The Red Sari: A Novel

by Javier Moro

  “Sanjay’s failure to produce a car could seriously affect your political position,” he told her. “The Maruti may be the crack in your armour that the opposition parties are looking for.”

  Indira looked up at her advisor for a few seconds and did not answer. She felt a mixture of faith and compassion for her son which prevented her from seeing reality as it really was.

  But there was another strong factor that contributed to Indira’s blindness: her immense power. The men that Indira chose for important posts acquired enormous power to dispense favours and sponsorship, just because they had been designated by her. They relied on a gigantic source of corruption, which were the measures that the party itself had set in motion to control economic activity as part of its Socialist programme. In order to do any business, to start up any company, to import pieces of equipment or spare parts you needed endless licences, permits and authorizations. A system that people called the Licence Raj, ‘the empire of the permit’. There, bureaucrats and politicians had the chance to get rich by exchanging favours for money or other favours. The Licence Raj prepared the way for even higher levels of corruption. And Sanjay decided to fish in those waters.

  Indira was aware of the influence that money and power exercised over those who were around her, but she thought that a certain degree of corruption had always existed and was an integral part of the system. The important thing was for it not to get out of control. Besides, closing her eyes to the corrupt practices of her people was also a way of keeping them tied down. It was true that Indira was not the only case—in India or in the world—of a political leader who was personally irreproachable but who turned a blind eye to the corruption of others. It seemed to her these were matters of little importance compared, for example, to the figures that had just been published that said that less than 20% of Indian women could read and write, and in the state of Bihar only 4%… Or that the population of the country was going to pass the threshold of seven hundred million. Which is to say more than double the population there was at the time of independence… At that rate, in only a few years, the population of India would overtake that of China. Those really were problems that demanded the highest level of attention. As was the wave of strikes, the discontent of the people and the spectre of famine. Even Rajiv and Sonia, who did not go out much, began to notice the corruption from the way the wives and daughters of members of the Congress Party dressed. Now they were wearing saris of imported silk, diamond jewellery and Italian shoes when they attended official receptions.

  Very much in spite of his mother’s tacit support, Sanjay’s project did not take off. All the prototypes had defects in the steering, gearbox, suspension and cooling system. One day he invited Sonia to try one out on the circuit round the factory perimeter. Sanjay tried hard to show that his vehicle was capable of reaching a hundred kilometres an hour, but the ground was so full of potholes and bushes that Sonia was scared to death and asked him to slow down. Although it was new, the car looked old. The doors did not close properly, the suspension was very rough and the sound of the engine was deafening. But Sanjay could not see those defects. To such an extent that, in May 1973 he thought he could finally present a model before the Press and invited a reporter from Surge magazine to try it. The car overheated and lost oil. The reporter noted that there were only five unpainted cars in the workshops and another fifteen in the process of being manufactured. The engines were assembled manually and there was no sign of an assembly line. She realized that instead of being the cheap mass-produced car that the government wanted, the Maruti was a very poor-quality handmade product.

  The problem was that Sanjay had raised a lot of money and was burdened with debts. At first, as he could not call the people who could help him with the finances directly, he used the services of one of his mother’s secretaries, a man with oily hair brushed back from his forehead and with a broad mechanical smile, whose name was R.K. Dhawan (he had been Nehru’s stenographer). Dhawan saw a good opportunity to improve his standing with his boss by cultivating contact with Sanjay. He dealt with calling different businessmen from number 1, Safdarjung Road, and they came running because they did not want to miss the chance to do the Prime Minister a favour, via her son. It is possible that they thought that Indira herself was interested in these deals, but actually she knew nothing at all about her offspring’s shady business.

  Later, Sanjay asked for a deposit of half a million rupees from each of the 75 dealers that he had designated, in exchange for the promise to hand over the first cars for sale in the next six months. He had also gone to the banks, recently nationalized by his mother and had obtained unsecured loans to the value of eight million rupees. But the car still did not materialize and Sanjay’s ineptitude became evident. In order to defend himself from the ever more numerous attacks, he attributed his failure to bureaucracy and the number of administrative stumbling blocks through which he had to navigate. He was partly right, but if anyone was in a position to struggle with the difficulties and obstacles of the Licence Raj, it was him. Even so, he chose to blame everyone else. But the MPs’ protests were becoming very strident and the newspapers began to talk about the Maruti affair, linking Indira and her old enemy, Nixon. The Maruti affair, according to the Press, was Indira’s Watergate.

  At the end of 1973, anxious at the proportions the affair was taking on, Indira asked her Chancellor of the Exchequer to take a look at the Maruti papers. Sonia could see she was very worried. Her mother-in-law was convinced the opposition was using the Sanjay business to destroy her, and it did not seem fair to her. She still thought that her son deserved an opportunity. One day she told her that in her youth she had met a Catholic priest who had built a plane in two garages in Bombay and that he used to take his friends for rides over the bay. “If that man could build a plane… Why can’t Sanjay build a car?” she asked.

