‘Landslides are very common in this area,’ my neighbour said unhelpfully, but then uttered the magic phrase, ‘No problem. Our driver is very experienced. ’ As indeed he seemed to be. He began edging the van on to the rubble, and I could now see that a rough passage, barely wide enough for a car to squeeze through, had been hacked through the obstruction. The wheels spun on the loose rock and gravel, and we were all asked to get off to lighten the van. This time the wheels began to gain traction, and the vehicle lurched forward.
As we picked our way through the rock and scree, I noticed that while I had been dozing the landscape had changed completely. Gone were the neatly barbered hills of Coonoor and Wellington with their sprightly cockscombs of eucalyptus and cypress, and sholas in the valleys; everywhere I looked there were towering crags of granite, slick with moisture and almost bare of vegetation. A dirty grey mist that seemed to be drawn deep from within the lungs of the giants that bore down on us poured through the clear mountain air, lessening the visibility ahead. As we climbed back into the van, the dangerous driving conditions began to worry me and I told the driver to go slowly. Either he deliberately chose to ignore me or had misheard, because no sooner were we settled into our seats than he took off at great speed. Fortunately, the road was so bad that it put the brakes on his suicidal notions. Although we were thrown around a fair amount as we ploughed through potholes and puddles, we seemed in no imminent danger of sliding off the mountaintop, and my nervousness subsided, even though the light was dwindling overhead. Perhaps there was going to be a storm. I remembered my host telling me that Meham was prone to more than its share of thunderstorms because of its location at the very tip of the Nilgiris. But I wasn’t too concerned, the town couldn’t be more than a few kilometres away now, and even if by some mischance we were stranded, help would be within reach. We rounded a corner and all my worrying was washed clean from my head by the spectacle that unfolded before us.
Above, the sky had grown dark and muscular and veined with lightning. Below, the earth fell away from the narrow road in tremendous cataracts of living stone, rearing up occasionally into a confusion of jagged peaks before falling again for thousands of feet into the heat-hazed plains. Between the hard, dark emptiness of sky and stone, thunder rolled and echoed without pause, and thorned whips of lightning cracked time and time again. There was no rain and, as if reading my thoughts, my neighbour said, ‘There won’t be rain. This is a peculiarity of Meham: often there are storms without rain, sometimes the Gods just need to play. It’s not called the Tower of God for nothing.’ I looked to where he was pointing and saw, at very edge of the escarpment, dimly visible in the poor light, a smooth almost cylindrical peak rising straight up from the choppy surf of boulders and forest at its base. ‘There is a shrine at the very summit of the Tower of God. It’s one of the holiest places in South India,’ my informant said. ‘It’s been a place of pilgrimage for almost 300 years; people of all religions come to worship at the Shrine of the Blessed Martyr.’ So this was the place that Mr Sorabjee had asked me to investigate. I hadn’t expected it to be so spectacular, however, imagining it to be an insignificant place of worship that had suddenly attracted unwelcome attention because of the troubles elsewhere in the country. The van turned a corner and the Tower of God was lost to view. I asked my neighbour whether it was difficult to get to, and he said it wasn’t if you approached it from Meham town.
‘But the hill itself is very steep,’ he added. ‘There were quite a few accidents in the past but now the government has installed railings in the most dangerous sections, and it is prohibited to make the climb during the rainy season.’
~
After the grandeur of the Tower of God the town of Meham came as something of an anticlimax. Growing like a mould at the base of a mountain, it comprised a cluster of small shops, a bazaar, lodges and showrooms that were mostly engaged in the buying and selling of tea, and further back an untidy straggle of houses. The bus stop was at the edge of town, and I immediately spotted Mr Khanna’s driver standing next to a gleaming blue Contessa. He looked incongruous in his spotless white uniform and peaked chauffeur’s cap but also very grand and I wondered madly for just a few seconds whether I should give him the slip and take a less ostentatious means of transport to my lodging. But the moment passed, and gripping my suitcase a little more firmly than was necessary, I went up to him and identified myself. The chauffeur stowed my suitcase in the boot and opened the back door for me. I climbed in gingerly and sat as carefully as I could on the plush cushioned seat. It was by far the most luxurious car I had ever ridden in. The chauffeur got behind the wheel and the heavy vehicle moved off, its weight soaking up every bit of roughness in the road, so that it seemed as if we were driving on glass.
