The Red Sari: A Novel

by Javier Moro

  Among the crowd there were two women of about thirty. One of them was short, with dark skin and glasses. Her name was Dhanu. She was wearing a denim jacket over an orange Punjabi costume, which consisted of a long skirt worn over wide trousers, unlike the rest of women in the south, who usually wear saris. She looked as if she was pregnant. No one suspected that the reason for her corpulence was that under her jacket, stuck to her body, she had a nine-volt battery, a detonator and six grenades with shrapnel wrapped in plastic explosive. The other girl was called Kokila, and she was the daughter of a party worker. Rajiv put his arm affectionately over her shoulders as she recited a poem in his honour. Dhanu, with a garland in her hands, managed to make her way through, and stood behind Kokila. When the girl finished her poem, it was Dhanu’s turn, but just when she was going to hand her garland to Rajiv, a woman police officer stopped her with her arm. Rajiv smiled at her. “Let everyone have their turn… Don’t worry, it’s all right.” The policewoman desisted and turned round, not suspecting that in that way she was saving her life. Then Dhanu approached Rajiv to put a garland made out of sandalwood shavings carved into the shape of petals round his neck. Rajiv thanked her with his beautiful smile, and following the tradition, he took off the garland to hand it to a party comrade who was behind him. Meanwhile, Dhanu bent down to touch his feet. Rajiv did the same, to show humility, as though saying that he was not worthy of that greeting. But the woman tricked him: she was not touching his feet in a sign of veneration, but pulling the cord that activated the detonator.

  The explosion was apocalyptic. “When I turned round,” said Suman Dubey, Rajiv’s assistant and an old friend of the family, “I saw people flying through the air as if in slow motion.” Barbara Crossette, who had stayed at the back, saw “a very intense explosion…and then people falling all round, in a circle, like the petals of a flower. In the place where Rajiv was supposed to be, there was a hole in the ground.” The shrapnel had killed the murderess, Rajiv and seventeen other people. Panic came over the crowd and the police, who did not know if that was an isolated explosion or if there would be more. The dust and smoke cleared to leave the sight of the massacre in full view: dismembered bodies, smoking, black earth, burned objects. Curiously, the dais was still standing, what had been blown to pieces was the people that had been sitting there.

  “I was looking for something white,” Suman Dubey would declare to the press, “because Rajiv always wore white. But all I could see was black, burned things.” Other party workers approached and found Pradip Gupta, Rajiv’s faithful bodyguard. He was still alive, lying on his back with his eyes wide open, suffering in his own flesh the prediction he had made to Sonia: “If anything happens to Rajiv, it will have to be over my dead body…” He died a few seconds later. Under his body, someone found a white sports shoe. It was Rajiv’s. A party colleague tried to turn what was left of the body over, but could not do it because it was falling to pieces. Rajiv had literally been eviscerated by the explosion, his skull was fractured and had lost almost all the brain mass. He had died instantly. Fifteen minutes after the explosion, the phone rang at number 10 Janpath Road.

  41

  The person who picked up the phone was Rajiv’s secretary, who was working in his boss’s private office, in a distant wing of the house. The family was asleep. In her bedroom, Sonia heard the phone in her sleep and it sounded like a scream.

  “Sir, there has been a bomb attack,” said a faltering voice, muffled by interference.

  “Who’s speaking?”

  “I’m from the Intelligence Agency. I’m calling from Sriperumbudur.”

  The secretary’s throat closed up.

  “How is Rajivji?” he asked.

  The man did not reply. The secretary could hear how the man speaking coughed to clear his throat before speaking again.

  “Sir, the fact is…” he began to say, not finishing the sentence.

  Nervous, the secretary urged him:

  “Why don’t you tell me once and for all how Rajiv is?”

  “Sir, he’s dead,” the man let out and immediately hung up.

  The secretary was left with the receiver in his hand, his eyes unfocussed, trying to take in what he had just heard. The slight hope that it might have been a false alarm evaporated as soon as he hung up, when the phone rang again. A member of the Congress Party in Tamil Nadu confirmed the news. There was no longer any doubt. Immediately, the other lines began to ring, making an unbearable racket. The secretary hurried out.

  “Madam, madam…”

  He met Sonia in the corridor, having just come out of her room, tying up her dressing gown.

  She could hardly open her eyes. Her hair was in a mess. She knew that a call in the middle of the night could not mean anything good. The call she had received one night in the family home at Orbassano telling her that Sanjay had died was engraved on her memory. Now she was prey to a similar feeling and her stomach went into knots. But what left her icy cold was the scared, almost hysterical look on the secretary’s face, a man usually calm and measured.

  “Madam, there’s been a bomb…” he stuttered.

  Sonia gave him a severe look. Her face was puffy with sleep.

  “Is he alive?”

