by S L Bhyrappa
Then she thought about the review. It was not really a review. It had no word about the plot or subject or technique or prose, and it completely omitted mentioning elaborate historical evidences she had provided. It was just a continuous stream of vicious prosaic attack aimed at the author, a form of cheap, street-level political pamphleteering. For some reason, she recalled her past life. If life hadn’t been different since her father’s death, if she hadn’t come here, she would have written a review for such a book more or less along these lines.
She read her novel again and didn’t find any major flaw. Most historical situations in the novel were accompanied by footnotes, but not all details had references to primary sources and citations. She regretted the fact that she hadn’t thought of providing an extensive bibliography at the end of the book. It wasn’t still too late. She could quickly draw up a bibliography and give it as a supplement.
~
A police jeep braked to a halt in front of her house that evening. A sub-inspector and five constables emerged from it. A couple of minutes later, a truck stood a few metres behind the jeep. About ten constables alighted from it.
It was clear why they had come. So the book ban was being enforced at lightning speed. She stood there not knowing what to do and tried to think of her situation like an outsider. This was yet another new experience.
The sub-inspector walked up to her and said, ‘Are you Lakshmi alias Razia Begum?’
She nodded.
‘We have orders from the government to seize all copies of your book. Kindly cooperate.’
Without waiting for her response, he signalled to the constables who rushed in and began their search operation. They combed the house thoroughly looking out for spaces behind utensils where it could be innocently concealed. They climbed the attic and they looked under the bed and pillows.
It was after some time that the sub-inspector noticed the bundles in the courtyard. Six hundred copies in bundles of twenty. Each bundle was affixed with a sticker with the name of the novel printed on it. He ordered his three constables to put them in the truck.
Then the sub-inspector entered her study, looked briefly around the room and shouted, ‘Take them all!’ Constables crowded into the modest room, opened the cupboards and pulled the books out, and grabbed some six or seven books at a time, as if they were hugging them.
‘Stop this now!’ Lakshmi screamed and blocked the door. ‘One, you haven’t showed me the seizure order. Two, the order is to seize the copies of the novel I wrote. Not these. These are really old books, some older than fifty years. Please leave them as they were.’
‘Madam, we’ve been ordered to bring all the books that we find here. It’s not our responsibility to categorize them. We do as we’re told. You can file an application with the court and get them categorized,’ he said coolly and signalled something to a constable. In a second, the constable had gripped her shoulder and forcibly moved her out of the way.
It was all over in a few minutes. Her house was emptied of all books, which now lay rudely scattered in the truck. The vast collection left no standing place for the policemen. A few of them stood on the books nonchalantly.
She watched them without emotion and a while later became contemplative. These constables come from a culture that treats books as Goddess Saraswati, the goddess of learning. If your feet accidentally touched even a piece of paper, you would touch your eyes in a gesture of asking forgiveness from the goddess. Forget culture, didn’t these guys have even the basic decency to treat books properly?
The jeep left first, then the truck. Everything had been seized—histories, travel accounts, primary sources, her father’s notes and reference material. Recovering them would mean spending a few decades running around courts. Even if she managed to recover them in the end, they would be badly damaged and unusable. This brought a scary thought to her mind. It was a very real possibility that they would hunt for copies of these books in libraries across India and then destroy them all.
She couldn’t sleep that night. Feelings of helplessness, sadness and fear engulfed her. Her breathing and heartbeat had gone out of control. Her state was similar to that of the protagonist whom she had created—his testicles were smashed. His experience was now hers. She thought of ways to fight this suppression of freedom of inquiry, thought and expression. It was impossible not to fight this injustice. Then she heard the sound of the rooster.
~
She dragged herself out of bed, had a bath and ate some ragi rotti with coconut chutney for breakfast. Instead of coffee she drank a bowl of curd. It worked. She began to feel drowsy. She went to the study and lay down on her father’s bed. The sleep that slowly set in felt very good.
After a few minutes, she felt Lakshmamma jabbing her shoulder.
