The Solitude of Emperors (21 page)

The objective of every fanatical gardener in the Nilgiris was to win first prize in one or another category at the annual Flower Show that was held in Ooty. There were prizes awarded for Garden of the Year, Outstanding Large Private Garden, Outstanding Medium Private Garden, Outstanding Small Private Garden, Outstanding Rose Garden and numerous others besides, and to the elite nothing mattered more than to come first in their area of specialization. It was accepted that Garden of the Year and Outstanding Large Garden would go to establishments like the Defence Services Staff College in Wellington or Chettinad House in Ooty, which had armies of gardeners to primp, polish and tweak every blade of grass and every petal, so the competition was most intense at the medium garden level, especially for the S.A. Dorai Ever Rolling Cup. None of the gardens in Meham had ever won or even been placed among the finalists in the category and the Brigadier was determined to change that. He bullied, harangued, threatened and cajoled his fellow members to shake off their sloth and get to work, and within a couple of years Meham’s gardens began to win prizes, especially the Brigadier’s own garden, which won top honours in three of the five years it was entered in the competition. Then the Brigadier’s wife, Neeti, who was the person who executed her husband’s plans, died, and the Brigadier lost all interest in his garden, until his daughter, a fashion designer in Delhi, visited him one winter and exclaimed over the beauty of a fuchsia shrub. It had once been the hub of an exquisite arrangement of flower beds shaped like a wheel, but now nothing grew there but weeds. Anxious about her father’s health, his daughter nagged him to take an interest in the garden again. Deep within the Brigadier’s gloom a memory glowed of his wife’s excitement when she had first glimpsed the fuchsia. It was the first time he had thought about the garden in the two years since her death. When his daughter returned to Delhi, he sent word to his old accomplice, the flower thief called Arumugam, to say he was back in business.

The Brigadier had always been an obsessive man, but beneath his obsessiveness lay a methodical mind, which was why he had been such a good soldier and officer, and latterly a gardener. As he grew obsessed with fuchsias, he renamed the Gardeners’ Club of Meham the Fuchsia Club of Meham, successfully petitioned the authorities who ran the Flower Show to institute a prize for Best Fuchsia Garden and aggressively set about making his garden the finest in the district.

In this, Arumugam was a key ally. He had become a flower thief quite by chance. As with many other subsistence farmers in the district, when the small plot of land he farmed was sold to pay off a debt to a local moneylender, he had had to find some way to feed his wife and seven children. He found temporary employment as a gardener at one of the big hotels in Coonoor. One day, a fat woman decked out in an expensive sari had tottered up to him in her high heels and asked him to give her a cutting from a rose bush he was pruning. Without thinking, he had said five rupees as he handed over the twig. She beat him down to two rupees, but a career was born. When he was laid off from the hotel, he went into the business of stealing and selling plants full time. He had a phenomenal memory and a natural ability to identify hundreds of species and sub-species. All he had to do was look at a garden once to know exactly which plants flowered where and how valuable they might be to the intensively competitive gardeners of the district. He played no favourites; he stole from everybody and sold to everybody. A friendly, diminutive man, he had been arrested so many times by the police that he was no longer confined to a jail cell when he was caught but allowed to hang around with the policemen.

After the death of the Brigadier’s wife Arumugam no longer took the bus to Meham, but when the Brigadier began to obsess over fuchsias, he was once again summoned to the big bungalow on top of Tiger Hill. There weren’t too many varieties of the shrub to be had and they were well guarded, but Arumugam was resourceful: he was friends with a vaidyan in Meham bazaar who would mix him potions that could put a Rajapalaiyam hound to sleep, he knew which servants to bribe, and he was careful not to get caught with the stolen goods in his possession. He was no longer arrested nearly as frequently, and the Brigadier’s fuchsia garden flourished. It took top honours in its category five years in a row and a visiting gardener from a fuchsia club in Somerset, to which the FCM was affiliated, pronounced it among the finest he had ever seen.

