The Great Indian Novel (46 page)

My heart still weeps at the thought of the condition of our army in those days, Ganapathi. They were cock-a-hoop, in their military lingo, after having captured an ill-defended enclave by the simple expedient of marching into it in numbers large enough to discourage any resistance. The only shot in the Comea campaign was fired by a young soldier who accidentally marched into a house of pleasure and discharged his rifle in startled excitement, bringing down a chandelier of imitation crystal on the heads of several of the territory’s Portuguese notables. He received a medal for their arrest and penicillin injections for the other consequences of his intrusion.

The major consequence of the conquest of Comea was complacency. Kanika felt vindicated in his stewardship of the Defence Ministry, and took his triumph as a licence to devote even more time to the prolix speeches and scabrous character-assassination that were his favoured pastimes. It is said that there was a report on his desk pointing out that the
jawans
in our mountain regiments had no all-weather rations and were obliged to wear canvas tennis-shoes in the Himalayan snow, but that he had placed it in an overflowing ‘Pending’ tray. Dhritarashtra, meanwhile, was so content with the company of his popular and successful Defence Minister that he had no desire to listen to the warnings that the few of us who cared to, dared to give him. Indeed, nor did the people at large share our misgivings. The year after Comea, Dhritarashtra went to the polls for the third time since Independence in the quinquennial exercise that affirmed our status as the world’s largest democracy, and triumphed handsomely. Kanika was returned to Parliament with a record plurality.

Imagine it, then, Ganapathi: our soldiers with their ill-clad and unprotected backs turned, warming gloveless hands before domestic stoves in the icy mountain passes, as Defence Minister Kanika Menon pirouettes on the world stage in the Kathakali mask of a confirmed conqueror, Dhritarashtra makes visionary speeches about non-aligned unity and the brotherhood of Indians and Chakars, and the massed millions of the Chakra People’s Liberation Army slant their jaundiced eyes to the sights of weapons whose gleaming barrels are pointed towards New Delhi.

At this very time the Pandavas, after years of promoting rural uplift, had arrived in the market town of Ekachakra, their number swollen by the birth of Bhim’s son Ghatotkach. ‘A few months of domesticity will do us all some good,’ the new father had proclaimed, to his mother’s undoubted relief, and they had taken up residence as the paying guests of a friendly Brahmin. It was in the first full flush of their indolence that word reached them of the challenge thrown down by the famed wrestling champion Bakasura, who had pitched his tent in the city.

‘We saw the posters all over the town,’ Nakul said excitedly, ‘and everyone was talking about it. Bakasura the Invincible, they call him. It seems that he has proclaimed that he will wrestle with any man in Ekachakra who puts up a hundred rupees as a deposit, and if he is defeated he will pay the winner five thousand rupees. All sorts of local
pahelwans
have tried, but he’s thrashed them all. Bakasura’s become richer by several hundred rupees, and the stake he’s put up remains intact. There’s even a drawing of a five-thousand rupee cheque on some of the posters.’

‘I suppose we could use the money,’ Yudhishtir said.

‘Yes, come on, Bhim, go and have a crack at this Bakasura,’ Arjun suggested, stretching a lazy leg.

‘Not today,’ the doting father replied, dandling his unpronounceable infant on his lap. ‘Today I’ve promised to play with Ghatotkach and give him his bottle - eh, my Ghatotkachy-koo? Some other time, perhaps.’

‘But today’s our only chance,’ Nakul protested. ‘Bakasura’s folding his tent and moving on to the next city in the evening. I heard them announce it. He always moves when he’s run out of opposition anywhere.’

But Bhim, chucking his son under his arrowhead-shaped chin, could not be bothered.

‘I’m planning to attend a lecture on the dharma of non-violence,’ Yudhishtir said when they looked at him instead. ‘Sorry.’

‘And I’ve just discovered a library next door,’ Arjun said. ‘I want to catch up on my reading too. Life is not all physical activity, you know.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Nakul pleaded with his three elder brothers. ‘If I hadn’t twisted my ankle running here to give you the news, I’d do it myself.’

‘Now that’s a good idea,’ Bhim said, briefly turning to them. ‘Not you, Nakul, of course, but Sahadev. I mean, with what we’ve all learned and practised over the years, any one of us should be more than able to get the better of this Bakasura.’ His words were met by a chorus of approval from three of his brothers. Even Ghatotkach gurgled his support.

‘I don’t know,’ said Sahadev dubiously, but his hesitancy was drowned out by the unthinking enthusiasm of the others.

And so it was that the brave, the strong, the wise, the gifted Pandavas sent into the ring - against a cunning and brutal champion tested and tempered by his recent triumphs over the local wrestlers - their youngest brother, a boy who had never spoken for himself and who had never needed to act alone in a situation of any seriousness.

