The Great Indian Novel (33 page)

‘Are you sure the Indians won’t mind? All the pomp and ceremony, I mean.’

‘Mind? Don’t be silly.’ Lord Drewpad put his fingers out, nodded approbation, and put away the nail-file. ‘Do you know,’ he said in the tone of erudition he habitually used to convey his nuggets of half-knowledge, ‘that the very word “ceremony” comes from India, from the Sanskrit
karman,
a religious action or rite? What we shall be performing in India is nothing more, and nothing less, than the last rites of our Indian Empire.’ He swivelled on a slippered heel, flashing a dazzling smile: three mirrors smiled back at him. ‘Let this be my epitaph: “Alone amongst his peers, he did not hesitate to stand on ceremony”.’

‘Sounds marvellous.’ Georgina purred contentedly. ‘But for now, are you finished, dear? Will you put out the light?’

Her husband took one last self-satisfied look at his reflection. ‘Yes, I think I’ve done my exercises for the day,’ he said, allowing himself a yawn. ‘Time for bed. Good night, dear.’

He switched off the lamp with a fragrant hand, plunging the room into darkness, while five thousand miles away in the country he was to rule, the flames of communal frenzy burned brightly across the land.

The Drewpad viceroyalty was conducted just as Georgina had been promised - in the light of chandeliers and flashbulbs, beneath the glitter of diamond tiaras and shimmering gold braid, and to the tune of the bagpipes of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. The last representatives of His Majesty the King-Emperor were not lacking in company: 913 servants in cummerbunds and scarlet livery attended to their individual needs, from perfumed bathwater to choice chicken breasts for their dogs; 500 horsemen guarded their corporeal persons; 368 gardeners trimmed and watered their manicured lawns (assisted by 50 youths whose sole job was to run about scaring away the crows). On the first day in his new palace Drewpad, in silk sash and gold aiguillettes, his beribboned breast awash with medals and orders he had not had to fire a shot in order to obtain, ambulated in stately fashion down miles of red-carpeted corridor, his satin-gowned consort on his arm, to be sworn in as Viceroy in a ceremony only marginally less elaborate than a coronation. Within hours he embarked with Indian leaders on the negotiations whose breathtaking pace was to characterize his in-candescently brief tenure.

‘Five
minutes?’
protested a bewildered Dhritarashtra, his stick tripping over the threshold, as he was ushered out of his first meeting with the new Viceroy. ‘Is that all he’s prepared to listen?’

‘That’s about as far as his attention-span seems to stretch,’ confirmed Mohammed Rafi, Gangaji’s latest choice as President of the Kaurava Party. ‘Something tells me we’re not going to have an easy time with this man - or indeed much time at all.’

‘I have no intention of giving them room to argue,’ the new Viceroy explained to his Vicereine in the relative privacy of her capacious dressing- room, while she divested herself gradually of several lakhs of rupees’ worth of antique jewellery. (He had himself earlier been meticulously undressed, from epaulette to silver boot-buckle, by a winsome aide-de-camp. In the course of a meteoric cavalry career Drewpad had become, in the American phrase, somewhat AC/DC, a proclivity reflected in his choice of A D Cs - and in his indulgence of his wife’s extra-curricular romps.) ‘That’s one mistake my predecessors made - to talk endlessly with these Indian politicians in the hope of arriving at some sort of conclusion. Absolutely hopeless business, of course.’

‘But if you don’t talk to them, how will you ever solve the problem?’ asked Lady Drewpad, tilting her head to remove a heavy earring.

‘Oh, I’ll talk to them all right,’ her husband responded airily. ‘But I won’t listen to them. All I want to hear from you lot, I’ll tell them, is a yes or a no. We’ve had enough of reconciling different plans for the transfer of power with both groups haggling over each clause.’

‘But what if you can’t get the different sides to agree?’

‘Not important.’ Lord Drewpad shrugged. ‘We’ll try and charm the blighters into being reasonable, but if they persist in their bloody-mindedness we’ll tell them where to get off. Darling, put that on again, will you?’ He inclined his head towards the diamond tiara which had crowned her golden curls. ‘I want to look at you like that for a moment.’

She smiled, flattered, and turned to face him. On a sudden impulse, she slipped her blue silk
peignoir
off her shoulders. There she stood, Ganapathi, as Britannia had first come to us: naked, with outstretched hands, about to place our crown on her head.

