Riot night

The crowd pulsed, a hundred people behind my arms, 20-30 of them trying to push forward with sticks and other weapons.  Opposite us another 15-20 men, some of them also wielding weapons, reached towards the crowd behind me.  Belt blows from the front rained down on my arms and shoulders, and someone’s elbow or fist caught me in the side of the head.

How did we get here?

I had been eating dinner in the dark with my wife and foster daughter when I heard a roar outside.  My first comment was, “That’s not a normal fight.”  I went outside and saw a crowd filling the alleyway outside our home, half of the men unrecognizable to me.  At first it seemed to be a typical yelling argument.  But then I saw signs which indicated that real violence might be possible, so I went down and got ready to intervene.

I soon found that the men I didn’t recognize were from a nearby neighborhood and had come to support one of my neighbor families in the fight.  I couldn’t understand the yelling enough to figure out what the fight was about, but the women living next door to me had instigated it somehow.   There was a good chance there would be yelling and not much more.

Some teenagers I knew made their way in my direction.  Electricity had been out for some time, so I was wearing my headlamp and it attracted their attention.   One wanted to try it on, and got a kick out of shining the light in everyone’s face.  He asked how much it cost – I told him it was expensive and refused to put a number on it.  (Oddly, my headlamp was bought for scientific research in the jungle and is one of the most expensive things I own.)   Minutes later he slipped something into my hand.  They’re brass knuckles, or at least a cheap steel version.  I’m dumbstruck that these kids had come to the argument like they were ready for a gang war.   The brass knuckles didn’t belong to my friend, but to another teenage kid he had taken them from.  

In the dark I casually slipped the weapon into my back pocket and said that I lost it.  The original owner argued for it back, and I told him I’d give it back tomorrow, then switch and say I’ll give it back in an hour.  My friend laughs and calls the kid a “beast”.  The kid appeared to be satisfied with my promise to return it.  I decide I'm gonna hold onto them until I know the moment of violence is passed.

The argument doesn’t seem to get anywhere, but enough people were trying to force the instigators to back off that the energy seemed to be dying.  The outside gang of boys that formed one side backed further and further away until they were almost around the corner.  I decided to get back to dinner, and discreetly slipped the brass knuckles into the kid’s hand and went upstairs.

Ten minutes later, the roar came again.

I rush downstairs and see that people are really at each other.  I work through the mob to try to get to the flash point in the middle.  A couple people trying to hold back the most aggressive instigators have formed a partial division, but the fighters are streaming around them.  I get into the gap and begin to pull/push people back until we create a clear line between the mobs.

If my Hindi was better I might have understood what happened next, but someone said or did something that made the tension escalate.  The crowd pushed behind me and I thought they would push past me for a second, but I was just barely able to hold them back.  Someone pushed me on the chest and I realized that two other guys, shorter than me but very bulky and strong, were also holding the crowd back.  I shouted, “Hey, I’m trying to help you!”, and they realized that we were three.  In that narrow alley, the three of us with our arms out formed a wall that the major instigators in the mob failed to break out of some combination of lack of strength, coordination, or commitment to the fight.  The other mob didn’t have the same kind of coordinated defense, but there were two people who were individually trying to keep the most aggressive men back.

Suddenly there was another rush and the two groups met.  We managed to hold the wall, but now were pushed from the front and the back.  The guys in the mob in front of me had pulled off their belts and randomly-aimed blows struck my arms and shoulders.  Someone behind me from my “own” group hit me in the side of the head with either a fist or an elbow.  But we held, and I yelled at them to back off, and somehow something made the mobs pull back again.

We still had to maintain the wall but I felt a bit of latitude because they weren’t pushing as hard anymore.  I began yelling over the general din at the men in front of me, “You hit me!  You hit me!  Why’d you hit me?  What did I do?”  The sight of a random White foreigner, who clearly wasn’t fighting anyone himself, confronting them in Hindi for having hit him seemed to disarm them.  Several of them apologized, and most began to back off further and form sort of a straggling presence down the alley rather than a grouped mob.

I took the chance to turn and look at my own group, and saw that several still had sticks raised in threat.  One woman who had seemed to be at the center of the issue picked up a brick; I began to move through the crowd towards her and she put the brick down.  I went to her anyway and reached for the stick that she held in her other hand. At first she tried to pull it back from me, then she let me have it.  I dropped the stick in the gutter.

