But it is Rekha. “Shiv? You haven’t called for a while. Is everything alright?”
“Yes, of course, I was planning to call you tonight. I’ll call you back later.” For some reason, he feels uncomfortable talking to Rekha while Meena sits a foot away. The other two calls did not bring home the fact that only the telephone next to Meena’s bed is working.
“Do that, but now that I’ve called, I had better tell you—I don’t know if the gardener has been coming regularly, and I’m worried about my plants. I don’t want everything drying up by the time I get back. I have a list for you—Shiv, are you listening? Will you get a pencil and jot this down?”
“Okay, go on,” he says though he does not make a move to get a pencil or paper. He catches something about bamboo, Night Queen and heliconia. When she is finished, she says, “Have you got all that? Shiv—you haven’t asked about Tara and her new job.”
“How is she,” he asks like a dutiful zombie.
“She’s fine, she loves the job. You should see the size of your daughter’s new office! But are you managing? You don’t sound too well.”
“I’m fine—really. Oh yes, Meena—Sumati’s daughter Meena—is here for a few days. She’s hurt her leg. No, it’s nothing to worry about. Kamla is looking after her.”
Shiv hangs up, steals a look at Meena to see how she has reacted to what she has heard. But this call—or his end of it—seems of no interest to her. The minute he hangs up, she says as if they were not interrupted, “What’s the plan of action? How do we beat your fundoos at their game?”
Fundoos. How familiar Meena’s generation is with the word fundamentalist. So much a fact of life that a nickname, fundoos, rolls off Meena’s tongue with ease. A nickname for a pet, a pet enemy. The familiar garden-variety hatemonger, inescapable because he has taken root in your own backyard. Fundoo, fundamentalist. Fascist. Obscurantist. Terrorist. And the made-in-India brand, the communalist—a deceptively innocuous-sounding name for professional other-community haters.
Meena is waiting for Shiv, her head full of plans. To her it is a foregone conclusion that he will pick up a spear and a shield and rush headlong into battle. The new lesson waits upstairs to be written, the lesson that traces the fall of a wonder-city. Vijayanagar City waits to be sacked again, this time of its half-revealed memories. And as for Shiv—he has escaped both to sit idle in Rekha’s garden, among her ambitious attempts to grow a lush landscape, complete with orchids on tree trunks, on Delhi’s inhospitable rocky soil. The bamboo is to his right; he has identified this, the lantana hedge that needs shaping, the chikoo sapling, and the infant jasmines. It’s the more intimidating names he has yet to put a plant to: Juniper horizontalis, heliconia, Ficus benjamina.
Rekha is good at naming things. To Shiv the garden is just so much soothing but undifferentiated greenery. When they first moved to this house, the backyard was a jungle of thorny shrubs and weeds, the kind that spread like an army advancing forward day by day. Rekha was dismayed, but Shiv could tell she was also excited by the challenge. He saw a look on her face that he imagines many of the conquerors of Delhi have shared; a gleam that assesses the strength of the enemy, and the spoils to be won. The kind of hungry look that wants to colonize as far as the eye can see, to clear and rearrange spaces and lives.
The men Rekha hired for daily wages cut and slashed, chopped and dug. By the time they spread the manure-rich soil that came in odorous, tightly packed bags, the weedy army was a distant memory. The stretch of soil enclosed by barbed wire had the cowed look of an obedient subject. All the conqueror had to do was keep it domesticated—plant afresh on the blank tablet things of her choosing, things she could name and that depended on her for their survival.
Like Rekha, Meena names things with ferocious certainty. Communalist, fundamentalist. These women warriors seem to know exactly which cities they want to raze to the ground, which they want to raise in their place.
Shiv’s own campaigns are minor rebellions, secretive mutinies. He is not used to keeping much back from Rekha. Sometimes he wonders if that is the real attraction Amita Sen holds for him. That if he has a few secret moments with her, he also has a dark and sordid corner in his neatly swept life, a place where nothing is labeled or put back in place. A corner unsupervised by Rekha.
