Olivia and I returned down to Delhi through the burning plains three days later. We arrived after midnight on one of those suffocating late summer nights when the heat exudes from the walls and the roads, and the air seems used and stale, composed of exhalations only. Overhead, the red moon shone behind clouds of heavy, wind-borne dust. We paid off the rickshaw and walked towards the front gate. As we drew near, in the dim light we could see that an elaborate tent had been erected inside the garden and a line of trestles set up to one side. Mrs Puri had obviously been entertaining. But it was late at night and I didn’t stop to ask myself why our landlady would suddenly have taken to entertaining out of doors in high summer.
I only discovered what had happened in our absence the following morning.
At nine o‘clock I went downstairs as usual to fetch the milk. Outside Mrs Puri’s flat, twenty pairs of shoes and slippers were scattered by the door. The sitting-room had been completely cleared of furniture and white sheets had been spread out on the bare floor. Around the wall, sitting back against bolsters, was a group of large Punjabi women, all frantically fanning themselves and talking in hushed voices about the monsoon:
‘It gets later and later each year...’
‘We used to get such lovely rains, but nowadays ...’
‘It’s this ozone layer that is doing it ...’
‘What to do?’
Mrs Puri, wearing a white salwar, was sitting slightly apart from this group with her back to me. Her head was drooping. She was not joining in the conversation. Walking into the kitchen, I asked Ladoo what was happening.
‘It’s Mr Puri,’ he said.
‘What about him?’
Ladoo looked suddenly serious. ‘Khatam hogia,’ he said. ‘He died on Sunday.’
‘Mr Puri’s dead? How?’
‘He died in his sleep. They cremated him on Monday evening. Mataji [Mrs Puri] took his ashes to the Ganges herself.’
‘And these people?’ I pointed to the sitting-room.
‘These are the mourners.’
That evening a party of Sikh priests arrived from the gurdwara. They built a small shrine at one end of Mrs Puri’s sitting-room and placed a huge bound copy of the Sikh holy book — the Guru Granth Sahib — under a canopy in the centre. Then they began singing a series of sad and plaintive mourning hymns, each verse rising to a prolonged wail of grief.
Olivia and I took our places quietly at the back. For a moment I did not recognize our landlady sitting opposite us at the far side of the room: she seemed to have shrunk somehow, to have disappeared into herself. She sat silently in a corner, hunched under her veil, suddenly small and vulnerable. The formidable grande dame who had kept us all in order for ten months was unrecognizable in her grief. At the end of the service we went up to Mrs Puri and said how very sorry we were.
‘He was an old man,’ she said simply. ‘It is bad for us but good for him. This is life.’
‘He will be reincarnated now?’ I asked.
‘This is what the Gurus tell us,’ said Mrs Puri. ‘But these things are myths. Who is to say? Many have gone that way but none have returned.’ She raised her hands in a gesture of helplessness. Then she added something that took us both by surprise.
‘I would have liked you to have been here for the cremation,’ she whispered. ‘You should have been there. You are part of our family now.’
All week the priests sang their hymns, the relations fanned themselves and Mrs Puri looked more and more exhausted. As the week dragged on, she sunk lower and lower on her bolster, sometimes falling fast asleep during the chanting. She had not had a single night’s sleep since her husband died.
Among Sikhs there is a tradition that mourning should continue for a full seven days after a cremation. On the third day, the Akand Parth (the chanting of the Guru Granth Sahib) begins. It continues night and day for ninety-six hours without a break until every verse of the sacred book has been sung. When, on the seventh day, the chanting is over, a final service of farewell is held; it is called the Antim Ardas.
The day before the service, an army of half-naked workmen began constructing an enormous marquee the full length of the public lawn opposite the house. A cathedral of bamboo staves rose from the holes bored into the solid earth; above that was wrapped a superstructure of brightly coloured homespun. The shrine containing the Guru Granth Sahib was moved on to a high dais at the end of the tent, and beneath it was placed a framed and garlanded portrait of Mr Puri flanked by pictures of Guru Nanak and Guru Tegh Bahadur. Vases of tuberoses and frangipani were placed on either side of the pictures, filling the tent with their mesmeric scent.