My host had informed me, back in Bombay, that if ever I got lost in Meham and couldn’t find my way back home I should ask for directions to the Englishman’s House, because that was the name by which the locals knew Cypress Manor. The retired English tea planter who had built the bungalow over a hundred years ago, when Meham had enjoyed its brief heyday as a quieter, healthier, more scenic alternative to Ooty, had picked his location well. The house was built halfway up a hill thickly clothed with cypress and eucalyptus, and commanded an unparalleled view of the town, the tea estates fitting the low rounded hills in the north-west like skullcaps, and in the distance the great wall of peaks that marked the eastern edge of the Nilgiris. The road leading up to the house, in contrast to the other roads in the area, was in an excellent state of repair—I later learned that this was because all the residences on the hill belonged to the wealthiest, most powerful people in Meham.
Cypress Manor was a long, low bungalow with white distempered walls, doors and windows picked out in green paint and a roof of overlapping red tiles. A semi-circular driveway separated the house from the garden, which stretched down the hillside in bright waves of colour. The afternoon was so sunny and clear that the storm that had threatened the Tower of God seemed to have existed only in my imagination.
There were no signs of life anywhere on the property. The driver pulled the car up to the front door, and, precisely on cue, an elderly butler clad in a spotless white veshti and turban emerged and made a deep namaskaram in my general direction. A younger servant followed him out of the house, and bowing if anything even more deeply, took my suitcase away. Unused to such attention, all I could do was stand around awkwardly until the butler asked deferentially whether he might show me to my room.
~
It is remarkable how quickly you can get used to a life of luxury, especially if there is no one around to observe you and make you feel self-conscious. Within a couple of hours of arriving at Cypress Manor, bathed and clad in clean clothes, including a brand-new sweater that I had bought specifically for my sojourn in the hills, I was luxuriating in a deep armchair in the living room sipping a cup of tea that was incredibly flavoursome compared to the rubbish I was used to drinking in Bombay. When I had finished, I decided to explore the house. I wandered through room after room, each as perfectly maintained as the next, the floors and metal polished and shining, the furniture and windows without dust or water marks, the very air of each high-ceilinged space denuded of odour. I could have been in a museum. Nowhere did the house bear any traces of its owner; there were no family photographs or personal mementos, even the paintings and vases of flowers on the carved mantelpiece and sideboards were beautiful but impersonal. I contrasted the burnished neutrality of the house and furnishings with the disorder that marked every room of Mr Sorabjee’s home, and wondered if Mr Khanna looked forward to his annual visits to Jehangir Mansion simply in order to get some clutter into his life, some balance. The sterile beauty and order of the rooms soon drove me out into the garden.
The scene outside could have been lifted from a tourist brochure—a sky so blue and hard that knives could have been sharpened on it, and light so clear that everything it touched turned to crystal. I am an urban creature through and throu
gh, without the least bit of interest in gardens and nature, but even my jaded city eye was momentarily diverted by the beauty that was laid out before me. About half of the garden was given over to flower beds, and the rest was planted with fruit trees. A line of poinsettia bushes, exuberantly coloured, marked the farthest boundary. Paths of beaten red earth laced the garden, and I took one of them. I recognized a few of the flowers—roses of pink-and-gold, thrusting their petals out for inspection, a blaze of yellow marigolds near the garage, hibiscus bushes lining the driveway, and a multitude of other plants and blooms, each individual leaf, petal and sepal distinct and perfect in the relentless clarity of the light. As I walked among the flower beds, my eye was caught by a row of short stumpy shrubs slathered with flowers in arresting colours. They looked like the cheap gaudy earrings a common whore would wear, but despite their seeming tawdriness, they were quite extraordinary to behold. I wondered what they were called, and looked around to see if there was a gardener I could ask. It was then that I caught sight of smoke rising beyond the thick clump of trees that marked the north-eastern corner of the property. As I approached the trees, I saw a short dark man with white hair and white sideburns that curved like riding boots down either side of his face feeding a pile of bluish-violet flowers into the fire. If he noticed me approaching, he gave no sign of it. I watched him for a couple of minutes, and then coughed to attract his attention. He looked up briefly, and then went back to his work. Unsure of what to do in the face of the man’s rudeness, I was about to turn and make my way back to the house, when he said, still not looking up, ‘You’re the dorai from Bombay. Is there anything I can do for you?’
