The Solitude of Emperors

by David Davidar

  He put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye and said, ‘That you have found a purpose after the trauma you have suffered is something we should be thankful for. But do not worry about this shrine. Nothing can destroy the handiwork of God.’ He took his hand off my shoulder, made the sign of the cross over us and left.

  When he had disappeared from view, I asked Menon if there was anything he could add to the details that he had given us the previous evening of how the shrine might be defended in the event of attack. ‘It is possible to defend it, if you’re wholly committed to the effort,’ he said. ‘If the attackers make it up the steps, there are only two approaches and they can be easily guarded. The only problem is that Brother Ahimas will not allow any form of active defence. He says the saint was an apostle of peace, and any violence will desecrate his memory. The last time, about a dozen youths, Christians, Hindus and Muslims, arrived at the shrine with a variety of weapons but Brother Ahimas sent them away. Fortunately, as you know, the weather saved the day, and soon after the town elders organized a peace march and calmed the people, so Rajan couldn’t do any real damage, but if he is planning a sneak attack, then we will have a problem.’

  ‘The more I think of it, the more convinced I am that he will make his move on Feast Day,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, we will need to be extra vigilant,’ the professor said.

  ‘I’ve said this to Vijay before but I’ll say it again,’ Noah said. ‘I’m aware I’m the lone dissenting voice here but Rajan is too smart to want to alienate the people of this town. The shrine is part of their daily lives, they wouldn’t want it to be destroyed. I think he might try to give us a scare, but I don’t think he’ll do anything drastic.’

  I thought of the poor muddy streets of Meham, the aimless young men who stood around on its street corners, and their faces merged with the faces of the thugs who had tried to destroy Bombay and I knew Noah was wrong. He didn’t know what people like Rajan were capable of, he didn’t know how susceptible people with nothing else in their lives could be to the allure of religious feuding.

  ‘We thought Bombay could not be destroyed, and that’s what a lot of people thought about the Babri Masjid. But there’s no telling what people can do when they are caught up in a religious frenzy,’ I said.

  ‘I agree with Vijay,’ Professor Menon added sombrely. ‘We should take every precaution we can.’ He told us he would phone the police and the Collector, and quietly arrange to have some of the town’s young men patrol the approaches to the shrine.

  It was time to go, I had to attend the New Year’s Eve celebration at the club with Brigadier Sharma. I told Professor Menon that I would spread the word there about Rajan’s intended plans so we could muster as much support as possible.

  10

  Fuchsia Wars

  The true gardener, Noah once said to me, sees the world very differently from the rest of us. Where you or I might remark upon the beauty of a rose or be captivated by the riotous colour of a bed of geraniums, the gardener will focus on a mottled leaf that might be the first sign of disease, or pick up a clod of earth and crumble it in his fingers to gauge its porosity and alkaline content, or read the clouds or the behaviour of birds and other strange portents which are incomprehensible to non-gardeners. I had never so much as uprooted a weed, so the mysterious world of the gardener was, I suspected, forever shut to me. The gentlemen gardeners of the Fuchsia Club of Meham seemed, at first glance, to be as ignorant of gardening as I was, but they didn’t let that bother them.

  The club’s claim to be the oldest continuously active association in the Nilgiris was not belied by the age of its members. They all appeared to be over seventy; the Indian cabinet seemed positively sprightly by comparison. But neither their advanced years nor the fact that they had never dirtied their hands with topsoil prevented them from making vigorous contributions to the club’s last meeting of the year.

  ~

  As soon as I got home from the shrine I had hurriedly bathed and changed, and it was just as well that I did, for at a quarter to seven a midnight-blue Mercedes, buffed and polished until it shone, with a uniformed chauffeur behind the wheel, pulled into the driveway.

