The Red Sari: A Novel
Page 3
“Madam, you have a visitor.”
The secretary who has interrupted her remains in the doorway until Sonia makes a gesture signifying “I’ll be right there”, and then the man retires. She says goodbye to her mother and hangs up, wiping away her tears. As she stands up she adjusts the folds of her sari and heads for her husband’s office, on the ground floor of the colonial villa where they have lived since they left the Prime Minister’s residence. On seeing all his things in their place, his cameras, his books, his magazines, his papers, his radio, she thinks for a moment that he is still alive, about to arrive home from some trip or other, that what she is going through is nothing more than a bad dream, that life is going on just the same because it is stronger than death. But it is not Rajiv who comes through the door, smiling, tired and ready to hug her, but three of his party colleagues, three veterans with sad, disconsolate expressions on their faces, two of them wearing Indian shirts with high collars, the third in a kind of safari suit. Because if this terrorist attack has devastated the family, it has also left the Congress Party without its leader. And someone has to lead the Party. Who will it be next? that is the question these big fish who have now come to visit Sonia asked themselves only hours after finding out about the tragedy.
“Soniaji,” says the spokesman of the committee, using the suffix ji which denotes affection and respect. “I want you to know that the Congress Working Committee, meeting under the presidency of your husband’s old friend, Narashima Rao, has elected you president of the party. The election was unanimous. Congratulations.”
Sonia stands staring at them impassively. Is grief not something pure and sacred? They have not even allowed her to dry her tears for the death of her husband and the politicians are already here. Life goes on, and it is cruel. Incapable of smiling, she does not have the desire or strength to pretend she is honoured by the result of the voting.
“I cannot accept. My world is not politics, as you already know. I do not wish to accept.”
“Soniaji, I don’t know if you realize what the committee is offering you. It is offering you absolute power over the largest party in the world. And it’s doing that on a silver plate. It’s offering you the chance to lead this great country. Above all it’s offering you the chance to take on the inheritance of your husband so that his death is not in vain …”
“I don’t think this is the right time to talk about this …”
“The Working Committee has deliberated for many hours before making this proposal to you. I can assure you that we have thought deeply about it. You will have a free hand and will be able to count on our full support. We ask you to continue the family tradition. It is your duty as a good daughter of India.”
“You are the only one who can fill the void Rajiv has left,” adds another.
“India is a very big country…” Sonia replies. “I can’t be the only one out of a billion.”
“But you are the only Gandhi…”
Sonia looks up, as though she was expecting that argument.
“Not counting your children, of course.”
“My children are still very young, and neither are they up to talking politics today.”
“It is not a small thing to be called Gandhi in India …” adds another.
“I know what you mean,” Sonia interrupts him. “It’s a name that carries an obligation, but also damns the bearer. Just look what has happened.”
Actually Sonia is called that because her mother-in-law, Indira, married a Parsee called Firoz Gandhi, not because there was any family ties with the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi. He could have been called Kumar, or Bose, or Kapur, or any one of the common surnames in India. But chance made his name coincide with that of the most famous Indian of all, the man most loved by his people for having guided them along the path to liberty. The man who became such an intimate friend of the Nehrus that he was considered as another member of the family. Together they won independence and they did so thanks to a powerful tool, the Congress Party, which today is fatherless. That gives the Gandhis, including Sonia, an aura in the eyes of the masses that has an incalculable value for the politicians of that party.
“Look … You are the heir of this photo.” One of them points to a photo on a side table next to the sofa. It is in a silver frame, and shows Indira, as a child, sitting by the Mahatma.
“Thank you very much, really, for thinking of me for that position. It is a great honour, but I do not deserve it. You know that I hate renown. Besides, I do not belong to the direct family, I’m just the daughter-in-law…”
“You married an Indian, and you know that here a daughter-in-law becomes part of her husband’s family when she gets married… You have kept all our customs religiously. You are as Indian as anyone, and not just any Indian is the wife of a Nehru- Gandhi. Look at this photo … isn’t that red sari that you wore on your wedding day the one Nehru wove while he was in jail?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that I’m a foreigner …”
“The people don’t care where you were born. You wouldn’t be the first woman of foreign birth to be President of the Congress Party,” interrupts the third man. “Remember that Annie Besant, one of the first leaders of the party and the first to lead it at a national level, was Irish. The idea isn’t so crazy.”
“Those were other times. I’m too vulnerable to take on that post. Can you imagine the attacks from the opposition? They would use the people against me, and it would be a disaster for everyone.”
“Soniaji, we are making you an unconditional offer …” says the eldest man, an astute politician known for his skill in manipulation, and who seems about to pull something out of his sleeve. “Perhaps the most important thing for you is that you will once again enjoy the highest level of protection, just like when Rajiv was Prime Minister.”
“I’m sorry, but you have knocked on the wrong door. I have no ambition for power, I’ve never liked that world, I feel uncomfortable in it and I hate being the centre of attention. Rajiv didn’t like it either. If he went into politics it was because his mother asked him to. Otherwise he would still be an Indian Airlines pilot, he would still be alive today and we would probably be very happy … So, I’m very sorry, but don’t count on me.”
