in Dallas... the President has been shot at... the President has been hit... hit in the head.

Foxy, prone in her chair, can look out of the window at the scene outside. "On the slate opposite, a small flock of pigeons, having settled over the Post Office chimney for warmth, clumsily swirled and lifted."

That is how Foxy remembers it, the pigeons flying even as the President was being rushed to the hospital, a composite image which is a jumble of impressions, meaningful only to her: the assassination of President Kennedy. Out of her chair, she remembers that, that very evening, the dentist, Freddy Thorne, and his wife, have asked all the 10 Couples of Tarbox, which is the name of their township, to a formal dinner, and she says to him: "But you must cancel!"

"But I’ve bought all the booze!" Freddy protested.

The Thornes decided to have their party after all. Georgene called "all the houses of the invited and explained that the food and the liquor had been purchased... (and that) a formal dinner-dance was very fitting for the President who had had such style."

So they had a jolly party which everyone enjoyed enormously and after the party came the obsessive couplings that had become such a feature of post-pill permissiveness in America.

When those shots were heard in Dallas, I was visiting America for the first time, goggle-eyed at the manifestations of affluence, and riding on the crest of a still-rising wave that all writers never cease to dream of: the limelight and dollars made possible by literary success. My very first book to be published in New York, a novel called The Princes, had been selected by the Literary Guild of America as its main choice for December, which normally ensures a sale of a quarter million copies. What was even more heady, ‘The Princes’ had figured in the Best Sellers list of the New York Times, and my publisher, Viking had ordered a second impression to cater for the rising demand.

I was on a book-promotion tour and taken by Viking’s Chicago representative to what I was told was America’s biggest bookstore. I was signing away presentation copies which the store wanted to save up for its on-tap clients, benignly watched over by the store’s manager. From here I was going to be taken to one of those expense-be-damned luncheons and I was vaguely thinking of what I would order and about not drinking more than one pre-lunch. Martini since there were more book-shop visits scheduled for the afternoon ending up with an interview at the Chicago Press Club.

That was when the public address system of the store came alive and there was that male voice announcing a "special bulletin...shots heard in Dallas."

If, to Foxy Whitman, the Kennedy assassination was bound up with a flight of dirty pigeons, for me it was the waiting line of book-boxes still piled up on the counter which were never opened for me to inscribe. Needless to say, those shots in Dallas also brought down the curtain on the success story that was The Princes.

Another violent death I associate with a plume of dense smoke across an unsullied morning sky and stunted barren hills covered with black rocks as seen from the window of a train. The meter-gauge train in which I was travelling was due to reach Pune at 6.30 a.m. That would give me plenty of time to dash across to the main platform and catch the connection to Bombay. I was dressed and packed and sitting up, idly watching the passing scene, a little annoyed that a fellow passenger had put on his radio and was listening to the English news from Delhi. Luckily it was a short bulletin and he had already switched off his transistor when I found myself sitting bolt upright and asking: "What was that? Who did she say had died?"

He shrugged, spread his hands. "Some American writer...sounded like Hemming...Hemming something." It was the morning of July 3, 1961. Ernest Hemingway, the literary icon of my generation, had killed himself.

January 30, 1948 was a Friday. I was in the Army, a Staff Officer at Delhi. I had just moved into a new house which was a part of an enormous sprawling bungalow on the corner formed by Aurangzeb Road and Albuquerque Road which has since been transformed into Claridge’s Hotel, barely within two hundred yards of Birla House, and thus actually close enough to have heard the shots which killed the Mahatma. I didn’t, but heard the news within minutes anyhow, and well before its radio announcement. I had just returned from office and shucking off my uniform when Damian Dias, my Goan bearer who had been watching the prayer-meeting gathering from a distance came rushing in babbling in his quaint Goan Hindi: Log bhagta hai bolta Gandhi ko mar dala.

My wife and I rushed into the verandah, a crowd was already building up on Albuquerque Road and a long line of VIP cars muscling their way through with police assistance. Later that year, Albuquerque Road was renamed Tees January Marg.

Where I live, in a house in the jungles, in 1984, there was no TV, and the newspapers did not come till the afternoon. On October 31, I had had no idea that Indira Gandhi had been shot at till around 11-30 am when, wanting to find out how our cricket team was faring on its tour of Pakistan, I switched on the radio commentary. The match was being played in Peshawar, and our side was doing very well indeed. Vengsarkar, known more for dash than reliability, was having a field day, going at every ball with cavalier disdain. How soon would he get his century?

He never got to it. Abruptly, in mid-delivery, as it were, the commentary went off the air. Fiddling about with knobs in case I could get it on some other band, I blundered on a BBC announcement. Indira Gandhi had been assassinated!

What I had chanced upon by way of a ball-by-ball cricket commentary was not revealed by All India Radio till several hours later, as though shock had brought on paralysis that, or AIR had lapsed into feudal concepts about the secrecy of royal deaths as highlighted in E.M. Foster’s A Passage to India, when Aziz implores Ralph Moore: "Mr Moore, don’t tell anyone that the Rajah is dead. It is a secret still."