  The Brigadier got out to shake hands, and I was immediately conscious of how underdressed I was in my grey trousers and sweater. In contrast, the Brigadier could have stepped from the pages of a magazine aimed at the Distinguished Older Gentleman: grey flannels, blinding white shirt, crested blazer, regimental tie and well-shined black shoes. Everything about him exuded wealth. Noah had told me the Brigadier’s wife’s family were prominent Delhi industrialists. He must have barely met the army’s height requirement, but his erect carriage, fierce, upswept, almost cartoonish moustache and direct gaze more than made up for his lack of inches. He took in my attire and frowned for a moment, then said, ‘Umm, you’ll need a tie, but we can fix that quite easily, old boy.’ He sized me up a little longer, and then bellowed, ‘Karunakaran.’

  The chauffeur, who seemed to be ex-army as well, stiffened to attention.

  ‘Tie lao. Jaldi,’ the Brigadier growled and, to my astonishment, the chauffeur opened the boot of the car and brought out a portable tie rack on which three ties were draped.

  ‘Always be prepared is my motto,’ the Brigadier said smugly. ‘I fancied that you might not know the rules of the club, old chap, so here we are.’ He drew out a silvery grey patterned tie, shook his head, and finally decided on a plain red tie that he thought would go with my beige sweater. Before I could react, he had folded out my collar, slung the tie around my neck, knotted it expertly, bent my collar back into place, and then stepped back to examine his handiwork. He pronounced himself satisfied and we set off.

  On the way to the club, he told me about the genesis of the FCM. Noah had already told me a bit about it, but I wasn’t about to say that I knew anything—I wanted to avoid the inevitable question about my informant—so I let the Brigadier hold forth.

  ~

  About twenty years ago, while he was serving in the army, he had been posted to the Nilgiris as a member of the directing staff at the Defence Services Staff College in Wellington. He had attended the college as a young student officer several years earlier, and both he and his wife had been enchanted by the place. During his second sojourn in the Nilgiris his wife had succumbed to the allure of gardening, the favoured pastime of senior army wives and other upper-class women in the district. In the course of one of her periodic forays to the Sims Park Nursery, which offered the widest selection of plants, she had noticed a small shrub with vividly coloured flowers and had immediately bought it. The gardener who was showing her around didn’t know what the plant was, so he had taken her to his superior, who had identified it. The Brigadier winked at me, and said with a bray of laughter, ‘The poor man didn’t know to pronounce it, he called it a Fuck-sia.’ I smiled along with him, and he continued his story.

  The lone bush had flourished in the Brigadier’s garden, but all his efforts to procure other specimens had failed. The nursery didn’t know how it had come to be included in its shipment of plants and so didn’t know how to order it, and none of the Brigadier’s contacts could get any more for him. Meanwhile, the exotically named De Groot’s Happiness was the envy of every gardener in the district.

  When he retired from the armed forces, he and his wife had decided to settle down in the Nilgiris, rather than return to Bhopal, his home town. They had bought a house in Meham, and transported the treasures of their garden, a number of fuchsias among them (for the efforts of the Brigadier and about a dozen other equally determined gardeners had succeeded in procuring a few more varieties of the plant from other hill stations in India) to their new home. It was around then that the Brigadier had taken over the gardening club at Meham, an association affiliated to the Meham Club, which comprised a score of elderly gentlemen who used it as a pretext to get away from their wives and families for one afternoon every month. Gardening played a very small part in their deliberations, it wa
s more a time for gossip, good food and vast amounts of rum. After the Brigadier arrived, all that had changed. Determined to make the best of his retirement—he had seen too many of his fellow officers drop dead or go to seed when they were discharged with a pension—he poured all his energy and enthusiasm into the gardening club. He did not let his lack of experience with spade and pruning knife deter him; there would always be proper gardeners who could be relied upon to actually sow the seeds, water the plants and stamp out the weeds; what was necessary was to make the gardens of Meham the best in the district, and that needed strategy, organization and a firm, decisive leader.

