The Great Indian Novel (50 page)

Call me Krishna.’ The party secretary smiled. ‘Everyone does. Dwarakaveetile Krishnankutty Parthasarathi Menon is a bit of a mouthful even in these parts.’

‘Thanks, Krishna. I’m Arjun.’

Krishna smiled again as he acknowledged the easy assumption of familiarity. He was dark, of medium height and build, with long, slightly curly hair and brilliant white teeth which shone like pearls against the velvet of his skin whenever he smiled, which was often. He smiled at everyone he met as he walked with Arjun to the bus-stop, picking up one fold of his spotless white
mundu
to facilitate his stride. The villagers all seemed to know him, and he was greeted affectionately by young and old, male and female alike - a joyous, radiant being with God’s own mischief in his eyes.

The jolting bus ride back to Gokarnam was the beginning of a friendship that would transcend time, space and distance, and give meaning and purpose to Arjun’s life.

Krishna was, despite his relative youth, a political veteran. He had entered politics earlier than anyone else in the Kaurava Party: his parents, both freedom fighters, were in jail when he was born, the youngest and decidedly the most vocal prisoner of the Raj. With his parents continuing active electoral careers, Krishna’s largely unsupervised childhood had given him a reputation both for mischievous pranks and political precocity. The youngster’s playgrounds were often the
maidans
of party rallies; he was reading Gangaji’s abstruse autobiography when his classmates were coping with comics; and he was arguing with adults when he ought to have been speaking to them only when spoken to.

His political opportunities came correspondingly early. He was a popular and successful election campaigner for the party, with almost no competition for the women’s vote. From an early age Krishna had the rare talent of being able to talk to people at their own level. He was equally at home teasing the milkmaids while they bathed in the river as when debating the theory of permanent revolution with the local Mau-Maoists. He would disarm them all with his laughing good nature, then resolve the point at issue through the utterance of a perception so startling in its clarity and simplicity that it made all further argument otiose. And he would invariably get his way with members of either group.

This was not surprising, for the most striking thing about Krishna was his joyousness. He was always relaxed, always laughing, full of innocent mischief that never quite obscured his deep, instinctual wisdom. The wisdom was always apparent, despite the laughter, and it was not a wisdom acquired through learning or even through experience, but something that arose from deep within himself, as if from the very earth he stood on. Yet Krishna wore his wisdom lightly: he expressed it with a simplicity so profound that it did not seem to recognize the depths from which it sprang.

Arjun found himself entranced. In Krishna he found qualities he had never seen in any man nor sought in any woman. He was irresistibly drawn to Krishna’s almost magical combination of self-possession and extroversion, mischief arid maturity, joy and judgement, and his rare gift of the common touch. Days after he should have filed his story and left, Arjun stayed on at Gokarnam as Krishna’s guest and disciple.

He followed the Gokarnam Party secretary on his daily round of meetings and speeches; watched him squat on his haunches in a paddy-field with a stalk between his teeth, talking about irrigation to a calloused peasant; helped him hide the
davanis
of bathing milkmaids in the bushes by the river. And at night after a late meeting or a working dinner, Arjun sat alone in the swift-falling darkness and surrendered himself to the haunting strains of Krishna’s flute floating across to him on the still night air. Each pure clear note on that magical instrument seemed marinaded in mystical meaning, yet when Arjun first tried to express his admiration, Krishna laughingly dismissed the topic. And Arjun understood that even the highest praise would only diminish what the music of that flute meant to his friend.

Krishna’s words, like his music, were those of a soul at peace on this earth. But Arjun learned that not all had been tranquil in his friend’s life. Stories he heard suggested that when Krishna was young, jealous relatives - led by his maternal uncle, the dread patriarch in Kerala’s matrilineal
marumakattayam
system - had coveted his inheritance and sought to destroy him. But Krishna’s surging vitality had triumphed, and in his first election Krishna had toppled his own uncle, the formidable local party boss, Kamsa. Yet as a popular hero and a secure Member of the Legislative Assembly, Krishna had been too satisfied with his life in Gokarnam to seek a place in the national Parliament. As someone who knew national politics too well, Arjun found this appalling.

‘You’ve got to let me persuade you,’ he told his friend, ‘that the country needs people like you in the mainstream of national politics.’

‘I’m quite happy with my local river, thanks,’ Krishna laughed. ‘If you were to stay a little longer here, see my life, my place in the lives of the people, you would understand.’

‘But what a waste,’ Arjun expostulated, warming to his theme and his friend. ‘You could find a place in the hearts of the entire country, not just one part of it.’

‘I should quote you to Radha,’ Krishna said. ‘You see, Arjun, I’m very content with the part I have.’

‘Are you married?’ Arjun asked gauchely.

‘No,’ Krishna replied, flashing those white teeth of his, ‘but my wife is.’

Arjun deeply pondered that remark. Krishna, though always warm and candid, was a master of the art of being elliptical without sounding evasive.

Yet his friend’s ellipses never aroused the slightest doubt or anxiety in Arjun. Krishna must have had good reasons; Krishna had to be right. True, he avoided making a national commitment; but so what? His very being was a celebration of life; he could not possibly be accused of evading its challenges. Krishna could, after all, have lived on his inheritance, enjoying prestige and status without effort, but he had entered the lists and toppled Kamsa. He would swim out of his chosen backwater when he considered it necessary, and not before.

Arjun found his article impossible to write. It was intended to be simple and short, but nothing about Krishna could be either.

For a man so completely in tune with India’s ancient harmonies, Krishna was startlingly liberal.

‘Who is that stunning girl?’ Arjun asked as they strolled outside his host’s parental home one evening, past a group of laughing collegians who smiled and waved and called out to Krishna.

