The Solitude of Emperors

by David Davidar

  If Rajan was surprised to see Noah, I’m guessing he didn’t show it. He would have been single-minded in his objective and now that he was so close to achieving it, he wouldn’t have flinched even if he had found commandos in full battle gear confronting him. As there were no reliable witnesses to their encounter, we’ll have to guess at what happened next.

  As I had discovered, the old approach to the shrine that wound around the rock was so narrow that there was barely enough space on it for two people to walk abreast. A single strand of wire was all that stood between anyone on the path and a drop of thousands of feet; indeed the protection afforded by it was so inadequate that on festival days volunteers would prevent people from taking that route for fear of an accident.

  Rajan had already advanced a fair way along the path when he realized he was not alone. His two followers have steadfastly maintained that it was Noah who initiated the attack, although it is clear that they would have no means of knowing this, but both of them agree that any altercation the men might have had was short. From my knowledge of the two, I’d say it was Rajan who made the first move, once he realized that Noah had no intention of getting out of his way. It was an attack that stood no chance of succeeding, but the darkness that had been building in the two men through their entire lives had settled in them, rock hard and unyielding, and it would exact its price. Rajan and Noah met in the middle of the approach, grappled briefly and silently, lost their footing, slipped and fell; their momentum was arrested for a moment by the guard rail before it gave way, then they pitched headlong down the yawning blue throat of God.

  ~

  Noah’s body was never recovered. Search parties were only able to make the perilous descent into the rift three days after the accident because the weather had turned particularly severe with heavy rain cutting off all access to the Tower and its approaches. When army jawans and the police finally lowered themselves into the chasm, they found Rajan’s shattered body—which was quickly cremated—but of Noah there was no sign. The tattered remnants of his Jimi Hendrix T-shirt were discovered on the branch of a tree and it was surmised that it had been ripped off as he hurtled to his death. Once the police had finished with it, I had it interred in a cheap plywood coffin in the cemetery in which Noah had lived. Moses, the priest, graciously gave me permission to bury the coffin there, although the cemetery had long been abandoned; parishioners of the church were now buried in a new cemetery, further up the hillside.

  At the funeral service there was one face I didn’t recognize, a short weathered wisp of a man, who came up shyly after it was all over and introduced himself as Arumugam, Noah’s long-time accomplice. None of the working-class people from town and the surrounding countryside made an appearance. I guessed it was because they were intimidated by the thought of attending a church service along with the sahibs and dorais, not that any of Meham’s elite bothered to attend. As he shook hands with me, Brother Ahimas said he would hold a special service for Noah the coming Sunday—his friends would get to bid him farewell after all. After the funeral I asked Moses if he had seen Godless, and he said the dog was tethered to a tree behind the parsonage. Arumugam had asked for him and would be taking him away in a short while. We walked across, and the long black form of the great hound flowed up from the ground and regarded us silently. I had never petted him before, and I hesitated to do so now. Finally, I did nothing, but made a namaskaram to Arumugam, which included Godless, and went off with the pastor. I had a couple of questions which I hoped he’d be able to answer before Mr Khanna’s driver took me to Coimbatore to catch my train.

  The priest cleared up a little more of the mystery surrounding Noah. He told me he wasn’t related to him in any way. However, as he had known his father, who had once been the pastor of the church, he had decided to help when he found Noah sleeping on a bench in the Meham bus terminal a decade or so ago. Noah was homeless and jobless at the time and was scavenging for food from the town’s rubbish dumps. The priest had told him he would pay him a small salary to be the caretaker of the old cemetery and look after the parsonage’s vegetable garden. Noah had never given him any trouble besides occasionally borrowing his scooter without permission, but that was a minor infraction outweighed by the benefits—his family had never had to go to the vegetable market in all the time Noah had tended their garden. He showed me the gatehouse that he had permitted Noah to use. Its interior was very clean, and besides an old blanket and the trunk I recognized from my visits to Noah, the only other thing in the room was a rough-hewn plank of wood attached to the wall on which there were a handful of paperbacks, many without covers, all well used—books of poetry by Rimbaud, Rilke, Pessoa, Moraes, Eliot, Auden and a dozen others who were new to me. The priest said I could have the books if I wanted, but I demurred saying I had no taste for poetry, then changed my mind and took a few volumes, those that Noah had quoted from.

