The Red Sari: A Novel

by Javier Moro

  31

  Painting. Concentrating on each brush stroke, without her hand shaking. Mixing and re-mixing the paint on the palette, finding the correct tone, the right colour. Taking off her glasses and putting them on again. Moving slowly forwards, step by tiny step. Scrape with the spatula, smooth down, clean, add a little colour, start again… For Sonia, her courses in restoring old oil paintings in the National Museum were a kind of therapy that allowed her to forget the commotion at home for a few hours. Those stolen moments provided her with intense, personal satisfaction and now she was sure that this would have been her real vocation if life had not led her along other paths. It was an activity that allowed her to develop her potential, her nature as a perfectionist who liked to fix, repair and patch. To restore something she had to become invisible. It was not a question of inventing, but of interpreting the intentions of the original artist. It was not for rebels who might end up imposing their own criteria. It was for characters like hers, malleable, not fond of confrontation and rather docile, who always ended up adapting themselves best and getting the best out of what there was. Now she could spend time on her hobby because her home was an oasis of peace again, as it was before Maneka came to live there. And that peace helped Indira to calm down, little by little, surrounded by the love of the grandchildren she had left and the certainty that Sonia was taking charge of the house, which meant, for example, organizing a dinner for Mitterand and his entourage, or a reception for Moslem leaders at midday and another for party leaders in the evening.

  Sonia always tried to adjust her timetable and commitments so that she would have free time with Rajiv and her mother-in-law. She felt that, perhaps to counteract the harshness of life in politics and to get over the upset of the battle with Maneka, both of them needed now more than ever the stability, privacy and the direct and open relationships they could find within the family. Between the four walls of their home, neither Rajiv nor Indira had to weigh their words or worry about what they were saying or who they were saying it to. Sonia kept a sanctuary for them so they could be protected from the hustle and bustle of politics. So they could enjoy the warrior’s rest. “I was dedicated to my husband with unconditional love,” she would say. She could have said the same about Indira. Rajiv was deeply grateful to her for having agreed to take the step and change her life, and he told her so: “As the Hindu tradition says, a man is only half a person and his wife is the other half. With you, I feel exactly like that”, he wrote to her in a note one day before he went off to work.

  At that time, Nadia, Sonia’s younger sister, went to live in New Delhi with her husband, a Spanish diplomat. She was a young woman with fine features, dark-haired and with undeniable natural distinction. She was introverted and she liked reading, and the influence of her husband made her become fond of Spanish literature. Her ambition was to become a translator from Italian into Spanish. Now she was too busy with her two young daughters, but she was leaving it for the future… For Sonia, it was wonderful to have her so close by, to be able to organize excursions at the weekends with both couples’ children or to go for dinner at friends’ homes, where cosmopolitan Indians and Europeans resident in the city got together. Nadia and her husband had a much busier social life than Rajiv and Sonia, because they were part of the diplomatic circle in the capital of India.

  At the beginning of 1982, the family went through the separation from Rahul. Following the custom inherited from the English, he was sent to a boarding school which was in the foothills of the Himalayas. It had been founded by an English teacher who had stayed on as headmaster after independence. Doon School was an institution with an excellent reputation, created in the image of British schools, where the children and grandchildren of the wealthy studied. At first, Sonia had been opposed to the idea. Separating from her son at the age of eleven is not part of the Italian tradition, although Rajiv reminded her that her own parents had sent her to a convent boarding school in Giavenno.

  “Yes, but that was only twenty kilometres away from home.”

  Doon School was seven hours from Delhi, which, on the scale of India, was a short distance. Even so, it was hard to be apart from the boy. It was the same suffering that Great-grandfather Motilal and Grandfather Nehru had gone through. At that time, the well-to-do classes sent their offspring to England when they were seven. Rajiv was as convinced as his great-grandfather that parting from his son, however painful it might be, was an experience that would help the boy to grow up, to be stronger and more independent. What worried him, as much as it did Sonia, was that Rahul should be mature enough to deal with the attacks and cruelty of his classmates. They had already had to struggle with that kind of problem when they went to school in Delhi and both Rahul and Priyanka were the victims of the taunts of some children who made fun of the family. Except that then their parents were nearby to offer their support. “If they get at them when they’re far away, who will console them?” Sonia wondered uneasily. “Sometimes they’ll say all kinds of nonsense about your grandmother, your mother or me,” Rajiv wrote to his son to give him confidence, “but you mustn’t worry. Perhaps you’ll come across some boys at school who use it to get at you, but you’ll discover that most of those things are not true… You have to learn to fight against that kind of provocation… to not take any notice of things that might annoy you, and not let it get to you.”

  What the boy found out from the newspapers was about the numerous tours his parents made. At that time, Indira travelled a lot, and whenever she could she was accompanied by her son and Sonia. They went to New York together, where Indira was delighted to meet up again with her old friend Dorothy Norman, who described her thus: “There she was, the woman who led a highly complex society of over seven hundred million people, most of them poor and facing all kinds of problems; a woman still overcome by the grief of having lost a son, sadder than before…”

  “Yes, I am calmer, sadder too.” Indira confirmed. “But would it be fair to ask for more? Life has been splendid to me, both in happiness and in grief. How can you appreciate one without the other?”