“You are the only one who can avoid the collapse of the party. And if the party breaks up, it is very likely that the whole country will fall to pieces. What has kept India united since independence? Our party. Who guarantees the values that enable all the different communities to live together in peace? The Congress Party. Since we have been out of power, look how the old demons have gained ground: communal and religious hatred, the separatist aspirations of so many states … The whole country is falling apart, and only you can help us to save it. You have prestige and the people love you. That is why we have come in person … to appeal to your sense of responsibility.”
“Responsibility? Why does it have to be this family that pays a constant tribute to the country with the blood of its members? Hasn’t it been enough with Indira and Rajiv? Do you want more?”
“Think about it, Soniaji. Think about Nehru, about Indira, about Rajiv … Your family is as closely linked to India as a vine round the trunk of a tree. You are India. Without your family, we are nothing. Without you there is no future for this great nation. This is the message we have come to bring you. We know that these are bitter hours, and we beg your forgiveness for interrupting your grief, but do not abandon us. Do not throw so much sacrifice and struggle overboard. You have the torch of the Nehru-Gandhis in your hand. Do not let it go out.”
Words, words, words … There is always a higher purpose, a greater goal at the end of the road, a nobler cause, a better justification to dress up the final aim, which is still to take power. Politicians always find arguments and excuses to talk about the only thing that interests them: power. Because she has lived so many years in the shadow of two Prime Ministers, Sonia knows the score. She can imagine perfectly well th
e desolation of all the candidates who were going to stand in the elections and who today also feel fatherless. The murder of her husband has broken the dreams of many people, not only his family. She can imagine the conjecturing, the manoeuvres, the backstabbing, the trickery of all those who are fighting to succeed Rajiv in the heart of the party. A lot is at stake and that is why the big fish have come to pay their respects to her, without wasting a second. They are not thinking about her as a human being, even in these dark hours, but as an instrument for holding on to the reins of power. It is time to jockey for position within the party because power cannot stand a vacuum. In a country where resources are scarce, where there are few opportunities, political power is the key to individual prosperity.
Sonia learnt from Rajiv and Indira to keep the politicians at bay, to not allow them to use her. But they are cunning and think that Sonia will end up giving way, that she will do so, if not for herself, then for her children, to keep the family name alive, because power is a magnet from which it is impossible to escape. Do the Vedic poets not say that even the gods cannot resist flattery?
The next day Sonia sends a letter to the central office of the party: “I am deeply moved by the trust placed in me by the Working Committee. But the tragedy that has struck my children and myself does not allow me to accept the presidency of this great organization.” It is a jug of cold water for the faithful who cannot accept her rejection and decide to continue pressurizing her with all the means at their command. Every morning, party sympathizers demonstrate in front of her home, a colonial villa located at number 10, Janpath, an avenue in the centre of New Delhi. They carry posters and shout slogans such as “Long live Rajiv Gandhi; Soniaji for President”. Sonia, annoyed, asks her husband’s secretary to get rid of the demonstrators, to put an end to this spectacle that she thinks is stupid and senseless. “Let them look for another successor,” she thinks. “My family has done enough already…”
Those who feel really reassured when they read the news in the newspapers are her relations in Orbassano, near Turin. “In the town we’re all breathing sighs of relief,” declares a neighbour. “Thank goodness she hasn’t accepted her husband’s job. It would have been a great risk to her and her children.”
ACT I
THE GODDESS DURGA RIDES ON A TIGER
Power is there to protect.
PASCAL
3
Sonia was 18, the age at which she decided to go to England to learn English, when she fell in love with Rajiv. She was so pretty that people turned round in the street to look at her. She walked very erect, and her straight, dark brown hair framed her madonna-like face. Josto Maffeo, now a well-known journalist, at the time a classmate of hers, who shared the bus trip with her at weekends from the town of Orbassano where she lived with her family, to the centre of Turin, remembers her as “one of the prettiest women I’ve ever known. And besides being pretty, she was interesting, a very good friend to her friends, and quiet and well-balanced. She didn’t like going to huge parties and she definitely always maintained a certain reserve towards other people.”
It is not surprising then that Sonia’s father, a burly man whose rugged face showed the marks of a tough past of hard work in the open air, should oppose it so vehemently when his daughter wanted to go and study English in Cambridge. This good man, Stefano Maino, with his short hair brushed back, his thick moustache that tickled his daughters when he kissed them, and his red cheeks, was very old-fashioned. To such an extent that years before, when he settled in Orbassano and found out that the village school was mixed, he refused to let his daughters go there and chose to send them to Sangano, a town ten kilometres away, to a school just for girls. As they got older, he always wanted to know where his three daughters were and who they were with. Neither was he very pleased when they went out at weekends, and that did not mean being out at night, which he would not have tolerated. They went into Turin, half an hour away by bus or train, to walk under the arcades of its beautiful avenues or, if the weather was bad, to sip a cup of hot chocolate with their friends in one of the famous cremeries of the city. Stefano was a man of strict principles and it was inevitable that he would clash with his adolescent daughters. The one that used to stand up to him the most was Anushka, the eldest, an argumentative girl with a strong, rebellious character. Compared to her, Sonia was an angel. The youngest, Nadia, was still too young to cause problems.
