{"id":2636,"date":"2017-10-30T23:22:50","date_gmt":"2017-10-30T23:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/how-to-write-a-memoir.com\/?p=2636"},"modified":"2017-10-30T23:24:04","modified_gmt":"2017-10-30T23:24:04","slug":"assassination-scene-3-draft-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/how-to-write-a-memoir.com\/?p=2636","title":{"rendered":"Assassination – Scene 3 (Draft 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Assassination \u2013 Scene 3 (Draft 1)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rough hands lifted David up and propelled him forward toward the smoking corpse of the immolated man – toward his own fate. He wanted to scream, to fight free, but shock and disbelief kept him mute. A cane struck him across the back and another across his face. Fists beat into his chest and shoes against his legs. His two captors shouted at him to stay silent and then at the crowd of men.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are taking this white man to our village,\u201d they announced. \u201cHe is an American! CIA!\u201d They spit the words as though something foul were in their mouths. \u00a0\u201cOur village mourns the death of our Mother Gandhi. We have not had a way to revenge the murder. We will take him to sacrifice there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere is your village?\u201d challenged the brute who had started the fire.<\/p>\n

\u201cAwagarh,\u201d David\u2019s captors answered. \u201cWe deserve our own sacrifice, so our village knows we honored the Mother,\u201d he repeated, as though the crowd had not heard him the first time.<\/p>\n

Somehow the crowd acquiesced. Their need for revenge had been sated by the horror of their deed. Much later, David would reflect that the ungodly screams and the sickening smell of burning kerosene and flesh brought them out of the collective trance that drives a mob. When the spell is broken, each man then becomes an independent witness to the atrocity of the mob and must carry the cruel act alone in memory. But in the cold emptiness of that night, held rigid by his captors, all David understood was that his fate lay somewhere else.<\/p>\n

They walked for miles in the dark. At first the two men struck him viciously with canes and shouted in threatening tones, telling him he would die like the men who had killed their Mother Gandhi. David\u2019s eyes swelled shut, his legs bled from the rake of thorn bushes, and he broke toes on unseen rocks. His lips bled and he vomited bile from the stomach kicks. But miles away from the train tracks, miles from the immolated man and his friend who\u2019d been left behind, alive, when, sobered and perhaps ashamed, the vigilantes had dispersed, David\u2019s two captors grew quiet and gentle. They stopped at a river to rest and to bandage his wounds.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy name is Suresh,\u201d said the older man in soft, broken English. \u201cWhat is your name?\u201d David couldn\u2019t answer. Shock, fatigue and pain had reduced him to a shell. \u201cWhat is your name?\u201d repeated the man. David looked in the man\u2019s face and saw neither anger nor unkindness. \u201cThis is Arjun.\u201d Suresh pointed to his partner and David looked into the face of a boy who had yet to reach adulthood. \u201cWhat is your name?\u201d Suresh insisted.<\/p>\n

\u201cDavid.\u201d The sound was garbled in his broken mouth. \u201cDavid,\u201d he tried again.<\/p>\n

Suresh bound the worst of David\u2019s cuts with a bandana and Arjun picked gaanja along the stream, crushing the leaves into a pulp. \u201cEat. Eat,\u201d mimed Suresh, as Arjun forced the bitter mash into David\u2019s mouth. Within a few moments, David lay back on the ground to sleep. Dawn was a light streak across the sky, so Suresh and Arjun stripped to their lungis and bathed in the river, quietly invoking the goddess as they watched for danger. When David woke, Suresh and Arjun were squatting silently nearby.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had to beat you,\u201d apologized Suresh with a deep sorrow in his voice. \u201cThey had to believe\u2026\u201d A long silence followed. \u201cAre you American?\u201d Silence again while David\u2019s fogged brain tried to decide the right answer. \u201cAmerican?\u201d pushed Suresh, and David nodded, no idea what that meant for his future. Nothing more was said so David succumbed again to the pain and gaanja, slipping gratefully back into semi-consciousness.<\/p>\n

At dusk they woke him and wrapped his head and face with their dried lungis so he would look like an Indian. Crossing the river, they circumvented the main road of Awagarh and wound through fields to a mud and straw house with open windows, a cow, several chickens and a few stray dogs. David ducked as they pushed him urgently through the small entry and into a storage room on the side of an open courtyard. He heard Suresh silence the alarmed voices of women and then he was alone. \u00a0The windowless room held pots, bags of grain, and a pile of dried buffalo dung patties for cooking. He fell to the ground in exhaustion and when Suresh came in some hours later, David was asleep on the mud floor.<\/p>\n

