Durbar (3 page)

‘But she is a foreigner,’ I gasped, ‘she doesn’t even speak Hindi. She never reads the newspapers. It’s a crazy idea.’

The colleague who gave me the news of Sonia’s new political role said he was going next door to the Congress Party’s office to get more details of the working committee’s decision. I went with him. It was close to midnight but the lights were on in all the rooms of the squat, yellow-washed bungalow and the grounds were filled with party workers. They were mostly villagers and had probably been camping in the party office because the election campaign was not yet over. Somehow we found our way through the crush of workers and in the hectic corridors of the party office located a general secretary who told us that Arjun Singh, former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, had proposed Sonia’s name for party president and the working committee had unanimously decided that she would be the best choice. He gave us a copy of the working committee’s resolution.

The next day Rajiv Gandhi’s remains arrived in Delhi in a big wooden coffin, which was placed in Teen Murti House, where his grandfather had lived as India’s first prime minister and where Rajiv and his brother Sanjay
had spent their childhood years. It was one of those Delhi summer days when the heat is so intense it becomes incandescent. Outside Teen Murti House the queues were long and the mourners angry. Plump, middle-aged women and grey-haired government servants talked of the need for revenge. It was not clear yet who was behind Rajiv’s assassination and the general assumption remained that it must have been Sikhs.

The queue I stood in moved slowly. It took me an hour to get into the high-ceilinged hall where the closed coffin lay, a large portrait of Rajiv at its head. Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Sikh priests sat beside it murmuring a babel of prayers and the scent of burning sandalwood filled the room. Sonia, her daughter and other ladies of the family sat in white saris on the floor. Sonia’s dark brown hair was tied back and covered with her cotton sari and her face was carefully made up. Even the lower eyelashes she painted on to make her eyes look bigger were in place. I reached out and held her hand, but she pretended to greet someone else. When our eyes met, she looked at me as if I were a total stranger.

How much had changed. What a long way we had come from those days of long lunches in my little flat in Golf Links when she would laugh and gossip and urge me to tell her what was going on in the city. There were so few people, she used to say, who dared speak freely to her and she had got tired of listening to sycophants. Did they think she was so stupid that she could not see through their lies?

After Rajiv became prime minister, our friendship lasted for the first two years and then deteriorated for reasons that to me remained obscure. Except that perhaps Sonia, as the prime minister’s wife, probably wanted around her only people who totally supported her husband. My support for him had waned after the Bofors scandal. When fingers started being pointed at him for corruption in the Bofors arms deal Rajiv seemed to lose confidence. Much was lost because of his inability to do anything to rectify the damage done to Indian democracy and to the fabric of Indian politics during the two decades that his mother ruled India with the populism of a demagogue.

By the time Mrs Gandhi was killed, a deep cynicism had infected not just Indian politics but the soul of India. People had lost faith that things would ever change for the better. One of the reasons why Rajiv won his first election with the largest majority in Indian parliamentary history was because he had become for one brief, shining moment the embodiment of hope.

What had gone wrong?

I
was born almost exactly three years after India became an independent country. My father’s family was landed aristocracy from that part of Punjab which is now Pakistan. They lost their estates and everything else in 1947 when India was divided. Believing that they would be able to continue living in Pakistan, they made no preparation to leave until they were forced to by the violence. My grandmother, a young widow at the time, explained that they had ‘opted’ for Pakistan because their home and their lands, in a village called Rajkot, near Gujranwala, went to Pakistan. She had never been to Delhi, she said, or worn a sari or spoken any language other than Punjabi. My uncle, only seventeen but already a cynic, said, ‘We thought that in Pakistan there would be Muslims ruling us but that was all right because before the British ruled us we were ruled by Muslims – so what difference would it make to us if they became rulers again?’ My father, two years older than his brother and a young army officer, said one of his considerations for wanting to stay in Pakistan was that his regiment, Probyn’s Horse, had been given to Pakistan when the Indian Army was divided.

