White Teeth (33 page)

‘You totally misunderstand his sacrifice,’ Samad will reply.

‘What sacrifice? He couldn’t even kill himself properly! The problem with you, Sam, is you won’t listen to the evidence. I’ve read up on it all. The truth is the truth, no matter how nasty it may taste.’

‘
Really
. Well, please, my friend, since you are apparently an expert in the doings of my family, please, enlighten me. Let us hear your version.’

Now, the average school student nowadays is aware of the complex forces, movements and deep currents that motivate wars and spark revolutions. But when Archie was in school the world seemed far more open to its own fictionalization. History was a different business then: taught with one eye on narrative, the other on drama, no matter how unlikely or chronologically inaccurate. According to this schema, the Russian Revolution began because everyone hated Rasputin. The Roman Empire declined and fell because Antony was having it off with Cleopatra. Henry V triumphed at Agincourt because the French were too busy admiring their own outfits. And the Great Indian Mutiny of 1857 began when a drunken fool called Mangal Pande shot a bullet. Despite Samad’s opposition, each time Archie read the following he found himself more convinced:

The scene is Barrackpore, the date 29 March 1857. It is Sunday afternoon; but on the dusty floor of the parade ground a drama is being enacted which is suggestive of anything but Sabbath peace. There chatters and sways and eddies a confused mass of Sepoys, in all stages of dress and undress; some armed, some unarmed; but all fermenting with excitement. Some thirty yards in front of the line of the 34th swaggers to and fro a Sepoy named Mangal Pande. He is half drunk with bhang, and wholly drunk with religious fanaticism. Chin in air, loaded musket in hand, he struts backwards and forwards, at a sort of half dance, shouting in shrill and nasal monotone, ‘Come out, you blackguards! Turn out, all of you! The English are upon us. Through biting these cartridges we shall all be made infidels!’
The man, in fact, is in that condition of mingled bhang and ‘nerves’ which makes a Malay run amok; and every shout from his lips runs like a sudden flame through the brains and along the nerves of the listening crowd of fellow Sepoys, as the crowd gets bigger, the excitement more intense. A human powder magazine, in a word, is about to explode.

And explode it did. Pande shot at his lieutenant and missed him. Then he took out a large sword, a tulwar, and cowardly lunged while his lieutenant’s back was turned, catching him on the shoulder. A sepoy tried to restrain him, but Pande battled on. Then came reinforcements: one Captain Hearsay rushed forward, his son at his side, both armed and honourable and prepared to die for their country. (‘Hear-say is precisely what it is! Rubbish. Fabrication!’) At which point Pande saw the game was up, pointed his enormous gun at his own head and dramatically pulled the trigger with his left foot. He missed. A few days later, Pande stood trial and was found guilty. From the other side of the country, on a chaise longue in Delhi, his execution was ordered by one General Henry Havelock (a man honoured, much to Samad’s fury, by a statue just outside the Palace Restaurant, Trafalgar Square, to the right of Nelson), who added — in a postscript to his written instruction — that he
did
hope that this would put an end to all the rash talk of mutiny one kept hearing recently. But it was too late. As Pande swung in the sultry breeze, hanging from a makeshift gallows, his disbanded comrades from the 34th were heading for Delhi, determined to join the rebel forces of what was to become one of the bloodiest failed mutinies of this or any century.

This version of events — by a contemporary historian named Fitchett — was enough to send Samad into spasms of fury. When a man has nothing but his blood to commend him, each drop of it matters, matters terribly; it must be jealously defended. It must be protected against assailants and detractors. It must be fought for. But like a Chinese whisper, Fitchett’s intoxicated, incompetent Pande had passed down a line of subsequent historians, the truth mutating, bending, receding as the whisper continued. It didn’t matter that bhang, a hemp drink taken in small doses for medicinal purposes, was extremely unlikely to cause intoxication of this kind or that Pande, a strict Hindu, was extremely unlikely to drink it. It didn’t matter that Samad could find not one piece of corroborating evidence that Pande had taken bhang that morning. The story still clung, like a gigantic misquote, to the Iqbal reputation, as solid and seemingly irremovable as the misconception that Hamlet ever said he knew Yorick ‘well’.

