“I read the news online,” she says. “Why didn’t you tell me it was a bigger mess than I thought?”
“It just grew before I knew what was happening,” Shiv says, on the defensive. But he also catches the bewilderment in her voice, the sense of disbelief he too has been feeling. “It’s so sudden, so unexpected,” he says. “The fuss, the interviews, being hated by people I don’t even know … It’s all strange and new—at least to me,” he adds humbly.
Rekha listens in silence, then she says wearily, “I should get back, I can’t stay on for another month. I’ll worry too much about what will happen next if I am here. About how you are managing it all.”
For an instant Shiv sees a tempting vision: Rekha in charge; and all the rest—the Head and the Dean, Meena and Amar, even the Manch and poison-ink Current—sent to their respective seats in a well-ordered classroom. Shiv regretfully lets go of this comforting illusion. “Let’s not do anything in a hurry,” he says. “I’m fine and there’s nothing to manage. A lot of people—respected academics—are supporting me. In any case, the lesson has gone to some review panel of supposed experts.”
Rekha sighs in exasperation. “I wish you hadn’t got involved in something like this. And all for a correspondence course and some poet no one remembers. It’s so unlike you too.”
“These phone calls are getting expensive,” says Shiv. “I’ll e-mail you every time I go to the Department. Or I’ll buy a modem for the old computer at home. Anyway, don’t do anything to your ticket yet—maybe it will fizzle out soon—go away as suddenly as it came. Maybe we’re making too much of a little thing.”
Shiv himself does not believe this for a minute. If anything, he can sense something, a whole series of events designed to take him by surprise, waiting in the wings. Brewing while waiting to catch him unprepared. But how is he to prepare if he doesn’t really know what the other side might do?
The only thing he can think of is to go back to his lesson, or study his notes on Basava; prepare for cross-examination by strangers, whether on the other side or his own. Shiv has heard the subtext of Rekha’s words. A poet no one remembers. What she means is, what difference does it make? Whatever he said and did, he is dead and gone, and you are here and alive.
Rekha has never understood the pleasures, or the uses, of speculation. The first few times he spoke to her of his father—of what may have happened to him so that he disappeared—Rekha listened to him with sympathy. She lost patience when she saw that his father’s ghost refused to be exorcised; when she saw that he refused to leave, or, more accurately, that Shiv refused to let him go. “What’s the use of beating it to death when you can’t possibly know for sure?” she asked him sharply when she heard him go over that “last day” again and again, painfully piecing together fact and supposition.
But all that was a long time ago. It’s been years now since his father was mentioned between them. His father still remains, though; he is there between them like a secretive past that grows heavier every day. And now Basava, the other mystery Rekha would like to safely banish to an irrelevant past. Basava, a man of his times, but also a man whose questions remain relevant eight hundred years later. Basava was no cardboard saint singing syrup-sweet devotional songs, only concerned with the hereafter. For a brief period, probably the span of one generation, Basava helped create a new community; a new ethos, that provoked people to dare to experiment.
What happened, finally, to this man? Though Shiv has read whatever he can lay his hands on about Basava’s life, his end remains a mystery. It is this mystery that Shiv finds himself going back to again and again; the point at which Basava leaves the city and the collapsing movement, and returns to Kudalasangama, the confluence of rivers where he began his career.
Basava’s death will always have a resonance for Shiv. A special message he must decode though he does not know how to go about it.
Each of us carries within ourselves a history, an encyclopedia of images, a landscape with its distinct patterns of mutilation. A dictionary that speaks the languages of several pasts, that moves across borders, back and forth between different times. Some biographers date Basava’s death—or the presumption of death—as January 1168. But in Shiv’s mind, this tentative date creeps forward insidiously. Not to June 7, 1962, when his father disappeared, but to its medieval counterpart, June 7, 1168.
Like Shiv’s father, Basava disappeared. He was presumed dead. His end would always be shrouded by mysterious circumstances and speculation. Speculative narratives. Narratives of love or faith or revolution. But is all narrative doomed to be inconclusive?
