The Great Indian Novel (25 page)

‘At first I never doubted that I could provide all that Ashwathaman might need. I could offer him learning, and for food he shared what I was given each day; as for clothing, its lack never bothered me, for what does a Brahmin need but his sacred thread? Or so I thought; but sages, alas, sister, do not know everything.

‘The needs of the son are sometimes the making of the father. I did not want, and so assumed I had brought my son up not to want. But one day Ashwathaman asked me - sister, you will understand this - he asked me for a glass of milk. He had seen rich children drinking this thick white liquid, and he too wanted to have some.

‘Well, sister, I had none to give him. Who in my position would have? You know the price of milk, you know the purposes for which it is used, for tea and sweets and cheese, all luxuries beyond the means of a humble man of learning. But I could not bring myself to tell my son this.

‘I promised him I would get him some, and set out the next morning with but that one purpose in mind. But you know, sister, how people are these days. They will gladly give a sadhu some of the rice and dal they cook in abundance each day, but milk is too valuable a commodity to be wasted on such as me. In the old days a holy man could have knocked on the first sizeable door and be given a cow if such was his need, but I could not get so much as a glassful. Household after household turned me away. “Milk, indeed!” some said. “What do
you
need milk for?” Or
“Haiya,
what will these sadhus expect next? Rice-bowls made of gold or what? Really, there’s a limit, I tell you.” When at last, weary and disheartened, I came home, I found Ashwathaman with a glass in his hand, his eyes shining with excitement. “Father, father, I have tasted milk at last!” he exclaimed. “I asked my friends, and they gave me some.” I took the glass from him, sister, and put my lips to it. What Ashwathaman had been given to drink was cheap rice-flour mixed with water.

‘I could not bear to look at the child, gazing at me with an expression of such simple joy in his wide eyes. The pain and hurt that suffused my heart stifled my breathing. That my learning and wisdom had brought my son to this! It is all very well to renounce the material pleasures of the world but one has no right to renounce them for another. I resolved never again to beg for a living. I would find myself a patron, I vowed, and bring my son up to know the good things of life, not just the important ones.

‘I thought instantly of the Englishman who had given me his card. He was now an official of even greater importance in the province. Taking my son with me, I went to his residence. At first the guards would not even let me past the gate, but when I produced the card, a little bent and soiled and curling at the edges, but still unmistakably his card, I was allowed in. Mr Ronald Heaslop, for that was his name, himself met me on the steps of his porch. He was wearing a silk dressing-gown and had a glass in his hand, and he was weaving slightly as he walked, but his speech was clear and his grip on the glass was firm.

‘”Yes,” he said as I approached, “what can I do for you?”

‘I did not like the brusqueness of his tone, but I put it down to the manner of superiority that all Englishmen seem to have instilled in them at an early age, and which they mistake for a sign of good breeding. The haughty stare, the taciturn manner, are simply, I thought, their equivalent of the politeness and respect for elders we teach our children to show. “You remember me, Mr Heaslop,’ I began, and saw from his unchanged expression that he did not. “You gave me this card.”

‘He took it, almost snatched it, from me. “What of it? I give my card to hundreds of people. You could have picked it up from the ground.”

‘My bile was rising, sister, but having come so far I felt I could not simply turn away. “You gave it to me,” I said, “on your departure from Devi Hill
taluk
six, seven summers ago, in return for all the knowledge and instruction I imparted to you, on the subject of the holy
shastras
and our tradi —”

‘”Knowledge? Instruction?” he interrupted me derisively. “You have no
knowledge
you can
instruct
me in, black man. I remember now - yes, I gave you the card. A lot of superstitious twaddle you told me, and I found it amusing, a diverting way to pass the time. But I was much younger then. I’m afraid I no longer find your kind of prating very interesting. Is that all you came here about? Because I’m afraid I really don’t have time for this.”

‘I was smarting at these words, sister, but I was determined not to slink away like some wounded dog. “I came,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster, “because I was in need, and I thought I could call upon our past friendship -”

‘”Friendship?”
he interrupted me again. “Don’t be stupid. We are not here to be your friends, black man; we are here to rule you. There is no friendship possible in this world between the likes of you and such as me; not now, not here, not yet, not ever. You say you are in want; it is no concern of mine, but here - Ghaus Mohammed! Bring me my purse!”

‘I should have turned on my heel and left at that very instant, but exhaustion and astonishment kept me rooted to the spot. The Englishman’s servant arrived with the purse; Heaslop put his hand in and stretched out a fistful of change towards me. Not in the name of any supposed friendship, of course, nor even in acknowledgement of our past contact, but because this gesture defined the proper relations between a British national and a native beggar. I could not bear to move; little Ashwathaman, his eyes wide in fear and discovery, clung to my leg as I stood transfixed. Heaslop waited for a brief moment, saw me immobile; then with a casual, almost careless flick, he flung the coins in my face.

‘Thunder rolled within my breast, sister, lightning flashed through my mind, a storm drenched my eyes. The skies opened, and through the rain that poured down upon us I saw Heaslop returning a little unsteadily to his house. And little Ashwathaman scrabbling in the mud for the fallen coins.

‘A rage filled me such as I cannot begin to describe. “No!” I bellowed. “No!” I seized Ashwathaman by the scruff of the neck and began shaking him in fury. “Not one of those coins, boy, not a single one!” I screamed. His little hands unclenched, and one by one the coins, some big, some small, began to fall out of his grasp. The last one to fall was a rupee coin - yes, sister, more than enough to buy him a glass of milk. But I was determined my son would not drink of an Englishman’s charity.

