The Red Sari: A Novel

by Javier Moro

  The spectacle of nature in Kashmir, the land of her ancestors, always filled her with emotion. The sunsets over the sparkling waters of Lake Dal were sublime. There was magic in the air. It seemed as though the kingfishers were tame. One of them flew into the houseboat and perched on Rajiv’s shoulder. Then they made an excursion of several days to Daksun, an idyllic place where they caught wild trout in rushing rivers that flowed down among meadows covered in flowers and woods of pines and Christmas trees, framed by the eternally snow-capped mountain peaks. Firoz told her that he had just bought a piece of land in Mehrauli, near Delhi, and they talked about building a house there one day. It would be their own house, so they would not have to live in government-owned houses any more (as MP for the state of Uttar Pradesh, Firoz also lived in an official residence). It was a wonderful reconciliation for Indira, after such a stormy marriage, with so many fights, betrayals and humiliations, even more painful because most of them had been exposed to the public eye. Now the shadow of the peaks of the Himalayas acted as a balm that healed the wounds of the past. During that time when they were able to enjoy the peace of the mountains, they once again talked about a future together. It was then, in that fleeting yet intense moment of happiness, that Indira decided that once her father had died she would give Firoz all her attention. But on September 8th, 1960, the heart attack came and shattered the dream.

  16

  Sanjay no longer had a reputation as a womanizer, which he had had in England. Obsessed with the Maruti, his life was just work, work, work. He left home before dawn and came home at seven or eight at night to have dinner with his nephew and niece or to share a snack with Sonia. Rarely with his brother or his mother, because they were both so absorbed in their work at the time that they were rarely at home.

  Since his return from England, Sanjay had had two relationships, one with a Moslem woman, which did not last long, and another longer and more serious affair with a German woman, Sabine von Stieglitz. She was Christian’s sister, the friend who had introduced Sonia to Rajiv, and she worked in New Delhi as a language teacher. Tall, blonde, pretty and cosmopolitan, Sabine was culturally more English than German because she had lived almost all her life in England. She was a great friend of Sonia’s. They spent many afternoons together, taking care of the children, playing with them or reading them stories. One of them, “The animals in my town”, was especially funny because it described the elephant, the monkey, the boa, the raven, the vulture, the crow… as familiar animals. And it was true, they were everywhere. The cawing of the crows was the soundtrack to life in India.

  Sonia was a great mother, very meticulous with her children’s upbringing. She did not tolerate any fussiness with food, and she knew how to control their behaviour, without being as severe as Stefano had been with her and her sisters. She spoke to them in Italian when they were alone, and in English if they were all together or with Sabine. Actually, Sonia was meticulous in everything, and because of that she wanted to take a course in restoring old pictures. That hobby fitted in well with her discreet, hardworking personality, since she was conscientious and had an eye for detail. She thought of doing it as a job as soon as the children were a little older and needed her less.

  Sonia nursed the hope that the relationship between Sanjay and Sabine would become stable one day and they might end up getting married. But Sabine was getting tired of waiting.

  “Sanjay is more in love with the Maruti than with me,” she confessed to Sonia one day. “I don’t believe he’s going to get engaged to me. He only thinks about his business venture, and there’s no room for anything else in his life.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going back to Europe.”

  “What a shame!… It would have been great to have you as a sister-in-law.”

  “I would have liked that too,” she told Sonia, as Rahul and Priyanka fought over a biscuit.

  Sonia went to the airport to see her off. What she did not know was that she would see her again two days later.

  “What’s happened? Weren’t you in London?”

  Sabine told her that when they got to Teheran, the Air India pilot called her over the P.A. system. Surprised, Sabine went to the flight deck of the Boeing.

  “Someone wants to talk to you over the radio,” they told her.