A cheer went up from the assembled crowds as Sahadev stepped diffidently into the ring, his slim, lithe and lightly muscled figure a startling contrast to the gleaming oiled barrel of solid flesh that was Bakasura. Sahadev turned to acknowledge the cheers and heard them become a roar - a roar, though he was to realize it only later, of fear and warning. He raised his hands in a grateful and graceful
ñamaste
and suddenly found himself being picked up from behind, spun above Bakasura’s head like the blades of a human helicopter and flung bodily into the row of seats occupied by the judges of the contest. As he passed out amidst their screams and the splintering of chairs, the last word he heard was Bakasura’s chest-thumping snarl: ‘Next!’

‘He gave me no warning,’ Sahadev groaned later as he lay on a pallet at home and his mother applied compresses of turmeric on his rainbow of bruises.

‘There are no
warnings
in wrestling, silly ass,’ Arjun said. ‘No one told me the rules.’

‘You’re supposed to guess them as you go along,’ Bhim pointed out. ‘If that Bakasura were still here I’d teach him a thing or two. I have half a mind to follow him to the next town and get our own back.’

‘You’ll do nothing of the kind.’ Kunti’s eyes blazed. ‘Isn’t one lesson like this enough for you? If I had been here when you discussed your stupid plan I would never have let poor Sahadev go in the first place. How could you allow it to happen, my sons?
How
could
you?’

How
could
you
have
allowed
it
to
happen?
It was a question many of us in the Kaurava Party could not resist asking Dhritarashtra when the Chakars invaded, tossed our ill-fed, ill-clad ill-shod
jawans
contemptuously aside and inexorably erased the Big Mac Line. By the time our panic-striken response could be organized the war was over; the Chakars had announced a unilateral cease-fire that we were in no condition to reject. In a few humiliating days they had achieved every one of their objectives: asserted their view of MacDonald’s draughtsmanship, captured enough territory to permit the construction and protection of an all-weather road linking Tibia to Drowniang, and exposed the shallowness of our international pretensions to the world. They even shook the credibility of Dhritarashtra’s non-alignment, for our blind Prime Minister panicked enough to welcome the offer of a squadron of fighter planes
and
pilots from the superpower whose alliances he had earlier consistently spurned. It was not, Ganapathi, a time at which we covered ourselves in glory.

Criticism in the party was vociferous and unrestrained: many of our MPs howled with the jackals of the Opposition for sacrificial blood. This time Dhritarashtra did not offer to resign, as he had so often done whenever the party had found fault with his approach to a multitude of lesser issues. He did not, because for the first time since Gangaji had brought him into politics he could not be certain that his offer would be unanimously and unhesitatingly rejected. He did the next best thing and presented the jackals with a hawk- faced head on a platter: his best friend Kanika’s. The hero of Comea resigned and was relegated to the back benches in disgrace.

That was not the most important price the nation had to pay for its defeat by the Chakars. Dhritarashtra, the Dhritarashtra of the confident rhetorical flourishes and dazzling visual metaphors, the Dhritarashtra of the original international initiatives and the high priest of proud non-alignment, would never be the same again. The military humiliation not only shattered his self- esteem; it broke his heart.

His decline was gradual but decisive. He ate little, began denying himself more and more of the little comforts we all take for granted, resigned himself to acts of painful penance. He began to sleep on the bare floor and to invent new privations for himself. He replaced his regular massages with flesh- mortifying exercises. When he had no official appointments he would be found in the woods behind his prime ministerial residence, clad in tattered rags and penitential strips of bark. ‘It is time for me,’ he said to me when I approached him sympathetically, ‘to take to the life of
Vanaprastha.’

You know the ancient concept, Ganapathi, of the four ages of man: his youthful and celibate
Brahmacharya
when he learns what life has to offer him, his marital and parental
Grihastha
phase when he exercises his duties and responsibilities as householder and professional, his
Vanaprastha
of renunciation in the forest and, for a select few, the ultimate
Sannyas
of the sages. But to hear this traditionalism from the lips of the Cambridge-accented, agnostic Dhritarashtra was the final indication for me that his spirit had completely evaporated.

He did not last long after that. One morning he walked, thus attired, into the foliage of the woods. He breathed for the last time the honey-laden fragrance of the flowers, felt the warmth of the sun’s rays on his faded skin and the sharp scratches of twigs and brambles against his emaciated legs. Then he sat down in the lotus position, his bare back to a tree, facing the east, where the dawn breaks for all of us but had never done for him.

I found him there hours later, immobile in the yogic posture, perfectly still. I did not need to touch his heart.

