The Red Sari: A Novel

by Javier Moro

  Now the time had come to celebrate another general election, which the electoral commission set for May 20th, 23rd and 26th, 1991. India was in the middle of a crisis, which could make it easier for a party in opposition, such as the Congress Party, to return to power. Apart from the rise in Hindu fundamentalism, Kashmir was undergoing an escalation in violence. On the economy front, the management of the recent governments had been disastrous. Inflation, caused by the increase in the price of crude oil because of the Gulf War, was out of control and threatening to cause serious social problems. Rajiv proposed a programme based on stability and economic reform, including more privatizations and fewer controls on industry and commerce. The enemy to be beaten at the polls was the BJP, the Hindu party, which was taking shape as an organization on the rise with a programme that was potentially dangerous for the country’s stability. The other parties, including those of the coalition leaving power, could only aspire to a limited number of seats.

  Once again, Rajiv set off on campaign, sure of his victory. Politics was like that, like a reflection of life itself, where nothing is permanent and everything changes all the time, sometimes with dizzying speed. He wanted to start the campaign with Sonia at his side, and he piloted the plane himself, landing in Amethi on May 1st, 1991. It was the first of 600 stops that he had to make in twenty days. A crowd was waiting for them when they got off the plane. Among them there were many women who came up to welcome Sonia. One of the reasons for her huge popularity in Amethi is that Sonia had an amazing memory, and remembered the names and faces of women she had perhaps seen for only five minutes on previous trips. She identified fully with those peasant women who touched her with almost child-like curiosity just to check that she was flesh and bone like them. She intended to spend three weeks camping in her husband’s constituency, asking for the vote house by house, while he went round the sub-continent. At the end of the day, before going up the steps to the plane, Rajiv turned to his electors and said a very simple phrase, but which later turned out to be prophetic: “I don’t think I’ll be able to come back again, but Sonia is staying to look after you.” Sonia felt a stab in her heart. Not because she was going to be left on her own, because the warmth of the people and the kind attitude of the local members of the Congress Party made her feel at home, but because it was the first time in 23 years of marriage that they were going to spend so much time apart, almost three weeks.

  That night, while she was in a tent trying to get to sleep lying on a charpoi, a camp bed made of plaited ropes, and struggling with the heat and the mosquitoes, Sonia remembered the last time she had been in Amethi. It was in February, the month when they celebrated their wedding anniversary. She had come there to open a campaign of vaccination against polio. She thought they would not be able to celebrate their anniversary together, because Rajiv had planned to travel to Teheran over those days. He was going with the aim of launching a diplomatic initiative to put an end to the Gulf War. But one night, like that one, although not so hot, a note had come to her from Rajiv asking her to please cancel her commitments in Amethi and return as fast as possible to Delhi to go with him on that trip. “I feel as though … I want to be with you, only you and me together, the two of us, without hundreds of people flapping around us as usual.” said the note. When Sonia arrived in New Delhi, around midnight, she found Rajiv nervous because he thought they would not arrive in time to catch the flight. She discovered that he had already packed their suitcases and everything was ready for the journey. In Teheran, after the official commitments, they went out to have dinner alone in a restaurant. How long had it been since they had been able to allow themselves such a romantic luxury? They could not remember… Rajiv gave her a present that he had brought from Delhi, some beautiful, simple earrings, just the kind of thing she liked. When they got back to the hotel, he picked up his camera, which he always travelled with and they took a photo of themselves with the automatic button, a thing they had never done before.

  “Madam, madam!…”

  A voice from outside the tent interrupted her daydream in a whisper. Sonia got up, put on her dressing gown and went out. A young man, a party follower, handed her an envelope. It had come from New Delhi and was from Rajiv. Sonia opened it and found a rose, with a hand-written note. She read it, smiled, showing her dimples, and went back to her charpoi. “It was a love letter,” she would confess later.

