About the Book
‘We do not know what to do with one of our most precious resources, solitude, and so we fill it with noise and clutter . . .’
Suffocating in the small-town world of his parents, Vijay is desperate to escape to the raw energy of Bombay in the early 1990s. His big chance arrives unexpectedly when the family servant Raju is recruited by a right-wing organization. As a result of an article he writes about the increasing power of sectarian politicians, Vijay gets a job in a small Bombay publication, The Indian Secularist. There he meets Rustom Sorabjee-the inspirational founder of the magazine who opens Vijay’s eyes to the damage caused to the nation by the mixing of religion and politics. A year after his arrival in Bombay, Vijay is caught up in violent riots that rip through the city, a reflection of the upsurge of fundamentalism everywhere in the country.
He is sent to a small tea town in the Nilgiri mountains to recover, but finds that the unrest in the rest of India has touched this peaceful spot as well, specifically a spectacular shrine called The Tower of God, which is the object of political wrangling. He is befriended by Noah, an enigmatic and colourful character who lives in the local cemetery and quotes Pessoa, Cavafy and Rimbaud but is ostracised by a local elite obsessed with little more than growing their prize fuchsias.
As the discord surrounding the local shrine comes to a head, Vijay tries to alert them to the dangers, but his intervention will have consequences he could never have foreseen.
The Solitude of Emperors is a stunningly perceptive novel about modern India, about what motivates fundamentalist beliefs, and what makes someone driven, bold or mad enough to make a stand.
About the Author
David Davidar is the founder of Aleph Book Company. He is the author of The House of Blue Mangoes, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and The Solitude of Emperors, which was short-listed for a regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
Also by David Davidar
The House of Blue Mangoes (2002)
Ithaca (2011)
ALEPH BOOK COMPANY
An independent publishing firm
promoted by Rupa Publications India
This digital edition published in 2013
First published in Great Britain in 2007 by
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Copyright © David Davidar 2007, 2013
No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic, mechanical, print reproduction, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Aleph Book Company. Any unauthorized distribution of this e-book may be considered a direct infringement of copyright and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
e-ISBN: 978-93-83064-44-1
All rights reserved.
This e-book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form or cover other than that in which it is published.
For Rachna Singh
for Eddy Davidar
The one who stays within the limits assigned to him is a man
The one who roams beyond these limits is a saint.
To reject both limits and their absence:
That’s a thought with immeasurable depths.
—KABIR
contents
PART ONE
Prologue
1. The Final Kick
2. The Indian Secularist
3. In Bombay
4. City of Fear
PART TWO
5. Journey to Meham
6. The Plant Hunter
7. The Essence of Women
8. The Legacy of Martyrs
9. The Tower of God
10. Fuchsia Wars
11. The Rioter
12. The Solitude of Emperors
13. Seven Steps to a Tragedy
14. Death of a Rioter
15. The Last Truth
Acknowledgements
PART ONE
Prologue
They are the invisible ones, the ones who were too small, weak, poor or slow to escape the onrush of history. No obituaries mark their passing, no memorials honour their name and we don’t remember them because in our eyes they never existed. Yet we ignore them at our peril, if only because their fate today could be ours tomorrow; history is an insatiable tyrant.
I have never been much good at ritual or ceremonial homage—I blame this on my parents, who never really taught me—so I have had to invent a private rite of remembrance for Noah, a man who was ignored by almost everyone for as long as he lived, but who, in his death, affected me more powerfully than I would have thought possible. I can picture his mocking smile now, for the ceremony I’m about to conduct takes its inspiration from a somewhat bizarre funeral I saw him preside over all those many years ago. It is the middle of winter in this northern city, and even though the bitter cold would deter most from setting foot outside a heated room, I have always been stubborn and determined once I have decided to do something, and so I shuffle through the wind and snow to the cemetery closest to my house.
Once there, I look for a grave with an angel on its headstone; there is a crust of snow on the grave and I scrape it off, unroll the plastic mat I have brought with me, and sit down. Noah wouldn’t have liked this cemetery, it’s too neat and formal; he believed the dead were entitled to comfortable lived-in surroundings. He would have missed his beloved trees: the great peepul with leaves like flattened spearheads and the jacarandas that flung sprays of blue into the deeper blue of the Nilgiri sky. Here the maples are bare, and the evergreens are too dull and uniform to have appealed to him. But there is nothing I can do about the surroundings, so I begin to unpack the rucksack I have brought with me. I take out a bottle of rum, a cigarette packet (I do not smoke and the cigarettes have been replaced by two joints that I have procured with some difficulty from a Bolivian colleague), a cheap plastic lighter, a CD player and, finally, a manuscript. I sprinkle some of the rum around the grave to propitiate the dead, put the headphones on, and am preparing to light up a joint when I hear the sound of an approaching vehicle. I am grateful for the cover of the snowstorm because I doubt the groundskeeper whose vehicle this must be would understand if he caught me here.
