The Great Indian Novel

by Shashi Tharoor

  Imagine, Ganapathi: they had, in the modern phrase, everything going for them, and yet they killed each other for exclusive possession of a calculatingly desirable woman.

  There are many lessons one can derive from this story, including the basic one that twins should beware of women called Tilottama, but the moral that the Pandavas took to heart from my recitation of the tale was more constructive: that when many men desire one woman they must take all possible precautions against the slightest risk of similar self-destruction. Accordingly the Five drew up elaborate schedules and procedures for the sharing of Draupadi, dividing their proprietary rights with due heed to the privileges of seniority and the inconveniences of her time of month. And they concluded with a rule as inflexible as the one that bound them to filial obedience: should any one of them interrupt Draupadi in the embrace of another, the intruder would be banished from the household for twelve months.

  A remarkable rule, that, but they were a remarkable quintet, Ganapathi. Some day their lives and beliefs will be studied by bright young scholars across the country, so let us look at them now, in the early years of their adulthood, as a textbook might. A school textbook, for they personified the hopes and the limitations of each of the national institutions they served; a school textbook, with portraits drawn in clear simple lines, and accompanying text in large bold letters.

  First, inevitably, would be Yudhishtir, clearly the inheritor of the Hastinapur political legacy. Maturely serious and prematurely bald, he qualified as a lawyer but made politics his only vocation, rising with steady inevitability up the party’s ranks. The fact of seniority and the assumption of authority made him extremely sure of himself, to the point, indeed, where he did not always stay on the right side of the borderline between self-confidence and smugness. Oh, he was polite, courteous to elders, truthful, honest, dutiful. But certitudes came too easily to him, doubts almost never. Like many an eldest son in India, he believed he invariably knew what was best for his juniors and expected automatically to be obeyed by them. This meant that the older he grew, the fewer were those to whom he needed to defer, and the less accommodating he became. Secure in his integrity and righteousness, he was impervious to the corruption and injustice around him; he sought to be right rather than to do right.

  Turn the page of our primer, Ganapathi, and you would find a large, muscular figure in battle fatigues. Bhim embodied the physical strength without which the new nation could not have defended itself. He joined the army; to many of us, he was the army. His pureness of heart and spirit, his courage and bravery, the depth of his convictions, were at the nation’s disposal at the borders, and - in times of emergency - wherever it was needed within the country. Belying the profuse moustache whose bristles he proudly groomed, Bhim was gentle and considerate with those in his care, especially his mother and Draupadi Mokrasi. But he was as thick-skinned and unimaginative, as incapable of original initiative, as the strongest ox in a fertile field.

  Our textbook would probably devote most space to the paragon of perfection, Arjun. There he would stand, straddling two pages, his shining gaze as steady as his strong legs. I thought of Arjun, with his paradoxical mixture of attributes, as the spirit of the Indian people, to which he so ably gave voice as a journalist. India could not be India without the loud, vibrant, excited babel of contending opinions that its free press expresses. Arjun, himself a man of contradictions, perfectly reflected both the diversity and the discordance of the Indian masses, whose collective heartbeat he heard and echoed. His gentleness of expression, his frequently troubled frown of reflection, mirrored the doubts and questions that were as much a part of his nature as the decisive flurries of action he undertook when circumstances generated their own certainties.

  Madri’s twins Nakul and Sahadev - can one ever speak of them separately? - were destined early for the twin pillars of India’s independent governance; the administrative and diplomatic services. Nakul’s quickness and agility kept him always a step ahead of his brother. He spoke with breathtaking speed, the words tripping out as if only the act of utterance could give them stability and coherence. Nakul was made, Yudhishtir drily said, for diplomacy, since he could speak a lot without saying anything. Sahadev was both opposite and complementary: quiet, reflective, willing to let Nakul speak for him - until and unless he was sure of his own view, in which case his diffidence quietly gave way to clarity and firmness. One might have imagined that, with these attributes, it would be Nakul who would articulate the glib banalities of diplomacy and Sahadev who would confront the agonizing dilemmas of administration. But Fate, and a shrewd Public Services Commission interviewing panel, willed otherwise, and each went into the profession seemingly suited for his brother.

