‘Good boy.’ Gandhari was holding her daughter’s free hand in a tight grip. ‘My son. You are all - all I had.’ The words were coming out in gasps now. ‘Alone. Always alone. In . . . the . . . darkness.’
We were both still, Duryodhani motionless in her mother’s grasp and I, destiny’s observer, unable to move from my place in the shadows at the foot of the bed. And in the stillness I realized that nature too was quiet. There was an unnatural silence outside. The crickets had stopped their incessant chirping, the mynahs were no longer twittering in the trees, the hundred and one sounds that always came in from the garden at this time of day had mysteriously died. It was as if all creation was holding its breath.
‘Darkness!’ Gandhari screamed in one convulsive gasp. Her hand left Duryodhani’s and seemed to reach for the bandage across her eyes; but before it could touch that slender satin shroud it fell back lifelessly across her breast.
‘Mother!’ Duryodhani sobbed, burying her face in the folds of Gandhari’s garment. It was the only time I would ever see her weep. ‘Mother, don’t leave me, don’t leave me alone!’ The tumbler fell from her hand, clattering against the marble floor. A trail of water flowed slowly from it in a winding rivulet towards the doorway.
A cane tapped its way down the corridor and came to a stop. The curtain was pushed aside.
‘Don’t cry so, my child,’ said a gentle voice. ‘See, your tears have wet my feet.’
‘Papa!’ Duryodhani turned her tear-stained face to her father, and her cry was heart-rending. ‘She was waiting for you!’
‘I’m . . sorry.’ Dhritarashtra took a hesitant step forward. ‘Won’t you come to me, my child?’
For a moment the stillness continued; then a solitary koyal cooed in a tree outside, and Duryodhani was on her feet, running towards her father, who dropped his cane and caught her in an all-enveloping embrace . . .
I stepped soundlessly forward to where Gandhari lay, neglected in death as in life. Tenderly, in a gesture that I could not explain, I crossed her palms across her chest. Then, ignored by her husband and daughter lost in mutual consolation, I eased that terrible bandage off her face.
Her eyes were open.
Gandhari was gone, but her dark, devastated pupils spoke of greater suffering and solitude than most of us can endure in a lifetime of light. But she was right, Ganapathi. There are some realities it is better not to see.
I placed my hand on her forehead and very gently closed her eyes. Then, for the last time, I slipped her bandage back into place.
‘Goodbye, Gandhari,’ I said.
The Eleventh Book:
Renunciation - Or, The Bed of Arrows
65
‘Gentlemen,’ announced Viscount Drewpad, ‘I have summoned you here today to tell you that His Majesty’s Government - in other words, I - have had enough.’
He looked around the table at the representatives of the three parties the British had chosen to deal with: the Kauravas (Dhritarashtra, the ebullient Mohammed Rafi and myself), the Sikhs (Sardar Khushkismat Singh, whose stock of jokes about his community was rivalled only by other people’s anecdotes about him) and the Muslim Group (Karna, a robed mullah in a hennaed beard and a surrogate for the Gaga Shah, who was himself already out of the country arranging his post-Independence future abroad). We all looked back at the Viceroy, but none of us spoke: with this superficial and supercilious man even Karna was at a loss for words.
‘Whitehall has formulated, and successive Cabinet missions have presented, a number of plans to you all relating to a possible transfer of power from British rule to Indian self-government,’ he went on. ‘Each and every one of them has foundered on the intractable opposition of one or other of you.’ To avoid giving gratuitous offence with those words he fixed his gaze directly on the Sardar, who had, in fact, cheerfully given his assent to each and every variant of the Independence formulae thus far proposed. But he might as well have looked at Karna, because we had tried to bend as far as we could to accommodate him, and each time he had balked. Various schemes had been drawn up, grouping the Muslim provinces separately, proposing ‘lists’ of states in a weak confederation, devising elaborate guarantees of minority rights and communal representation. Each had foundered on the rocks of Karna’s intransigence. At one point Gangaji - who no longer came himself to these negotiations, saying he preferred to give us moral guidance from outside - suggested that as the price of keeping India united we should simply offer Mohammed Ali Karna the premiership of all India. So central was Karna’s personal ambition to his political stand that it might even have worked, but this time it was Dhritarashtra who refused to countenance the suggestion. Drewpad was really speaking for all of us as he went on: ‘We cannot, with the best will in the world, go on indefinitely like this.’
Karna glowered at him. ‘We have not come here, Viceroy, to be lectured at like errant schoolchildren,’ he snapped.
‘I have not finished.’ Drewpad fixed him with an amiable gaze. ‘I wish to tell you today that I, for my part, have decided to wash my hands of your squabbling. You all agree on one thing: that in the end you want the British out Very well, we shall proceed on that basis. Whether you agree on anything else or not, the British will pull out - on August the fifteenth, 1947.’
To say that the seven of us around the table gasped in astonishment might seem a cliché, but like most clichés this too was true. ‘But that’s barely eight months away!’ Karna, as usual, was the quickest to recover. ‘What made you choose such a date?’
‘It’s my wedding anniversary,’ Drewpad responded innocently.
‘This is preposterous!’ Rafi was shouting. ‘You can’t do this!’
Lord Drewpad picked up his papers and drew his chair back. ‘Oh, yes? As our American cousins say, Mr Rafi, can’t I just!’
And before we knew it he was striding out of the room.
