A N OTE ON T RANSLATION AND
T RANSLITERATION
Interviews for this research have been conducted in English, German, and Punjabi. Whenever warranted, I have retained the original expressions in parenthesis and hope my translations are accurate enough to convey the meaning and tone of words used by my interlocutors. There is frequent reference to cultural and religious concepts that are unique to the South Asian context. These include terms from the Sikh scriptures (gurbani) and some references to Ahmadiyya religious sermons and tracts that are in Urdu. Instead of using a glossary, I provide the corresponding English expression whenever they first appear. I have made selective use of footnotes to expand further on some words to clarify their contextual uses and meanings. For the purpose of this book, I have refrained from using any diacritical markers in my transcriptions. I am aware that this simplification misses out on nuances in nasalization and other specific linguistic features of especially Punjabi and Urdu words. I have made this concession to provide a more simplified system at the expense of philological scrutiny.
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research and writing of this book evolved over a ten-year period in which I was fortunate enough to make friends and have fostered long-term relationships with many of my interlocutors and collaborators in Frankfurt and Toronto. I would have utterly failed in this endeavor without their generosity: my research participants’ willingness to share their personal stories, the help of my research assistants who have worked tirelessly, the support of my friends who reached out and built bridges across terrains, oceans, times. Sharing their stories and insights, which are assembled in this book, is both a blessing and a burden. I am well aware that of all the words, feelings, and thoughts, only fragments can eventually resurface in these written pages. My labor has been to do justice to the truths of their stories. My first lines of appreciation are to all of them who lent their voices to this project. They cannot be named in person here. I have used pseudonyms throughout the text to ensure their confidentiality.
Among my collaborators who contributed to the research process, I am indebted to Khuswhant Singh in Frankfurt for his continuing support and friendship. I thank Kamal Arora and Duygu Gül for their research assistantship, collaborative writing, and general support at all stages of the research in Toronto. Harjot Singh, Gurwinder Singh, Bernd Wagishauser, Dr. Aslam Daud, Hamid Chaudhury and family, Horst Schäfer, Dr. Günter Kruchen, Christian Borschberg, Hadayatullah Hübsch (1946–2011), Abid Mirza, Gurpreet Singh Deepak, Jasbir Kaur, Jaspreet Multani, Loveleen Kang, Mohammad Ilyas, Mohammad Ali, Manfred Backhausen, Preet Virdi, Naseer Ahmad, Waqas Taimoor, and Salma Ahmed have all generously offered their help in facilitating my research and deserve a special
note of acknowledgment. I am particularly thankful to Veena Nijhawan for establishing some of my research contacts in Frankfurt.
Several of the book chapters have been presented in early draft form at academic meetings in Europe and North America. In no particular order I would like to thank the following colleagues who have commented to great avail: Veena Das, Virinder Kalra, Vasudha Dalmia, Martin Fuchs, Amira Mittermaier, Anna Schultz, Anne Murphy, Arvind Mandair, Raji Singh Soni, Doris Jakobsh, Attiya Ahmad, Inderpal Grewal, Harjant Gill, Khachig Tölöliyan, Kristina Myrvold, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Markus Dressler, Nicola Mooney, Patrick Eisenlohr, Jan Kubik, Jenny Wustenberg, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Roma Chatterji, Roschanack Shaerie, Ruth Mas, Saadia Saeed, Satwinder Kaur Bains, Pashaura Singh, and Tej Purewal.
York University in Toronto has been a very welcoming place for my intellectual pursuits and academic career. The research and writing of this book has been supported by internal research grants awarded by the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University and a Standard Research Grant awarded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (2010–2013). Initial stages of my research in Frankfurt (2002–2005) benefitted from research grants through the German Research Council (SFB 619). A visiting scholarship at the University of California at Berkeley in 2010 and a fellowship in Erfurt awarded by the Max Weber Kolleg for Advanced Social Studies in 2013 provided me with sanctuaries for the writing process. I thank Martin Fuchs, Jörg Rüppke, Doreen Hochberg, Diana Blanke, and Ilona Bode at the MWK as well as Alexander von Rospatt and Nancy Lichtenstein at the University of Berkley, California, for the invitations and all the support during the fellowships.
Many colleagues and administrative staff have offered their unrelenting support over the years. Special thanks to Jackie Siebert, Audrey Tokiwa and Debbie Best among all the great staff in Sociology. Alicia Filipowich’s assistance at the York Centre for Asian Studies (YCAR) has been indispensible during periods of grant writing, conferencing, and all the other nitty-gritty matters of academic life. I also thank Susan Henders and Philip Kelly at YCAR, and Mark Webber as well as Jean-Paul Kleiner when they were still at the Canadian Center for German and European studies (CCGES) for entrusting me with responsibilities and inviting collaborative work during their terms as directors and/or coordinators. I also thank Ratiba Hadj-Moussa for her invaluable support, academic collaboration, and mentorship, as well as many of my colleagues for their collegiality and
support throughout the years. Last but not least, I am indebted to my former and present students, as I continue to learn from them. There are too many to mention, yet I owe special thanks to Rana Sukarieh: Duygu Gül, Kamal Arora, Khalida Ramyar, Nilum Panesar, and Saad Sayyed for devoting many hours of their graduate assistant work to make this book possible.
I am blessed to have Kate Pendakis as my editorial voice and interlocutor during the entire writing process. Thank you for your love of detail, your subtle and encouraging commentaries, and all the labor and scrutiny you put into reading and editing my work.
Burke Gerstenschlager at Palgrave and Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Jennifer B. Saunders, and Susanna Snyder were kind enough to accept this book for their series Religion and Global Migration and offer their feedback and advice.
It is difficult to adequately express my sense of gratitude to my family, friends, and loved ones in Delhi, Frankfurt, Lörrach, and Toronto, who in close proximity and over distance, share the burden and joys of everyday life and ensure keeping a good balance in life. You are always in my heart. Thank you especially to Theresa Kersten, Jamie Tsang, and Anthony Godfrey for keeping us well and help us survive. I am grateful to spend the days with my two gifted singers and loved ones Shobna and Mayur, who keep the house full of music and my wicked comments neatly recorded for the annual visit of the elves.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
This book examines the social and cultural textures of contemporary Sikh and Ahmadiyya diasporas in respect to experiences and memories of violence. It takes the form of an ethnography of precarious subject positions and vulnerable social relations that is grounded in methods of anthropological fieldwork and qualitative sociological research. Fieldwork and close to seventy-five in-depth narrative interviews with members of both communities in Frankfurt and Toronto were conducted in intermittent phases between 2003 and 2013. It is through the materials gathered in this tenyear period that the book is able to capture the different ways in which violence has entered the lives of my interlocutors, especially those situated at social and political margins. My work dovetails with newer diaspora studies that have paid close attention to the precarization of lifeworlds and the differentiating effects of specific violent events around which diasporic groups have mobilized and the extent to which this mobilization is contingent on local, institutional, and other sociological factors such as class, gender, race, and age, among others. Age has recently come to the forefront of some of these studies in the form of the new interest in the political subject of youth and through a reconsideration of intergenerational transmission. Yet despite the centrality and longstanding interest in the subject of generational transfers, says Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, “the diverse ways in which children and youth ‘inherit,’ contest and negotiate diasporic identities have infrequently been examined” (ibid. 877).
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 M. Nijhawan, The Precarious Diasporas of Sikh and Ahmadiyya Generations, Religion and Global Migrations, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-48854-1_1
1
By putting the theme of generations and diasporic youth identities at the center, the book aims to show how younger generations of Ahmadis and Sikhs have had to negotiate both the legacies of past violence and the objectifying categorizations and normative regulations of current citizenship regimes.
