Step Across This Line (25 page)

TUESDAY, APRIL 11

A day to grind through. Long, grueling journey to Agra, then back to Delhi. Zafar suffers but remains stoical. He’s too weak to walk around the magnificent Fatehpur Sikri site, and only just manages to drag himself around the Taj, which he declares to be smaller than expected. I am very relieved when I can finally get him into a comfortable hotel bed.

I turn on the television news. Cronje has confessed.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12

CRONJE: I AM A CROOK say the banner headlines in the morning papers. The erstwhile cricketing demigod has admitted to having feet of clay: he has “been dishonest,” he has taken money, and now he has been fired from the South African captaincy and kicked out of the national team. K. K. Paul and his men have been thoroughly and dramatically vindicated.

The money Cronje took was paltry, as it turns out: a mere $8,200. Not much of a price for a man’s good name.

Meanwhile, back in South Africa, the predominantly white cricket-loving public (South African blacks are much more interested in soccer) rallies behind its beloved Hansie. Put him back in the team, say the opinion polls, and the media, too, back him to the hilt. In Durban, a crowd of whites attacks Sadha Govender, chairman of the KwaZulu-Natal Cricket Development Programme, who is repeatedly slapped and kicked. “Charros brought Cronje down,” the whites shout. (Govender is of Indian origin. Charros are Indians.)

Hansie Cronje’s locker-room nickname—given him long before the present scandal—was Crime. As in crime doesn’t pay. He was notoriously stingy, the story goes, about buying a round of drinks. Now, as the South African government moves toward agreeing to his extradition to stand trial in India, and his lawyers warn him to expect a jail term, he must have started thinking of that nickname as a prophecy.

I am impressed by the relative lack of triumphalism in the Indian response to Cronje’s downfall. “What are we gloating over?” warns Siddharth Saxena in
The Hindustan Times
: meaning, let’s not be self-righteous about this. The bookmakers were Indians, after all, and in the revelations that should now begin to flood out, we may learn that we’re no angels, either. One of the bookies, Rajesh Khalra, is already under arrest, and a suspected middleman, the movie actor Kishen Kumar, will be arrested as soon as he gets out of the hospital, where he is being treated for a sudden heart problem.

At a roadside
dhaba
earlier today, Zafar saw a smiling young man in a Pepsi poster. “Who’s that?” he wanted to know. “That” was Sachin Tendulkar, India’s great cricketing superstar, the best batsman in the world. My God, I thought, if one day a scandal should touch Tendulkar, it really would destroy the game. People wouldn’t be able to stand it.

Another alleged go-between, Hamid “Banjo” Cassim, a South African businessman, is named by the Indian police. He is said to have links with the bookie Sanjiv Chawla, as well as Mohammed Azharuddin . . . and Sachin Tendulkar. Azharuddin’s and Tendulkar’s denials of wrongdoing are instant and furious, and nobody actually accuses them of anything. But a shadow falls across the sun.

Roper Starch Worldwide, a market research agency, has issued a World Happiness Barometer. On average, apparently, just 24 percent of the world’s population describes itself as happy. The happiest countries are the USA (46 percent), India (37 percent), and the United Kingdom (36 percent). India’s in the Happiness Silver Medal Position! Her right to a place at the world’s top table is confirmed!

The unhappiest countries in the world are China (9 percent) and Russia (3 percent). Figures for the present happiness level of cricket fans in South Africa are not included.

India’s national happiness level has been raised, this morning, by the good news that Indian-born Jhumpa Lahiri has won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book of stories,
The Interpreter of Maladies.
She’s on the front page of every paper, beaming at her good fortune, and in spite of the somewhat ambiguous attitude in these parts to the work “Diaspora Indians,” she is given glowing write-ups everywhere. She is a very talented writer, and I share the general feeling of pride in her achievement.

Sri Lanka wants the United Kingdom branded a terrorist state, because it harbors so many terrorist groups: the LTTE (Tamil Tigers), Hamas from Palestine, the Kurdish PKK, the Kashmiri Harkat-ul-Ansar, and, according to the Sri Lankans, sixteen other groups on the U.S. terrorism list. I can’t help feeling that Sri Lanka has a point. The United States is presently accusing Pakistan and Afghanistan of forming a “terror hub” because they give house room to Osama bin Laden and various Kashmiri separatists. If it isn’t too sad-sack a question in the midst of all this happiness, why isn’t Britain being “chargesheeted” as well?