In the twelve years since Noah died, I have performed this ceremony annually—in other cemeteries, other cities, in Madras, Bombay, in London, a city I passed through on my way to Canada—and every time I’ve carried it out surreptitiously, for it is not something that can be explained away easily. The vehicle sweeps past, its driver an indistinct figure in the cab, and silence descends again. I apologize to Grace MacKinnon (1902-1972), whose grave I have temporarily taken over, switch on the CD player, and to the sound of Jim Morrison singing ‘Riders on the Storm’ I light the joint. The first drag sets me coughing uncontrollably; I wait for my agitated lungs to stop protesting, take another hit, then perform the final part of the ceremony. I pull out a torch from the rucksack, switch it on, shake the snow off my manuscript and begin reading aloud the last chapter. I have neither the effrontery nor the imagination to make this the sort of book Noah would have admired, but my years as a journalist have equipped me with enough tools to thread together a coherent, sturdy narrative. In the course of the decade it has taken me to complete the book—by any accounting that would be deemed slow, slightly over a chapter a year, but I should point out that it has gone through five drafts—I think I have finally put down a version of the events of the winter of 1993/4 that I am satisfied with. More importantly, I feel I understand the man at the centre of them better.
Noah told me once that the dead remain with us for as long
as we need them and I have begun to see what he meant. I sensed his presence from time to time as I attempted to recreate his life and the events leading up to his death, and the book has benefited as a result. I should say at this point that I am aware that this account is different from the version put out by the police and the government commission of inquiry that investigated his death; in my defence all I can say is that nobody else recorded the witness of the dead.
1
The Final Kick
I am of the school that believes a journalist should never become part of the story he is covering, and the only time I broke that rule, the consequences were disastrous and signalled the beginning of the end of my career.
I did not set out to become a journalist. I hadn’t grown up yearning to write about corrupt government ministers or the daily injustices that took place in our teeming cities and villages. All I wanted was a job, any job that would take me out of K—, the small town in Tamil Nadu that I was born and brought up in. I can write about it calmly now, but back in 1990 when I was looking to escape from K—, I was filled with the desperation that anyone who has sought to leave small-town India with a second-class degree from a third-rate college would readily understand.
K— sprawled haphazardly beside one of the national highways. It had the standard-issue refuse-filled streets, open drains, ugly residential sections, hospitals, a cinema or two, clamorous bazaars, open-air barber shops, temples, mosques, churches, the scanty shade of neem trees, cows, crows, bicycles, beggars and sunlight so intense that by mid-morning everything in town was wrapped in a shimmering skin of heat—a stereotypical small town, then, with little to distinguish it from the dozens of others that were strewn across the great South Indian plain. The two things that set it apart from its fellows were a temple and a hospital. The temple, which was dedicated to Lord Shiva, had been constructed sometime in the eighth century by a minor ruler of the Pandyan dynasty, and possessed an unusual architectural feature—in the courtyard that fronted the main shrine stood a dozen stone columns that, when struck, produced the saptha swarangal, the basic notes of Indian classical music. The temple at K— was not as well-known as the Nellaiyappar temple, with over a hundred musical pillars, which lay an hour and a half to the south by bus and attracted hordes of tourists and pilgrims, but it was a source of pride to us and its annual festival during the Tamil month of Aani was the cultural and spiritual highlight of the year.
Our pride in the Shiva temple didn’t extend to its surroundings. It stood at the end of a street full of litter, and just beyond its precincts cows munched placidly on discarded banana leaves and flower garlands, while beggars and stray dogs fought over the right to occupy the best spots to importune worshippers for food and alms. In the evening, their ranks were swelled by what appeared to be the entire male population of K— between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, who waited for the young unmarried girls to appear, chaperoned by their mothers, for evening worship at the temple. The girls would arrive at a set hour, their jewellery and the corrugations of their richly coloured saris catching the dying light and turning them into worthy handmaidens of the Lord. In a marvel of contrivance and skill, they would manage to peer up from beneath their eyelashes at the waiting boys, while simultaneously affecting not to notice them—for the benefit of their mothers—and delicately picking their way through the garbage strewn in their path. The boys would giggle and shuffle their feet and the girls would press on towards the entrance of the shrine, their mothers waddling along beside them, looking severe. The entire process lasted no more than a few minutes but neither side could have done without it, it was the closest thing to public contact between unmarried men and women in town.