  Dorothy would remember Rajiv and Sonia with great affection because of the way they were with her. She saw that Indira was very proud of her son: “Rajiv has done a magnificent job with the Asian Games,” she told her. The games, inaugurated on November 19th, 1982, the day that Indira was 65, had been a feat of organization. Six stadiums, three luxury hotels and a whole district with accommodation for the athletes had been built in record time. The physionomy of south Delhi changed forever. Rajiv had come out of his first test looking good, with the image of an efficient, modern leader, and a good manager, although the Press denounced the living conditions of the labourers, mainly immigrants from the south. They were bony men and women with dark skin, who were cruelly exploited by the legions of go-betweens, contractors, works chiefs, builders, manufacturers of bricks, cement and steel who handled the budget. It was not an easy task to modernize India. Yes, avant-garde buildings were being put up, but it was done by a mediaeval society, where children worked from dawn to dusk for an amount of money that was stolen from them by those who hired them. Rajiv had realized that the challenge lay in changing that social structure that was eroded by corruption. An immense challenge, because Indian society had had those vices for thousands and thousands of years, including the exploitation of some castes by others. If a salary of a hundred rupees a day was set aside in the budget for a labourer, everybody knew that he would end up getting thirty, at best. The rest was kept by the contractor or the middlemen. Then there was something else that revealed the poverty of the country. A large number of the blood tests carried out on Indian athletes indicated the presence of anaemia. How could they expect to compete with Japanese, Koreans, Malaysians? Because of all that, the games were a bittersweet victory for Rajiv.

  Although Rajiv could not always accompany his mother, Sonia did every time Indira asked her. She had never travelled so much: she toured several countries in the east, Indonesia, Fi
ji, Tonga, Australia, the Philippines as well as other places in South America. When the trip was to Europe, she took advantage and hopped over to Orbassano to give her family a hug. Sonia always avoided the cameras and she did not at all like civil servants who treated her with special deference for being the daughter-in-law of the Prime Minister, which usually pleased the Indian delegation and their hosts abroad. In Washington, Sonia was able to see for herself that Indira was still not connecting with American presidents. This time it was Ronald Reagan, whose attention Indira could not manage to hold for more than a few minutes, as though the ravages of the illness that would attack him later in life had already begun. “Do you realize?” she said to her daughter-in-law after the stopover in Moscow where she had had an interview with Brezhnev. “The future of the human race is in the hands of two old men, firm in their positions, and with no flexibility or desire to initiate dialogue.” But at that moment Sonia was more worried about Indira’s health than the future of the world. She had noticed that when she was tired her mother-in-law had a tic in one eye, and her eyelids started trembling all the time. And she was sleeping very badly. She would suddenly say odd things: “When I close my eyes, I can see a misshapen old woman who wants to hurt me.”

  Home in New Delhi, Indira told her friend Pupul, “I’ve received secret reports that someone is performing tantric and black magic rituals to destroy me. Pupul, do you think there are evil forces that can be unleashed through tantric rituals?”

  “Even if it were true,” her friend told her, “Why are you reacting like this? By doing that, you’re only making those forces stronger…”

  “Do I have to ignore those reports then? I get them every day. . What shall I do?”

  Pupul and Sonia were perplexed. Was that behaviour the result of her inner solitude which she had never really left behind since her childhood, since she waited alone at home for her parents to come out of prison or the clinic? She had not seen her grandson Firoz Varun for almost two years, and both Pupul and Sonia guessed that the pain of being apart from him was ravaging Indira’s heart. She kept up her stoic composure, but deep inside she was so hurt, that perhaps she was going crazy.

  Sonia did not think so. She attributed Indira’s crazy ideas to the evil influence of her guru, Dhirendra Brahmachari, who still wandered around the house, always dressed in orange kurtas. He was like a blowfly, which always came back, no matter how hard you tried to chase it away. He was fatter, his matted grey hair hung down on his shoulders, and he had let the nail on his little finger grow until it was as long and sharp as a knife and disgusted Sonia so much that she found it hard to hide her feelings. Everyone knew that the guru frightened Indira with those supposed “secret reports”, but no one knew what to do to stop it. It was incredible: the Prime Minister of India believed more in those “reports” than in those of the government’s Statistics Department. The fact is that in her times of depression, now more and more frequent and intense, the supernatural acquired worrying importance to her.

  There was another reason that explained why she used the services of the guru, and it was because another holy man, a thirty-year old Sikh called Brindanwale, had launched the most serious political challenge of her life. That man was a simple village preacher, a fundamentalist who called on people to purify Sikhism, return it to its former orthodoxy and fight for a Sikh homeland. The conflict with the Sikhs went back to Partition which, with all its horrors and massacres, caused a trauma in the awareness of this community, born in the fifteenth century to fight against the idolatry and dogma of Hinduism and Islam, the two dominant religions of the time. In 1947, Partition tore apart the country of the Sikhs, the Punjab. “The land of the five rivers” was one of the most beautiful and fertile regions of India, a countryside of golden fields of wheat and corn crossed by rivers of silvery waters. The border between Pakistan and India, drawn by the English, cut the region in half. Western Punjab became part of Pakistan; eastern Punjab remained in India, with a population that was half Sikh and half Hindu. As a reaction, a strong separatist feeling left its mark on the Sikh population.

