The Red Sari: A Novel

by Javier Moro

  On the way home, she saw people celebrating her defeat with joy—children and adults were still on the streets at that time of night—and she suddenly felt afraid. It seemed to her that her house was poorly guarded. When she arrived, she went to Rajiv and Sonia’s room. They were still awake.

  “It would be wise if you were to take the children to some friends’ house,” Indira suggested. “… Tonight.”

  “We aren’t going to leave you on your own.”

  “Just for a few days, until the atmosphere in the city has calmed down. There’s a lot of commotion now. I’ll feel calmer if you go to another house.”

  “Let’s all go then, you too.”

  “I can’t. I have to stay here. Besides, Sanjay’s coming back tonight, so I won’t be alone. Off you go, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if something happened to the children.”

  At two in the morning, with Rahul and Priyanka half asleep and wrapped in blankets, Rajiv and Sonia left the house as though they were refugees in a country at war. Indira had refrained from telling them that a few days earlier she had refused the offer of the chief of security to bring troops to New Delhi to protect her in case she lost the elections and the opposition decided to organize a march against her home.

  “The crowd might get out of control and attack your residence…” the chief of security had told her.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Indira answered. “What I do ask is that you look after my children.”

  Perhaps Indira never believed she would lose, in spite of the overwhelming indications that she would. Perhaps she felt so protected by the aura of her name, in an almost supernatural way, that she did not realize what was coming her way. Perhaps she was blinded by the idea she had of herself. The journalist and friend Dom Moraes asked her, “Ma’am, will you be coming back into politics?” and Indira replied, “No. I feel I’ve taken a weight off my shoulders. I will never return to politics.” Perhaps the relief she felt now was because life had put her back in touch with reality. But it was a reality that was hard to take: at the age of 59, she found herself with no job, no financial income and no roof over her head. For the first time in her life she realized that she had nothing. The family home of Anand Bhawan had been donated to the State and was now a museum. Even if she had held onto it she could not have kept it up.

  It was four in the morning when Sanjay and Maneka arrived. They did not seem especially depressed or affected by the defeat. They did not seem to be aware of what it meant. Quite the opposite: Maneka told her they had come back from Amethi in a friend’s private plane and went on to tell her how Sanjay himself had taken the controls for landing. A perfect manoeuvre, she added. “It was then that I realized the strength and character of the man I had married,” she would write later. Neither of them had found out yet that the inhabitants of Turkman Gate in old Delhi had gone home to their neighbourhood full of joy and were threatening to sterilize Sanjay.

  Indira gave them one of her meaningful silences and went to her room. It was very late and she was exhausted when she fell into bed. She thought about her grandchildren. The important thing was that they were safe, at least for the moment. Far away, the explosions of the fireworks could still be heard.

  22

  Indira was really a very perplexing character. The serene, natural manner with which she accepted her defeat left both followers and enemies disconcerted. There were few examples in history of national leaders who had committed political hara-kiri with such integrity. If she felt satisfied in spite of everything, it was because she had given India back its trust in the power of the vote, in a nation that was now more stable and prosperous than before. As for her, she had fulfilled her mission and had a clear conscience. She did not feel responsible for the suffering caused by the measures she had taken. The system was to blame for that, together with bureaucracy and the dirty tricks of the opposition. “With these elections, India has shown that democracy is not a luxury that belongs to the rich,” said the New York Times in her defence. Something that all observers, both Indian and foreign, agreed on was that Indira Gandhi’s political career was over. They were all wrong, except for an old colleague, a militant in a party on the Left, who went to visit her and said, “You’ll soon see. The people will come back to you.”

  Then Indira turned to her with her eyes full of tears and asked, “When? When I’m dead?”

  Usha, her faithful secretary, did not know what to do or say when she went to work the day after the elections. She had never been in favour of the state of emergency and her comments when she read out articles that were critical would almost have cost her her job if Sonia had not warned her not to go on making them. She had not slept all night, but had kept the radio on all the time. When she went into the office, which was next to the dining room, she found Indira sitting at her desk. Smiling, the ex-Prime Minister said to her, “Usha, you have to give back the fat lady.”

  “Fat lady?”

  “Yes, the figurine they lent us from the National Museum.”

  She was referring to a statue without a head or arms, of no great value, which Indira had borrowed from the museum to decorate her sitting room. Usha immediately found the corresponding receipt and set to work. “I knew that Mrs Gandhi had said that to relax the tension. It was very typical of her.”

  It was necessary to move house soon because, in spite of owning a large comfortable house in Dupleix Road, her successor, the Conservative Hindu, Morarji Desai, wanted to make Indira’s home his official residence. Throwing her out of the house was a symbol of his victory and of his petty-mindedness at the same time. Indira was hurt. But what could she do? The civil servants who came to check the offices and other rooms were already in the house with an inventory in their hands. They began to take away objects and appliances that had been prerogatives of the Prime Minister: secret telephones, typewriters, photocopiers, air-conditioning units, office tables and chairs, and all that while Usha and Sonia were classifying documents, putting files away and desperately trying to impose some order on all that chaos.

