The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  Out of the mists of half-registered memories an image swirled into my mind - an image of Ekalavya emerging from Priya Duryodhani’s room one night; a recollection of his stumbling into me and saying quickly in his cocky voice, ‘I had hoped to borrow a copy of the sayings of Gangaji, but Miss Duryodhani isn’t in her room. May I have yours?’ At the time it had never occurred to me to wonder where Priya Duryodhani could have been at that hour of the night. Now, all of a sudden, it struck me. She had been in her room all along.

  So this was how she consoled herself for the opportunities lost in filial devotion to her blind father: and was this the reward she had agreed for Ekalavya’s services?

  ‘He is bright and able, but suffers unfairly from the handicap of a low-caste birth,’ Priya Duryodhani went on. ‘In our country that means he will never be able to marry a woman worthy of him. Draupadi would be perfect: after all, she has a similar problem. You would be doing them both a favour.’

  I tried to keep my voice steady. ‘You seem to have thought it through,’ I said. ‘Then why do you need me? You’ - and I was aware of the cruelty of my words, Ganapathi, but I rubbed them in deliberately - ‘you are old enough to take them both by the hand and arrange it for them.’

  She gave me a quick, suspicious look, but my expression had not changed. ‘Who am I?’ Duryodhani asked bitterly. ‘Draupadi would never listen to me. There . . . there isn’t the required . . . trust between us.’

  ‘Then this is very selfless of you, Duryodhani,’ I replied. ‘But I am sorry, my answer must be no. I have never myself believed in arranging marriages. Draupadi needs a husband, but she must make her own choice. I will not force it, and’ - I looked directly into those smouldering eyes - ‘neither must you.’

  Of what happened thereafter, Ganapathi, and of how it happened, I retain only the most confused of recollections. There was always something mystical about the daughter of Dhritarashtra and his British Vicereine, as if she walked on another plane from the rest of us, and my memory of her act of choice is inextricably entangled with the long and vivid dreams I later began to have about her life and times.

  I seem to remember a competition. Yes, definitely: a competition for Draupadi’s hand. Was it at the Kaurava Party camp, or in some bejewelled palace from the depths of mythological memory? I cannot say. I have a vision of a vast canopied hall, filled to overflowing with teeming, cheering multitudes; of nobles and princes assembled in their finery to vie for the hand of our heroine; of Draupadi herself, resplendent in a simple cream sari with a striking red border, her long hair hanging loose to her waist, adorned by a solitary rose. She held a garland of white jasmine in her hands, fragrantly poised to be draped around the neck of the deserving victor.

  Then the contest began, and this must have been a dream, for it was a contest unlike any I have ever seen in our land. A large wooden box, slit at the top, sat in the middle of the hall, and everyone in attendance moved forward, in a silent ethereal procession, to drop a folded slip of paper into it. This done, Draupadi approached the box, and I, with the expansive gestures of a magician at a fairground, elaborately placed her inside it, resting serenely on her bed of ballot-papers, white garland at the ready. I closed the lid with a click. Now it was the turn of Draupadi’s suitors, each of whom had to try to open the box. The first to let Draupadi out of it would be garlanded by Miss Mokrasi as her husband.

  In the mists of my dream, Ganapathi, a long line of contenders walked forward to claim the hand of Draupadi Mokrasi. There were rich men, men of title, commoners, kings. There were others from my dream: Heaslop in suit and bowler hat, clutching textbooks and commercial contracts; a strange, ugly American in a flowered shirt and Bermuda shorts, with a camera around his neck; a pug-nosed commissar in an astrakhan cap that still dripped the blood of the lambs slaughtered for its manufacture; even a clone of Chakra’s inscrutably sinister Chairman. None of them could open the box. Draupadi sat within, breathing calmly through the slit at the top, betraying no sign of anxiety or expectation. Strong men, weak men, tall men, little men came to take their turn, and shuffled silently away in defeat.

  Then Ekalavya strode to the box, but when he placed his fingers upon the clasp, he found his thumb would not move. He backed away in fear and wonder.

