The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  ‘What good would it do to join you?’ Yudhishtir replied. ‘Would it change Pinaka’s ways, give his tenants full title, and grant security to those among them who are ill or idle?’

  They both went away, denouncing the Pandavas as hopeless and untrustworthy. At last, seeing that there was little they could do in this divided village, the Pandavas quietly left, abandoning both sides to their endless quarrel.

  So too, Ganapathi, rising from our perch near the village of Pinaka and Saranga, we may flap our, wings above the concrete and asphalt of the nation’s capital. There, poised in the warm middle of a global cold war between the former colonizers and their allies on one side, and well-armed barbarians on the other, Dhritarashtra and Kanika evolved and elaborated the concept of ‘non-alignment’. In their articulate exegeses this emerged as a lofty refusal to take sides in an immoral and destructive competition that could enflame the world. Yes, Dhritarashtra and Kanika developed into a fine art the skill of speaking for the higher conscience of mankind. To the brash and moralistic money-makers with whom the former colonial powers were allied, India’s refusal to join the forces of God, light, and the almighty dollar was downright immoral, and Kanika Menon was portrayed on the covers of their international news-magazines - an honour even Gangaji had been denied - with his sharp face and hooded eyes drawn to resemble a poisonous cobra. To the bluff and amoral slavers and statists on the other side, India’s rhetoric was insincere, either a Brahminical ploy to conceal the brown Britishness of their language and education, or a canny camouflage for the capitalist course being pursued beneath India’s veneer of democratic socialism.

  They were both right and they were both wrong, for Dhritarashtra was guilty only of the insincerity of the blind and Kanaka of the inaccuracy of the ivory-tower. Both - Dhritarashtra for idealistic reasons, Kanika for ideological ones - believed in the non-alignment they preached, but neither could control the convictions or even the conduct of those who were to implement their policies.

  Nor could either control indefinitely his own desire to flex the nation’s muscles, which many outside thought to be atrophied by disuse and pacifism. Just as the loudest proponent of celibacy is most vulnerable to the temptation of easy sin - for restraint must always be ustained by lack of opportunity - so too non-violent India was being stirred into a frenzy by the provocations of a weak and wanton neighbour. This was the last remaining colonial enclave on the Indian coast, the picturesque Portuguese possession of Comea, a land of long beaches and cheap liquor, a haven for loose women and tight lipped spies from which its foreign masters obdurately refused to withdraw.

  After years of gentle persuasion by Dhritarashtra and his smoothest diplomats had failed, the hawk-faced Defence Minister persuaded his Premier that it was time to embark on a new course. The armed forces of the Indian Republic would take over the defiant but ill-defended colony.

  Under the two bachelor statesmen, India’s soldiers would at last enjoy their first foreign affair - and return home with a fair and fertile bride.

  88

  It was at this time that the Pandavas, fatigued by a long day’s marching on their passage through India, decided to settle down for the night in a wood.

  It had been a tiring journey, and long before they reached the wood Kunti and the twins had felt too exhausted to carry on. Bhim lifted them up in his immense arms, but even his arborescent biceps began to feel the strain, and when they reached the first clearing in the forest Bhim simply put his burdens down and tore the private property - no trespassing sign off its post, flinging it with a crash into the bushes.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ asked Hidimba, a large man with a small goatee who owned the wood and the sprawling bungalow at the centre of it. He patted his enormous belly, yawned the sleep out of his colossal body and turned to his sister, who was serving him. ‘Will you go and see what that is?’ he asked. ‘If it is an animal or a gust of wind, I shall go to bed. If it is a human trespasser, I shall have some sport.’ He pushed his chair back and rose, a mountainous creature who towered over his sylph-like sibling as if he had absorbed her share of growth chromosomes in their common womb.

  The girl stepped tentatively out, her fear of the darkness outweighed by her terror of her brother. A few paces into the forest brought her within sight of the clearing. She stood at its edge, saw the woman and the four youths asleep on the grass, and Bhim, sitting with his back to a tree, keeping guard. She took in the size of his chest and the strength of his arms, the straightness of his back and the solidity of his shoulders, the sinews on his neck and the subtlety in his eyes, and she fell instantly in love.