The deadline was impossible. ‘Leave us,’ Gangaji had written to Drewpad’s predecessor when he was jailed for his Quit India call. ‘Leave us to God or to anarchy.’ It had sounded good at the time; but now, when the British seemed to be about to do precisely that, we felt sick to the pits of our stomachs.
We met, the Kaurava Working Committee, at the Mahaguru’s feet the next day. It was one of his days of silence, which meant that he would listen sagely to what we were saying, then scrawl a few words on the back of an envelope that Sarah-behn would read aloud to the rest of us. ‘One hell of a way to chair a meeting,’ Rafi breathed in an aside to me as we sat cross-legged on the floor. ‘Especially the most important meeting of our lives.’ But of course, Gangaji wasn’t chairing it at all; Rafi was the President of the party. Yet everyone knew whose view mattered the most in our conclaves.
‘The first thing to be sure of is, does he mean what he says?’ someone asked.
‘From what I have seen of Drewpad,’ responded Dhritarashtra wearily, and without irony - you know how he was for ever speaking in visual images - he strikes me as the kind of person who always means what he says.’
‘In that case we have our backs against the wall.’ This was Rafi. ‘All that Karna and his cohorts have to do is to stick obstinately to their demand for a separate state. With the British scheduled to leave for certain by a specific date, they know that sooner or later we’ll have to give in.’
It was a difficult thing for Rafi to say, because as a Kaurava Muslim he was amongst the party’s strongest opponents of the demand for Karnistan. If a separate Muslim state came into being it would, after all, leave him and his co-religionists in the Kaurava camp isolated, on both sides of the communal divide.
A hubbub of comment followed, largely tending to agree with the President. Gangaji raised his hand. We were all silent as he traced words on to a scrap of paper in his spiky pencilled hand.
‘You must never give in,’ Sarah-behn read, ‘to the demand to dismember the country.’
‘Gangaji, we understand how you feel,’ Dhritarashtra said. ‘We have fought by your side fo
r our freedom, all these years. We have imbibed your principles and convictions. You have led us to the brink of victory.’ He paused, and his voice became softer. ‘But now, the time has come for us to apply our principles in the face of the acid test of reality. Rafi is right: Karna and his friends will simply dig in their heels. Separation or chaos, they will say; and on Direct Action Day last year they showed us they can create chaos. How much worse will it be without the British forces here? Might it not be better to agree in advance to a - the words stick in my throat, Gangaji - civilized Partition, than to resist and risk destroying everything?’
The Mahaguru had already started writing before Dhritarashtra had finished. ‘If you agree to break the country, you will break my heart,’ he wrote.
‘It will break many hearts, Gangaji,’ his chosen heir said sadly. ‘Mine, and all of ours, included. But we may have no choice.’
‘Then I must leave you’ now,’ Sarah-behn read in a quavering voice. ‘I cannot be party to such a decision. God bless you, my sons.’
The Mahaguru waited until the last word was read, then nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing visibly like a painful lump in his throat. He slowly got up and, with one hand on Sarah-behn’s shoulder, hobbled out of the room. Nobody spoke; and nobody tried to stop him.
His departure, as we had all known it would, made the rest of the meeting much easier. Misgivings were voiced on all sides, but we had struggled too long for freedom to want to tarnish it when it was within our grasp. It was better to give Karna what he wanted and build the India of our dreams in peace and freedom without him.
That evening, the Working Committee of the Kaurava Party resolved unanimously to accept in principle the partition of the country. It was the first time we had ever gone against the expressed wishes of Gangaji. His era was over.
66
Some people said later that we had acted too hastily; that in our greed for office we sacrificed the integrity of the country; that had we been willing to wait and to compromise, Partition would never have occurred; that Karna was the most surprised man in India when our resolution was passed because he was only asking for the mile of separation in order to have the yard of autonomy and we should have called his bluff. To all these theorists, Ganapathi, I say: That’s absolute cow-dung. Or its male equivalent. We gave in to Partition because Karna’s inhuman obduracy and Drewpad’s indecent haste left us no choice.
Of course, there was a great deal we didn’t know, although the whole horde of hindsight historians act as if we did. We had no idea that the sun was burning out behind Mohammed Ali Karna’s increasingly pallid skin, and that within nine months of the vivisection of our land the half-moon on his forehead would throb feebly into eclipse. We could not have imagined, either, that Partition, which we accepted as a lesser evil, would lead to a carnage so bloody that anything, even the chaos of an unresolved Independence settlement, might have been preferable to what actually happened.
Nor could we have even begun to guess what the practical process of partitioning the country would involve. The appointment, for instance, of a political geographer who had never in his life set foot on any of the territories he was to award either to India or to the new state of Karnistan.
‘It’s really quite easy,’ the stout, bespectacled academic announced, standing with a pointer before a small-scale map. ‘One takes a given cartographical area - there - one checks the census figures for religious distribution and then one applies the basic principles of geography, choosing natural features as far as possible for the eventual boundary, studying elevation and relief - see these colours here? - not forgetting, of course, heh-heh, the position of these thin lines, which are roads or rivers, and then . . . then one draws one’s boundary line v-e-ry carefully, like this.’ Lips pursed in concentration, he proceeded to trace, in a shaky hand, a sharp slim line on the map. That, ladies and gentlemen,’ he declared, ‘will be the new frontier between India and Karnistan in this area.’ He put down the pointer and half-bowed, as if expecting applause.
‘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.
67
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 w
ere 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?
The Great Indian Novel Page 25