  Priyanka arrived in Amethi a few days later to keep her company. They visited an average of fifteen villages a day. They listened to people’s complaints about a pension that did not come, a blind child who needed money for an operation or an old lady who complained that after the previous elections, the Congress Party people took no notice of them. Sonia took notes and gave instructions to her assistants. “Have faith,” she told the supplicants, “I’m going to make sure this is sorted out for you.”

  In one of the villages, Priyanka witnessed an extraordinary event, bearing in mind her mother’s aversion to speaking in public. Without Rajiv having asked her, Sonia got her courage together and made her first speech before a crowd of several thousand people. “My husband has worked a lot for your wellbeing and I work for my husband… Only the Congress Party can represent you in a worthy fashion. Take my husband’s hand…” Priyanka laughed to see her exhorting people to vote for the Congress Party, and, furthermore, in an amusing way. The sentences in Hindi with a slight accent came out easily for her, she smiled and seemed to be having fun, perhaps because there were no reporters; they were all humble folk who did not intimidate her. The most surprising thing was that she had done it of her own accord, as an act of selflessness for her husband.

  They both returned to New Delhi on May 17th, exhausted, sweaty and covered in dust, but optimistic about the final result of the elections. The following night, when Rajiv came back from his tour and came in through the front door, they were speechless. “He was exhausted. He could hardly speak or walk. He had not slept or eaten decently for weeks. He had been campaigning for about twenty hours a day. His hands and arms were covered in scratches and bruises. His whole body ached. Thousands of admirers had touched him, had shaken his hand, given him brotherly hugs and slaps on the back. It broke my heart to see him in such a state.” His fingers were so swollen from the number of handshakes that he had had to take off his wedding ring. But he was happy, his heart full from so many demonstrations of affection, so much enthusiasm. His deficient security service had allowed him to go out and find what his grandfather and mother called “the love of the people”, and he came back moved because the people responded. “In Kerala and Tamil Nadu they have the custom of pinching your cheek, and that is why mine is so red and swollen,” he told Sonia as she placed a footrest for him so he could stretch out his legs, “…and sometimes, in Moslem areas, they kiss you, you know, one, two three kisses and then that special hug that almost breaks your back… My whole body hurts, but it doesn’t matter.” They sat quietly chatting for a good while, exchanging impressions of their mutual experiences. Rajiv was satisfied because he had managed to show the people that they mattered to him. But he was not sure he would win: “It’s going to be a tough fight,” he told her. That night he slept for five hours, quite a luxury, before he left for Bhopal, where he held a rally for a hundred thousand people on May 19th. The city was still traumatized by the catastrophe in 1984. The multinational responsible for the accident had reached an agreement to pay a sum of money in compensation to the victims, but the money had still not reached the hands of those that needed it. It was diverted by corrupt civil servants and intermediaries. Once again it was the system that failed.

  After Bhopal, there was only the south left, “friendly country”, as the members of the Congress Party called it. First he came home and he was so tired that he fell asleep in the sitting room, relieved to think the campaign was coming to an end. Three more days and they would all meet up there, because Rahul would be coming to spend the summer holidays. He was expected to arrive on May 23rd. Sonia and
Priyanka were also happy. They were more certain than Rajiv that he would win the elections by an ample margin. The whole family had made a huge effort to put a Gandhi and the Congress Party back at the head of the country. Indira would have been proud of them all.

