Herbert James Draper Lancelot and Guinevere paintingHerbert James Draper Lament for Icarus paintingGeorge Inness The Trout Brook painting
possessed, as though a spirit were upon him, to testify. "For me," he said, "the issue cannot be foreign intervention. We always forgive ourselves by blaming outsiders, America, Pakistan, any damn place. Excuse me, George, but for me it all goes back to Assam, we have to start with that." The massacre of the innocents. Photographs of children's corpses, arranged neatly in lines like soldiers on parade. They had been clubbed to death, pelted with stones, their necks cut in half by knives. Those neat ranks of death, Chamcha remembered. As if only horror could sting India into orderliness.
Bhupen spoke for twenty-nine minutes without hesitations or pauses. "We are all guilty of Assam," he said. "Each person of us. Unless and until we face it, that the children's deaths were our fault, we cannot call ourselves a civilized people." He drank rum quickly as he spoke, and his voice got louder, and his body began to lean dangerously, but although the room fell silent nobody moved towards him, nobody tried to stop him talking, nobody called
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