The Solitude of Emperors (10 page)

‘They wanted me to write on communalism and how the country was going to tackle it. I have spent my life trying to educate adults to the dangers of sectarianism, but it is, if anything, even more important to mould young minds, don’t you think? Young people, especially young men who are making the journey from adolescence to adulthood, are so full of energy and desires and the need to make their mark on the world that they will turn to anything that will make them feel fulfilled. This is why the fundamentalists find it so easy to recruit them, especially when they feel rejected or cast aside. But if they could be moulded in the right way, what a force for the good they could become!’

‘As I was thinking about how I might make the book interesting enough for a teenager, it struck me that this might be the way in which I could finally write about my emperors: I could use them as examples for my argument on how intolerance could be combated. However, I’m sorry to say the book languished; I’m a journalist, and asking a journalist to write a book is rather like telling a sprinter to run a marathon. And it might never have been written had it not been for the riots and the bomb blasts—they so anguished me that I wrote the book in a frenzy, in less than six weeks, pouring into it all my dreams of what I would like this country to become. I’m not at all sure that this is what my publishers are looking for, although there is nothing in it that an intelligent teenager couldn’t grasp. But that’s not the reason I’m bothering you with it: it’s only that when I was rereading it, I wondered if it might not also have some appeal to young people of your generation, Vijay. I would be greatly obliged if you could read it and tell me what you think of it before I send it to the publishers.’

PART TWO

5

Journey to Meham

In the winter, visitors to the Nilgiris are rare. The gaudy entertainments of the summer are a distant memory, the big resort hotels in Ooty and Coonoor are empty and the mountains are restored to those who live there. I was pleased by this because the relative absence of touts and tourists was very welcome. The Toyota van I boarded to my final destination on the eastern edge of the mountains was almost empty, and I managed to get a good seat by the window. The driver told me that we would arrive in Meham in about an hour, and I settled back in my seat, glad that the journey was almost over. The long train ride from Bombay, an uncomfortable night in a waiting room at Coimbatore station, and the subsequent stretch the next morning by bus up a road that rose by a series of hairpin bends clipped to the mountainside, had left me feeling drained. By the time I changed vehicles in Coonoor, I was looking forward to a bath and the opportunity to rest for a while.

All morning long, as the mountains had loomed like a wall of blue smoke on the horizon, I had looked forward to being amongst them, but they hadn’t made any real impression on me so far. This was not surprising given how exhausted I was feeling, but now, as we neared our destination, I began to take an interest in my surroundings, helped by the invigorating eucalyptus-scented breeze that began to flush the dirt and pollution of the city out of my system.

‘In the old days, the British called the Nilgiris a sanitorium, you know,’ Mr Khanna had told me in Bombay. ‘It was where people went to recover, especially when they were run-down from months of living in the heat and grime of the plains.’

As the van made its way through low rounded hills that might have been plucked from a child’s watercolour painting, past white-washed houses set in exact gardens, churches pleated into sheltered valleys, a golf course edged by a jade-green stream, all this enclosed in a pipe of air so pure you could feel its passage into your lungs, I could see what my host meant.

A few kilometres past Wellington, the road to Meham branched off to the right. A roadside marker announced that our destination was twelve kilometres away. I shut my eyes and had begun to doze off to the sound of the wheels on the road when a bone-jarring crash brought me fully awake. The van had hit a large pothole but it didn’t appear to have been damaged in any way because the driver soon picked up speed again. It didn’t seem a very sensible thing to do because the condition of the road had deteriorated alarmingly. It was pitted everywhere with large craters and in some parts had disappeared entirely, submerged under a foot or so of running water. None of this seemed to deter our driver. He drove as fast as before, crashing the vehicle through all the obstacles that were strewn in his path. I had heard it said that these ugly vans were built to withstand terrain even tougher than the one we were traversing but no vehicle could stand the sort of punishment this one was taking for too long. I wanted to get to Meham, so I leaned forward and was on the point of asking the driver to slow down when he brought the van to a stop of his own accord. Peering through the windscreen, it seemed to me that a part of the mountain had collapsed on to the road. I wondered whether this meant that we would have to return to Coonoor. And if this was the only road to Meham, and if things moved as slowly as I expected them to in a mofussil town, how long would it be before the obstruction was cleared?

‘Landslides are very common in this area,’ my neighbour said unhelpfully, but then uttered the magic phrase, ‘No problem. Our driver is very experienced. ’ As indeed he seemed to be. He began edging the van on to the rubble, and I could now see that a rough passage, barely wide enough for a car to squeeze through, had been hacked through the obstruction. The wheels spun on the loose rock and gravel, and we were all asked to get off to lighten the van. This time the wheels began to gain traction, and the vehicle lurched forward.

As we picked our way through the rock and scree, I noticed that while I had been dozing the landscape had changed completely. Gone were the neatly barbered hills of Coonoor and Wellington with their sprightly cockscombs of eucalyptus and cypress, and sholas in the valleys; everywhere I looked there were towering crags of granite, slick with moisture and almost bare of vegetation. A dirty grey mist that seemed to be drawn deep from within the lungs of the giants that bore down on us poured through the clear mountain air, lessening the visibility ahead. As we climbed back into the van, the dangerous driving conditions began to worry me and I told the driver to go slowly. Either he deliberately chose to ignore me or had misheard, because no sooner were we settled into our seats than he took off at great speed. Fortunately, the road was so bad that it put the brakes on his suicidal notions. Although we were thrown around a fair amount as we ploughed through potholes and puddles, we seemed in no imminent danger of sliding off the mountaintop, and my nervousness subsided, even though the light was dwindling overhead. Perhaps there was going to be a storm. I remembered my host telling me that Meham was prone to more than its share of thunderstorms because of its location at the very tip of the Nilgiris. But I wasn’t too concerned, the town couldn’t be more than a few kilometres away now, and even if by some mischance we were stranded, help would be within reach. We rounded a corner and all my worrying was washed clean from my head by the spectacle that unfolded before us.

