Column

Walking gingerly along the pavement one rainy day in Delhi some years ago, I had my first face-to-face encounter with a racist bully. And I have to say it went rather well...
The man had been racing his scooter at top speed along a water-logged South Delhi road, whistling a happy tune and splashing passersby with cheery nonchalance that’s so common in Delhi. And purely by way of convivial greeting, a group of us pedestrians who had been well and truly splashed hailed him with some well-chosen insults that insinuated that his relationship with his sister did not conform to known standards of public morality.

It was an everyday Delhi situation, if you know what I mean. If the matter had ended there, we’d all have gone back home, some of us wetter than the others, and nothing more would have been said of it.

But, unbeknownst to us, among our group of pedestrians was also a wiry black African, a student perhaps, who too was rendered wholly wet by the scooterist’s mechanical exertions. Not being sufficiently well-versed in Hindi social graces, he had unburdened himself of an angry expletive in English, but you could see it didn’t come naturally to him. “Idiot,” was the best he could come up with.

Yet, out of the corner of his eye, the speeding scooterist must have caught a glimpse of a black man shouting at him, from amidst a group of others of various chromatic dispensation — and was incensed enough to pull over by the roadside. He parked his scooter, and turned towards us, and only then did we notice that he was a pretty beefy sort of bloke, with muscles in places where most men don’t even have places.

But ignoring the rest of us, who had flung the more disgusting insults at him, the bully advanced menacingly on the black man. “What did you say?” he asked, eyes flashing, muscles flexing. His prey, completely shaken, stood transfixed with that deer-in-the-headlamps look.

All this had happened in a flash, and none of us bystanders had had any time to react. But at just the last minute, when the bully raised his arm and was about to land it with force, something stirred me to action. I stepped up, positioned myself in front of the bully, and rested my hand on his chest, not so much with the intent to confront as to restrain.

All this, I have to say, was entirely out of character for me: I’m not used to being in combat situations, and in normal circumstances, would have crossed roads to avoid physical contact with burly men. But in such situations, one’s instincts take over.
But if my response was surprising, the bully’s was even more so. The man, who could have easily swatted me in the same way that he intended to swat the other, visibly crumpled, and pausing only to ask why I was standing up for “him”, turned around and scampered back.

Indians picking on blacks for racial abuse — as happened at Mohali most recently when two black cheerleaders claim they were subjected to some racist name-calling — is doubly unfunny because on most occasions they do it without any conviction of any racial superiority, and because they suck at it. And that’s without even going into the cruel irony that Indians abroad are more often than not at the receiving end of racially biased treatment, in which event we’re overcome by paroxysms of bilious rage.

But what does it say about the intensity of a racist bully’s emotion if all it takes is one man, who is in any case not particularly brave or burly, to beat him back? But then, why must I expect any higher emotion from a man who will overlook insults about incest — but get incensed by schoolboy taunts...