The Great Indian Novel (9 page)

‘If you say so, sir.’ Heaslop tried to keep the anxiety he felt out of his voice. He was beginning to feel like Pandora after casually opening the box. ‘What exactly do you propose to do, sir? I mean, there isn’t much point in demanding his ouster as Regent, is there, when we know perfectly well he isn’t Regent any more?’

‘Ouster? Who in damnation spoke about demanding his ouster, Heaslop?’ ‘Well, you said, sir, I mean no one, sir, but you did say that if he were still Regent you would —’

‘Have his hide for a carpet.’ Sir Richard recalled his metaphor. ‘I’m not foolish enough to ask for his dismissal from functions he no longer exercises, Heaslop. It’s not a symbolic victory I’m looking for. I want to teach Mr Datta, and any others like him, a lesson they’ll never forget.’

‘May I ask how, sir?’ Heaslop’s voice was faint.

‘You may indeed, Heaslop, and I will answer you in one word,’ Sir Richard replied, rubbing his hands in anticipatory satisfaction. ‘Annexation.’

‘I’m not sure I want a
hundred
sons,’ Dhritarashtra said to his bride. ‘But I’d be happy to have half a dozen or so.’

They were reclining on an enormous swing, the size of a sofa, which hung from the ceiling of their royal bedroom. The unseeing prince lay on his side, propped up against a bolster, his head supported partly by an elbow and partly by Gandhari’s sari-draped lap. His new princess, playing idly with strands of his already thinning hair, did not smile at his words, nor did she look at him. Gandhari the Grim, as this frail, dark beauty was already being called in the servants’ quarters, could not, for her eyes were completely covered by a blindfold of the purest silk.

‘You shall have a son,’ she said softly, ‘who shall be strong and brave, a leader of men. And he shall see well enough and far enough for both of us.’

Her husband sighed. ‘Dearest Gandhari,’ he whispered, his free hand reaching for her face and feeling the satin bandage around it. ‘Why must you do this to yourself?’

‘I have already told you,’ she replied, decisively moving his hand away. ‘Your world is mine, and I do not wish to see more of it than you do. It is not fitting that a wife should possess anything more than her husband does.’

A fragrance of the attar of roses wafted slowly down to him as she spoke. It was one of the signs by which he could tell her from any other presence in a room, that and the silvery tinkle of the
payals
at her ankle. ‘How often must I tell you that you would be more useful to me the way you are?’ Dhritarashtra asked sadly.

He never ceased to marvel at the strength of this woman’s resolve. For a young girl, embarking on adulthood and marriage, to vow never to see the world again! What it must have meant to her to make this sacrifice, to blot out the world to conform to an idea of matrimony even fiercer and more intense than that handed down over the generations. What was it that drove her to this extreme act of self-denial? Not just tradition, for even the tradition of the dutiful wife, the Sati Savitri of myth and legend, did not demand so much. Not love, for she had never set eyes on Dhritarashtra before; nor admiration, for the days of his greatness still lay ahead. No, it was some mysterious inner force that led this young girl to will herself into blindness, to give up the glory of the sunlight and the flowers, to renounce the blazing splendour of the
gulmohars
or the gathering thunderclouds of the monsoons, to have to judge a sari by its feel rather than its colour, a space by its sound rather than its size, a man by his words rather than his looks. It was a sacrifice few, let alone this delicate wisp of a woman, would be thought capable of making.

‘Useful? It is not a wife’s role to be
useful.’
Gandhari tossed her determined head. ‘If that is all you want, you can hire any number of assistants, secretaries, readers and scribes, cooks and servants and even women of pleasure. As I am sure you have done whenever you have felt the need.’ She ran her fingers through his hair to remove any hint of offence. ‘No, my lord, a
dharampatni
is not expected to be useful. Her duty is to share the life of her husband, its joys and triumphs and sorrows, to be by his side at all times, and to give him sons.’ A note of steely wistfulness crept into her voice. ‘A hundred sons.’

Dhritarashtra had never known a woman like this in England. He tried to inject a note of playfulness into the conversation. ‘Not a hundred. That would be exhausting.’

His quiet wife did not. laugh. This was not a subject on which she entertained levity. ‘Who knows? That is what the astrologer has foretold. It would take a long time, to produce a hundred sons.’

‘And so it would.’ Dhritarashtra the sceptic, with his Cambridge-taught disbelief that the stars could be read any more accurately than the tea leaves he constantly brewed, chuckled, and reached for his wife. This time his hands touched a different fabric, and felt a responsive warmth beneath. ‘So what are we waiting for?’

His fingers tickled her and at last she laughed too. The swing rocked with their love, at first slowly, then with accelerating rhythm, casting moving shadows on the walls that neither could see.

Behave yourself, Ganapathi. What do you mean, how could I know? You don’t expect me to spell out everything, do you? I just know, that’s all. I know a great many things that people don’t know I know, and that should be good enough for you, young man.

Meanwhile, as they say in those illustrated rags which I suppose are all your generation reads these days, Pandu was having the time of his life with his two wives. The scandal-burdened Kunti was every bit as delectable as her reputation suggested, and the steatomammate Madri, if less symmetrically proportioned, more than made up for this with the inventiveness of her love- making. Pandu was always something of a physical soul, if you get my meaning, and he revelled in the delights of bigamy, taking due care to ensure that his pleasures were not prematurely interrupted by pregnancy.