‘Enough! It makes no difference how many times you read these things to me, Archibald.’ (Archie usually came armed with a plastic bag full of Brent Library books, anti-Pande propaganda, misquotes galore.) ‘It is like a gang of children caught with their hands in an enormous honey jar: they are all going to tell me the same lie. I am not interested in this kind of slander. I am not interested in puppet theatre or tragic farce. Action interests me, friend.’ And here Samad would mime the final zipping up of his lips, the throwing away of a key. ‘True action. Not words. I tell you, Archibald, Mangal Pande sacrificed his life in the name of justice for India, not because he was intoxicated or insane. Pass me the ketchup.’

It was the 1989 New Year’s Eve shift in O’Connell’s, and the debate was in full swing.

‘True, he was not a hero in the way you in the West like your heroes — he did not succeed except in the manner of his honourable death. But imagine it: there he sat.’ Samad pointed to Denzel, about to play his winning domino. ‘At the trial, knowing death was upon him, refusing ever to reveal the names of his fellow conspirators—’

‘Now,
that
,’ said Archie, patting his pile of sceptics, Michael Edwardes, P. J. O. Taylor, Syed Moinul Haq and the rest, ‘depends what you read.’

‘No, Archie. That is a common mistake. The truth does
not
depend on what you read. Please let us not get into the nature of truth. Then you do not have to draw with my cheese and I can avoid eating your chalk.’

‘All right, then: Pande. What did he achieve? Nothing! All he did was start a mutiny — too early, mind, before the agreed date — and excuse my French, but that’s a fucking disaster in military terms. You
plan
, you don’t act on instinct. He caused unnecessary casualties. English
and
Indian.’

‘With respect, I don’t believe that to be the case.’

‘Well, you’re wrong.’

‘With respect, I believe I am right.’

‘It’s like this, Sam: imagine here’ — he gathered a pile of dirty plates that Mickey was about to put in the dishwasher — ‘are all the people who have written about your Pande in the last hundred-and-whatever years. Now: here’s the ones that agree with me.’ He placed ten plates on his side of the table and pushed one over to Samad. ‘And that’s the madman on your side.’

‘A. S. Misra. Respected Indian civil servant.
Not
a madman.’

‘Right. Well, it would take you at least another hundred-and-whatever years to get as many plates as I have, even if you were going to make them all yourself, and the likelihood is, once you had them, no bugger would want to eat off them anyway. Metaphorically speaking. Know what I mean?’

Which left only A. S. Misra. One of Samad’s nephews, Rajnu, had written to him in the spring of ’81 from his Cambridge college, mentioning casually that he had found a book which might be of some interest to his uncle. In it, he said, could be found an eloquent defence of their shared ancestor, one Mangal Pande. The only surviving copy was in his college library, it was by a man named Misra. Had he heard of it already? If not, might it not serve (Rajnu added in a cautious P. S.) as a pleasant excuse to see his uncle again?

Samad arrived on the train the very next day and stood on the platform, warmly greeting his soft-spoken nephew in the pouring rain, shaking his hand several times and talking as if it were going out of fashion.

‘A great day,’ he repeated over and over, until both men were soaked to the skin. ‘A great day for our family, Rajnu, a great day for the
truth
.’

Wet men not being allowed in college libraries, they spent the morning drying off in a stuffy upstairs café, full of the right type of ladies having the right type of tea. Rajnu, ever the good listener, sat patiently as his uncle babbled wildly — Oh, the
importance
of the discovery, Oh, how
long
he had waited for this moment — nodding in all the right places and smiling sweetly as Samad brushed tears from the corners of his eyes. ‘It is a great book, isn’t it, Rajnu?’ asked Samad pleadingly, as his nephew left a generous tip for the sour-faced waitresses who did not appreciate overexcited Indians spending three hours over one cream tea and leaving wet prints all over the furniture. ‘It is recognized, isn’t it?’

Rajnu knew in his heart that the book was an inferior, insignificant, forgotten piece of scholarship, but he loved his uncle, so he smiled, nodded and smiled firmly again.

Once in the library, Samad was asked to fill in the visitors’ book:

Name
: Samad Miah Iqbal
College
: Educated elsewhere (Delhi)
Research project
: Truth

Rajnu, tickled by this last entry, picked up the pen, adding ‘and Tragedy’.

