The Solitude of Emperors (4 page)

We mailed a revised and updated copy of the piece to
The Indian Secularist’s
offices on Carmichael Road in Bombay, and ten days later there was a reply. On a postcard, in copperplate handwriting, Mr Sorabjee wrote that he had admired the piece and was willing to publish it if I was open to making some editorial changes.

I was about to dash off a reply, my enthusiasm now as great as my father’s at the prospect of seeing our piece about the unfortunate Raju published, when my father stopped me.

‘If he likes your article, maybe he wouldn’t be averse to employing you. Why don’t you write and ask him about a job?’

He brought home a pile of back issues of
The Indian Secularist
the next day, so my letter to Mr Sorabjee could make suitably enthusiastic references to the magazine, and after several attempts he finally approved my letter of application. My wait for the post from that day on took on the same sort of intensity it had in the days when I had first sent out applications for jobs. This time Mr Sorabjee did not reply as quickly, and I began to lose hope. However, three weeks later I received a response. In his neat script Mr Sorabjee apologized for the delay in getting back to me, but said he’d had to attend to a personal matter out of town; if I was still interested, he would be pleased to invite me to an interview in Bombay. I would be reimbursed second-class train fare to and from the city, and as soon as he had the dates of my arrival he would have me booked into a lodge near the office.

~

The day before I was due to leave for Bombay, my father suggested we go for a walk in the maidan. This was unusual because we didn’t often do things together; there was always a certain distance between us. We walked for a while in a somewhat awkward silence, then my father began talking about inconsequential things—it was clear that this was quite difficult for him. I wondered whether he saw in my departure from K— to the big city something that he should have done twenty years ago; was his hope that I make something of myself intricately bound up with his own long-abandoned dreams? It is often true that the most profound things surface at the end of a protracted conversation, and so it was that after we had completed a circuit of the maidan and were walking back home my father began telling me a story about a cousin of his back in Salem who had been a brilliant athlete in his youth, a long-distance runner. He participated in and won his speciality, the 10,000 metres, in every inter-collegiate and amateur sporting event in the district. His greatest rival for the mantle of top distance runner in the state was a man who studied at Loyola College in Madras. The two had raced against each other once before, but not since they had each grown to be so dominant in their event. The big showdown would take place at the annual inter-collegiate event in Madras, and there was an extra honour the athletes would vie for—a chance to try out for a spot on the Indian Olympic team.

My father told me that his cousin decided to add an extra element to his training routine—he travelled to Madras a month before he was due to compete and ran every morning on the soft shifting sands of Marina Beach, dragging a rickshaw behind him. His endurance had always been a feature of his athletic excellence but now he raised it to a different level.

On the day of the race, the stadium was packed. The Madras man had the stands full of raucous supporters, while my father’s cousin ran virtually alone, with just my father and another boy to cheer him on. He ran a magnificent race, and as the runners came up to the last lap, the crowd fell silent, for the Salem boy looked as fresh as when he had started out, whereas his rival looked exhausted, the breath heaving out of his slender body in great waves. My father’s cousin was in the lead by a few feet, a position he had held for most of the event, and as the gong sounded he raced confidently into the last circuit. His rival held on, barely, and then midway through the lap came the moment the fans had been waiting for, the final kick that would carry one of them to victory. The athlete from Madras, who until then had looked on the verge of collapse, reached deep within himself, found one last pocket of energy, and began accelerating forward. He drew level with his rival, and then began to surge ahead. When my father’s cousin looked for his own kick he found nothing there. He could have run another 10,000 metres without any problem—he had enough stamina to spare—but during his long hours of training on the beach with the rickshaw, which had invested him with prodigious endurance, he had neglected to practise the final sprint that would separate the victor from the rest of the field.

‘What it comes down to in the end is timing and the last push forward. You’ve done everything you can to prepare, Vijay,’ my father said, ‘just don’t ever forget the final kick.’

