The Red Sari: A Novel

by Javier Moro

  25

  The next day, Indira was arrested as she left Parliament, amid a huge demonstration of support and cries of “Long live Indira Gandhi!” This time she did not ask to be handcuffed. The police van where she was put made its way with great difficulty through the crowd. She was taken to Tihar Jail, whose name alone was enough to terrify the most hardened criminals. But unlike the Maharanis of Jaipur and Gwalior, she was not locked in a cell with prostitutes and common delinquents. She was put in the same huts where the leader of the opposition had been held during the state of emergency. She was on her own—quite a privilege. Two female guards took turns to watch her. When they brought her something to eat she refused to even try it.

  “I do not intend to eat anything that has not been brought here by my family,” she said imperiously, knowing that she could only trust food from Sonia’s hands. The guard went out to discuss it with her superiors. As usual in India, there were long conversations that seemed to go on forever.

  Meanwhile, Indira spent her time looking round her cell. The noise from the yard and the other women prisoners could be heard. It was spacious and was generally better than what she had expected. It had a wooden bed with no mattress, and there were bars on the windows, although they lacked glass or blinds. It was very cold. At the end of December, the temperature can come close to zero at night.

  Indira was blocking the window hole with a blanket to keep out the cold and try to have a little privacy when the guard came back.

  “You have a visit.”

  Sonia and Rajiv were waiting for her in the visiting room, a large room with peeling walls, some tables and metal chairs and a lot of people, mostly poor, bony, young men who had come to see their wives and mothers who had been locked up. The lower part of the walls was covered in red stains, the vestiges of the countless gobs of spit of all the people who chewed betel leaves. It smelt of urine and rancid incense. As they had already been there to visit Sanjay, they were not horrified. But they seemed upset and it was Indira who had to raise their spirits.

  “I’m fine, really. I’m going to take advantage of the time to do some reading. They let me have up to six books … aren’t I lucky?” she said sarcastically. “They’ve made a kind of special washroom for me and I’ll be able to have a shower in the morning with hot water. The cell is quite clean but it’s all so horribly ugly, as you can see… How are the children?”

  “Priyanka wanted to come and see you, but we thought …”

  Indira’s face lit up.

  “Oh yes!” she said, smiling. “Bring her. It’s good for her to see what a jail is like. From a very early age, we Nehrus have visited our relatives in jail… We must not lose the tradition.”

  They laughed. As usual, Indira was not letting herself be beaten down by adversity. Not once did she allow the slightest sign of self-pity to show. It was enough for her to be convinced that she had moral right on her side.

  “I’ll come to bring you your food…” Sonia told her.

  “Don’t bring much. I’m not very hungry.”

  Sonia went twice a day to take her food prepared at home. She had to put it all through a metal detector. Then a female guard inspected the containers. Sweets were forbidden because on one occasion a prisoner had offered his jailer a sweet with some narcotic substance inside it and had managed to escape. Neither were bananas permitted in the women’s section: the authorities were so Puritan and suspicious…

  One day Indira told Sonia that she had received two anonymous telegrams. One said: “live frugally”. And the other advised her to count the bars to help the time go by. “I’ve counted them. There are twenty-eight,” she told her. She also said that she kept to a strict routine which helped to pass the days. She woke up at five o’clock and did her yoga exercises. After that she drank a glass of cold milk—which Sonia had brought the day before—and went back to bed until seven. Then she washed, did a little meditation and read a little. The afternoons seemed never-ending, but she did not complain. She spent the time thinking, withdrawing into herself and, curiously, resting. She experienced the best moment when her granddaughter went to visit her. Everybody in the family said that Priyanka was just like her grandmother. She had personality and was wilful and determined. Indira adored her. Rajiv and Sonia had to get involved in very lengthy discussions to get the prison authorities to allow the little girl in. It was a happy reunion in gloomy surroundings.

  Before they left, Indira asked Sonia to do her a favour.