  On May 20th, Rajiv and Sonia left the house at 7.30 in the morning to place their votes. At that hour the temperature was still bearable. The crows seemed to greet them from the branches of the trees with their harsh cawing. Rajiv, dressed in a white kurta and with a tri-coloured scarf round his neck, drove the car along the wide avenues, which were almost deserted, but at the entrance to the electoral college a small crowd was waiting for them and a television team. Sonia looked splendid in a red salwar kamiz. They greeted people left and right and Rajiv signed some autographs while they waited for the college to open. Behind them, the line was beginning to grow. A young volunteer from the party came up to Rajiv with a tray on which there was incense, sugar and flower petals with the idea of making a puja (offering) right there in order to begin the day on an auspicious note in his honour. Whenever she was with her husband in a public place, Sonia closely observed anyone that came close, trying to guess whether they had any hidden intentions, a suspicious- looking lump, an unusual gesture. Her paranoia gave her no peace. Perhaps because of that she was scared when the man with the tray, intimidated by Rajiv, dropped it with a crash which made everyone jump. Sonia tensed up and then began to sweat copiously. Rajiv noticed his wife’s distress and asked for a glass of water for her. When it was her turn to vote, she was so upset that she could not find the paper with the symbol of the Congress Party on it. For a moment she thought she would have to leave without voting. When they left, as they went towards the car, she told Rajiv, who laughed. “He held my hand,” Sonia would remember, “with that warm, soothing touch that always helped to dissipate any feeling of anxiety.” It was perhaps the last occasion on which Rajiv was present to calm his wife, because after he left her at home, he went off for the next tour. In the evening he expected to come back to New Delhi to change the helicopter for a plane and leave for a destination in the south, where the elections would take place two days later.

  But that evening, Rajiv surprised them by coming home. Sonia and Priyanka were happy to see him, even if only for a short time. Rajiv had a quick shower, then had something to eat and called his son in the United States: “I’m calling to wish you luck in your exams, Rahul, and to tell you how happy I am that you’ll be home soon… It’s going to be a great summer… I love you … Bye bye.” Then he kissed Priyanka. He had to go again, but the good thing was that that would be the last stage of the electoral tour. He was calm, he was going to the south, safe territory, not like the north, with so much upheaval and danger.

  “Can’t you stop now?” Sonia asked him. “This trip will not change the results…”

  “I know, but it’s already been organized… Come on, one last push and we’ll come out on top… Just two more days and we’ll be together again,” he told Sonia with that captivating smile of his.

  “We said goodbye tenderly …” Sonia would remember, “and he left. I stood looking through the crack in the curtains and I saw him go off, until I lost sight of him… This time forever.”

  40

  The next day, May 21st, 1991, Rajiv embarked on a helicopter to visit several cities in the state of Orissa, in the east of the country. It was an exhausting trip, and at night he was so tired that he thought he would catch up a little on his missing sleep and cancel the last visit he had planned to a village in the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu. It was called Sriperumbudur. Besides, a report from the central government’s Intelligence Agency had expressly advised him not to attend meetings in Tamil Nadu after nightfall, because the Tamil Tigers had considerable support among the population in that state. He was hungry, and the local party leader, a young professional woman that he had recruited for the Congress Party, invited him for dinner at her home, but he was still thinking about the people who were expecting him in Sriperumbudur, about all the effort that his party comrades had invested in organizing the rally, and in the end he did not want to disappoint them and he declined the invitation for dinner. The party deserved a final effort.

  “I’ll sleep as much as I like with Rahul, Priyanka and Sonia around me,” he told one of his companions.

  “So you aren’t going to take any notice of the report from the Intelligence Agency then?”

  “If I had to listen to all those reports, I’d need to have given up the campaign long ago. Besides,” he added, “political violence is rare in southern India, we all know that. Here the elections are more like a village festival than a serious political event.” When he boarded the plane, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the local leader had sent some pizza and pastries for him. He had hardly taken the first bite of his dinner when he was told that the plane could not take off because of a technical snag. “That’s better,” Rajiv said to himself, only thinking about having a quick nap. “So we’ll stay here.” He got off the plane and got into an Ambassador that took him to the government lodgings. But on the way, an official car caught up with him.

  “Sir,” said a policeman through the window, “the problem has already been solved, the plane is ready for take-off.”