  If you had seen the monstrousness of her brother Hidimba, my dear Ganapathi, you would not look so surprised.

  She stepped into the clearing with her finger to her lips.

  Bhim looked up at the vision of her firm and shapely hips.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked the girl, with a gentle winning smile;

  ‘Don’t you know this land is private for at least up to a mile?

  My brother puts a sign up warning trespassers away;

  If he finds them here he beats them like a farmer thrashes hay.

  But if you’ll follow me now, I shall lead you to a spot

  Where Hidimba cannot see us, and the world can be forgot.’

  She swayed her hips suggestively just as she spoke that phrase.

  Her eyes both misted dreamily like a cool pond in a haze.

  Her fingers played seductively with the beads around her throat;

  She looked at Bhim as longingly as an M P at a vote.

  ‘Don’t say a word,’ she whispered, as he seemed about to speak;

  ‘Don’t risk my brother coming to discover what I seek.

  He’s a nasty, cruel monster, and he keeps me like a slave,

  To cook and clean and stitch for him, heat water for his shave.

  ‘He doesn’t let me go out, and no one can come in;

  The very thought of another is an inexcusable sin.

  And if he catches someone with no business to be here,

  He beats him very badly, makes him really pay dear.

  I was sent to see what had made the noises in the dark;

  If I tell him he will come out and eat you like a shark.

  But if, my dear, you come with me, as a flame welcomes a moth,

  I’ll hide you all and save you from my brother’s terrible wrath.’

  She was so sweet, so lovely, from small feet to ripened breast,

  That her passionate entreaties might put any man to test.

  But Bhim, though not unable to enjoy a bit of fluff,

  Was – even in these matters – made of much sterner stuff.

  ‘You are a fool, you silly girl, despite your many charms,

  To think that at a time like this I’d take you in my arms,

  Forgetting my first duty to my family sleeping here,

  Whom I am closely guarding as the stag protects the deer.

  ‘And let me tell you, woman, that you can tell your brother,

  I can handle his assaults as I can handle any other.

  There is no man I have yet seen who ever lived or died –’

  ‘But you’ve not seen him!’ the girl exclaimed; and sighed;

  ‘. . . who frightens me,’ Bhim went on, ‘upon this blessed globe!’

  ‘. . . And you’ve not seen me,’ she said, slipping off her robe.

  For a very long moment then our hero was struck dumb

  As he stared at this creation whose ruby lips called, ‘Come.’

  Her eyes like silver fishes flashed him signals of desire,

  Her breasts like heavy conch-shells set his manliness on fire;

  Her curved round brown midriff with its oval opening

  Was taut like a tabla ready for a man’s drumming;

  Her swaying hips and tapered thighs offset her downy jewel

  Which mesmerized his malehood as if challenged to a duel.

  Bhim found he
could no longer speak; his throat was parched and dry,

  And he might well have given in – but for a curdling cry:

  ‘Whore! Slut! Lustful woman!’ erupted a banshee shriek,

  But it was no ghost nor female who provoked his sister’s ‘Eek!’

  The gigantic man who entered, each nostril breathing fire

  Left no doubt of his physical strength, and considerable ire.

  Advancing with a heavy tread he raised a ham-like paw

  And in an instant would have struck his sister to the floor;

  But the naked girl in terror flung herself away from him

  And took shelter behind the sturdy back of the startled Bhim.

  ‘Hold on a sec,’ our hero said, ‘what kind of man are you?

  You get your kicks from bashing girls?’ (He spat:) ‘Tch-Tchoo!

  If that’s the case, my outsize friend, with you I’ll pick a bone

  I shall teach you, in the future, to leave the weaker sex alone.’

  ‘Aagh!’ screamed the tyrant in inarticulate outrage,

  ‘I’ll take that girl and whip her and lock her in a cage.

  And as for you, fat stranger, it will be stranger still

  If I don’t tear you limb from limb and leave you very ill.’

