by Javier Moro
As for his mother, she chose not to believe what she was told. Completely distanced from reality by that same court of her son’s sycophants who assured her that the reports of abuse were based on unproved rumours, Indira saw the criticism as personal attacks and ignored them with the stroke of a pen.
“People exaggerate a lot,” she said to Rajiv when they saw each other at home, echoing Sanjay’s words. “You shouldn’t believe what people say.”
“I’ve just got back from Bhopal,” Rajiv insisted, “and there the Moslems are terrified. They say that the Hindus manipulate the campaign against them… Those people have to be reassured before it becomes a communal conflict.”
“What has to be done is to limit the population by whatever means. There is no way out for India if we can’t do that.”
Rajiv also realized that it was impossible to talk to his mother. She did not allow anyone to contradict her. She interpreted everything as a political vendetta, or saw it from a supernatural point of view, which was especially worrying. The influence of her yoga teacher, Dhirendra Brahmachari, was greater than ever. The man took advantage of the Prime Minister’s loneliness and he came to have easier access to Indira than her own son, Rajiv. He was able to use that proximity to power in his favour, because during the state of emergency he amassed a small fortune, so much that it allowed him to purchase a light plane. In the city he was known as “the flying saint”. Rajiv and Sonia disliked him because they realized how much he was taking advantage of Indira. They had been observing him: first he frightened her by talking about supernatural plots against her and Sanjay, and then he convinced her to agree to recite certain mantras and to protect herself with them from those that were seeking her destruction. In this way, he held considerable influence over Indira, which she was unable to shake off. When Sonia and Rajiv tried to put her on her guard, she shut herself up in one of her famous silences. Sonia could not stand the presence of the guru in the house. He was always demanding food and drink whenever he felt like it. He got fatter and fatter, the result of his voracious appetite, and he had no manners.
“He’s a real pig!” they said, disgusted at seeing him eat.
“I don’t know how my mother puts up with him…” said Rajiv. “She lives in an ivory tower, and if her only contact with the world is Sanjay and the guru, we’re in a real mess!”
“Let’s go to Italy, really Rajiv, let’s give the children a bit of normal life.”
When they told her, the expression on Indira’s face completely changed, to such an extent that they immediately regretted having even mentioned it. They understood, even before Indira had said a single word, that it was going to be difficult, not to say impossible.
“I can understand you Sonia. I understand that you’re tired of living in this atmosphere,” Indira said to her, “that you have to listen to all that unfounded criticism that is showered on me. I understand that you feel like going back to Italy… But can you imagine what they would say if you went away now? They would interpret it as a desertion, as a secret manoeuvre of mine… ‘She sends the children off to Europe, then she’ll follow, she’s preparing her getaway’, I can hear them saying it…”
“It’s just that we thought it’s something we can do now that the children are small,” said Sonia. “Later on it will be impossible…”
“Can’t you wait a little while?”
Sonia looked at Rajiv and put her head down. He was pensive. Sonia guessed at how torn he must feel inside. Indira went on: “It’s just that it’s a bad time now…”
“I understand, and the last thing we’d want to do is harm you,” her daughter-in- law said as she stood up, even before Rajiv could say a word.
“At difficult times the family has to be seen to be united. It’s important for people, for the people, to see that.”
Sonia nodded.
“Don’t worry, Mummy, we’re staying,” she told her with an understanding smile.
What was not said in the conversation was equally important. Apart from being afraid of what might happen, Sonia wanted to leave for a while because she was tired of the behaviour of her sister-in-law. Maneka, called her “Italian” insultingly, and acted with the insolence of a queen consort, sheltered by her husband, deus ex machina of the state of emergency. For her part, Indira did not mention the aversion she felt at being apart from her grandchildren, whom she adored. She played with them, sometimes she took them into her office and was proud to introduce them to people. They were her great passion. The fact is that Indira had become as possessive and protective a matriarch as her grandfather, Motilal Nehru, the former patriarch of the clan, had been.
20
It was a poor individual who opened Indira’s eyes to the reality of the abuses committed in the name of the Emergency. The soles of his sandals were worn out from the five days it had taken him to walk as far as the office in Akbar Road. He was a young teacher from a school in a distant village. An honest man, idealistic and a fighter, who came to tell Indira how he had been forcibly sterilized, in spite of only having one daughter. The police had overpowered him with blows and had taken him to a dispensary along with other men from the village. He told her about his wife’s despair and the despair of his whole family that he would not be able to have any more children now, especially a boy. He talked about whole villages that the police surrounded at night in order to catch the men and sterilize them. For the first time, Indira heard for herself the testimony of a victim of her policy and she was moved by the encounter. “Yes,” she admitted, “perhaps Rajiv and so many others are right, after all.” She was horrified at what the teacher told her about other teachers who had been beaten for not fulfilling their quota of volunteers for the vasectomy. Suddenly, the truth hit her in all its harshness from the mouth of that brave and bony little man. There was no room for any more excuses. “We have to send an urgent, crystal-clear message to all the regional heads of government,” she ordered her secretary, “saying that any individual caught in the act of harassment while carrying out the family planning programme will be punished.” Indira was finally reacting.