Looking back again towards the mob on the other side, I saw one of them back off to just around the corner, lift up his shirt, and tuck something back into his pants.  I didn’t see what it was at all – it literally could have been anything.  But I have some feeling for what it looks like when a man tucks a gun into his pants.   I kept my eyes on him but he immediately walked away in a different direction from everyone else and disappeared.  The presence of a gun there would be hard for me to believe – I wouldn’t put more of a 20-30% chance that that’s really what I saw.  Yet an hour later after everything had wound down, I began hearing vague talk from neighbors about “the gun” that someone had seen.

Back to the moment, both mobs had backed off to the point that there was now 50-60 feet separating them, with the door to my house directly in the middle.  Besides myself only 3-4 other people walked in this gap between the groups – I don’t know what separated someone who thought they should stay behind the lines from those of us who were willing to walk in the middle, but it was obvious I could do what I wanted.

I wandered over to “my” side, and the tension had dropped enough that people started talking about my role in it.  “You were holding everyone back!”, some of them said, and one teenager began to mime the way in which I’d extended my arms to hold back the crowd.  “You got hit, didn’t you?” several asked, which excited a lot of people, and the extent to which I’d been hit began to dominate the conversation.   One or two of them felt my chest and said, “Your heart is beating hard, isn’t it?  Jon’s heart is beating so hard!”  Meanwhile the tensions decreased and people from both sides began to peel away.  A moment or two before two police officers came around the corner, the opposing mob disappeared entirely.

The police behavior was horrific.  They were intimidating (one officer was at least 4 inches taller and 50 pounds heavier than me, a shockingly big person in these parts), but they intimidated in the manner of tough teenagers, not mature adults.  They yelled at and berated the family who had started the thing as if they were speaking to naughty children.  About the only good thing they did was order the family to stay inside their home and not come out into the alley again for 1 hour.  Overall, though, they reminded me more of how a teenager gang leader might handle a dispute than an officer of the law, and an incompetent gang leader at that.

The police went towards the remnants of “our” crowd that were still there, who excitedly tried to get in complaints about this person or that person from the other side who had done violence.  Then I hear, “They hit the White foreigner too!”

Great.  I’d been wondering if I should disappear when the police showed up, but I wanted to see how they would handle the situation. I really didn’t want their attention.

The police officers were shocked when they heard that from the crowd.  I had stood next to the officers as they berated the family, but perhaps in the dark they hadn’t recognized me as a foreigner.  Or maybe they had seen me but assumed I didn’t live there, or that I hadn’t been involved.  They asked the crowd questions – several of the crowd reiterated how I had been hit.  They turned towards me (I was standing a good 20-30 feet away) and asked if I had been injured.  I shouted out, “No, no, I wasn’t injured, it was nothing.  No, it was nothing,” and made as clear as possible that I was not going to get involved in their complaint.  The officers continued to interrogate the crowd incredulously about me.  They seemed shocked that I lived there, asked what I was doing, got the explanation that I was teaching Hindi reading.  Thankfully, they got enough answers from the crowd that they didn’t come back to me.  They left, and I left.

Back up in my home, my landlord’s family came into our room as a group and berated me.  First they told me I absolutely must not go outside when such fights happened.  I explained that I and two other men had stopped the entire fight, and I would not fail to get involved in such a situation because something really bad could have happened.  They then shifted tones and said that that was okay, but that I needed to disappear once the police came.  This was clearly their real concern.  We talked about the police for ten minutes.  I explained that they had nothing to worry about, that I had my official registration papers that they had helped me to obtain, that I had registered with the local police 2 years earlier, that my visa and registration and lease and everything was all in order.  They still made very, very clear that they didn’t want any involvement with the police, in any way, ever.

This is a common sentiment in the basti.  Almost everyone I know has told me nothing but bad things about the police.  They avoid them at all costs.

I agreed with the family that the police behavior I had seen was not good, and that I would disappear next time and not stick around if the police were around. That seemed to satisfy them, and they’re okay with me getting involved to stop the next fight.

The next day, my involvement in the riot was the talk of the community.  Rumors that I had been injured seemed to have spread across our section of it, and I was asked about my "injuries" by 7-8 people the next day.  One of the most touching interactions was from an old, half-senile man who asked me to sit next to him and then lamented what had happened.  "How could they have hurt someone like you, a nice man who has come here just to teach the children and is doing such good things?"  The second most touching interaction was from a teenager who had been present, who rushed up to me the next day and shouted in an emotion I'd have to call glee, "I listened to you, didn't I?  I respected you, didn't I?  I did what you asked!"