His wife, Paola, a woman with regular features, an open smile and a more refined air, made up for Stefano’s severity with her flexibility. She was more open-minded, more tolerant, more understanding. Perhaps because she was a woman, she was more able to understand her daughters, although her adolescence had been very different, having been brought up in a mountain village which had fewer than six hundred inhabitants, and at a time when Italy was a poor country. Very poor. Her daughters have never had to milk cows, or work in the fields or serve coffees in the family bar. They were post-war children, daughters of the Marshall Plan, of economic expansion, of the re-emergence of Italy in Europe. They have only known poverty obliquely, when they were little, because in the post-war years it was impossible to get away from the sight of the cripples and beggars who sought the warmth of the sun and public charity leaning against the walls in the village square. And that contact marked them forever, especially Sonia. In Vicenza, the big town nearest to the village where they lived, poverty could be seen before you got to the centre, in those slum areas where the children played naked or went around in rags.
“Why do their mothers let them go out like that, stark naked?” asked little Sonia, puzzled.
“Those children are like that because they don’t have any clothes. They aren’t like that because they want to be but because they have no option. Because they’re poor.”
The child understood for the first time what a terrible thing poverty was. Furthermore, her mother added, some families went hungry. Didn’t the parish priest come by the house every month to collect powdered milk, food and clothing which he then shared out among those that were the neediest? That priest knew he could always count on the Maino family who, although they too were going through hard times, were devout Catholics and practiced charity.
“The Gospel says that the poor will be the first to enter the Kingdom of Heaven … Haven’t they taught you that in Catechism?”
Sonia nodded, while she helped her mother prepare a parcel of used clothes. In the Maino household nothing was thrown away, nothing was wasted. The younger ones inherited things from the older ones. What was not used was given to the poor. The memory of the war was too close to forget the value of things.
Sonia’s parents were originally from the Veneto region, specifically the village of Lusiana, in the Asiago mountains in the foothills of the Alps, a cattle-raising area that gives its name to one of the best-liked cheeses in Italy, known also for its marble quarries. The father’s side of the family, the Mainos, were rough-mannered, honest, direct and very hard-working. A quality that did not escape Sonia’s mother, Paola Predebon, the daughter of an ex-carabiniero who ran the grandfather’s bar in the village of Comarolo di Conco, down in the valley. Stefano and Paola got married in the pretty church in Lusiana, dedicated to the Apostle James, with its tall spire pointing into Heaven resembling the minaret of a mosque, no doubt the influence of the Ottomans, who were in the region centuries ago.
Sonia was born at 9.30 pm one cold night on December 9th, 1946 in the civil hospital of Marostica, a very old, little walled city in the foothills of the Asiago mountains. “E nata una bimbaaa! ” the good news quickly reached the village of Lusiana, and the echo bounced off the stone walls of the houses and stables, the rocky slopes and the mountains all around until it vanished in the distance, in a cascade. In tribute to the newborn baby girl and in accordance with tradition, the neighbours tied pink ribbons to the bars on the windows and doors of the village. A few days later she was christened by the Lusiana parish priest and given the name of Edvige Antonia Albina Maino
, in honour of her maternal grandmother. But Stefano wanted a different name for his daughter. The eldest girl, baptized Ana, he called Anushka, and Antonia he called Sonia. In this way he kept the promise he had made to himself after getting away from the Russian front with his life. Like many Italians mired in poverty, Stefano had let himself be seduced by the Fascist ideas and propaganda of Mussolini and at the beginning of the war he had enlisted in the 116th Vicenza infantry division, a regiment that belonged to the bersaglieri corps, with such a high reputation in the Italian army, and in it had also served the Duce. The bersaglieri, who were known for their fast marching pace when they paraded, over 130 steps per minute, and above all for their wide-brimmed helmets with a plume of shiny black cock’s feathers falling to one side, were surrounded by an aura of courage and invulnerability which the Russian campaign destroyed in one stroke. The division lost three quarters of its men in the first confrontation with the Russians. There were thousands of prisoners, among them Stefano, who managed to escape together with other survivors. They succeeded in taking shelter in a farmhouse on the Russian steppes, where they lived for weeks under the protection of a peasant family. The women healed their wounds, the men provided them with supplies, and the experience, apart from saving their lives, changed them completely. Like thousands of Italian soldiers, they returned disillusioned with Fascism and grateful to the Russians for having saved them. From then on, Stefano no longer talked politics; for him, it was all a pack of lies. As a tribute to the family that had saved his life, he decided to give his daughters Russian names. And in order not to argue with his in-laws or the priest, for whom the name Sonia was not part of the calendar of saints—Sophia was acceptable, Sonia was not—Stefano agreed to have her registered with completely Catholic names. After the christening they invited neighbours and family to a meal of cod Vicentina, the favourite dish of the region, with a lot of polenta to soak up the sauce. It was a luxury to get hold of cod, because in post-war times there was a shortage of everything, even in Vicenza, the region’s capital, situated fifty kilometres away, down on the plain.