  It was Sanjay. There, in front of a crew that could not get over their amazement, they acted out their penultimate love scene. Sanjay asked her to go back to New Delhi: “Let’s give each other a last chance,” he begged her. Sabine could not resist the man she loved and that is why she had returned. She was a little ashamed at having given in. Sonia was delighted, and once again dreamed that her friend might become her sister-in-law.

  But a few weeks later they broke up again, and this time it was for good. Sonia’s dream of having her friend close at hand vanished, but only for a while. Sabine did not settle in England. She had become used to living in India. In Europe she missed the warmth of the people, Asian politeness, and the rhythm of life. “I feel the same,” Sonia told her. Besides, Sabine had a job that allowed her to live better than if she had gone off to London. So, to Sonia’s great joy, they once again spent their afternoons together, and weekends in the surrounding area, like the one that ended in a little tragedy when they got too close to a wasps’ nest and went home covered in stings.

  Sabine finally met one of the teachers at the Goethe Institute in New Delhi and married him. They lived in the Indian capital for six years. They did not have any children until later, after they had moved to Mexico, but they had dogs that they allowed to run free with Sonia’s when they went to the countryside, to the delight of the children. Sabine held on to the memory of Sanjay as a serious young man, with drive, but too egocentric.

  For Indira it was better that way because if both of her sons had married Europeans it would not have been politically correct. It would have been like publicly confirming that the Nehrus were going completely Western and were leaving their Indian roots behind forever. By then Sanjay was already involved in politics, not so much out of vocation as to defend himself from the criticisms that were pouring down on him from all sides as a consequence of his appalling management of the Maruti affair.

  It was at a cocktail party to celebrate the coming wedding of an old school friend that Sanjay would meet his future wife. It was December 14th, 1973, and the date coincided with his birthday. That day Sanjay was very excited, and it was not because of alcohol because he never drank. But he was aware that he was the most eligible bachelor in India. Handsome, although at 27 he already had a large bald patch, he tried to be careful not to get involved with women that he suspected were only interested in becoming members of the first family of India. The friend that was getting married introduced him to a cousin of his called Maneka Anand, a willowy girl with regular, well- proportioned features. She was freckled and attractive enough to have won a beauty contest, and she worked from time to time as a model for a make of towels. She was pretty and photogenic, with a lively, energetic character. She immediately attracted Sanjay and he spent the evening talking to her. Maneka told him she had dropped out of her Political Science course at Sri Ram College in New Delhi and wanted to become a journalist. She was the daughter of an army colonel, a Sikh, and his wife, named Amteshwar, the daughter of a Punjabi landowner and farmer.

  From that day on, Sanjay spent all his free time with Maneka. They saw each other every day. As he no longer liked going out to restaurants or the cinema, he preferred to see her in the evenings at the home of one of the families. Sonia was not very impressed with this new girlfriend. Compared to Sabine, she was an immature young girl who would only last as long as it took Sanjay to see how ambitious she must be. Because now Sonia was infected by the distrust that comes with power or proximity to power. Like her mother-in-law, she thought that anyone who came close to the family did so out of self-interest. Most of the time she was right. She thought that Maneka, just another one of the many girls who cou
rted the golden bachelor of India, would be a flash in the pan.

  But at the beginning of 1974, Sanjay invited her home for lunch, a sign that the young man was taking the relationship more seriously than usual. The girl was very nervous because she had to go through the difficult step of meeting the Prime Minister. Sonia understood her perfectly: she had been extremely nervous the day that Rajiv was to introduce her. The difference was that at the time she and her fiancé had been together for a year, and not a month, like Sanjay and Maneka. But she knew her brother-in-law and she knew how impulsive and impatient he was. Also, at that time, in England, Indira was a different woman, more deliberate and without the stress or tension that come from power. Visibly intimidated, Maneka looked at everything like a frightened little bird: the furniture, the pictures, the photos. When she suddenly came face to face with Indira, she did not know what to say. She went red and began to stammer. Indira broke the ice: “As Sanjay has not introduced us, tell me your name and what you do for a living,” she said.