  The objective of every fanatical gardener in the Nilgiris was to win first prize in one or another category at the annual Flower Show that was held in Ooty. There were prizes awarded for Garden of the Year, Outstanding Large Private Garden, Outstanding Medium Private Garden, Outstanding Small Private Garden, Outstanding Rose Garden and numerous others besides, and to the elite nothing mattered more than to come first in their area of specialization. It was accepted that Garden of the Year and Outstanding Large Garden would go to establishments like the Defence Services Staff College in Wellington or Chettinad House in Ooty, which had armies of gardeners to primp, polish and tweak every blade of grass and every petal, so the competition was most intense at the medium garden level, especially for the S.A. Dorai Ever Rolling Cup. None of the gardens in Meham had ever won or even been placed among the finalists in the category and the Brigadier was determined to change that. He bullied, harangued, threatened and cajoled his fellow members to shake off their sloth and get to work, and within a couple of years Meham’s gardens began to win prizes, especially the Brigadier’s own garden, which won top honours in three of the five years it was entered in the competition. Then the Brigadier’s wife, Neeti, who was the person who executed her husband’s plans, died, and the Brigadier lost all interest in his garden, until his daughter, a fashion designer in Delhi, visited him one winter and exclaimed over the beauty of a fuchsia shrub. It had once been the hub of an exquisite arrangement of flower beds shaped like a wheel, but now nothing grew there but weeds. Anxious about her father’s health, his daughter nagged him to take an interest in the garden again. Deep within the Brigadier’s gloom a memory glowed of his wife’s excitement when she had first glimpsed the fuchsia. It was the first time he had thought about the garden in the two years since her death. When his daughter returned to Delhi, he sent word to his old accomplice, the flower thief called Arumugam, to say he was back in business.

  The Brigadier had always been an obsessive man, but beneath his obsessiveness lay a methodical mind, which was why he had been such a good soldier and officer, and latterly a gardener. As he grew obsessed with fuchsias, he renamed the Gardeners’ Club of Meham the Fuchsia Club of Meham, successfully petitioned the authorities who ran the Flower Show to institute a prize for Best Fuchsia Garden and aggressively set about making his garden the finest in the district.

  In this, Arumugam was a key ally. He had become a flower thief quite by chance. As with many other subsistence farmers in the district, when the small plot of land he farmed was sold to pay off a debt to a local moneylender, he had had to find some way to feed his wife and seven children. He found temporary employment as a gardener at one of the big hotels in Coonoor. One day, a fat woman decked out in an expensive sari had tottered up to him in her high heels and asked him to give her a cutting from a rose bush he was pruning. Without thinking, he had said five rupees as he handed over the twig. She beat him down to two rupees, but a career was born. When he was laid off from the hotel, he went into the business of stealing and selling plants full time. He had a phenomenal memory and a natural ability to identify hundreds of species and sub-species. All he had to do was look at a garden once to know exactly which plants flowered where and how valuable they might be to the intensively competitive gardeners of the district. He played no favourites; he stole from everybody and sold to everybody. A friendly, diminutive man, he had been arrested so many times by the police that he was no longer confined to a jail cell when he was caught but allowed to hang around with the policemen.

  After the death of the Brigadier’s wife Arumugam no longer took the bus to Meham, but when the Brigadier began to obsess over fuchsias, he was once again summoned to the big bungalow on top of Tiger Hill. There weren’t too many varieties of the shrub to be had and they were well guarded, but Arumugam was resourceful: he was friends with a vaidyan in Meham bazaar who would mix him potions that could put a Rajapalaiyam hound to sleep, he knew which servants to bribe, and he was careful not to get caught with the stolen goods in his possession. He was no longer arrested nearly as frequently, and the Brigadier’s fuchsia garden flourished. It took top honours in its category five years in a row and a visiting gardener from a fuchsia club in Somerset, to which the FCM was affiliated, pronounced it among the finest he had ever seen.

