I was angry now, but my anger was mixed with sadness. What had this country come to, if educated middle-class people like Kamath could harbour such sentiments? Would he think differently if he had read a book like Mr Sorabjee’s during his formative years or was that mere wishful thinking? Controlling my emotions, I said, ‘This is not America, Kamath. The people who are being attacked are not newcomers or immigrants, they have lived here for centuries just like you and I. They put their faith in the constitution, in the law—’
‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘But forget it, yaar, this is too boring, let’s go in and have another drink. It’s nearly time to bring in the New Year.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But you still haven’t told me why Rajan is leading the agitation against the shrine. I’ll need some background for my interview tomorrow.’
‘Well, he’s a man of some influence here, you know. He owns shops and is said to have made a substantial contribution to one of the hospitals. People respect him, and that is why the Kadavul Katchi roped him in to help.’ He began to talk about the political scene in Tamil Nadu, and compare it to the politics of his native Karnataka. Realizing that I was not going to get any more useful information from him, I suggested we go back inside as he had proposed.
We couldn’t get further than the entrance to the bar for the place was now heaving. Everyone in the club had crammed into the room as the midnight hour approached and there wasn’t space for even the waiters to circulate. A group of teenagers began to count down the hour, and at the stroke of midnight a large pile of fireworks stacked on the tennis court was set alight. I could hear the Brigadier’s baritone boom out, ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot. And never brought to mind…’
Three score voices joined in, singing lustily and tunelessly. Beside me Kamath was singing too, caught up in the immediacy of the moment. I left him and the other members of the club to their revels and wandered out into the crisp, cold night. The stars were raining down from the heavens and rising up to meet them was the sound of church bells calling the faithful to midnight mass. I walked to the very edge of the property and looked towards the Tower of God but the dark was too absolute for me to see anything.
~
I got home at half past one in the morning. Although it had been a long day, I found it difficult to drop off. There had been so much incident and revelation that had come my way that I found it hard to absorb it all: the very real fears of Menon, the stories about Noah, my meetings with Maya and Rajan. I could feel myself being swept headlong into the lives and affairs of people I had barely met, and there was no question but that I was struggling to maintain my composure and balance. I longed to go to someone for advice, Mr Sorabjee, even my father if it came to that, but I knew that I would be told not to get involved. Yet how could I not? By nature I am level-headed and pragmatic, but when something has been brewing in me for a while I can be impetuous. It was so when I made up my mind to leave K—, and that was why I had decided to try to cover the riot in Bombay. In Meham all the things that could be expected to get me going were present in full measure; if anything they were more pronounced than ever before in my life. I still hadn’t fully emerged from the trauma of the attack on me in Bombay, I was haunted by the destruction I had witnessed in the wake of the riots and explosions, and I was convinced that something like that should never be allowed to take place again. How then could I sit by and watch as Rajan and his cohorts attacked people like Professor Menon and Brother Ahimas? Even as I felt myself getting pulled into the situation, I was aware of how ill-equipped I was to deal with it.
I would have liked to have talked to Noah, but after my meeting with Kamath I wasn’t sure I could bank on someone who appeared to be generally untrustworthy. I would need a much more reliable ally if I was looking to take on Rajan. As I thought about my impending interview with him I grew nervous, for it was clear that I was up against a formidable adversary. Finally, more to distract myself than anything else, I picked up Mr Sorabjee’s manuscript although I suppose I also had the vague notion that I might find some information in it that might come in useful if I was to get into a debate with Rajan the following day. It struck me as I began reading that it was a clear indication of how slender my resources were that all I could come up with for my encounter with Rajan was a book written for teenagers, but I consoled myself with the thought that at least I had Mr Sorabjee speaking into my ear.
