The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  ‘Precisely.’ Yudhishtir seemed undisturbed.

  ‘You can’t lie to him then! A dying man - your own guru . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry, VVji,’ Yudhishtir said. ‘I won’t lie.’

  I went with him to Drona’s house. The old man lay in a darkened room, surrounded by the medicines and equipment that kept him alive. Sahadev was crouched miserably at his bedside; I was shaken to see that the Messiah was weeping.

  As we entered, he turned to Yudhishtir with a desperate anxiety even his frailty could not efface. ‘He tells me this terrible fate has befallen my son,’ Drona said. ‘Tell me, Yudhishtir, is it true? I cannot believe it unless it comes from you. Tell me, is Ashwathaman safe?’

  A look of genuine sadness appeared on the Prime Minister’s face. ‘I am sorry, Dronaji,’ Yudhishtir said. ‘Ashwathaman is dead.’

  Even I believed him then, for Yudhishtir simply did not lie. His honesty was like the brightness of the sun or the wetness of the rain, one of the elements of the natural world: you simply took it for granted.

  ‘Ashwathaman,’ he repeated softly, ‘is dead.’

  A terrible cry rose from Drona’s lips. He turned his face away from us, towards the white-plastered wall, his voice drained of all emotion. ‘Then I have nothing more to live for.’ His eyes closed.

  ‘I am sorry, Drona, to ask you this at this painful time,’ the Prime Minister whispered, ‘but will you not support the unity of the Front you did so much to create and place in power?’

  The Messiah did not look at him. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘Of course.’

  I saw the triumph in Yudhishtir’s eyes at the same time that I saw the light fade from Drona’s. Within minutes, the old guru was gone.

  We stood in vigil as the life ebbed away from him, and I felt regret flood my spirit. Throughout his life, during his days of violence and of peace, his years of teaching and of withdrawal, Drona had been one of India’s simplest men. ‘The new Mahaguru’, a Sunday magazine had dubbed him, but he was a flawed Mahaguru, a man whose goodness was not balanced by the shrewdness of the original. He had stood above his peers, a secular saint whose commitment to truth and justice was beyond question. But though his loyalty to the ideals of a democratic and egalitarian India could not be challenged, Drona’s abhorrence of power had made him unfit to wield it. He had offered inspiration but not involvement, charisma but not change, hope but no harness. Having abandoned politics when he seemed the likely heir-apparent to Dhritarashtra, he tried to stay above it all after the fall of Dhritarashtra’s daughter, and so he let the revolution he had wrought fall into the hands of lesser men who were unworthy of his ideals. Now he was dying, and the nation did not know what it would mourn.

  ‘”J.D.,” our modern Messiah, is no more,’ Yudhishtir announced outside when it was all over. ‘And his last words were a stirring plea for unity amongst us in the Front. It is no secret that he was deeply saddened by the troubles that have affected the government - his government, a government he did more than anyone else to make possible. It is sadly true that Dronaji died a deeply disappointed man, but his legacy lives on in the hearts of the Indian people - to whom, in the last analysis, he taught their own strength.’ Yudhishtir paused, his voice breaking. ‘I plead with all his followers and heirs today - let us not dissipate that strength. On this tragic occasion I shall call on every member of the Front, and in particular on Dronaji’s son Ashwathaman, our party’s President, to rededicate ourselves to the cause J.D. held so dear.’

  ‘Ashwathaman?’ I asked Yudhishtir later when we were alone. ‘I thought you told the old man he was dead.’ I shook my head in disappointment. ‘You, Yudhishtir; you of all people. I believed you could never lie.’

  ‘You believed right, VVji,’ Yudhishtir said implacably. ‘I didn’t lie this time either. When I said Ashwathaman was dead, I was speaking the truth. Before leaving the house I caught a cockroach in the closet, named it Ashwathaman, and crushed it under my prime-ministerial despatch-box. So you see, VVji, I did not lie to Drona. I never said it was his son who had died.’

  I stared at him, breathless at his sophistry. ‘Your words, Yudhishtir,’ I said at last, ‘took away the last spark of life from the old man. In effect, they killed him.’