  “I’d like you to send a bunch of flowers to Charan Singh from me with a note for his birthday.”

  “Charan Singh?” asked Sonia in astonishment.

  “Yes, him. Will you do it please?”

  “Of course,” Sonia replied, bemused.

  Charan Singh was one of the leaders of the Janata Party. He had been Home Secretary and the man responsible for her first arrest. Now he had been relegated to a ministry of less importance. Indira knew what she was doing. The Janata government still had three years to run, but she had received information that the members of the coalition were involved in a fight to the death. Charan Singh was resentful of the Prime Minister, Morarji Desai, the man who had insisted on taking away Indira’s home and protection, because he had dismissed him as Home Secretary. Indira thought that she could open up a split between the two leaders, and incite his ambitions so that the government might fall like a piece of rotten fruit. That was the purpose of the bunch of flowers.

  As soon as she came out of jail, there was a letter waiting for her from Charan Singh inviting her to his residence to join the celebrations for the birth of his grandson. In that reassuring family setting, Machiavellian negotiations took place, in which both political adversaries worked out a strategy to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Morarji Desai. In exchange for annulling the new Special Tribunals Law under which Indira and Sanjay could be accused without the usual legal protection, Indira offered the support of the Congress Party to defeat Morarji Desai. And once overthrown, she promised to help Charan Singh to become Prime Minister, which would allow him to satisfy his lifelong ambition. It was Sanjay who took charge of the delicate negotiations, ensuring he left no loose ends.

  The result was that the coalition split apart and Morarji Desai’s government fell, but Charan Singh could not, or would not, revoke the special law, so Indira pulled out her backing, and his government lasted less than a month. In order to get out of the mess, the President of the Republic dissolved Parliament and called new elections for January 1980. Indira had manoeuvred with experience, coolness and efficiency. Just as she had told MPs after her speech, she was getting ready for a comeback, and she would come in through the front door.

  A few months earlier, she had been thinking about giving it all up. She and Sanjay had even talked about retiring to a small town in the Himalayas. The wise man and philosopher Krishnamurti, a personal friend of Pupul’s, had recommended that Indira leave politics and she had replied that she did not know how, with 28 charges open against her. She did not want to end up like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had been executed by hanging on April 4th, 1979 in the courtyard of the central prison in Rawalpindi. The Pakistani dictator, fearful that Bhutto might make a political comeback, like Indira was doing in India, had managed to manipulate the courts to finish off his rival. Here it was not so easy to manipulate justice, because India was still a democracy. But danger was lurking.

  “I have two alternatives,” Indira had told Krishnamurti, “either I fight or they shoot me like a duck in a fairground stall.”

  Now there was no going back. Power was within her reach. True to herself, Indira went out to grasp it. Armed with two suitcases that contained half a dozen raw cotton saris, a thermos flask for hot water and another for cold milk, two cushions, several bags of dried fruit, a box of apples and an umbrella to shade her from the sun, she headed out to the furthest reaches of the sub-continent. She travelled seventy thousand kilometres, spoke at an average of twenty rallies a day, and alto
gether reached an audience of one hundred million. She was seen or heard by one in four voters. She immediately realized that her second spell in jail had made her immensely popular. A martyr and a heroine. In comparison, the candidates from the coalition that made up the Janata Party seemed like old dinosaurs. They were competing not so much with a tiny lady candidate aged sixty- two as with a living myth, a legend dressed in a sari and dusty sandals who aroused the passion of the people. Her message was simple, miles away from any abstractions or ideologies: “Vote for a government that works for you”. Sonia could not imagine that, years later, she herself would use the same slogan.

  Just like in the good times, Indira won hands down in the elections. Sonia was expecting it because she had gone with her on some of her tours round the villages and she had seen her moving totally at ease among the crowds of ragged people, saying a kind word to an old man, doing something nice for a handicapped person, smiling at a woman, giving a flower to a little girl. The memory of that fantastic campaign remained engraved on her mind, and years later it would be of enormous use to her.