My mother’s family is from Delhi. Her father was one of the five Sikh contractors who helped Edwin Lutyens build the city of New Delhi. Among the buildings he built was South Block, which houses the Indian prime minister’s offices as well as the offices of the ministers of defence and foreign affairs. As children we used to be taken for walks from Jantar Mantar Road to South Block where our ayahs would read out our grandfather’s name imprinted in a sandstone wall of South Block.

The Sikh contractors who worked with Lutyens stayed on in the new city. They built big houses for their families along the wide, tree-lined avenues, contributed to the building of Sikh temples and owned most of
Connaught Place. These contractors became rich enough to graduate from being nouveau riche to becoming part of the aristocracy of Delhi, replacing the prominent Muslim families that left for Pakistan. When millions of Punjabi refugees came to Delhi from Lahore and Rawalpindi, rich Sikhs like my grandfather helped many resurrect their destroyed businesses and broken lives.

Among the lives my maternal grandfather helped revive was that of his future son-in-law, my father. My father had got engaged to my mother before Partition and the date for their wedding was set for 15 December 1947. After his family was driven out of Pakistan he became both penniless and homeless and it was in a house in Dehra Dun that belonged to my maternal grandfather that he married my mother.

It is my maternal grandfather’s house, 5 Jantar Mantar Road in Delhi, that I remember as being the only permanent home in my childhood. That is where we came from boarding school every summer holiday. My father’s entire extended family were refugees from Pakistan who seemed always in the process of building their new homes. In Karnal, itself a broken down sort of half town, they lived in half-built houses on plots that had been marked out in the fields. My parents moved constantly from one army cantonment to another and I never got to thinking of the houses in those army bases as home. They always had about them the atmosphere of a transit camp. So 5 Jantar Mantar Road with its Persian carpets and hunting trophies on the walls, its carefully decorated bedrooms and its manicured gardens seemed to my childhood mind like a sanctuary. I remember the house on Jantar Mantar Road as vast, filled with more rooms than we could count and bursting with cousins and aunts and uncles. My mother used to be allotted the rooms she had lived in before she was married. They opened on to a red sandstone courtyard on one side and a garden with colourful swings on the other. Sadly, we never stayed there for long and seemed always to be on the verge of leaving for yet another army cantonment to move into yet another empty, charmless house.

The India of my childhood seemed full of people rebuilding disrupted lives in a country where every commodity seemed always to be in short supply. I can remember grown-ups complaining constantly about shortages. Even such ordinary things as sugar, milk and bread seemed every other day to become unavailable. Sometimes it would be kerosene and petrol that
would be rationed. Everything about life in India had a rundown, makeshift quality about it as if life itself had seen better days, but we saw this as an acceptable price to pay for Independence. If we blamed anyone for India being such a shabby sort of place in which even rich people lived in genteel poverty, we blamed it on ‘colonization’. We were building a new India, after all, and when new things are built there is about them an unfinished quality. In the army messes and the musty old British clubs conversations were often about ‘falling standards of cleanliness and discipline’. Men in immaculately pressed evening clothes lamented, in clipped British accents, about how things had declined after the British left. The circles in which my parents moved blamed this on our new socialist rulers, though nobody blamed the prime minister.

When I was eight I was sent off with my sister to a boarding school that had about it that same new and unfinished feel.

Welham Girls’ High School was six months old when my sister and I became its ninety-ninth and hundredth students. It did not have proper classrooms or dormitories but functioned languidly out of two old-fashioned houses with tin roofs and long verandas. The houses, we heard, had once belonged to a nawab. When I finished school two years too early at the age of fourteen (because they put me by mistake in the wrong class), India was still a dilapidated, unsure sort of place but it had about it the innocence of a country that believed in its dream of democracy and freedom.