MAHATMA GANDHI
Emperor of Truth
Every city, small town, and village (for all I know) in this country has a Mahatma Gandhi Road or Salai or Chowk. His statues are crammed into hundreds of public squares, his visage adorns currency, shop fronts and a variety of consumer brands, and we all religiously take 2 October off to celebrate the day of his birth. But pigeons desecrate his bust with their shit, the streets that bear his name fill with rubbish, and the empty homilies chanted in his name make a mockery of the legacy he bequeathed to our nation.
The Mahatma may be the most famous Indian who ever lived, but although more has been written about him and by him—there are a hundred volumes of his Collected Works—his message has been forgotten, and I doubt that anyone under the age of twenty-five really knows what he stood for. So, who was this man, what did he stand for, and why is it important that his message be heeded in these ungodly times?
The other emperors I have written about, Ashoka and Akbar, were men of their time, but their greatness lay in being ahead of their time. However, Gandhi was perhaps the only one who truly transcended time, his message was not only for the age he lived in, but for all time to come. In my eyes, he is the greatest of the three because, unlike the others, he was not born to greatness; he did not inherit an empire, he had no armies to command, treasuries to fund his campaigns or the power of life or death over his subjects. He hadn’t killed another human being or living thing in combat or sport and, importantly, he held no title when he was at his most powerful. Yet millions were ready to be brutally injured or to die at his command, he defeated the strongest empire of his time, and kings and presidents and heads of state came calling on him.
What made him such a force to reckon with? I intend to skim over his great civil, social and political strategies, they have been covered in exhaustive detail elsewhere. Nor do I intend to discuss his eccentricities, or his contentious economic theories and ideas of governance, this is not the forum to debate them. Instead, after sketching the man in the simplest of terms, I would like to let him speak himself on the subject that is at the core of this book.
The Mahatma returned to India from South Africa just before he turned forty-six, having spent almost half his life outside the country, first in England, where he had studied to become a barrister, and then in South Africa, where he had gone to work as a lawyer. The trials and triumphs of his formative years, the temptations of the flesh and spirit, the early attempts to formulate and implement a political strategy, his identification with the poorest of the poor, all these are well known, as are the staggeringly ingenious tactics that brought the British to a standstill: the satyagraha in Champaran in 1917, the agitations in Ahmedabad and Kheda in 1918, against the Rowlatt Act in 1919, the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920-2, the Dandi March of 1930 and the Quit India Movement of 1942.
But it isn’t because of these achievements that he fits into my pantheon of emperors. The reason I include him is because he was unambiguous about the need for India to be a tolerant, non-sectarian, multi-faceted and harmoniously plural society. Writing in his book Hind Swaraj he stated, ‘In reality, there are as many religions as there are individuals, but those who are conscious of the spirit of nationality do not interfere with one another’s religion … In no part of the world are one nationality and one religion synonymous terms; nor has it ever been so in India.’
And towards the end of his life he said, ‘Right from childhood I have been taught that in Ramrajya or the kingdom of God no person can be unworthy just because he follows a different religion.’ He repeated this in
January 1948, weeks before he was shot and killed by a Hindu fanatic precisely because he held such beliefs: ‘When I was young I never even read the newspapers. I could read English with difficulty and my Gujarati was not satisfactory. I have had the dream ever since then [of] Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians, and Muslims [living] in amity not only in Rajkot but in the whole of India.’ The crucial thing to note about him was that even while he expressed these sentiments for the country and its people he never gave up being a believing Hindu (just as Ashoka continued to be a Buddhist and Akbar remained a Muslim while proclaiming the virtues of secularism) and never thought of India as anything but a deeply religious land. Therein lay his genius—articulating his strategies for winning freedom and maintaining the secularism of the nation through the medium of his faith. If he hadn’t been a pious Hindu, the nation and the world would never have heard of satyagraha (truth force) and ahimsa (nonviolence); believing the latter was Hinduism’s greatest contribution to the world, he used it brilliantly as a weapon. He wrote in Harijan, ‘The hardest metal yields to heat. Even so must the hardest heart melt before a sufficiency of the heat of non-violence. And there is no limit to the capacity of non-violence to generate heat.’ And he saw his mission as ‘to convert every Indian whether he is Hindu, Muslim or any other, even Englishmen and finally the world to non-violence for regulating mutual relations whether political, economic, social or religious’.