Drewpad took her elegant fingers in his own. ‘How I wish I could present you to all India like this,’ he said. ‘My jewel, in a crown.’

She laughed, and tossed her
coiffeured
head. ‘It might stop them talking, for a while.’

‘And then their next words might just be, “Yes”. Several times.’ Drewpad bent to kiss her hands. ‘You’re an essential part of my plans, darling. We’ve got to charm these humourless fellows into being more accommodating. You’re my secret weapon.’

In another high-ceilinged but considerably darker room in distant Hastinapur, with a small kerosene lantern flickering yellowly in a distant corner, Gandhari the Grim lay dying.

‘Has he come?’ The voice was strained and feeble, and Priya Duryodhani, hunched near her mother at the head of the bed, had to lean closer to hear it.

‘Not yet, Mother.’ She looked towards the curtained doorway without hope, knowing she would have heard the tap of her father’s stick long before he appeared at the entrance to their room. ‘Word has been sent. He will be coming soon.’

The faded face seemed to sink deeper into the pillow. I was reminded then of that other night, so many years ago, when Dhritarashtra’s daughter had fought her way into the world.

‘Don’t strain yourself, Gandhari,’ I said gently. ‘He must have been detained. You know how things are these days.’

‘These days?’ The pale dry lips, highlighted by the bandage that still concealed her eyes, parted slightly in a bitter smile.

I said nothing. It had been no different in earlier days. The light from the lantern flitted briefly across the shadows.

‘Water.’ There was a sudden urgency in the voice. Duryodhani reached for the brass pitcher on a bedside table and poured the lukewarm liquid into a tumbler. Gandhari tried to raise herself, then gave up the effort. Her daughter’s hand quickly interposed itself, half-raising Gandhari’s head, while the other tilted the tumbler towards her mother’s parched mouth. A little water dribbled down Gandhari’s chin.

‘Good boy.’ Gandhari was holding her daughter’s free hand in a tight grip. ‘My son. You are all - all I had.’ The words were coming out in gasps now. ‘Alone. Always alone. In . . . the . . . darkness.’

We were both still, Duryodhani motionless in her mother’s grasp and I, destiny’s observer, unable to move from my place in the shadows at the foot of the bed. And in the stillness I realized that nature too was quiet. There was an unnatural silence outside. The crickets had stopped their incessant chirping, the mynahs were no longer twittering in the trees, the hundred and one sounds that always came in from the garden at this time of day had mysteriously died. It was as if all creation was holding its breath.

‘Darkness!’ Gandhari screamed in one convulsive gasp. Her hand left Duryodhani’s and seemed to reach for the bandage across her eyes; but before it could touch that slender satin shroud it fell back lifelessly across her breast.

‘Mother!’ Duryodhani sobbed, burying her face in the folds of Gandhari’s garment. It was the only time I would ever see her weep. ‘Mother, don’t leave me, don’t leave me alone!’ The tumbler fell from her hand, clattering against the marble floor. A trail of water flowed slowly from it in a winding rivulet towards the doorway.

A cane tapped its way down the corridor and came to a stop. The curtain was pushed aside.

‘Don’t cry so, my child,’ said a gentle voice. ‘See, your tears have wet my feet.’

‘Papa!’ Duryodhani turned her tear-stained face to her father, and her cry was heart-rending. ‘She was waiting for you!’

‘I’m . . sorry.’ Dhritarashtra took a hesitant step forward. ‘Won’t you come to me, my child?’

For a moment the stillness continued; then a solitary koyal cooed in a tree outside, and Duryodhani was on her feet, running towards her father, who dropped his cane and caught her in an all-enveloping embrace . . .

I stepped soundlessly forward to where Gandhari lay, neglected in death as in life. Tenderly, in a gesture that I could not explain, I crossed her palms across her chest. Then, ignored by her husband and daughter lost in mutual consolation, I eased that terrible bandage off her face.

Her eyes were open.

Gandhari was gone, but her dark, devastated pupils spoke of greater suffering and solitude than most of us can endure in a lifetime of light. But she was right, Ganapathi. There are some realities it is better not to see.

I placed my hand on her forehead and very gently closed her eyes. Then, for the last time, I slipped her bandage back into place.