  The secretary was unable to answer. The words would not come out. Neither were they necessary. Sonia had stopped listening to him. Her whole body contracted as if she had had an electric shock and from the depths of her mortally wounded soul a harsh, guttural cry arose. Seven years after the conversation she had had with Rajiv in the hospital operating theatre where they were sewing Indira’s body together, in which she begged him not to accept the post that his mother had left vacant because he would be killed, the prediction had come true.

  “Nooooooo…!!”

  Her cry woke Priyanka, who appeared in the hallway, also in a dressing gown, looking worn out and astonished. She was dumbstruck, incredulous, deathly pale. She got hold of her mother and took her into the sitting room as best she could. Never in all her nineteen years had she seen her in such a state of despair. No one had ever seen her cry like that. The sobbing was so loud and lasted so long that the first party colleagues to arrive at the house heard it from the street.

  Priyanka could not comfort her. Suddenly Sonia began to cough and choke in such a way that the secretary feared she would lose consciousness.

  “It’s an attack of asthma,” said Priyanka.

  It was so violent that she felt very afraid.

  “I’ll be right back,” she called.

  She ran to her mother’s bathroom and searched feverishly for her inhaler and anti- histamines. When she came back into the sitting room, she saw her sitting on an armchair with her eyes almost turned up, her mouth open and her head thrown back, trying to get air like a fish out of water. She thought she was dying. In fact, part of her had died with her husband.

  The medicines took effect and managed to stop the coughing, but not the sobbing. However much her daughter tried to calm her down, Sonia was inconsolable. Her weeping fed on itself, as insistent and regular as the waves pounding on the beach. Priyanka turned to the secretary.

  “Where is my father’s body?” she asked.

  “At the moment they are taking him to Madras.”

  “Please help me to do what’s necessary to get us there,” she asked.

  Priyanka took charge of the situation, showing admirable maturity, cool- headedness and sense of organization. She spoke to the first friends of her father’s and leaders of the Congress Party who arrived looking perplexed and desolate, some of them weeping their hearts out. She even spoke to the President of the Republic on the telephone. She asked him to put a plane at the family’s disposal. Deep down, something inside her prevented her believing that her father was dead. It was like a reflex that protected her from pain and allowed her to act. Sub-consciously, she found it hard to accept something so catastrophic without checking that it was true, and that is why she needed to see her father as soon as possible.

/>   “Do you think it’s wise to go there?” the President of the Republic told her.

  “Please, Mr President, I must insist. My mother and I have the firm intention of going to Madras this very night.”

  “OK. I’ll talk to the army to have an Air Force plane put at your disposal. Then I’ll come by your residence to give my condolences.”

  “Thank you. We’ll be expecting you.”

  Now she had to give her brother the news, in Harvard. There it was lunchtime. She managed to get a classmate to give him a message that he should call home urgently. An hour later, his sister and his mother gave him the worst news of his life.

  “I knew it, I knew it!” said the young man crying and biting his lip. “I knew it was going to happen.”

  That feeling of frustration and impotence accentuated the pain of everyone in the family.

  “We did what we could…”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Of course we did.”

  They told him to come on the first flight out, as they were beginning to organize the funeral and they were waiting for him.

  It was about eleven o’clock and the news had already spread round New Delhi. A crowd was gathering at the gates of the house. From inside, Priyanka and Sonia could hear hysterical cries and laments. Friends of the family, colleagues, ministers, policemen etc. kept arriving. It was a real invasion. The Press took up positions at the gate and in the street. The people still did not know against whom to direct their rage: against the Sikhs, the Moslem or the Hindu fundamentalists, the Tamil Tigers, the Assamese, the Dalits…? There were many grudges in such a densely populated country. Suddenly, they directed it against the national and international television teams. The people gathered there began insulting them. Some friends who were passing through the gate at the wheel of their cars were received in an ugly manner: Ottavio and Maria Quattrochi were booed and had a stone or two thrown at them, and the same occurred with the leaders of the opposition, who had come to give their condolences. The fury of the crowd extended to all of Rajiv’s adversaries. A mob tried to attack the nearby home of one of his fiercest critics, one of the leaders of a caste of the untouchables, when he was in government. Such was the atmosphere in the streets that the President of the Republic was unable to get to the house. He found a frantic, desperate crowd of people. They threw themselves on the bonnet of his car, weeping and sobbing.

  “Shall we disperse them?” the security officer asked the President.

  “No. Let’s turn round. I don’t want things to get even more heated.”

  Back in his residence in the former Viceroy’s palace, the President phoned Sonia. She was a little calmer and was able to thank him for his condolences and the facilities he had ordered for that singular journey.

  Dressed in a white salwar kamiz, her hair combed back and tied back in a bun, as soon as Sonia hung up she left the house with Priyanka. Outside, a car was waiting for them to take them to the airport. Uncle Kaul was driving, the one who had tried so hard to get Rajiv to follow in his brother’s footsteps. The car made its way with difficulty through the crowd that was packed around the house. The streets were more and more turbulent. Groups of people gathered on the street corners and at the roundabouts, in a state of mind that went between rage and grief.