Sometime in the 1930s my paternal grandfather, Mohammed Din Khaliqi, a successful Delhi businessman, acquired a hot-season retreat for his family, a modest stone cottage in the pretty little town of Solan in the Shimla Hills. He named it Anis Villa after his only son, Anis Ahmed. That son, my father, who later took the surname Rushdie, gifted the house to me on my twenty-first birthday. And eleven years ago, the state government of Himachal Pradesh took it over without so much as a by-your-leave.

It isn’t easy to seize a man’s property in India, even for a state government. In order to get hold of Anis Villa, the local authorities falsely declared it to be “evacuee property.” The law pertaining to evacuee property was devised after Partition to enable the state to take possession of homes left behind by individuals and families who had gone to Pakistan. This law did not apply to me. I was an Indian citizen until I became a British one by naturalization, and I have never held a Pakistani passport or been a resident of that country. Anis Villa had been wrongfully seized, and provably so.

Vijay Shankardass and I became close friends because of Solan. One of the most distinguished attorneys in India with, incidentally, a proud history of anti-censorship victories to his name, he took on the Himachal authorities on my behalf. The case took seven years, and we won. Both parts of this sentence are impressive. Seven years, by Indian standards, is
incredibly fast.
And to defeat a government, even when right is quite clearly on your side, takes some doing. Vijay’s victory has been much admired in India, and he deserves all the kudos he has received.

For Vijay, the Solan case was just one part of the larger task of putting right my relationship with India, which has become, for him, something of a personal crusade. He has dedicated much time to it, testing the waters, lobbying politicians, working tirelessly on my behalf. The present trip would have been impossible without him. He is softly spoken, has quite exceptional gifts of negotiation and persuasion, and I owe him a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.

We regained possession of the Solan villa in November 1997. Since then, the roof has been fixed, the house cleaned and painted, and one bathroom modernized. Impressively, the electricity, plumbing, and telephone all work. In preparation for our visit, furniture and furnishings have been rented for a week from a local store, at the surreal cost, for a six-bedroom house, of one hundred dollars. A caretaker and his family live on the premises. Solan has grown out of all recognition, but the villa’s view of the hills remains clear and unspoiled.

Zafar is just a few weeks shy of his own twenty-first birthday. Going to Solan with him today closes a circle. It also discharges a responsibility I have long felt to the memory of my father, who died in 1987. You see, Abba, I have reclaimed our house. Four generations of our family, living and dead, can now forgather there. One day it will belong to Zafar and his little brother, Milan. In a family as uprooted and far-flung as ours, this little acre of continuity stands for a very great deal.

To get to Solan you take a three-hour ride in an air-conditioned “chair car” on the Shatabdi Express from New Delhi to Le Corbusier’s city of Chandigarh, the shared capital city of both Punjab and Haryana. Then you drive for an hour and a half, up into the hills. At least, this is what you do if you’re not me. The police do not want me to take the train. “Sir, exposure is too great.” They are upset because the manager of the hotel in Jaipur has blabbed to Reuters that I was there. Vijay has managed to squash the Reuters story for the moment, but the shield of invisibility is wearing thin. At Solan, as even the police accept, or say they accept, the cat will surely spring from the bag. It’s where everyone expects me to go. The day before yesterday, the Indian state TV service Doordarshan sent a team up to Anis Villa to nose around and quiz Govind Ram, the caretaker, who stonewalled nobly. Once I’m actually there, however, the story will surely break.

One rather unattractive development: the police high-ups who telephone Akshey Kumar every five minutes to ask how things are going have developed the notion that the Jaipur leak was engineered by Vijay and myself. This germ of suspicion will shortly blossom into a full-blown disease.

Zafar is feeling better, but I refuse to inflict what will be a seven-hour car journey on him. I put him on the train, lucky dog. I am to meet him at Chandigarh station with my inconspicuous “car-cade” of four black sedans.

There’s another train leaving Delhi, a train whose existence wasn’t dreamed of the last time I was in India. This is the Samjhauta Express, the non-stop direct rail link between the Indian capital and the city of Lahore in Pakistan. Just as I’m preparing to celebrate this sign of improving relations between the old adversaries, however, I discover that the continuance of the service is now at risk. Pakistan complains that India isn’t providing its share of the rolling stock. India complains, more seriously, that Pakistan is using the train to smuggle drugs and counterfeit money into India.

