The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  Cut! Turn to Priya Duryodhani, twelve years old, and cheated of her best birthday present. As the screen fills with her sallow face Duryodhani does not betray the slightest hint of astonishment when Bhim rejoins her group), soaking and as large - quite literally - as life. ‘Been taking a swim, brother?’ she asks casually, her heart pounding for fear that he had seen her.

  Bhim laughs, his customary reaction to most questions. ‘Must have dozed off and rolled into the river in my sleep,’ he says, tossing water off his forelocks. ‘Unless one of you . . .’ but he dismisses the unspoken thought with another laugh, and any fears of discovery that Duryodhani may have are soon drowned in the squeals of the others as Bhim proceeds to chase them towards the river for a fraternal dunking.

  There I must end our little film sequence. But you see what I mean, Ganapathi. Priya Duryodhani acted only according to the dictates of her own conscienceless mind. Even at the age of twelve, overkill was already her problem.

  Perhaps things might have been different had Dhritarashtra taken her in hand, rather than his pen. But he did not, and there is no point in speculating about what might have happened if he had. History, after all, is full of ifs and buts. I prefer, Ganapathi, to seek other conjunctions with destiny.

  44

  With their father away on political errands or in prison, the Pandavas also lacked a stable paternal presence in the home. Kunti was determined not to let them suffer in this regard, and began looking for a regular tutor to take them in hand. But the wilful boys proved more than a handful for the various forlorn Bachelors of Arts Kunti engaged, and after several such failures she realized they would only respect a tutor they chose themselves. Yet none of the prospective candidates who answered her advertisements met with the boys’ approval, and Kunti despaired of ever finding them a suitable guru.

  One day the Pandavas were playing their favourite sport - cricket, of course, Ganapathi: that most Indian of organized pastimes, with its bewilder-ingly complex rules that are reduced in practice to utter simplicity, its underlying assumption of social order, its range and subtlety that so suit our national temperament - when a mighty swipe by Bhim sent the ball high over the others’ heads, soaring out of the ground and landing with a loud splash in a disused well. Five sheepish ex-princelings were soon gathered round the brick structure, helplessly watching the red cork-and-leather object float twenty feet below-them. It was a sheer drop; the fungus- and slime-covered wall offered no purchase, no crevice or projection, for a descent down its slippery side. There was not even a bucket attached to the threadbare rope that dangled uselessly from the wooden cross-beam above the well. The boys leaned despairingly over the edge, seeing their prospects of an innings ebbing with the water around their irretrievable ball.

  ‘What have you lost, sons of Hastinapur?’ asked a gravelly voice. They turned, startled, to discover a saffron-robed sadhu, his full beard still more black than grey, the staff and bowl of his calling in each hand, surveying them with an amused smile.

  ‘Our ball,’ replied Yudhishtir, the most direct. ‘But how do you know who we are?’

  ‘I know a great deal, my boys,’ came the answer. ‘A ball, eh?’ He looked with casual curiosity into the well. ‘Is that all? You call yourselves Kshatriyas, and you can’t even recover a ball from a well?’

  ‘Actually, we don’t call ourselves Kshatriyas, because our family doesn’t believe in the caste system,’ Yudhishtir replied, revealing yet again the obsessive earnestness, the desire to lay all his cards on the table face up, that was to become his best-known characteristic.

  ‘And if you think we’re so stupid, can you do any better?’ asked Bhim a little more aggressively.

  ‘Why, certainly, if you wish,’ the sadhu said, unoffended by the challenge. ‘But my services don’t come for nothing. If I can get your ball out for you, will you give me dinner tonight?’

  ‘Just dinner?’ Yudhishtir asked in surprise. ‘I’m sure we can offer you something that will last longer than that.’

  ‘Dinner will do for now,’ the saffroned savant smiled. ‘A sadhu’s lot is a hungry one.’

  He reached up for the old rope hanging above them, which in better days would have carried a bucket into the depths.

  ‘If that’s your plan, forget it,’ said Arjun, who had so far remained silent. The rope is old and frayed. We’ve already worked out that it won’t support the weight of one of us, let alone an adult like you.’