  A figure from the past, a distant neighbour, emerged. It was Mohammed Ali Karna, his golden skin gleaming; but I barred his way, declaring his ineligibility with outstretched arm and pointing forefinger. He stopped short, his face losing the look of unsmiling confidence that had made him seem like a conqueror at his own coronation. He gave me a bitter grimace of comprehension, but went.

  At last it was Arjun’s turn. He rose from the ranks of the throng, and there was a collective gasp at his appearance, physical perfection dressed in simple homespun. Arjun stepped forward with the spring of youth in his step, and placed his hand on the clasp of the box. He looked steadily at me, sensing my anxiety at either result. Then, with no visible effort, he calmly lifted the clasp.

  The lid of the box sprang open, and amidst the excited cries of the throng, Draupadi rose within, her graceful sari-clad body glowing like a white flame.

  As she bent forward to place the garland around Arjun’s neck, the hall erupted in prolonged cheers; the other Pandavas, watching amongst the crowd, leapt to their feet; and Arjun, the strength and suppleness of his limbs evident in each lithe movement, lifted Draupadi Mokrasi out of her confinement.

  In my dream, through a corner of my mind’s eye, I spotted Priya Dury- odhani striding out of the hall. Draupadi’s remarkable swayamvara was over, and I knew, even as I woke from the disorientation of my sleep, that one more of my desiccated grand-daughter’s schemes had misfired.

  93

  What followed was no dream.

  Draupadi Mokrasi had made her act of free choice: and whether it was the way I remembered it, or in some more prosaic encounter at the local coffeehouse or in a late-evening seminar on Modern Indian Institutions, it was as the betrothed of Arjun, and escorted by his four brothers, that she left the training camp.

  The first thing the Pandavas did when the camp was over was to telephone their mother. The line was crackling and static-ridden, the kind of connection that makes conversation difficult, shortens tempers and sentences, and restricts communication to essentials. In the hands of Yudhishtir a brief, factual call might still have been possible. But it was, as always, the irrepressible Nakul who insisted on making the call, and who announced to Kunti in his usual fashion: ‘You won’t believe what we’re coming back with! We have a surprise for you, Mother.’

  Never would Nakul’s singular choice of the plural prove so momentous. ‘I don’t need anything,’ the matriarch responded across the echoing miles. ‘Share whatever you have brought amongst the five of you - equally.’ ‘What did you say, Mother?’ Share your surprise amongst yourselves.’

  Share Draupadi amongst themselves! Imagine the consternation that remark caused, Ganapathi. How could the five ever forget they were committed, by their solemn oath, to obey every injunction of their mother’s, however casual? Throughout the journey home, they discussed and debated, in growing confusion and anxiety, whether their oath could be interpreted to exclude Kunti’s command. Yet for all the outrageousness of it, for all the risk of social disapproval and scandal, the idea of sharing Draupadi entered a corner of their minds and grew to thrilling immediacy.

  It was Yudhishtir who first expressed the previously unthinkable.

  ‘I didn’t ever want to get married,’ the eldest brother said in that solemn way of his, ‘but now I think we shall all have to marry Draupadi, even Bhim who is already married. Otherwise it would be a violation of our sacred oath, and of the precepts of dharma.’

  When they returned to confront her with the situation, Kunti seemed distraught at the dilemma into which her unthinking utterance had plunged the family. Arjun’s features were overwhelmed by agonized uncertainty. Only Draupadi remained undisturbed. She stood erect and calm amidst th
e confusion, unquestioning, untroubled, reading each brother’s mind, seeing through Kunti’s ambivalence. In her self-possessed silence it was apparent that, though she had given her heart to the godlike youth who had won her hand, she realized that democracy’s destiny, and hers, embraced his. brothers too.

  ‘There’s only one thing we can do,’ Kunti said at last. ‘Nakul, since you started it all, run off and bring Ved Vyas. He’s the only one who can tell us what would be - proper.’

  So I came back into the lives of my grandsons. Kunti offered me a cushion on a golden carpet. Before I sat down, the boys all bent to touch my feet. I pushed them away before their fingers got anywhere near my dusty toes: that is one traditional custom with the insincerity and unsanitariness of which I have little patience. The gesture is supposed to symbolize that the bender considers himself as the dust beneath the feet he bends before: if anyone has as little regard for himself as that I don’t want him to touch me at all.