Yet it is the safety of Rekha’s banal certainties that Shiv longs for now. He couldn’t tell her what happened today. He barely understands it himself, and besides, Meena was in the same room. Every word he said would have been like exposing himself to her, making himself vulnerable to her quick judgment.
For the moment, Shiv has to comfort himself with what Rekha might have said if he had confided in her: Take stock of the situation first. Don’t commit yourself one way or the other. If you can’t make a decision, go to bed and will yourself to sleep. And in the morning, be ruthless with yourself.
But Shiv knows there is no question of sleep. And he feels a little resentful, as if Rekha has actually said those words to him. Mine is not a nine-to-five job like yours, he thinks. It may be late into the night but my day is not yet over.
The booklet is on Shiv’s desk—the course booklet with the offending lesson. This is one lesson he does not need to reread to refresh his memory about what he wrote. It is, ironically, one of the few lessons he has written in his teaching career that was informed by genuine interest and historical curiosity.
Shiv tells himself he should leave the booklet alone and concentrate on the new one he has to write, the lesson on the end of the Vijayanagar empire. He pulls out the sheaf of notes he has on Vijayanagar. He forces himself to begin somewhere, anywhere. He writes on a blank sheet: Vijayanagar (or the City of Victory) was a medieval wonder-city, the capital of the wealthy Vijayanagar empire. The city was designed to be a showpiece of Hindu might. But its glory came to an end in 1565, when the city was sacked and left in ruins.
Shiv reads what he has written several times, searching for a clue to the next sentence. Then he puts his pen down. He wanders a little northward on the map; a little backward in time.
Three hundred kilometers north of Vijayanagar, almost three hundred years before the City of Victory rose and fell, there was another episode of glory and destruction. The terror and bloodshed in the two settings overlap; human suffering does not change all that much with time and circumstance. But glory—its meaning, its source—could not have been more different than it was for the treasurer of the Vijayanagar kingdom, and the treasurer of the twelfth-century city of Kalyana.
The treasurer of Kalyana was a man called Basava. This man was no ordinary finance minister. He had too much passion and charisma, too much vision, to remain a mere government official. Basava was plagued by questions; he needed to examine and think through and criticize everything that was traditional, sanctioned, as much as he needed to breathe. Basava gathered around him a unique congregation of mystics and social revolutionaries. Together they attempted a creative, courageous experiment: a community that sought to exclude no one—not women, not the lowest, most “polluting” castes. Poets, potters, reformers, washermen, philosophers, prostitutes, learned brahmins, housewives, tanners, ferrymen—all were part of the brief burst of Kalyana’s glory. All were equal in that they were veerashaivas; warriors of Siva.
These warriors worked. They made pots and mirrors and fishing nets and leather sandals. They ferried customers across the river. They saw their work as part of their payment for a passage to Kailasa, where Siva lives. And the warriors made poetry, poetry that chased prose; that searched passionately for the many faces of truth. This poetry, which was also their scripture, was called vachana: what was said. And it was said in Kannada, not in exclusive Sanskrit. The vachanas were created and spoken and sung in a people’s language, in words that were no strangers to poor homes or dirty streets.
Basava and many of his followers took on the caste system, the iron net that held society so firmly in place, that reduced the common man and woman to hopeless captives. Thousands of
these “ordinary” men and women took part in Basava’s egalitarian dream. The dream spread and took hold of people who had not been people before in Kalyana, people who had just been their functions: the makers of mirrors, the skinners of dead animals, the bearers of children. The people became a movement; the movement swelled and surged, a wave that threatened to swallow social conventions and religious ritual, staple diet of tradition. The king, Bijjala, an old friend of Basava’s, was under tremendous pressure from the pillars of society. Not surprisingly, the relationship between the king and his finance minister soured.
The wave peaked, the story goes, when a marriage was arranged between the children of two veerashaiva couples. The bride-to-be was brahmin. The bridegroom-to-be was the son of a cobbler. This marriage is more the stuff of legend and folklore than stern history. But so apt a symbol was it of the crisis Basava’s Kalyana was heading toward, that every subsequent popular account took the event for granted. The marriage is the ineluctable climax of the story in popular memory. (There is, however, ample historical evidence that Kalyana was rocked by violence in King Bijjala’s last days.)
