The Red Sari: A Novel

by Javier Moro

  On the way back to Delhi they stopped in a village where a wedding was being celebrated. It was a real Hindu wedding, full of colour and noise. The groom, with his face hidden by a little curtain of flowers, appeared riding on a skinny white mare covered in a velvet rug embroidered with gold. To the sound of drums and tambourines, he pranced towards his bride, who was waiting for him under a canopy. The families were proud that some strangers were attending the ceremony and immediately brought them tea and sweets, while the young man dismounted. Then the priest invited the bride and groom to meet each other officially. Slowly and shyly each of them pushed aside the other’s veil with their free hand. The boy’s happy face appeared in front of the shy gaze of the bride, a girl who could not have been older than twelve, as fragile and frightened as a little bird. Her family watched her with ill-contained emotion. Rajiv acted as interpreter, not only for the language, but also for the customs. That simple wedding, which seemed so innocent and inoffensive, hid several of India’s evils, real social scourges. Child marriages like this one risked girls becoming mothers, with the subsequent rate of mortality and health problems for mother and child. Furthermore, the bride’s parents, who looked like peasants, had probably got into debt for many years in order to pay the dowry, an indispensable requirement for marrying off a daughter. Yes, that was all very pretty and picturesque, but those customs kept the poor trapped in the mire of poverty. It was there that Sonia first heard of the custom of suttee, which was still practised sporadically in this region. The guests commented on a recent case, not very far from where they were, which had been a national scandal. A young widow had hurled herself on to her husband’s funeral pyre. The police had investigated the case without managing to find out the truth. The opinions of the guests at the wedding were very divided: some said that the widow was a saint for having had the courage to become suttee, others said that she had been drugged and forced to leap into the blaze so that she would not inherit any of her husband’s goods… Rajiv inclined towards the latter version. How could you get this country to modernize? he seemed to be asking himself, thinking about the enormous task that had fallen to his mother, as he drove the car back to Delhi.

  Then it was time for Sonia to say goodbye to her family. She went to the airport with them. After embracing her mother Sonia broke down and burst into sobs, perhaps because she guessed the sorrow she was feeling at leaving her daughter. For her mother, that was the real farewell: some were going back home, to their real home; Sonia was remaining in that strange land, alone and without them. Never more than at that moment had reality appeared so crudely, so much so that it hurt. Both of them were in floods of tears, and they did not normally cry much, which made the scene even more heart- breaking.

  “Write to me a lot, call me often…”

  “I promise, mamma.”

  In the car that was taking her back home, Sonia dried her face as flashes of happy moments from her childhood in Lusiana came to mind. She remembered going out to milk the cows with her father and mother, or when friends and cousins came to celebrate their birthdays with lots of presents. How far away that life seemed! By staying in India, she realized now that she was starting from zero. All that tension and all that hustle and bustle had left her feeling exhausted and depressed. She needed to see Rajiv as soon as possible. Only he could comfort her because he was the justification for all her anxiety.

  But Rajiv was not at home, he was at his classes, at the flying club. Sonia went to her room. If her husband was not there, then she preferred to be on her own, to lie on the bed and weep all those tears, and try to cast off the melancholy while she waited for him to come back. But as soon as she opened the door, she saw an envelope on the bed, with the heading of the Prime Minister’s office on it. She opened it. It was a note from Indira which said, “Sonia, we all love you very much.” Then her face lit up. Her melancholy evaporated like magic, she smiled and went out of the bedroom.

  10

  Everyday life in the Gandhi household began early, almost at dawn. When Sonia woke up, Indira was already at the end of the garden at her daily conversations, surrounded by the poor who came to have her darshan. Then she got into her official car which took her to her office in South Block, where she spent the whole morning. In the afternoons she usually went to work in her personal office, which acted as the Congress headquarters, and was very close to her house, at number 1, Akbar Road, only about fifty yards away. It was a pleasant walk through the garden, always green and with flowerbeds full of flowers and sweet-smelling plants. The government had just given this house over to her so that they could all fit into hers.

