The Red Sari: A Novel

by Javier Moro

  34

  Another bodyguard who had been following a little behind Indira and who was not part of the conspiracy, ran towards her. But before he could reach her, another burst of firing hit him in the ankle and he fell face down. The other people with her, paralyzed with fear and terrified that they were going to be gunned down too, crouched down as though to shelter behind Indira’s body. They were expecting the worst. Soon they heard the voices of other security guards who came running from Akbar Road. They thought a violent shoot-out would ensue, but at that moment the two Sikh guards threw down their weapons. “I’ve done what I had to do,” said the giant, Beant Singh in Punjabi. “Now you do what you have to do.” It was his way of saying that, in the name of the Sikhs, he had avenged the sacrilege in the Golden Temple. The policeman who had been holding the black umbrella hurled himself on top of him and threw him to the ground. Meanwhile, secretary Dhawan, who had miraculously come out unscathed from the last burst of firing, managed to come out of his stupor and drag himself over to Indira and squat down next to her to help her. More soldiers from the border police corps arrived immediately. They had been on duty in a sentry box in the street, and they neutralized the other killer bodyguard. They took them to the sentry box, where there was a tussle. It was said that they tried to escape. The fact is that they, in turn, were shot down. Beant Singh died instantly. The other one, seriously wounded, was going to be taken to hospital. Later it became known that in his off-duty hours, Beant used to frequent the gurdwaras (Sikh temples) in Delhi and that he used to talk to the most fanatic elements there. The other one had just spent a month on holiday in his town in the Punjab, in the very heart of Sikh nationalism.

  Indira’s personal physician, that one of the servants had called on hearing the shooting, came panting up and busied himself with reanimation exercises. “The ambulance, quick!” he shouted. “Call the ambulance to take Mrs Gandhi to hospital!” An ambulance was always parked outside the residence as a routine part of the security of the Prime Minister. But at that critical moment, it was not available.

  “The driver has gone off for a cup of tea!” said a servant.

  “Get a car then! Bring a car, now!”

  They managed to get a white Ambassador, which they manoeuvred and got into the garden. Secretary Dhawan and the policeman grabbed Indira’s inert body and carried her to the car. They lay her on the back seat, and they sat in the front. The car was about to drive off when Sonia appeared, in her dressing gown, haggard, with her hair wet and in a mess and her eyes full of terror. The shooting had caught her in the shower. At first she had thought it was firecrackers, like the ones children throw in Diwali. But the scream of one of the servants made her realize that something terrible had happened.

  And there was the confirmation of her fears: her mother-in-law lay on the back seat, lifeless. The woman she had identified with Joan of Arc since she was a child had in turn been betrayed and sent to her death by the people she trusted. Sonia got into the car. “Oh, Mummy! Oh my God, Mummy!” she said as she knelt on the back seat in order to hold Indira’s head in her hands and hug her and talk to her and keep her going until she breathed her last, in the hope that she might reverse the inevitable course of destiny. The car sped off towards the All India Institute of Medical Science, the same hospital where Sanjay had been taken after crashing his plane. Sonia would remember that trip of only five kilometres as the longest of her life. The traffic was very heavy and it seemed as if they would never get there. New Delhi was no longer the same city as when she had arrived there; now there were hardly any carts pulled by oxen or camels, or elephants in the streets. The population had quadrupled and the road traffic was very heavy. Indira was bleeding to death in her hands and Sonia felt helpless. “Oh my God, go faster!” she repeated as she wiped the sleeve of her dressing gown over Indira’s face and tried to clean her wounds. Like a crazy pendulum, her state of mind wavered from blackest black to hope. “What if she’s only unconscious?” she asked herself suddenly as the car tried to make its way through, hooting the horn. “Quick!” she said to the driver. “Maybe they can save her!” But no matter what efforts the driver made, it was impossible to get through the traffic. Could any of those sleepy drivers have imagined that in that white Ambassador that did not even have a siren available, lay the body of the woman who had ruled their destinies for over twenty years? In Sonia’s mind, questions arose one after another, in disorder, like a volcano erupting. “Where is Rajiv? How can I let him know? Where are the children? I have to send for them! Oh my God, Mummy, please don’t die!” There was blood everywhere: on Sonia’s dressing gown the bloodstains were bright red, on Indira’s pretty sari they had taken on a brownish tinge. The velvet covered seats were also soaked with it, making a huge dark stain. But, even so, Sonia still refused to accept that the worst had happened, and that it was all over now for the woman who until that day had been the pillar of her existence. Deep down, she already felt that the assassins’ bullets had claimed other victims: her happiness and that of her family.

