The Smoking Gun

I was in the living room with my parents, chatting about matters mundane and profound, when my father's gaze fell on a shiny black object lying within arm's length on the writing table.

“Where did this come from?” he asked, pointing to it. He hadn't noticed it lying among the piles of papers and neither had I. He was surprised to see it was a gun. “It must be Aai's,” I told him, recalling that my mother had mentioned having one.

But before my mother could say anything, my father picked it up, pointed it toward the open window and pulled the trigger.

A loud shot pierced the afternoon stillness and a wisp of white smoke billowed out of the gun. ‘Startled’ would be too mild a word to describe how I felt. I was visibly shaken, and so were my parents.

“I didn't think it would be loaded!” my dad cried, echoing my own sentiments.

“I had loaded it with Diwali cracker rolls,” my mother explained, snatching it from my father and putting it back on the table. “I took it out of my handbag a few minutes ago. After all, it's only a toy gun!”

All of us started laughing. Our relief was palpable. We made our way into the kitchen to have hot coffee, even though we were stewing in Mumbai's sweltering heat and the ceiling fans were spinning full speed. The incident was surely the high point of Day Three of my short visit to my parents’ home in India.

Seeing my dad hold a gun, I thought of the times when I had done the same. Twenty years earlier, I had been sitting in a computer lab on the campus of the University of Maryland late one Saturday night when there was a knock on the door. I wasn't unduly surprised; I figured it would be my friend Sridhar inviting me to join him for a coffee break. We had the unusual habit of pulling all-nighters on the weekends every once in a while, for it was easier to concentrate on our post-graduate research projects and make progress at that hour without being interrupted.

When I opened the door, I was surprised to see Kedar. He was all smiles. “I saw the light through the crack in the door. I figured it had to be you working at this late hour.”

I welcomed him into the lab. It was deserted; I was the only night-owl. We sat at my computer and made small talk, but only briefly. He was bubbling with enthusiasm, as if he was eager to tell me a secret. I wondered what epiphany he had had that was itching to be revealed.

“Look what I got!” he cried, reaching for his backpack. “You won't be able to guess.”

I didn't bother guessing - not because I didn't have the patience to make a string of wrong guesses and look foolish in the process but simply because I didn't share his excitement. He could have been carrying two onions for all I knew.

But Kedar pulled a gun out of his backpack. Shiny and silver-colored, it was no bigger than nine inches. I didn't know enough about guns to tell whether it resembled a pistol or a handgun. I took one look at it and shrugged.

My indifference was lost on him. “Hold it in your hand,” he urged, grinning widely.

I might as well please him, I figured. I took it from him in one deft move, pointed it toward the lab's door and placed my finger on the trigger. “Boom!” I cried.

Both of us burst out laughing. I handed it back to him, and it promptly disappeared into his backpack. “I can't tell you where I got it!” he said tantalizingly.

“Perfect! Please don't,” I felt like telling him. “I really don't care.” I used to play with such guns during Diwali while growing up in India; I was sure he did the same. Toy guns didn't have the same allure for me as they once did now that I was no longer a kid. It was easy to guess how he had obtained it: he must have asked a friend to get one from India.

As Kedar left the lab, I wondered for the umpteenth time whether he—the fellow student who stood a couple of inches taller, was a few shades lighter, a year or two younger, shared my green eyes and brandished a toy weapon in front of me—was my second cousin. He and I had a cousin in common, but we didn't have a common ancestor that we knew of. We had talked about it and ultimately decided that we were indeed second cousins. In the midst of the culture shock of moving to America, both of use felt reassured by having a cousin close at hand.

***

I must have known about guns from a very young age, but they became a tad more real to me when I was four. My father had left India to work in the Middle East, leaving me and my mother, who was pregnant, alone in Pune, in the top-floor flat of a newly-built building in a suburb so remote that we could see millions of stars in the night sky from the balcony, shining far more brightly than the dim, yellow street lights of the distant city.

But no matter how bright they shone, with night came the darkness. And with darkness came fear. Fear of ghosts, of evil spirits, scary monsters, not to mention large grasshoppers. What if they spirited me into the darkness in the middle of the night, never to return? My mother wouldn't have a clue; she would be fast asleep in her bed. Or what if an intruder broke the triple locks and bolts that my mother secured on the front door?