  Rajiv too usually left early for his flying lessons. He passed the commercial pilot’s exam with no difficulty and was now doing practice flights for the national airline, Indian Airlines. He was flying a DC-3, the famous Dakota, the plane of his childhood dreams. His brother Sanjay was absorbed in the task of designing an Indian car, adapted to the roads of India. Each member of the family led a separate existence, but Sonia spent a lot of time alone. A time that allowed her to observe the hustle and bustle of a large Indian house and get used to the heat, which soon came. A dry heat, intense and scorching, which rose inevitably day by day, and would go on rising until the rains in June, that is if they arrived on time this year. She did not like the air-conditioning because she was worried it would bring on an attack of asthma; she preferred to stand under the blades of the ventilators that hung from the ceiling. She understood why the domestic staff moved so slowly. At first she thought they were just lazy; now she understood that the heat, similar to the ferragosto in Italy, except they were in March, debilitated your muscles and weakened your willpower. There were not many domestic servants for a house like this. Normally there would have been a minimum of ten or fifteen, each in charge of a task specific to their caste. Although Nehru and Gandhi had officially banned castes in the Constitution of the new independent nation, the reality is that they still influenced people’s behaviour, especially in the lower levels of society and in rural areas. In none of the Nehru homes had they been able to fight that hierarchical structuring of domestic life, however much they had tried. It was no easy thing to wipe out thousands of years of history at one stroke. So the tradition continued, and the person that served the table was not the same as the one who cleared it; the chauffeur drove the car but did not wash it; the cook cooked, but did not wash the dishes; the ones who swept the floor did not clean the bathrooms, etc. The Nehrus managed with fewer servants than usual, but even so Sonia was not used to their eternal presence, as they slipped noiselessly along the corridors, and gave her terrible frights. Perhaps what bothered her most is that she seemed never to be out of view of indiscreet eyes, even in the privacy of her own quarters. More than once, after locking herself in her bathroom, she had jumped when she discovered the man in charge of cleaning, a bony, very dark-skinned figure, squatting with a rag in his hand, trapped in the corner. Little by little she learned what the wives of diplomats living in India had to learn—to live alongside that swarm of people, to know how to control them, to have patience with the sweepers, who only moved the dust from one place to another, to address each of them according to his rank or his religion so that at no time do they feel they “lose caste”, to take them to the doctor if they fall ill because there is no social security, etc.

  Not even the house of the Prime Minister escaped the bustle of everyday life in Indian cities. At mid-morning, Sonia would hear the picturesque street vendors calling out their wares from the street in sing-song voices. Some of them pushed little carts overflowing with fruit and vegetables; others carried boxes full of sweets; others brought milk, or the newspapers… From time to time a man with a dancing monkey and some bears called from outside, offering his show. Cloth vendors also came with their bundles of tablecloths and placemats, hand woven, plain or patterned, made of the finest cotton or raw silk, multicoloured or white. The tailor sat on the veranda sewing all morning, while Sonia looked in fascinat
ion at the bracelets of polished glass that a street vendor was offering her and whom the servants had allowed in thinking it would amuse her. The doors and windows that were open to the garden allowed in the perfumes of the flowers and the smell of the freshly cut, damp grass that went yellow as the days went by.

  Sonia often appeared in the office where her mother-in-law’s two private secretaries were working. One of them, Usha, would remember that she used to come to see her to ask her about all kinds of Indian things. How do you adjust a sari? How are birthdays celebrated? What present do you take to the party for a baby’s first haircut? How do you say “shut the door” in Hindi? etc. They teased her saying that she did not have only one mother-in-law, but three. She hardly saw the real one because she was so busy, although her presence was always felt. She was the central person in the family. One day Sonia went into Usha’s office very upset. She was holding a note that Indira had left her expressing her point of view about certain things, mostly critically, such as the fact that Sonia refused to learn Hindi or was so shy with people she did not know. “Why doesn’t she tell me in person instead of writing me a note?” asked the Italian girl on the verge of tears.

  “Mrs Gandhi finds it hard to express herself,” Usha answered, “she’s a rather introverted lady. But don’t worry about the letters, she also used to communicate like that with her husband and her father.”

  Sonia’s shyness and perhaps a certain complex began to hold her back so much that it became a problem when it came to dealing with important visits, or simply socializing. Apart from her husband’s friends and those of her brother-in-law, with whom she was on very friendly terms, it was difficult for her to break the ice and open up to people. Inside she was still a little peasant girl from the Asiago mountains, the provincial Italian student transplanted on to another planet, the home of a Prime Minister, where people of all classes and conditions came and went. “For a long time, Sonia was very timid,” Usha would say. “It was a complicated task to persuade her to do something.” In spite of how busy she was, Indira never lost sight of what was happening in the house and tried hard to get her daughter-in-law to come out of her shell. “It would be wonderful if you could convince Sonia to come tonight. But don’t force her if she really doesn’t want to,” she said in one note to her secretary. Both Rajiv and his mother were rather reserved by nature, so they understood that Sonia might need to take her time to get used to this new life. They tried to put as less pressure on her as possible, because they could see she was having difficulty adapting. Here she could not do simple things, like going out with a girlfriend for a walk, for example. The wide avenues of New Delhi were not made for walking: the distances were too great to be covered on foot. Besides, that part of the city was purely residential, and there were no shops or businesses. The restriction on her movements, the food, the heat, and the distance from her family caused attacks of homesickness that the magazine Oggi, sent punctually by her mother every week, could barely manage to alleviate. She was between two worlds, but not standing firmly in either of them. She remembered her father, and his warnings, and there were times when she would have liked to pick up the phone and talk to him, but Sonia was strong and knew she had to put up with it. Rajiv’s presence, in the evenings, calmed her anxieties.