If the temple was the epicentre of the arts, spirituality and romance, The Balaji Medical Centre represented the height of modernity. The gleaming new hospital complex on the north-eastern edge of the town had been completed in 1975, seven years after I was born, by a native son who had made good in Austin, Texas. Unacknowledged by his adoptive country, he had decided to memorialize himself in the town he had always congratulated himself on escaping from—until he had turned sixty and had begun to think about how he would be remembered after he was gone. Being a good self-publicist and an even better businessman, he disguised this giant act of the ego with the trappings of patriotism (‘I have long felt the need to do something for India’) while quietly taking advantage of the cheap land prices and tax breaks extended to him by grateful municipal and state governments. Nobody in town had ever been treated in the hospital’s private wards, it was too expensive, but its high white walls and celebrity patients certainly gave K— something to boast about. To find work at the hospital was the goal of the more ambitious of my college classmates.
Neither the temple nor the hospital complex made me like the place of my birth any better. There were things in general that contributed to my disenchantment such as the lack of opportunity, the slow pace of life, the petty jealousies and small concerns of the people I associated with, but besides these there were specific things that stoked my desperation.
The first of these had little to do with me but with my parents and their romance. My mother taught physics at the women’s college and my father economics at the government arts and sciences college I went to, and I felt they lacked the ambition and the guile to advance any further in their careers. Or perhaps they were happy just as they were, muddling along with no real expectations of life, part of the generation of Indians born on the cusp of independence, with no big ideas to fight for, as the previous generation had had, and without the breathtaking ambition of succeeding generations. Their greatest achievement, as far as I could tell, because we didn’t talk about such things, was getting married to one another. For they had married for love, and more audaciously across the caste divide—a titanic achievement in small-town India in 1967. My father was a Brahmin, and my mother belonged to the Chettiar caste, and they had attended the same college in Salem, their home town, where they had fallen in love. When they announced their intention to marry, my father’s family promptly disowned him, and my mother’s father, a thin-lipped old martinet who was the headmaster of a secondary school, and whose progressiveness extended only as far as letting his daughter attend college, locked her up in her room and began scheming with the extended family to send her to the most distant relative he could think of. For three days she had endured the lashings he administered with a belt and a diet of kanji, and then, in a plot line borrowed from Tamil cinema, she had sneaked out of the house—aided by her browbeaten mother—while her father had his afternoon siesta, wearing two saris and carrying a bottle of scented coconut oil and a large black umbrella, the only things she could think of taking with her in the nerve-racking excitement of her escape. Soon after they were married in secret, the couple left Salem for K—, where they had lived quietly ever since. In my more charitable moments I would grant that the drama and tension of their marriage might have so depleted my parents that they had no option but to spend the rest of their lives just getting by.
My father’s family eventually came round, especially after he assured them that I would be raised a good Brahmin, although he didn’t intend to do much about it, a legacy of his having been a closet communist as a student. My mother’s father never forgave her, not even when I arrived on the scene, which she’d hoped would be the occasion for at least a modest reconciliation. I never met my maternal grandfather as a result, and the few memories I have of my grandmother, who died a few years after her husband, are of a faded woman who dressed always in white, and took me to the Murugan temple every time we visited her in Salem.
My parents’ crossing of caste lines had not only largely cut me off from my extended family—something that everyone else in town seemed to possess—it also marked me out as an oddity, a mongrel. It wasn’t so bad because I was still a Brahmin and did not have to endure the various humiliations someone lower down the caste ladder would undoubtedly have had to put up with, but I
would never fit well into K— society. This was a condition somewhat exacerbated by my parents’ unconventional attitude to religion. My father’s brief flirtation with communism had further diluted any lingering effects of his religious upbringing. I cannot remember him ever going to the temple in the years that my mother turned her back on religion, but neither did he believe in communism enough to delete religion entirely from his life. My mother, from whom I have inherited my stubbornness and a slow-burning temper, had been so enraged by her own family’s treatment of her that she shut religion—which she blamed for her father’s inflexibility—out of her existence and mine for the longest time. She allowed my mild-mannered father to fulfil his promise to his family by investing me with the sacred thread and other outward accoutrements of Brahminism, but beyond these token gestures I grew up without religion except for my periodic visits to my grandmother in Salem. By the time my mother had got over her fury, and the house began to fill with the strains of M.S. Subbulakshmi singing bhajans through the speakers of a cheap two-in-one cassette player, and the sweet scent of incense filled the storeroom that had been converted into a puja room, I was in my teens and it was too late. I would occasionally accompany her to the temple, and dutifully munch on the sweet prasadam that was handed out, but I developed no more than a nominal interest in religion.
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