“Don't be afraid,” my mother told me one afternoon. “I'll shoot a thief if he breaks in. I keep a gun under my pillow every night!”

“Show me the gun, show me the gun!” I cried, eager to see a real gun.

But my mother demurred. “It's only for adults. I keep it locked in my cupboard during the day. Don't tell anyone though, because it's a secret.”

From that day onward, my fear of thieves receded, although my fear of other apparitions remained undiminished. I felt reassured but also a little uneasy. I couldn't articulate it at the time, but what if my mother mistakenly shot someone who wasn't an intruder?

I lost no time in sharing the secret with my friends from the building, as well as with my kindergarten friend Ajoy. “But don't tell anyone,” I warned them. “It's a secret.” I also told my grandmother on her next visit to Pune. She laughed, much to my bewilderment. I couldn't imagine what was so funny. After all, it was no laughing matter.

Only years later did I learn that my mother had good reason to be afraid, because a prankster would ring the doorbell in the middle of the night and run away by the time my answered.

I was eight or nine when my cousin Amol's parents bought him a toy rifle. My father had returned to India by then; I had a younger sister, and the four of us had moved into my grandparents' flat in Mumbai, a short walk from my cousin's home. The stars had disappeared, but so had the darkness, for everything was brightly lit at all times of the day and night.

Amol would take aim and pull the trigger, only to have a plastic cap shoot out of the gun but get yanked back by the string attached to it. The gun wasn't powerful enough even to harm a fly. Or perhaps it was, but it didn't matter, because houseflies that were adept at evading fly-swatters weren’t going to succumb to a rifle-toting kid. Besides, my cousin was more interested in shooting toy soldiers.

I lost no time in asking my parents to buy me a similar gun. Imagine my shock when my parents refused. “It's too expensive,” said my father. “Guns aren't for little kids,” said my mother. “You can have one when you grow up.”

I was disheartened. How could a gun be safer in the hands of my cousin? Wasn't he almost three years younger than me? And how could I not possess something that he did? Whatever happened to fairness, to equality? I cried and cried but to no avail. My parents steadfastly stuck to their guns.

It didn't take long for my grandfather to notice my plight. He took pity on me and bought me an identical rifle the very next day. I was thrilled. I lost no time in going on hunting sprees with my cousin. Off we would roam - inside the flat and on the building grounds, shooting at targets real and imaginary, but never once wounding any of them.

At long last, I was getting to use what my mother had assured me she had always possessed. I knew at some level that my rifle was a child's toy, but in my mind it was close enough to the real thing.

***

There are times when I wonder whether my views about guns have changed over the years or whether they have remained stubbornly the same.

Early one morning this past summer, more than twenty years after moving to the U.S., I was visiting the town of Newport News on a work-related trip. While I was having breakfast at the hotel, sharing the table with three people, veterans of the U.S. Forest Service whom I was working with, the conversation somehow turned to whether I was a U.S. citizen. I said Yes, I had been naturalized four years ago.

“Do you know anything about the U.S. Constitution?” one of them asked me, smiling sagely, stroking his gray beard.

The half-joking, half-sarcastic nature of his question wasn't lost on me. “I believe I know a thing or two about it,” I replied testily. “But what I care for most is the Second Amendment.”

“Ah ha!” he exclaimed, his smile turning into a grin. “The Second Amendment.”

Oddly enough, the other two men didn't smile. Instead they gave me wary looks. I didn't give it a second thought, though. They may well have had good reasons to be less than welcoming of the Second Amendment. To each his own.

I finished my breakfast, hopped into my car and drove the eight miles to work. The three men followed me in theirs.

Fifteen years ago, when I was relatively new to the United States, I was called upon to assist a customer at a small software company in old-town Alexandria, just across the border from Washington D.C., along the banks of the Potomac River.

As the week drew on and the customer became more comfortable with the computer code, we also talked about all manner of things. The subject soon turned to guns. “Guns don't kill people; it's people who kill people,” he explained, avid gun enthusiast that he was. I can't recollect how many guns he owned; all I remember is it was more than one.

“It's people who use guns,” I countered. “A gun isn't a robot that can wake itself up, take aim at someone and shoot him dead. It's people who use guns to kill other people."