All Shiv knows is that Basava left his home, his family, his city. He went back to Sangama, tired, disillusioned with his old friend and ally King Bijjala, perhaps with his own colleagues as well. A man close to the end, looking back to the past, remembering, evaluating, settling accounts. Trying to understand what had gone wrong. Trying to mine this failure for new answers to old questions. Living out, perhaps, a full day of reckoning, a life in a day, on June 7, 1168. There he was, a man by the river, the images of the past (credit, debit, profit, loss) a watery parade passing before him.
Now, more than ever, Shiv feels the need to construct a viable narrative of that last day, the key to a life. The narrative is speculative, fragmentary; but with the ghost of Basava—or his father—standing behind him, egging him on, Shiv’s imagination travels beyond the modest limits of prescribed module and syllabus. It begins, appropriately, with daybreak, with the tentative but hopeful light of sunrise over the river. There is a temple in the background, a whitewashed temple glistening like a silver signal. But the temple is not important for the moment. Shiv looks into the frame, zooming in on the man who stands alone by the river.
Shiv has only seen Basava’s pictures in the style of calendar art, but these images are forgettable, unlike the photographs he has seen of his father. So Shiv’s Basava, the man by the river: he is sixty-two but there is not a single wrinkle on his deep-brown face. His hair is still thick. From a distance it is all black, an unruly, wavy bush. Close up, the bush glints with silver strands, almost a decorative touch. His face is usually smooth-shaven, but now there is soft stubble on his chin and upper lip. This mossy unkempt stubble on his chin softens the sharp edge of his face about the jaw. For someone who has worn elegant silk all his years in the court (simple fabric, quiet colors, but silk all the same), he is now almost naked. A modest-sized white cloth is tied about his hips; the same rough-textured sort that made up his entire wardrobe in his youth by this river. The cloth is clean but damp; the outline of the loincloth below is clearly visible. There is not an ounce of flab on him; he is not a tall man or a particularly well-built one. The overall impression is of a fine, economically etched figure, with neat, functioning muscles and a straight spine firmly perpendicular to the ground he stands on. Hardness in miniature. A modest-sized, modestly dressed middle-aged man with large warrior-eyes. His eyes, where his power resides, now twin mirrors of the river.
Shiv tries to understand this river, Basava’s powerful river. It is a river that never stands still. It keeps moving, this river, flowing day after day, night after night. What can a river do but flow? From a distance, it is just a simple body of water, mindlessly acting out its nature, its constant movement a quest without a purpose. But close up, all complacent assumptions of simplicity vanish. There is nothing obvious about this river. Nothing about this river is what it seems. Close up, the river is actually two rivers. Two rivers flowing down their separate courses, then meeting, parting; meeting, parting, till they come to a point of union, a union deep enough for them to emerge flowing as a composite third river.
Shiv sees Basava standing by the river, considering it with a mixture of love and wariness as if he can see truth in the river. Truth, that large map of abstraction so many men fight over, die for, is the size of a pinpoint—just a glimmer in a drop of water, part of the flowing stream. And what is this truth Basava sees in the river? That crossc
urrents can coexist, that rapids and the most placid of waters are fellow travelers? Or that it is possible to move, to break free of gold-encrusted temples, customs and prejudices made of petrified stone, aspiring to stand like monuments for all time?
SEVEN
SEPTEMBER 18–23
In another time, on another day, Basava and his river are exchanging subtleties on the nature of many-faceted truth. In September 2000, as Shiv sits in his room in the university’s History Department, Basava could well be on another planet. A Martian saint-poet.
Shiv has come to the Department to meet the Head, but all he wants is to sit alone in his room. All he wants to do is take down books from his bookshelf, find the right references, and begin writing a new lesson. He wants to go back to being a simple teacher. Go back to that essential process of collating salient facts and bringing it all together in some meaningful shape. He wants to recapture for a moment the experience of a creator, or at least a quasi creator, of a design. Only that will make him feel at home in this room again. Make him feel it is indeed his, that he has a right to it.