Suresh carried a bowl of dal, some chapattis, and a lota of water. He sparked a kerosene lamp and squatted near the wall. \u201cKha,\u201d he grunted. Eat<\/em>. David painfully curled onto a bruised hip, aware of every wound, and looked warily at Suresh.\u00a0 He took up the lota and drank, but most of the water ran through split lips down his filthy shirt. He soaked the chapattis until they were sodden bites and drank the dal. Then he looked Suresh in the eyes and asked why. Why was he pulled off the train? Why did Suresh beat him and then feed him? Why was he here\u2026 in this village\u2026in this storeroom?<\/p>\n

\u201cThey would have killed you.\u201d \u00a0Suresh followed the simple statement with a matter-of-fact silence. \u201cThey\u2019ll kill you if they find you here.\u201d Then it was David\u2019s turn to be silent. \u201cWe\u2019ll guard you, but don\u2019t come out of this room.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tension wrote itself across Suresh\u2019s face. David\u2019s own anxiety waned only slightly as he began to understand the risk Suresh was taking on himself and his family. Gangs of men were wandering the roads killing Sikhs and their supposed ally, the American CIA. Suresh and his young brother Arjun had saved him in the only way they could\u2026by convincing the mob at the train that they would show him real punishment when he got to their village.\u00a0 It had been a convincing ruse, and he had the bruises to prove it. But the danger had not passed. Now he would have to protect this family by hiding in silence, as Suresh had protected him by shouting and beating. \u00a0The very thought was exhausting. Suresh said nothing more as he left and closed the door, plunging the storage room into darkness again. David dropped back to the mud floor, a grain sack for his head. His clothes smelled like burnt flesh, his cuts still bled, and his teeth were loose, but he was alive. As he passed into sleep, he saw the man afire and heard his screams, and he knew that scene had been burnt indelibly into his brain.<\/p>\n

Two weeks passed in the darkness of the storage room. Before dawn, Arjun would take him to the field to relieve himself, wrapped always in a lungi to disguise his white skin. Then he\u2019d have a banana, some chai and perhaps a clay bowl of poha mixed with yogurt. By the full light of day, he\u2019d be back in the storage room until nightfall. Occasionally he became restless, but the persistent darkness caused sleep that helped heal his wounds and, except for his broken teeth and toes, he started to feel mostly whole again. In the evening Suresh would bring dal, chapati and more chai. They\u2019d sit in the dimly lit storage room talking about life in America or David\u2019s interest in Hindu philosophy, then Suresh\u2019s work in the jute field and gossip from villagers about the current level of safety. Suresh had a plan to take David across miles of open fields on the next moonless night and put him on the slow cargo train to Calcutta where he could ride 3rd<\/sup> class with the goats, chickens and grains.<\/p>\n

David anticipated the escape would be as terrifying as the night he\u2019d been thrown off the Rajdhani. Memories of the burning man had grown and morphed in his dreams until he saw himself alight and more than once woke screaming, to the dismay of Suresh\u2019s household. He imagined himself stumbling through the dark, hiding from mobs of killers, missing the train, or worse, catching it to find the same killing mob in the cargo car. Cowardice bent his mind into perverse anguish, but shame made him humble in front of Suresh, the gentle, simple man who risked everything to save him. When the moonless night finally came, David rallied and accepted whatever fate allotted.\u00a0 Dressed in the ragged clothes of a villager, hiding behind a scruffy beard, uncut hair, and a lungi around his head, David set out with Suresh and Arjun for the long walk.<\/p>\n

The cargo train rattled across west India for an interminable two days. David squatted in a benchless 3rd<\/sup> class car crammed full of India\u2019s poorest people, their livestock, and their meager household goods. He looked and smelled like a vagrant, and no one paid attention to him. He was relieved to be unrecognizable, even to himself.\u00a0 Fear and humility had been great teachers over the past weeks, along with the miles walked barefoot in darkness with Suresh and Arjun. They had guided him safely to the train and given him a cloth bag with five rupees and three chapatis. He felt wealthy\u2026full of their kindness and their gifts, full of life as a different person than he\u2019d ever been.<\/p>\n

End Assassination \u2013 Scene 3 (Draft 1)<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Assassination \u2013 Scene 3 (Draft 1) Rough hands lifted David up and propelled him forward toward the smoking corpse of the immolated man – toward his own fate. He wanted to scream, to fight free, but shock and disbelief kept … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":801,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[150,149],"class_list":["post-2636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lesson-1","tag-historical-event","tag-india"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/how-to-write-a-memoir.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/how-to-write-a-memoir.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/how-to-write-a-memoir.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/how-to-write-a-memoir.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/801"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/how-to-write-a-memoir.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2636"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/how-to-write-a-memoir.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2637,"href":"https:\/\/how-to-write-a-memoir.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2636\/revisions\/2637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/how-to-write-a-memoir.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/how-to-write-a-memoir.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/how-to-write-a-memoir.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}