The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  ‘W,’ Nakul said next to him. ‘W for Wins.’

  ‘D,’ Sahadev replied as the letter went up.

  ‘Declares Victory?’ Nakul asked. All-India Radio had been announcing substantial wins for Duryodhani’s party in some states.

  D. E. Then, as the crowd seemed to hold its collective breath, F.

  An immense cry of exultation rose from the crowd.

  ‘Could be “Defeats Opponent,”’ Nakul ventured. ‘You know, in her constituency.’

  ‘No way, bhai-sahib.’ Sahadev was grinning from ear to ear: he had suddenly realized what he had wanted all along. ‘He doesn’t have enough letters with him for that.’

  The crowd was already roaring its approbation. Scattered cheers rent the air. People were slapping each other’s backs in delight. E. A. T. Then, finally, the khaki-skirted meghdoot speeding up his pace as the task neared completion, E and D. DEFEATED. Priya Duryodhani had been defeated.

  ‘Janata Front!’ somebody shouted. ‘Zindabad!’ Came the answering roar: ‘Janata Front, Zindabad!’ The chant picked up variety, and rhythm. ‘Drona, Zindabad! Yudhishtir, Zindabad! Janata Front, Zindabad!’

  ‘I knew it, I knew it,’ Sahadev found himself squeezing Nakul’s shoulders in triumph. ‘Oh, I’m so glad I took my home-leave now, Nakul. This is great! It’s simply great!’

  Nakul still seemed to be absorbing the news. Around them, the chant was vociferous; some energetic youths had begun dancing an impromptu bhangra. Members of the crowd were flinging coins and rupee notes at the peon who had put up the headline. The little man in the khaki skirt was catching them in dexterous ecstasy.

  ‘I was wrong,’ Nakul said slowly, abandoning the plural for perhaps the first time. ‘It’s all over.’

  ‘No it isn’t, brother,’ his twin contradicted him with uncharacteristic confidence. ‘It’s only just begun.’

  120

  They were both wrong. Something had passed whose shadow would always remain, and something had begun that would not endure. For it is my fate, Ganapathi, to have to record not a climactic triumph but a moment of bathos. The Indian people gave themselves the privilege of replacing a determined, collected tyrant with an indeterminate collection of tyros.

  I was partially responsible, but only partially. When the elections were over there was a general desire to avoid a contest among the victorious constituents of the Janata Front. It was resolved that Drona and I, the Messiah and the Methuselah, would jointly designate the nation’s new Prime Minister, who would then be ‘elected’ unanimously by the Janata legislators. At the time this seemed a sensible way of avoiding unseemly conflict at the start of the new regime. Only later did I realize the irony of beginning the era of the restoration of democracy with so undemocratic a procedure.

  And it was not just ironic. In our ageless wisdom Drona and I had failed to realize what most college students know: that if you begin an examination by avoiding the most difficult question it raises, it is that very question that will eventually guarantee your failure.

  The two of us spoke individually with the leaders of each of the political parties that made up the Front. There were several of them, each with his claims to overall leadership: political parties, after all, Ganapathi, grow in our nation like mushrooms, split like amoeba, and are as original and productive as mules. Most of these leaders had at one time or another been in the Kaurava Party, but had left - or been pushed out - at various stages of the party’s takeover by Priya Duryodhani. Drona and I surveyed the unprepossessing alternatives and decided to go for the only one among them whose honesty and sincerity was as unquestionable as his seniority: Yudhishtir.

  I made the suggestion knowing only too well how little these very qualities suited my grandson for kingship. Drona agreed because, typically, he was more anxious to make a moral choice than a political one. Yet we were political enough to make a gesture of appeasement to the many who disagreed with the conservatism of the new Prime Minister: almost immediately after announcing our view that Yudhishtir would be the Front’s consensual choice for the nation’s leadership, we asked the populist Ashwathaman to preside over the Front’s party organization

  There was, Ganapathi, one brief shining moment of hope, when the Front’s leaders, the euphoria of their unprecedented victory still mollifying their egos, gathered together before that symbol of the nation’s enduring greatness, the Taj Mahal, and swore a collective oath to Uphold India’s glory and its traditional values. Draupadi was present that day, as an honoured guest, and her skin glowed with a health and inner beauty that it had lacked for many years. She smiled then, dazzling onlookers with the strength and whiteness of her teeth. Even I could not guess how weak the roots were under that sparkling display of oral confidence.