The constellation of generational change and heightened anxieties around religious otherness frames how experiences and memories of past events that coalesce in the year 1984 are evaluated in their respective role for processes of transnational migration. To those knowledgeable in the field of Sikh and Punjab Studies, one need not point out that the violence of the 1980s in Punjab led to significant changes in the demographic and political map of Sikh and Ahmadiyya communities worldwide. This topic has been discussed at length in the scholarship on Sikh diasporas and, to a lesser extent, by those working on the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamat (AMJ). By bringing together perspectives from both communities, this book rejects the exclusive use of “Punjabi” to signify “Sikh” in diaspora studies and steers away from methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller 2002). Instead, it provides an inquiry into precarious religious subjectivities, something that has attracted little attention and conceptual elaboration despite the longstanding scholarly interest in social marginality in diaspora studies and precarity in the sociology of labor migration. There have been numerous excellent studies in these areas that will be referenced in this book. Similarly, I am indebted to newer contributions in anti-racism and postcolonialism that have tackled the prevailing suspicion against racialized religious others among anti-immigrant movements and in the context of the ongoing global war on terror. Yet I find there is often little differentiation within critical scholarship as to how categories of religion are internally produced and disputed. Moreover, the many anthropological and sociological studies on the revival of Islam among Muslim youth in Europe and North America, which are interested in precisely such modes of production and contestation, rarely expand their conclusions on how to rethink specific genealogies of diaspora and the diasporic. Here too there is far less transparency about the specific nodal points where societal norms of recognition and regulation intersect with the prevailing identity politics of hegemonic diasporas and transnational religious organizations. Hegemonic diasporas are the consequence of the specific conditions under which migrant groups create social imaginaries of belonging that link past and present, homelands and new lands. They are formed through a variety of cultural and political practices, reflecting the agentive role of
social actors of a broad societal spectrum, not just the power elites. But those who occupy key positions in religious organizations, cultural associations, activist groups, and other such sites of institutionalization, assume important roles through their strategic acts in mobilizing specific sectors within increasingly global communities. They might either dissuade or persuade group members from acknowledging heterodox positions and pluralism in values, practices, and cultural articulations; they might seek new alliances or espouse more clear-cut separations among different groups. Hegemonies are thus never unquestioned and have increasingly become “scattered,” to borrow a concept from Grewal and Kaplan’s (1994) work on transnational feminism. The voices of gendered and racialized subjects in migration are not only audible today, but also formative for how alternative projects of diasporas have been imagined (El-Tayeb 2011). This is not always recognized in the current debates on immigration and diasporas. Current public debates often remain exclusively focused on religious extremism and socially deviant youth. In post-9/11 contexts, this issue is widely discussed in regard to the phenomenon of second-generation migrant youth being drawn to join groups such as Salafists or explicitly militant organizations in Syria and elsewhere—an issue that continues to dominate debates in Western publics. Liberal governments have actively supported and enabled moderate and tolerant forms of Islam to be officially recognized and incorporated into the nation-state. In both Canada and Germany, the visibility of moderate Islam is justified with reference to the messages of peace and tolerance that are promoted by communities such as the AMJ. Hisham Aidi (2014) argues that this search for tolerant religious others poses its own conundrum insofar as genealogies of religion and religiosity are selectively read and rendered useful for political purposes within the ideological fabric of reigning global powers. The search for the “pacifist Sikh” as opposed to the “terrorist Sikh” has been part of precisely the same political process (Bhogal 2011; Mandair 2011).
This book thus poses the question: At such nodal points of scattered hegemony, how do specific representations and responses to violence and suffering carry an agentive role?
In order to tackle this question we must first shift attention to the boundary-setting and boundary-transgressing practices of particular religious formations by reconsidering them as the product of a deep genealogy of cultural and political encounters with “the West” that coalesced in colonial and postcolonial discourses on religious identity. The application of this lens reveals the aftereffects of the violent partition of India, which has left
its deep mark on so-called “communal relations” in India and Pakistan after 1947. One motivation for writing this book, which I share with many of my colleagues in the field, is to carve out the material and discursive forces of violent partitions and their ideological segregations, the consequences of which are still deeply felt among South Asians across the globe. The specific sites of diaspora formation examined in this book are shaped by this historical predicament. My initial remarks thus also serve to make explicit what little interest I have in a comparative project that would juxtapose two groups around fixed (religious) identity parameters or benchmark achievements in social and cultural incorporation on the basis of ideological stances, normative assumptions, or some measurable social or economic characteristics. We need to scrutinize the immigrant success and model minority discourse that gives rise to such comparisons and tends to bolster precisely those voices that assert key positions in representing their respective communities as “model minorities” (Sian 2013). As my chapters in this book will explicate, this is not to ignore differences in the forms of institutionalization, social incorporation, and the exclusion of “ethnic” and “religious minorities.” Close attention must be paid to the specific genealogies and forms of religious and political transnationalism, as well as the unique histories of each community’s respective encounters with the postcolonial state and the Western liberal state. Historical experiences continue to affect diasporic imaginaries and transnational social and political engagements in ways that are specific to Sikh and Ahmadiyya communities. Challenging the tendency to treat these perspectives in separate bodies of scholarship, I examine the interconnected histories through which we can reconsider the societal and cultural processes of global migration as well as the particularities of events and temporalities. This is, for me, an ongoing labor.
1984
From these different vantage points, I ask how we can approach and contextualize a historical date that—especially in the discourses of my Sikh interviewees—has become somewhat of a paradox. In some accounts, 1984 is the dominant organizing idiom for identity narratives; in others, it is more of an impasse for future-oriented community work and engagement with the teachings of the Sikh Gurus. There is no doubt that 1984 signals an open wound due to the complete lack of justice served for the mass murder (and what could arguably be called a genocide) and because the Indian State continues to actively inhibit reconciliation efforts more
than thirty years later. Much of the thirtieth year anniversary events in the diaspora have lamented this fact. At the same time, 1984 has also acquired the status of a founding story or myth in Sikh diaspora representations— one that tends to freeze time in images of horror and the spectacular that, as Veena Das (2007) has demonstrated, are notoriously difficult to work through ethnographically.
A few anecdotal insights illustrate the paradoxical position of 1984 in accounts: A friend of mine who at one point had the chance to speak as a young representative of Sikhs at the United Nations was, rather than being lauded for his achievement, rebuked by his father for omitting 1984 from his speech. Sukhbir’s father, himself a post-1984 refugee who struggled for many years to acquire citizenship in his new country couldn’t get over the fact that Sukhbir did not use this opportunity to speak to the prime political cause. Gurjot recalling his education at Sikh youth camps, expressed the feeling that “all history seems to ends with 1984,” while Harjant referred to 1984 as a “red herring” that prevented Sikh youth movements to step out of “ethnic enclave politics” and offered an interpretation of how to read those events as part of an ongoing project of neocolonial violence. It is the normative burden of 1984 that is expressed here: as a requisite reference for diasporic representation on the world stage, as an affective category that evokes a sense of frozen time, and as a politicized trump card that problematizes heterodox perspectives and consolidates separations between groups. There are thus a number of issues buried here, including the questions of historical memory and colonialism, continuities and change in religious knowledge and how to decipher biographies of violence and suffering, all of which will be addressed further on.