‘Truth and Tragedy,’ said a deadpan librarian, turning the book back round. ‘Any particular kind?’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Samad genially. ‘We’ll find it.’

It took a stepladder to reach it but it was well worth the stretch. When Rajnu passed the book to his uncle, Samad felt his fingers tingle and, looking at its cover, shape and colour, saw that it was all he had dreamt of. It was heavy, many paged, bound in a tan leather and covered in the light dust that denotes something incredibly precious, something rarely touched.

‘I left a marker in it. There is much to read but there is something I thought you’d like to see first,’ said Rajnu, laying it down on a desk. The heavy thud of one side of the book hit the table, and Samad looked at the appointed page. It was more than he could have hoped for.

‘It’s only an artist’s impression, but the similarity between—’

‘Don’t speak,’ said Samad, tracing his fingers across the picture. ‘This is our
blood
, Rajnu. I never thought I would see . . . What eyebrows! What a nose! I have his nose!’

‘You have his face, Uncle. More dashing, naturally.’

‘And what — what does it say underneath. Damn! Where are my reading glasses . . . read it for me, Rajnu, it is too small.’

‘The caption?
Mangal Pande fired the first bullet of the 1857 movement. His self-sacrifice gave the siren to the nation to take up arms against an alien ruler, culminating in a mass-uprising with no parallel in world history. Though the effort failed in its immediate consequences, it succeeded in laying the foundations of the Independence to be won in 1947. For his patriotism he paid with his life. But until his last breath he refused to disclose the names of those who were preparing for, and instigating, the great uprising
.’

Samad sat down on the bottom rung of the stepladder and wept.

‘So. Let me get this straight. Now you’re telling me that without Pande there’d be no Gandhi. That without your mad grandad there’d be no bloody Independence—’

‘Great-grandad.’

‘No, let me finish, Sam. Is that what you’re seriously asking
us
’ — Archie clapped an uninterested Clarence and Denzel on the back — ‘to believe? Do
you
believe it?’ he asked Clarence.

‘Me kyan believe dat!’ said Clarence, having no idea of the topic.

Denzel blew his nose into a napkin. ‘Troof be tol, me nah like to believe any ting. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Dat my motto.’

‘He was the tickle in the sneeze, Archibald. It is as simple as that. I
do
believe that.’

There was quiet for a minute. Archibald watched three sugar cubes dissolve in his teacup. Then, rather tentatively, he said, ‘I’ve got my own theory, you know. Separate from the books, I mean.’

Samad bowed. ‘Please enlighten us.’

‘Don’t get angry, now . . . But just
think
for a minute. Why is a strict religious man like Pande drinking bhang? Seriously, I know I tease you about it. But why is he?’

‘You know my opinion on that. He isn’t. He didn’t. It was English propaganda.’

‘And he was a good shot . . .’

‘No doubt about it. A. S. Misra produces a copy of a record stating that Pande trained in a special guard for one year, specially trained in the use of muskets.’

‘OK. So: why does he miss? Why?’

‘It is my belief that the only possible explanation is that the gun was faulty.’

‘Yes . . . there is that. But, maybe, maybe something else. Maybe he was being bullied into going out there and making a row, you know, goaded, by the other guys. And he didn’t want to kill anyone in the first place, you know. So he
pretended
to be drunk, so the boys in the barracks room would believe he missed the shot.’

‘That is quite the stupidest theory I have ever heard,’ sighed Samad, as the second hand of Mickey’s egg-stained clock started the thirty-second countdown to midnight. ‘The kind only you could come up with. It’s absurd.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Archibald, these Englishmen, these Captain Hearsays, Havelocks and the rest, were every Indian’s mortal enemy. Why should he spare lives he despised?’

‘Maybe he just couldn’t do it. Maybe he wasn’t the type.’

‘Do you really believe there is a type of man who kills and a type of man who doesn’t?’

‘Maybe Sam, maybe not.’

‘You sound like my wife,’ groaned Samad, mopping up a final piece of egg, ‘let me tell you something, Archibald. A man is a man is a man. His family threatened, his beliefs attacked, his way of life destroyed, his whole world coming to an end — he will kill. Make no mistake. He won’t let the new order roll over him without a struggle. There will be people he will kill.’