  It seemed strangely appropriate, Ganapathi, that the Front had chosen the Taj for this public reaffirmation of their democratic purpose. The Taj Mahal is the motif for India on countless tourist posters and has probably had more camera shutters clicked at it than any other edifice on the face of this earth. Yet how easily one forgets that this unequalled monument of love is in fact a tomb, the burial place of a woman who suffered thirteen times the pain of childbirth and died in agony at the fourteenth attempt. Perhaps that makes it all the worthier a symbol of our India - this land of beauty and grandeur amidst suffering and death.

  I stayed on after the ceremony, after the shamianas had been dismantled and the shamas, their songs over, had flown away I sat before the marble whiteness of the monument, already yellowing with the sulphur dioxide from the fumes of a near-by oil refinery, and watched the darkness drape itself round the familiar dome like an old shawl. Night had fallen many times upon the Taj; many times had dawn broken the promises of the last sunrise. But it had endured; chipped and vandalized and looted and trampled upon and scrubbed and admired and loved and envied and exploited, it had endured. And so would India.

  The hopes raised by that moving ceremony were soon betrayed. Krishna went back to his southern district and it was almost as if he had taken with him Agni’s boon of creative accomplishment. The Front began rapidly to dissipate its energies in mutual competition and recrimination. Yudhishtir was as stiff and straight-backed and humourless as his critics had always portrayed him, and his colossal self-righteousness was not helped by his complete inability to judge the impression he made on others. As the ‘strongmen’ of his Cabinet - a term they assiduously encouraged the media to employ - quarrelled querulously at every meeting, the Prime Minister remained tightly self-obsessed, seemingly unaware that half of those who sat on the executive branch with him were busily engaged in sawing it off.

  Yudhishtir suffered particularly from the failing of expecting everyone to take him as seriously as he took himself. When, in response to a question from an American television interviewer, the first journalist indiscreet enough to ask in public what her peers had cheerfully confirmed in private - ‘Mr Prime Minister, is it true that you drink your own urine every day?’ - when, Ganapathi, before a prime-time audience of 80 million incredulous Americans, quintupled by satellite newsfeeds to every television channel in the world with the money and the lack of taste to broadcast it, when, with the same lack of reflection he had shown in accepting Shakuni’s challenge, Yudhishtir launched into a sanctimonious homily on the miraculous properties of auto- urine therapy, he dropped the dice of government back at the Kauravas’ feet.

  His positive response was quoted in every one of India’s resurgent newspapers. Cartoonists and cocktail-party wags combined Yudhishtir’s confession with his well-known stance in favour of Prohibition (‘If I drank what he drinks, I’d be for Prohibition too’; ‘Would you ever invite the Prime Minister to a Bring-a-bottle party?’). Graffiti appeared on public lavatories across the country, more than one entrance signboard being repainted to read ‘Yudhishtir Juice Centre’. As the Prime Minister unsmilingly continued to make himself the laughing-stock of the nation, his coalition gradually unravelled beneath his feet. Write it on his
epitaph, Ganapathi: our Hero piddled while home burned.