‘Amma, somebody has come looking for you. He has come in a car. He says it’s very urgent. I told him you’re sleeping but he insisted that I wake you. He’s acting like a madman.’ Lakshmi took a long time to return to reality. She had fallen into a really deep sleep.
When she came to the courtyard, she saw a brand new car gleaming in the mid-morning sun. Amir was sitting on the portico. She was stunned and curious but before she could react, he came up to her quickly and whispered, ‘It’s urgent. You must listen to me…can we talk here?’
‘Come in,’ she said.
When they were alone in the study, she pointed to a chair and gestured at him to sit. He didn’t sit. He quickly looked behind him once and then around the room and then said in a very low tone, ‘I’ll tell you the rest later on the way. The government has issued an arrest warrant in your name. You need to escape before the cops come here. We’ll get a good lawyer and get an anticipatory bail directly from the high court. If you’re arrested, getting a bail might take days, weeks, even months. I suspect the idea is to let you rot in jail so that they can keep piling cases on you. They’ll accuse you of destroying communal harmony. Then they’ll accuse you of attempting to destroy the social fabric of the nation…and so on. Pack clothes for three to four days. We won’t take the usual Kunigal–Bangalore highway. We’ll take the village roads and get to Magadi and then to Bangalore. Stay at a friend’s place…somebody you can really trust. Don’t ever get out of the house. I’ll arrange for the anticipatory bail.’
She hurriedly packed some clothes and toiletries, went to the kitchen and told Lakshmamma that she was going to Tumkur for court work. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back. If somebody asks you—even if the police asks you—tell them I’m not in town. Tell them that I never tell you where I go. If they insist, tell them that it is bad manners for a servant to ask such questions of the master.’
She sat beside Amir in the front seat. When the car reached the Narasapura bus stand, she said, ‘Take a right. We will reach a village after five miles—Doddaghatta. Take a left from there. The rest of the journey to Bangalore from there is through villages. We’ll be completely out of sight from the main roads. Don’t worry.’
A strange sense of confidence had come over her. Thoughts began to form clearly now.
They’ll arrest me. Then what? Actually that’ll add to my strength. I’ll fight through satyagraha. I’ll fast until death. She thought about the kind of men and women whose lives she had studied in these five years. She thought about the kind of men and women she had created in her novel. Her own arrest didn’t seem so frightening in comparison.
Neither said a word. After Amir turned left at Doddaghatta, she remembered something. Why did he come here like this? Dramatic…sudden…and overwhelmingly affectionate after all that has happened? She turned and looked at his face fully. He had been glancing at her from the corner of his eyes from time to time. And now their eyes met.
‘I know what you want to say…very bad roads. I need to focus on driving. Let’s get to a decent road. We’ll stop somewhere and I’ll tell you everything. You know how amazing our cops are. We can talk as long as we want. They’ll never come this way.’
She n
odded, then touched his shoulder tenderly.
After about a mile of slow and bumpy driving, he carefully pulled the car to the right and entered the mud track that led to a vast grove. He stopped the car in the middle of the grove and turned the engine off. Neither said anything for a long time. Then Amir spoke.
‘That night in your room… I was drunk…I…’ He paused, looked at her fully in the face before continuing, ‘In the morning, I could recall most of the conversation we had. I woke up very late the next day and debated whether I should come to the seminar. Frankly, I was scared to face you but I decided not to let you intimidate me. I came. You…ignored me. At least that’s what I thought. As the seminar progressed and people began to beat you down again under the excuse of propriety, I couldn’t help but admire your guts. You faced them all alone! And your scholarship! I don’t know when my admiration turned to a kind of respect that I can’t define. I wanted to butt in and ask them to shut up if they couldn’t refute your arguments, but I didn’t because I couldn’t bring myself to speak in front of all those people, and most of all in the presence of Professor Sastri, who was the government’s representative. I wanted to bow down to you right there. You’re right. Every word you said there is backed by solid evidence. You’ve earned your scholarship. You own it. I…fell in love with you again.’
She looked at him with a straight face but said nothing.