Even more than ahimsa, Gandhi worshipped the truth. According to his grandson and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi, ‘His truth had four meanings: truth as the Universe’s reality (the sat or satya of Hindu thought), truth about facts, truth to a view or resolve, and the truth of the voice within.’ He wielded truth, love and non-violence as weapons, and showed India and the world how these could be more effective than mere guns or steel. Today, those who would rule us are using lies, hate and violence to achieve their ends. Would that another Gandhi rise amidst us, we have never had more need of someone of his strength and sagacity, a man of God who saw his God for what he truly was: ‘God is Life, Truth, Light. He is Love. He is the Supreme Good.’
~
And there the manuscript ended. It had concluded rather abruptly; I would point that out to Mr Sorabjee, I thought, and switched off the light. Lying in the dark, I worried again about my interview with Rajan tomorrow. I felt I was no match for him, I even thought I should duck it, and then my stubborn nature reasserted itself: I would go through with it, do the best I could. If I was going to help the people who depended on me, if I wanted to be worthy of my father, Mr Sorabjee and my own ambition to be someone who had done something with his life, then there was no way I could give up. The decision taken I began to relax and presently sleep claimed me.
11
The Rioter
Mr Khanna’s driver hadn’t yet returned from his holiday, but the butler had managed to arrange a taxi to take me to town, and I set off for my meeting with about an hour to spare. My resolve of the previous night was considerably less sturdy, for I still had little idea of how to tackle Rajan.
I was dropped off just outside the bus stop, where a long line of black and yellow Ambassador taxis, fat and ungainly as bumblebees, were parked by the side of the road. As I got out, I realized I had no idea where Nilgiri Cloth Stores, the location at which I had arranged to meet Rajan, actually was. I had written down some directions when I had talked to Mansukhani on the phone, but I had been expecting to pass them on to Mr Khanna’s driver and when he hadn’t turned up, it had put a crimp in my plans. My taxi driver didn’t know, so I asked one of the others for help. Within minutes I was surrounded by a gesticulating scrum shouting directions at me. Eventually, they arrived at some sort of consensus, and armed with their coordinates I set off to find the shop. I plunged into a side alley as I had been instructed, and within minutes I was lost. The further I penetrated the maze of badly lit streets, the less certain I was of ever reaching my destination. I entered a narrow lane with wooden doorways set into discoloured walls. A small boy squatted over an open gutter, relieving himself. I passed him, my steps dragging, and saw that at the far end of the alley a rectangle of sharp, white light seemed to indicate the end of the maze. I directed my steps towards the opening, and found myself on a street that was busy with people and traffic. As I looked up and down the street, I saw the queue of black and yellow taxis not too far away. I had evidently been going round in circles for nearly an hour. It was time to give up and go home, I thought wearily but not without a sense of relief, for now I wouldn’t have to confront Rajan. Best to leave the whole business alone, as Mr Sorabjee had enjoined me to, enjoy my holiday, or maybe just alert the police to my suspicions and write an article for the magazine when I returned to Bombay.
As I was thinking these thoughts, I had been walking away from the taxi rank, which I had adopted as a sort of landmark, and now I found myself climbing a flight of chipped and broken stone steps that I remembered Rajan’s friend had told me to look out for. At the top of the steps was a pharmacy, and next to it was a tin board on which was painted in red, ‘Nilgiri Cloth Stores’. Outside the shop were two men dressed in crisp white shirts and veshtis, the uniform of political workers in this part of the country. So he was still here. There’s still time to go home, I thought. I paused on the steps, undecided, but then I was swept by a vision of the assault on me in Bombay. I hadn’t thought of it for months, but it came back to me now clear in every detail. I was paralyzed with terror for a couple of moments but instead of making me retreat it only served to make me more determined—no, I couldn’t just stand passively by and let events take their course.