  Maneka went on to stutter it out as best she could, omitting the fact that she was a model for a company that made towels, which she did not think was worth mentioning.

  Indira chatted to her for a while and, as she was used to seeing the girls that Sanjay seduced passing through, she did not think anything special about it, except that she was rather young. Although she would have liked to find a daughter-in-law from among the best families of Kashmir, she did not get involved in her son’s love affairs, as she had not done with Rajiv either. Some time ago she had given up the idea of organizing an “arranged marriage”, Indian style. That she would leave for another life when she would have more time and more peace of mind…

  The months went by and it seemed that Maneka was there to stay. She was not just one more girl in Sanjay’s life. He had fallen in love and, true to his impulsive temper, he wanted to get married straight away. At first Indira had no difficulty accepting her. The fact that she was from a Sikh family was no problem for the Nehrus, who were staunch defenders of secularism. But under pressure from her son’s haste, she had no time to gather information about the family of her future daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, they set July 29th for the date of the engagement. Both families gathered at number 1, Safdarjung Road where, after a brief ceremony, they all sat down to celebrate with a meal. Indira immediately realized that they were not as educated, or cosmopolitan as she had thought, and she could sense the mother was very self- satisfied at having placed her daughter in the most sought-after family in the country. She might have been able to say something similar about Sonia’s family, but the difference is that the Mainos were simple people, and did not show off at all and were completely lacking in ambition. These were noisy and a bit ostentatious. However, Indira was equal to the circumstances. Noblesse oblige. The engagement ring her daughter-in-law was wearing was a present from her. And it was a very special present. It had belonged to Kamala, her mother, and had been designed by her grandfather Motilal. She secretly trusted that one day this young girl would come to understand the deeper meaning of such a valued present. She also gave her a gold and turquoise set, as well as a very fine embroidered silk sari, of Tanchoi style, a mixture of Indian and Chinese styles. A month later, she gave her an Italian silk sari for her birthday.

  The fears about Maneka’s family were confirmed by the information that began to flow in after the engagement. Indira found out that Amteshwar, her son’s future mother- in-law, had spent ten years in litigation with her brother over their father’s legacy. Rumours reached her ears that the other members of the family were rough and loud-mouthed. Other sources said they were social climbers. Just the type of person they had always tried to avoid had slipped into Sanjay’s life. Although parents are rarely happy with their children’s choice of partner, now Indira had to drink from the same cup as she had given her father when she informed him of her decision to marry Firoz. As in that case, now too it was a matter of families who came from different worlds and did not share the same values. But would it do any good to stand up to her son, as Nehru had stood up to her? Rarely in her life had she suffered as much, so she was not prepared to do the same to him. She could not open up another battlefront. The number of problems she had to struggle with was making her feel depressed. She could not see how to lift India out of poverty, and that made her despair. Her faithful secretary, Usha, would remember that at the end of July, on the way back from a funeral for the eternal rest of an old friend of the family, Indira had told her that she was tired of life. She gave her instructions on how her body was to be disposed of when she died.

  “I don’t want a funeral, Usha. Write it down… I want them to put my body in a coffin and drop it from a plane on to the perpetual snows of the Himalayas. Perhaps that way I can enjoy the peace that I have not enjoyed in life.”

  “Madam, the important thing is to have peace in this life, don’t you think? In the other life it’s guaranteed…”

  “Yes, I know, but that’s out of my hands and I don’t think it’s possible now.”

  “It has to be, Madam. But just let me say that no one’s going to agree to dispose of your body like that. If it were ashes, maybe… But how do you expect them to throw a coffin out of a plane and for it to smash open on the ground?”

  “Well I don’t want to be buried or cremated,” Indira stated baldly.