  In May it was so hot that, thinking that it would do her good to have a change of air, Indira invited Sonia to go with her on an official visit to the kingdom of Bhutan, a small country in the foothills of the Himalayas which was totally isolated from the world. To accompany her, she also invited the daughter of the Foreign Minister, Priti Kaul, who was the same age as Sonia. It was only a two-day trip, but they had great fun. As soon as they got off the helicopter, they were greeted by King Dorje Wangchuk, a very affable man and a devout Buddhist. He was an absolute monarch who kept his kingdom closed to the outside world. The temperature was perfect; it made you feel like drinking in the crystal-clear air. What a relief! thought the Italian girl when she felt the cool breeze from the mountains caressing her face, just like when she went on a trip to the Alps. Here there were no ski-lifts or restaurants, just prayer flags that floated in the wind, sending out Buddhist prayers towards the chain of the Himalayas, which showed its steely peaks against an intensely blue sky. There was nothing here that could be considered “modern”. There was practically no road traffic except for a few motorbikes, and the people wore the traditional clothes with a kind of coloured apron that looked very picturesque. They were on horseback or in carts pulled by oxen similar to yaks. The retinue came to the imposing monastery of Tashichhodzong, which dominated a bright landscape of white- crested mountains on whose slopes there were golden terraces of barley that came down towards the valley like a gigantic stairway. It was like a journey into the Middle Ages: there was no television, there was no jail or delinquency and the only concession to modern times was electricity, but only for two hours a day. The king accompanied them to their rooms himself. They had three rooms and a bathroom, all quite modest, and he explained that they were his own rooms. At that time there was no hotel infrastructure in Thimpu, the capital, which seemed more like a small town, so he gave his guests the best he had. After the banquet, at which Indira and the monarch talked about how to democratize the kingdom and at the same time preserve it from the negative influences of modern times, the girls went back to their room. Sonia discovered a trapdoor in the floor, under a carpet. Dying with curiosity, the two of them lifted it and saw a simple room with a narrow bed, similar to a monk’s cell. Suddenly a torch shone and they saw the king, scantily dressed, getting ready for bed. They shut the trapdoor feeling really embarrassed. They told Usha, who in turn told Indira, fearful that the incident might lead to a diplomatic conflict. Indira just laughed.

  The next day they flew by helicopter from Thimpu to the state of Sikkim, on the frontier with Tibet. They were welcomed by the local king and his wife, a delightful New Yorker called Hope Cooke, in their palace. At night, when Indira had already gone to bed, the American woman came to the girls’ room with the delicacy that Sonia liked the most: smoked salmon. It reminded her of her time in England, where she had discovered it.

  It was a short parenthesis of coolness in the middle of the extreme heat that was scorching the north of India. When they came back to Delhi, down on the plains, the thermometer marked 43º at eleven in the morning. The asphalt was melting. The trees looked as tired as the people who walked along with their umbrellas open to protect themselves from the sun. The rickshaw men waited for clients lying in any patch of shade they could find. At home the flowers in the garden had withered and the lawn was like dry straw. The servants sprayed water on the front of the house. Sonia had to learn to limit her movements to the minimum in order to save her energy. The temperature at night became so intolerable that she had to give way and have the air conditioning on. They advised her not to go out at midday because the sun was too fierce. This heat was nothing like the ferragosto. The air was so thick you could cut it with a knife, and the temperature went up to 46 degrees a few days later. It was a cruel and pitiless climate. Sonia waited anxiously for Rajiv to return, lying on her bed and dreaming about the bucolic countryside of the Veneto, remembering the squeaking of her Wellington boots in the freshly fallen snow, the icy water she drank directly from the streams, the smell of the countryside after the rain, the green meadows dotted with poppies in spring … But then her husband was there and they waited for evening to come in order to go out for a ride on the scooter and have an ice cream in one of the few places that served them in hygienic conditions. You had to be careful what you ate outside the house, because the heat affected the conservation of food.

  The tension at home increased in proportion to the heat, not because of how uncomfortable it became, but because of the political repercussions. After all, that was the house of the Prime Minister, and her work and her future depended largely, that year, on whether or not the monsoon rains came on time. Indira’s greatest concern was to continue the figh
t against hunger. She was clear that the shortage of food could be fought by introducing new methods of agriculture which had proved their efficiency in other parts of the world, and by encouraging the building of fertilizer factories. To achieve a real green revolution, to make India become self-sufficient, that was her main priority and she worked on it unstintingly. Everything else—and there was a lot more—could come later: health, education, improving the status of women, etc.

  The problem is that her ambitious programme needed time to produce results. Meanwhile, people had to eat. And it was such bad luck that India had suffered three consecutive years of drought. If the rains did not come that fourth year either, it would be disastrous. Added to that was the fiasco of American aid. In spite of all the indications, President Johnson had wanted to use the food aid as an instrument to make India fit in with his policies. Although Indira was prepared to make some concessions (facing a storm of protests at home), she never had any intention of abandoning her father’s non- alignment policy. In reprisal for a criticism that the Indian Foreign Minister made of Israel for its attitude towards the Arab countries, Johnson began to delay the shipments of foodstuffs. He asked for the reports on the grain shipments to pass through his office before the final go-ahead. Indira had a map of India on the wall in her office in South Block, where she tracked the movements of each shipment of food. The slowness was exasperating.