But the customer was adamant. “Guns make us safer,” he adamantly insisted. “They level the playing field, they let us defend ourselves.”

“I might have seen your point had I grown up in this country,” I told him, “But having grown up in India, where ordinary people cannot possess guns, I can testify that it's much safer not to have them. The number of gun deaths is an order-of-magnitude lower.”

He remained unconvinced. Had I known at the time that he was the type of guy who saw safety rather than harm in guns, the type who didn't think twice about dismissing evidence if it flew in the face of his beliefs, I wouldn't have bothered arguing with him.

How could I have gone from being ardently anti-gun to espousing the Second Amendment—the right to keep and bear arms—within a span of fifteen years? What on earth caused the hundred-and-eighty degree turn?

Oddly enough, the answer emerged in the aftermath of the Newtown killings of December 2012. When 20-year old Adam Lanza shot his mother dead in her bed, then killed twenty people, including a dozen school kids in one of the worst mass shootings in America, there was a lot of debate in the media about the Second Amendment.

Only then did it dawn on me that I had mistaken the First Amendment—the one which guarantees freedom of speech—for the Second. You might think of it as a lame excuse, although it’s a matter of shame for me. How could I have missed something so central when I have a reputation—at least in some quarters—for being a traveling encyclopedia?

If only I could go back in time and tell the veterans of the U.S. Forest Service what I truly meant! The gentleman who smiled sagely and stroked his gray beard while asking me if I knew anything about the U.S. Constitution had it right: I didn't.

If anything, my aversion to guns has hardened over the years. I'm sure I'll never do target practice, let alone own a gun. Power for me doesn't flow from the barrel of a gun but from the tapping of a keyboard, and not a musical one at that.

To this day, I cannot tell the difference between a pistol and a handgun. In fact, it is the fear of guns that has kept me glued to the suburbs. Never once have I lived or worked on a long-term basis in Washington, D.C. or any other U.S. city. There's always a chance that I could still fall victim to gun violence, but the chance may be slimmer in the suburbs.

Ever since I had the talk about guns with the computer programmer at the customer site in old-town Alexandria many years ago, I have come across all manner of wingnuts who zealously espouse what they think is the right of ordinary American citizens to possess assault weapons. But I steer clear of them as much as I can, for there's no point in taking a shot at changing their minds.

***

The Newtown killings didn't just clarify my own thoughts about guns; they also shed a light on my mother's.

“I should stop carrying a gun,” she told me when we were discussing the school shootings. “I keep it in my handbag.”

I was astonished, for I didn't know until then that she carried one. She couldn't see my astonishment, for we were speaking on the phone. She was in India, I in the U.S. I didn't ask her if it was a toy gun or a real one, for the answer was obvious. Gone were the days when I believed my mother's claim that she hid a real gun under her pillow at night.

I did ask her why she carried it though. “To scare anyone who tries to harm me on my way to and from work,” she explained. At that, both of us laughed. “I know it sounds ridiculous,” she added.

“Instead of carrying a gun, why don’t you take a musical keyboard with you - the one I gave you many years ago?” I suggested. “If someone threatens you, just whip the keyboard out and play a tune. Either he will die laughing or the music will scare the daylights out of him, and he will promptly turn tail and flee!”

My mother burst out laughing.

I didn't put two and two together at the time, but I later realized she had been getting repeated death threats from a bunch of goons who talked loudly outside my parents' flat almost every night for an hour or two. “Kill her tomorrow when she's on her way to work,” one would tell another. “I won't do it,” the other would say. “We've already paid a professional killer.” A third would ask, “Is she home tonight?”

When I visited India shortly after our phone conversation, my mother did good on her promise of not carrying the gun anymore. She took it out of her handbag and kept it on the table. It was that gun that my father had spotted and pulled the trigger.

Weeks after my cousin Kedar visited me in the computer lab one Saturday night twenty years ago, I learned that the gun he had brought with him was a real one. I don't know where he had got it or why he had it. No wonder he was reluctant to tell me.

To this day, it remains the only real gun I have handled, if only for a few seconds. I have no idea if it was loaded or not, but I sure am glad I didn't pull the trigger. 

August 2013