2

The Indian Secularist

The cornices and fretwork of Jehangir Mansion were crumbling, scaffolding propped up the west wing, but the grandeur of the five-storey building was still unmistakable 122 years after it was first built. Stately gulmohars and peltophorums kept out the tumult of the city from the wealthy enclave in which the building stood. It was from here that the legendary Rustom Sorabjee had published
The Indian Secularist
for a little over twenty of his eighty-three years. The magazine, still printed on one of the last surviving letter-presses in Bombay, had never missed an issue in this time; neither big events nor small—riots, cyclones, government censors, lawsuits, the death of Mr Sorabjee’s wife—had prevented its appearance on the first Monday of every month in the postboxes of its 3,200 faithful subscribers. At its peak, during emergency rule imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the 1970s, when virtually all the mainstream media had meekly submitted to government pressure to conform and prevaricate, the magazine’s defiantly independent stance had caused its circulation almost to quadruple. Once law and order returned to the land, however, the surge abated.

The Indian Secularist
broke no new stories and was printed on cheap paper, but its faithful readership was not buying it for any of these things. They subscribed to it for its mix of informed commentary and analysis of the sectarian mischief of politicians and priests and especially for Mr Sorabjee’s thoughtful editorials that he still wrote out in long hand to be typed up on an old-fashioned Godrej typewriter by only the second secretary he had employed since he had started the magazine. Mrs Dastur, who had come on board when his first secretary had died a decade previously, was a small woman with iron-grey hair and oversized lilac-framed spectacles—an unexpectedly ill-judged touch to her attire, which was otherwise restricted to sober skirts, white blouses and sensible shoes. She was devoted to her employer, and guarded him with a ferocity that anyone misguided enough to cross him soon discovered. Mrs Dastur was the one who announced me the first time I met Mr Sorabjee. She led me into a room with high ceilings which, at first sight, seemed overwhelmingly given over to paper. Old issues of the magazine, newspapers, government reports and files stuffed with clippings were strewn everywhere on the sofas, bookshelves, sideboard and desk.

‘Don’t take too much of his time, he’s had a bad attack of gout,’ she whispered and left.

Her employer was a small man with a large domed head that was totally bald and spattered with liver spots. He put me in mind of a judge, with his commanding nose and deep-socketed eyes—a figure of trust and authority. He shook hands with me, murmured, ‘Mr Vijay,’ and indicated that I should sit on the only chair besides his own that wasn’t littered with paper. A telephone rang in the outer office, and Mr Sorabjee cocked his head as if to hear what his secretary was saying. Then he said quietly, ‘I have published this magazine for two decades, Mr Vijay, and I have rarely despaired as much about the country’s future. Not since we put the insanity of the partition killings behind us have I felt things were so bleak; communalism seems to have become an everyday thing. And all because of a small group of people with a self-serving agenda and those who have been taken in by them. That’s why I was so heartened by your article—the sense of disgust with the way things are is good to see in someone so young. Although we’re one of the world’s oldest civilizations, in many ways we are a young country too, so it’s crucial we chart the right path for the future.’ The large domed head shook as if in sorrow and then he added, ‘But I am sure we will have plenty of time to talk. Shall we start the interview?’

I had prepared for this day as I would for a final exam. With my father’s coaching I had studied wide swathes of Indian history, ploughed through the scriptures of all the major religions and memorized the sayings of holy men on the universality of God. Most importantly, given the bias of the magazine, I was reasonably informed about the violence instigated by religion in the country—over half a million dead during the partition of the subcontinent, nearly 20,000 dead in riots, the majority of them Muslim, in the country since independence. It had made for depressing reading, the endless catalogue of destruction and death engineered by calculating politicians and holy men, but I had carried on, determined that there should be no question that Mr Sorabjee had that I didn’t have some sort of answer to. He was my path out of K—, I was sure about that, and I was determined not to be found wanting in any way. And then, to my chagrin, the very first question he asked stumped me.

‘How do you see yourself, Vijay?’