  The reasons for her son’s inability to imitate the Catholic priest came to light in the interview that took place between Indira, Sanjay and Subramanian, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had been the architect of the “green revolution”. The minister asked Sanjay for the report on the project.

  “There cannot be a report on the project before the project is carried out,” answered Sanjay.

  The Chancellor went on to explain to him that although he might possibly be able to design a car, he should have a report with the specifications for each component, the way they would be produced and the cost per part.

  “That is no longer necessary,” Sanjay answered with a touch of arrogance. “Those are the old ways of working.”

  The Chancellor told Indira that, however dynamic he might be, her son lacked the knowledge required to be successful in an enterprise like this. He promised her he would obtain the help of professionals to advise him, but Sanjay was vehemently opposed to it. He did not want anyone to overshadow him or to lose control of his business. Everything pointed to Indira listening to her Chancellor, but she did not. Caught between her duty as a leader and the blind faith she had in her son, not only did she ignore Subramanian’s advice, but she removed the advisors who were most critical of Sanjay. The absolute power that Indira now wielded demanded characterless, malleable people around her. She did not allow anyone to overshadow her or show disagreement or criticism, even if it was friendly. Power, which was poisoning the son and blinding the mother, only accepted submissiveness.

  Rajiv had never liked his brother’s project, which he saw as a megalomaniac’s dream which could harm his mother’s reputation, and by extension the reputation of the rest of the family. Both brothers had their first big disagreement as adults when Rajiv, on returning from a trip, found out that Sanjay had convinced Sonia to sign several documents that made her a partner in a new company, Maruti Technical Services, with a salary, bonuses and travelling expenses included. The children, Rahul and Priyanka, also appeared as partners.

  “How could you do that?” he asked his brother furiously. “I don’t want to end up with mud on my fa
ce from your shady dealings, or for you to get Sonia and the children into trouble…”

  “There’s no trouble…”

  “What do you mean? How long do you think it’s going to take the opposition to find out about this?”

  “It isn’t illegal.”

  “Yes it is. You’ve forgotten that, by law, Sonia does not have the right to own shares in an Indian company because she’s a foreigner.”

  Sanjay shrugged his shoulders, as if that was not of the slightest importance. Rajiv was also angry with Sonia.

  “I agreed just as a favour to your brother,” she told him. “He’s always been so kind to me, and if he asks me to do him a favour, I’m not going to say no.”

  “But you’ve signed that you’re going to receive a salary, do you realize that?”

  “I signed blind, I didn’t know about the salary, and I never had any intention of taking any money, you know that…”

  “You’ll see how the Maruti affair is going to reflect badly on all of us sooner or later.”

  Rajiv was furious, as Sonia had rarely seen him. Under the name of a consulting company, Maruti Technical Services was actually a cover for diverting money from the mother company, Maruti Limited, into the hands of Sanjay and those who had invested large sums in the car factory that never produced cars. Now Rajiv wanted only one thing: to distance himself completely from anything that had to do with Maruti.

  Both brothers had been brought up in the same home, but since their earliest childhood they had shown marked differences. The primary school teacher who had taught them described Rajiv as a polite, docile child, a decent student. On the other hand, Sanjay was rebellious, destructive, and stubborn, with no interest in school activities, arrogant towards his teachers and very difficult to deal with. He grew up as a turbulent, whimsical capricious teenager, messing around with cars and attracting dubious friends. Both joined Doon School, the most elite school in India, created in the image of the great British educational establishments such as Eton or Harrow. But Sanjay could not stand the discipline or the pace of studies. He had so little interest in reading that in an interview he gave as an adult he was unable to name a single book that had influenced or inspired him, not even those written by his grandfather. He only liked the metal workshop activities. He was obsessed by cars and planes. In spite of being who he was, he was expelled from school. It was then that, in desperation, Indira sent him to take a course as an apprentice at Rolls-Royce in England. “What he liked most was to talk about Indian politics and to make fun of English politics,” his supervisor would say, before adding, “Once, when I told him off for a mistake he’d made, he said to me, ‘Look, the British have fucked with India for centuries, and now I’ve come here to fuck with England.’”