As I approached the sari shop, Rajan’s cohorts glanced at me incuriously, the dark glasses they wore lending a faint air of menace to their presence. I asked them whether Rajan was in, saying I had an appointment to see him, and the heavyset one nodded and gestured for me to go in. Within the long rectangular room, the walls rippled like coloured water in the dim light of candles. The setting could have been lifted from a fantasy, the insubstantial walls of shimmering silk, the hunched figures that emerged from the gloom, the air of mystery that pervaded the place, but the reality was more prosaic—there had been a power cut.
Rajan and his friend Mansukhani sat behind a glass counter on the far side of the room. Beside them was the brightest source of illumination around, an emergency lantern that glowed white in the dark. A shop assistant materialized at my side, but Rajan had already spotted me and waved me over. As I approached the two men, I began apologizing for being late, but Rajan cut me short, ‘Arre, bhai, this is Meham, no hurry, no worry—you should simply enjoy. It’s not like Mumbai, tension everywhere, no time for anything. But if I had to live here I would die. Of boredom.’ He laughed, the sound loud in the quiet confines of the shop, and I laughed dutifully along with him. His hulking friend didn’t even smile. An old-fashioned rotary telephone on the counter, with a lock embedded into the dial, began to ring insistently. Rajan’s friend picked up the receiver, listened in silence to the caller for a minute or two, then spat a couple of words in Hindi into the phone and hung up. He leaned over and whispered something into Rajan’s ear. A frown briefly wrinkled the latter’s forehead, then his expression relaxed and he said to me, ‘What will you have to drink? Chai? Pepsi?’
I began demurring but he brushed my protestations aside and told his friend to order us some tea and the delicious pakoras that the hotel across the street made daily. Mansukhani bellowed instructions across the room to one of the shop assistants then the two men settled back into their seats and waited for me to begin. For a few agonizing moments I had nothing to say to them, all the questions I had rehearsed for the interview had evaporated from my mind. This wasn’t a wholly unusual occurrence, there had been moments in the past when a combination of nerves and excitement had made interviews go awry, but this was different. Rajan sensed my confusion and stepped into the breach.
‘Have you seen the sights, bhai? Coonoor, Ooty, you should see the Bot
anical Gardens, Doddabetta…’
When I didn’t answer immediately, he added, ‘Mansukhani can organize a taxi for you.’
I forced myself to speak and said a friend had taken me around. He nodded and said in Hindi, ‘Achcha, achcha, this place is so beautiful, not like the hill stations in the north, Nainital, Mussoorie, all ruined, ugly buildings everywhere, the forests cut down…’ I would never have taken Rajan for an environmentalist, and grew even more confused in my sense of him.
‘You should have come last year, my friend, when the kurinji was flowering. You know the kurinji?’
I nodded. Noah had told me that in the years when the kurinji flowered the peaks of the district seemed to emerge from lakes of blue, which was how the Nilgiris or Blue Mountains had got their name.
‘It was fantastic. Everywhere you looked the place was covered with flowers, especially towards Mukurti. Now you’ll have to wait twelve years for it to flower again.’
As he rambled on about the sights of the Nilgiris, my mind finally settled down, and the questions I had formulated began to come back. I had thought I would start by asking about his early years in Bombay, just to get him talking, then move on to the riots, where I hoped to trap him into some sort of admission that he had been involved, before steering him around to the agitation he was about to lead on the Shrine of the Blessed Martyr. If I could pin him down, uncover his plans, I could give the Brigadier and the authorities something to work with. It would not be easy, but I would have to try. Just as I was about to begin, the tea and pakoras arrived. Rajan urged me to try a pakora; I almost scalded my tongue, it was so hot, and he smiled kindly at me, and all at once I was as comfortable as I was ever going to be. I opened my notebook, and said, ‘Sir, please tell me briefly about your early years in Bombay.’
The Solitude of Emperors Page 19