I was nervous so might have been excused my stammering attempts to answer the question, but the truth was I didn’t quite know how to. I could have spoken at length on why I wanted to work for
The Indian Secularist
, the evils of sectarianism and the role of the media, but how did I see myself? What sort of question was that? Should I be completely honest and say I saw myself as a twenty-two-year-old unemployed youth with an undergraduate degree in economics who was so desperate to get out of K— that he would do anything Mr Sorabjee wanted—shine his shoes, marry his daughter, carry water from the well, milk his cows … The seconds passed, and I finally found my voice.

‘What do you mean, sir?’

‘Don’t be nervous, Vijay, take your time. I was just curious to know how you see yourself.’

‘As a South Indian, sir?’ I hazarded.

He nodded vigorously in approval. ‘Yes, indeed, a South Indian. And?’

‘A BA in economics, sir.’

‘Very good, young man. Tell me more.’

‘A Tamil, sir.’

‘And?’

‘A Brahmin, sir, although I’m no great believer in caste or religion.’

‘Do you mind telling me why?’

I told him then about my experiences in K—, about how I had begun to feel oppressed by the very things that seemed to nourish and reassure my peers.

Mr Sorabjee listened attentively, and when I had finished said, ‘You have handled your situation sensibly. But, tell me, why didn’t you lose your faith?’

I replied that because of my upbringing my own faith had never been so strong that I had felt restricted by it, and therefore tempted to discard it; what I had disliked was the way faith in general had made the environment I lived in claustrophobic.

He nodded and said, ‘I’m very glad to hear that, Vijay. Here at the magazine we don’t believe in throwing religion overboard. Our stance is that it has its place, it only turns malign when it exceeds its boundaries.’

I was quite comfortable now as I had expected to be asked this sort of thing at the interview, but then, without warning, the questions became unorthodox again.

‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to set the subject of faith aside for the moment. May I ask who your favourite cricketer is, Vijay?’

‘Kris, sir. Srikkanth, I mean.’

Mr Sorabjee smiled. I noticed he had perfectly white, even teeth, and then it occurred to me that they were probably dentures.

‘Not Azharuddin, Kapil?’

‘Oh, they are brilliant cricketers, but…’

‘Very well, let’s move on. I assume you’re a movie buff. Who are your favourite movie stars?’

‘Kamal Haasan, sir. And I also like the old Sivaji Ganesan movies.’

Good. What about books?’

‘I have read several books by top journalists, sir.’

And so it went for another ten minutes, with Mr Sorabjee eliciting my preferences in song and food, my views on marriage and friendship, the weather and fashion. Apart from the brief exchange we’d had about my personal experience of religion, not once did we discuss the politics of faith or any of the myriad other subjects I had studied. At the end of his questioning, Mr Sorabjee said to me, ‘Well, that’s all I have for you, young man. Do you have any questions for me?’

I had grown tense as the interview continued to meander along without touching on anything that I hoped would clinch the job for me; now, without intending to be quite so forceful, I blurted out, ‘But sir, don’t you want to know my views on politics, on communalism…’

‘I already know everything I need to know,’ Mr Sorabjee said with a slow smile that folded the skin at the corners of his eyes like a concertina. ‘Let’s see, what we have here is a young, single, economics graduate, a Tamil Brahmin from K—who prefers Krishnamachari Srikkanth to Kapil Dev and Kamal Haasan to Amitabh Bachchan, who listens occasionally to M.S. Subbulakshmi and doesn’t really know too much about contemporary popular music.

‘And this young man wants to work for an old Bombayite with a degree in philosophy from Wilson College, a practising Parsi who is fascinated by every other religion that has taken root in this country, a widower who has had to give up red meat on account of his gout, whose cricketing geniuses stopped with Farrukh Engineer and Sunil Gavaskar, who loves to go to Western classical music concerts, Dvořák and Tchaikovsky preferably, at the NCPA auditorium, who is partial to Shakespeare especially the tragedies, whose favourite hero will always be Cary Grant, and, well, I deliberately didn’t bring up heroines, young man, we’re all entitled to some secrets…’