The story is that the marriage was the catalyst; it generated a shock that charged all of Kalyana City. The traditionalists were already enraged by Basava’s challenge to their monopoly of god and power and the afterlife. Now, terrorized by their fear that “even a pig and a goat and a dog” could become a devotee of Siva in an equal society, they condemned this marriage as the first body blow against all things known, familiar, normal. Against, in short, a society based on caste. Egalitarian ideas are bad enough, but a cobbler and a brahmin in the same bed? As well bomb Kalyana (and its vigorous trade, its prosperous temples and palace) out of existence!
King Bijjala was pressured into joining the condemnation of the marriage. He sentenced the fathers of the bride and bridegroom (and the young untouchable bridegroom) to a special death. Tied to horses, they were dragged through the streets of Kalyana; then what was left of them was beheaded.
But Basava’s followers did not call themselves warriors of Siva for nothing. They, particularly the young and the militant, particularly those who had shed the stigma of their lower caste status to become followers of Basava, retaliated. Basava’s call for nonviolence was not heard. His charisma was no longer enough to keep the moderates and the extremists among his followers together.
The city burned; now in the untouchable potters’ colonies, now in the coffer-heavy temples. Basava left the city for Kudalasangama, the meeting point of rivers that had been his inspiration in his youth. The king was assassinated, allegedly by two of Basava’s young followers. Not long after King Bijjala’s death, Basava too died under mysterious circumstances. The popular legend is that there, where the waters of the two rivers meet, the great river took him into its all-embracing arms.
Though veerashaivism would live on, its great moment of pushing for social change was over. What began as a critique of the status quo would be absorbed, bit by bit, into the spongelike body of tradition and convention. But Basava and his companions left a legacy: a vision consisting of vigorous, modern thought; poetry of tremendous beauty and depth; images that couple the radical and the mystical. Most of all, Basava’s passionate questions would remain relevant more than eight hundred years later.
In his deceptively quiet Delhi garden in the year 2000, Shiv considers Basava’s legacy—a legacy he is now heir to in a sudden, unexpected way. Basava’s dream broke up a long time ago, it no longer stands. But it was there. It lived. His movement for equality, for democracy, must be remembered, but so must its destruction; one without the other perverts memory. How is Shiv to explain Basava—his ideas, his times—to some bunch of hate-crazy goons? Or to Meena with her Said and Asterix, or even to Rekha with her sound instinct for the safe position?
Meena has not yet switched off the light in her room; she is probably waiting for Shiv to “chalk out” a plan. He will have to sneak upstairs to bed without her hearing him. And he has to think up a few answers for the Head and Dean tomorrow, anticipate their questions. Shiv sighs as he makes his way upstairs to his solitary bed.
One man in him wants to hit out, dazzle the Head and Dean into submission with Basava’s courage and passion. Certain gods always stand watch at the doors of people. Some will not go if you ask them to go. Worse than dogs, some others. What can they give, these gods, who live off the charity of people, O lord of the meeting rivers?
But even as he recalls Basava’s brave words, the other man in Shiv, the In-Charge of B.A. History, Rekha’s predictable husband, strikes back in fear. He is an academic, he argues, not some rabble-rousing activist. He is a professor after all, not a two-inch newspaper column hero. Basava’s man is ready with his rejoinder: Why pretend you are a professor if you can’t stand up to someone telling you what to think? How to think? Shiv hears the apparently gentle tone, determined to be patient and reasonable, as persuasive as his own father used to be: Shiv, do you imagine an ordinary man cannot be a hero?
Shiv pulls the sheet over his head, shuts his eyes tight. He can’t remember when last he felt so alone. Already he is looking back with nostalgia at life before the phone call: his editing Amita’s module this morning, the secret, tentative pleasure of his lazy afternoon before the TV with Meena. All this is now what went before; a thing other than his actual life. Though he didn’t know he was dreaming, the dream is coming to an end. When he wakes up tomorrow, he will wake, whether he is ready or not, to real life.