Gently, I removed the dark glasses from his lifeless eyes and let them face the sun. Then I took away the empty bottle he had dropped near his feet. He belonged to the ages, but the instruments of his failure did not.

The Fifteenth Book:
The Act of Free Choice

‘I
’m afraid I have bad news for you,’ said Draupadi Mokrasi’s adoptive father. ‘Dhritarashtra has left you nothing in his will.’

The girl looked at him with her large, untroubled eyes. She was beautiful now, and though her skin was not of the pale colour prized by upper-class India, she was delicately dusky, with the sun-ripened wheatfields of the Doab glowing in her complexion. Yes, Ganapathi, ours was inevitably a darker democracy, and all the more to be cherished for the Indianness of her colouring. The gleaming darkness of her skin lit up her beauty, so that she shone like a flame on a brass lamp. When she entered a room, everyone in it became a moth, drawn irresistibly to her. Yet her beauty did not intimidate or threaten. Draupadi’s beauty attracted both men and women, both young and old. All sought to be part of her beauty; no man presumed to attempt its submission.

When I saw her, Ganapathi, I wanted the radiance of that flame to spread, to engulf everyone I knew within its warmth. For she was warm, our Draupadi. Hers was not a beauty that held itself aloof; it was not arrogant, nor withdrawn, nor self-obsessed, indeed not even self-sufficient. Other women nurtured their beauty privately, with their secret scents and oils and unguents; Draupadi’s beauty was public, absorbing the beauty of the world around it, blossoming in the sunlight of popular adulation. With her it seemed that in isolation there would be nothing: this was not a beauty that sought confirmation in a mirror; nor was it a light that burned alone, eventually to flicker out untended. No, Ganapathi, Draupadi was like the flame of a brass lamp in a sacred temple of the people. Imagine it: a flame nourished by a ceaseless stream of sanctified oil and the energy of a million voices raised in chanting adoration. A flame at an evening
aarti,
at the end of the puja, a flame offered to the worshippers as bells tinkle and incense smoke swirls, and a hundred hands reach out to receive its warm benediction; a flame curling and moving towards these hands, glowing ever more brightly as it breathes their reverence. This was the beauty of Draupadi, a beauty that glowed in the open, that drew sustenance from the public gaze. The more people beheld her, the more beautiful she seemed.

This was the extraordinary woman who confronted the reality of her father’s passing. ‘He did so much for me when he was alive; must I expect him to sustain me even after his death?’

‘My child, I have nothing,’ her guardian replied. ‘I gladly took you on for his sake, though God knows it has not always been easy. But now - you are of marriageable age, and what can I do for you? In my community it is not a custom to arrange marriages, and anyway, to whom could I marry off a girl of your uncertain parentage? Draupadi, I simply don’t know what to do.’

‘Don’t worry, Papa,’ Draupadi said, those still, round eyes completely calm. ‘I shall find my own husband.’

It happened sooner than either of them expected.

Those were difficult days for the party. Dhritarashtra had been like the immense banyan tree under whose shadow no other plant could grow. There were a number of us who were leaders of some consequence in different parts of the country, but we had no one of truly national stature to succeed Dhritarashtra - except perhaps for me, and I was already far too old for the job. After long and inconclusive meetings we decided that the Kaurava Party would be run more or less by collective leadership, with the Working Committee effectively in command and the one who was least unacceptable to the others - the honest but limited Shishu Pal - as Prime Minister.

No one was at all certain how it would all work out, or even whether poor decent Shishu Pal would prove up to it. Nor could anyone be entirely sure that Indian democracy itself would not fall into the wrong hands. It had happened elsewhere, notably in neighbouring Kamistan, where a series of shambolic civilian administrations had been overthrown by a military coup.

It was amidst this state of uncertainty that I convened a training and consciousness-raising camp for the youth members of the Kaurava Party. Priya Duryodhani helped me run it. The Pandavas were there; the news of Dhritarashtra’s death had brought them back to Delhi, since Vidur’s reason for keeping them away was gone. Also present at the month-long event was the dark, captivating beauty whose origins only I fully knew, Draupadi Mokrasi.

The camp was a success. I organized, and sometimes gave, lectures on the history and philosophy of the Kaurava Party, the precepts of Gangaji and the contribution of its illustrious leaders from Dhritarashtra and Pandu to Rafi and Shishu Pal. Apart from the plenary sessions under an enormous
shamiana,
we sat together in smaller, discussion groups, talking about the country’s social and political problems in a more intimate atmosphere, often late into the night. The air those young people breathed was heavy with the warmth of ideas.