‘Goodbye, Gandhari,’ I said.

The Eleventh Book:
Renunciation - Or, The Bed of Arrows

‘G
entlemen,’ announced Viscount Drewpad, ‘I have summoned you here today to tell you that His Majesty’s Government - in other words, I - have had enough.’

He looked around the table at the representatives of the three parties the British had chosen to deal with: the Kauravas (Dhritarashtra, the ebullient Mohammed Rafi and myself), the Sikhs (Sardar Khushkismat Singh, whose stock of jokes about his community was rivalled only by other people’s anecdotes about him) and the Muslim Group (Karna, a robed mullah in a hennaed beard and a surrogate for the Gaga Shah, who was himself already out of the country arranging his post-Independence future abroad). We all looked back at the Viceroy, but none of us spoke: with this superficial and supercilious man even Karna was at a loss for words.

‘Whitehall has formulated, and successive Cabinet missions have presented, a number of plans to you all relating to a possible transfer of power from British rule to Indian self-government,’ he went on. ‘Each and every one of them has foundered on the intractable opposition of one or other of you.’ To avoid giving gratuitous offence with those words he fixed his gaze directly on the Sardar, who had, in fact, cheerfully given his assent to each and every variant of the Independence formulae thus far proposed. But he might as well have looked at Karna, because
we
had tried to bend as far as we could to accommodate him, and each time he had balked. Various schemes had been drawn up, grouping the Muslim provinces separately, proposing ‘lists’ of states in a weak confederation, devising elaborate guarantees of minority rights and communal representation. Each had foundered on the rocks of Karna’s intransigence. At one point Gangaji - who no longer came himself to these negotiations, saying he preferred to give us moral guidance from outside - suggested that as the price of keeping India united we should simply offer Mohammed Ali Karna the premiership of all India. So central was Karna’s personal ambition to his political stand that it might even have worked, but this time it was Dhritarashtra who refused to countenance the suggestion. Drewpad was really speaking for all of us as he went on: ‘We cannot, with the best will in the world, go on indefinitely like this.’

Karna glowered at him. ‘We have not come here, Viceroy, to be lectured at like errant schoolchildren,’ he snapped.

‘I have not finished.’ Drewpad fixed him with an amiable gaze. ‘I wish to tell you today that I, for my part, have decided to wash my hands of your squabbling. You all agree on one thing: that in the end you want the British out Very well, we shall proceed on that basis. Whether you agree on anything else or not, the British
will
pull out - on August the fifteenth, 1947.’

To say that the seven of us around the table gasped in astonishment might seem a cliché, but like most clichés this too was true. ‘But that’s barely eight months away!’ Karna, as usual, was the quickest to recover. ‘What made you choose such a date?’

‘It’s my wedding anniversary,’ Drewpad responded innocently.

‘This is preposterous!’ Rafi was shouting. ‘You can’t do this!’

Lord Drewpad picked up his papers and drew his chair back. ‘Oh, yes? As our American cousins say, Mr Rafi, can’t I just!’

And before we knew it he was striding out of the room.

The deadline was impossible. ‘Leave us,’ Gangaji had written to Drewpad’s predecessor when he was jailed for his Quit India call. ‘Leave us to God or to anarchy.’ It had sounded good at the time; but now, when the British seemed to be about to do precisely that, we felt sick to the pits of our stomachs.

We met, the Kaurava Working Committee, at the Mahaguru’s feet the next day. It was one of his days of silence, which meant that he would listen sagely to what we were saying, then scrawl a few words on the back of an envelope that Sarah-behn would read aloud to the rest of us. ‘One hell of a way to chair a meeting,’ Rafi breathed in an aside to me as we sat cross-legged on the floor. ‘Especially the most important meeting of our lives.’ But of course, Gangaji wasn’t chairing it at all; Rafi was the President of the party. Yet everyone knew whose view mattered the most in our conclaves.

‘The first thing to be sure of is, does he mean what he says?’ someone asked.

‘From what I have seen of Drewpad,’ responded Dhritarashtra wearily, and without irony - you know how he was for ever speaking in visual images - he strikes me as the kind of person who always means what he says.’