Though he is faceless to the readers of his lessons, Shiv too felt the urgency of a teacher at one time, when he still had a real classroom. Later this urge to make someone understand what he had to say came upon him in fits and starts, usually when Rekha and he went for an evening walk. But he soon learnt to rein in that urge, what Rekha calls his attacks of professoritis. The irony is that it is now, when he coordinates resources for educational clients, when he no longer has a student walking shoulder to shoulder with him, that he is being tried, and displayed, as a real, living teacher.
Shiv tries to read the pile of papers in his In-tray, mark time before he sees the Head. But the memos and notices, all the boring, reassuring signposts of normalcy, are written in some indecipherable language. A foreign tongue. He puts them aside and looks out of the window; his recent conversation with Menon comes to mind. Menon, the sort of academic who feels safest in a maze of files, records and rules, called Shiv this morning to add a new anxiety to his hoard. “Shiv, you’re lucky all this is happening in Delhi,” said Menon. “You know how people here have trouble remembering what has happened in the rest of the country.”
Shiv waited patiently; Menon does not take kindly to being hurried out of his maze.
“It seems there was a similar controversy in 1994. But that was about a play on Basava, and the play was written in Kannada. Do you know anything about this?”
Since the call, as if the file in Shiv’s mind has just been waiting for Menon to open it, he has remembered. (It shocks Shiv that he, who prides himself on his good memory, has not recalled this in the past weeks of confusion.)
The play Menon was talking about was published in 1986. It won a state award and was prescribed as a textbook in a couple of universities. Then eight years later, some group in Karnataka—cousins, or ancestors, of Shiv’s Manch—woke up to the possibilities of the book. They accused the play of portraying Basava as a coward; implying that he committed suicide; casting aspersions on the “chastity” of some women saints; and letting some characters use obscene language.
The group demanded that the play be withdrawn from the university syllabus. There were the usual ban-the-book scenes. Copies were burnt; so was an effigy of the playwright. Rallies were held for and against; buses and trains came to a halt. There were protest fasts; one man attempted self-immolation. Most of all, it became a convenient election issue. Finally, “in view of the law and order situation” the book was withdrawn from the university syllabus in 1995 by government order.
Now, in 2000, the distance between the imaginary lands of literature and the prosaic city of history has shrunk. All occupy the same beleaguered space, the same territory under indefinite siege. The horizon, the sky, all wide-open spaces are reduced to the size of a pinpoint; the Manch and its cohorts are telling them all that there is only one way to remember a great man, their way. Only one way to remember the past.
Perhaps Shiv would be better off if he allowed his memory to be sullied; if he remembered less, if he turned his back on his father’s ideal historian. If he allowed a simple excision of memory, a few minor assaults on shade, nuance, complexity. But will he recover? Or will he skulk around the rest of his life, a paid witness, a hireling of thugs?
As if she knows Shiv is cornered, that he is casting about for refuge, Meena wanders into his mind. Meena sitting straight in bed, her cast stretched before her, every muscle of her body tense, an alert healthy animal ready to pounce. Meena sitting among her friends, girl-matriarch, listening to Amar proposing leaflets, posters, a “broad-front” rally.
She is just twenty-four. At an age when she should be looking at love for the first time, trembling with wonder and confusion at the mysteries of the human heart. The human body, her own body. A man’s body.
Instead she sits in a meeting to rescue an aging historian from the mob. Her eyes fill with yearning, but it is not a desire Shiv has seen in a woman’s face before. Meena’s fish-eyes, made for poetry, yearn to look a starker terror in the face. They do not flinch at the prospect of violence, of violation. They wait, with a youthful certainty Shiv finds unbearable, to meet halfway some brutal, premeditated injury, the very opposite of love.
Her brief history, a history of doing. His longer history, peopled with events in books, bound to a repository of public events long past. Now, after long safe years, the custodian is being shown the door.