  ‘Why don’t you start?’ Bhim sprang up: ‘or shall we toss a coin?’

  With one swift move he thrust a knee into Hidimba’s groin.

  The giant screamed, and hopped about, and Bhim stepped on his toe:

  And then, as Hidimba swung, nimbly evaded the blow.

  As the fight began the others stirred; their sleep was now disturbed,

  And what they saw, when they took it in, left them most perturbed.

  (Imagine waking from your dreams to see Bhim, his trousers torn,

  Grappling with a monster, while a nude girl cheers him on.)

  ‘Who are you, girl?’ Kunti asked, anxious to establish a nexus,

  As Bhim drove a sledge-hammer fist into Hidimba’s solar plexus.

  ‘The monster’s sister,’ she replied, scrambling for her dress,

  Which in the fight had been reduced to something of a mess.

  ‘My brother owns this land,’ she said, ‘in fact, this very wood;

  And when he sees intruders he gets angrier than he should.’

  ‘I see,’ said Kunti, as the giant emitted a roar of pain,

  ‘My son gets angry too – oh! There he goes again!’

  ‘I know!’ the girl, all bright-eyed, said; ‘isn’t he terrific?

  Of all the men I’ve ever seen, he really is the pick!’

  ‘Ah,’ said Kunti, understanding, ‘and how many have you seen?’

  ‘Two,’ confessed the girl, ‘and the other one’s so mean.’

  Her mean brother was certainly having the worst of the fight;

  Each jarring blow opened his eyes as if he was seeing the light.

  ‘Does that explain,’ Kunti asked, waving an embarrassed hand,

  ‘Your. . . er . . . state of dress?’ (A picture would be banned.)

  ‘Oh – yes.’ The girl modestly cast down her almond eyes:

  ‘I deeply love your son; and though I’m not his size,

  I know that given half a chance I could make him very happy.

  I cook, I clean, I sew and stitch, and I’m really quite snappy.

  And then I think’ (she blushed at this) ‘speaking as a woman,

  I believe my body pleases him’. ‘Well, yes, it’s only human.’

  Hidimba’s grunts and awful groans were now too hard to bear;

  ‘Oh, stop it, Bhim,’ Yudhishtir called; ‘stop, and leave him there.’

  ‘All right,’ said Bhim, with a final punch to his rival’s groggy head;

  Hidimba fell, lay still. Said Kunti: ‘Bhim, it’s time to wed.’

  What?’ The strong jaw dropped; Bhim stopped like a broken carriage;

  ‘I can’t believe it! As I fought, you were arranging my marriage?’

  It seemed somehow appropriate,’ Kunti replied, unflapped,

  ‘If you fight for a girl you can hardly tell her later you were trapped.

  And besides, this fit young lass will be a great help to me –

  You boys never think of the awful strain of your itinerary.’

  ‘It’s all too sudden – I’ve got to think.’ Bhim leaned against a tree;

  An hour ago, I was sitting here . . . it’s all too much for me.’

  ‘I’m not too much, am I, my dear?’ asked the girl with a gentle smile;

  Her face was bright, her eyes alight, innocent of any guile.

  Bhim looked at the girl, and then he thought of the woman he had seen:

  The hips, the lips, the breasts, the rest, the face of a beauty queen –

  A beauty she had offered him with a love transcending shame.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll marry you. Er . . . what is your name?’

  89

  Comea had fallen. Nationalists danced in the streets at the expulsion of the last colonial power from Indian soil, the only one that had not had the intelligence or the grace to withdraw amicably in time. Kanika was a national hero for having - as Defence Minister - planned and led the decisive action It was being said that, for all his talk of peace and morality, Dhritarashtra had learned a lesson from his namby-pambiness over Manimir; there were some things for which cannons were far more effective than conferences.

  To the north, however, there were frowns on the anti-colonialist faces of the mandarins of the world’s most populous tyranny, the People’s Republic of Chakra, as they contemplated the hubris of their southern neighbours.

  ‘They are glowing too big for their boots,’ said the Chairman, and a dozen inscrutable faces nodded as vigorously as the tight collars of their regulation tunics would allow.