  The sadhu gave him a darting, sidelong look, as if briefly acknowledging the perspicacity of the speaker. But he did not reply, and the smile was still on his face as he looped one end of the rope and balanced the decaying hemp in his hand. Then, with the briefest of glances at the position of the ball, he tossed the rope in a casual curve into the water, tightening the loop as it landed. When he hauled the rope up, the ball, its redness dulled by the soaking, was safely imprisoned in the knot he had made.

  As the boys stared at him in astonished gratitude, he slipped the ball free and tossed it to Yudhishtir. ‘Next time,’ he said, sounding at last like a sage, be more careful.’

  ‘That’s fantastic!’ the twins exclaimed in one breath. ‘Can you teach us how to do that, sir?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Nakul and Sahadev,’ began an embarrassed Yudhishtir, turning to the sadhu. ‘Thank you, sir. . .’

  ‘Why not?’ the sage cheerfully addressed the little twins. ‘And many other things besides, if you’re only willing to learn.’

  ‘Can you teach him to bat properly?’ Nakul pointed at his twin. ‘He was out for zero again.’

  ‘Zero?’ the sadhu laughed. ‘Well, that is nothing to be ashamed of. The English game of cricket would never have taken shape without the Indian zero.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ This was Arjun, intrigued but wary.

  ‘It’s quite simple,’ the sadhu replied. ‘While some of our historical-scientific claims (to have discovered the secret of nuclear fission in the fourth century AD, for instance) are justly challenged by Western scholars, no one questions the fact that our ancestors were the first to conceive of the zero. Before that mathematicians, from the Arabs to the Chinese, left a blank space in their calculations; it took Indians to realize that even nothing can be something. Zero; shunya, bindu, whatever you call it, embodies the unchanging reality of nothingness.’

  ‘But zero’s still zero,’ Nakul said.

  The sadhu roared with laughter. ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘The Indian zero is no empty shell. It reflects the perpetual intangibility of the eternal, it embodies the calm centre of the whirling tornado of life, it stands for the point where our verifiable values are transcended by the enigma of the void. Yes, young man, it is empty of numerical value. But it is full of non-empirical possibilities. It is nothing and everything; it is the locus of the universe.’ He chuckled at the puzzlement on the twins’ faces, even as he took in the sharper look of insight that had appeared in Arjun’s and Yudhishtir’s eyes. ‘Now do you see, my friends, why your zero is really something very special, very Indian?’

  ‘But can you teach him to bat?’ asked Nakul, as his elder brothers burst out laughing.

  ‘Perhaps,’ side-stepped the sage. ‘But first, what about that dinner?’

  45

  So they took him home, Ganapathi, and sat around him in an adoring semicircle as he deftly did justice to an appetite as prodigious as his skills. In between courses, he told Kunti and the Pandavas his story.

  ‘My name is Jayaprakash Drona,’ he said. ‘I was born a Brahmin, and believed from my youth in the great tradition of Brahmin learning, unrelated to any profession or material gain. When I felt ready I took leave of my family and, adopting the robes of a mendicant, set forth into the world. All my knowledge and skills I acquired from a rishi at the foot of the Himalayas, and as for my food, I was given whatever I wanted by those to whom I extended my empty bowl, since I believed, in the tradition of our great sages, that my material needs were irrelevant, for a Brahmin’s upkeep is the
responsibility of society. Having learned all that my rishi had to teach me, and upon his advice, I returned to the plains, there to impart some of my learning to those who sought it, asking in exchange nothing more than the occasional bowl of rice and dal.

  ‘In the course of my wanderings I came across an Englishman, who was then visiting the remote district in which I happened to be travelling. He was a civil servant sent out to administer justice in a complicated matter involving land. (How ironic, is it not, my sister, that the British, those great usurpers of land in this country, presume to tell us Indians what to do with the little they have left us?) Anyway, this Englishman clearly found his stay onerous and had little to do in his spare time in that place, until he chanced upon me. He spoke our language, after a fashion, and we talked. He professed interest in our ancient practices and customs, our traditional knowledge and skills. I answered his questions, and he seemed greatly interested in what I had to tell him. During the time that he remained in that district I saw him for at least an hour every day. When he left he said that he owed all that he knew of India to me, and that he would never forget it. He gave me his personal card and said that if ever I needed assistance I should not hesitate to call on him.