  At nine thirty-two, or sixteen minutes after the attack, they got to the hospital. But no one had phoned ahead from the house to say that the Prime Minister was about to arrive there. When the young doctors on duty in the Emergency Room recognized her, they went into a panic. One of them had the presence of mind to call an expert cardiologist and few minutes later a team of the most veteran doctors in the hospital came down to take care of Indira. They performed a tracheotomy on her to help the oxygen get to her lungs and they inserted several tubes in order to give her a blood transfusion. They decided to take her up to the operating theatre on the eighth floor. There, the electrocardiogram showed signs of a weak heartbeat. They told Sonia, who was alone in the waiting room. A dim light of hope shone in her tearful eyes. They told her that the doctors were giving Indira’s heart a vigorous massage, but they refrained from explaining to her that it was obvious from the dilatation of the pupils that her brain was irreparably damaged. The bullets had perforated the Prime Minister’s liver, lungs, several bones and her spine. “She’s like a sieve,” said one doctor. Only her heart was untouched. Even so, for four hours, the doctors tried to perform a miracle.

  Sonia could barely control her trembling. The idea that the enemy was inside the house was terrifying. Who could be trusted? What if some servant or employee or a secretary was involved? It was as if all the certainties in her life had suddenly collapsed. Once again that feeling of having quicksand under her feet, where nothing is what it seems and everything might change from one minute to the next! “Oh my God! What about the children?!” She could not help thinking about Sheikh Rahman and all his family. His son was the same age as Rahul. Would they have gone to fetch the children from school? If only she could talk to her sister! But Nadia was not in New Delhi at that time.

  It was Pupul Jayakar, Indira’s best friend, who arrived first and calmed her down. The children were at home safe and sound and they were as calm as could be expected in the circumstances. Pupul told her that the news had not yet got out and that things in the streets were normal. “I found Sonia in a state of shock,” she would say later. “She could hardly speak. She began to tremble and I didn’t want to ask any more questions.” Pupul had brought her some clothes and Sonia changed the bloodstained dressing gown for a sari. In the next hour, other friends began arriving, together with members of the party and the government. Sonia would have liked to throw them all out of the room, all of them except the close friends and colleagues who had shown their unbreakable loyalty to Indira, so few of them that they could be counted on the fingers of one hand. But that was forgetting that Indira was not only her husband’s mother: she was the mother of a whole nation. Her assassination was extremely serious. The country was leaderless, without a hand at the helm. No one yet knew whether the attack had been a specific act of revenge on Indira or whether it was part of a wider plot that would end in a coup. That is what the whispered conversations in the hospital corridors between
members of the government and the opposition were about, while the Vice-President talked to top government civil servants in a room on the floor below. They discussed the future of the country, because Indira was already the past. She was about to enter history. At two twenty-two in the afternoon, five hours after having been gunned down by men whose job it was to protect her life, the doctors declared that Indira Gandhi had died. Ten minutes later, the BBC broadcast the news all over the world.

  Three thousand kilometres away, Rajiv’s Ambassador was going as fast as it could along a narrow road full of potholes in the state of Bengal, avoiding elephants, wagons, motorbikes, lorries piled high with goods and people, lots of people. He wanted to get to Calcutta as soon as possible so that he could fly from there to Delhi and perhaps arrive in time to say goodbye to his mother. His pre-campaign electoral tour had been interrupted when his car was intercepted by a police Jeep two hundred kilometres south of Calcutta. A policeman handed him a note: “There has been an accident at the Prime Minister’s home. Cancel all visits and return to Delhi immediately.” As they drove through a countryside of glittering rice paddies and adobe villages, Rajiv found out from the car radio that his mother had been gunned down by her bodyguards and had been taken to hospital, where the doctors were trying to save her life. He reacted with calm and self- possession, perhaps because he still nursed the hope that she might survive. After a noisy two and a half hour drive, a police helicopter intercepted his car when they were about fifty kilometres from Calcutta. Rajiv got on board and the helicopter left him at the airport, where an Indian Airlines Boeing was waiting for him to take him home. He completed the journey on the flight deck, with the pilots, who were in radio contact with the capital. The absence of news made him feel that he would not see her alive again. It was by means of a communication full of interference that he finally heard that she had died. He remained still, not speaking and not shedding any tears. The Nehrus do not cry in public when they receive a blow; that he had always been taught. It seemed as if the news had not surprised him, perhaps because he was overcome by a certain feeling of fate, similar to what his mother had felt.

  At the hospital, after the announcement from the doctors, Sonia asked Pupul to go home with her to get some clothes in order to dress Indira for her final journey. Besides, Sonia was anxious to see her children and get out of that hospital full of people. Outside, the activity in the streets seemed normal. The news had still not got out.

  When she got home and her children asked her: “How is Grandmother?”, Sonia went to pieces. Her sobbing drowned out her words. But were any words necessary? Rahul hugged his mother tight and Priyanka ran into the house and came back with the inhaler. Sonia did not need it and gradually she calmed down. Then, after explaining everything to them, Pupul and Sonia went into Indira’s dressing room. For her final journey, they chose one of her favourite saris, old rose coloured, and a bodice that had been a gift from an old wise man that she greatly admired.

  The children did not want to stay in the house. They also wanted to see their grandmother for the last time, and they did not want to leave their mother in that state, so Sonia and Pupul took them with them back to the hospital. The atmosphere in the streets had changed completely. The shops were closing. “We could see men with anxious faces pedalling quickly to get back home,” Pupul would say. As they got closer to the hospital, they saw more and more people walking in the same direction. There was such a crowd that the police blocked the main entrance, so they had to use a service entrance.