  The abortive ritual undergone, Yudhishtir gravely explained the problem.

  There’s nothing in the vedas that would sanction one woman marrying several husbands,’ I responded at my most ponderous, ‘but there is certainly a great deal against violating a vow, especially a promise made to a parent. The real question is which would be a worse violation of dharma - breaking your oath to your mother or adopting polyandry. I am inclined to think our traditions would tolerate the second option more easily than the first. There is nothing in any of our ancient texts that extenuates the breaking of a promise - I can’t even think of anyone, however villainous, who is described as doing so. Whereas in the Puranas one reads of Jatila, simultaneous spouse of seven sages, so polyandry’s not wholly without precedent.’ I paused, and softened my learned tone. ‘But the sacred texts may not be the only place to look for an answer to our conundrum.’ I looked deep into Draupadi’s eyes. ‘Strange, my dear, are the ways of the Lord. Did you, when you were anxious about your marital prospects, pray to Heaven to intercede?’

  Draupadi lowered her lashes. ‘Yes,’ she admitted.

  ‘Did you, by any chance, invoking Shiva, plead, ‘”Give me a husband”?’

  ‘I prayed to Shiva,’ Draupadi said, ‘to Jehovah, to the Virgin Mother of my adoptive parents, to the Allah of the Muslims and’ - she blushed in acknowledgement of her maternal faith - ‘to the Archbishop of Canterbury.’

  ‘Poor confused child,’ I said. ‘They have all answered your prayers.’

  Once it was clear that Draupadi had brought her five husbands upon herself by her five prayers, all resistance to the multiple marriage melted.

  Only Nakul had one last question: ‘What about the . . . the law?’

  ‘The law proscribes bigamy,’ I admitted, ‘but says absolutely nothing about polyandry. You will undertake five religious marriages, which I, as a Brahmin, will conduct; the law does not oblige you to register any of the five. Prosecution, in any case, is highly unlikely: the Indian police have far too many other things to worry about. This is not an offence - if offence it is - of which they will take cognizance.’

  ‘And I thought I was the lawyer in the family,’ Yudhishtir said admiringly.

  So the weddings were solemnized and conducted with all due ceremony, one a night for five successive nights. For the last time in my long career I was able to put to good use the instruction of my father Parashar, so that Draupadi entered each of her nuptial beds a virgin. She was not a woman whom any single man could feel he was the first to possess.

  And yes, Ganapathi, I see from your frown that you have sensed the one discordant note I have so far omitted to strike. Bhim’s wife, the sylph-like sister of the monster Hidimba, left him and took with her his copper-muscled, spear-chinned son Ghatotkach.

  ‘My brother,’ she said sadly, ‘needs me more than you do.’

  This was true: the Pandavas, under their mother, were terribly self-sufficient, with the self-obsession that sometimes accompanies self-possession. It had not been easy for her to belong; perhaps the only way to belong in that family was Draupadi’s.

  It was ironic but true: one swayamvara drove out another.

  And so, Ganapathi, Bhim’s wife left our story, never to return. And - have you noticed? - we still don’t know her name.

  After the last of the wedding ceremonies, I took Kunti aside and thanked her. ‘You played your part well, mother of Arjun,’ I said solemnly. ‘I realize it could not have been easy for you. But it was essential that you maintained your command to share her. Draupadi Mokrasi. cannot be confined to one husband, however worthy: she needs them all.’

  Kunti lowered her eyes in acknowledgement of our collusion. When she raised her head there was a fierce determination in the set of her jaw. ‘I did as you said,’ she admitted, ‘but I only knew I was right when they all arrived home. I saw then that it was the only way. The beauty of this woman would have destroyed the unity of my family.’

  ‘You did well, Kunti,’ I said. ‘Now she will bring strength to your sons, as she will derive strength from her husbands.’

  Kunti smiled quietly and left me. I watched with grandfatherly affection as she rejoined her five sons and their common bride.

  Once again, Ganapathi, I was playing my role.

  94

  Shishu Pal was a good Prime Minister, in his decent and well-meaning way. But he was one of those whom Fate destines to the footnotes of history.

