The Great Indian Novel (34 page)

‘Congratulations, Mr Nichols!’ A veteran administrator named Basham rose to his feet. ‘I have lived and worked in that very district for the last ten years, and I must take my hat off to you. You have just succeeded in putting your international border through the middle of the market, giving the rice-fields to Karnistan and the warehouses to India, the largest pig-farm in the zilla to the Islamic state and the Madrassah of the Holy Prophet to the country the Muslims are leaving. Oh, and if I understand that squiggle there correctly,’ he added, taking the pointer from the open-mouthed expert, ‘the schoolmaster will require a passport to go to the loo between classes. Well done, Mr Nichols. I hope the rest of your work proves as - easy.’

‘Of course,’ stammered a beet-faced Nichols, ‘given the cir . . . circumstances in wh . . . which we’re working, and the short dead . . . deadlines, m . . . m . . . mistakes are possible.’

‘Of course,’ commiserated the old India hand.

‘Field visits are out of the question. Simply not feasible, in the circumstances. We have no choice but to work from maps.’

‘Quite so,’ sympathized Basham. ‘Field visits out of the question, of course I understand. Just think, Mr Nichols, if only Robert Clive had felt the same way about field visits at the time of Plassey, you wouldn’t even have this problem, would you now?’

Yet somehow, Ganapathi, it all went on. Fat little Nichols drew his lines on his maps, and each stroke of his pencil generated other lines, less orderly and less erasable lines, lines of displaced human beings leading their families and animals away from the only homes they had ever known because they were suddenly to become foreigners there, lines of buses and bullock-carts and lorries and trains all laden with desperate humanity and their pathetic possessions, lines too of angry vicious predators with guns and knives flashing as they descended on the other lines, lines now of shooting hitting wounding raping killing looting attackers ripping apart the lines of stumbling fleeing bleeding crying screaming dying refugees . . . In those days, Ganapathi, lines meant lives.

There were other lines too. Lines of glittering socialites queuing up to be received at one of the numerous soirées and balls organized at the Viceroy’s house (‘almost as if he wants to spend the rest of the government-hospitality budget while he still has one,’ a cynic commented). Lines of journalists and cameramen queuing outside his study for quotographs as he emerged after his breezy summits with a succession of dignitaries (‘almost as if he only meets them for the sake of the pictures afterwards’). Lines of stiff soldiers in starched uniforms, ceremonial swords at the ready, to welcome him to airfield after airfield on his whirlwind tours of the country (‘almost as if he wants to see it all before they take away his plane’). Lines of nawabs, maharajas and allied potentates anxious to wheedle some assurance out of him that they wouldn’t have to merge their principalities into either the new democracy or the emerging Karnocracy (‘now there he did the right thing by us: he told the princelings they wouldn’t get a pop-gun out of Britain if they sought to resist’).

At last Vidur came into his own. He was by now sufficiently senior in the States Department, the organ of government that dealt with the princely states, and Drewpad needed an Indian in his higher councils on the eve of a transition from British to Indian rule. Within a short while - and remember a short while was as much as Drewpad gave anybody - he was amongst the Viceroy’s closest advisors. It was he who did the meticulous paperwork that allowed Drewpad to deliver his startling pronouncements on everything from princely privilege to constitutional prerogative. And if occasionally he slipped away to brief Dhritarashtra or myself in advance of an impending development of some importance to the future of the country, he was only doing his larger duty - to the nation, rather than just to the government. As a result of which India did not do too badly out of the partitioning of the army or the division of governmental assets. Vidur, as always, did his work well.

Ah, Ganapathi, those were proud paternal days for me, unacknowledged father though I was. One son was poised to inherit the first free government of India, another had been martyred in the attempt and was revered in almost every Indian home, and the third stood side by side with the British Viceroy as the last arrangements were made for the withdrawal of colonialism. There were few fathers, Ganapathi, who could say, as I could, that history had sprung from their loins.

But I would rather procreate history than propagate it. There are moments in my own story I would rather forget, and that terrible year of 1947 was full of them. For the last time I took to the dusty roads in my sandals to see and learn what was happening, and I saw too much, Ganapathi, I heard too much. The killing, the violence, the carnage, the sheer mindlessness of the destruction, burned out something within me. I could not understand, Ganapathi, even I could not understand, what makes a man strike with a cleaver at the head of someone he has never seen, a son and husband and father whose sole crime is that he worships a different God. You tell me, Ganapathi. What makes a man set fire to the homes and the animals and sometimes the babies of people by whose side he has lived for generations? What makes a man tear open the modesty of a girl he has never noticed, spread her legs apart with a knife to her throat, and thrust his hatred and contempt and fear and desire into her in a spewing bloody mess of possession? What madness leads men to seek to deprive others of their lives for the cut of their beards or the cuts on their foreskins? Where is it written that only he who bears an Arabic name may live in peace on this part of the soil of India, or that raising one’s hand to God five times a day disqualifies one from tilling another part of the same soil?

Yet such were the assumptions and actions of ordinary men in those days, Ganapathi (I will not add the obligatory ‘and women’ because for the most part they did not perpetrate the madness, they were caught up in it, they were the victims of it). And those of us who saw it as madness, who saw it destroy everything we had lived and struggled for, were powerless to stop it. We tried, each in our own way, where we could, but found it too strong for us. Like Gangaji, we walked rather than wept, preached and prayed rather than giving up in despair. But each time we opened our eyes it was to a new anguish, a new despair, which ground its heel into the already unbearable torment of our nation’s suffering.