  ‘It was not long after that I found a good woman to bear me a son. I called him Ashwathaman, and his birth obliged me, if not to settle down, at least to acquire a dwelling where I could leave him as I set forth each day. The responsibilities of parenthood are not meant for us who have taken saffron; and yet I must confess that my son became the be-all of my life, much as I imagine these fine young boys are to you, sister.

  ‘At first I never doubted that I could provide all that Ashwathaman might need. I could offer him learning, and for food he shared what I was given each day; as for clothing, its lack never bothered me, for what does a Brahmin need but his sacred thread? Or so I thought; but sages, alas, sister, do not know everything.

  ‘The needs of the son are sometimes the making of the father. I did not want, and so assumed I had brought my son up not to want. But one day Ashwathaman asked me - sister, you will understand this - he asked me for a glass of milk. He had seen rich children drinking this thick white liquid, and he too wanted to have some.

  ‘Well, sister, I had none to give him. Who in my position would have? You know the price of milk, you know the purposes for which it is used, for tea and sweets and cheese, all luxuries beyond the means of a humble man of learning. But I could not bring myself to tell my son this.

  ‘I promised him I would get him some, and set out the next morning with but that one purpose in mind. But you know, sister, how people are these days. They will gladly give a sadhu some of the rice and dal they cook in abundance each day, but milk is too valuable a commodity to be wasted on such as me. In the old days a holy man could have knocked on the first sizeable door and be given a cow if such was his need, but I could not get so much as a glassful. Household after household turned me away. “Milk, indeed!” some said. “What do you need milk for?” Or “Haiya, what will these sadhus expect next? Rice-bowls made of gold or what? Really, there’s a limit, I tell you.” When at last, weary and disheartened, I came home, I found Ashwathaman with a glass in his hand, his eyes shining with excitement. “Father, father, I have tasted milk at last!” he exclaimed. “I asked my friends, and they gave me some.” I took the glass from him, sister, and put my lips to it. What Ashwathaman had been given to drink was cheap rice-flour mixed with water.

  ‘I could not bear to look at the child, gazing at me with an expression of such simple joy in his wide eyes. The pain and hurt that suffused my heart stifled my breathing. That my learning and wisdom had brought my son to this! It is all very well to renounce the material pleasures of the world but one has no right to renounce them for another. I resolved never again to beg for a living. I would find myself a patron, I vowed, and bring my son up to know the good things of life, not just the important ones.

  ‘I thought instantly of the Englishman who had given me his card. He was now an official of even greater importance in the province. Taking my son with me, I went to his residence. At first the guards would not even let me past the gate, but when I produced the card, a little bent and soiled and curling at the edges, but still unmistakably his card, I was allowed in. Mr Ronald Heaslop, for that was his name, himself met me on the steps of his porch. He was wearing a silk dressing-gown and had a glass in his hand, and he was weaving slightly as he walked, but his speech was clear and his grip on the glass was firm.

  ‘”Yes,” he said as I approached, “what can I do for you?”

  ‘I did not like the brusqueness of his tone, but I put it down to the manner of superiority that all Englishmen seem to have instilled in them at an early age, and which they mistake for a sign of good breeding. The haughty stare, the taciturn manner, are simply, I thought, their equivalent of the politeness and respect for elders we teach our children to show. “You remember me, Mr Heaslop,’ I began, and saw from his unchanged expression that he did not. “You gave me this card.”

  ‘He took it, almost snatched it, from me. “What of it? I give my card to hundreds of people. You could have picked it up from the ground.”