  Not that the unravelling Front had ever been very tightly knit. Within weeks of its assumption of office it had become the vehicle for the personal ambitions of at least three veteran politicians besides the Prime Minister. With their adeptness at camouflaging petty self-interest under wordy speeches on the uplift of (depending on the precise nuances of their electoral bases) the ‘backward classes’, the ‘backward castes’ or the ‘backward strata of society’, they rapidly acquired for their party the sobriquet ‘the Backward Front’. As they stumbled from argument to argument, lawlessness erupted, prices spiralled upwards, government offices sank beneath dusty cobwebs of red tape, and every policy decision was hamstrung by factional disagreement. Their ineptness helped Priya Duryodhani rapidly to recover from the shock of her ouster. ‘The Backward Front government can move the nation neither backward nor forward,’ she was able to declare to uneasy applause at surprisingly well-attended public meetings. ‘It is merely awkward.’

  That she was free at all to lavish such scathing contempt on her conquerors was one more instance of the weakness of the Front’s combination of virtue and avarice in the face of so formidable an adversary. Just across the border, chaos following charges of intimidation, ballot-stuffing and vote-rigging in Karnistan’s show election had led to Zaleel Shah Jhoota’s being toppled and jailed by his generals; his military tormentors were now debating whether to have him publicly flogged for his misdeeds or hanged or both. In India, however, the Front had decided to take the former Prime Minister to court on the esoteric charge of détournement de pouvoir, which was a polite legalistic way of saying she had subverted the Constitution. Since everyone who had lived in India for the last three years with his eyes open knew she had subverted the Constitution, it did not seem to be a charge that required much proof. Yet the chosen means did not serve the choicest ends: the lawcourts, Ganapathi, with the solitary recent exception of post-Falklands Argentina, are not the place for a people to bring their former rulers to account. Priya Duryodhani and her skilled lawyers (minus Shakuni, who was now loudly asserting his democratic credentials and disavowing the Siege, the ex-Prime Minister and all her works) ran circles of subtlety around the Front’s witnesses.

  It was all like an elaborate game between teams of unequal strength. Law, of course, rivals cricket as the major national sport of our urban élite. Both litigation and cricket are slow, complex and costly; both involve far more people than need to be active at any given point in the process; both call for skill, strength and guile in varying combinations at different times; both benefit from more breaks in the action than spectators consider necessary; both occur at the expense of, and often disrupt, more productive economic activity; and both frequently meander to conclusions, punctuated by appeals, that satisfy none of the participants. Yet both are dear to Indian hearts and absorb much of the country’s energies. The moment the law was chosen as the means to deal with the former Prime Minister, it was clear that the toss had gone Priya Duryodhani’s way.

  As with cricket, the problem with law is one of popular participation. The lawcourts of India, Ganapathi, are open to the masses, like the doors of a five-star hotel. Priya Duryodhani could afford to command the best in the profession; ‘the people’, on the other hand, though she was being prosecuted in their name, could not always find a place in the courtroom where she was questioned about her crimes against them. Whatever purpose her trial served, it was not that of popular justice.

  The case dragged on and, after the first few sensational revelations, lapsed into unreality. Duryodhani’s lawyers so effectively turned it into a showcase for their forensic skills that the issues behind their legalistic hair-splitting were soon forgotten. The fatal turn occurred: people became bored. Their ennui banalized her evil.

  The trial was in its fourteenth meandering month when the crisis within the Front, hopelessly riven over conflicts of its own making, came to a head.

  The issue that brought the simmering pot of mutual dislike to a boil was ostensibly the government’s attitude towards the Untouchables - Gangaji’s Harijans, or Children of God. It all started with a sage whom Yudhishtir went to see, an ochre-robed godman whose vocabulary was as out of date as his garments.

  Godmen are India’s major export of the last two decades, offering manna and mysticism to an assortment of foreign seekers in need of them. Once in a while, however, they also acquire a domestic following, by appealing to the deep-seated reverence in all Indians for spiritual wisdom and inner peace, a reverence rooted in the conditions of Indian life, which make it so difficult for most of us to acquire either. These backyard godmen, unlike the made-for-export variety, are largely content to manifest their sanctity by sanctimoniousness, producing long and barely intelligible discourses into which their listeners can read whatever meaning they wish. (If religion is the opium of the Indian people, Ganapathi, then godmen are God’s little chillums.)