Sonia thought that then she would adopt some measure to put a stop to Sanjay’s activities, but she was wrong. She did nothing. “How can her love for her son blind her to such an extent?” she wondered. “Would I do the same with Rahul?”
“I hope not, I hope you never lose your objectivity,” Rajiv said to her, finding it harder and harder to put up with the situation.
Now he practically never even spoke to his brother or Maneka. He hated Sanjay’s methods and style and he felt powerless to change things. Powerless before his mother: “The good thing about Sanjay is that he gets results,” Rajiv heard her say, referring to the four million Indians who had been sterilized in the first five months of the state of emergency. At that rate, the goal to achieve 23 million in three years was in sight of being achieved, and for that reason, deep down, Indira was satisfied. It was Rajiv, thanks to the relations he had with his colleagues and in the airline, who realized first, even before his mother, that disaster was heading their way. He knew that the story-tellers, wandering wise men and fortune-tellers were going to the four corners of this continent country, sometimes distorting and exaggerating the facts to give them epic dimensions, telling of the abuses and suffering that the sterilization campaign had unleashed. The terror those tales evoked and the lack of safety they generated broke the trust that the people had in those who governed them. The state of emergency was beginning to turn against those in power, against Indira. But she could not see it.
“My brother and my mother are betraying the family legacy,” Rajiv repeated to Sonia in a desperate tone of voice.
He was trapped in a situation with no way out. He could not leave and yet it disgusted him to stay. He did not like to be identified with everything that was going on. In spite of belonging to one of the most aseptic professions in the world, it was inevitable that his collegues, and people in general, would tar him with the s
ame brush as his brother. He did not mind confronting Sanjay…
“You’re letting down our grandfather!” he told him several times to his face.
“We’re modernizing this country!” Sanjay replied.
“You’re setting people against you!… The end does not justify the means.”
But to say the same thing to his mother was impossible for Rajiv. An Indian son does not stand up to his parents. A certain amount of submission towards the figure of the parents is a characteristic which forms part of the deepest cultural heritage of India. Sonia knew this and therefore tried not to make matters worse. She trusted that the passing of time would end up putting things back into place. Fleeing from the latent tension, they took refuge in their rooms at the back of the house, taking as little part as possible in the lives of the others. They no longer felt that this was their home, as they had before. The writer Kushwant Singh, an assiduous visitor to the house, came to see Maneka one day when Rajiv and Sonia were celebrating the birthday of one of their children. “I realized that the children and each of the women occupied widely separated parts of the house and had little to do with each other.” The fights between the dogs reflected the tension of the inhabitants. Sanjay and Maneka had two Irish wolfhounds “as big as donkeys”, according to the writer, sitting paralyzed with terror for several minutes in the sitting room when they left him alone with the dogs and a cup of tea in his hand. It was Indira who saved him from that situation by taking them out into the garden. In contrast, Sonia had a sausage dog called Reshma, and Zabul, a quiet Afghan. When the dogs started fighting, Sonia was horrified, and would intervene to separate them, while Maneka watched the scene imperturbably because she knew her dogs were stronger.
In spite of the latent aggression, at home the Gandhis tried to avoid direct confrontation. Communication was reduced to the level of written notes, always polite, to express complaints and disagreements. “Yesterday you left the dog loose in the house, please don’t do that again, because it scares the children.” Maneka would read the note, but take no notice.
Rajiv and Sonia found support amongst their friends, among whom were Sabine and her husband, as well as an Italian couple who had recently arrived, Ottavio and Maria Quattrochi, a very witty and amusing pair with whom they often went out for dinner. Also part of that group was an Indian Airlines pilot, an Indian couple consisting of a businessman and an interior decorator who was very friendly with Sonia, a journalist and his editor wife and another couple or so. Sonia laughed a lot with Ottavio Quattrochi, her fellow Italian, who was an experienced businessman, the representative of some large Italian companies, and who had a fine sense of humour. Their friends helped them to put up with the unpleasant family situation.
Sonia found out what was happening in Old Delhi from an Indian friend who told her over the phone. She told her that her driver and her cook, both Moslems, had asked her for help, knowing that she had connections with Indira’s family. Both of them were terrified because, according to what they told her, “Sanjay’s men are flattening our neighbourhood.” They wanted their “mistress” to intercede to save their homes. Sonia knew nothing about it.
“We are always the last to find out. You know what the situation is like at home. I don’t know whether we’ll be able to do anything.”