As an army child it was the war with China in 1962 that I remember as the moment when things began to change. I turned twelve that year and was not capable of fully understanding how the Chinese had defeated us, but I remember Krishna Menon, the defence minister, and General Kaul, the Army Chief, being talked of as the villains of the war. Nobody blamed Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru but what I remember repeated in conversations about the war was ‘that scoundrel Menon was making coffee percolators in defence factories’. It made a deep impression on my twelve-year-old mind because it seemed so extraordinary that a factory meant to make guns should be making coffee percolators instead.

By the time of the next war, with Pakistan in 1965, I was in St Bede’s College in Simla which was so removed from politics and current events that even when the sirens went off signalling an air raid we were never sure what was happening. We knew that we were at war with Pakistan and that Simla, as the headquarters of the Western Command, could be a target but
we never really understood what the war was about. A Kashmiri friend called Poornima Dhar would tell us, as we ran excitedly down to the basement when the sirens went off, that it was about Kashmir and we believed her. We had no interest in why the Pakistanis wanted Kashmir. We just knew that they must be wrong and that they were the enemy. I confess that I grew up with such a limited understanding of the world that when I, aged twenty-one, first met a Pakistani in London it surprised me that he spoke Punjabi (not Urdu) and that his Punjabi accent was just like my grandmother’s Lahori accent.

After completing an education that left many, many gaps I ended up doing a course in journalism at the New Delhi Polytechnic only because it was the shortest course on offer. Textile designing was a three-year course and interior design took two years, but journalism you could supposedly master in a year. At some point during that year I realized that I really wanted to be a journalist. So, once I got my diploma from the Polytechnic I started wandering about the offices of the four main English newspapers in Delhi – the
Times of India
, the
Hindustan Times
, the
Indian Express
and the
Statesman
– to offer my services as a reporter.

It did not take me long to discover that women were not popular in the reporting business. There were, I was told, only five women reporters in Delhi at the time and only one of them, television journalist Barkha Dutt’s mother, Prabha, had the temerity to try and do the hard reporting that men did. Defeated and despondent, and only nineteen, I gave up on journalism and took a job as a secretary in a travel agency that had its offices in the newly opened Oberoi Hotel. This was not a good choice. The Oberoi Hotel with its glistening new coffee shop was the favourite watering hole of my mostly idle friends. So many friends came by to ask my grouchy boss if they could take me out to coffee that I got sacked in less than six months. At this point, a kindly, older secretary at the travel agency felt sorry for me and suggested I apply to the Ford Foundation for a job. She knew someone there and could put in a good word for me. I was exceptionally good at shorthand and the fastest typist she knew, she said. For this I must acknowledge the mysterious option we had in Welham to drop geography for shorthand typing. As a result, I did not discover that the earth moved around the sun until I became a journalist but I learned how to type.

The job at the Ford Foundation came through, and I found myself working for a nice Englishman called Kevin Mansell. After several
months of watching me hiding one book or the other under my desk when he walked in, he told me that I was truly the worst secretary he had ever had. Was there not something else I would rather do? When I told him about wanting to become a journalist, he said he had a friend who might be able to help me get on to a training programme run by the Thompson Group in England. A few days later he said I should send an application letter to his friend who worked for the
Evening Mail
in Slough, a town I had never heard of until then. He asked me to mention that as an Indian I would be able to understand the language and the problems of the Indian and Pakistani immigrants flooding into Slough. I followed his advice and, to my amazement, got accepted to work as a trainee reporter for the
Evening Mail
.

Slough was a dismal, ugly town but close enough to London for me to be able to live in the big city and commute to work. In the two and a half years I spent at the
Evening Mail
, I learned to speak English in a Slough accent because I had to phone copy over to copy-takers who found my Indian accent incomprehensible. I learned accuracy from covering magistrates’ courts, speed from covering police and fire stories, and I learned to understand the dreary concerns of local government from reporting on the proceedings of local councils. I could have continued to work in British journalism if I had wanted, but in a short time I got bored with my job and homesick for India. In early 1974 I came home only to find that it was still very hard for women to get jobs in journalism. I had returned confident that since I was a foreign-trained journalist in a country that revered all things foreign it would be quite easy for me to get a job. I was wrong.