Shining Hero (39 page)

That he might lose the race was a thought that Karna could not allow to enter his mind. He knew with a desperate certainty that he had to win.

Arjuna employed a mechanic who specialised in preparing cars for the Himalayan Rally. The man knew every trick and agreed that Arjuna’s was the best kind of car for this competition. ‘In all India there is not such a strong car as the Ambassador of this period and also you can get parts for such a car anywhere. It has a simple engine so that, with a little instruction from myself, you will be able to replace most parts yourself. Though once I have lightened the body and speeded up the engine, this vehicle will probably get you from Bom to Cal with nothing going wrong at all.’

Karna, too, was souping up the engine of his new Triumph Herald. The kigalis of Calcutta reaped parts off the parked cars of Park Street and New Market and sent them to him, until Karna and his mechanic had transformed his family runabout into a formidable racing car.

The brothers decided that no one should find out about their race. Certainly not the media, who would undoubtedly make the most of India’s two up and coming Bollywood stars, setting off to beat each other in a frightful dash over the countryside, the prize being the part of Arjuna and Poopay Patalya. Both knew the sort of thing Poopay might say when she found out. Karna and Arjuna kept the race absolutely secret.

The only people to see Karna and Arjuna leave Bombay in their final competition were their respective mechanics who carefully checked the opponent’s cars. Everything was minutely looked over, from the steering to the brakes. They even examined the cars’ undersides to ensure that no explosives were fixed there before allowing the two combatants to set off.

The pair left Bombay in the early morning, before most people were up.

Karna’s new car was quicker off the mark – almost at once Arjuna was overtaken but he was not worried. There were many hours and miles before them. Arjuna felt relieved that they had prepared their cars in Bombay and not Calcutta where Karna had so many friends and
acquaintances of the underworld. At least he did not have to worry about some drastic damage having been done to his car. In Calcutta, one of Karna’s goonda or kigali friends, on hearing of the race, would probably have cut through Arjuna’s steering rod or tampered with the braking system. They would not have worried about maiming or even killing Arjuna if it meant that their hero, Karna, would win the race. Luckily Karna did not know that kind of person in Bombay. But all the same Arjuna felt a touch of uneasiness if there came a slight change of tone in the engine and a throbbing sound that might have come from a loose nut startled him.

Karna drove very fast, passing everything on the road, trying hard not to make errors. As he hurled bumpily along the rutted surfaces and left the town, a jumbo jet filled with people travelling off to England, Europe or America, moved over his horizon. He was touched with a sudden scald of loneliness at the thought of the people up there, excited and carefree, while he sat alone fighting for the only things that would make his life worth living. But then the thought came to him that soon Arjuna would be gone, he would be famous and rich and then he and Poopay would often sit on aeroplanes, sipping gin and travelling to America and London. He was grim with determination as he flew up through the gears. He had so far been rather unlucky – Arjuna always got the luck and Karna never did. But this time, he assured himself firmly, it was not going to turn out like that.

Karna was far ahead now but Arjuna knew that all he had to do was keep steadily on. Arjuna had visited Karna’s mechanic secretly. A large sum of money had changed hands and the mechanic had made a small adjustment to one of the tyres and to the spare of Karna’s Triumph Herald. Hopefully, when Karna got his puncture, it would be in some unpopulated area. It would take Karna some time to discover that the spare had been dealt with too and even then Karna, who was so clever and resourceful, would find a way of mending the puncture
in the end. But by that time Arjuna should have got himself a good head start.

Arjuna did not feel guilty. After all, Karna had tampered with the Ambassador before selling it to him. All’s fair in love and war and he felt sure that Karna too would have taken any advantage he could. The little damage he had caused to be inflicted on Karna’s tyre would not put the other in physical danger, whereas who knows what lengths Karna, who had already tried to murder Arjuna, might have gone to if he had been among his criminal friends.