  A few days after she came back with the rest of the family from her friend Sabine’s house, where they had taken refuge, Sonia found civil servants taking away furniture, lamps, cutlery and crockery. All the decoration she had put in over the last nine years, was being moved out by removal men who acted with the arrogance of the victor. The feeling of helplessness became even greater when she noticed the absence of the official servants, the secretaries provided by the government, the guards at the entrance and even the gardeners, who had vanished, some of them without even saying goodbye. Once the boss was gone, the rats were leaving the ship.

  Indira owned a plot of land in Mehrauli, in the outskirts of the city, which Firoz had bought in 1959 and where she dreamed of retiring with her family. Rajiv had invested part of his savings in building a country home, but he had run out of money to complete it. Anyway, Indira did not want to be exiled to the countryside. She preferred to stay near her grandchildren, at the heart of things, in New Delhi. She knew the words of one of Napoleon’s generals called Desaix, from the battle of Marengo: “It is true that I have just lost a battle, but it is two o’clock in the afternoon and before night falls I can win another one.” At this stage, Indira knew that the ideas of success and defeat were both ephemeral in politics.

  It was an old family friend who saved her. The diplomat Mohammed Yunus, generously offered to vacate his house at number 12, Willingdon Crescent, in order to allow the Gandhis to live there. It was where Sanjay and Maneka’s wedding had taken place three years before. This new home was quite a lot smaller and Sonia wondered how they were all going to fit in there. The move lasted several days, the time it took to move the possessions accumulated over thirteen years, the belongings of five adults, two children, five dogs, countless boxes of books, files overflowing with papers and documents, pictures, objects, souvenirs from trips, etc. Indira was unwilling to throw anything away: every paper, every gift, every book, was a memory. So
they piled up in boxes and trunks in the hallways. In Indira’s room there was only space for her bed and her favourite armchair, whose back she used for leaning on and writing. She no longer had a shorthand secretary or even an office of her own. She entertained people on the veranda or in the overcrowded dining room. Sonia organized things so there would always be a vase with some gladioli within sight.

  A large part of the work of this huge move fell on Sonia’s shoulders, and she had to buy, or borrow from her friends, a fridge, several air conditioning units, radiators, saucepans, frying pans and kitchen utensils. Her sense of family had intensified from living in India. She worked with a perfect sense of organization, which reminded her of her parents during her childhood, when they were poor in Lusiana and had to work all hours to keep their heads above water. Her knowledge of horticulture came back to her and she cleared an area at the back of the garden where she planted lettuces, courgettes, tomatoes and some greens that were unknown and exotic in India, like broccoli. Having known hard times helped her to overcome the difficult patch with more strength than her husband, who could not forgive himself for not having been firmer: “I was unable to put a stop to my brother’s activities,” he had confessed to a family friend, not hiding his frustration.

  As the cook had left and Indira was reluctant to hire another one in case he was a government spy and might poison them, Sonia had to take charge of doing the shopping and preparing the meals. In that family they had never tasted such delicious lasagnas, pasta a la puttanesca and risottos as in those fateful days. She had also learned to cook Indian dishes, which she seasoned with milder spices than normal. She was expert at making spinach with cheese and chicken with korma sauce based on ground almonds, coriander and cream. Cooking was also her way of spoiling the family and helping to relax the atmosphere. The nun at Sonia’s school had said that she had the quality of a peace-maker, hadn’t she? That quality kept the family united during that time. Rajiv and Sanjay were still not talking to each other, except for the bare necessities, in spite of the fact that now their rooms were opposite each other down the corridor. Indira insisted on keeping up the custom of eating together at least once a day, but it was almost impossible to have the two brothers sitting at the same table. Rajiv blamed Sanjay for the family’s fall in status, for having gone from being the most highly respected to being like pariahs. It was also true that they lived off Rajiv’s salary and the donations of the few faithful friends who had not abandoned Indira, hoping perhaps that their loyalty would be rewarded at some future time. Sanjay did not bring anything in, rather the opposite: he needed money to pay the horde of lawyers that were defending him from endless accusations that attributed him with the most horrible crimes. He could not bring any money into the family’s coffers, but he tried to make up by saying that one of the magnates who was helping them financially was a young friend of his, the owner of a soft drinks factory in New Delhi. Maneka, true to herself, did not help with the household chores, unlike Indira, who did not hesitate to pick up a broom and start sweeping. “Sonia cooked, Maneka ate,” said a friend of the family. The result was that the relationship between Indira and Sonia became even closer during that period.

  Shortly after they settled in, Usha felt that there was no sense in her staying on. She continued going on alternate days, until she decided to leave completely: “I’m going to go to Bombay with my sister,” she told Indira, who guessed this was an excuse and that she would not be back. But Usha did not dare to tell her the truth: perhaps she might have stayed if Sanjay and his henchman, secretary Dhawan, had not gone on lording it with that air of arrogance that Usha could not stand. Indira gave a sad smile when they said goodbye. She felt sorry to lose that woman who had been her secretary for so many years. She had trusted her utterly and she knew that Usha knew the innermost secrets of her heart.