The year 1984 is not an arbitrary reference point: neither for the generation that had witnessed the violent upheavals in Punjab on a personal level, nor for the next generation that has dealt with stories and silences pervading social spaces of family and community. In Sikh discourses, 1984 marks a key moment of being projected as terrorists in the global public sphere. The events of the Indian Army’s attack on the Sikh Golden Temple (in June 1984), which were followed (in October and November 1984) by the assassination of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi and the subsequent politically orchestrated Delhi riots against Sikhs, had the effect of victimizing and mobilizing large sectors of the global Sikh community. A decade of political violence ensued that saw the rise of Sikh militancy and the Indian state’s brutal repression of widespread unrest and violence through anti-terrorism operations such as forced detainment, widespread
disappearances of young male Sikhs, and systemic torture of both male and female detainees in Punjab’s prisons. The role of 1984 in Sikh diaspora discourses has been the subject of several seminal contributions in the field (e.g. Axel 2001; Bhogal 2011; Mahmood 2010; Shani 2010; Tatla 2006). The issue has led to vicious divides within Sikh Studies, as “constructivist” arguments by “Western academics” that seemed to undermine Sikh identity claims were forcefully rejected in the 1990s by a range of political actors in Punjab and its diasporas.1 A generation later, it has also triggered new intellectual, artistic, and political responses—the subject of later chapters. These interventions render visible what has transpired for this generation as a stigma and challenge, but also an opportunity: While youth have had experiences after 9/11 that heightened their sense of being associated with a suspicious religious identity, they also grasp new potentials for translocal social justice work as part of their engagement in religion. Whereas youth events that cater to a prevailing sentiment of 1984 justice issues are to some extent the outcome of changes within political parties previously associated with militancy, we now observe a far broader interpretive effort to reclaim Sikh ethical principles and modes of Sikh sovereignty in a globalizing age in which the nation-form itself has come under close scrutiny and in which the power of social movements geared at global social justice issues has found appeal among the youth. The events that led to mass migrations of Ahmadis in 1984 (and after) were in no immediate way linked to what occurred on the Indian side of the border in Punjab. In a less visible manner—that is, with less international media coverage, but with arguably similar potent effects for diaspora formation and transnational migration—Ahmadis were systematically marginalized by a 1984 presidential ordinance that made it de facto illegal for Ahmadis to claim official status as a religious organization and practice ordinary religious lives as Muslims in Pakistan. Violent mobilizations and discriminatory legal acts against Ahmadis had also occurred earlier—especially through the 1953 riots and 1974 constitutional amendments that already designated Ahmadis as non-Muslims. However, it was in 1984 that further political changes and frequent murders of ordinary Ahmadis culminated in the decision of the Ahmadiyya religious leadership (under the newly elected Khalifa Mirza Tahir Ahmad) to relocate from Rabwah in West Punjab (Pakistan) and claim asylum status in London. Over the last thirty or so years, London has thus become the center for reorganizing a religious movement and organization that since its inception was interested in missionary activity and appealing to Muslims globally. The
historical caesura of the recentering of the khilafat to London was thus also foundational for what became a dynamic organizational success story of religious transnationalism.
As Adil Hussain Khan (2015) points out, the significance of 1984 might be captured in the idea that “Ahmadis often compare the story of [the khalifas] escape from Pakistan to the hijra (emigration) of the Prophet Mohammad from Mecca to Medina” (ibid. 165). Discrimination of Ahmadis, pejoratively labeled the “Qadiani sect” after the birthplace (Qadian) of their religious founding figure Mirza Ghulam Ahmad,2 was historically motivated by contentions between political factions and religious organizations that date back to the pre-Partition period and the newly acquired and central role of the Ahmadiyya movement (see also van der Linden 2008). It was under Mirza Mahmud Ahmad and during the Kashmir crisis, argues Adil Khan, that the movement gradually shifted its emphasis from an “otherworldliness of Ghulam Ahmad’s Sufi metaphysics” to a broader “populist approach that offered this-worldly gains for average Indian Muslims” (Khan 2015: 126).3 Political scientists have argued that the conditions of post-1947 state formation, in the context of volatile institutions and political mobilizations (Iqtidar 2012), created the peculiar conditions for Ahmadis to assume the role of a surrogate victim or of the nation’s enemy and heretic other. In addition to Islamist parties, which had as their rational the rejection of continuous prophecy in Ahmadiyya doctrine, parties far removed from Islamism similarly adopted the idea of Ahmadis as deviant others or delegitimized Muslims. Thus in the period between 1974 and 1984, the “Ahmadiyya question” gained political ascendancy with the consequence, argues Sadia Saeed, that the “heretic Ahmadi” was disciplined into denouncing Islamic affiliation and in that sense served as the decisive figure in a process or redefining the relationship between state and religion. Hence, boundaries “between the centre and the periphery, public and private, lawful and unlawful […] were debated, re-drawn, and re-inscribed in the nationalist narrative” (Saeed 2007, 146). These processes of sanctioning Ahmadis were also supported by the socialist government under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto until it was overthrown by Zia al-Haq’s regime and the authors of the 1984 ordinance (Ahmed 2010; Iqtidar 2012; Saeed 2007).
We can provisionally remark here that 1984 doesn’t constitute the same kind of event for Ahmadis as it does for Sikhs, and yet the precarization of religious minority status and politicization of religious identity can be read comparatively as postcolonial contentions over sovereignty within newly
forming states and with respect to disputed political claims over pluralism. In the post-Partition state, Sikhs and Ahmadis became entangled as religious minorities at the center of a crisis of nation-state formation, which was experienced in each case as a moment of community transnationalization. The demographic and political changes induced by 1984 did not constitute a “birth date” for diaspora, to be sure, but the scope of violence did alter key dimensions of social imaginary significations (Castoriadis 1998) and of biographies in migration. While diasporas are always emerging, shaped by the political economy of global labor diasporas, political activism, and religious transnationalism, the important changes brought on by 1984 are worth investigating.4
The peculiar ways in which stories of 1984 have become linked and structurally embedded in already existing chains of migration is still an open question and warrant a closer assessment of Sikh and Ahmadiyya diasporas as they have emerged over time. I can only attempt a first sketch of such a genealogy in this book. A more comprehensive account would need to take into account various historical archives and details of religious minority politics in pre- and post-Partition states and pay attention to the changing relationship between the Sikh and Ahmadiyya communities with respect to evolving forms of collaboration, exchange, and antagonisms in other locations and across borders.5 Geopolitical forces pertaining to how nation-states operate, cross-border movements among political and religious actors, and intercommunal relations which have been documented for places such as Qadian and various diasporic locations, can all contribute different shadings and facets to such a project.6 I employ the 1984 lens in order to both limit the scope of investigation and bring newer developments and crosscutting ties to the fore, as these characterize a more recent regime of states and migration. It is noteworthy that the events of 1984 parallel a crucial phase in global capitalism and thus the political economy of global migration. Apart from its general structural effects of labor precarization and a widening gap between rich and poor, this has had lasting implications for diaspora formation. Migrants departing from East Punjab and West Punjab at the time encountered a situation in Canada and Germany of emergent neoliberal restructuring and reforms to immigration systems and asylum legislation. Importantly, whereas Pierre Trudeau’s Canada was at the time revamping its agenda toward official multiculturalism, Helmut Kohl’s Germany had begun to systematize its asylum and refugee system and make it more difficult to be admitted under the premise that the country did not constitute a society of—or for—immigrants.
In the recent decade, state practices of immigration show more of a family resemblance with Germany gradually opening its citizenship agenda and generously responding to the refugee crisis and Canada toughening its immigration laws under the conservative government of Stephen Harper.7 There remain decisive differences, however, in the two cityscapes studied here and I detail the specific processes of diasporic citizenship in each.
FRANKFURT AND TORONTO
Frankfurt and Toronto are two key players in the global economy and international urban agendas. Both cities have embarked on different paths of shaping their immigration policies and of publicly negotiating globalization processes, yet more recently, representatives from municipalities and Canadian and German governments have also consulted each other in the course of modeling and reorganizing the mutually intersecting domains of multicultural policy and citizenship. In fact, my two research sites are central to the debate on citizenship and belonging in their respective countries and public spheres. Some have labeled these cities as “laboratories” or “testing grounds” for how to manage ever-growing cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity. Toronto certainly holds a more prominent position in the current debate on global cities and the progressive policies around immigrant inclusion and diversity that it lauds. But Frankfurt and its metropolitan area, the Rhein-Main region, have similarly been regarded as global cityscape shaped by economic and cultural transnationalism. Like Toronto, Frankfurt has been driven since the 1980s by neoliberal restructuring, active forms of internationalization through its municipal political actors and corporate elites, and a progressive approach to multiculturalism and migration which has become wedded to what Roger Keil (2011) refers to as Frankfurt’s “neoliberal urban regime.”8 Scholars in urban studies have examined how the rescaling of globalization has taken a turn to regionalization and internalized globalization, which has produced specific forms of social differentiation, the consequences of the 1960s and 1970s working class housing still to be felt in terms of urban segregation as these housing complexes are now mainly inhabited by migrant groups (Espahangizi 2014). It is also undergoing new trends in the emergence of the in-between cityscapes (Keil and Young 2009, compared to Toronto, Young and Keil 2014), political participation (through the unique municipal structure of German Kommunalpolitik which affects migrant services too), and other institutional changes that
have complicated the contentious politics of the urban (Keil 2011, 2499). In comparison to the Toronto metropolitan area, the Rhein-Main region itself is still of relatively smaller scale and diversity. Yet, through the banking sector, one of the largest international airports, industrial zones that cater to the new information technologies and cultural institutions that compete at the world stage, Frankfurt has clearly occupied a central role within Germany’s political and cultural economy.