The morning of the Antim Ardas, the weather changed quite suddenly and it dawned strangely overcast and heavy. Sulphurous red thunderheads rose up in the south-east. At noon there was a brief dust storm; then, very gradually, the sky darkened even further to turn the colour of essence of damsons.
The rain came just as lunch was finishing. A breeze rose, the trees shivered and for the first time in Delhi in many months it began to spit: the first of the pre-monsoon showers. Ayahs (nannies) rushed out on to the roof terraces to rescue their washing. Children playing hopscotch in the road gave up their game; raindrops wiped clean the dust they had carefully marked out in squares. There was a distant peal of thunder. But in the event it turned out only to be a brief shower. The first of the rainy season clouds floated on northwards and the service started at three o‘clock as planned.
A large party of Sikh priests had already taken up position on the dais. Behind the book sat two granthis; one held a horsetail fly-whisk, the other waved a container full of billowing incense. Both men ministered to the big bound book as if it were some living dignitary. To one side sat four other elderly Sikhs: a singer with a fine high tenor voice, a harmomium player and two drummers. The band quietly struck up a series of sad, slow dirges, and the marquee began to fill with people. Men sat on the left, women on the right. Most of the congregation consisted of the Puris’ Sikh neighbours, but at least twenty or thirty Hindus also turned up. Irrespective of faith, when the mourners entered the tent they walked up to the dais and prostrated themselves almost flat before the picture of Guru Nanak.
Soon, despite the rain water dripping incessantly from the leaky tent, two or three hundred people were sitting cross-legged on the floor. The hymns wound their way through minor keys. The climax of each verse was beautifully held by the singer, while a descant harmony was added by the harmonium player. The congregation were visibly moved; turbanned heads shook slowly from side to side in time with the music:Wahe Guru,
Wahe Guru,
Wahe Guruji-ol
Wahe Guru!
Sat nam,
Sat nam,
Sat namji-o!
Sat nam!
The hymn drew to a close and one of the priests gave an address; everyone stood up, then they all prostrated themselves before the Guru Granth Sahib. Prayers were said for Mr Puri, his widow and his children and grandchildren. There was a last chant of ‘Wahe Guru!’ and the family filed slowly out led, with great dignity, by Mrs Puri. They lined up at the entrance to the tent to say goodbye to the guests. At the end of the line was our landlady. As we drew near we could see her eyes were red and her cheeks were still wet.
Taking my hand, she mumbled, very quietly: ‘Thank you very much for coming.’
We had now been in Delhi for nearly eleven months. The monsoon proper had arrived in Bombay and would soon be in the capital. Already the air was heavy and sticky with a terrible damp-heat. The thick pall of gloom cast over the household by Mr Puri’s death made up our minds. We longed for home, for our friends and our families. Although it was the most unpleasant time of year in Delhi, the Scottish Borders were now at their best: the harebells were out on the Lammermuirs and the gannets would soon be nesting on the Bass Rock. It was time for a proper break. Olivia booked us two tickets back to Britain at the end of the month.
Before we could go, however, I had to complete my
research. As soon as the Antim Ardas was over, I headed back to the Nehru library and began sifting through the bottom layers of Delhi’s historical stratigraphy.
It soon became clear that trying to disentangle the history of pre-Muslim Delhi was like penetrating deeper and deeper into a midsummer dust storm: the larger landmarks stood out, but the details were all obliterated.
Prithviraj Chauhan was the twelfth-century Rajput chieftain who lost Delhi to the Muslims. He enlarged the walls of Lal Kot, the Delhi fort of the Rajputs, but other than those walls he left no other testament or record. All we know of the man comes from a very late mediaeval epic, the Prithvi Raj Raso, written by the Rajasthani bard Chand Bardai.
In the epic, Chauhan is depicted as the archetypal heroic gallant who elopes with the daughter of a neighbouring chieftain, Jai Chand, sweeping her up on to the back of his stallion while her father looks impotently on. A year later (in 1191 ) when the Muslim warlord Muhammed of Ghor descended from Central Asia with his Turkish cavalry, Prithviraj repulsed and defeated the invading army, but chivalrously released Muhammed whom he had captured. In 1192 the treacherous Turk returned with a far larger force and defeated Prithviraj at the battle of Taraori, Jai Chand having obstinately failed to come to the aid of his son-in-law.