  ‘My bile was rising, sister, but having come so far I felt I could not simply turn away. “You gave it to me,” I said, “on your departure from Devi Hill taluk six, seven summers ago, in return for all the knowledge and instruction I imparted to you, on the subject of the holy shastras and our tradi —”

  ‘”Knowledge? Instruction?” he interrupted me derisively. “You have no knowledge you can instruct me in, black man. I remember now - yes, I gave you the card. A lot of superstitious twaddle you told me, and I found it amusing, a diverting way to pass the time. But I was much younger then. I’m afraid I no longer find your kind of prating very interesting. Is that all you came here about? Because I’m afraid I really don’t have time for this.”

  ‘I was smarting at these words, sister, but I was determined not to slink away like some wounded dog. “I came,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster, “because I was in need, and I thought I could call upon our past friendship -”

  ‘”Friendship?” he interrupted me again. “Don’t be stupid. We are not here to be your friends, black man; we are here to rule you. There is no friendship possible in this world between the likes of you and such as me; not now, not here, not yet, not ever. You say you are in want; it is no concern of mine, but here - Ghaus Mohammed! Bring me my purse!”

  ‘I should have turned on my heel and left at that very instant, but exhaustion and astonishment kept me rooted to the spot. The Englishman’s servant arrived with the purse; Heaslop put his hand in and stretched out a fistful of change towards me. Not in the name of any supposed friendship, of course, nor even in acknowledgement of our past contact, but because this gesture defined the proper relations between a British national and a native beggar. I could not bear to move; little Ashwathaman, his eyes wide in fear and discovery, clung to my leg as I stood transfixed. Heaslop waited for a brief moment, saw me immobile; then with a casual, almost careless flick, he flung the coins in my face.

  ‘Thunder rolled within my breast, sister, lightning flashed through my mind, a storm drenched my eyes. The skies opened, and through the rain that poured down upon us I saw Heaslop returning a little unsteadily to his house. And little Ashwathaman scrabbling in the mud for the fallen coins.

  ‘A rage filled me such as I cannot begin to describe. “No!” I bellowed. “No!” I seized Ashwathaman by the scruff of the neck and began shaking him in fury. “Not one of those coins, boy, not a single one!” I screamed. His little hands unclenched, and one by one the coins, some big, some small, began to fall out of his grasp. The last one to fall was a rupee coin - yes, sister, more than enough to buy him a glass of milk. But I was determined my son would not drink of an Englishman’s charity.

  ‘Still holding him by the neck, I propelled my son out of the compound. Ashwathaman, snivelling, kept trying to
look behind us. I turned briefly to see the servant Ghaus Mohammed bend to pick up the fallen coins.

  ‘We walked on, sister, and from that moment a new determination was born in my heart. Of what purpose is our cultural and philosophical heritage, our learning and our history, if it condemns us to being offal at the feet of a Heaslop? I vowed to work for the defeat and expulsion of Heaslop and the government he represents, not only by supporting the Kaurava Party in its just struggle against the oppressor, but by educating and training those who will one day rise to lead our people when we replace the alien system they have thrust upon us.’

  ‘Will you educate and train us, Dronaji, sir?’ asked Yudhishtir.

  ‘It will please me,’ Kunti added, ‘if you would accept.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Drona equably. ‘Indeed, I should have been quite embarrassed had you not asked. For it is this very task that has brought me here. Gangaji engaged me as your tutor last week.’

  46

  One day, Ganapathi, when I was visiting the home of one of our younger party leaders - never mind his name - I found myself the object of the curiosity and admiration of his little son, aged, oh I don’t know, maybe seven. He was sitting at my feet, chin cupped in his hands, and at one stage when his parents were both out of the room, he said to me, ‘Dadaji, won’t you tell me a story?’

  No one had asked me to do that before, Ganapathi - one of the hazards of the peripatetic procreation I had practised was the loss of any claims to grandfatherhood - and I was touched by the request. ‘Certainly,’ I said, and embarked upon a story. It was a tale from our ancient annals, the Panchatantra or the Hitopadesha, I am no longer sure which, and I was telling it rather well, spinning the yarn along with a fluency worthy of a real grandfather, when the boy cut in to ask: ‘But Dadaji, what happened in the end?’