‘No, nothing,’ I said, hastily, and then without intending to sound as peremptory as I did, asked, ‘Why are you burning those flowers?’
‘Because,’ he said slowly, ‘that’s the only way to get rid of them, although you wouldn’t think it to look at them.’ He plucked a flower from the pile and held it out to me. The petals were pale and almost translucent, so delicate they were already shrivelling from being plucked. ‘The morning glory is tough. It’s the weed every gardener in Meham detests. It’ll take over your garden, suck the goodness from the soil and smother every other plant. And it’s virtually indestructible. It can survive pesticides, drought, frost… The only way to get rid of it is to burn it. Very beautiful, very deadly.’
This little rant seemed to have exhausted the gardener, and he lapsed into a moody silence. He wasn’t going to be the most helpful tour guide, I decided, so I left him to his task and continued to explore the garden.
The air was alive with the sound and movement of birds and small animals. By the time I left Meham, I would learn the names of the swifts that darted through the air snapping up insects, the green parakeets that flew as straight as jets at a fly-past, and the two varieties of bulbuls that ravaged the guava trees, but on that first afternoon in the garden, ignorant of almost everything that surrounded me, I felt profoundly out of place. The rural setting, the lack of people I could relate to, even the purity of the air and light unsettled me, and I was suddenly possessed by the desire to flee back to Bombay.
The feeling passed. I plucked a guava from one of the overburdened trees, and savoured the tart, sweet pulp and seeds, plucked another, and yet one more, realizing as I ate them that this was the first time I had actually eaten ripe fruit off a tree. Growing up in K— the best I’d been able to do was sample stolen green mangoes from a neighbour’s grove. I rambled aimlessly around the garden a little longer, and then for want of anything better to do I went back into the house, ensconced myself in a comfortable armchair and picked up Mr Sorabjee’s manuscript. The next thing I knew the butler was gently shaking me awake. Feeling sheepish at passing out fully dressed, I quickly went into the bathroom, washed my face and made my way to the dining room in the centre of which was an enormous teak dining table that seated twelve. A single place was set at the head of the table.
The butler apologized for the simplicity of the meal. He explained that one of his staff was sick and hadn’t been able to go to the market, but it was an unnecessary apology—the rice, sambhar, fried mutton and beans kootu that were served wouldn’t have been out of place in a fancy hotel in Bombay. I ate well, my appetite sharpened by the journey and the mountain air. After dinner, I strolled once more into the garden. The vast blackness of the night was sprayed with the glitter of stars and it was very quiet. To my city-bred ears, the absence of noise was something that took a little getting used to. I stood there for a while longer, thinking about the series of events that had brought me to this mansion on the hill, and I felt curiously distant from everything. The violence and dissonance of men in the cauldron of the city seemed to belong to a different world altogether. And then I remembered the admonitory finger pointing to the heavens, the Tower of God, which I had seen on the journey into town, and realized the peace of the countryside was probably an illusion.
It was beginning to get chilly, so I went back inside. The servants had returned to their quarters, but my bed had been turned down and a fire lit in the fireplace. What luxury, I thought, feeling a little embarrassed. I shrugged away the thought easily enough, changed and got into bed, but found that I wasn’t sleepy because of my unscheduled nap in the evening. Mr Sorabjee’s manuscript had been neatly arranged on the bedside table and, picking it up, I began turning the pages.
THE NEED FOR EMPERORS
Our Gods have always looked after us, through the good times and the bad. All 333 million of them—and I’m not talking here just of the Gods of Hinduism but of all the deities of all the faiths that have found a place in this great land—Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, Judaism and Zoroastrianism. It’s quite a good arrangement, when you come to think of it, because our surfeit of Gods, one for every three or four of us, more than makes up for the lack of doctors, policemen, school teachers, nuclear scientists and judges. We make a few sacrifices to our deities, show them that we love, respect and venerate them, and in return they are expected to take care of all our needs and aspirations in this life and our lives to come. Our compact with the Gods has worked quite well for thousands of years, but it is broken, every now and again, and that’s when we find ourselves in serious trouble.