Muhammed proved in victory to be less magnanimous than Prithviraj. The Rajput was beheaded; his fort of Lal Kot was beseiged and captured, then burned to the ground. The Qu‘watt-ul-Islam, the first mosque in India, was raised from the shattered masonry of Delhi’s sixty-seven Hindu temples; thus was Islam brought to the subcontinent.
Before the Chauhans, Lal Kot was controlled by another Rajput clan, the Tomars. Again, one name survives: Raja Anangpala Tomar. Later bardic historians maintain that Anangpala founded the fort of Lal Kot in the year 1020 and that he installed within it the enigmatic metal pillar which still stands, gleaming and unrusted, beneath the Qutab Minar. The Tomar’s name is still preserved at Anangpur, a village six miles to the south of the Qutab, where a massive, pre-Muslim dam of shining quartzite still straddles a narrow valley. Near the structure, heavily overgrown, lie pillars from long-destroyed temples and a few barely-visible ramparts of a primitive hill fort. But of the purpose of the dam or the character and qualities of its builder, nothing is now remembered, and scholars dispute happily among themselves the value of different pieces of mutually contradictory evidence — ambiguous references in late, highly corrupted religious texts; the evidence of place names; stray finds by archaeologists; the odd almost unreadable inscription.
And then, quite suddenly, on the very edge of the dark abyss of prehistory, ancient Delhi is dramatically spotlit, as if by the last rays of a dying sun. The light is shed by the text of the greatest piece of literature ever to have come out of the Indian subcontinent: the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic.
While its equivalents in the west - the Odyssey, Beowulf or the Nibelungenlied — have died out and are only remembered now by the most bookish of scholars, the story of the Mahabharata is still the common property of every Hindu in the subcontinent, from the highly educated Brahmin scientist down to the untouchable roadside shoe-black. Recently, when a 93-episode adaptation was shown on Indian television, viewing figures never sank beneath 75 per cent and rose to a peak of 95 per cent, an audience of some 600 million people. In villages across India, simple Hindu peasants prostrated themselves in front of their village television screens for two hours every Sunday morning. In the towns the streets were deserted; even the beggars seemed to disappear. In Delhi, government meetings had to be rescheduled after one memorable Sunday morning when almost the entire cabinet failed to turn up to an urgent briefing.
The Mahabharata is more than worthy of its fame. Even in translation it retains the narrative and moral power of a Shakespearian tragedy, but with the action grafted on to the Indian equivalent of the world of Homer. The epic occupies roughly the same place in the Indian national myth as that held in Britain by tales of King Arthur, but for Hindus the Mahabharata also retains the religious significance of the New Testament: included within it is the Bhagavad Gita, the most subtle, wise and sacred of all Hindu religious texts.
The Mahabharata opens in a hermitage on the edge of the Naimisa Forest. There a group of rishis are preparing for the night when the bard Ugrasravas arrives on the threshold. The sadhus invite the bard to join them on the condition that he amuses them with tales of his travels. Ugrasravas tells them that he has just returned from the great battlefield of Kurukshetra and agrees to tell the story of the apocalyptic war which reached its climax on those plains. He introduces the epic by emphasizing its sacred power.
‘A Brahmin who knows all the four Vedas [the Hindu Old Testament] but does not know this epic, has no learning at all,’ he says. ‘Once one has heard this story no other composition will ever again seem pleasing: it will sound as harsh as the crow sounds to one who has heard the song of the cuckoo. From this supreme epic comes the inspiration of all poets: no story is found on earth that does not rest on this base. If a man learns the Bharata as it is recited, as it once fell from the lips of Vyasa — what need has that man of ablutions in the sacred waters of Pushkar?’