‘Still holding him by the neck, I propelled my son out of the compound. Ashwathaman, snivelling, kept trying to look behind us. I turned briefly to see the servant Ghaus Mohammed bend to pick up the fallen coins.

‘We walked on, sister, and from that moment a new determination was born in my heart. Of what purpose is our cultural and philosophical heritage, our learning and our history, if it condemns us to being offal at the feet of a Heaslop? I vowed to work for the defeat and expulsion of Heaslop and the government he represents, not only by supporting the Kaurava Party in its just struggle against the oppressor, but by educating and training those who will one day rise to lead our people when we replace the alien system they have thrust upon us.’

‘Will you educate and train us, Dronaji, sir?’ asked Yudhishtir.

‘It will please me,’ Kunti added, ‘if you would accept.’

‘Certainly,’ said Drona equably. ‘Indeed, I should have been quite embarrassed had you not asked. For it is this very task that has brought me here. Gangaji engaged me as your tutor last week.’

One day, Ganapathi, when I was visiting the home of one of our younger party leaders - never mind his name - I found myself the object of the curiosity and admiration of his little son, aged, oh I don’t know, maybe seven. He was sitting at my feet, chin cupped in his hands, and at one stage when his parents were both out of the room, he said to me, ‘Dadaji, won’t you tell me a story?’

No one had asked me to do that before, Ganapathi - one of the hazards of the peripatetic procreation I had practised was the loss of any claims to grandfatherhood - and I was touched by the request. ‘Certainly,’ I said, and embarked upon a story. It was a tale from our ancient annals, the
Panchatantra
or the
Hitopadesha,
I am no longer sure which, and I was telling it rather well, spinning the yarn along with a fluency worthy of a real grandfather, when the boy cut in to ask: ‘But Dadaji, what happened in the end?’

What
happened
in
the
end?
The question drew me short. The end was not a concept that applied particularly to that story - which, as it happens, involved one of the characters embarking upon another story in which one of the characters tells another story and . . . you know the genre, Ganapathi. But even more important, ‘the end’ was an idea that I suddenly realized meant nothing to me. I did not begin the story in order to end it; the essence of the tale lay in the telling. ‘What happened next?’ I could answer, but ‘what happened in the end?’ I could not even understand.

For what, Ganapathi,
was
the end? I know where our modern Indians have acquired the term. It is a contemporary conceit that life and art must be defined by conclusions, consummations devoutly to be wished and strived for. But ‘the end’ isn’t true even in the tawdry fictions that reified the phrase. You want one of those Hollywood films that conclude with the hero and heroine in a passionate clinch, you watch the titles on the screen announce ‘The End’, and you know perfectly well even before you have left the hall that it is not the end at all: there are going to be more clinches, and a wedding, and more clinches, and tiffs and arguments and quarrels and perhaps saucers flying against the wall; there will be the banalities of breakfast and laundry and house-cleaning, the thoughts of which have never crossed the starry-eyed heroine’s mind; there will be babies to bear and burp and birch, with flus and flatulence and phlebitis to follow; there are the thousand mundanities and trivialities that are sought to be concealed by the great lie, ‘they lived happily ever after’. No, Ganapathi, the story does not
end
when the screenwriter pretends it does.

It does not even end with the great symbol of finality, death. For when the protagonist dies the story continues: his widow suffers bitterly or celebrates madly or throws herself on his pyre or knits herself into extinction; his son turns to drugs or becomes a man or seeks revenge or carries on as before; the world goes on. And - who knows? - perhaps our hero goes on too, in some other world, finer than the one Hollywood could create for him.

There is, in short, Ganapathi, no
end
to the story of life. There are merely pauses. The end is the arbitrary invention of the teller, but there can be no finality about his choice. Today’s end is, after all, only tomorrow’s beginning.

I was struggling inarticulately with these thoughts when the boy’s mother returned to drag him off to bed. Saved by the bed! ‘I shall tell you tomorrow,’ I promised the impatient child. But of course I never did, and I fear the boy thought me a very poor story-teller indeed.

Or perhaps he grew to understand. Perhaps, Ganapathi, he came to manhood with the instinctive Indian sense that nothing begins and nothing ends. That we are all living in an eternal present in which what was and what will be is contained in what is. Or, to put it in a more contemporary idiom, that life is a series of sequels to history. All our books and stories and television shows should end not with the words ‘The End’ but with the more accurate ‘To Be Continued’. To be continued, but not necessarily here . . .

Ah, Ganapathi, I see I disappoint you once more. The old man going off the point again, I see you think; how tiresome he can be when he gets philosophical. Do you know what ‘philosophical’ means, Ganapathi? It comes from the Greek words
phileein,
to love, and
sophia,
wisdom. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, Ganapathi. Not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling defect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes. Whereas wisdom, true wisdom, is eternal, immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.

I do not pretend to such wisdom, Ganapathi. I am no philosopher. I am a chronicler and a participant in the events I describe, but I cannot accord equal weight to my two functions. In life one must for ever choose between being one who tells stories and one about whom stories are told. My choice you know, and it was made for me.

My choice you know, and it was made for me.
Does the river ask why it flows to the sea?
I share with you a fragment of experience -
Embellished no doubt, a figment of existence;
But it is true.

It moves me, I do not control it.
When the pantheon marches, can the police patrol it?
It is a shard of ancient pottery -
Awarded to a spade as if by lottery;
But it is true.