~

Our car had come to a stop behind a long line of cars and buses and trucks, seemingly every wheeled vehicle in town, and the Brigadier ordered the driver to find out what was causing the traffic jam. ‘These municipal authorities are useless. Give me the army any day, we knew how to get things done,’ he said grumpily. The driver returned to say that there had been a landslide further up the road, and there was room for only one vehicle to proceed at a time.

‘If I was in charge I’d get a bulldozer to clear it away, put fifty jawans on the job, three shifts. How the hell does this country think it’s going to get anywhere if nobody will take any responsibility? The bloody contractor who was hired to do the job is probably being paid by the hour, or isn’t being paid enough or has another more lucrative job somewhere else, or hasn’t been paid a big enough bribe. I’m sick of all this. I wish I had permission to shoot anyone who was incompetent or a moron or both, I’d solve both the population problem and the country’s inefficient ways at one and the same time.’ The Brigadier ranted in a mixture of Hindi and English, clearly in order to include both the driver and myself, but as his anger began to subside, he switched back to English, and then he fell silent, gathering his thoughts. I thought now would be the time to talk to him about Rajan and his proposed assault on the shrine. The previous evening, when Noah had dropped me off, I had told him about my invitation to the annual general meeting of the FCM, and he had said, ‘I don’t much care for them, as you know, and I especially don’t like the Brigadier, but he and his group are very influential in this little dung heap, so you should try and persuade them to help. But on no account should you mention my name, even hint at the fact that you know me, especially to the Brigadier, because you’ll then be damned in his eyes forever.’

I was about to interrupt the Brigadier, who had begun prattling on about his fuchsias, when I realized with dismay that the car was turning into the gates of the club. Had I missed my opportunity? Perhaps not, because it might be even more useful to place the matter before the whole group. As the car pulled to a stop, I said hastily to the Brigadier, ‘Sir, there is a matter I want to discuss with you and the other members of the club. Could I have a few minutes after the meeting?’

‘Of course, old boy, of course.’

~

We walked up a flight of steps, past a file of silently bowing retainers dressed in white, green and gold, and through chilly rooms with high ceilings, in which fires were just being lit, infiltrating life into the dead glass eyes of the stuffed heads of tiger, gaur, sambhar and leopard that sprouted from every wall. In the dining room the tables were set with spotless white napkins and cutlery, the library’s shadowed light and winged armchairs needed only a corpse to complete a scene from an Agatha Christie novel, and in the billiard room perfectly arranged billiard balls awaited the drunken onslaught of partygoers with inexpertly wielded cues. In an hour the place would be jumping, the rooms filled with light, noise and a press of bodies, but for now we had it to ourselves. The meeting was being held in the bar area, the Brigadier said, because the private room in which they traditionally met was being renovated. As with the other rooms in the club, the bar was deserted except for a couple of white-jacketed and white-gloved bearers, and the barman who stood behind the long counter that ran along the far wall.

We were the last to arrive. The other members of the FCM sat around a rectangular table. The Brigadier took his place at the head of the table, waved me to an empty seat to the left of him, and made the introductions. To his right was a man with a face that was entirely hairless, except for two tufts that escaped like steam from his ears. He was introduced as Venkateswaran, a retired forestry official. Beside him sat the man whom Noah had evaded at the butcher’s shop. Dr Das, I learned, had been a very senior official at BARC, the atomic research institute in Bombay, and even in retirement the importance of his job remained sculpted on his face. Next to him was a small man with quick deft movements, the local GP called Kuruvilla, and beside me was the last member of the group, Kathirvel, a wealthy building contractor. There was an empty chair next to Kathirvel which prompted the Brigadier to make a rather tasteless joke. The absent member, Mr Lal, a tea planter in his nineties, was critically ill. Fixing me with an alarmingly conspiratorial eye, the Brigadier said in a loud whisper, ‘People have been saying for years that Lal is about to sleep in heaven. The only problem is he keeps going halfway and coming back.’ He laughed uproariously at this, but I noticed I was the only one joining in, so I suppressed any further signs of mirth for fear of giving offence.

