The Solitude of Emperors (14 page)

Noah fell silent for a moment caught up in his remembering, and then said, ‘I am not surprised at all by the violence being done to the city but it is not for the reasons you think. It’s because the poetry is gone, da, the Muse has fled the great and the good, not to mention the people around them. Bombay’s time is behind it now, just like all the other great flaming cities of the past, their brief effulgence spent, you know like in that Cavafy poem where he compares the future to a row of lit candles, and the past to burned-out candles, and doesn’t want to look back because

how quickly the dark line lengthens,

how quickly the snuffed out candles multiply.’

He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was perfectly even, all the passion leached from it. ‘I’m glad I don’t live there anymore. What’s it like now anyway?’

Here was my chance to tell him my stories of Bombay, stories of murderers and innocents, but also of people who were fighting to save their beloved city, but before I could do so he held up a hand, and said, ‘No, don’t, best to leave things as you remember them.’

‘Aren’t you worried the same thing will happen to Meham? You know this place is so peaceful, but with this Tower of God tamasha…’

‘Nah, nothing will happen, this is Meham, da. Fucking place is inoculated against any kind of catastrophe. Worst thing that can happen here is some kind of pest attacks the fuchsias, then you’ll see some real panic, I tell you.’

‘But I hear that a Bombay politician is involved.’

‘Umm ya, a local who went to Bombay and made good. Fellow by the name of Rajan. Smart guy, very smart guy, I have no idea why he’s bothering with this Tower of God stuff. But look, when we go there, I’ll introduce you to some people who’ll give you all the dope, OK? I’ve got some business to take care of right now, but we’ll meet tomorrow, say eleven. Right here. I’d have offered to pick you up, except the toffs on your hill don’t like me. Come on, I’ll see you safely past Godless and his harem, they might love you to death.’

~

Late in the evening I took my mug of tea and sat out on the front steps looking out over the landscape as I had that morning. The sky was the colour of flame but the light was delicate, softening every thing it touched.

I wondered about the strange man I had met in the cemetery. It was evident he was no primitive philosopher, some idiot savant of the Nilgiris, but a man of some learning who was familiar with the world beyond Meham. And even assuming he had merely dropped the names of famous Bombay personalities to impress the stranger, how did he know about them in the first place? You didn’t get that sort of knowledge from books or magazines; poets were not movie stars. And if he were the priest’s son, why had he fallen out with his father? And how and why had he lost his faith? And why did Brigadier Sharma and the other elite of Meham dislike him, was it simply because he had stolen their flowers? There was too much about him that did not make sense. I wondered if it would be safe going with him to the Tower of God, but I quickly put that thought aside; Noah seemed perfectly harmless and besides I doubted that I would be stupid enough to follow him to some remote place to be set upon by a gang of local thugs.

The butler came up and handed me an envelope on a silver salver. A big, untidy hand had scrawled my name on the envelope, and inside there was a note in the same handwriting. The notepaper inside was headed Brigadier N.P. Sharma AVSM, PVSM (Retd). The most powerful man in Meham, according to Noah, was asking if I would do him the pleasure of joining him for drinks and dinner at the Meham Club on New Year’s Eve, a couple of days away, to help bring in 1994. Here was the perfect source to discreetly pump for information about my friend from the cemetery, I thought. I went back into the house and scribbled a note to the Brigadier accepting his invitation.

It promised to be a full day tomorrow, and I couldn’t wait to get started. After supper, just before I dropped off to sleep I decided to read some more of Mr Sorabjee’s manuscript, as I didn’t know how much time I would have to devote to it once I began investigating my story.