  I don’t remember much about the journey back to Bombay, except that during the early hours of the morning, when we were still an hour from the city, I drowsily recalled the one trip that Noah and I hadn’t taken while I was in Meham. Noah had said to me that if I’d had more time, he would have taken me to see the Toda land of the dead, the ammunor, which lay beneath the western edge of the mountains. One of the things he liked most about Toda culture was the fact that their afterworld closely resembled the everyday reality of the Nilgiris. In my waking dream I picture him walking west towards the Kundah Hills, along routes clearly marked for the convenience of those who would cross over. He crosses the Avalanche River and reaches a stone which the dead are expected to touch so that they can forget the world of the living. Further on he will reach another stone which he will touch to rid himself of all earthly infirmities. Whole and healthy, he will take a path through the jungle until he reaches a rope bridge over a deep ravine. The Toda believe that if a man or woman has led a good life they will negotiate the rope bridge safely; otherwise it will give way and they will fall into the leech-infested ravine below. Noah crosses the rope bridge safely, passes the other obstacles that trip up sinners and enters the land of the dead. It is a world I am sure he will be welcomed into; the dead look out for their own.

  15

  The Last Truth

  Bipeds, especially those from southern climes, are not meant to walk upright in ice and snow. A South African friend who has lived slightly longer than I have in Canada taught me how to negotiate the slipperiness of winter by walking like a penguin—feet splayed outward, gait flattened and rocking from side to side. I always feel faintly ridiculous walking like this, but as the alternative seems to be either falling backwards every few steps or crawling on my hands and knees, I put up with it, and maybe one day it will come naturally to me.

  I have lived here for seven years now, and it has helped me to heal. The locals think of their city as bland but I prefer to see it as a kind city, hospitable and welcoming to those of us who have fled traumas that we would be unable to deal with at home. It is exactly what I was hoping to find when I tried to put as much distance as I could, both physically and mentally, between myself and the tragedy in Meham.

  I work as a cashier in a bank. The job is undemanding and unwavering, as is my daily routine. I live alone in a one-bedroom apartment in an inexpensive part of town, and besides my twice-monthly forays to Gerrard Street to stock up on supplies—Indian spices and poppadoms, and occasionally mangoes from the subcontinent—I go nowhere and see no one. My parents have given up on me, they doubt that they will ever see me ‘settled’ as they put it, but I don’t think that’s for me, at least for now. I prefer my solitude and have guarded it obsessively in all the years I have spent writing this book. The only time it was broken was when I was briefly involved with a waitress at the local Tim Horton’s. The affair lasted less than six weeks, and I wasn’t tempted to let anyone into my life after that.

  ~

  One of the lessons Mr Sorabjee taught me was that in a news story there should be no loose ends, and keeping t
hat dictum in mind I will do my best to tidy things up, knowing full well that this is not a news report; when you are trying to reconstruct a life or lives there will inevitably be questions that remain unanswered.

  I cannot, for example, tell you exactly why Noah’s death came to mark me so permanently. Anyone would have been traumatized by the violent death of someone they were close to, and felt they were in some way responsible for, but most people would, I think, have come to some sort of acceptance of the tragedy and moved on.