  These, then, were the five who shared Draupadi Mokrasi, who gave her sustenance and protection, and who guaranteed their unity by the rigid rule that punished any intrusion with a year’s banishment.

  It was a good rule as far as it went, but like all inflexible rules it suffered from the great disadvantage of leaving no room for exceptions. And so it happened that one day I stopped by and asked Arjun for the manuscript of a speech whose text he had been revising for me; I had to leave sooner than expected to deliver it and needed it immediately. I had no idea, of course, that Arjun had left it in the bedroom where at that very moment Yudhishtir and Draupadi were locked in connubial bliss. For a moment he weighed in the balance the certainty of the penalty against the certainty of letting me down, and made his dutiful choice. Perhaps he was, in some subconscious way, restlessly yearning for exile.

  Arjun entered the bedroom quietly, not wishing to disturb his brother, and slipped the text off the bedside table unnoticed by the ecstatic couple. But when I had gone he waited for Yudhishtir to emerge and confessed he had violated their mutual undertaking.

  ‘Well, in that case I guess you’ll have to go,’ Yudhishtir said righteously. ‘Pity - it was going to be your turn tomorrow, since Bhim’s away.’

  ‘You can have my shift,’ said Arjun, without resentment. ‘Draupadi seems happy enough in your company.’

  ‘That’s dangerous talk,’ his elder brother said sharply. ‘In fact, I intend to rearrange everyone’s schedule to share your turn equally amongst the others, if you must know. But Arjun - watch your tongue. Remember Sunda and Upas-unda.’

  ‘I know.’ Arjun was instantly ashamed. ‘I’m sorry.’

  But despite everything - and though he fully appreciated the objective necessity for the arrangement they had made and the exile it now imposed upon him - Arjun could not help wondering, as he took his leave of a tearful Draupadi, whether Yudhishtir would have been able to win Draupadi’s hand by himself

  And think of Draupadi: abandoned by the man she had loved and wanted to marry, because of his unavoidable violation of a rule that itself served only to limit his access to her. It was not that the others displeased her; but Arjun was always her favourite, the reason why she was a Pandava bride at all, and now she would have to do without him altogether for a year.

  It is, Draupadi Mokrasi thought as she submitted again that night to Yudhishtir’s studious caresses, a curiously unjust world.

  96

  Arjun embarked, on the rebound, on one of the great erotic sagas of our history. Travelling around the country to spend his exile as a roving correspondent for his paper, he restlessly sought an elusive fulfilment in the arms of a succession of remarkable women. Each dateline on the despatches he mailed or cabled back to the capital concealed a night, or a week, of passion.

  In Hardwar, for instance, by the sacred Ganga, there was Ulupi, a Naga beauty who taught him underwater pleasures omitted in his adolescent swimming lessons. In Manipur, source of a story about the great indigenous school of classical dance, he found Chitrangada, a skilled danseuse who performed startling duets to his percussion instrument. At Khajuraho, from where he mused in print about the nation’s most sensuous tourist attraction, he succumbed to the dusky Yaga, who practised on him the results of her
extensive study of temple sculpture. At each halt he left behind something of himself, but he grew immeasurably as well. He moved on, driven by an urge he could not describe and did not fully comprehend, knowing only that he had not yet found what he was seeking.

  Despite the women, Arjun’s travels were not all pleasure. He saw the range and immensity of India and all its concerns. In rural Bengal he learned of the rage and frustration that led middle-class young intellectuals to throw bombs at lower-class old policemen - underpaid uniformed menials who were startled to find themselves branded by their betters as symbols of the injustice of an oppressive social order. He understood, in turn, the reciprocal ruth-lessness of the police, who felt closer to the proletariat than their highly educated assailants, and who beat and gouged and shot the Naxals on the principle of doing unto others before they did unto you. And then Arjun saw the tortured Naxalites languish in their cockroach-infested prison cells and did not blame them when they recanted, emerging to join commercial firms where they could dissolve their angst in the cocktails of a new conformity.