  When the results were made official, the house was flooded with friends, journalists, party members, industrial magnates, neighbourhood shopkeepers and people from right across the spectrum of society. There were flowers everywhere. Her friend Pupul found it hard to make her way through the crush of people. When they saw each other, Indira almost burst into tears. “She was very emotional, and a little vague,” her friend would say. “Although she realized that the tide had turned in her favour, the shock of her victory left her feeling knocked out.” Taking in that she was Prime Minister again and that with one stroke of the pen all her problems were solved, took its time. But she reacted immediately.

  “What does it feel like to be leader of India again?” a European correspondent asked Indira. She turned to him with a fiery look.

  “I’ve always been the leader of India,” she answered drily.

  Another journalist, surprised at the massive presence of poor people, said to Indira that she must have done something good for them in the past for so many of them to turn up, to which she replied a little cryptically: “No, the ones we have helped are where they cannot be seen.”

  Sanjay was at her side, smiling, wrapped in a salmon pink shawl, like a young Caesar. He had won too, in the same constituency that had rejected him three years previously. Now his power would be somewhat legitimate. Life was smiling at him for another reason too. Maneka had become pregnant a few months before, when the situation was very bad for both of them. They had come to wonder what sense there was in bringing a child into the world in the middle of so many threats. Now that veil of uncertainty was lifting and the future looked promising. Maneka, very excited, chatted to reporters and friends, proudly exhibiting her bare belly, showing between her top and the skirts of her sari. Rajiv, Sonia and the children were all over the house. Once again, they seemed like one big happy family.

  Those who had been the victims of the campaigns of nationalization and abolition of privileges did not share that joy. The photo of Indira smiling next to Sanjay, which filled the front pages of the main newspapers on the following days, made more than one in that huge country feel a shiver of fear. Mother and son were returning to the attack. In their now decrepit palaces, the heirs of the maharajas received the news with cynicism… What could she take away from them now that she had not already taken away? Such was the hatred that Indira inspired in many families of the old aristocracy of the country that once, on a visit to Bhopal, she was invited to have tea in the home of the heirs of the old begums, who had governed the sultanate for generations. Indira never knew that the slice of chocolate cake she enjoyed so much was tainted by a gob of spit, a hidden gift from the lady of the house who, noblesse oblige, nevertheless treated her with the utmost deference.

  On January 14th 1980, Indira was sworn in as Prime Minister before the President of the Republic, surrounded by her family, a few friends and party comrades, in the resplendent Ashoka hall of the former Viceroy’s palace, whose paintings on the ceilings and walls told the mythological story of age-old India. It was the fourth time she had done so in this same setting, whose grandiosity evoked the enormous power that she was being granted. This time she did not swear on the Constitution, as on previous occasions, but in the name of God. She had always been a little superstitious, unlike her father, but now mentioning the Almighty was a surprise. Perhaps she admitted deep inside that her return to power was due more to destiny than to her own merits or the failings of her adversaries. Perhaps so many attacks had left a dent in her armour, and she needed comfort. She had always felt respect for the supernatural, a legacy she attributed to her mother, a deeply religious woman. She had always listened to astrologers. That date had been chosen by her yoga teacher, the guru Dhirendra Brahmachari. According to him, it was an auspicious day as it corresponded to the winter solstice in the Hindu calendar. For twenty years, this curious character, who also practised astrology, told her the lucky or unlucky days for certain activities. Lately, his influence had diminished considerably. Indira looked at him with suspicion because the Shah Commission had brought his shady dealings into the open and questioned the origin of his fortune. Even so, she continued to ask him about good or bad days before taking a decision. At her age and after what she had been through, Indira did not want to take any risks by tempting fate.