  I didn’t because, through some mysterious process, it became the defining moment of my life. Most of us actively search for this key moment, which is why we look for love, for achievement, or whatever it is we think will lend a certain weight and permanence to our days. But for some of us such moments come unexpectedly, as happened to me in Meham, and we have no choice but to configure our lives around them. What we do with the experience is up to us. The heroes in Mr Sorabjee’s book used it to change the world around them for the better, but for most people that is not an option; what we are led to do is infinitely more humble. I, as you know, decided to bear witness. I began the book at Mr Sorabjee’s suggestion, he said I would find the writing of it therapeutic, but along the way it became much more than something I was doing to heal myself. And now that it is finished, I am slowly beginning to take an interest in the world once more. The other day in the bank, when wind chill and freezing rain kept customers away, an unexpected thought came to me—perhaps I should go back to my own country, there was work to be done. I reckoned I had done with all that, it was why I had left India, but I did not immediately suppress the thought as I might have done in years past. I would have liked to have talked things over with Mr Sorabjee, but sadly that was not an option for he had died a year into the new century. No, I would have to make up my mind on my own. There is no rush, though, the wars inspired by the gods will be with us for a long time to come.

  ~

  All that remains for me to do now is to complete the story with a quick recap of the aftermath of the tragedy. I busied myself with routine for the first few days after my return to Bombay, filing my story for the magazine, giving Mr Sorabjee a slightly more detailed account of the incident, and generally immersing myself in the tasks that were allotted to me. I didn’t feel able to talk to Mr Sorabjee about his book or the part it had played in the unfortunate events that had taken place, so I put the manuscript in an envelope, along with a short note saying that I liked it very much and hoped it would be successful, and gave it to Mrs Dastur to pass on. Mr Sorabjee did not bring it up with me, not that I had expected he would.

  On my first weekend back I took to my bed at the hostel feeling slightly feverish, but it wasn’t my physical health that was the problem, it was more that I was consumed with guilt over Noah’s death—my final argument with him kept running in a continuous loop through my head. I told myself that if I hadn’t pushed him so hard he would still be alive, and I was furious with myself for straying beyond the boundaries of the assignment that had taken me to Meham. I bottled all of this up, and as my obsession with Noah’s death grew, my health suffered, the nightmares returned and the days crawled by, huge and oppressive, embroidered by thoughts of the calamity. I began to neglect my work at the magazine, even to question our mission. What was the point of fighting on? I asked myself; people would continue to die in the name of God no matter what we did. Even Mr Sorabjee’s decision to keep going after the bombs had gone off no longer resonated with me in my grief. What did it matter if one person was convinced of the message we were trying to propagate, when even the sacrifices of people like Noah would really change nothing? Yet I didn’t want to let Mr Sorabjee and my colleagues down. I knew they believed in what they were doing and I tried to keep on as best I could, but finally I knew it wasn’t working and I resigned. Mr Sorabjee didn’t attempt to change my mind, but when I came to the end of my notice period, he courteously enquired if I was free to have coffee with him at the Taj.

  ~

  We settled into window seats in the Sea Lounge which offered a view of the verminous ooze of pigeons spreading over the cobblestones of the Gateway of India and boats stacked like driftwood in the harbour, but I didn’t see any of this; my gaze was focused inward on a disused cemetery deep within the Nilgiri mountains where a cold river of mist floated angels free of their gravestones. The reserve that I had maintained ever since I had returned broke down, and my remorse, grief, guilt and doubts poured forth, unstoppably. I told Mr Sorabjee in great detail about the disaster, and I asked him insistently why things had transpired the way they had. I talked about his book at length. I told him how I had used the final chapter to bolster my resolve, although in the end it had been of no use. I told him I considered myself a failure because I hadn’t been capable of doing anything to defuse the situation at the shrine or prevent the death of Noah, I hadn’t been able to measure up when it counted, I hadn’t been capable of the final ‘kick’ my father had told me about. I asked him why Noah, ignored and discarded by the world, had been able to do what no one else had done, and most of all I asked him if he thought I was guilty of my friend’s death.

  Mr Sorabjee’s response was measured and caring. After expressing his grief over both the deaths in Meham, he told me that I wasn’t responsible for Noah’s final actions, he had acted of his own accord. I might have nudged him towards something he had been waiting for his entire life, but that did not make me guilty; he would have done something similar sooner or later. He explained that we spend our early, untried lives floating around in a fog of doubt, making our mistakes, having our certainties eroded, and in this way we finally come to a sense of ourselves. But once we come to that knowledge, sooner or later, depending on the luck or tragedy of our lives, we act entirely on our own where truly important matters are concerned.