If only - if only we had said no to Drewpad, and not obliged people to flee! It is flight that makes men vulnerable, it is flight that makes them violent; it is the loss of that precious contact with one’s world and one’s earth, that pulling up of roots and friendships and memories, that creates the dangerous instability of identity which makes men prey to others, and to their own worst fears and hatreds. Those of us whose spirits are moored in a sense of place, whose minds can still climb up the leafy branches of family trees with roots plunged deep into the soil, who from those branches can wave to other friends, neighbours, cousins, rivals similarly perched on theirs, who can recognize the countryside around and name the seeds from which the surrounding fruit had grown -
we
do not murder other people’s children, burn their homes or slaughter their cattle. But those who have been deprived of such security are prompted by their anxiety and bitterness into the roles of either perpetrators or victims - yes, both, because it is often the man who has lost everything who is also the most convenient target, for he is faceless, homeless, placeless, and his lack of identity invites and seems to mitigate attack. After all, no one mourns a nobody.

But we cannot blame only Drewpad. He had a job to do, and that job was to exit, pursued by a bear; if the bear was of his own creation rather than the cause of his departure, it was a bear none the less, and we, as its hereditary keepers, remained responsible for its appetites. Gangaji recognized this, and took upon himself the tragedy of the nation. He saw the violence across the land as a total repudiation of what he had taught. All his later life he had seemed ageless; suddenly he looked old.

It was at this stage that he turned to that unfortunate nocturnal experiment which was to cause so much needless controversy amongst his later biographers. In his despair, in his dejection over the state of the country, and in his resultant ageing, he seemed to have lost that incredible physical self-sufficiency that had let him stride up the steps of Buckingham Palace in the English winter in his dhoti. He now trembled as he stood up, needing to lean on both his stick and Sarah-behn; and at night he was given to terrible fits of shivering. Perhaps that was what sparked it off - an old man feeling the cold at night - but Gangaji attributed no such simple motive to the decision that he, with characteristic lack of embarrassment, announced to his entourage one morning.

‘Many of you,’ he said, with that combination of simplicity and shrewdness that was uniquely his, ‘will notice a change in my sleeping arrangements from tonight. Sarah-behn will sleep in my room from now on - and in my bed.’ He paused, seemingly oblivious to the consternation his words had engendered. ‘Some of you may wonder what I am doing. What has happened, you may ask, to that terrible vow of old Bhishma, and the principles of celibacy he has enjoined on all of us? Do not fear, my children. Sarah-behn is like a younger sister to me. But I have asked her to join me in an experiment that will be the ultimate test of my training and self-restraint. She will lie with me, unclad, and cradle me in her arms, and I shall not be aroused. In that non-arousal I hope to satisfy myself that I have remained pure and disciplined. And not merely that. It is my prayer that this test will help me to rediscover the moral and physical strength that alone will enable me to defeat the evil designs of that man Karna.’

The Mahaguru, at his venerable age - an age when most normal men should have been dandling great-grandchildren on their arthritic knees - thinking, and speaking, of testing his capacity for arousal! It was, to many, downright indecent, and the thought of their saintly sage wrapped up in the commodious pink flesh of the formidable Sarah-behn was more than most of his followers could bear. Various whispered explanations were discussed, from the obvious one of senility - that this was simply eccentricity compounded by age - to the more esoteric one of Shunammitism, that Gangaji was decadently seeking his rejuvenation through the ministrations of a younger woman. There was no consensus on the matter, but there was rapid agreement on one thing: the story had to be kept from the press. A tight blanket of loyal self-censorship descended on all of us, covering our own discomfort and our leader’s nakedness.

But inevitably, word leaked out about Gangaji’s latest experiments in self- perfection. And while it never circulated verifiably enough to appear in print, it attracted a fair amount of both vicious gossip and sincere curiosity. I think it was in the latter category that the eminent American psychoanalyst, who had questioned the Mahaguru periodically since Budge Budge, came up to him and asked in all earnestness:

‘Could it be that your inability to become the Father of a united India drives you to seek maternal solace in British arms?’

Dhritarashtra was the one man who was equal to the situation. His affliction, of course, spared him the worst scenes of horror and devastation. Not for him the walks through burning villages; not for him the sight of a corpse-laden train, steaming into the station with every man, woman and child in it butchered in the very vehicle of their escape by the people from whom they were fleeing. Instead, Dhritarashtra busied himself in the committees and meetings that planned the end of the empire and the birth of the nations that would replace it. He frequented the conference-rooms and situation-rooms from where what could be controlled of the country was controlled. And he developed a relationship with Lady Drewpad that curiously - and usefully - made him all the more welcome in the Viceroy’s antechamber.

They made a strange pair, those two - the blond patrician and the blind politician, engaged in animated conversation in the rose garden as the world turned itself upside-down around them. Sometimes they would walk, and I saw the deepening lines on Dhritarashtra’s face soften as her words soothed his spirit, heard her infectious laughter dissolve the perennial frown on his prominent forehead, sensed her gently take his hand to lead him over the unfamiliar steps into her life.