  Brought up among Prime Ministers that the people adored like gods, Sanjay ended up thinking that India was his personal playground. He never knew privation, unlike his mother and his grandfather. After a life of struggle, Nehru had given free rein to his desire to spoil his grandchildren, as if by doing that he could make up for the suffering he had gone through. Sometimes he gave them eccentric gifts, like a crocodile that became Sanjay’s favourite pet until Indira finally sent it to the zoo when it almost bit off her fingers. Neither did Sanjay inherit from them their immense love for the people of India or their genuine compassion for the poor. He never had to see the skeletal faces of old women weeping for their dead, he never had to look into the eyes of peasants who stared at their fields cracked open from the drought, he never heard the silent clamour of a people who had been crying out for protection for centuries. Sanjay seemed to be annoyed by the backwardness of his country and he did not understand its complexity. He was a rebel against tradition, impatient with laws and rules. He went from being kind and attentive to direct and brutal in a flash, and that brusqueness was shocking in a country where relations between people were steeped in ancient courtesy, like a patina, the product of thousands of years of uninterrupted civilization. For him, life was a game in which you had to win, and the problems of life were obstacles that had to be overcome in order to reach the finishing line. And he was in a hurry. A hurry to change things, to get there sooner, to gather the power that was not his to wield. He was in such a hurry that he did not care about the means to get to the end.

  His brother had grown in the opposite direction. Since he was little he had always been more sensitive to the suffering of others. He had inherited his mother’s sensitivity to those more unfortunate and her love of India, and that could be seen in the photos he took. As a young man, he visited his parents’ friends who were ill, spontaneously, without anyone forcing him to do it. One day, when he was 17, Indira met him when she went to give her condolences to the family of a friend and veteran leader of the Congress Party who had just died. That is how she found out that her son had been visiting him during his last days. Rajiv was the type of person who did not hesitate to stop and offer his help if he saw a road accident, and if necessary, he took the victim to hospital and then was concerned about his progress. In the garden at home, he watched over a robin’s nest, and if there was an injured fledgling, he would take it to the Chandni Chowk bird hospital, even at the risk of arriving late for work. Rajiv was happy with what he had, with Sonia, their children, their dogs, and the luxury of being able to spend time doing what he liked to do. He did not ask any more of life, and there, precisely, lay his wisdom. But his mother did not seem to appreciate it: more than wisdom, she saw a lack of ambition, which did not arouse her admiration.

  And yet Indira thought that a privileged life did not mean that they had not suffered in their childhood. They had lived in a house that was always full of adults, whose atmosphere was steeped in the seriousness of the discussions and the solemnity of what was decided in the offices, rooms and studies of Teen Murti House. The fact that they had not become fond of reading was perhaps a reaction against that official world of protocol where they were just children, she thought, always seeking excuses for them. When they really had a good time was when they went to visit their father at weekends and for the holidays. Firoz was an extrovert, talkative and affectionate, and gave them his full attention. He knew how to play with his sons and keep them entertained. He taught them to assemble toys and take them apart again, to plant and care for roses, because he was very fond of growing them. Far from the stern formality of the Prime Minister’s palace where they lived, in their father Rajiv and Sanjay found a person with an overflowing capacity for fun. Furthermore, he was able to instil in them the feeling that they were very important to him, which made a deep impact on them. Just as in all broken marriages, in the end it is the children who suffer for the tension between the parents, even if they do not understand it. But could Indira explain it to them? Could she tell them that she no longer lived with Firoz because he had been repeatedly unfaithful to her? Because they did not understand each other and she was fed up with fighting? Her sense of dignity prevented her from doing that. The boys could see that their grandfather Nehru had no sympathy for his son-in-law, and they picked it up. Perhaps sub- consciously they blamed their mother that Firoz was away from them and was not part of the Prime Minister’s home. After the cremation, a devastated Sanjay threw in his mother’s face that she had not looked after their father. He blamed her directly for the heart attack that had killed him.

  Indira took it well. She must have felt guilty that her marriage had not worked. And therefore guilty that her children might have suffered because of it. Her weakness for Sanjay perhaps hid her desire to make up for that guilt. It shocked Sonia that she, the strongest woman in India, should be so astonishingly weak with her younger son. Her many enemies did not take long to realize that Sanjay was her Achilles’ heel.

  Indira, who was completely open with Sonia, often chatted to her. She was perhaps the only person in the house with whom she shared confidences. One day she confessed to her that her marriage had seen many ups and downs, but that she could not have married anyone other
than Firoz. He was the only man she really loved. She often talked to her about him, and with affection, because she said that Rajiv reminded her of her husband. They both had their feet on the ground, were sensitive to the beauty of nature and music, and were good with their hands and practical in their way of dealing with problems. She never thought that Firoz would die so soon, so young. It is true, she admitted that she had pushed him aside in recent times, but she had done so thinking that they both had their lives ahead of them and that they would make up for lost time. They had been reconciled in 1958, after his first heart attack. So that he could recover, Indira had organized a family holiday in a houseboat on the lake in the city of Srinagar, the Venice of the East, as the capital of Kashmir is known. Firoz and the boys had a wonderful time, swimming, canoeing and taking photos. Indira took advantage to learn Spanish, a language that had always attracted her.