  He said that I shouldn’t consider myself a failure, I had done everything I could, and in so doing had enabled Noah to find within himself what he felt called upon to do. He called Noah a true hero, an Emperor of the Everyday, and quoted Western philosophy and Eastern scripture and myth in support of his definition, saying that while most of us, after a period of youthful rebellion or flight—such as my escape from K— devote ourselves to burrowing into society, building safety nets, surrounding ourselves with barricades like family and possessions against the unsettling nature of life, mavericks such as Noah retain the lightness of unburdened youth; it is this that enables them to soar up above the rest of us and perform feats that we would find impossible. Our role, he said, was to provide the springboard, usually unbeknown to ourselves. He said it saddened him to accept my resignation, but he understood why I wanted to leave. We talked then about what I might do next. I said I wanted to return to K— for a while to think about things, spend some time with my parents, before I got on with the rest of my life.

  Towards the end of the evening we returned to the subject of Noah. He said, and this seems a fitting note on which to end the book, that it is only when people close to us die that we begin to learn how to live as we should. No matter how much we think we know about how to cope with the death of those we love—through the experience of others, our reading and our faith or lack of it—nothing quite prepares us for it. It is impossibly shocking and we feel it’s the first time death has ever occurred. But sooner or later we begin painfully to engage with it, and eventually move past it, and onward. And without our realizing it, imperceptibly, the one who has passed on fuses with us, and we become a different person altogether. It is a condition of life that our beloved dead will never be forgotten.

  Acknowledgements

  I am deeply indebted to my wife Rachna who helped at every stage of the writing of this novel. My father Eddy Davidar gave me the benefit of his vast knowledge of the Nilgiris where much of the action takes place.

  My agents David Godwin, Nicole Aragi and Kerry Glencorse were brilliant as always.

  The editorial suggestions of some of the best publishers in the busine
ss—Kirsty Dunseath, Doug Pepper, Ravi Singh and Thomas Abraham—helped improve the book, every writer should be so lucky.

  Four friends—Bipin Nayak, Nirmala Lakshman, Kiran Desai and Ramachandra Guha—went out of their way to assist, it’s something I’ll always be thankful for.

  For helping in a myriad different ways I must thank Vinod Gideon, Yasmin Kotawala, Colonel Raghu Shastri (retd), Noor Mohammed, Air Vice Marshal Gurunathan (retd) and Ravi Matthews in the Nilgiris; Ruth and Rajendra Swamy in Madras; Aparajita Pant, Bena Sareen, Diya Kar Hazra, Hemali Sodhi, K.D. and Nini Singh, Mooma, Mallika and Arjun Nath, Aienla Ozukum, Ritu Vajpeyi-Mohan, Rajkumari John and Chander Shekhar in Delhi; Katie Hambly, Pia and Dilsher Sen in London; and Allan Reynolds and Ashley Dunn in Toronto.

  I would like to thank The Hindu for permitting me to use the author photograph by S. Subramanium.

  My understanding of sectarianism, secularism, pluralism, as also Ashoka, Akbar and Gandhi was deepened by the following books and authors: The Great Transformation and The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong; Identity and Violence and The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen; Secular Common Sense by Mukul Kesavan; On Identity by Amin Maalouf; The Good Boatman by Rajmohan Gandhi; Gem in the Lotus and The Last Spring: The Lives and Times of The Great Mughals by Abraham Eraly; The Bastion of Believers and Sacred Spaces by Yoginder Sikand; The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; The End of Faith by Sam Harris; No god But God by Reza Aslan; Early India by Romila Thapar; The Concerned Indian’s Guide to Communalism edited by K.N. Panikkar and Hindutva by Jyotirmaya Sharma.