  ‘You are being most unjust, VVji,’ Yudhishtir replied. ‘He was ill; he was dying. Perhaps his grief hastened his end, but is it not said that the time of our going is determined from our births? I may not have spoken the whole truth, but I spoke no untruth, and my words may have helped sustain a greater truth by prompting him to endorse my plea for unity. Would it have been better to allow his tremendous moral authority to have been manipulated by the radical rabble to bring down the government that has restored Indian democracy? I believe, VVji, that I acted righteously, in full pursuit of dharma. Dharma, you know, is a subtle thing.’

  ‘But not as subtle as that, Yudhishtir,’ I replied sadly. ‘I do not believe you will profit from your deception. Our national motto is “Satyameva Jayate,” Truth will Prevail. Not your truth or mine, Yudhishtir; just Truth. A truth too immutable to be uttered only in the letter and violated in the spirit.’ I rose, clenching my walking stick so tightly my palm hurt. ‘Goodbye, Yudhishtir. You shall not see me again.’

  I did not turn to see if my exit had even momentarily shaken his complacency.

  122

  It did not matter, for of course I was right. Drona’s dying benediction achieved no more than his lifetime’s crusades. A majority of the Front’s MPs left the Prime Minister’s emunctory embrace. The government fell; and in the elections that followed, Priya Duryodhani was returned overwhelmingly to power. The still unresolved case against her was discreetly withdrawn. Dharma had turned full circle.

  123

  What remains to be said, Ganapathi? There is, of course, the question of expectations. This story, like that of our country, is a story of betrayed expectations, yours as much as our characters’. There is no story and too many stories; there are no heroes and too many heroes. What is left out matters almost as much as what is said.

  Let me, as so often in our story, digress once more. There is, Ganapathi, a curious parallel. To most foreigners who know nothing of India, the one Indian book they know anything about is the Kama Sutra. To them, it is the Great Indian Novelty. The Kama Sutra may well be the only Indian book which has been read by more foreigners than Indians. Yet it is for the most part a treatise on the social etiquette of ancient Indian courtship, and those who think of its author Vatsyayana as some sort of fourth-century pornographer must surely be sorely disappointed to go through his careful catalogue of amatory activities, which reads more like a textbook than a thriller. But what a far cry it is from the precision of the Kama Sutra to the prudery of contemporary India! It never ceases to amaze me, Ganapathi, that a civilization so capable of sexual candour should be steeped in the ignorance, superstition and prurience that characterize Indian sexual attitudes today. Perhaps the problem is that the Kama Sutra’s refined brand of bedroom chivalry cannot go very far in a country of so many women and so few bedrooms.

  It is no better with the great stories of our national epics. How far we have travelled from the glory and splendour of our adventurous mythological heroes! The land of Rama, setting out on his glorious crusade against the abductors of his divinely pure wife Sita, the land where truth and honour and valour and dharma were worshipped as the cardinal principles of existence, is now a nation of weak-willed compromisers, of leaders unable to lead, of rampant corruption and endemic faithlessness. Our democrats gamble with democracy; our would-be dictators do not know what to dictate. We soothe ourselves with the lullabies of our ancient history, our remarkable culture, our inspiring mythology. But our present is so depressing that our rulers can only speak of the intermediate future - or the immediate past.

  Whatever our ancestors expected of India, Ganapathi, it was not this. It was not a land where dharma and duty have come to mean nothing; where religion is an excuse for conflict
rather than a code of conduct; where piety, instead of marking wisdom, masks a crippling lack of imagination. It was not a land where brides are burned in kerosene-soaked kitchens because they have not brought enough dowry with them; where integrity and self-respect are for sale to the highest bidder; where men are pulled off buses and butchered because of the length of a forelock or the absence of a foreskin. All these things that I have avoided mentioning in my story because I preferred to pretend they did not matter.