Although the FCM was only a private association of gardeners, the Brigadier ran its annual meeting as though it were the board meeting of some large conglomerate. He was a director on the board of a few companies in Madras and Delhi and thought, no doubt, that his cronies in Meham could do with some business discipline. The Chair was duly elected, apologies accepted, and then we got on to the agenda proper. I had received a poor photocopy of the single sheet of paper entitled ‘Agenda’ and this is how it read:

1. Election of the Chair
   
2. Apologies
   
3. Minutes of the previous meeting
   
4. Petition to the Collector
   
5. De Groot’s Happiness
   
6. Jack Stanway
   
7. Hidden Treasure
   
8. Brian M. Cox
   
9. Forfar’s Pride
   
10. Wally Yendell
    
11. Any Other Business
    

As there weren’t enough copies of the minutes to go round, I shared with the building contractor. He had a heavy cold and smelled of onions and Vicks VapoRub so I tried to keep as far from him as possible. As with any meeting, some of the participants were more active than others—the Brigadier and the doctor dominated the proceedings with the forestry officer chipping in from time to time on technical points. The nuclear scientist seemed profoundly bored by everything and didn’t say a word. There being no dissenting voices, the minutes were swiftly passed, and the next items on the agenda were taken up. The Brigadier held forth at length on the attempts of the club to get the press office of the Flower Show in Ooty to include a picture of the year’s prize-winning fuchsia garden with the press release handed out to the media. For reasons that weren’t quite clear to me, this had not yet happened, although talks on the matter had been initiated more than two years previously. The Brigadier proposed that a delegation visit the authorities before the details of the current year’s show were finalized.

‘We should, it’s only right,’ the nuclear scientist said vehemently, and then, just as suddenly, he subsided into the somnolence he had displayed since the beginning of the meeting. The Brigadier instructed the forestry official, who was recording the minutes, to note that a three-person delegation comprising the Brigadier, the building contractor and the forestry official would visit Ooty within the next fortnight. The group then began to discuss passionately items 5—10 on the agenda, varieties of fuchsia that the club was trying to develop with varying degrees of success. The nuclear scientist spoke for only the second time that evening about his attempts to get the Brian M. Cox variety to thrive in his garden, which seemed to be going rather well. The others around the table had less success to report, and none of them seemed to be able to get the hottest fuchsia in all the Nilgiris, the Wally Yendell, to sprout in their gardens; the Brigadier had passed around seeds and advice from the affiliated club in Somerset but all the members reported that they had failed to propagate the flower.

‘Our climate is much like the climate of the plant’s native habitat in Peru and Colombia. If our friends in England, where the conditions are much less conducive to the proper growth of fuchsias, can breed these plants, why can’t we?’ the Brigadier said irritably to the gathering. A flower bloomed in my mind, its pink petals gorgeously flounced and crinkled like a ballerina’s tutu, and I wondered how these gentlemen would react if they knew that the fuchsia they coveted grew in solitary splendour in the lee of a cemetery wall? I listened to the Brigadier ranting on for a while but grew bored and, shutting out his voice, I began to look around surreptitiously.

The meeting had been going on for nearly an hour, and in this time the room had begun to fill up. Five large card tables had been installed and on four of them games were in full swing. Dotted across the wooden floor were clumps of sofas, and most of these were occupied by large men and women, the men in suits and the women in heavy formal saris, sipping drinks and gossiping as they waited for the dining hall to open. From the neighbouring billiard room came the sharp crack of balls.

A tall young woman, beautiful in a way that dimmed the lamps in the room, walked in and every man present felt a momentary pang that she was not his. Trying hard not to stare, I took in her shoulder-length hair that matched the black sari she wore, the feline eyes, the straight plane of her nose that would look imperious when she grew old, the complexion of ivory and cream and the perfectly made-up face. Her gaze passed over me and the others in the room, made the slightest gesture of acknowledgement to someone outside my direct line of vision, and then she was gone, leaving a long afterglow in my mind. I wondered who she was; she seemed to belong in a sophisticated city setting, not in the Meham Club bar on New Year’s Eve. I heard my name being mentioned, and dragged myself reluctantly back to the meeting. The Brigadier was saying, ‘If we don’t have any other business, gentlemen, then I’d like to invite Vijay, my young friend from Bombay, to say a few words.’