SAMRAAT ASHOKA

Emperor of Renunciation

In his time he ruled the largest empire in the world, as every one of you who has passed the fifth standard or read an Amar Chitra Katha comic knows: a land mass that stretched from the mountains of the Hindu Kush in the far north, all the way down to the south, ending at the Pennar River. But strangely for such a powerful ruler he made little impression on the minds of contemporary historians, and vanished from view for a thousand years. Then, in 1837, a sickly, obsessive English clerk called James Prinsep, who worked for the British Raj in Calcutta and who had spent the best years of his life trying to decipher the Brahmi script, stumbled across a reference to a king called Devanampiya Piyadassi or Beloved of the Gods. Prinsep’s chance discovery was followed by other revelations about the unknown ruler. As scholars began to understand mysterious edicts carved on rocks and sandstone pillars weighing as much as fifty tons apiece that had puzzled them for centuries, a picture began to emerge of an emperor who was like few others the world had seen. H.G. Wells, the English writer, wrote of him, ‘Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history… the name of Ashoka shines, and shines almost alone, a star.’

If you are as inattentive a student as I was, you will probably have forgotten most of the stuff you were taught in history class, so I think you will find my recapitulation of a few facts about Ashoka useful. He was the grandson of Chandragupta Maurya, who came to power around 321 BC. With the help of his wily adviser Kautilya, who wrote the manual of statecraft
The Arthashastra
(which Machiavelli is thought to have studied for his own great work
The Prince)
, Chandragupta assembled a vast empire. But this story is not about him, so we must skip over his greatness, and that of his son Bindusara, Devourer of Foes, and move on to the third in the Mauryan line of kings, Ashoka (290-232 BC), the one who would be hailed as the greatest of them all. It is appropriate to enter a caveat into the narrative at this point: most of our information about Ashoka’s life and times comes from Buddhist texts such as the
Divyavadana
which were not authored by trained historians. Fable, myth and hyperbole were used as liberally as facts, so the best we can do is construct a reasonably accurate picture of the man whose name would be celebrated for millennia.

A second son, Ashoka’s beginnings were not as propitious as one might have expected. In fact, the Buddhist texts refer to him as Chand Ashoka or Cruel Ashoka. He is said to have killed one or all but one of his brothers (legends say there were 101) in a terrible war of succession; he is also said to have enjoyed killing and torturing people and animals. He was ugly and bad-tempered and was thought to have beheaded ministers for daring to disagree with him and burning alive women who dared to mock his less than pleasing features. He was also supposed to have put down rebellions brutally. But all these stories might just be a way of providing a stark contrast to his saintly later years, as we ought not to forget that the Buddhist texts that are our principal source were not concerned so much with history as with propagating Buddhism through tales of its greatest son. Be that as it may, the Ashoka who came to power was not a gentle soul—he could not afford to be if he was to rule an enormous empire. He may well have killed one or more of his brothers, he was certainly a tough ruler, and his reputation for ruthlessness was not without foundation, as we will see.

We will join him now as he marches to the last battle of his life. The Mauryan army is a terrifying engine of war. Ashoka has at his disposal elephants, chariots, cavalry and over half a million men. The Kalinga force that opposes him has a long and valorous tradition of fighting off invaders but it is much smaller. According to Pliny, the Kalinga army comprised 60,000 foot soldiers, 1,000 horsemen and 700 battle elephants, and even if you double or triple that number (to mesh with other estimates of the Kalinga force) there is no question but that it faced a numerically larger enemy. However, the Kalingas would not back down; they would fight to the very end if need be.

The progress of Ashoka’s army is slow, accompanied as it is by a number of support staff and others—the harem of the king and senior officers, traders, prostitutes, cooks, physicians and servants. But it inexorably draws closer to Kalinga.

Battle is joined on the flat plain of Dhauli eight kilometres to the south of Bhubaneshwar in present-day Orissa. It is a pleasant place, fringed by low hillocks and edged by a river, but it will soon become a charnel house. War in Ashoka’s time was in many ways a more gruesome business than it is today because it was fought at close quarters and with terrible savagery. The weapons both sides used included bows as tall as men that shot arrows with tremendous velocity, heavy swords that cut through the light armour and shields that the soldiers used for protection, and, above all, elephants, not the most reliable weapon because they could run amok trampling anyone who stood in their way, including the soldiers of their own army.