Drugs are a huge issue, of course, but the counterfeit money issue is also a big one. In Nepal, these days, people are reluctant to accept Indian five hundred rupee notes, because of the quantity of forgeries in circulation. Not long ago a diplomat from the Pakistan mission in Delhi went to pay his young son’s school fees, and used a mixture of genuine and funny money to do so. The boy was expelled, and although he was later reinstated, the link between the Pakistani government and the bad money had been clearly established.

(On Friday the fourteenth, India and Pakistan agree to let the train continue running for the moment. But it can no longer be said to symbolize the spirit of friendly cooperation. Rather, it’s just another problem, another location of the struggle between the two neighbors.)

I collect Zafar at Chandigarh, and as we go up into the hills my heart lifts. Mountains have a way of cheering up plains dwellers. The air freshens, tall conifers lean from steep slopes. As the sun sets, the lights of the first hill stations glow in the twilight above us. We pass a narrow-gauge railway train on its slow, picturesque way up to Shimla. For me this is the emotional high point of the trip to date, and I can see that Zafar, too, is moved. We stop at a
dhaba
near Solan for dinner, and the owner tells me how happy he is that I’m there, and someone else runs up for an autograph. I ignore the worried expression on Akshey Kumar’s face. Even though I’ve hardly ever been here in my life, and not at all since I was twelve years old, I feel like I’m home.

It’s dark when we reach the villa. From the road we have to climb down 122 steps to reach it. At the bottom there’s a little gate, and Vijay, also in a state of high feeling, formally welcomes me to the home he has won back for my family. Govind Ram runs up and astonishes Zafar by stooping down to touch our feet. I am not a superstitious man, but I feel the presence at my shoulder of my grandfather, who died before I was born, and of my parents’ younger selves. The sky is on fire with stars. I go into the back garden by myself. I need to be alone.

THURSDAY, APRIL 13

I am woken at 5:00 A.M. by amplified music and chanting from a
mandir,
a Hindu temple, across the valley. I get dressed and walk around the house in the dawn light. With its high-pitched pink roofs and little corner turrets, it’s more beautiful than I remembered, more beautiful than it looked in Vijay’s photographs of it, and the view is as stunning as promised. It’s a very strange feeling to walk around a house you don’t know that somehow belongs to you. It takes a while for us to grow into each other, the house and I, but by the time the others wake up, it’s mine.

We spend most of the day mooching around the premises, sitting in the garden under the shade of big old conifers, eating Vijay’s special scrambled eggs. I know now that the trip has been worthwhile: I know it from the expression on Zafar’s face.

In the afternoon we make an excursion to the next town, the former British summer capital. They called it Simla, but it’s gone back to being Shimla now that they have left. Vijay shows me the law courts where he fought for Anis Villa, and we go, too, to the former Viceregal Lodge, a big old pile that once staged the crucial pre-Independence Simla Conference of 1945 and now houses a research establishment called the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies. The fabric of the building, of course, is badly neglected, and may soon become unsafe.

Zafar walks gravely around the conference table where the shades of Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah are seated, but when we get outside again he asks, “Why is that stone lion still holding up an English flag?” The probable answer, I hypothesize, is that nobody noticed until he did. India has been independent for over half a century, but the flag of St. George is still up there on the roof.

A little ducking and swerving in the grounds to dodge the BJP-wallah who now runs the institute. Alas, I am here not only as observer but also as observed, and I mustn’t fall into the trap of looking like the BJP’s man. A handshake that would certainly be photographed is worth a little fancy footwork to avoid.

Unlike V. S. Naipaul (who is also in India, I gather), I do not see the rise of Hindu nationalism as a great outpouring of India’s creative spirit. I see it as the negation of the India I grew up in, as the triumph of sectarianism over secularism, of hatred over fellowship, of ugliness over love. It is true that Prime Minister Vajpayee has tried to lead his party in a more moderate direction, and that Vajpayee personally is surprisingly popular among Muslims, but his attempt to reshape his party in his own image has failed.