‘Which one?’ Krishna looked at him shrewdly. ‘There were seven girls in that group, unless my buttermilk had fermented more than I realized.’

‘I only noticed one,’ Arjun replied. ‘It was as if the other six were her maids in a traditional painting, gathered to do her honour. The fair girl in red, with music in her voice and sunrise in her hair.’

Krishna’s laugh bellowed across the road. ‘I hadn’t heard the music or been blinded by the sunrise, but there was only one girl in red,’ he chuckled. ‘My sister Subhadra.’

Arjun stopped still, the shock of recognition coursing through him. Of course! That was what had caught his eye - the startling similarity of the fair girl to his dark friend. He had noticed it subconsciously as they approached the girls and as they walked past, but he would not have been able to define what it was about the girl that so captivated him. Now he knew. Despite the astonishing difference of colour - not so uncommon in Kerala families - the girl’s every gesture, every turn of the head or movement of the hands, was Krishna’s. He found himself looking back at her, and reddened. ‘Your sister! I say - I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all,’ Krishna laughed. ‘I don’t often find myself in this position. Now if it was one of the other six . . . So you like the look of Subhadra, do you?’

‘God, yes,’ said Arjun fervently. He looked at the merry face before him and recalled its smiling female version. ‘I’d want to woo her immediately, if you’d only tell me how.’

‘I thought you said you were married.’

‘Yes and no. I mean, I’m married but not all the time,’ Arjun assured him hastily. ‘Four fifths of me is still available, and I’d like to offer that to Subhadra. If you will allow me.’

‘Allow you? My dear Arjun, what age are you living in? I do not dictate to Subhadra whom she should allow to woo her. Besides, she is somewhat difficult to woo. Like many of these modern girls, she thinks herself too good for a mere man, but unlike most, she won’t let any man get close enough to prove otherwise.’

‘Then tell me, Krishna, what should I do? How can I seek to win her?’

‘You
are
one for medieval chivalric conventions, aren’t you? Subhadra has always said she’d choose her own husband, but from what I’ve seen of her I doubt very much she’d be able to judge what was for her own good. My advice would be quite simply to give her no choice. Be Valentino, not Valentine. Kidnap her. Take her away on a white charger!’

‘You mean - elope?’

‘You make it sound so prosaic, Arjun,’ Krishna sighed in eye-twinkling resignation. ‘But yes, I suppose I do mean elope. Except that if eloping involves the consent of both parties, abduction might be a lot more effective.’

Startled, Ganapathi? Not quite the way for a good Indian elder brother to behave, eh? If you thought that, I suppose you’d be right, but this was just one more instance of Krishna’s innocently instinctual amorality. He lived by rules which originated in an ancient and ineffable source, a source that transcended tradition. Unlike the rest of us, even unlike Arjun, Krishna found his basic truth within himself. No conventional code could confine the joyous surging force of vitality, of essential life, that he embodied.

And so the plans were laid; Arjun borrowed a white Ambassador car to serve as his charger, and lay in wait after dark along the route Subhadra used on her way back from her evening classical-music lessons.

A little later than expected, he saw her emerge from a building across the road with a small group of fellow students. They stood in a little knot on the front steps, but in a moment the knot unravelled and the girls strolled away in different directions.

Subhadra was walking alone.

Arjun felt the palpitations in his chest as he turned the key. The car did not start. His heart was beating more vigorously than the motor.

He turned the key again, cursing. The girls were disappearing one by one down several streets.

The Ambassador car is, of course, Ganapathi, the classic symbol of India’s post-Independence industrial development. Outdated even when new, inefficient and clumsy, wasteful of steel and petrol, overpriced and overweight, with a steering mechanism like an ox cart’s and a frame like a tank’s, the Ambassador has dominated India’s routes since Dhritarashtra’s ascent to power, protected and patronized by our nationalists in the name of self-reliance. Foreign visitors have never ceased to be amazed that this graceless contraption of quite spectacular ugliness enjoyed two-year waiting lists with all the dealers. What they don’t realize is that if they had to drive on Indian roads in Indian traffic conditions, they would prefer Ambassadors too.

Arjun sighed, then opened the boot and pulled out one more evidence of the Ambassador’s appropriateness to Indian conditions - the crank. He took the L-shaped iron bar to the front of the vehicle, inserted it and turned it vigorously. The engine cranked, wheezed and spluttered into life. Arjun was back in the running.

He returned to the driver’s seat and anxiously scanned the road. The girls had all disappeared. But he was fairly sure he knew which road Subhadra would take to walk home. Amidst the blaring of offended horns, he eased his car into the traffic.

That was it - the turning - and surely that was her, just beyond the last flickering street-lamp? Arjun began to turn, then realized it was a one-way street. This is not a consideration that always impedes Indian drivers, but in this case the entrance to the street was blocked by an enormous lorry prevented from heading the right way by a homesick cow yoked to an unattended cart. The impasse appeared likely to last: certainly the truck driver had resigned himself to the situation, for he had placed his prayer-mat on the bonnet and had begun performing his
namaz.
Arjun drove on. He would try the next street.

This time the turn was easier to execute. He proceeded slowly, looking for the first left turn that would bring him back to the street on which he had spotted Subhadra.

There wasn’t one.

Arjun felt the sweat on his palms and the frustration higher up. He
had
to get her! He turned right, hoping to find two lefts later. The roads all seemed to curve away at impossible angles from the direction in which he wanted to go. Whenever he found a left, it seemed to be succeeded by a street with a no-entry sign or a cul-de-sac. He turned; he swerved; he reversed down oneway streets; he retraced his route and did the opposite of what he had done before. Finally, dizzied by seventeen left turns and thirteen unintended rights, he emerged on a quiet unlit street that seemed vaguely familiar. As familiar, in fact, as the skirted figure walking hip-swayingly ahead into the shadows.