  The two countries had, for nearly two thousand years, been separated by the vast expanse of Tibia, a large nation of few people which had served as a willing conduit for a number of Indian religious innovations from Buddhism to Tantrism. Despite periodic ritual genuflections to the north (whenever the Chakars had a central regime strong enough to warrant Tibian circumspection), Tibia had maintained its independence till its casual conquest - in circumstances almost indistinguishable, in fact, from that of its homonym Tibet - by Sir Francis Oldwife. The British, eventually convinced it was the one place on earth to which it was not worth assigning a civil service, withdrew from Tibia not long after. But in order to feel they had got something for their pains, they took the trouble to conclude a peace treaty with their recent subjects, a document which among other things defined the border between Tibia and British India. Since it was drawn by a crusty Scot named MacDonald, the now-defined frontier came to be known as the Big Mac Line.

  When Chakra’s glamorous Generalissimo gave way before the raucous regiments of the cherubic Chairman, Dhritarashtra had been amongst the first to applaud, for sound anti-imperialist, pro-socialist reasons. India’s was even the first government to accord the Communist regime the honour of formal diplomatic recognition. During the early phase of international ostracism endured by the People’s Republic, India was seen frequently by Chakra’s side, advocating its admission to various international forums, speaking regularly in favour of ‘peaceful co-existence’ with Snuping, as the capital of Chakra was then still called. As Dhritarashtra and Kanika bobbed and beamed alongside their yolk-hued counterparts for the benefit of the world’s flashbulbs, a new slogan was, with official encouragement, given wide currency in India: ‘Hindi-Chakar bhai-bhai.’ That meant that, faith and physiognomy notwithstanding, Indians and Chakars were brothers; and since ‘chakar’, carefully pronounced, also meant ‘sugar’ in Hindi, the slogan implied that sweetness infused the relationship. Little did its originators realize how easily it would soon be twisted into a pointed ‘Hindi-Chakar bye-bye’.

  The problem arose on two levels. On the more elemental level the Chakars, despite their new egalitarian ideology,
did not particularly care for what, to the inheritors of the Middle Kingdom, seemed the patronizing support of their ethnically inferior neighbours. And then, on the geo-political level, there was the Big Mac Line. Since the Chakars had marched into Tibia and taken it over with even less trouble than Sir Francis had, the Scot’s handiwork now represented the border between Chakra and India.

  It was, from Snuping’s point of view, a most inconvenient line. For one thing, it was tainted by having been imposed by a colonial power in negotiations with a state that had ceased to exist: logic, therefore, called for it to be renegotiated with the People’s Republic. For another, MacDonald had made it inconsiderately difficult to cross from Tibia into the Chakran province of Drowniang (an activity which he may not have considered strictly necessary, given that the two did not at that time belong to the same rulers). A few border adjustments seemed, to Snuping, to be essential.

  The Chakars could well have tried, Ganapathi, through amicable negotiations based on good neighbourliness and mutual realism, to come to an understanding with India. After all, not many of us - and I, don’t forget, was a Cabinet minister in Dhritarashtra’s government in those days - had any particular affection for a line drawn by a Scot, and drawn, let us face it, on the basis of mapping techniques which were so primitive as to justify revision on cartographical grounds alone. But such a procedure would have addressed only the second level of Snuping’s problem. They preferred a method which would simultaneously tackle the first - which would, in the words MacDonald might have used, give us a bloody nose, cut us down to size and put us in our place. Ironically, it was Kanika’s far-too-easy conquest of Cornea which showed them the way.

  My heart still weeps at the thought of the condition of our army in those days, Ganapathi. They were cock-a-hoop, in their military lingo, after having captured an ill-defended enclave by the simple expedient of marching into it in numbers large enough to discourage any resistance. The only shot in the Comea campaign was fired by a young soldier who accidentally marched into a house of pleasure and discharged his rifle in startled excitement, bringing down a chandelier of imitation crystal on the heads of several of the territory’s Portuguese notables. He received a medal for their arrest and penicillin injections for the other consequences of his intrusion.