The BJP is the political manifestation of the extremist Hindu movement, the RSS (Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh), rather as Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland is the political offspring of the Provisional IRA. In order to change the BJP, Vajpayee would have to carry the leadership of the RSS with him. Regrettably, the opposite is happening. The relatively moderate RSS chief, Professor Rajendra Singh—“Rajju Bhaiyya”—has been ousted by the hard-line K. S. Sudarshan, who has started warning Vajpayee to toe the RSS line.

The prime minister’s options are limited. He could give in and unleash the dogs of religious strife. He could try doing what Indira Gandhi brilliantly carried off in 1969, when the kingmakers of the Congress attempted to turn her into their puppet. (She resigned from her own party, formed the Congress-I or Indira Congress, took most of her MPs with her, called a general election, and destroyed the old guard at the polls.) Or, as seems most likely, he could soldier on until the next election and then stand down. At that point the BJP’s moderate mask will slip, it will no longer be able to hold together the kind of broad-based coalition that presently underpins its hold on power, and, given the shambles the Congress Party’s in, India will enter another phase of splintered, unstable governments. It’s not a happy prediction, but it’s what the probabilities suggest. And it’s a good enough reason for keeping away from BJP apparatchiks, however low-level they may be.

There is a conference under way at the institute. Professor B. B. Lal, using grayware pottery shards found at sites associated with the great Kuru-Pandava war as evidence, concludes that the age of the revered
Mahabharata
may be only three thousand years, not the supposed five thousand. What will the BJP/RSS make of so radical a rewriting of the story of this sacred Hindu text?

My metamorphosis from observer to observed, from the Salman I know to the “Rushdie” I often barely recognize, continues apace. Rumors of my presence in India are everywhere. I am profoundly depressed to hear that a couple of Islamic organizations have vowed to make trouble, and trouble is news, and so maybe, I think, this will be seen as the meaning of my trip to India, which will be very, very sad, and bad, indeed.

At dinner in Solan’s Himani restaurant, I’m tucking into the spicy Indian version of Chinese food when I’m approached by a Doordarshan reporter called Agnihotri, who just by chance happens to be vacationing up here with his family. And there it is: he has his scoop and the story’s out. Within moments a local press reporter arrives and asks me a few friendly questions. None of this is very unexpected, but as a result of these chance encounters the jitteriness of the police reaches new heights, and boils over into a full-scale row.

Back at Anis Villa, Vijay receives a call on his cell phone from a police officer named Kulbir Krishan in Delhi. Krishan is somewhere in the middle of the invisible chain of command of Delhi desk-pilots, but what he says makes Vijay lose his composure for the first time in all the years of our friendship. He is almost trembling as he tells me, “We are accused of having called those journalists to the restaurant. This man says we have not been gentlemen, we have not kept our word, and we have, if you can believe the phrase, ‘talked out of turn.’ Finally the fellow says, ‘There will be riots in Delhi tomorrow, and if we fire on the crowds and there are deaths, the blood will be on your heads.’ “

I am horrified. It quickly becomes clear to me that there are two issues here. The first, and lesser, issue is that after a week of accepting all manner of limitations and security conditions, we are being accused of dishonesty and bad faith. That is insulting and unjust, but it isn’t, finally, dangerous. The second issue is a matter of life and death. If the Delhi police have become so trigger-happy that they are preparing to kill people, then they must be stopped before it’s too late.

No time now for niceties. Zafar looks on, dazed, while I blow my stack at poor, decent Akshey Kumar (who is not at all to blame) and tell him that unless Kulbir Krishan gets back on the phone
right now,
apologizes to Vijay and me personally, and assures me that there are no plans to murder anybody tomorrow, I will insist on our driving through the night back to New Delhi so that I can be waiting at Prime Minister Vajpayee’s office door at dawn, to ask him to deal with the problem personally.

After a certain amount of this kind of raging—“I’ll go to the British high commissioner! I’ll call a press conference!
I’ll write a newspaper article!
”—the hapless Kulbir does call back to speak of “misunderstandings,” and promises that there will be no shootings or deaths.

“If I spoke out of context,” he memorably concludes, “then I am very sorry indeed.” I burst out laughing at the sheer absurdity of this formulation and put down the phone. But I do not sleep well. The meaning of this entire journey will be defined by what happens in the next two days, and even though I hope and believe that the police are overreacting, I can’t be sure. Delhi is their town, and me, I’m Rip Van Winkle.