‘No. Not the romantic kind of love…not the sort is that shown in films but understanding. A kind of bond that I never felt before that seminar. The kind of love that happens without completely understanding a woman’s intelligence isn’t what I mean. What I mean is the kind of feeling that comes…that should come in every man’s life where he feels proud of his woman, where his love is elevated to worship. I felt that. For you. I wanted to come to your room again that evening to tell this to you this but I was scared. And I learnt that you weren’t invited to the second seminar only after I reached Delhi. You know how the government is. They’ve commissioned me to do another set of documentaries. It’s very lucrative. I make 75 per cent profit from each film. That’s how I bought this new car. Anyway, I kept thinking about what you told me that night. There’s nothing I can share with a woman who is no way my equal. I don’t mean to be snobbish… You’ve been on my mind. I wanted to come and see you after I returned to Bangalore but I was buried under work.’
A strong wind blew. He turned away from her face and looked around. The weather was perfect to savour the breeze out in the open grove.
‘Let’s sit there on that bench,’ he said and opened the door on his side without waiting for her response.
When they were seated next to each other, he said, ‘I read the supplement yesterday after waking up. You know Venkat Rao?’
‘That film journalist?’
‘Yes. He took my interview some time back. He said they would run it in the Sunday supplement. When I opened it, I saw the review of your novel and I was a little surprised, shocked. I didn’t even know you were writing a novel. I’m sure you’ve read it. The review, I mean.’
‘Yes. I get three Kannada papers and one English.’
‘Is that piece of dung even a review? I thought some insane bastard had written it but the language is what got me thinking. I mean, the novel definitely had something to invite that kind of abuse. No bookstores were open. I called your assistant, Mohan Kumar, the self-proclaimed die-hard fan of Kannada literature.’ He smiled a little. ‘He said, “Sir, I’ve already read it. I have the book with me. It might hurt you.” I said I didn’t care and asked him to send it across. As I read it, I felt…I don’t know…I was confused, angry, hurt and surprised. I felt it was incredible that such things had actually happened. Although I didn’t want to believe it, I knew it was the truth—all those footnotes, first-hand records of the sultans and badshahs and travellers’ accounts can’t be made up. Your book made me want to read at least some of those but I didn’t know where I could find them.
‘I got the news that evening on TV. “Popular screenwriter Razia begum’s novel has deeply hurt the sentiments of a certain community who have taken to the streets to express their protest. Mild rioting has been reported on MG Road since morning. Business establishments and state transport buses have been stoned. A few cases of arson have been reported. The government has managed to quickly bring the situation under control. It has also announced a ban on the novel and according to the latest reports from the home ministry the police have been dispatched for the task. The community has also demanded the immediate arrest of the novelist.”’
‘I was scared as hell for your safety and called the DIG and told him who I was. I think that carried enough weight.’ He grinned. ‘He gave me a brief report in order to, I think, impress me. He said his police force had already returned with the author’s entire library including copies of the offensive novel. He said he was confident that the riots would completely stop tomorrow. I asked him about the demand for your arrest. He said he wasn’t in a position to say any more than this. I thanked him and after I put the phone down, I knew that he had just confirmed the TV news. You would be arrested. I just couldn’t sleep after that. When I closed my eyes, I could see you battling it out in the seminar. I could hear you recite the names of primary sources. I recalled that night…we were sitting like this on the swing and your legs were strumming mine when you passionately argued with me about Tipu Sultan. I felt like reading the books you’ve cited in your novel. You said your father had bought them all with his own money. And now they’re gone and once the cops seize them, they’re gone forever.’
When she looked at his face, he detected a glint of quiet understanding. They got up and walked towards the car.
When they were on the way, she asked, ‘I’m curious. Who do you think wrote that review?’
‘You tell me your guess first. I’ll tell you mine.’
‘Could it be Professor Sastri?’
‘I think so too. Maybe he hasn’t written it himself. He has no shortage of supply of willing pawns. Or it could be someone in the newspaper. A review like that would boost its circulation like nothing else. If I know him well, he wouldn’t have written it himself. He’s shrewd. He knows his daughter is married to your son and he knows that Nazir loves you intensely. The professor won’t ever allow himself to be implicated in anything.’