  The godman whom Yudhishtir approached came into this category, advocating measures either so unexceptionable (regular prayer) or so exceptional (regular consumption of one’s own liquid wastes) that his following was confined to a small number of devoted devotees. Indeed, no one might have paid him any attention at all, were it not for the fact that the Prime Minister was discovered one day at one of his speeches. At a speech, in fact, in which the godman carelessly, or unimaginatively, or perversely - it really doesn’t matter which - referred to the nation’s traditional outcastes as ‘Untouchables’.

  That was all, mind you. He didn’t suggest that they deserved to be where they were, didn’t imply they had to be barred from temples or from our daughters’ bedrooms; he simply called them ‘Untouchables’ instead of the euphemism Gangaji had invented in an effort to remove the stigma of that term. And Yudhishtir committed, in the eyes of his most radical critics, the unpardonable sin of neither correcting him nor walking out of his audience.

  Now you know as well as I do, Ganapathi, that words are among India’s traditional palliatives - we love to conceal our problems by changing their names. It mattered little to the men and women at the bottom of the social heap whether they were referred to by the most notorious of their disabilities or by the fiction of a divine paternity they supposedly shared with everyone else (which was almost as bad, because if everyone was a Child of God, why were they the only ones branded as such?). But to the professional politicians anxious to score points against my insensitive grandson, Yudhishtir’s silence when the term was employed in his hearing meant acquiescence in a collective insult. The government, they declaimed to Priya Duryodhani’s enthusiastic endorsement, was anti-Harijan.

  Ashwathaman, the Front’s radical leader, was foremost in his criticism of the Prime Minister. He could not, in all conscience, he announced, continue to support a government which had thus revealed its casteist cast. Yudhishtir’s rivals, scenting his blood on the trail of their own ascent to his throne, agreed.

  Suddenly the fragile unity of the Front began to crumble. One legislator declared he would no longer accept the party whip; another demanded that the Front expel its ‘closet casteists’. There was open talk of forming a new Front, purged of ‘reactionary’ elements. A majority of the ruling party’s legislators were just waiting, it was said, for a signal to abandon Yudhishtir. The signal had to come from the man whose Uprising had first started them on their ascent to power - Drona.

  121

  But the new Messiah lay on his sickbed, his liver devastated by the privations of Priya Duryodhani’s prisons. Ill, exhausted, bitterly disappointed by the way in which the popular tide of his dreams had dribbled wastefully into the arid sands of sterile conflict, Drona lay torn between loyalty to the government he had created and the son for whom he had, all those years ago, changed his life.

  ‘I can’t afford to lose him to the other side,’ Yudhishtir said to me. ‘I must get him to issue a statement in my favour before Ashwathaman returns from his tour of the southern states and
beats me to it.’

  ‘Yama, the god of death, might beat you both to it,’ I said. My own advancing years had made my imagery even more traditional, at least on the subject of mortality. ‘I saw him this morning and felt he wouldn’t last till tomorrow. But if he does, Yudhishtir, he is not going to support you against his son.’

  ‘I realize that. And if he adds his voice to Ashwathaman’s, I am finished,’ Yudhishtir said matter-of-factly. ‘The time has come for me to act as our ancestors would have done.’ Without responding to my raised eyebrow, the Prime Minister beckoned to his youngest brother. ‘Sahadev, I want you to go to Drona’s house now and tell him Ashwathaman’s plane back to Delhi has crashed.’

  I was numbed by his words. ‘You can’t possibly do this,’ I protested as soon as I had recovered my breath.

  ‘Tell him also,’ Yudhishtir went on obliviously, ‘that I am on my way over to give him the news myself. I shall follow you in about ten minutes. Make sure no one else is with you when you say this, or when I enter.’

  ‘But Yudhishtir,’ I expostulated, ‘you’ve never told a lie in your life!’

  ‘And I never will,’ my grandson replied piously.

  ‘Drona knows that,’ I pointed out. ‘And he is bound to ask you for the truth of Sahadev’s information.’