FIVE
SEPTEMBER 7
In the morning, before the mirror. A soldier putting on armor to face the world with its Deans and Heads, and its wild and weedy protectors of history. Its Meenas, waiting for Shiv to turn into the club-wielding, foolhardy imitation of a mythical hero.
The reflection in the mirror is no hero, however. Nor is it a young man preening in well-fitting armor. It is fifty-two years old, an unlikely age for the birth of a hero. And the rest of the picture: medium height, soft-voiced, a stingy salt-and-pepper mustache, a gently swelling herbivorous paunch. Shiv hesitates as he pulls on his trousers—should he button and belt them above the bulge or below? He is not sure why he considers this choice afresh every morning. He always chooses to pull up his trousers anyway, hoist them well over his stomach, above the point where his waistline used to be. Hips seem unreliable. Trousers can fall.
…
The Dean’s office is a cool, soothing cave. Thick dark curtains, the dirt on them blending chameleon-like into the deep brown, shut out the university grounds. The Dean’s room declares that he is a cultured man. The table, the chairs, the cupboards and bookshelves bear the required university branding in white paint. KGU-SS-32-1, says the painted corner of the Dean’s table, a head of wooden livestock or a prisoner. All counted and accounted for. The Dean’s furniture may be, in university officialese, “as per regulations,” but his room is different. The understated earth colors of the ethnic prints on the wall, the dhurrie on the floor, the pen and staple and clip holders, the wooden vase with a dried-flower arrangement—all these signal that though he is a rising star in the university’s Administration, he is not really one of them.
The Dean and the Head have been talking over cups of tea. There is a cup for Shiv, the skin on the liquid’s surface announcing how long it has sat there waiting for its victim. The tea also tells him which chair to take; the Dean and the Head have decided where the defendant’s dock is to be located. The Head sits on the chair beside Shiv’s, across from the Dean; the Head seems to shrink away from Shiv, shift his chair a fraction to the right as if he might need a little more room. The Head’s eyes take in Shiv’s appearance in a quick, devious glance, then look away. The Dean, unsmiling but unfailingly courteous, says, “Come, Professor Murthy. Please take a chair. Tea?”
Shiv picks up the cup obediently and the Dean continues.
“I am sorry we had to ask you here while you are on leave. In fact, I am sorry we have to meet about this matter at all. But Professo
r Sharma must have told you the situation is getting serious.”
The Head nods before Shiv can react. He seems mesmerized by the Dean’s eloquence.
“Suppose we begin with what you have to say about this lesson. I have read it now, but I want to be absolutely sure that I present your version faithfully to the school board—and if it becomes necessary, to the University Governing Council.”
Shiv takes a sip of the cold tea, which tastes as foul as it looks. Then he makes his reply exclusively to the Dean, ignoring the still nodding Head.
“The lesson is part of the module for the medieval Indian history paper, which carries three credits. Since the medieval period is my area, I preferred not to commission an outside expert to write the module. Though Basava is so many things, so many people rolled into one—poet and mystic, finance minister and political activist, man of the people and man of god—the lesson itself is quite straightforward. It traces the life of Basava. The growth of his radical ideas and his struggle against caste divisions and the temple establishment, the tensions that grew between the court and the brahmins and the merchants on the one hand, and on the other, the low-caste artisans and the untouchables who made up a large part of Basava’s veerashaiva movement. The lesson ends with the crisis these tensions led to, and the dispersal of Basava’s followers; and his own departure from Kalyana and his death shortly after.”
The Dean listens to Shiv with interest, or perhaps a habitual simulation of it. But the Head (who is no longer nodding his head) is getting impatient.
“Yes, we’ve read the lesson, Dr. Murthy. The problem is not the text itself but the implications. What can be read between the lines. I have gone through the lesson carefully and I have made a list of the phrases and sentences that lend themselves to misinterpretation. I am afraid these lapses are what we will now have to explain.”
In Times of Siege Page 6