By evening, Karna’s eyes started to sting with staring but he thrust on through the velvet black of the Indian night. He dared not stop to sleep, in case Arjuna, who sometimes seemed superhuman, managed to overtake him.

He had been tempted, several times during the previous week, to find some way of tinkering with Arjuna’s car, but this race was for something much, much more important than the part of Arjuna. It was for Poopay Patalya. It was for Dolly. Karna wanted, when he won this race, to feel that he had been worthy of his success. Worthy of the two women he loved so much. He wanted to become, once more, worthy of Dolly, his mother, who never did dishonest things. He had forgotten, for a while, the wonder of Dolly’s glorious honesty but now could not stop remembering how, even when she was so poor that she was starving, she had refused to cheat or steal or lie. Perhaps, he thought, he had brought bad karma on himself by tinkering with Arjuna’s car the last time. Perhaps, if he had left things alone Poopay would not have looked at Arjuna in that special way at Dilip Baswani’s party and she would not have told that journalist that she was in love with Arjuna. But this time he had done it right. He would win because of his driving, his courage and his strength. He would beat Arjuna because he would not need to sleep or eat or rest for two days and nights. He would win the race because he knew the roads and people of India, and understood the inside of his car, whereas Arjuna, who had been brought up as a sahib and zamindar,
had been sheltered from all these things. Karna would win because he was better than Arjuna and not because he had tricked him.

Sometimes dogs or drunken people staggered across the road before him and he was forced to hurl the car up against the verge or rush towards those coming in the opposite direction. Great insects beat against the windscreen then died there in a splat of black blood. Owls rose from the road and went winging off, so silent that it made Karna feel his urgency was something almost contemptible.

At every turn of the road, Arjuna expected to find Karna stranded with his puncture. The mechanic had assured Arjuna that he had shaved a patch on the inner tube so thin that it would certainly give way as soon as the tyres heated up. He hoped the man had not tricked him as he pressed his foot down on the accelerator. He leant into the night and felt a little touch of regret because this was going to be his last contest with Karna. After this Karna would have to go away forever, set up a life somewhere else and leave Arjuna without a challenger.

Karna nearly crashed into an over-turned lorry that was spilling ghee and wove with screaming wheels among the crowd of men, women and children who wildly tried to gather up the golden oil before it sank beyond reach into the dust. Women were dabbing at the ground with their sari ends and men had taken off their turbans and were pressing them into the pools of fat then squeezing the precious butter oil into tins, brass jars and terracotta pots. They were so absorbed in reaping this luxury harvest that they hardly winced away as Karna whirled among them.

When Arjuna dodged the ghee gatherers half an hour later he was thinking about all the other times he and Karna had competed with each other. Those days when, as little boys in Shivarani’s garden,
they had tried to see who could pee the furthest. That thrilling race on the Calcutta course. How they had walked together up the Himalayas, seeing whose breath ran out first, seeing who collapsed first of hypothermia. Whatever happened from now on, thought Arjuna, he would never again find an opponent as worthy and as exciting as Karna.

Karna thrust past long processions of bullock carts, hay toppling house-high, little paraffin lamp swinging from each axle. Often the driver was asleep. The bulls knew their way home. He was feeling increasingly confident. By now he must be so far ahead that Arjuna did not have a chance and he wondered at Arjuna’s foolishness in choosing to race in the slow old Ambassador.

Then there were all those times when Karna had been belittled, thought Arjuna. There had been that cricket match at the Hatibari. Boys from Doon School had come to stay and they had tried to get a team together but had been one man short.

‘Let’s ask Karna,’ Arjuna had suggested. ‘He’s frightfully good.’

‘Who is Karna?’ the friends had asked and when Arjuna had explained they had decided it would be better to play one man short than have such a person on their team. Why had Arjuna not insisted? Karna must have known the discussion was going on, and must have realised why he was not invited to play.

And in spite of this sort of thing happening again and again throughout their boyhood, Karna, himself injured, had carried Arjuna down the mountainside, struggling in the freezing cold to save Arjuna’s life.