  At the same time, Rajiv was landing at Palam Airport with his stomach in knots. Neither Sonia nor his children were there to meet him, the only people that he would really have liked to see at that moment. On the other hand, his assistants were waiting for him at the foot of the steps, with some friends and, above all, many politicians from the Congress Party. They were already there. Rajiv immediately knew what they had come to ask him. They had come to demand that, whether he liked it or not, he should be the next Prime Minister of India.

  Some friends took him to the hospital. They also agreed with the idea that he should succeed his mother. No one seemed to disagree with what was considered as a natural law. Furthermore, it was the best thing that could happen for his safety and that of his family, because he would have all the power of the State at his command to protect him. It was a powerful argument, which left its mark on Rajiv.

  “But that has to be decided by the party and the President of the Republic,” he objected. “The President is the one designated by law to choose the person who must form a government.”

  “He has already taken that decision.”

  “But he isn’t even in Delhi!”

  “He has already made it known. You have to accept, Rajiv, it’s the best thing for you all.”

  On board the plane in which he was returning from an official visit to the Yemen, interrupted by the news of Indira’s assassination, the President of the Republic, an old friend of the Nehru family, had already taken the decision to ask Rajiv to be Prime Minister. And in addition, that he should take over immediately, straight away, without letting any more time go by. The moment was of extreme importance. The death of Indira at the hands of Sikh gunmen made him fear an outbreak of communal violence, the nightmare of any Indian leader. For that reason it was urgent to avoid a power vacuum, in order to keep the country united in the face of such a threat, which could put an end to constitutional order and, definitely, to India as a nation. That is what he informed the senior member of the party, even before leaving the airport: “We must not leave the throne empty, it’s very dangerous.” Later, when the President of the Republic explained the reasons for his choice, he said that he had to choose a new Prime Minister from the Congress Party, because it was the party with an overwhelming majority in Parliament. And who better than Rajiv, who had an unsullied reputation and was young and intelligent? There was another reason, which had nothing to do with Rajiv’s professional merits, and it was that this was what Indira would have liked. “I knew the way she thought and what she wanted,” the President admitted, “even though we never discussed it specifically. I just knew what she was like.” So Rajiv found himself with no way out. From beyond death, his mother’s voice echoed in his ears. If he had never abandoned her while she was alive, was he going to do it now that she was dead? Had he not already taken the decision to go into politics? Was what the country was asking of him not the logical consequence of that? He had never wanted to be Prime Minister, not even to have a post in the government, but sometimes life moves quickly and leaves no room for choice.

  As he walked along the corridors in the hospital, Rajiv came across a whole series of people who had been part of his mother’s life, including a tearful Maneka, the ineffable guru Dhirendra Brahmachari, who kept repeating that Indira should have listened to him to avoid the danger that was hanging over her, ministers and civil servants, assistants and secretaries who wept in small groups. The party barons were all at the hospital and took advantage of his arrival to let him know that they wanted him as leader of the Congress Party and, in consequence, as the nation’s new leader. Everyone took it for granted that they were speaking to the future Prime Minister. “You have to accept,” they said to him. “If not for yourself, do it for your wife and children, for your safety. And for your mother, for the memory of your grandfather, for the family, for India.”

  It was quarter past three in the afternoon when Rajiv got to the room next to the operating theatre. He gave Sonia a big hug and she burst into tears. Perhaps she was remembering that first meeting with Indira in London, when she had felt such panic at meeting her. Who would have thought then that she would love her so much, and that she would leave them like that, alone facing the abyss?

  Then Rajiv hugged the children, who were very frightened. The wave of terror that the attack had unleashed had spread like an epidemic. After Operation Blue Star, a group of fanatics had sworn to exterminate Indira’s descendants for a hundred gener
ations, hadn’t they? Who would be next? “Daddy, Mummy, us?” Who knew if behind any nurse, any visitor, any of the many people walking the corridors of the hospital, another murderous terrorist might not be hiding? Where would the avenging fury of the Sikh extremists stop?

  He did not have much time to console his family because people kept asking for him all the time. The country required his attention, not even giving him time to weep for his mother’s death or calm his family down. “I remember that I felt the need to be alone with him, even if just for a moment,” Sonia would say. She took him off to a corner of the operating theatre, a few metres away from where the doctors were sewing up Indira’s body. It smelled of formaldehyde and ether. The white neon light brutally illuminated the devastated features of Rajiv’s usually soft face.

  “They’re going to make me Prime Minister,” he told her in a whisper.

  Sonia shut her eyes. It was the worst thing she could have heard. It was like the announcement of a second death on the same day. Rajiv took her hands, as he continued whispering the reasons that were forcing him to accept the post.

  “Sonia, that is the best way for us to protect ourselves, believe me. We will have maximum protection available. That’s what we need now.”

  “Let’s go and live somewhere else…”