Because so much has been written on Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area with its large and prospering migrant communities (among them among the largest sections of Sikh and Ahmadiyya diasporas worldwide), I want to add a few more specifics on Frankfurt here for there is yet little comparable information on the communities I have worked with and the specific conditions of migrant incorporation as shaped by local city agendas. In terms of participatory citizenship, Frankfurt clearly prides itself as promoting inclusion. The city has emerged in its postwar years as one of the country’s cultural and intellectual centers for modeling a critical memory discourse around Germany’s difficult past (we think here of Adorno and the Frankfurt school and the current role of various institutions such as the Fritz Bauer Institute). We can add that social and political movements had a pivotal role in defining the parameters of urban citizenship in Frankfurt (in particular the 1968 student protests and the Occupy movement today), while postwar immigration (and the more recent dynamics of transnational migration since the 1980s) has reshaped the composition of the city’s populace. Currently, more than 50 % of its residents trace a personal history of migration from other parts of the world. This is not a surprising statistics for Toronto standards, but noteworthy in the German context. As a consequence of an innovative municipal structure and the launch of its department of multicultural affairs (Amt für Multikulturelle Angelegenheiten or AMkA) by the left coalition in 1989, Frankfurt has also emerged as the city with the highest concentration and visibility of religious organizations and cultural associations in the form of officially registered societies (eingetragene Vereine).9 Heavily promoted by AMkA’s strategies of creating visibility for such religious and cultural association (Friedmann and Lehrer 1997), the multicultural has become the new normative in Frankfurt’s cityscape, promoted by all major parties of the political spectrum. These brief descriptions can only sketch the broad contours of the processes of urban governance and citizenship that have informed the processes of Sikh and Ahmadiyya diaspora formation. Comparative insights and reflections on the rescaling of cities are important, as processes of migration
lie at a nexus of globalizing and localizing practices mediated by particular forms of national, provincial, and municipal government.10 Cities themselves provide all kinds of resources and markets and consist of transnational migrant networks that incorporate newcomers in different realms of the economy. Places such as Toronto and Frankfurt offer a multilevel institutional social support structure for newcomers that spans across the social support and welfare system. Asylum claimants and those in institutionally and socially weak positions, such as migrant workers, often rely on these networks and resources even as accessibility remains a vexed issue due to changing citizenship regimes and practices. It is this nexus of institutional accessibility, the power relationships that exists between those granting access, those working as intermediaries through social networks and the specificities of social lifeworlds that is considered here.11 This book situates youth within these everyday practices and social relations of Ahmadiyya and Sikh diasporas and contemporary struggles over urban citizenship and place-making and considers the ways in which they “inherit the city” (Kasnitz et al. 2009) that have a transformative impact on their life.
GENERATIONS
Migration studies have offered a wide range of contributions on generational change. Earlier theories in this area were mainly concerned with how to frame the configuration of cultural continuities along generational axes (in the American context, Margaret Mead’s distinction between postfigurative, cofigurative, and prefigurative generations comes to mind as well as Hansen’s third-generation thesis). More recent paradigms contrasting theories of (segmented) assimilation (Portes 1996; Portes and Rumbaut 2001) with those of cultural hybridity (Modood and Werbner 1997) have been guided by an overarching preoccupation with the integration stories of newcomer generations in relation to the persisting structural inequalities that shape opportunities of social upward mobility. This concern over social upward mobility is also found in newer studies on “second- and third generation adaptation.” We find here two tendencies: On the one hand, a comparison looks at different ethnic cohorts that are set in relation to dominant societal formations (e.g. “ethnic orientations” vs. “national orientations”), which, as Heath (2014) in a recent editorial asserts, continues to be defined by the “headline story of […] increases across generations in cultural and social integration” (ibid. 9). On the other hand, there is an attempt to read the changing dynamics
of second-generation religiosity and institutional inclusion as crucially informed by intergenerational modes of transmission (Diehl and Koenig 2009; Fleischmann and Phalet 2011). The times are, of course, long gone in which such transmission models could be described as linear, unfolding along a three generations axis, and what “transmission” entails and signifies is an issue that must itself be open to debate. The new sociological and anthropological literature on transnational second generations has provided substantial evidence for how the boundaries between generations and between spatial configurations have become porous and permeable.12 Sometimes referred to as “hinge generations,” second generations turn out to be quite malleable, contingent on the contextually specific forms of social integration paradigms and rapidly changing forms of transnational activism and diasporic subjectivity. The latter, depending on context and location, may assume the form of political participation and mobilization in home countries on the basis of an active intervention in transnational social spaces (Fouron and Glick-Schiller 2002) or of a selective transnational brokerage based on differences in social and cultural capital among segments of a group and across diasporic sites (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013).
When we look through the lens of a post-assimilatory approach to study the pervasive effects of normative integration discourses on public spheres and migrants’ everyday life, we need to take account of the new societal role of transmigrants, which nation-states increasingly recognize as important economic and cultural harbingers in a globalizing world. Some of my interlocutors conceive themselves precisely in this transmigrant and cosmopolitan role and capacity, whereas others apparently lack these possibilities and are forced to reckon with the material constraints of migrant labor and the exclusivist effects of citizenship and asylum law in their daily lives. Attentive to generational differences and the specifics of age and cohort, my work pays attention to the socio-political conditions that forge the emergence of youth as social and political actors. I aim to show that this process contributes to how diasporic practices and memories acquire significance in specific locales. In both Frankfurt and Toronto, we encounter next generations as key actors of social mobilizations that both keep alive debate and culture within community organizations and reassess collective commitments. These mobilizations often entail a reorientation to modes of piety and religiosity in relation to allied agendas of social movements that often have a secularist approach. As we will see, the neat distinction between the secular and the sacred is itself challenged by these young social actors.
In contemplating the sociological concept of generation, it is important to understand the social transactions between generations and the specific locations of the current generation without falling into the trap of assuming a uniform historical experience. Accordingly, instead of a simplistic and homogenous model of post-1984 generations, I seek a differentiated concept of generational effects that intersects with the other sociological factors delineated here. While the issue of generation receives careful elaboration in the text, I should also point out that memories of violence are seen in their constitutive role insofar as these are actively shaped by youth as political actors. We would be entirely ill-advised to read their discourses merely in terms of a “response” or of “coming to terms with” past trauma. While in some parts of the book I show how the language of trauma has become formative for representational tropes around 1984, I also show how religious and messianic imaginaries inform postmemory in unique ways that matter for diasporic religious identities.
HETERODOXY AND HERESY
It might seem counter-intuitive to organize this book around institutional processes of “religion-making” (Dressler and Mandair 2011), when for well over two decades, a chorus of critical voices has deemed the prioritization of religious diaspora a rather problematic inheritance. I agree that posing religious imaginaries as somehow more authentic by naturalizing modes of collective belonging around often exclusivist and patriarchal models of nation and sacred territory certainly creates all kinds of social hierarchies and misrecognizes the structural problem of how categories of religion have been mapped upon colonized societies and their populations with long-term detrimental effects (Abeysekara 2008; Mandair 2009; Masuzawa 2005). Yet, in the context of the global war on terror, we need to examine the emerging practices of the governing of religious others (and religious agency as a suspicious category) and, at the same time, rethink the role of religious attachments, practices, and imaginaries as they continue to change and, through such change, alter diasporic imaginaries and transnational social fields. This is the main reason why I have conceptualized the book chapters in a palpable way so as to unpack the political discourses and everyday practices through which representations of Sikh and Ahmadiyya diasporas have become entangled in concrete sites of the institutionalization of religion in late modern states.