When she investigated, she found out that Sanjay had ordered the district, a labyrinth of alleys, ruined old buildings and unhealthy slums, to be demolished. A dirty, crowded and polluted district, but containing the soul of the old city. It was part of his programme of “city beautification”. The locals had rebelled, throwing stones, bricks and even Molotov cocktails at the bulldozers. A crowd of women had surrounded the family planning clinic shouting slogans and threatening the workers with castration. The police soon arrived and dispersed the crowd with tear gas. A pitched battle ensued with hundreds injured and a dozen dead, among whom there was a thirteen-year old Moslem boy who had been watching the riot like a film. In the end the police imposed a curfew so the demolition could go on. When Sonia told him all this, Rajiv made a big fuss.
“How is it possible for my mother to allow them to destroy that area? It’s one of the districts she herself protected at the time of the Partition riots!”
This time Rajiv dared to tell his mother. “The city beautification programme is causing great unrest among the population, the poor are being forced to vacate their shacks without the time to collect their things… Hundreds of shacks have been razed to the ground. We’re being called even by our friends’ servants to do something…”
Indira heard him out, hardly saying a word. Rajiv went on: “Grandfather convinced those people, who are mostly Moslems, to stay and not flee to Pakistan. You know that, Mother. He promised them protection. And now his grandson is kicking them out and beating them!”
Indira had Sanjay called and he immediately refuted his brother’s accusations.
“Nonsense!” the young man interjected. “All those evicted are being provided with alternative accommodation.”
Indira believed him.
“In this country, there is a lot of resistance to modernization,” he murmured.
She always believed Sanjay in matters of politics, or the street. She believed Rajiv when something broke down at home; only then was his word worth its weight in gold.
What Sanjay had said was a half-truth. In Old Delhi, over seventy thousand people, amongst whom were Sonia’s friend’s cook and driver, had been forced at gunpoint to get into lorries to be taken to their new “residences”, a euphemism to describe wretched plots of land surrounded by wire fences on the other side of the River Yamuna, about twenty kilometres from the city. Each family had the right to a pile of bricks to build their new refuge and ration cards to buy materials and food. But meanwhile, they had no roof over their heads.
In the end, the person who made Indira see the truth about the terrible things that were happening was her friend Pupul. She came back from Benares, the holy city on the banks of the Ganges, in a state of shock. The amazing thing, the marvellous thing about Benares is that life has gone on in practically the same way since the 6th century BC. However, Pupul had seen with her own eyes how excavators were destroying ancient buildings to widen Vishwanath Gali, a narrow, winding alley, paved with stones from the river that shone from the patina caused by the feet of the countless generations of pilgrims who walked across the heart of the city. A street where cows had had preference since the dawn of time, and which holy men walked along with their bodies covered in ashes and their hair wild, newly-wed peasants with their brides on their arm, grandmothers with their grandchildren and old men who came from far away to reach the temple of Vishwanath, the Lord of the Universe. Considered the holiest in the world by the Hindu faithful, that temple housed a polished block of granite, the most highly valued relic in Benares, the original lingam, a phallic emblem that symbolized the life potency of the god Shiva, the representative of the strength and regenerative power of nature. By prostrating themselves and offering water from the Ganges, the Hindu faithful expressed one of the most ancient forms of Hindu religious fervour. Benares and the temple of Vishwanath in particular, was the centre of that cult. There were lingams and yonis (the feminine equivalent) everywhere, in the temples, on the small altars set into the facades of buildings, on the steps of the ghats, those monumental stairways that sink into the riverbanks like gigantic tree roots, thus sealing the union of Benares with that most sacred of rivers. Every morning, as far back as human memory could remember, thousands of Hindus devoutly anointed the polished surface of the lingams with sandalwood paste or oil. They wove garlands of jasmine or Indian carnations that they carefully placed round the erect stone with rose petals and bitter bilva leaves, Shiva’s favourite tree.
“We want to widen the alley so that cars can go down it,” the delegate of the local council who accompanied her told Pupul. Pupul was thunderstruck.
“What are you going to do with the temples, the gods, all those little
altars?”
“We’ll move them elsewhere. We are preparing a concrete structure to house them all.”
“But you can’t, they are the guardians of the city, you can’t just move them like that…”
Pupul was so indignant that she was lost for words. The man acted stupid. Then he added by way of explanation, “The fact is that Sanjay wants to beautify the city.”
“But you can’t play around with Benares, it’s the holiest of the holy cities… You can’t play around with people’s faith.”
Pupul understood that it was pointless trying to convince the delegate, who was only following instructions. Upset and nervous, she asked him to halt all demolition activity until she got back to Delhi and spoke to the Prime Minister. The man agreed.
When Indira saw Pupul’s photos and heard what she had to say, “she hit the roof”, according to her friend. “I had never seen her so angry. She picked up the phone and asked her secretary to get the head of government in Uttar Pradesh on the line. She exploded when she spoke to him: ‘Don’t you know what’s going on in Benares?’ she asked him, before ordering him to come and see her immediately in New Delhi. Then she hung up and covered her face with her hands. ‘What’s happening in this country?… My God, no one tells me anything.’”