In sheer length, the epic is still unrivalled. It consists of some 100,000 Sanskrit slokas (stanzas), eight times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey put together, four times the length of the Bible; quite simply it is the longest composition in the world. Yet miraculously, even a generation ago, it was common to find wandering storytellers who knew the whole vast epic by heart: they would sit in the coffee houses or on the steps of the Delhi Jama Masjid and recite the entire poem without a break over the course of seven days and seven nights.
Even today, when the wandering bard has followed the Indian lion into near-extinction - killed off, in the case of the epic, by Hindi movies and national television - it is just possible, in very remote places, to find men who still know the epic. A friend of mine, an anthropologist, met one such wandering story-teller in a little village of Andhra Pradesh. My friend asked him how he could remember so huge a poem. The bard replied that in his mind each stanza was written on a pebble. The pile of pebbles lay before him always; all he had to do was to remember the order in which they were arranged and to read the text from one pebble after another.
In the form in which it survives today, the Mahabharata is a colossal miscellany of Hindu religious discourses, folk tales and legends. But all these diversions are built up around a central story of almost minimalist simplicity.
The epic tells the tale of two groups of semi-divine cousins who vie for control of Upper India - the Bharata, from which the poem takes its name. One branch of the family, the Kauravas, rule from Hastinapura; the others, the Pandavas, from the great city of Indraprastha. When the Kauravas cheat the Pandavas out of their kingdom through a rigged game of dice, the latter are forced to spend twelve years in exile wandering in the wild forests at the foothills of the Himalayas. At the end of the thirteenth year, when the Kauravas refuse to return Indraprastha to their cousins as agreed at the end of the game of dice, the two sides prepare for war. When the last battle - the Hindu Ragnarok - finally takes place on the field of Kurukshetra, the world is all but destroyed by Pasupata, the Ultimate Weapon, given to the Pandavas by Lord Shiva. But after eighteen days of horrific slaughter, the Kauravas are defeated and the good rule of the Pandavas is re-established.
The site of Indraprastha - the Pandavas’ great capital, the Indian Troy - was marked until very recently by the village of Inderpat. The settlement was cleared away in the construction of Lutyens’s Delhi, but until then it had survived since prehistory beside the (much later) ruins of Purana Qila, the early Mughal fortress built by the Emperor Humayun in the late sixteenth century. According to the Mahabharata, the great city which once stood there — the very first of all the innumerable cities of Delhi — was simply unparalleled anywhere, either in the world of men or the world of the Gods. ‘[It resembled] a new heaven,’ wrote Vyasa,made strong by moats that w
ere like oceans and surrounded by a wall that covered the sky ... Dread-looking double gates hung on towers that rose up into the clouds. The walls were covered with spears and javelins of many kinds, surpassingly sharp and smoothly turned as though with double-tongued snakes ...
[Inside] the fortress was a well-laid plan of streets ... that shone with beautiful white buildings. This lovely and beautiful place was packed with treasure as if it was the seat of the God of Riches. There did the Brahmins assemble, the wisest scholars of the sacred Vedas who knew all tongues of the earth. From all regions merchants too came to that city to seek their fortune, and artisans [skilled in] all crafts came to live there.
Lovely gardens surrounded the city with mango and rose-apple trees, breadfruit and oleanders, palms and jasmine, all charming to behold and blossoming and bending under the burden of their fruit. The trees were always in flower and swarmed with birds of all kinds ... There were pleasure hillocks and tree-shaded lotus ponds filled with pure water, alive with wild geese and ducks, doves and cakravaka birds ...
The finest of all the town’s buildings was the Great Hall, the master-piece of Maya, the architect of the gods. Fetching precious stones and crystal building materials from the far north, Maya built:... a peerless hall, celestial, beautiful, studded with precious stones which became famous in the Three Worlds [Earth, the Heavens and the Underworld]. The Hall-which had solid golden pillars - measured ten thousand cubits in circumference. Radiant and divine, it shimmered like Fire, challenging even the luminous splendour of the Sun. Eight thousand armed Raksasas [demons] - red-eyed, sky-going, terrifying - guarded and protected the hall. It stood covering the sky like a mountain or a monsoon cloud, long, wide, smooth, faultless ... not even the Hall of Krishna or the Palace of Brahma possessed the matchless beauty imparted [to that building] by Maya ...
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