There is a proliferating discourse on the contested nature of religion and the secular in Social Theory today (de Vries 2008; de Vries and Sullivan
2006), which is beginning to show its effects in the area of diaspora and migration studies. This is true even if much of the debate seems tailored to deconstruct the dominant discourse on religious violence, which William T Cavanaugh (2009) has exposed as a founding myth that results in all kinds of problematic assumptions regarding religious subjects today. Although all of the chapters in this book reflect the scholarship and debate on violence and religion in one way or another, I make no suggestion that this relationship is a stable one or that it serves as a primary lens of what diasporic imaginaries are about. As a matter of fact, it is through a detailed examination of specific practices and imaginaries that I want to recover forms of heterodox, heretic, and precarious subjectivity that unsettle homogenous representations of (religious) diaspora. I would further argue that this approach, in venturing into a critical reading of precarious religious subjectivity, can inform the ongoing project of critical diaspora studies.
Yet, as we have seen with postcolonial theories of diaspora in the past, there is a strong inclination against permitting perspectives that are rooted in fields and discourses identified as religious to occupy the same status as secular critique. The shortfalls of secular critique (the difficulty of historically isolating the secular from the religious and the political process of universalizing specific Enlightenment discourses as having inherited secularism) have been widely debated in the new literature on postsecular religion (e.g. Asad 2003; Sullivan, Shakman Hurd, Mahmood and Danchin 2015). And yet, as Dressler and Mandair (2011) argue, the objective today is not just to deconstruct the inheritance of secularism and understand its various genealogies in political and legal fields but also to point to possible pathways through which the secular–religion binary can be un-inherited (ibid. 18–19). This project has really just begun and it is too preliminary to speculate on what consequences this might have for the project of critical diaspora and transnational studies.13 I do suggest in this book, however, that a focus on precarious diaspora might serve this purpose of un-inheriting, if we can disentangle the concept of precarity from a purely socioeconomic lens and if we are able to theorize precarious religious subjectivity alongside a careful reflection of the everyday lived conditions and practices through which subjects inhabit what Elizabeth Povinelli called projects and spaces of the otherwise.
When thinking about everyday practices of inhabiting alternative spaces and “religious” subjectivities, I therefore do not propose associating religion with either the response to political secularism (the mutual effect of state policy and public debates on religious identity/difference politics)
or the retreat from the political (in terms of how certain piety-oriented movements are considered to be depoliticized). This would leave intact the hegemonic view of religion as a separate realm of thought. The specific discourses and practices that hinge on 1984 as a formative event for diasporic imaginaries require us to broaden our perspective on temporality (Chap. 2) and spatiality (Chap. 3) in our conceptualizations of how they shape modes of subjectivity. But it will also be necessary to show how the process of inheriting and un-inheriting the memories of 1984 affect the ways in which Sikh and Ahmadiyya generations position themselves in contemporary times in which they are (1) continuously framed as a problem category of religious attachment in liberal discourse and (2) affected by new political disputes in Punjab that many commentators today argue show an eerie similarity to the events of 1984. I have already examined the history of the Ahmadiyya community’s subjection to routine violence and the impunity by which so-called blasphemy laws have been enacted. This concern with violence has been brought back forcefully since the Lahore attacks of 2010. Notably, in the context of Indian politics too, the situation in Punjab has been aggravated by police shootings after widespread Sikh protests against defamations of the Guru Granth Sahib and an unfolding debate on the political entanglement of sant movements such as the Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS), whose figurehead Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh roleplays Guru Gobind Singh (the last of the historic Sikh Gurus and founder of the Khalsa brotherhood) and is alleged to have committed different kinds of blasphemy.14 Sikh diaspora organizations have issued calls for peaceful action and resolutions and various forms of collective action, including the boycott of the Badal government and the need for decentralizing collective decision-making in Punjab. The American Sikh Council15 has also appealed to “the vigilant Sikh diaspora that unless Sikhs wake up and unite under one flag, and approach the world community for justice, the Sikhs will continue to suffer in Punjab and their voices will be stifled, just like it was done earlier prior to and after the Indian army attack on Darbar Sahib and other Sikh Shrines/Gurdwaras in June 1984.” This certainly points to the problematic ways in which representations of diaspora remain entangled in a process of contested sovereignty across borders which affects diasporic subjects in their own sense of belonging. Such issues have mobilized Sikh youth in the past and they have an effect on them today in how they situate themselves toward perceived orthodoxies and heterodoxies of faith.
Sociological theories that deploy concepts of heresy and heterodoxy to account for counter-hegemonic acts on the part of deviant insider subjects
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
unstrung. Now tell me, why don't you want me to see this detective?"
"Because I—I lied to you that day—about the purse."
"Lied to me?"
"Yes, I—I did steal the purse."
THE PENITENT
At Hester's startling avowal, Betty shrank away in involuntary aversion.
"Oh!" she cried, and her truthful eyes judged the girl sternly.
The culprit faced her in pleading appeal. She had played her last card recklessly, impulsively, risking everything. She never understood afterward what had impelled her to this dangerous unnecessary confession. Was it fear or calculation? She knew that if Betty betrayed her it was all up with little Hester, and she had no reason to believe that Miss Thompson would condone or tolerate an act of flagrant wickedness. Yet she had told her.
"A thief!" shivered Betty.
"Yes, a thief," flung out the other, in half defiance. "You don't think I'm good enough to touch, do ye? Maybe I'm not, but—say, do you want to know what made me steal—the first time? Do you want to know?" The words tumbled out in a fierce tumult, and Betty, fascinated, watched this strange girl as her dark eyes blazed and her nostrils quivered.
"Tell me," said Betty gently, "sit here—tell me everything." And, leading the way to the davenport, she placed Hester beside her. "Now!"
"I was only a kid—about twelve," panted the penitent. "We lived on Orchard street."
"New York?"
"Yes. In a rotten tenement and—my sister Rosalie—she was seventeen —she took care of us, me and my little brother."
"Wait!" interposed Betty. "Is this true? You mustn't try to work on my feelings. You must tell me the truth. You know you haven't—Hester—at other times."
The Storm girl sat biting her red lips and twisting her fingers nervously. "I've been crooked," she said, speaking low, "but, lady, I hope God will strike me dead if——"
"Hush! Don't say that."
"I do say it. I mean it. I want you to believe me. Nobody's ever believed me or—been kind to me—except you and——" she was sobbing now, "if you're going back on me—I don't care—for anything." She sprang up suddenly with a fierce gesture, and pointed to the door. "Go on! Call in Grimes! Give me up!"
"I don't want to give you up," soothed Betty; "but—I must do what is right. Sit down! Tell me the rest. What about Rosalie?"
At the mention of her sister, Hester's face softened.
"Say, she was the finest girl, the prettiest girl, you ever saw. That's why I liked you, because you—honest you did—you made me think of Rosalie."
"Yes?"
"But she wasn't strong. She worked thirteen hours a day at a sewing machine, a damned heavy thing that'd break your back and—she never went to the country and—she never had a pretty dress."
"What a wicked shame!"
"Every cent she made she spent on us. Then she got sick and—she coughed a lot and—she couldn't work the machine. There she'd lie on the bed, in a little back room, with her face all flushed and I'd hear her say, 'Please, God, take care of Hester and Jamie, and let me see the green fields —just once.' Say, lady, what would you have done, if you'd been me?"
"I—I don't know," murmured Betty, wiping her eyes.
"S'pose ye didn't have a dollar in the world?" pursued Hester eagerly, "and the agent came for the rent, a red-faced devil with a big diamond pin, and s'pose he tried to kiss ye and ye knew that pin might save Rosalie, say, would ye have pinched the pin?"