  But they matter, of course, because in our country the mundane is as relevant as the mythical, Our philosophers try to make much of our great Vedic religion by pointing to its spiritualism, its pacifism, its lofty pansophism; and they ignore, or gloss over, its superstitions, its inegalities, its obscurantism. That is quite typical. Indeed one may say it is quite typically Hindu. Hinduism is the religion of over 80 per cent of Indians, and as a way of life it pervades almost all things Indian, bringing to politics, work and social relations the same flexibility of doctrine, reverence for custom and absorptive eclecticism that characterize the religion - as well as the same tendency to respect outworn dogma, worship sacred cows and offer undue deference to gurus. Not to mention its great ability to overlook - or transcend - the inconvenient truth.

  I have been, on the whole, a good Hindu in my story. I have portrayed a nation in struggle but omitted its struggles against itself, ignoring the regionalists and autonomists and separatists and secessionists who even today are trying to tear the country apart. To me, Ganapathi, they are of no consequence in the story of India; they seek to diminish something that is far greater than they will ever comprehend. Others will disagree and dismiss my assertion as the naivety of the terminally nostalgic. They will say that the India of the epic warriors died on its mythological battlefields, and that today’s India is a land of adulteration, black-marketing, corruption, communal strife, dowry killings, you know the rest, and that this is the only India that matters. Not my India, where epic battles are fought for great causes, where freedom and democracy are argued over, won, betrayed and lost, but an India where mediocrity reigns, where the greatest cause is the making of money, where dishonesty is the most prevalent art and bribery the most vital skill, where power is an end in itself rather than a means, where the real political issues of the day involve not principles but parochialism. An India where a Priya Duryodhani can be re-elected because seven hundred million people cannot produce anyone better, and where her immortality can be guaranteed by her greatest failure - the alienation of some of the country’s most loyal citizens to the point where two of them consider it a greater duty to kill her than protect her, as they were employed to do.

  Perhaps they were right. Or perhaps it is simply that I can no longer distinguish between right and wrong, real and unreal. For as I arrived near the end of my telling of this story, Ganapathi, I again began to dream.

  I dreamt again of Hastinapur. Not, this time, of the glorious palace of the princely era, resplendent in its prosperity and basking in the warmth of the people’s adulation, but of a drab township with squalid streets and peeling walls, with rancid rubbish accumulating in the open spaces of what had been the Bibighar Gardens. In my dream great hot winds blew into the town, filling it with swirling clouds of gritty dust. The sun disappeared from sight. Out of the breath-choking haze emerged, at savage random, flying objects that sprang from the sky and smashed in splinters on the ground, aimlessly mutilating passers-by and pavement-sleepers. In the murky half-light of dawn and dusk, hands outstretched as if groping for direction, roamed a hundred headless figures, the gaping emptiness at their necks suppurating horribly. The sacred river that flowed by the palace backed up in a surging torrent that swept it against nature, returning it toward its source.

  I groaned in my sleep as I saw these things, Ganapathi, but my tossing and turning would not drive the images from my fevered brain. Hastinapur crumbled before my eyes. Fierce-toothed rodents scurried through the town, gnawing and nibbling at the stocks of grain, the vegetation, the electrical wiring and the fingers of the maimed street-dwellers. The milk on every stove boiled over, reeking of the odour of charred flesh. Pots and plates developed cracks; white vessels became black in the washing. The purest milk turned watery and ripe mangoes tasted more bitter than gourds. Sacks of rice were found to contain more stones than grain. The most carefully prepared food turned out to be crawling with maggots. Wells turned brackish, roads broke up into rubble, roofs caved in. I was dreaming, Ganapathi, of the worst kind of devastation - that which occurs when nature turns upon itself.

  Even the full moon could not be seen on its appointed night. Instead the koyals, songbirds once, never stopped crowing; cows brayed like donkeys and whelped mules rather than calves; and jackals howled in the streets as if they belonged to the houses of Hastinapur rather than to the jungles surrounding it.

  I could see, even in my sleep, that the process could not be overcome; it could only be escaped from. In the distant hills overlooking Hastinapur loomed the snow-covered top of a gleaming mountain, and from it, a celestial peace on their visages, Gangaji, Dhritarashtra and Pandu smiled and beckoned. From the debris of the town, looking up at that shining light on the mountain, our recent protagonists decided to embark on the ascent.