  In that state of mind, the prospect of marrying her son to a girl of 17 from a family that she considered “vulgar” was not something to raise her morale. The only thing she could do was to delay the wedding. When she heard that on the date set Maneka would not yet be of age, she told her son, “You’ll have to wait until she’s eighteen. I can’t allow you to break the law.”

  The problem of child marriages was still a thorny topic in India and had been denounced by Gandhi, Nehru and all those who wanted to modernize the country. Thousands of girls ended up being “bartered” by their fathers, married off and turned into servants to the husband’s family, with no power to decide on the number of children they would have. Maneka’s case was far from that, but Indira was not prepared for Sanjay not to set an example. Besides, by gaining time perhaps her son would eventually think again.

  But that did not happen. That summer, Sanjay had to have a small operation for a hernia. After her morning classes Maneka spent the afternoon and part of the night in the private room at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the most up-to-date hospital in New Delhi. A few weeks after his convalescence, on September 23rd, 1974, they got married in a civil ceremony in the house of an old friend of the family, Mohammed Yunus. The wedding was proof of the secular India that the Nehrus had always defended: the son of a Parsee and a Hindu was marrying a Sikh girl in the home of a Moslem friend in front of a Catholic daughter-in-law. Indira was generous to Maneka: she gave her twenty-one saris of the finest cloths, some gold jewellery and, most valuable of all, one of the cotton saris that Nehru had woven in prison with his spinning wheel. She did her duty as a mother-in-law down to the last letter. To welcome her daughter-in-law, she assigned the new couple a bedroom that gave on to the main sitting room, near the front door, in the opposite part of the house to Rajiv and Sonia’s room. She decorated it and furnished it with great care, placing objects and jars on the dressing table and choosing some bracelets that, by tradition, Maneka was to wear on her wedding night and which she left on the bedside table.

  Just after the celebration, Maneka came into the home of the Nehru-Gandhis just like Sonia had done with Rajiv six years earlier. “The wedding went off well,” Indira wrote to Dorothy Norman that same night, “Maneka is so young that I had my doubts about the matter and was not sure if she knew what she was doing. But it seems that she has fitted in, and is lively and happy.”

  But Maneka was not Sonia, and although she came from a family that lived only one kilometre away, her adaptation was much harder than her sister-in-law’s who came from the other side of the world. In spite of Indira’s hopes, the girl found i
t hard to fit into that household. To start with, she smoked, a habit which was very frowned upon. Sanjay hated tobacco; Indira, who had had tuberculosis, loathed it; and Sonia, who was asthmatic, was allergic to the smoke. A bad start. Furthermore, she was talkative and spoke very loudly. “In my house we were informal and sometimes used bad language,” Maneka would say. “The Gandhis are polite to each other, come what may.” Sanjay and she had diametrically opposed temperaments and there were many factors that suggested it would become a failed marriage. It is true that it was not always easy to communicate with Indira, an imposing presence. Sometimes, during meals, Maneka would start talking about books she had read or was reading as though she wanted to impress her with her intellectual capacity. Indira would look up, glance at her and go on eating. “She was spirited and intelligent,” Usha, Indira’s faithful secretary, would say, “but at the same time she was ambitious and very immature.” Several times she mentioned that one day Sanjay would be Prime Minister, which made the others feel embarrassed for her. Other times she spoke about happiness with a gloomy face. “I knew she was not referring to a philosophical search,” Usha would remember, “but to her own unhappiness caused by Sanjay’s absence.” What she really liked doing was going out and being seen, exactly what her husband could not do now, busy as he was in leaving his mark on Indian society.

  Consequently Maneka was very bored in a house where no one smoked, drank or swore. She killed time in Usha’s office asking about her husband’s agenda, which was always very full, and trying to discover the keys to that new world in which she was trapped. The traditional world she did not even attempt to get near. When Sonia suggested that she might teach her to cook, even if only to amuse her, because nobody knew better than she did what was happening to her sister-in-law, Maneka replied that she was not interested in cooking or anything else to do with the house.