The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  The Gaga, struggling free of the enveloping embrace of the cushions into which he had sunk, nearly choked. ‘But . . . here . . . where are you going? I don’t understand.’

  ‘I shall make myself perfectly clear. I have no desire to offer advice, as you put it, or counsel, to an ineffective covey of irrelevant old men. If you’ll pardon my language, sir. And now I shall take my leave. I have other pressing matters to attend to.’

  The Gaga, to Karna’s surprise, chuckled, restraining the young man with a pudgy hand. ‘Come, come,’ he said, pushing the lawyer with surprising strength back towards the chair. ‘Pardon your language!’ he gave vent to a throaty chortle. ‘I shall do nothing of the kind. That is precisely the kind of language we need to hear more of in the Muslim Group. Sit down, dear chap, and tell me what you think you could do for us. Apart from giving us advice, that is.’ He laughed heartily and clapped his hands for more pastries. Karna, mollified, his half-moon fading to blend with the golden skin around it, allowed himself to be steered to a seat.

  ‘Good,’ said the Gaga, subsiding once again into the upholstery. ‘Now, tell me.’

  ‘I have given the matter some thought,’ the lawyer said. ‘At first I hesitated even to come here; I have never had a very high opinion of the political achievements of your Group, despite my personal regard for many of its members.’ The Gaga acknowledged the courtesy, and the criticism it modified, with a gracious nod. ‘In the ordinary course I would have been reluctant to identify myself solely with one community. But I do not like the direction that the Kaurava movement is taking, and I am forced to acknowledge that of the available political alternatives, the Muslim Group, which at least enjoys a certain prestige in the eyes of the Raj, has the best potential.’

  He paused here to look meaningfully at the Gaga, who nodded, a lemon tart between his cheeks making other communication difficult.

  ‘I say potential, Your Highness, and I use the word advisedly,’ Karna continued. ‘Because I do not believe the Group as it is at present constituted has any prospect worth the name, except to serve as a forum for the landed Muslim interest and to speak for the secular concerns of the community from time to time - without, that is, wielding any real political power. The only positions the Group has gained are those to which the British have chosen to appoint its members. We must be grateful for that, but we cannot afford to be content with it.’

  ‘Quite so,’ the Gaga concurred, hastily swallowing a morsel. ‘Quite so.’

  ‘We are reasonably secure under the British, but we must think of the future,’ Karna went on. ‘A future under Ganga Datta’s Kauravas does not bear thinking about. Neither you nor I would have any place in the kind of India they are likely to construct.’

  ‘I quite agree,’ the Gaga intoned. ‘Go on.’

  ‘That is why we must prepare our battlements now,’ the young man concluded. ‘And that is why you do not need advice. You need leadership.’

  ‘Leadership which you can provide?’ the Gaga asked.

  ‘Leadership,’ Karna said firmly, ‘that only I can provide.’

  The Gaga was silent for a long moment, weighing the implications of the words as if they were diamonds he was being called upon to give away. ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘Name your terms. I believe we can meet them.’

  Karna pulled a piece of paper out of the inside pocket of his double- breasted jacket. ‘I thought this might be required,’ he said impassively. ‘Here they are.’

  The Gaga took the sheet from him and read it carefully, and this is where my narrative falters, Ganapathi, for the young man in the cummerbund, standing discreetly attentive behind a thick curtain, could not make out the writing from where he stood. Yes, Ganapathi, he was one of my men. I have told you repeatedly, haven’t I, that I have my sources. They were everywhere, even on the Gaga Shah’s personal staff. I am glad to see that how-could-he- possibly-have-known look, which you have been wearing ostentatiously throughout this scene, disappear from your face. A little more faith, Ganapathi, a little more respect, a small suspension of disbelief, and you will find our story sailing smoothly on, without all these breaks for justification and explanation which your furrowed brow periodically imposes upon me.