It was, of course, too good to last. That, Ganapathi, is one of the unwritten laws of life that I have observed in the course of a long innings at the karmic crease. It is just when you are seeing the ball well and timing the fours off the sweet of the bat that the unplayable shooter comes along and bowls you. And it is because we instinctively understand this that we Hindus take defeat so well. We appreciate philosophically that the chap up there, the Great Cosmic Umpire, has a highly developed sense of the perverse.

Didn’t think I knew much about cricket, did you? As I told you Ganapathi, I know a great deal about a great deal. Like India herself. I am at home in hovels and palaces, Ganapathi, I trundle in bullock-carts and propel myself into space, I read the
vedas
and quote the laws of cricket. I move, my large young man, to the strains of a morning raga in perfect evening dress.

But we were talking about something else - you mustn’t let me get distracted, Ganapathi, or you will be here for ever. Was it not the profound inscrutability of Providence I was on about? It was? More or less? Well, in Pandu’s case it manifested itself quite early. He was in bed one day with both his consorts, attempting something quite unspeakably imaginative, when an indescribable pain shot through his chest and upper arm and held his very being in its grip. He fell back, unable to mouth the words to convey his torture, and for a brief moment his companions thought their ministrations had brought him to a height of ecstasy they had never seen before. But a quick look lower down convinced them something quite different was the matter. They frantically screamed for help.

‘Massive coronary thrombosis,’ said Dr Kimindama, as Pandu lay paler than ever under the oxygen tent. ‘Or in plain Hindustani, a whopping great heart attack. He’s lucky to be alive. If it weren’t for the prompt call,’ he added, looking with appreciation at the two not-quite-shevelled ladies beside the bed, ‘I’m not sure we could have saved him.’

Pandu recovered; his big heart rode the blow and knit itself together. But when he was ready to resume a normal life the doctor took him aside and gave him the terrible news.

‘I’m afraid,’ Dr Kimindama said, ‘that in your case there is one prohibition I must absolutely enjoin upon you. The circumstances of your attack and the present condition of your heart make it imperative that you completely, and I mean completely, give up the pleasures of the flesh.’

‘You mean I have to stop eating meat?’ Pandu asked.

The doctor sighed at the failure of his euphemism. ‘I mean you have to stop having sex,’ he translated bluntly. ‘Your heart is simply no longer able to withstand the strain of sexual intercourse. If you want to live, Your Highness, you must abstain from any kind of erotic activity.’

Pandu sat heavily back on his bed. ‘That’s how bad it is, doctor?’ he asked hollowly.

‘That’s how bad it is,’ the doctor confirmed. ‘Your next orgasm will be your last.’

Think of it, Ganapathi! To be married to two of the most delightful companions that could have been conjured from Adam’s rib, and yet to be denied, like an over-cautious chess-player, the pleasures of mating! Such was the lot of my pale son Pandu, and it could have been the ruin of a lesser man. But the blood of Ved Vyas ran in his veins, don’t you forget that, Ganapathi, and he resolutely turned his back on his misfortune, and his wives. His putative father had died of his lust, and Pandu had no desire to conform to the pattern.

‘This is a signal,’ he explained to his grief-stricken spouses. ‘I must pull up my socks, turn over a new leaf and make something of my life, if I am ever to acquire salvation. Sex and worldly desires only tie a man down. I am determined to roll up my sleeves and put my nose to the grindstone, not forgetting to gird my loins while I am about it. I shall practise self-restraint and yoga, and devote myself to good causes. Oh, yes, and I shall be sleeping alone from now on.’

It was a time of great grief and much sorrow
When Pandu rose up from the dead;
For starting today (not tomorrow)
He must renounce the joys of the bed.

The medic didn’t give him an option
Except ‘tween this world and the next;
To live (and avoid any ruption)
He just had to give up sex.

To young Pandu, as you can imagine
It came as a painful wrench;
He could enjoy life’s great pageant
But he couldn’t lay hands on a wench.

To his wives, two lovely ladies,
He could offer no more than a kiss;
They might as well have lived in Hades
For all the hope they could have of bliss.

Yes, after those nights full of pleasure –
Full of baiting and biting and laughter –
They would now have only the leisure
To contemplate the hereafter.

Good deeds! was now the motto
Of the rest of their lives on this earth;
No frolic, no getting blotto,
No foreplay, no unseemly mirth;

No, nothing but an ascetic’s toga
And the quest of the good and the right:
A regular session of yoga
And a guru to show him the light.

Thus Pandu abandoned the pastime
Of expending in women his lust;
He shrugged passion off for the last time
And set off to strive for the just.

And where else could he go, Ganapathi, but to his uncle Ganga, now ensconced in his ashram on the river bank? Of course, Pandu the so-recent sybarite was not about to enrol straight away in the commune and take cheerfully to his share of dish-washing and toilet-cleaning; he remained initially an occasional day-scholar, coming to listen to Gangaji’s discourses when he could, then returning to the comforts and - for he was still the younger brother of a blind maharaja - the responsibilities of the palace.