"You mustn't ask a—question like that," replied the other, trying vainly to keep back her tears.
"Yer cryin'! Then—then ye don't despise me?"
"I'm sorry for you, so sorry, but—Hester, you must make amends for what you've done, you must give back the purse."
"I will."
"Where is it?"
"You'll stand by me? You won't let them take me?"
"I'll do the best I can for you. Where is it?"
"You won't tell Grimes that you were in the railway carriage?"
"I must tell him, if he asks me. I can't remain in a false position."
Hester's eyes filled with tears. "Then that settles me. He'll get the truth out of you; he'll twist you around his fingers. My God! They'll send me away for ten years!"
"Be quiet. Let me think."
Distressed and perplexed, Miss Thompson walked back and forth trying to decide what she should do. And Hester in wide-eyed supplication watched her, knowing well that her fate was trembling in the balance. If she could only think of something—something that would influence this fine, high-toned girl, whose soul could not be reached by any base appeal, she realized that.
At this moment there sounded beyond the conservatory the sharp call of a whistle, low and sinister.
"What's that?" started Betty.
Hester listened in tense alarm. "It's Grimes. He's got a man outside. Say," she quivered, "what are ye goin' to do with me?"
"What can I do?"
"Hide me somewhere until Grimes has gone. Will ye?" she begged.
As Miss Thompson studied the wretched girl she felt like an avenging angel who, without quite understanding how, had been changing into a benevolent fairy. Here, cowering before her, was a fugitive from justice who should, no doubt, be given up, but somehow, Betty could not do it.
"Hester," she said. "I'm doing wrong, but I can't help believing there is good in you and—I can't send you to prison. You can stay in my little room —there!" She pointed to the mezzanine door.
"Oh, lady, ye'll do that for me?" Hester seized Betty's two hands and pressed them to her lips.
"Wait! It's understood that you give back the money—the stolen money."
"Sure! I'll tell ye where it is and you can give it back yourself."
"I'll give it to the bishop. He's on his way here now."
"The bishop? He don't know I'm here?"
"He knows nothing. I'll tell him that—I'll say that the person who took the money is sorry and—I'll save you somehow."
"You give me your promise—your promise true?"
"I give you my promise—true," repeated Betty firmly. "Where is it—the money?"
Now, briefly and humbly, Hester told the truth about the bishop's purse, acknowledging her own wrongdoing, and tracing the treasure from her capture of it on the train up to the moment of its hiding under the rose bush.
"I see," said Betty. "You dropped the purse in my golf bag when they came to search you on the train?"
"Yes," confessed the other.
"And—and—oh, it's all clear! It was to get the money out of my golf bag that you came here. Was it?" she demanded.
"Yes."
"And now this five thousand pounds is there in the conservatory— hidden in a flower pot?"
"Yes. You'll find it there. I wouldn't touch it. I hate it. But, lady," she pleaded, "don't take the money out until Grimes has gone. He's watching everywhere, and—he's liable to see you and—that would queer me. Promise ye won't take the money until Grimes has gone?"
This seemed reasonable. "Very well, I won't take the money until Grimes has gone," agreed Miss Thompson. "Now come! I'll show you the way."
Betty started for the winding stair, but Hester caught her arm with an eager movement.
"See here!" she said and her eyes were warm with gratitude. "You've been good to me and—I know something that'll make a lot of difference to
Mr. Baxter. A cablegram came for him this morning."
"A cablegram?"
"Yes. And if he don't get it before twelve o'clock, it's all up with him."
"Before twelve o'clock? How do you know that?"
"I stood at that door while Anton was on the phone talking to a man named Henderson."
"Mr. Baxter's enemy!"
"That's what. Anton's a crook in Henderson's pay. He got this cablegram and held it back. If you don't believe me"—swiftly she drew the paper from her dress—"there!"
"Heavens! When did this come?"
Hester studied the yellow form. "Must have left New York at ten o'clock last night. See? Must have got here before anybody was up—except Anton."
"The scoundrel!" Betty hurried to her desk and rapidly deciphered the message. "This is terrible! There isn't a moment to lose. If something isn't done before twelve o'clock, Mr. Baxter will be ruined. I must think. Come to my room."
A moment later the two women disappeared into Betty's chamber, and, scarcely had the door closed softly after them, when Grimes entered. He had a round, red face, a stubbly, reddish mustache, and small, peering eyes. He wore a checked suit and was smoking a large black cigar. Altogether he looked the typical American detective familiar in farce; but Grimes was not a farcical person; on the contrary, he was one of the most formidable men connected with Scotland Yard, a silent man, and it was considered bad business for the criminal who had Grimes on his track.
The detective glanced carelessly about the big room, moved here and there, picked up the red-covered code book that Betty had left on her desk
and was frowning at its mysteries when Betty herself appeared on the landing above the winding stair.
"I beg your pardon," she said with challenging directness. "May I ask what you are doing there?"
"I was going to ask you the same question," answered Grimes quietly. "What are you doing—there?"
"I'm attending to my duties as Mr. Baxter's secretary," she said coming down the stair and trying not to seem ruffled.
"I see. That's an interesting little door." He pointed to the mezzanine chamber.
"Yes. Are you an architect?"
"No. I'm an officer from Scotland Yard—Mr. Grimes. Just looking around a little while I wait for Mr. Baxter. Don't let me disturb you."
He strolled off toward the conservatory, but turned at one of the French windows. "Oh! May I ask your name?"
Betty glanced up from the code book which she was consulting in nervous haste.
"I told you I am Mr. Baxter's secretary."
"Yes, but—your name?"
The girl drew herself up to her full height and, looking the man straight in the eyes, said simply, "Miss Thompson. Really, Mr. Grimes, you must excuse me now."
The detective gave her a keen glance that seemed to take in every detail of her face and person. "Certainly," he said, then, bowing politely, "I'll see you later, Miss Thompson."
CHAPTER XXXI
LIONEL TO THE RESCUE
Without losing an instant Betty flew to the telephone.
"Hello! Hello!" she called impatiently, but there was no response. She worked the lever, shook the receiver, tapped her foot, and winked her long eyelashes rapidly, all to no avail. The instrument seemed dead, there was no familiar buzzing of the wires and it presently occurred to her that this was no ordinary delay of a heedless operator; there was something wrong with the telephone itself.
"Oh, dear!" she cried. "What shall I do?" And, hurrying to the conservatory window, she looked out despairingly among the palms and lilies. Then her face lighted as she saw Lionel coming slowly across the lawn. In one hand he carried his inevitable watering pot and in the other he held an open book that he seemed to be studying.
"Mr. Fitz-Brown! Come here—please—quick," she called.
"Right-o!" answered the amateur gardener and blissful lover, and leaving his watering pot, but clinging to his book, Lionel presently joined the young lady in the library.
"I say, I'm awfully pleased you called me," he beamed. "You know you're an awfully intelligent girl, Miss Thompson, and all that sort of thing and—do you happen to know anything about—er—bugs?"
"Bugs?" gasped Betty.
"Isn't that what you Americans call them? We call the little beggars beetles. This is an American book, 'Brown's Compendium of Familiar
Bugs.' Rather good, that? They are familiar. Er, what?"
"Please, Mr. Fitz-Brown," she protested, but there was no stopping him.
"Potato bugs and spinach bugs and cauliflower bugs," he rattled on. "I say, do you know how to tell a spinach bug, Miss Thompson?"
"No, but——"
"Ah, I was sure you wouldn't," continued the delighted agriculturist. "Spinach bugs have red backs and green whiskers. Say it over to yourself— red backs and green whiskers."
"My dear Mr. Fitz-Brown, I really can't——"
"Oh, yes, you can," insisted Lionel. "It's perfectly easy except cauliflower bugs. Let me see! Cauliflower bugs," he paused to consult the book.
"You must put the book away and help me. I've got to send a cablegram. There isn't a minute to lose."
The gardener's face clouded with visions of charges at a shilling a word. "A cablegram! By Jove! I'll see, but——" he began to search through his pockets.