  For a fraction of a second, Rajiv hesitated whether he should go on or return to the airport. In the end, he allowed himself to be carried along by events and told the driver to turn round. Back on board the plane, he sat down, put on his seat-belt and when the plane was beginning to taxi down the runway, he realized he had left his food behind in the car.

  He reached Madras at half past eight in the evening, attended a short press conference, had a soft drink and went on by road. He was sitting in the front, next to the driver, with the window open. On the Ambassador’s dashboard there was a small fluorescent light that shone on his face so that people could see him in the dark at night. He stopped in a village where he held a twenty-minute rally, and at half past nine he was already in the next village at another rally. On the way, he took advantage of the time to chat to reporters. That day he was accompanied by Barbara Crossette, the correspondent from the New York Times and a specialist in Asian matters. As they went through the villages, the car made its way slowly among the crowds, and the people, with expressions of delirious joy on their faces, threw flowers. “We’re expecting good results in this area,” Rajiv said to the reporters. As soon as he got out of the car, his followers fought to place garlands round his neck, while others gave him scarves and shawls. At a given moment, he stopped to greet a woman who was being squashed by the crowd. He placed a silk scarf round her neck and said a few words to her. The woman covered her face with her hands and held the scarf to her chest. Barbara Crossette was surprised at the lack of protection he had. “More than a hundred times, any one of the hands that reached into the car to touch his arm or shake his hand could have stabbed him or shot him.”

  They went on. All along the road there were coloured lights and posters welcoming him. From time to time, Rajiv indicated to the driver to go more slowly or to stop the car so he could get out and shake more hands as he asked people to vote for the Congress Party. The curious thing is that he said it in English, because he did not speak Tamil. When he had to explain something longer, an interpreter did it for him. He put the notes and letters that he was given by people into a grey airline bag that he always had with him. Barbara Crossette interviewed him for the last time. She asked him if he took vitamin supplements or had a special diet to put up with that outpouring of energy, bearing in mind the temperature of 40 degrees and the poor condition of the roads… Rajiv burst out laughing. “These Americans!” he must have thought. “Most of the time I don’t eat anything. I keep going with this…” he answered, pointing to a couple of thermos flasks, one of coffee and the other of tea. He indicated that the only concession to comfort was the white sports shoes he wore. Then he talked about his favourite topics: “The people are frustrated because the
system is not efficient, and does not feed their aspirations. We have to find a way to improve it drastically. But, above all, I am determined to put an end to all the controversy over religion. We want complete separation between religion and politics. The mixture of them is explosive, not only here, but all over the world.”

  At ten o’clock that night, the local leaders in Sriperumbudur, a small agricultural village announced the leader’s arrival. The people were watching a display of dances typical of the region, very colourful and noisy, a normal thing at electoral rallies, as the candidates seldom arrived on time. The two hours’ delay on the expected schedule did not take away people’s desire to cheer him and throw firecrackers to celebrate his arrival. Rajiv jumped when he heard the first bangs, but he was told that it was the usual way to greet an important dignitary in Tamil Nadu. Normally, at an act like this, in the north, there would have been a metal detector arch at the entrance to the compound. But there was nothing like that here, except for the efforts of the faithful bodyguard, Pradip Gupta, to keep people back and prevent them from touching the man he protected. Rajiv stopped in front of a statue of his mother and ceremoniously placed a garland of carnations on it. The crowd was made up especially of friendly-looking men, dressed in longhis, cloths wound round their waists, and short- sleeved shirts or collarless kurtas. After the tribute to Indira, Rajiv walked along a red carpet towards the stand where the local party leaders were waiting for him sitting round a long table. He accepted with his eternal smile the garlands that were being presented to him, stopping to shake someone’s hand, responding to the greeting of another, taking off the garlands piling up round his neck and throwing them to the women, arguing with the local police officers who were trying to keep the crowd back, laughing and joking with everyone. He got his incredible energy from contact with the people, thus linking back to the example of his grandfather and his mother.