‘In that case we have our backs against the wall.’ This was Rafi. ‘All that Karna and his cohorts have to do is to stick obstinately to their demand for a separate state. With the British scheduled to leave for certain by a specific date, they know that sooner or later we’ll have to give in.’

It was a difficult thing for Rafi to say, because as a Kaurava Muslim he was amongst the party’s strongest opponents of the demand for Karnistan. If a separate Muslim state came into being it would, after all, leave him and his co-religionists in the Kaurava camp isolated, on both sides of the communal divide.

A hubbub of comment followed, largely tending to agree with the President. Gangaji raised his hand. We were all silent as he traced words on to a scrap of paper in his spiky pencilled hand.

‘You must never give in,’ Sarah-behn read, ‘to the demand to dismember the country.’

‘Gangaji, we understand how you feel,’ Dhritarashtra said. ‘We have fought by your side for our freedom, all these years. We have imbibed your principles and convictions. You have led us to the brink of victory.’ He paused, and his voice became softer. ‘But now, the time has come for us to apply our principles in the face of the acid test of reality. Rafi is right: Karna and his friends will simply dig in their heels. Separation or chaos, they will say; and on Direct Action Day last year they showed us they can create chaos. How much worse will it be without the British forces here? Might it not be better to agree in advance to a - the words stick in my throat, Gangaji - civilized Partition, than to resist and risk destroying everything?’

The Mahaguru had already started writing before Dhritarashtra had finished. ‘If you agree to break the country, you will break my heart,’ he wrote.

‘It will break many hearts, Gangaji,’ his chosen heir said sadly. ‘Mine, and all of ours, included. But we may have no choice.’

‘Then I must leave you’ now,’ Sarah-behn read in a quavering voice. ‘I cannot be party to such a decision. God bless you, my sons.’

The Mahaguru waited until the last word was read, then nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing visibly like a painful lump in his throat. He slowly got up and, with one hand on Sarah-behn’s shoulder, hobbled out of the room. Nobody spoke; and nobody tried to stop him.

His departure, as we had all known it would, made the rest of the meeting much easier. Misgivings were voiced on all sides, but we had struggled too long for freedom to want to tarnish it when it was within our grasp. It was better to give Karna what he wanted and build the India of our dreams in peace and freedom without him.

That evening, the Working Committee of the Kaurava Party resolved unanimously to accept in principle the partition of the country. It was the first time we had ever gone against the expressed wishes of Gangaji. His era was over.

Some people said later that we had acted too hastily; that in our greed for office we sacrificed the integrity of the country; that had we been willing to wait and to compromise, Partition would never have occurred; that Karna was the most surprised man in India when our resolution was passed because he was only asking for the mile of separation in order to have the yard of autonomy and we should have called his bluff. To all these theorists, Ganapathi, I say: That’s absolute cow-dung. Or its male equivalent. We gave in to Partition because Karna’s inhuman obduracy and Drewpad’s indecent haste left us no choice.

Of course, there was a great deal we didn’t know, although the whole horde of hindsight historians act as if we did. We had no idea that the sun was burning out behind Mohammed Ali Karna’s increasingly pallid skin, and that within nine months of the vivisection of our land the half-moon on his forehead would throb feebly into eclipse. We could not have imagined, either, that Partition, which we accepted as a lesser evil, would lead to a carnage so bloody that anything, even the chaos of an unresolved Independence settlement, might have been preferable to what actually happened.

Nor could we have even begun to guess what the practical process of partitioning the country would involve. The appointment, for instance, of a political geographer who had never in his life set foot on any of the territories he was to award either to India or to the new state of Karnistan.

‘It’s really quite easy,’ the stout, bespectacled academic announced, standing with a pointer before a small-scale map. ‘One takes a given cartographical area - there - one checks the census figures for religious distribution and then one applies the basic principles of geography, choosing natural features as far as possible for the eventual boundary, studying elevation and relief - see these colours here? - not forgetting, of course, heh-heh, the position of these thin lines, which are roads or rivers, and then . . . then one draws one’s boundary line v-e-ry carefully, like this.’ Lips pursed in concentration, he proceeded to trace, in a shaky hand, a sharp slim line on the map. That, ladies and gentlemen,’ he declared, ‘will be the new frontier between India and Karnistan in this area.’ He put down the pointer and half-bowed, as if expecting applause.