"It isn't that," said Betty. "I have the money. It's to get it there in time. The cable office is a mile away and we've only twenty minutes. I tried to telephone it, but the thing doesn't work. I'm afraid Anton has tampered with the wires."
"Oh, I say!"
"And, knowing what I do of Anton, I daren't send him with the car. Oh, it's maddening!"
"I can drive a car, Miss Thompson, if that's all you want."
"Really? Oh, splendid! Just a second while I write the cablegram."
She started for the desk, but stopped midway with a look of despair.
"It's no use! I had forgotten. Mr. Robert Baxter is out with the car; there's nothing to be done." She sank hopelessly into a chair.
Lionel Fitz-Brown stroked his mustache, adjusted his eyeglass and then, with a flutter of the ancestral spirit, rose to the situation.
"But, my dear Miss Thompson," he drawled, "if we have twenty minutes, I don't mind telling you that I can do my mile in ten."
Betty sprang to her feet. "You can?"
The gardener screwed up his eyeglass and nodded. "Sprinting is one of the things I do rather well."
"Then sprint—for your life," cried the girl excitedly. "If you get this message off before twelve o'clock—wait—where are those cable forms? Ah, here!"
And, snatching up one of the yellow blanks, she began to write with feverish haste. "Pontifex, New York. Can you read that?"
"Pontifex? I say, it sounds like a potato bug," chuckled Lionel, peering over her shoulder.
"That's the cable address. Now, the rest of it—no time to put it into the code."
Then she wrote rapidly: "Authorize you to sell for my account 50,000 shares Independent Copper. Act immediately. Gramercy."
"Gramercy?" questioned Fitz-Brown.
"That's Mr. Baxter's code signature. Here! And here's the money." She handed him the cablegram and some gold pieces, then anxiously looked at her watch. "Sixteen minutes. Can you make it?"
"Four to one I can make it, but, Miss Thompson, don't you think we ought to—er—I know you're a deucedly clever girl and all that sort of thing, but I really think——"
"Don't think! Run as you never ran before."
"Right-o! I'm going. Now watch me," and, dropping his precious book on bugs, Lionel Fitz-Brown darted out through the conservatory and a moment later this amiable descendant of the crusaders might have been seen, in gardener's costume, his eyeglass firmly in place, rushing madly along the dusty highway in a manner that would certainly have astonished his exquisite friends in Mayfair.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE STORM
Long after the luncheon gong had sounded Betty Thompson sat at her desk in the library, too agitated to think of eating, too anxious about the outcome of things to take her mind off the tense situation. Whichever way she turned perplexities confronted her. There in the conservatory was the stolen money, but she had promised not to touch it until this wretched detective had gone. When would he go? And there in her little chamber was this unfortunate girl, Hester Storm, whom she must save somehow, but how? And, wandering about the village of Ippingford—what could be keeping him?—was Lionel Fitz-Brown, bearer of that desperate cable message that might save Hiram Baxter or—or it might ruin him. Oh, dear, why didn't Lionel come back?
When Horatio entered presently with some food on a tray, a little cold meat and a salad, Betty shook her head sadly. She had no appetite, she really could not eat.
"You seem troubled, my dear," said Merle with kindly concern. "Is there anything I can do?"
"No, thank you," she answered wearily.
The clergyman put down the tray, looked about him cautiously, and then, tiptoeing close to Betty, he whispered: "Miss Thompson—that man— the detective?"
"Yes?"
Horatio lifted his chin wisely, and, with a tragic thumb, pointed to the library door.
"He's still waiting. He seems to be everywhere at once. In the words of King Solomon, he lieth in wait at every corner. I wish he would go away."
"I wish he would," she sighed.
"He acts as if he thought we were sheltering a fugitive in this house."
Betty started. "Is that such a dreadful thing to—shelter a fugitive?"
"My dear," said the curate earnestly, "I am speaking of a fugitive from justice, a malefactor, and to shelter such a person is tantamount to becoming a partner in his crime. It is a grave offense in the eyes of the law; it means imprisonment; it means——"
"Mr. Merle," interrupted the girl indignantly, "do you mean to tell me that if a repentant sinner came to you for help and protection you, as a Christian, would refuse to shelter him?"
Horatio stroked his side whiskers and opened and closed his mouth several times with clerical deliberation.
"This is one of those delicate questions, Miss Thompson, one of those delicate questions that—that——"
But Betty would not be put aside with pompous generalities.
"Mr. Merle," she asked earnestly, "suppose you had made a promise to shield some one, to save her from a terrible disgrace?"
"Some one who had done wrong?"
"Yes, she has done wrong, but—she is sorry for it—she has made amends."
"Then, my dear, your duty is plain. If she truly repents of her sin, and if you have given your promise——"
"But suppose keeping my promise to save this person—suppose it means—telling a lie?"
"Ah," replied the clergyman, solemnly lifting two scandalized palms, "it is my duty to forbid you, my child, under any circumstances to tell an untruth—even to save another from destruction."
As he uttered these words he blinked uneasily behind his powerful glasses, and immediately added with nervous haste: "I say that as a minister of the church, but—er—as a man——"
"Yes? As a man?" she questioned eagerly.
It is impossible to know how Horatio would have extricated himself from this dilemma, for, just as he was searching for some theological barrier against the girl's persistence, the telephone rang sharply.
Betty took up the receiver. "Yes?" she answered, while the curate wiped his brow and observed this fair American with wondering interest. What a country America must be, he reflected, if so charming and clever a young lady was a specimen of its secretaries! What must its leisure class be? Then he remembered that Hiram Baxter had once assured him that plumbers and gasfitters were the only leisure class in America. He had asked Harriet to make a note of the fact. Extraordinary, this American aristocracy of plumbers and gas-fitters!
The secretary, meantime, was listening, with brightening eyes and a flush of pleasure, to the telephone message.
"Don't you know who it is?" she smiled. "Miss Thompson. Yes, I was in Brighton, but I came up here this morning for—for some things."
Then there was a pause of listening, while the girl's face took on a startled expression. "The Bishop of Bunchester? Oh! I see. Very well, I'll tell Mr. Merle." And she hung up the instrument.
"It was Mr. Robert Baxter," she explained to Merle. "He is on his way here in the motor with a friend of yours."
"A friend of mine?"
"I suppose he's a friend of yours—the Bishop of Bunchester."
"Bless my soul!" exclaimed the curate. "The Bishop of Bunchester!" He took off his glasses and rubbed them nervously.
"They will be here shortly and Mr. Robert wanted me to ask you," her eyes twinkled mischievously, "I don't understand what you have to do with it, Mr. Merle, perhaps he meant Mrs. Merle, but he asked if you would please see about one of the guest rooms."
"Quite right, my child," answered the clergyman gravely. "I will take great pleasure in arranging everything for his lordship. You see, I am—I am one of the servants in the house."
With a sort of humble dignity Horatio took up the tray while Betty stared at him in puzzled interest.
"Oh, Mr. Merle!" she said. "If you don't mind leaving that tray, perhaps I might eat a little—later."
"Certainly. I'll leave it here. By the way, my dear," he paused at the door, "the difficult question—that was troubling you?"
"Yes?"
"Why don't you put it to the bishop?"
"Perhaps I will," said Betty, and, long after the curate had gone, she sat still at her desk, thinking. Nor could all her worries and perplexities silence the glad thought that very soon she would see the man whose voice had just thrilled her over the telephone, the man who, without knowing it, had made her suffer, and who now, without knowing it, had made her happy.
Following a sudden joyous impulse, Betty took a key from her bag and, opening the top drawer of her desk, drew out, with loving touch, a small book beautifully bound in dark green leather. It was a little volume of the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius. And her eyes fell upon one of her favorite marked passages:
"It is in thy power, whenever thou shalt choose, to retire into thyself. For nowhere, either with more quiet or freedom from trouble, does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that, by looking into them, he is immediately in perfect tranquillity; and I affirm that tranquillity is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind."