Above, the sky had grown dark and muscular and veined with lightning. Below, the earth fell away from the narrow road in tremendous cataracts of living stone, rearing up occasionally into a confusion of jagged peaks before falling again for thousands of feet into the heat-hazed plains. Between the hard, dark emptiness of sky and stone, thunder rolled and echoed without pause, and thorned whips of lightning cracked time and time again. There was no rain and, as if reading my thoughts, my neighbour said, ‘There won’t be rain. This is a peculiarity of Meham: often there are storms without rain, sometimes the Gods just need to play. It’s not called the Tower of God for nothing.’ I looked to where he was pointing and saw, at very edge of the escarpment, dimly visible in the poor light, a smooth almost cylindrical peak rising straight up from the choppy surf of boulders and forest at its base. ‘There is a shrine at the very summit of the Tower of God. It’s one of the holiest places in South India,’ my informant said. ‘It’s been a place of pilgrimage for almost 300 years; people of all religions come to worship at the Shrine of the Blessed Martyr.’ So this was the place that Mr Sorabjee had asked me to investigate. I hadn’t expected it to be so spectacular, however, imagining it to be an insignificant place of worship that had suddenly attracted unwelcome attention because of the troubles elsewhere in the country. The van turned a corner and the Tower of God was lost to view. I asked my neighbour whether it was difficult to get to, and he said it wasn’t if you approached it from Meham town.

‘But the hill itself is very steep,’ he added. ‘There were quite a few accidents in the past but now the government has installed railings in the most dangerous sections, and it is prohibited to make the climb during the rainy season.’

~

After the grandeur of the Tower of God the town of Meham came as something of an anticlimax. Growing like a mould at the base of a mountain, it comprised a cluster of small shops, a bazaar, lodges and showrooms that were mostly engaged in the buying and selling of tea, and further back an untidy straggle of houses. The bus stop was at the edge of town, and I immediately spotted Mr Khanna’s driver standing next to a gleaming blue Contessa. He looked incongruous in his spotless white uniform and peaked chauffeur’s cap but also very grand and I wondered madly for just a few seconds whether I should give him the slip and take a less ostentatious means of transport to my lodging. But the moment passed, and gripping my suitcase a little more firmly than was necessary, I went up to him and identified myself. The chauffeur stowed my suitcase in the boot and opened the back door for me. I climbed in gingerly and sat as carefully as I could on the plush cushioned seat. It was by far the most luxurious car I had ever ridden in. The chauffeur got behind the wheel and the heavy vehicle moved off, its weight soaking up every bit of roughness in the road, so that it seemed as if we were driving on glass.

My host had informed me, back in Bombay, that if ever I got lost in Meham and couldn’t find my way back home I should ask for directions to the Englishman’s House, because that was the name by which the locals knew Cypress Manor. The retired English tea planter who had built the bungalow over a hundred years ago, when Meham had enjoyed its brief heyday as a quieter, healthier, more scenic alternative to Ooty, had picked his location well. The house was built halfway up a hill thickly clothed with cypress and eucalyptus, and commanded an unparalleled view of the town, the tea estates fitting the low rounded hills in the north-west like skullcaps, and in the distance the great wall of peaks that marked the eastern edge of the Nilgiris. The road leading up to the house, in contrast to the other roads in the area, was in an excellent state of repair—I later learned that this was because all the residences on the hill belonged to the wealthiest, most powerful people in Meham.

Cypress Manor was a long, low bungalow with white distempered walls, doors and windows picked out in green paint and a roof of overlapping red tiles. A semi-circular driveway separated the house from the garden, which stretched down the hillside in bright waves of colour. The afternoon was so sunny and clear that the storm that had threatened the Tower of God seemed to have existed only in my imagination.

There were no signs of life anywhere on the property. The driver pulled the car up to the front door, and, precisely on cue, an elderly butler clad in a spotless white veshti and turban emerged and made a deep namaskaram in my general direction. A younger servant followed him out of the house, and bowing if anything even more deeply, took my suitcase away. Unused to such attention, all I could do was stand around awkwardly until the butler asked deferentially whether he might show me to my room.

~

It is remarkable how quickly you can get used to a life of luxury, especially if there is no one around to observe you and make you feel self-conscious. Within a couple of hours of arriving at Cypress Manor, bathed and clad in clean clothes, including a brand-new sweater that I had bought specifically for my sojourn in the hills, I was luxuriating in a deep armchair in the living room sipping a cup of tea that was incredibly flavoursome compared to the rubbish I was used to drinking in Bombay. When I had finished, I decided to explore the house. I wandered through room after room, each as perfectly maintained as the next, the floors and metal polished and shining, the furniture and windows without dust or water marks, the very air of each high-ceilinged space denuded of odour. I could have been in a museum. Nowhere did the house bear any traces of its owner; there were no family photographs or personal mementos, even the paintings and vases of flowers on the carved mantelpiece and sideboards were beautiful but impersonal. I contrasted the burnished neutrality of the house and furnishings with the disorder that marked every room of Mr Sorabjee’s home, and wondered if Mr Khanna looked forward to his annual visits to Jehangir Mansion simply in order to get some clutter into his life, some balance. The sterile beauty and order of the rooms soon drove me out into the garden.