  The curious thing about Brindanwale is that Sanjay had discovered him. Concerned about the progress of the moderate nationalist party which took many votes away from the Congress Party in the Punjab, Sanjay thought that by backing and promoting Brindanwale, he would manage to divide and weaken Sikh nationalism. The problem, which no one could have foreseen, is that Brindanwale got out of control and ended up becoming a monster who now threatened Indira.

  He looked like a holy man who had come directly out of an ancient age, with a long, silky black beard that fell to his waist. He had penetrating, dark little eyes, an aquiline nose, a severe, gaunt face and he always wore a turban. He dressed in a long blue gown, and proudly carried his metre-long kirpan (sable) in his sash. Almost two metres tall, he was an imposing presence. His speeches, full of fanatic passion, inflamed many Sikhs who dreamed of independence from the rest of India. He had left his wife and children in order to lead a legion of followers, as extremist as he was. Sanjay had not counted on the fact that, as his influence grew and more people gathered around him, Brindanwale’s ambition would also grow along with his desire for autonomy. Shortly after the 1980 elections, in which he participated actively in the campaign, supporting the Congress Party and even sharing the podium with Indira on one occasion, the holy man decided he no longer wanted to be the puppet of the Gandhis and broke his connections to the party. In time, he and his followers demanded the creation of a sovereign state called Khalistan, “the land of the pure”. The land of the Sikhs.

  The problem is that they did so using violence as a means of intimidation and pressure. In 1981, Brindanwale was accused of ordering the murder of the owner of a chain of newspapers in the Punjab whose editorial line was very critical of his activities and ideology. But his imprisonment caused a wave of demonstrations so violent and destructive that the central government intervened. Hesitating and not really knowing which path to take, Indira herself ordered the Home Secretary to release him when only three weeks had gone by. She did so precisely not to turn Brindanwale into a martyr, but it was already too late. He had gone into prison as a fanatical provincial preacher and he came out a national hero. He made a tour of the large cities during which he proved his immense popularity among the Sikhs of the diaspora. But his return to the Punjab coincided with an increase in the violence. Every day, in the alleys of Amritsar or Jallandar, the bodies of Hindus or Moslems appeared with their throats cut. In several temples, faithful Hindus were horrified to find the heads of their sacred animal, the cow, thrown at the feet of the altars. Added to these bloody provocations there were blacklists published by Brindanwale in the newspapers with the names of the adversaries he intended to eliminate. And he carried out his threats. The son of the murdered owner of the newspaper chain was, in turn, shot down, which spread terror among the media and the population in general. The Sikhs who dared to criticize him also became the target of his attacks. He went back to jail, but his followers continued to kill their opponents. When he came out, he and his army dug in at the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikhs.

  Built in the middle of the shining waters of a broad ritual lake crossed by a bridge, the Golden Temple is a white marble building covered in decorations of copper, silver and gold. The dome, completely covered in gold panels, houses the original manuscript of the Holy Book of the Sikhs, the Granth Sahib. The faithful always circle clockwise round the lake; they walk barefoot over the shining marble and have their heads covered by brightly coloured turbans and wear long beards and thick moustaches. Brindanwale’s army occupied this place of peace. They got into the building adjacent to the temple, from where they sent out orders to the terrorist commandos to murder, pillage, profane and burn in the villages of the Punjab. While Indira still did not know how to fight this grotesque creation of Sanjay’s, Brindanwale received TV teams from all over the world who treated him like a real media star. The polic
e, whose morale was at rock bottom owing to the increase in delinquency and violence, did not dare to enter such a holy place.

  Other outbreaks of violence in Kashmir and Assam gave the impression that the nation was heading straight for chaos and disintegration. The murder of a police inspector as he prayed in the Golden Temple on April 23rd, 1983, killed by shots fired by Brindanwale’s men hidden behind the bars of the windows, forced Indira to take a decision. But what decision? To attack the temple with the army and risk provoking the fury of the other Sikhs? To lay siege to the temple until the terrorists had no alternative but to surrender? Indira tried to negotiate with leaders of the moderate nationalist party, while the pillaging and murders continued, but any agreement that did not include full independence for Khalistan was systematically vetoed by Brindanwale. He, in turn, emboldened by the indecision of the central government and by the fact that the murder of the police inspector had gone unpunished, dug himself in in the Akal Takht, the second most holy building in the complex. He got hold of sophisticated weapons paid for by Sikhs abroad and turned the temple into a real fortress. Indira, Rajiv and their advisors waited patiently for the leaders more moderate than Brindanwale to gain control or distance themselves from the fanatical preacher. They thought that time would be on their side, but two years went by and the terrorists were still entrenched there.