  Almost from the first day his rule seemed stamped with the label ‘interregnum’. The Karnistanis, too, saw the haze of transience around his eyes. They began their preparations soon after he had unassumingly assumed office, and seized the first tactical opportunity to make their second grab for Manimir.

  But, like everyone else, the Karnistanis had underestimated Shishu Pal. He prayed from dusk till dawn, then gave the order for counter-attack. Our army had learned its lessons from the Chakra humiliation, and hit back so hard that our troops were just seven kilometres from Karnistan’s most populous city, Laslut, when another cease-fire intervened. (The story of the subcontinent’s recent wars, Ganapathi, is that of politicians shouting both ‘Fire!’ and ‘Cease!’ at the wrong times.)

  Shishu Pal then sat at the conference table and meticulously gave back everything our boys had won on the battlefield.

  ‘Peace demands compromise,’ he murmured, as he signed away the very passes and bluffs and salients on which our best soldiers had earned their posthumous mentions in despatches. But he agonized over each square inch he returned, seeming to weigh the amount of Indian blood soaked into each clump of soil that he tossed back into Karnistan.

  At last, the night that he signed the peace treaty, aware that at home the jackals were again baying, ‘Betrayal,’ but convinced that his dharma placed the preservation of life above the exaction of revenge, Shishu Pal tossed and turned his way into an eternal sleep. It was almost as if dying was the only means he had of showing the widows and cripples how intimately he suffered for their wasted sacrifice.

  And so Shishu Pal passed from the nation’s front pages as unobtrusively as he had entered them. If a war had broken Dhritarashtra’s heart, a peace had broken his.

  And so, too, we sat down together again in my house, the members of the Kaurava Working Committee, the collective husbands of Indian democracy, and asked ourselves a question we had hoped not to ask again so soon: ‘What do we do now?’

  Someone suggested the same formula: that one of us be elected to rule as primus inter pares, just as Shishu Pal had been. But as soon as names were broached it became apparent that no one could attract even the minimal ‘no objection’ consensus which had given that good man the job that had cost him his life.

  At last I spoke the words that had lain dormant in me all those years, the words I had hoped I would be able to suppress when the time came, the words I knew I was fated to speak from the moment that Gandhari the Grim had rested her sweat-soaked head upon her pillow and refused to look at her new-born baby.

  ‘There is only one
possible solution to our dilemma,’ I said, the words emerging by themselves from my vocal chords. ‘Priya Duryodhani.’

  ‘A woman?’

  Imagine, Ganapathi, that was all they found to say; that was the principal objection of the guardians of our nation to the forces of destiny. ‘A woman!’ they said, as if they were not all born of them.

  ‘Precisely,’ I replied, speaking as I was willed to speak. ‘We want a Prime Minister with certain limitations, a Prime Minister who is no more than any minister, a Prime Minister who will decorate the office, rally the support of the people at large and let us run the country. None of us can play that role as well as Priya Duryodhani can. She is easily recognizable, she is known as her father’s daughter, and she will be more presentable to foreign dignitaries than poor little Shishu Pal ever was. And if we ever decide we have had enough of her - well, she is only a woman.’

  What can you expect, Ganapathi? My irrefutable eloquence carried the day. Priya Duryodhani was sworn in as the third Prime Minister of independent India. And once again I had acted as the agent of forces stronger than myself, leaving my smudgy thumbprint on those pages of history that it had been my task to turn.

  95

  Do you, Ganapathi, know the story of Tilottama?

  Tilottama was an apsara, the most ravishing of celestial nymphs, and she was sent down to earth to perform a task even the gods found impossible - the destruction of the invincible twin sovereigns Sunda and Upasunda.

  The twins were absolute monarchs and absolutely inseparable; they ruled the same kingdom, sat on the same throne, ate off the same plate and slept on the same bed; and they enjoyed a boon that decreed they could die only by each other’s hand. They were so close that this seemed an improbable prospect, but the gods knew a thing or two about men. They sent Tilottama down on her terrestrial mission, and within days - not to mention nights - she had the twins so maddened by jealousy of each other that they fought over her, fatally.