She pondered these comforting words, then, shyly, with a little gasp of pleasure, turned back to the flexible cover, where a flap of silk formed a thin pocket for some few sacred things, a picture of her mother, a faded and flat-pressed flower and four-leaf clover that once had been important, and, with these, the typewritten letter that Bob Baxter had dictated to her in this very room, the letter beginning "My dearest Betty" that she had shamefacedly saved from rumpled oblivion in the scrap basket, and ever since had treasured among her precious possessions.
Once again Betty read over this wonderful epistle, and she recalled all the nice loyal things Bob Baxter had said that day about his little pal of olden times. Did he mean them then? Had he forgotten them now? She
sighed. He couldn't have meant them very much and be carrying on as he was with Kate Clendennin. Poor little pal of olden times!
And now a singular thing happened. As Betty looked fondly at the typewritten words she suddenly had an uncomfortable feeling that some one had entered the room and was looking at her. There had been neither sound nor word, but she knew that a person was standing there. And, glancing up, she saw Hester Storm at the half-open door of the mezzanine chamber, her dark eyes fixed on her benefactress in silent supplication.
"Oh!" cried Betty, in quick self-reproach.
Hester touched a warning finger to her lips and disappeared into the chamber. Whereupon Miss Thompson, dreading some new development, moved swiftly toward the little stair. On the way she stopped, in an impulse of kindness, and took up the tray of food.
"Poor girl! She's had nothing to eat," she thought, and, a moment later, she joined Hester in the bedroom.
Thus it came about that when Robert Baxter, in brilliant color and fine spirit, burst into the library a few minutes later, eager to see Betty Thompson, he found the big room empty. But there on the davenport were signs of a recent feminine occupation, suede gloves, a smart traveling hat and veil, and a lizard skin bag with silver monogram. Betty was evidently somewhere about, and the young fellow settled himself down to wait. He must talk to Betty, he must explain that he hadn't meant to hurt her feelings the other day at Brighton. He was only having a joke with her—why, he wouldn't hurt her feelings for the world.
As the young man glanced about the library his eyes fell on the little volume of Marcus Aurelius, and, taking it up carelessly, he came upon the letter shut within its pages. He had no thought of prying, indeed, he had no idea to whom the book belonged, and, before he realized what he was doing, he had read his own letter.
"By the Lord Harry!" he muttered, and the hot blood rushed to his face as he understood what this meant. That dear girl! His Betty! To think that
she had kept that letter! He remembered seeing her crumple it up and throw it in the waste basket. She must have stooped down and picked it out again —and smoothed it—and folded it—and kept it. His plucky little pal! His Betty!
Bob rose and strode unhappily about the room. What a fool he had been not to recognize Betty! Couldn't he have seen that she was no ordinary secretary? My God! A child would have understood. And the worst of it was he had liked her all the time, he had looked at her and wondered about her, and—and then he had gone and made a silly idiot of himself with Kate Clendennin. It was sickening.
Bob had just brought himself to this state of righteous penitence and self-abasement when the door from Betty's chamber opened, and Betty herself appeared. She was stronger and happier now from having cheered and strengthened a disheartened sister woman. She was resolved to give Hester Storm this one last chance that she begged for to make good. She would try to save the girl from prison. She would hide her for a few hours, until Grimes had gone. This much she had promised sacredly to the pleading penitent, and she would keep her word.
At the sight of Betty, Bob went toward her eagerly, holding out his hands.
"Betty! Betty!" was all he could say.
"There!" she said, smiling happily and giving him her hand. "It's all right, Bob; it's all right."
"No, no, it's all wrong," he insisted.
She loved his nice naughty child penitence. Nor did she object to his masterful way as he drew up chairs.
"I've a lot to tell you," he went on, "but——"
Her dimple deepened at his embarrassment, and she reflected that he certainly needed a woman to help him pick out his cravats.
"I'm listening," she said demurely.
"This is the first chance I've had to speak to you since that day at Brighton—when you—
"I'm sorry I—I lost my temper, Bob," she whispered.
"Sorry," he burst out. "Why should you be sorry? You did the right thing. You called me down, but—you didn't say enough—not half enough."
"I didn't?"
He caught the mischief of her eyes, and, suddenly, as they remembered Betty's slashing outburst, they both were seized with a wild desire to laugh.
"My little pal! Betty Thompson!" he exclaimed in the old cordial way. "Say, why didn't you tell me about this—secretary business?" He tried to take one of her hands in his, but she drew it away gently. "Why didn't you, Betty?"
"I—I didn't want to," she answered in a low tone.
"That's no answer. I don't see why you did it."
"You don't? Bob, you must see why I wanted to help Guardy when he's been so good to me, and—he had no secretary, and—I've been so extravagant. Think of all the money Guardy has given me, and I—I supposed it was mine, I thought it was money father left me, but—he really left nothing. He—he left nothing."
"Nothing? He left the finest, pluckiest girl in the world. And, anyway, I don't see why you had to hide your name. Why didn't you say you were Betty Thompson and not just any old Miss Thompson? I mean any young Miss Thompson," he added, laughing.
She hesitated before answering.
"Bob, you may not believe me, you think musicians are crazy people— yes, you do, you said so, but—I've worked hard at my singing, and—I have
a voice, a fine voice. I've sung in concerts, and—I'm going to make a name for myself, not like Melba or Emma Eames, but—well, you'll hear of Elizabeth Thompson some day, and it won't be as a secretary pounding on a typewriter, either; it will be as a singer. So there!" She drew herself up with a flash of the eye and a lift of the chin that made Bob thrill as he watched her. "Now you see why I'm just plain Miss Thompson."
"Betty, you know you've been talking nonsense; you know you've not given me the right reason."
Betty dropped her eyes in confusion. "If there was another reason it was a—foolish reason, and——" suddenly she drew back, and, with a start of remembrance, changed the subject. "How stupid! We're forgetting the bishop."
"Hang the bishop! He's lying down. He says we're going to have a storm —says he aches all over—that's how he knows."
"How interesting! I believe we are going to have a storm. Look, Bob." She pointed to a line of heavy clouds advancing formidably in purple black masses.
He shook his head. "I don't want to talk about the storm, Betty, or about the bishop or about any other old thing. I want to talk about you. Tell me about that foolish reason. I love foolish reasons."
"Well, I—I thought it would be—amusing to—see if—you would know me." She doled the words out teasingly, then, with a laugh of half triumph, half reproach: "And you didn't, you didn't!"
"How do you know I didn't? I knew you all right the other day at Brighton."
"Yes, but your mother told you. Oh, you needn't look so innocent. I'm sure she did. Why, you didn't even remember the little keepsake you gave me."
"What keepsake?"
"Ah! I told you! And I've kept it all these years."
She opened her lizard skin bag and produced a silver pencil with a whistle at the end.
"There! I suppose you've even forgotten the whistle." She blew shrilly on the little plaything.
Bob looked at her out of straightforward loyal eyes. "I own up, Betty, I had forgotten. I didn't know you until Mother gave the thing away, but I'll say this, you made me think of Betty. I never knew how it was, but—now I know." He leaned toward her eagerly. "There's only one Betty in the world; there couldn't be two and——"
"It really is going to storm, Bob," she said, rising nervously. "Just hear that wind. And see how dark it's getting."
She felt caressing shivers running up and down her back as she caught the unsteadiness of his voice.
"Sit down, Bob. I'm going to sing for you. I'm going to sing my favorite song."
He tossed his big shoulders impatiently, and she flung him a pouting reproof.
"Oh, well, if you don't care to hear my favorite song."
"I do care, Betty. I'm crazy to hear it, but—hello!" He paused as a pompous cough and ponderous tread resounded through the hall.
"It's the bishop," said Betty, and the words were scarcely spoken when his lordship entered, his benignant smile relieving the formidable impressiveness of his ecclesiastical coat and buckled knee breeches.
"Ah, my young friends," was his sonorous greeting as he peered among the shadowed spaces of the great room. "Ah, here you are! Quite a charming twilight picture!" He took their hands in a hearty grasp, then,