  ~

  Our car had come to a stop behind a long line of cars and buses and trucks, seemingly every wheeled vehicle in town, and the Brigadier ordered the driver to find out what was causing the traffic jam. ‘These municipal authorities are useless. Give me the army any day, we knew how to get things done,’ he said grumpily. The driver returned to say that there had been a landslide further up the road, and there was room for only one vehicle to proceed at a time.

  ‘If I was in charge I’d get a bulldozer to clear it away, put fifty jawans on the job, three shifts. How the hell does this country think it’s going to get anywhere if nobody will take any responsibility? The bloody contractor who was hired to do the job is probably being paid by the hour, or isn’t being paid enough or has another more lucrative job somewhere else, or hasn’t been paid a big enough bribe. I’m sick of all this. I wish I had permission to shoot anyone who was incompetent or a moron or both, I’d solve both the population problem and the country’s inefficient ways at one and the same time.’ The Brigadier ranted in a mixture of Hindi and English, clearly in order to include both the driver and myself, but as his anger began to subside, he switched back to English, and then he fell silent, gathering his thoughts. I thought now would be the time to talk to him about Rajan and his proposed assault on the shrine. The previous evening, when Noah had dropped me off, I had told him about my invitation to the annual general meeting of the FCM, and he had said, ‘I don’t much care for them, as you know, and I especially don’t like the Brigadier, but he and his group are very influential in this little dung heap, so you should try and persuade them to help. But on no account should you mention my name, even hint at the fact that you know me, especially to the Brigadier, because you’ll then be damned in his eyes forever.’

  I was about to interrupt the Brigadier, who had begun prattling on about his fuchsias, when I realized with dismay that the car was turning into the gates of the club. Had I missed my opportunity? Perhaps not, because it might be even more useful to place the matter before the whole group. As the car pulled to a stop, I said hastily to the Brigadier, ‘Sir, there is a matter I want to discuss with you and the other members of the club. Could I have a few minutes after the meeting?’

  ‘Of course, old boy, of course.’

  ~

  We walked up a flight of steps, past a file of silently bowing retainers dressed in white, green and gold, and through chilly rooms with high ceilings, in which fires were just being lit, infiltrating life into the dead glass eyes of the stuffed heads of tiger, gaur, sambhar and leopard that sprouted from every wall. In the dining room the tables were set with spotless white napkins and cutlery, the library’s shadowed light and winged armchairs needed only a corpse to complete a scene from an Agatha Christie novel, and in the billiard room perfectly arranged billiard balls awaited the drunken onslaught of partygoers with inexpertly wielded cues. In an hour the place would be jumping, the rooms filled with light, noise and a press of bodies, but for now we had it to ourselves. The meeting was being held in the bar area, the Brigadier said, because the private room in w
hich they traditionally met was being renovated. As with the other rooms in the club, the bar was deserted except for a couple of white-jacketed and white-gloved bearers, and the barman who stood behind the long counter that ran along the far wall.

  We were the last to arrive. The other members of the FCM sat around a rectangular table. The Brigadier took his place at the head of the table, waved me to an empty seat to the left of him, and made the introductions. To his right was a man with a face that was entirely hairless, except for two tufts that escaped like steam from his ears. He was introduced as Venkateswaran, a retired forestry official. Beside him sat the man whom Noah had evaded at the butcher’s shop. Dr Das, I learned, had been a very senior official at BARC, the atomic research institute in Bombay, and even in retirement the importance of his job remained sculpted on his face. Next to him was a small man with quick deft movements, the local GP called Kuruvilla, and beside me was the last member of the group, Kathirvel, a wealthy building contractor. There was an empty chair next to Kathirvel which prompted the Brigadier to make a rather tasteless joke. The absent member, Mr Lal, a tea planter in his nineties, was critically ill. Fixing me with an alarmingly conspiratorial eye, the Brigadier said in a loud whisper, ‘People have been saying for years that Lal is about to sleep in heaven. The only problem is he keeps going halfway and coming back.’ He laughed uproariously at this, but I noticed I was the only one joining in, so I suppressed any further signs of mirth for fear of giving offence.