At midnight driving suddenly became difficult. Karna switched the windscreen wipers on, thinking it was raining, although it was January and the monsoon was over. But then he realised it was because he was crying. How odd, he thought, as he tried to push the tears aside and see the road. He did not remember
ever crying but now the tears were rushing down so thickly and swiftly that it was as if all the weeping of his life was flowing out.

An idea came to Arjuna. Suppose, when he came upon Karna, he said, ‘You don’t have to finish this race after all. You can be the winner.’

Karna wondered if there had been tears on his mother’s face when she died. Perhaps as she lay dying she had wept like he was doing now. Perhaps she had lain there desperate for him to return and had died crying because she would never see him again and had not had a chance to say goodbye to him.

Arjuna was starting to feel regretful at what he had done to Karna’s tyres. It would have been so much better, he realised now, if he had managed to win the race by his driving skills alone. But Karna was always so tricky and he had not thought it possible to beat his half-brother in any other way. And when he had seen that Triumph Herald transformed into a racing car with all those expensive stolen parts, Arjuna had felt that Karna had already cheated him. He decided that when he came across Karna struggling with his puncture, Arjuna would stop and help him. Then, when the tyre was repaired, the two would start the race from scratch and this time it would be a fair one.

What was the purpose of tears? Karna wondered. When people see you crying do they give you back your part? Do they say to you, ‘Oh, you are crying, so please play Arjuna after all?’ Do they say, ‘Oh, you are crying, so please understand that it was only a joke. Poopay and me are not really in love. She loves you, Karna.’ Do people say things like that? No.

Definitely, thought Arjuna, when he found Karna, he would suggest they abandon the race altogether. For he saw now that this was not the way to solve their rivalry.

Up there, in the Himalayas, there had been a time when Arjuna had thought that he and Karna had become equals and that in the future they would support each other and enjoy the friendship of being brothers. Perhaps this was still possible. The two of them would drive on to Calcutta in the Ambassador, and on the way they would work out a more sensible and satisfying way of sorting out their relationship.

Karna had reached the place on Laika’s nose where the river bent. He was starting to feel smug and successful. It had been absurd, from the start, that Arjuna should have expected to beat Karna in that old tin can. Then there came an explosive sound so that, for a moment, Karna thought that he had been shot at. He visualised Arjuna leaning from the window of his competing car, aiming a pistol. The car began to skid crazily. He clutched the steering wheel, gripping with all his might but it kept swirling wildly. The car began to slide with a scream of tyres, skidding this side, that side. Lorries thundered by heavily, blowing their horns at him, narrowly missing him.

When he came upon Karna, Arjuna could say, ‘I have always admired you, admired your courage and resourcefulness. Even though you are not my father’s son, but only my mother’s, I will give you money from the Hatibari estate for it is not fair that I should have so much and you so little.’

Karna could not regain control. The car thundered down a long steep slope, rolling over and over, so that Karna kept cracking from floor to roof and back again. It hit the riverbank with such force
that Karna was hurled though the windscreen in a shatter of glass. The car bounced and fell again, this time into the river. With a great surge of water and a screaming rush of daaks and egrets, the bonnet punched mud and Karna’s car rocked there, like a fat dart in a soft target …

Arjuna thought, ‘When I inherit the Hatibari I will ask Karna to come and live with me there. He and I together will restore the tennis courts and we will play great tournaments till we get too old to run. And when we get the stables once more filled with Katiawari horses we will set up tent-pegging in the grounds and see who can take up the greatest number of pegs on their lance, just like my grandfathers and great-grandfathers used to do. Karna and I could live together in the Hatibari in a joint family situation, he with his wife, I with mine, our children being brought up together just as I was brought up with my cousins.’ He imagined his and Karna’s children skidding over the flooded paddy fields, punting themselves in banana logs, heard their happy laughter as they played in the Hatibari gardens and felt filled with a warm hopefulness at the thought.