Why does this happen? If we look at it from the point of view of the Gods themselves, I can think of a couple of reasons. First, our deities have plenty to do in their own world as well as in all the other worlds they are responsible for. As a result, from time to time they take their eyes off the affairs of men and catastrophes result: a tsunami or an earthquake, a train wreck or a building collapse, but these accidents do not threaten the world. More serious are the times when the Gods put forth their power to save mankind and it fails. No one quite knows the reason for this, not even the Gods themselves, and until their power is restored to them, mankind is extremely vulnerable. For this is when the old Gods, the pre-Vedic Gods, the Gods of Jahiliyya, the Gods of Naraham, a few lapsed Gods turned Demons, who were laid off when the new religions arrived on the scene a few millennia ago and have nursed a grudge ever since, stage a comeback. These were Gods of war and devastation whom our distant ancestors worshipped in a time of great turmoil and fear, when a people could be exterminated by any number of things—natural phenomena, more powerful tribes, disease… Naturally they needed pahelwan Gods who could be asked to destroy any threat that appeared. The only problem was that the other tribes worshipped similar Gods, so there was a bit of a stand-off until new faiths were brought into being by religious geniuses of the time in order to put an end to the bloody cycle of destruction and regeneration that existed. The old Gods were abandoned but this didn’t mean they went away; they just bided their time until the power of the new deities faded so they could rise again.
For rioters are nothing but the children of these unholy Gods. They do not lie when they say God is on their side. He is on their lips and in their hearts, and when they kill they do so on His command, this terrible deit
y striding out of the mists of time. How else could you explain the fact that, when weapons have acquired the sophistication to kill ‘cleanly’ and from a great distance, rioters still prefer to kill the old-fashioned way, with lathis, with choppers, with rocks, with their bare hands? Why do they burn their victims alive? Rioters, it is clear, are not making war; they are performing a holy rite, an act of loving worship to an ancient, terrifying God in which both the murderer and the victim are blessed by the sacrifice. This is why rioters feel no guilt, the men who send them out to kill feel no guilt, and the apathetic majority who watch and do nothing feel no guilt. Surely nobody can be expected to feel guilty for being pious?
The tearing down of the mosque and the riots and bomb explosions in Bombay are only the latest manifestations of our genuflecting to the old Gods and there will be more wanton acts of destruction in the name of religion unless we do something about it. So what is to be done? In order to get rid of the old Gods it is evident that we first need to sort out their proxies. But to rob the fanatics of their power we will first need to understand them, then checkmate them, and kick them out.
It is not difficult to understand how the fundamentalists gained power; they have always been around, like their masters the Gods of destruction, and again just like their masters they have had to bide their time before coming to power. When we—men and women of different faiths, classes and castes—gained independence and dreamed of a new India, we would not be swayed by the religious ideologues and mischief makers who threatened our tolerance, pluralism and stability—that way lay the road to another country, a country bedevilled by obscurantism, hate and religion gone mad. This, despite the violence of partition and the assassination of Gandhi. For what the great men who brought us our freedom did not forget was that India had always been the most plural of countries, a country that contained the world. Our people had come from everywhere: they were descended from central Asian tribes, Mongol warlords, Portuguese adventurers, Arabian seamen, Chinese travellers, Buddhist princes, Jewish wanderers, British traders, Christian apostles, Macedonian soldiers, and although it hadn’t always been easy to adjust, we had managed to do so. I am reminded here of a story that was told about my own people. When we first landed on the shores of Gujarat, the local ruler didn’t want to let us in—his kingdom was already full, and he didn’t want his own people to lose their livelihood or have to put up with strange rituals and customs. Our leader asked for a tumbler of milk and a handful of sugar. He dissolved the sugar in the milk and said to the ruler, this is what we will be like. You will notice, Your Highness, that not a drop of the milk has spilled, but that it is now sweeter and even tastier to drink. We will merge with your society and our advent will make it better. If that was true of the Parsis, it is also true of those who came from elsewhere, every community has added its colour and flavour and is essential to this ancient land. Our art, our music, our architecture, our wealth, our philosophy, all this and more has been created by Indians belonging to every faith, every caste and every creed. When you contemplate a great painting, or listen to a great musician, or read a great book, or send your child to a great educational institution, or even buy a bag of cement to build your house, you don’t pause to think about whether its creator is Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsi, Sikh or Jain; you merely enjoy it for what it is and at some level are thankful that all these great Indians have given generously of their talent for the benefit of us all. That is why when the fundamentalists seek to portray one Indian as somehow being more Indian than another their lies need to be flung back at them, and it is they who should be asked to leave this country, before their nefarious designs spell the end of India.
The Solitude of Emperors Page 8