In the days when Shiv was on the crossroads to manhood, there were only three professions open—or so it seemed to his uncle, his surrogate father. Doctor, engineer, chartered accountant. Anything else was out of the question. Teaching was not beyond the pale, as business was, for example. But to choose teaching was also an admission of failure, a regressive choice of dubious, impractical virtue.
Shiv’s daughter, Tara, always an indifferent student, now has some sort of job in America to do with computers. Her salary—a clear indication that Rekha’s genes have triumphed over his—would have assured his uncle that Shiv’s existence is justified. Shiv wonders now about Tara: how well does he really know her? She is younger than Meena, but unlike her, Tara couldn’t wait to finish with life as a student. Her world is a small, small place, but she knows it very well indeed. Delhi to Seattle via computer courses, competitive exams, a job that promises a yuppie future. Tara seems to have entirely escaped Shiv’s fumbling, yearning uncertainties, his hole-in-the-soul sense of being incomplete. Tara overcame doubt very early in her life. Shiv remembers the time when she was seven or eight, a plump, neat little girl. She sought him out in his study and told him, with all the confidence of a conformist bent on survival, “My teacher and my friends say there’s a god. The whole world says it; only you say there isn’t a god. I’ll believe the whole world, not you.”
It’s the same easy belief that makes Tara e-mail Shiv now: I’ve been getting messages from friends in Delhi and some Indians here. It’s sort of weird and embarrassing to explain why you have written something against our temples and priests and all that. It’s only after coming to the US that many of us have learnt to appreciate Indian traditions. This sounds like a lecture, doesn’t it, and that must amuse you, considering I always ran away from your lectures!
At the bottom of Tara’s message is a line that has recently begun to border all her e-mail. The exact words change from time to time, but they are all variations on the same theme: Joy, peace and love—may these blessings find their way to you. Below this sweet if impractical thought is the ubiquitous question, Do you yahoo?
The phone rings and Shiv looks at his watch. Fifteen minutes to go for his meeting with the Head. He picks up the phone.
“Dr. Murthy?” asks Mrs. Khan. “The Head would like to speak to you.”
Shiv holds on to the receiver and listens to two different pitches of static on the line, two incompatible tracks playing simultaneously.
“Dr. Murthy,” the Head’s voice echoes Mrs. Khan’s greeting wi
th false heartiness. “How are you?”
Shiv is not sure this merits a reply, but the Head is rushing ahead anyway. “I’m sorry, I can’t squeeze in our meeting after all. I have to leave in a minute for an emergency meeting across the city—and you know how the office-hour traffic is. But I thought I would quickly bring you up-to-date. Just think it out carefully, Shiv. You know I want you to continue in our Department. And I’m sorry the lesson had to be recalled—but these things happen, it’s all part of the game. The best thing now would be to keep quiet. Wait for the storm to blow over. I must tell you the Dean and I are distressed that you are talking to the media. It’s your decision, but if I were you, I would be more cautious.”
The car sent by the studio is plush and air-conditioned. With the distance to be covered, and the traffic en route, Shiv is safe in this cool, silent, moving island for what seems a lifetime. The untidy, grasping tentacles of Delhi are outside the window glass, powerless. They seem to belong to a television program, to a viewer’s guide to some distant, seething planet. Thank god, you think, watching the images on the screen-like window glass, that I don’t live in a place like that.
When the car turns into the studio compound and comes to a halt, he is reluctant to emerge. If he gets out of the car, he will have to let go of his hour of limbo, with someone else doing the driving, to parts of the city he has never seen before. He will have to let go of the illusion of being mid-journey, of many long, safe hours before he goes back to being himself.
In the studio building, Shiv is met by a young woman in jeans and a T-shirt. A mobile phone grows out of her hand like an unshapely wart. She ushers Shiv into what appears to be a dentist’s waiting room. Two or three bored occupants, reading dog-eared back issues of magazines, look up the instant they walk in. “I’ll send in some tea and biscuits,” the woman promises and disappears. The others, having exhausted the brief distracting possibilities of examining Shiv, go back to their magazines.
In Times of Siege Page 10