  41

  As it happens, we do not need the contents of that piece of paper to be able to guess what Karna’s terms were. For within months of his return to India everything had become clear. He was introduced into the Muslim Group and made its President with almost indecent haste. The Committee of Elders, which had hitherto guided the activities - such as they were - of the party, was reconstituted into an advisory panel named by President Karna and serving at his pleasure. The party’s Constitution was redrafted to confirm the President’s supreme position and to proclaim a new objective: the advancement (not just the defence) of the rights and interests of India’s Muslims. Using the immense resources of its patrons, the Group established offices, and launched membership campaigns, in every district of the country. Karna was creating his constituency.

  I said earlier that in the country’s political race for independence the Mahaguru was not the only one doing the running. Karna’s Group declared itself for the first time in favour of freedom from the British. It was no longer pleading and pledging its loyalty to the colonial masters in exchange for favours: it was now a nationalist movement in its own right, like the Kaurava Party. The only difference was that the Group considered nationalism to be divisible. ‘Independence without Hindu domination’ was Karna’s new slogan. If that seemed less than consistent with his previous non-sectarianism, he couched it in constitutionalist terms, speaking glibly of the need for a new form of federalism, the protection of minority rights, the importance of each community being able to advance unobstructed by the others. Some, at least, refused to take him at his word. ‘What he really means is the importance of Mohammed Ali Karna wielding power over at least one part of the country, unobstructed by anyone else,’ Dhritarashtra said mordantly to the Kaurava Working Committee. ‘You can hardly accuse him of inconsistency in that. He’s never believed in anything else.’

  Picture the situation then, Ganapathi. The Kaurava Party, riven by the dissent of the Panduites, its most successful popular movement of civil disobedience suspended in the wake of the Chaurasta deaths, its eccentric but charismatic leader continuing to thumb his nose at the Raj. And in the opposite corner, the Muslim Group, richly endowed, favourably looked upon by the rulers, decisively led. The clash was as inevitable as its outcome was uncertain.

  The Eighth Book:

  Midnight’s Parents

  42

  Let us leave them there for a minute, Ganapathi, and take a quick look at the others. The wives and children of politicians may not lead such momentous lives, but that is no reason for us to ignore them. Pandu’s extended family, for instance, flourished in his absence. Though Madri did tend once in a while to look long and wistfully at herself in the mirror, she and Kunti ran a remarkable household for their five sons.

  And what sons they were, Ganapathi! Yudhishtir showed every sign of rapidly vindicating his father’s astral prophecies by excelling at his studies, making a habit of standing first in his class at every examination he took. And if he was overly fond of starched shirts and encyclopaedias, neither was likely to do him much harm in the courtroom career for which everyone believed he was destined. Bhim developed stature and musculature with each successive meal, and from the first became the strong-armed protector of his brothers. He was too heavy to swagger, but his lumbering tread was held in dread - no, no, Ganapathi, I am not returning to verse, keep your pen on the same line there - by every would-be juvenile bully. Arjun, of course, was perfection with pimples. Fleet of foot and keen of mind, supple and sensitive, lean and strong, a sportsman and a scholar, Arjun united all the opposite virtues of human nature: he was prince and commoner, brain and brawn, yin and yang. As for the twins, Nakul and Sahadev, they were the right foils for their exceptionally endowed brothers, for each wa
s pleasant, simple, decent and honest, exemplifying all the merits of the amiable mediocrity they shared with millions of their less illustrious countrymen.

  And so grew the five brothers, known variously as the Famous Five, the Hastinapur Horde or quite simply as the Pandavas. While all by herself, in Dhritarashtra’s wing of their palatial home, Priya Duryodhani, away from her cousinly brood, cozenly brooded.

  She was a slight, frail girl, Ganapathi, with a long thin tapering face like the kernel of a mango and dark eyebrows that nearly joined together over her high-ridged nose, giving her the look of a desiccated schoolteacher at an age when she was barely old enough to enrol at school. She might have even been labelled plain had not Nature, with her marvellous flair for genetic compensation, given blind Dhritarashtra’s disappointing daughter the most striking pair of eyes in Hastinapur. Dark and lustrous, they shone from that pinched face like blazing gems on a fading backcloth, flashing, questioning, accusing, demanding in a manner that transcended mere words.