  In the urban Bengal of the Maoists’ coffee-houses and second-hand bookshops and crowded theatres, Arjun met a young poet with piercing eyes and a goatee, who recited with painful intensity the refrain, ‘Calcutta, if you must exile me, blind my eyes before I go.’ Blind my eyes, Arjun understood, to the despair and the disrepair, the dirt and degradation, but also to the searing summer beauty of the gulmohar and cassia blossoms flaming insolent and tender along the dusty roadsides, to the awesome thunderclouds swallowing up the rooftops before a northwester storm, to the little boats gently bobbing on the Hooghly river at sunset against the shining steel frame of the massive Howrah Bridge. Blind my eyes to the rioters and the agitations and the human molluscs clinging to the outsides of smoke-spewing buses, but also to the kaleidoscope of brightly coloured kites leaping up at the blue sky, to the little boys playing cricket with makeshift gear in countless narrow lanes, to the compassion of students, housewives and nuns who strive to serve the city’s victims. Blind my eyes, finally, to the flimsy sheet-covered forms of the homeless sleeping under the arcades of fashionable hotels, to the resigned despair in the unblinded eyes of the woman, a small infant balanced on her hip and two ragged children trailing behind, who begged for help in a thin, melancholy wail which clung tenaciously to the air long after she had silently received Arjun’s alms and left.

  Arjun left too, but each departure was a new beginning. In the foothills of the Himalayas he saw poor village women tying themselves to tree trunks in a defiant and life-saving embrace to prevent the saws of rapacious contractors cutting them down for commercial timber. In the deserts of Rajasthan he found how cheap it was to buy a woman for life at the district bazaar, and wrote savagely about his own purchase of such a girl for sixty rupees (when he told her she was free to go, she asked, ‘Where to?’). In urban Madras he marched alongside slogan-shouting Tamil demonstrators whose protests against the imposition of that alien and barbaric northern tongue masquerading as a ‘national’ language - Hindi - soon disintegrated into riots in which buildings and vehicles otherwise innocent of linguistic preference were stoned and burned in the angry flames of Dravidian cultural assertion. He saw the devastation wreaked by cyclones in the lush green lands of the Coromandel coast, and he dragged himself above the floodwaters to travel to drought- ravaged Bihar. There he walked on the parched, sun-scorched clay oven that had once been part of the fertile Gangetic plain, feeling the earth cracking and crumbling underfoot, learning the meaning of famine in the hollow cheeks and sunken eyes of mothers whose babies sucked at breasts as dry as the area’s riverbeds. Here too, in the cradle of Magadhan civilization that had ruled India more than 2000 years earlier, he watched a skeletal cow stumble and collapse by the side of a withered tree; and as he saw a village woman bend to pour the last precious drops of water from her own lota into the animal’s mouth, the thought struck him with overwhelming intensity: ‘This is my land’.

  It was eye-opening, heart-rending - and exhausting. When the last sight and the last night had passed without either the event or the woman leaving an impression on him, Arjun realized he had seen and done too much. But he had to go on: the terms of exile were harsh.

  It was thus a weary, jaded Arjun who arrived at the tip of the peninsula, at the last halt on his long traverse across the land, the obscure southern town of Gokarnam.

  He did not, of course, know that it was to be his last halt. Arjun was looking for a young political giant-killer who was not well enough known outside the south, the man who had unseated the formidable local Tammany Hall boss, Kamsa, in his first election and had made himself something of a legend in the area since then. He was the Gokarnam Party secretary, and Arjun thought it would make an intriguing story to feature a local hero who had refused to seek national office. He could already visualize a quick, five- hundred word despatch: ‘the man who would not be king’. Then he would move on.

  The town’s Kaurava Party office was a long, musty room in the rutted main street with a painted aluminium board outside proclaiming its purpose. Inside, the busiest sound was the hum of a fly amidst the dusty stillness of scattered files. A young man in white - clerk or functionary, Arjun did not know - sat beneath a black-and-red Malayala Manorama calendar idly fanning himself with a yellowing Mathrubhoomi Azhichapadippu.

  ‘Secretary gone out,’ he informed Arjun with pleasure. ‘Some party work he is having in near-by village. If you are wishing to go there, I will explain you how.’