They journeyed for a long time silently. He suddenly slowed down and looked at her as if remembering something, and said, ‘Do you remember the names of the books that the cops seized? If you can recall the publishers’ names as well, it would be a bonus.’
‘Why?’
‘Make a catalogue of those books. It’ll make our case stronger when we file an application to get them released. Add a disclaimer indicating that your catalogue is not exhaustive.’
She thought about this for a while. It made sense and opened up another possibility. She said, ‘It’s not just about getting the books released. I can argue in court that if the ban on my book is justified then all these books need to be banned as well because my novel cites these books as evidence.’
They reached Bangalore late in the evening. Amir dropped her off at her friend Nanjundappa’s house. After dinner, she began making the catalogue from memory.
1. Abu-L-Fazl Allami The A-IN-I-Akbari, tr. H. Blochmann, vols I, II & III,1927, rpt., Delhi: DK Publishers & Distributors Pvt. Ltd, 1949.
2. Abu-L-Fazl The Akbar Nama, tr. H. Beveridge, vols I & II, 1902, rpt., Delhi: DK Publishers & Distributors Pvt. Ltd, 1939.
3. A.K. Priolkar The Goa Inquisition with accounts given by Dr Dellon and Dr Buchanan, 1961, rpt., Voice of India, 1991.
4. Alberuni’s India ed. Edward C. Sachau, vols. I and II, 1910, rpts, 1989, 1993, 1996.
5. Babur-Nama tr. Annette S. Beveridge, 2 vols., 1921, rpts, 1989, 1997.
6. Sir H.M. Elliot and John Dowson The History of Indiaas Told by Its Own Historians, 8 vols. (These eight volumes contain the translations of contemporary accounts left by Muslim his
torians in the service of the Muslim kings of their period and describe in detail the invasion of India, the battles they fought and how they administered their empire.)
7. David Frawley and Navaratna S. Rajaram Islam in Today’s World (The Myth and the Truth), Bangalore: Naimisha Research Foundation.
8. David Frawley S.V. Seshagiri Rao and Navaratna S. Rajaram Crusade in India: Christianity’s Struggle for Survival in the Post-Colonial World, Bangalore: Naimisha Research Foundation.
9. Harsh Narain Jizyah and the Spread of Islam, New Delhi: Voice of India, 1990.
10. The Islamic Trilogy Series Mohammed and the Unbelievers, vol. I; The Hadith for the Unbelievers, vol. II; A Simple Koran: Readable and Understandable, vol. III; An Abridged Koran, vol. IV; Mohammed, Allah, and The Jews, vol. V, The Foundational Doctrine; Mohammed, Allah, and The Christians, vol. VI, The Foundational Doctrine; Mohammed, Allah, and Hinduism, vol. VII, The Foundational Doctrine; Mohammed, Allah, and The Intellectuals, vol. VIII, The Foundational Doctrine, Centre for the Study of Political Islam, CSPI Publications.
11. Ishwar Sharan The Myth of Saint Thomas and The Mylapore Shiva Temple, Voice of India, 1991.
12. Jadunath Sarkar A Short History Of Aurangzib, 1930, rpts, Orient Longman, 1954, 1962, 1979; Shivaji and his Times, 1919, rpts, Orient Longman, 1973, 1992, 1997; A History of Jaipur, 1939–40;. Military History of India, 1960, rpt, Orient Longman.
13. James Todd The Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, 2 vols., 1829, London: Routledge Kegan Paul Ltd, rpt, Rupa & Co., 1997.
14. John F. Richards The New Cambridge History of India: The Mughal Empire, Cambridge University Press, New Delhi: Foundation Books, 1993.
15. Koenraad Elst Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society; Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam; Psychology of Prophetism; Ram Janmabhoomi vs. Babri Masjid: A Case Study in Hindu-Muslim Conflict, Voice of India; The Saffron Swastika (The Notion of Hindu Fascism) vol. 1 & II, Voice of India; Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, A True Aryan; Indigenous Indians: Agastya to Ambedkar.