  “I hope the government acts soon and doesn’t allow the same to happen as after Indira died,” commented Uncle Kaul.

  The flight lasted three and a half hours, the time a jet takes to cross the sub- continent from north to south. Below, in that dark stretch of land scattered with little dots of light that indicated the cities and villages, India slept. In a few hours it was going to wake up to the tragedy of another political assassination. In a few hours, they thought, the country will be steeped in sorrow. Nobody spoke during the flight. Only Sonia’s sobs could be heard.

  It was still dark when they arrived in Madras at half past four in the morning. The plane taxied to the old terminal, lit up and surrounded by a growing crowd. Rajiv’s body was there. At the indication of the President of the Republic, they had taken him there to avoid Sonia and Priyanka having to drive into the city. Sticky, damp air enveloped them as soon as they got off the plane. They were very nervous because the moment was approaching. The moment when they would see him for the last time. What were they going to find? Were they ready for it? Could they stand it? They asked themselves these questions as they walked down the steps of the plane and greeted the dignitaries who had gone there to welcome them. Here too the authorities were afraid that disturbances might break out, the governor told them. The crowd was seeking a scapegoat and feelings in the city were running very high. For that reason they had taken the necessary steps for the flight to take off before dawn. When she recognized Suman Dubey, Rajiv’s loyal, old friend who had miraculously come out unscathed from the attack, Sonia threw herself into his arms to cry.

  But they did not see Rajiv. They could not. They were told that the body was in such bad shape that it had been impossible to embalm him. The only thing they saw was two coffins. One contained Rajiv’s remains and the other the remains of his bodyguard, Pradip Gupta. From then on it all happened quickly. Holding tight to each other, mother and daughter watched as the coffins were put into the hold of the plane. They went back up the steps into the plane. Once inside, Sonia asked for the coffin to be placed beside her. With one hand she put a garland of flowers on the coffin, while with the other she covered her face with a shawl to wipe away her tears. Priyanka, seeing the coffin tied down there, had to admit what her sub-conscious had been refusing to accept, that her father was in that coffin, or rather what was left of him. Then she could not hold it back any longer and she broke down. She suddenly realized that she would never see him again, that never again would her father’s love and warmth comfort her. She held on to the coffin and sobbed there for a long time.

  The plane was already taxiing along the runway. Suman Dubey and Sonia calmed her down, got her to sit down and did up her seatbelt. At that moment Sonia made a gesture that Rajiv no doubt would have appreciated. As she realized that the coffin of the bodyguard Pradip Gupta had nothing on it, she went and placed a garland of jasmine there too.

  It was daylight when the plane took off, on its way back to the capital of India. Rajiv Gandhi’s last journey was beginning.

  ACT IV

  THE HIDDEN HAND OF DESTINY

  You do not know the limits of your strength, you do not know what you are doing. You do not know who you are.

  Euripides

  42

  That’s it. It’s all over. In spite of Rajiv not holding any official post, sixty-four countries have sent an official representative to the funeral. Rajiv had something special, which made him well loved by those that had dealings with him.

  The ashes are already on their way to the ocean, dissolved in the Ganges, mixed with those of his great-grandfather, Motilal, his grandfather Nehru and his brother. The individual grief is only a part of the huge vacuum he has left behind. The serving and security staff are sad and disoriented. Even the dogs at home are downhearted. The rock that everyone could hold tight to during the ups and downs of a chaotic, unsafe world, has disappeared. How can they believe that he is no longer there? Sonia and the children feel his presence all the time, especially at night, in their dreams. The unconscious moves more slowly than reality, finding it hard to catch up, and that is why waking up is especially difficult. At other times they wake up with a start and come face to face with reality, and then they realize that this is their worst nightmare.

  The important thing is that it all went off peacefully. The bloodbath has been avoided, not like after Indira’s assassination. The government called out the army in time and decreed seven days of national mourning. What it has been impossible to avoid are the several suicides and immolations in the interior of the country. Eternal India is still alive in the hearts of the people.

  Now, even his political adversaries agree that Rajiv was a decent man. In de
ath, they praise the leader they denigrated in life. The Press too, who first extolled him and then vilified him, examines its conscience. One morning, Priyanka shows her mother an article from the Hindustan Times.

  “Read it, Mother. They have published a tribute here that seeks to exonerate the attitude the media had to Daddy.”

  Sonia is proud of her children. They have been equal to things. Thank goodness she had Priyanka near her to organize everything, to keep the house in order, to go and fetch Rahul and choose the place for the cremation. She could not have done it. It is impossible to take decisions when you feel dead in life. She thinks that Indira would also have been proud of them.