  Arjun was indeed wishing to go there, having nothing better to do. He soon found himself stepping off a shuddering rural bus at an enormous family-planning hoarding that dominated the centre of the village of Karink-olam. Tea drinkers at the rickety stall near the bus stop, their mundus tucked up around their knees, grinned at his attempts to communicate the object of his search in English, Hindi and the universal language of signs.

  ‘Krishna, party secretary? From Gokarnam?’ the chaya-kadakamn, the stall- keeper himself, finally put Arjun out of his misery. ‘You will find at Ottamthullal - that way.’

  Arjun followed the pointing finger down a dusty track that led from the village centre towards, and then through, the paddy-fields that covered most of Karinkolam. He paused at the crest of the road, overwhelmed by the breathtaking simplicity of the sight. The beauty of the Kerala countryside was the beauty of the commonplace: of the green of the rice stalks and the green of the palm fronds, of the glow of the sun and the freshness of the air, of the sweat of labour and the miracle of grain. Arjun walked on past the busy figures of thozhilalis, ankle-deep in muddy water, bending over the breeze- stirred plants, and he slowed his pace occasionally for a gaggle of giggly schoolgirls or a trundling bullock-cart. He was now walking through the fields themselves, on a narrow path of earth, in places barely a footstep wide. As he picked his way gingerly over an unexpected dip in the path, the rhythmic throbbing of an unfamiliar drum floated across the paddy-fields. Clearly something was going on, a local event at which he might find someone to lead him to Krishna.

  The path turned a corner and Arjun suddenly found himself facing a rudimentary stage, sheltered by palm fronds. Over a hundred people had gathered before it, and were intently watching a performance of an art form Arjun had never seen before. A dancer, his head topped by a vividly painted papier-maché crown, bells dangling from a string around his waist and tinkling at his feet, was jumping - there was no other word for it - in large, flowing steps to the rhythm of the accompaniment of three musicians. There were also, on stage with him, three expressionless men with bare chests and mundus trailing to the floor, one banging vigorously at the taut sides of a madallam, one striking a kettle-drum with the flat of his palm, the third clashing tiny cymbals in time with the crashing of the dancer’s feet. A song, incomprehensible to Arjun but unquestionably of solemn, possibly religious, significance, droned on in the background.

  Arjun looked round the appreciative crowd, then selected a bespecta
cled man attired in a Terylene shirt, with a pen in his front pocket.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he asked in English, ‘but can you tell me where is . . . er . . . Ot-tamthullal?’

  The man turned and looked at him with interest. ‘What do you mean, where is Ottamthullal?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m a stranger here, and I may not be pronouncing it right, but I’m looking for a place, or house, called Ottamthullal. I’m hoping to meet someone there.’

  ‘You have found your Ottamthullal, but it is not a place or a house. It is a dance. This dance.’ The man gestured toward the stage, from which the dancer, to loud applause, was just descending. ‘Which seems now to have ended.’

  But not quite. As Arjun looked in dismay at his informant and at the applauding audience, a white-shirted figure - apparently at the urging of a section of the crowd - rose from the audience and leapt on to the platform. The crowd greeted his appearance with a thunderous roar. Even the expressionless musicians smiled briefly to acknowledge their new companion, and thumped their instruments with celebratory verve. A few young men in the audience whistled in loud excitement. Grinning unselfconsciously, the intruder pulled off his immaculate shirt, revealing a dark, gleaming and undeniably pudgy torso. He tossed the garment into the crowd and deftly caught the gaily coloured dancer’s head-dress and bells that were tossed back to him. As he tied them on, the music built up into a steady rhythm, clearly more cheerful than the dirge that had preceded it. Arjun found himself waiting to see what would happen: the happy expectancy of the crowd had infected him too.

  The man on the stage stepped forward, knees apart and bent, feet pointing in opposite directions. His right foot came down in a decisive thrust; the crowd cheered. His body swerved, his feet pounding, the stage, the tempo of the music accelerating. Then he began to sing. Arjun could not understand the words, but it was a strange, droll lyric, the man’s almond eyes widening and shrinking expressively with each turn of phrase, his hands turning and flowing in gestures of mock classicism, his every movement punctuating the verse with bursts of laughter from the ground. Arjun turned in puzzlement to his informant.