  Indira was mentally and physically exhausted, as well as worried about the general exodus, the fights at home between her sons and the reprisals that the new government, she was sure, was going to take. She had black bags under her eyes, and it looked as if her whole body had shrunk. As ex-Prime Minister, she was entitled to continuing official protection, but the new head of the government, her bitterest political enemy, Morarji Desai, an orthodox Hindu, wanted to take it away from her just as he had taken away her home.

  “What is she afraid of?” he asked one of Indira’s ex-ministers. “It isn’t a good thing for her to be always surrounded by police officers.”

  “There’s an atmosphere that’s hostile to her and her son…”

  “No, it isn’t that. It’s her vanity.”

  The new Prime Minister immediately launched into a diatribe against women in power, from Cleopatra to Indira, including Catherine of Russia, coming to the conclusion that they had all been full of vanity and were disasters as heads of government.

  The campaign of harassment that man unleashed against the Gandhis turned into a real witch hunt. At first, Sonia was surprised to always see the same men following her a certain distance away when she went shopping. The same thing happened with the other members of the family, including Maneka. Indira found out that they were members of the CBI (Central Bureau of Intelligence, the central intelligence agency of the government) who had instructions to follow them and bug their phone conversations. With the arrogance of someone who had never had to face up to a misfortune from which he not recovered, Sanjay sarcastically told the secret service agents who were following him that he would take them in his own car in order to save petrol. One day, they turned up at the half-built house in Mehrauli with metal detectors. “What are you looking for?” Rajiv asked them. They did not answer, but later on he heard them shouting when the detector began to emit a whistling sound. They thought they had found the treasure that Sanjay had buried. The treasure turned out to be an empty can of cooking oil.

  It was approximately at that time, in the middle of the heat before the monsoon rains, when Indira appeared late one night at her friend Pupul’s house. She often came to visit her, to escape from the tension at home. Once again Rajiv had thrown in her face that: “Sanjay and Dhawan are the ones who have brought you to this.” Indira had not answered, and had simply lowered her head. She knew perfectly well that in the final analysis she was the one responsible for everything that had happened and that is why she did not blame Sanjay. “I’ve come to sit for a little while and enjoy the peace and quiet,” she told her friend. And she sat a while in silence, on the veranda, finding herself again.

  Another night of extreme heat she arrived very agitated and with a look of desperation: “I have reliable information that they want to put Sanjay in prison and torture him.” Pupul was shocked and did not know what to say. Indira was terribly afraid. “Neither my son nor I are the kind of people who commit suicide, so if we turn up dead, don’t believe what they’ll be saying…” The fact that in its desire for vengeance the new government was searching feverishly for evidence in order to take revenge on her through Sanjay was an open secret. That they had decided to torture Sanjay was more a product of her paranoid imagination than part of an organized plan. No one knew better than Indira that from a position of power it was relatively easy to manipulate the intelligence agencies. And the former empress of India felt desperately alone. She saw politicians who went to visit her every day, but she could not count on any of them. Those who could help her did not dare to go near the house because they were afraid of the surveillance. On the other hand, the family’s financial situation, with so much being spent on lawyers, was becoming untenable. The media, who had so docilely bent to her demands when she had imposed the Emergency—to such an extent that as soon as the state of emergency was lifted, an opposition politician said of the role of the Press: “They asked you to submit and you choose to crawl”—now spent its time earnestly inventing terrible stories, or exaggerating rumours to make it look as though the Gandhis were a band of delinquents. “They accuse me of all kinds of crimes, even of having killed I don’t know
how many people…” Indira complained. It was true: the Home Secretary had said in Parliament that Indira had “planned to kill all the opposition leaders that she had had thrown into prison during the state of emergency.” Five days later, the government ordered the Supreme Court Judge, J.C. Shah to set up a committee of investigation “to find out if there was subversion of proceedings, abuse of authority, unlawful use of power and excesses during the state of emergency”. Another commission was created specifically to investigate everything concerning the Maruti. The government was determined to make Indira and Sanjay swallow the same bitter pill that they had given the country during the state of emergency.

  In that atmosphere, the news of the suicide of Maneka’s father, Colonel Anand, sounded like the first notes in a wider drama that was beginning to unfold in the background, like the first chords of a funeral march. His body was found face down on an embankment, next to a pistol and a note that said: “Worry about Sanjay unbearable”. At first, it was not known whether it had been a suicide or a murder, although Maneka and the closest members of the family were convinced that the colonel had taken his own life. He had already made a similar attempt some time before, by taking an overdose of pills and he had a history of mental instability and depression. He had not been able to bear the sudden fall in reputation and social position. His countless convenience friends had vanished into the thin New Delhi air. The rumour immediately went round that his father-in-law knew too much about Sanjay’s shady business deals and that his death was actually a murder disguised as a suicide. But nothing could be proved and as soon as the attention of the Press disappeared, the case fell into oblivion.