All that day Ashoka’s men massacred enemy troops and officers, chopping off heads and limbs and destroying animals, until their arms grew weary and their weapons were too slippery with blood to hold. Ashoka’s own estimate puts the number of Kalinga warriors slaughtered at 100,000. Many times that number from among the army’s camp followers died or were taken prisoner. Even allowing for some exaggeration there was no doubt that tens of thousands of warriors died that day. The river ran red with blood, and the screams of the wounded filled the dusty air. It was normal practice for kings to stay away from the forefront of the battle, a sensible precaution for if the king was taken or killed defeat was certain, but Ashoka was a skilled warrior and had been in the thick of combat. That evening the enemy army completely routed, Ashoka wandered among the dead and dying combatants, inhaling the smell of blood in the air, exulting in his victory. Kalinga had been won at the point of his bloody sword; there was nothing left for him to conquer. But gradually the terrible cost of his victory began to sink in. He took in the piteous groaning of the wounded, the dazed women who wandered silently among the dead looking for their men, and the dismembered limbs and body parts that the kites and jackals were descending upon.

One of the accounts of the aftermath says that Ashoka was approached by a man dressed in tattered garments carrying the lifeless body of his child in his arms, who challenged the Emperor to demonstrate he was truly powerful by bringing the child back from the dead. The enormity of his crime washed over Ashoka and he cried to the heedless kites and carrion eaters, ‘What have I done?’ The beggar, who it is said was a Buddhist monk in disguise, saw that Ashoka’s remorse was genuine and began to initiate him into the precepts of Buddhism, a faith Ashoka had taken a passing interest in. As he immersed himself fully in the religion, Ashoka declared he would never draw his sword again, and pledged that he would abstain from all killing.

‘All men are my children,’ he proclaimed in one of his rock edicts. He also pledged that henceforth he would win people over by dharma, which he defined as sinning less and performing actions that were compassionate, liberal, truthful and pure. In time he who was once called Chand Ashoka would come to be known as Dharma Ashoka, Ashoka the Good.

Ashoka was in his forties when he renounced war and covetousness and devoted himself to the welfare of his people. Our history is rife with examples of men of power who gave everything up to become ascetics and devote themselves to the contemplation of God, but Ashoka was unique in that he gave up the entitlements of emperors but stayed on to serve his people. He encouraged charity, built hospitals, prohibited animal sacrifice, lined the roads of his kingdom with trees, and in many ways set up what was arguably the world’s earliest welfare state. Crucially, although he became a devoted Buddhist and spent a lot of time and money proselytizing, he commanded in one of his edicts that no man be interfered with in the pursuit of his faith. It is an edict that deserves to be quoted from at length: ‘Beloved of the Gods, King Piyadassi… values… growth in the essentials of all religions. Growth in essentials can be done in different ways, but all of them have as their root restraint in speech, that is, not praising one’s own religion, or condemning the religion of others without good cause. And if there is cause for criticism, it should be done in a mild way. But it is better to honour other religions for this reason. By so doing one’s own religion benefits, and so do other religions, while doing otherwise harms one’s own religion and the religion of others. Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion, and condemns others with the thought “Let me glorify my own religion” only harms his own religion. Therefore contact [between religions] is good. One should listen to and respect the doctrines professed by others. Beloved of the Gods, King Piyadassi, desires that all should be well learned in the good doctrines of other religions.’

Ashoka was a man well ahead of his time, and our need is for someone like him who will be the perfect antidote to the savage generals of God who dominate our country today.

~

I should get some sleep, I thought, and set the manuscript down, drank some water and turned off the light. I liked what Mr Sorabjee was trying to do. It had been a good idea to pare the lives of the emperors to their essential greatness, the profiles were brief enough to hold the attention of even the most restless teenager, and perhaps it would give some of them a moment’s pause, a new filter through which to view the country’s greatest sons. How far ahead of his time Ashoka had been! Which leader today would consider giving up his power—no matter how paltry when compared to the absolute power someone like Ashoka would have commanded—and devoting his life to the welfare of the people? How many politicians had resigned because of the riots that had broken out in Bombay and elsewhere after the mosque in Ayodhya was destroyed? One? Shouldn’t that make people angry, especially the young?