  Not that words were of much use to Priya Duryodhani. She had little feeling for them, and her high-pitched squeaky voice would have made a poor vehicle for any figure of speech. But those eyes more than made up for all her other deficiencies, Ganapathi. They gave her a strength, a dynamism, that everything else belied. Gandhari the Grim, let down by the fates in both the number and the gender of her offspring, had been blessed with savage irony in the one aspect of her daughter she would never be able to appreciate.

  Unappreciative and unappreciated, Gandhari wasted away in the home she had hoped to make with her perennially absent husband. She had given up her most precious possession for him, but he was not there to share the darkness with her.

  Yet Gandhari refused to accept that her sacrifice had been pointless, and clung to her blindfold with the intensity that only Indian women accord their marital symbols. What sustained her it was impossible to imagine, but it certainly was not her husband. Dhritarashtra addressed all his letters from prison to Priya Duryodhani, well before she was old enough to understand any of them, rather than to the long-suffering wife who had offended by delivering her. As her health deteriorated, Gandhari’s world remained circumscribed by her silken blindfold, and she became withdrawn and increasingly grim.

  There are those who make much of Dhritarashtra’s devotion to his daughter and use it to explain her subsequent actions. I prefer to give far more importance, Ganapathi, to the years at her mother’s darkened bedside, to her exposure at so impressionable an age to the sad betrayal of Gandhari’s sacrifice, to her profound realization of her own aloneness. After what she saw in her childhood Priya Duryodhani would never be able to trust another human being, no, not even - especially not - her own father.

  Some aspects of her unique character manifested themselves early. Such as the time she decided to get rid of Bhim.

  43

  Bhim, you will recall, Ganapathi, was one of those disgustingly strong children who are excessively healthy and hearty, and whose good spirits burst out of them to the general inconvenience of others. Growing up with Bhim meant having dust flung in one’s eyes, finding one’s clothes in the river after a swim, being picked up and dropped into slushy puddles, all to the tune of his uproarious laughter - and it also meant having no choice other than to grin and bear it. The experience must have been something along the lines of being a team-mate of Ian Botham on a cricket tour. Boys who climbed trees to pluck fruit were liable to find themselves shaken off the branch, along with the fruit, by Bhim rattling the trunk as if it were a sapling. I can see why Duryodhani, who at the best of times saw little to laugh at in life, found this all a bit tiresome. But her proposed remedy was, even then, a little on the drastic side.

  Imagine the situation for yourself, Ganapathi. A dark, introverted, frail Priya Duryodhani shakes free the last dead spider from her dress, wipes off the last mud-stain, or puts the last drenched letter from her father out to dry - and decides to act. Not in haste, mind you - that would not be characteristic of her. She waits till her twelfth birthday is to be celebrated and then invites her cousins to a children’s picnic at Pharmanakoti, on the banks of the river. It is she who has chosen the spot.

  What lies behind the pinched face and lustrous eyes of little Duryodhani? She is not normally one for parties, even less for picnics. But neither her parents nor her guests - both relieved at this apparent sign of advancing normality - question her intent. ‘Thweet Priya Duryodhani,’ says her aunt Madri, ‘it ith tho thweet of her to think of thith.’ Little does Madri know that she might just as well have lisped the word ‘think’ too.

  Yes, Ganapathi, thinking and sinking are both terms that apply to our heroine’s intentions. For she has found a bottle in her mother’s overflowing medicine-chest whose label reads ‘Poison - keep out of the reach of children.’ Wrapping it carefully in fine lace, Priya Duryodhani takes this with her to the picnic-spot. And she takes care - for she always follows instructions, especially written ones - to keep it out of the reach of the other children.

  Think of it, Ganapathi. An idyllic scene from a Basohli painting. The sun shines brightly from a powder-blue sky, while on the thick, moisture-rich grass boisterous princelings play rowdily together. Duryodhani, whose lukewarm interest in the proceedings has led to her gradual exclusion, eases herself, unmissed, out of the group. She walks to where the servants have been busy laying out the contents of the three picnic hampers they have brought. ‘Very good,’ she says after a cursory inspection. ‘You may go now. Return in two hours to clean this up. We should have finished by then.’ It is an interesting choice of words, Ganapathi. There is much that Duryodhani intends to finish.