  They had not even begun their march when Krishna fell to the ground, a deep wound oozing in his heel. He clutched his foot, his face contorted in agony. ‘I cannot move,’ he gasped. Krishna’s dark features were sallow with pain. ‘I can sit, I can speak, I can give you advice, but I cannot walk on with you. Go without me.’

  And so, as the others sorrowfully turned away, Krishna’s life oozed into the earth of my dream. And a voice from the mountain-top echoed in my mind: ‘He could have prevented all this, but he chose not to act. He remained content with his little fief, giving advice and verse to Arjun, and then went back to his comforts and allowed all this to happen. India has too many Krishnas. His brilliance burned itself out without illuminating the country. He cannot reach the top.’

  Leaving him behind, the others set out across rock and ravine, valley and hill, towards the foot of the mountain. A little dog attached itself to them, and trotted beside Yudhishtir. Onward they walked, then upward, till each step seemed unbearably heavy and the thin air rasped in their lungs. Then Draupadi collapsed to the ground.

  ‘Why her?’ I asked the faceless voice in my dream.

  ‘Democracy always falters first,’ came the echo. ‘She can only be sustained by the strength of her husbands. Their weakness is her fatal flaw. She cannot endure to the mountain-top.’

  The others walked on After hours of trudging through the mire of my mind, Sahadev stumbled and fell. In my dream, I no longer needed to ask the question: the unseen voice answered the unspoken query.

  ‘He knew what was right, but did nothing with his knowledge,’ it said. ‘He stayed outside the country, saw its greatness and its failings in perspective, but did not involve himself in its true struggle for survival. He cannot stride to the mountain-top.’

  Nakul was the next to give up.

  ‘He was too willing to serve institutions rather than values. Dharma consists of more than just doing one’s duty as narrowly defined by one’s immediate job. There is a larger duty, a duty to a greater cause, that Nakul ignored. He will not see the mountain-top.’

  When Arjun fell, I remember the shock radiating even through my dream. But Arjun - the paragon of virtue, who by the unanimous wish of the people succeeded Priya Duryodhani! How can he fall?’

  ‘He believed himself to be perfect,’ resonated the reply, ‘and allowed others to believe it. But India defeats perfection, as the rainclouds obscure the sun. His arrogance tripped him up when his gaze aimed even beyond the peak. He will never get to the mountain-top.’

  They were still some way from the crest when Bhim sank heavily to his knees.

  ‘He protected the Pandavas and the country, but that was not enough. He did not do enough to shield Draupadi Mokrasi from abuse, b
ecause he saw himself as only one of her guardians and placed his commitment to his brothers above his commitment to her. He will not stand on the mountain-top.’

  Yudhishtir, unflagging, climbed on steadily, alone except for the little dog still trotting by his side. ‘Why him?’ I asked. ‘Yudhishtir, with his priggish morality, his blind insensitivity to others, his willingness to gamble Draupadi away, his self-serving adherence to the letter of honesty rather than its spirit? How can he be allowed to climb on when all the others have fallen?’

  The voice seemed surprised by the question. ‘But he was true to himself throughout,’ it said. ‘He was true to dharma.’

  And indeed, Yudhishtir at last reached the top of the mountain, and looked around him, seeing the peaks and the valleys below, at a level with the fluffy white clouds that floated past like gossamer from nature’s veil.

  One of the clouds swooped down upon him in my dream. Upon it was seated a splendid figure of godlike magnificence, wearing a golden crown on his smooth and unwrinkled brow.

  ‘I am Kaalam, the god of Time,’ he said with a dazzling smile. ‘You have reached the mountain-top, Yudhishtir; your time has come. Mount my chariot with me and let us travel to the court of History.’

  ‘I am greatly honoured,’ our hero replied. ‘May this dog come with me?’

  ‘No, he may not,’ Kaalam said with some distaste. ‘History has no place for dogs. Come, we must hurry.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Yudhishtir pursed his lips. ‘This dog has been my faithful companion throughout my long ascent. I cannot abandon him now that I have reached the top.’

  ‘Then I shall have to leave without you,’ Kaalam said impatiently.

  ‘Leave then, if you must,’ Yudhishtir’s jaw was set. ‘I shall not come without the dog. It would not be dharma to repay devotion in this manner.’