It was here that Draupadi Mokrasi met the Pandavas for the first time, and dazzled them, and all the other young men in the camp, with her radiance. For all my advanced years, Ganapathi, I am not insensitive to the impact of young beauty on the rest of my species. But I allowed myself to think that Draupadi’s would be different - until the evening Priya Duryodhani stepped into my room wearing an elegant shawl and an inelegant scowl.

‘You’ve got to do something about this.’ She was direct as usual. ‘The girl is becoming a positive nuisance. None of the boys are listening to anything that’s going on - they have eyes and ears only for Miss Draupadi Mokrasi.’

I didn’t think it was quite that bad, but I shrugged sympathetically. ‘What do you expect me to do?’

‘You’ve got to get her married,’ she responded bluntly.

She herself had never married, sacrificing nuptial pleasure for service to her father as his official hostess. It was an improbable proposition for her to advance.

I’m afraid I was too taken aback to reply. ‘Married?’ I repeated stupidly.

‘Yes, married.’ Priya Duryodhani’s tone was impatient. ‘It’s the only solution. She has no one to arrange her marriage, it would seem. And you’re practically
in
loco
parentis
to all of them here, so there’d be no harm in your trying. Might tame the girl, and bring the boys under control. We can’t have Miss Mokrasi running wild.’

Marriage! Yes, of course, Draupadi had to be married one day. But to tie that boundless spirit to any one man - it would be a crime; it would diminish and confine her, and all of us. It would be like imprisoning the rays of the sun in one room. And who could this exceptionally fortunate man be, who deserved the hand of Draupadi in his? To such a question there could be only one answer - Arjun. To many the pairing would mean wedding perfection to magic; it would unite democracy with the voice of the people. And yet I knew that could not be the whole answer. Arjun might prove worthy of her, but she would not be enough for him. His restless spirit would inevitably move on to other challenges; he would not always be faithful to her. Draupadi could not, should not, be given away to a man who would one day break her heart.

I needed time to think about this. ‘You have raised an interesting question, Duryodhani,’ I acknowledged. And, dare I say it, an important one. I must think about who might be suitable for the girl. Do you have any suggestions?’

‘Certainly.’ Her coal-black eyes seemed to shift away, to a point on the wall behind me. ‘It should obviously be a young member of the Kaurava Party, who is bright, intelligent, well-informed. I can think of only one person who meets these requirements in all respects.’ I sat back, waiting for the obvious name. ‘Ekalavya.’

I tried not to show my surprise. Ekalavya! The boy who had once presumed to call himself a pupil of Drona, and been sent packing by his mentor in an act of dubious ethicality. Of course, I had noticed this repellent youth, with his pencil-line moustache and mocking voice, an intelligent but arrogant young man who had struck me throughout the camp as being far too clever for his own good. And it had been whispered, I knew, that there was hardly a girl at the camp who had been spared one variety or another of his amatory attentions. Why him?

Out of the mists of half-registered memories an image swirled into my mind - an image of Ekalavya emerging from Priya Duryodhani’s room one night; a recollection of his stumbling into me and saying quickly in his cocky voice, ‘I had hoped to borrow a copy of the sayings of Gangaji, but Miss Duryodhani isn’t in her room. May I have yours?’ At the time it had never occurred to me to wonder where Priya Duryodhani could have been at that hour of the night. Now, all of a sudden, it struck me. She
had
been in her room all along.

So this was how she consoled herself for the opportunities lost in filial devotion to her blind father: and was this the reward she had agreed for Ekalavya’s services?

‘He is bright and able, but suffers unfairly from the handicap of a low-caste birth,’ Priya Duryodhani went on. ‘In our country that means he will never be able to marry a woman worthy of him. Draupadi would be perfect: after all, she has a similar problem. You would be doing them both a favour.’

I tried to keep my voice steady. ‘You seem to have thought it through,’ I said. ‘Then why do you need me? You’ - and I was aware of the cruelty of my words, Ganapathi, but I rubbed them in deliberately - ‘you are old enough to take them both by the hand and arrange it for them.’

She gave me a quick, suspicious look, but my expression had not changed. ‘Who am I?’ Duryodhani asked bitterly. ‘Draupadi would never listen to me. There . . . there isn’t the required . . . trust between us.’

‘Then this is very selfless of you, Duryodhani,’ I replied. ‘But I am sorry, my answer must be no. I have never myself believed in arranging marriages. Draupadi needs a husband, but she must make her own choice. I will not force it, and’ - I looked directly into those smouldering eyes - ‘neither must you.’

Of what happened thereafter, Ganapathi, and of how it happened, I retain only the most confused of recollections. There was always something mystical about the daughter of Dhritarashtra and his British Vicereine, as if she walked on another plane from the rest of us, and my memory of her act of choice is inextricably entangled with the long and vivid dreams I later began to have about her life and times.