  The boys are still far away as the servants retreat. At one place, as is by now customary, they have served twice as much food as for the others; this is, of course, for Bhim. Priya Duryodhani sits there, taking care to ensure that she has a view of her guests frolicking in the distance. Then, from her own shoulder-bag, from under her books and magazines and the inevitable letter from her father, she takes out a little bottle wrapped in lace. Opening it with care, she liberally douses the serving before her with its contents. Then, carefully closing the bottle, she wraps the lace meticulously around it once more, restores the bundle to her bag, takes out a book and, primly crossing her thin legs, begins to read.

  Aha, Ganapathi, I see you thinking, something is not right here. Surely our illustrious Leader-to-be did not commit juvenile homicide? Perhaps there is something wrong about the label on the bottle; or perhaps she has not poured enough of it to do any serious harm; or perhaps, Heaven forfend, she has simply poisoned the wrong serving? I am afraid, Ganapathi, you must think again. The bottle that the diligent Duryodhani has pilfered does indeed contain poison, and there is very little of it left now that it has been put back in her bag. And she has indeed picked the right mound of pilau to soak. And what is more, the undiscriminating Bhim, who would consume anything provided there was enough of it, tucks voraciously into his plateful and before long has eaten it all.

  Think of it, Ganapathi! The tranquil scene of your Basohli begins to disintegrate into a Tzara. The bright sun swims before Bhim’s eyes, like an orange disintegrating in a storm. He complains of feeling tired and nauseous. ‘You’ve eaten too much,’ Duryodhani says without sympathy. Through the gathering mists he hears her suggesting a rest by the river bank. While his unsuspecting brothers turn to French cricket, Bhim loses consciousness on the water’s edge.

  Out of view of her rumbustious cousins, Duryodhani tiptoes to her sleeping victim. She looks around her: not a leaf stirs. She drops a pebble on his chest, to find out whether he might lightly wake. When this provokes no change in the rhythm of his heavy breathing, she tries a larger, sharper stone. Still there is no reaction. Now acting with unpractised efficiency, she bends to thrust an umbrella under Bhim’s bulk. Using it as a lever, and with surprising strength for one of her frame, she topples him with a splash into the river.

  Imagine it, Ganapathi, as
a silent film of the 1920s. There stands Priya Duryodhani, a thin cotton dress on her bony frame, contemplating for one jerky moment of uncertainty the riverine ripples eddying from her action. Then it is all swift movement. She looks around with a rapidity only the celluloid of the era can record, to ensure that no one has seen her. Satisfied - imagine the close-up, Ganapathi, at that firmly set mouth, those grim thin lips, that determined face with its blazing eyes - Duryodhani slips quickly away.

  You can invent the caption to that shot, young Ganapathi. Bhim has sunk like a boulder; with the poison also working its way inside him, it is a reasonably safe bet that he will not resurface alive. ‘A job well done!’ the titles would say on the screen. Fade and dissolve, to Duryodhani returning to join the others, her expression giving nothing away. Years later an American Secretary of State would sigh with regret at the loss that Priva Duryodhani’s political success had meant to the world of poker.

  But no, Ganapathi, do not fear the worst. A reasonably safe bet, it certainly was; but she was quickly to learn that with the Pandavas there are no reasonably safe bets.

  Pan our film back to the shot of the riverside. As Bhim rolls into the water - slowly here, it is over in an instant - he is bitten by a venomous snake. Thus does Fate protect her favourites, Ganapathi, for the scheming Priya Dury-odhani had poured the contents of a poisonous snake-bite antidote into her victim’s lunch. The sharp fangs wake Bhim from his drugged stupor just as the serpent’s venom encounters its antidote in his bloodstream - and neutralizes it. Bhim, instantly awake and cured, takes a deep breath as he goes under, comes back to the surface and swims back to the shore in a few strong strokes. Applause, Ganapathi, from the cinema floor, from the youths in the 25-paise seats. Cat calls and cheers as Bhim hauls his bulk out of the water and wrings his singlet dry.