  Just after the swearing in, Indira went straight to the President’s palace, to her old office in South Block. She could not trust the majority of her former ministers and colleagues because they had betrayed her. Neither did she want to surround herself with figures that people might identify with the state of emergency. She had to choose the members of her cabinet from among a hotchpotch of MPs without much experience, many of them from the ranks of Sanjay’s Youth Congress. To the surprise of many and relief of some, she did not give her son any portfolio, in spite of his legitimacy as validated in the polls. She did not want to expose him too much. She preferred him at her side, wanting to train him and see him mature under her protection. She had complete confidence that Sanjay would be able to revitalize the party and ensure that the rural development projects would be properly carried out. And she did not want to repeat the mistakes of the past.

  Meanwhile, Sonia took charge of the move again. Indira’s victory meant that they were all returning to number 1, Safdarjung Road. It was becoming urgent to make more space again. First of all, Indira wanted to send a dozen Hindu priests to purify the house where Morarji Desai had resided while he had been harassing her. She had found out that her rival was an assiduous practitioner of urinotherapy, an ancient custom that consists of drinking a glassful of the first urine of the day every morning on an empty stomach. To ensure that there was not a single glass left from the old tenant in the house, Sonia and Indira busied themselves collecting them all, placing them in a box and sending them back to the administration. She also sent a team of bricklayers to knock down the Indian- style bathroom that her rival had had built and replace it with a European-style one, with a toilet and bath tub. When they moved, it was as if they had never been away from that house. “An air of renewed elegance reigned in all the rooms, which were again full of servants and enormous vases of flowers falling in cascades”, Pupul would write. Sonia once again took on her role as housewife extraordinaire in that special home, where dinners and receptions had to be organized for a continual parade of personalities: Giscard d’Estaing, Mobutu, Yasser Arafat, Andrei Gromyko, Jimmy Carter, etc. They all came to strengthen ties with one of the most powerful women in the world.

  Family life became pleasant again. The new situation and greater space made the atmosphere more relaxed. The fights stopped, and, even better, the silences. Everyone was attentive to Maneka, who was about to give birth. During the pregnancy, Sonia had tacitly made peace with her sister-in-law. She had chosen to forget the old bickering, the mood swings, the nasty comments, to concentrate on her duty as “elder bahu”—elder dau
ghter-in-law—and to help Maneka with her experience. She kept an eye on her all the time. The family comes first. Definitely, Sonia was by now very Indian. Although the two sisters-in-law were like chalk and cheese, they managed to reach a kind of entente cordiale. Indira, who was beside herself with joy when she thought about her new grandchild, had already chosen a name for him: Firoz, like her husband. Maneka was not convinced and wanted to call him Varun. Sanjay settled the matter. The little one would be called Firoz Varun.

  Rajiv no longer had to spend almost all his free time, outside flying time, in the Tax Office. Once again, he could spend time on his family and his hobbies, such as photography or the radio. He was a wonderful father. He never missed an event at school, or reading a story if he got home before the children had gone to bed. Photography gave him a lot of enjoyment; it was a form of relaxation after the concentration required by his flying, often at impossible times. His hobby had grown over the years. He liked to experiment with filters and new equipment, he never missed an exhibition and he subscribed to specialized magazines. He also encouraged his children to take an interest. He taught them to develop their visual sensitivity by asking them to identify different tones of green in the garden. Later, he advised his son to note down the exposure time and speed at which he took photos so that he could correct them and improve. His camera was always there on special occasions: birthdays, anniversaries, family celebrations, etc. and if he was at home when a photographer came to take a portrait of his mother, he would take his camera and join in the session. He always enjoyed a special sense of camaraderie with photographers. He gave his mother a miniature folding album that she took with her on all her trips. “Rajiv, give me some more recent photos,” she asked him repeatedly when she tired of always seeing the same ones. Indira loved the photos of her grandchildren. She chose the ones she liked on contact sheets and asked Rajiv to enlarge and frame them. Her office was full of them.