Clearly the Head did not expect Shiv to get to the matter so quickly or to put it all so bluntly. After all, he handpicked Shiv for the Department, counting on his being a cautious, reliable team worker.
But again, it is Arya who speaks up before the Head. “The Manch represents public sentiment. History and everything else should respect this. For years leftist and pseudosecular historians have been filling committees with their agents. Now their monopoly is over and they are making a hue and cry.”
“I never claimed to be a Marxist, Dr. Arya,” says Shiv, and the Head chips in with, “Yes, I can assure you Dr. Murthy’s no communist. Whatever our little differences,” he adds, reluctant to give Shiv a completely clean bill of health.
But Arya cannot be fobbed off so easily. There is the right side and there is the other side—whether these are Muslims or communists or Christians is all the same to him. As it is he is so agitated he can barely sit still. He looks as if he is ready to produce some instant hue and cry of his own.
Menon says with admirable calm, “Dr. Arya, there’s no point getting emotional. We are supposed to be talking about a history lesson, and we can’t have a discussion if we start drawing battle lines like this.”
Arya glares at Menon, then at the Head. The Head does not look enthusiastic about this cue, but manages to say without looking anyone in the eye, “I may not put it like Dr. Arya, but I can understand why he is upset. We do need to talk about this lesson’s implications. The question is, if our young people lose all sense of veneration for rishis, sages and saints, who should they look up to?”
“Michael Jackson?” pipes up his yes-man Dr. Kishan Lal who has been a quiet little mouse so far. “McDonald’s culture with potatoes fried in beef tallow?”
The meeting is going nowhere. It’s clear that whatever Amita, Menon and Shiv say, the result will be a stalemate. Mrs. Khan, who looks like she may burst into tears any minute, has abandoned her minutes. She mumbles an excuse about returning soon and leaves the room, shutting the door behind her. The Head looks after her longingly.
But Shiv is finally getting angry. He snaps at Lal, “This is precisely the danger of pandering to any self-appointed preservers of culture. What about—” and he finds himself being lifted off the floor. Arya has pounced on him and has him by the collar. Shiv can feel Arya’s pungent breath on his face. Menon too has jumped up and he is holding Arya round his waist, pulling him back.
“Dr. Arya,” croaks the Head somewhere behind them. He has broken into a sweat and is panting as if he will have a heart attack any minute. “Please, let’s remember we are in the University, not on the street.”
Arya lets go of Shiv reluctantly and shakes off Menon. Amita rushes to Shiv to check that he is all right.
Suddenly Arya decides he’s had enough; the day’s mission has been accomplished. He goes to the door, then turns around for a parting shot. “If it comes to defending books by … who is it … Taslima Rushdie,” he says. “If it is someone like that or someone who wants to make a hundred percent blue film about widows in Benares, the secular fundamentalists are all on the streets shouting No ban, no censorship. But our historians and thinkers and activists get different treatment. They won’t even let us speak.”
Arya’s face promises Shiv they will meet once more. Then the door bangs shut and the meeting breaks up.
EIGHT
SEPTEMBER 25–30
Shiv is back in his room at the Department on Monday. The door is shut. He is tempted to switch off the light and fan as well so that no one knows he is here. But he stops short of such cowardice; besides, he finds he can’t move from his chair. He sits there, empty-handed, listening to the pigeons making scrabbling noises on the cooler. He doesn’t have the heart to chase them away today. Instead he shuts out their presence, looks out of the other window.
The view of the parking lot, a bland view that has met Shiv’s eyes in so many moments of boredom and impatience, is comforting. Its loyal, unchanging features reassure him; the world outside the window is not—or not yet—a complete stranger. He counts four little Marutis including his own. Two Zens. A brave and battered old Fiat. And to one corner, a great big foreign-looking monster he can’t identify, glinting ostentatiously in the sunlight.
Shiv has escaped here for an hour or two of silence. To be completely alone, to try and think dispassionately. The telephone receiver is off the hook. He thinks of Rekha’s yoga instructor telling her to empty her mind of all thoughts but one. Hold the one lone fragment firmly in view till it grows bigger and stronger, filling the frame. The Head, the Dean, Amar and his band, even Arya’s promise of more trouble to come, tumble out of Shiv’s head. Meena, weighed down by her cast, is less willing to move. He shakes his head to clear it and fix its sights on his father.
This is an old habit; every time Shiv asks himself a question, it is his father who is the audience in his head. His reader, his fellow-questioner, his quiet but critical listener.
Shiv now asks himself (or his father): What makes a fanatic? A fundamentalist? What makes communities that have lived together for years suddenly discover a latent hatred for each other?
As if in answer, Shiv hears a distant rumble, then the parking lot fills with people. Even at a distance he can sense the tension in them, bodies like clenched fists, voices angry and shrill.
Shiv gets up slowly, deliberately, as if any sudden movement might break a bone. He moves to the window in a dream, in a hypnotic trance of horrified fascination. He has never seen so many students on this campus before. Then one of them looks up, catches his staring eye. In that instant of recognition, Shiv knows he is not a student. He remembers that it’s the easiest thing in the world to hire protesters. All it takes is the price of a meal. Hungry touts are unlikely to ask what they are protesting against. They are also unlikely to shy away from violence.
The mob. A mob for Shiv, his own private adversary running him to earth.
There is a knock on the door and almost immediately the door is pushed open. It is Menon. The sight of him fills Shiv with gratitude. Menon must have known Shiv was here, yet he has left him alone. Shiv resolves never again to complain about Menon’s lack of social skills.
“Shiv, what are you standing there for? Come on, you should leave from the back before they come up here.”
They hear the flapping of wings on an ascending note. The pigeons have taken off. Abruptly, Shiv’s trance lets go of him; his body comes back to life.
Menon and Shiv rush out of the room and dash down the stairs. When they get to the parking lot, it’s empty.
At the car, Shiv turns to Menon. “I don’t feel right about this. Why don’t you call the security people? I could try and talk to the protesters till they come.”
“I’ve already called the security,” Menon says, and takes the car keys from Shiv. When he notices how unsteady Menon’s hand is as he unlocks the door, Shiv’s desire, for either dialogue or confrontation, dissipates.
He gets into the car and Menon slams the door shut.
Shiv sees Menon hurrying out of the frame in his rearview mirror. He starts the car, turns it around so it is facing his room. Then, in the empty lot, a parting shot reaches home, though Shiv is physically untouched. A chair flies out of the window of his room. A shower of glass follows, and papery confetti. Shiv pulls out of the parking lot, his foot pressed firmly on the accelerator. He races away from his room, the sight of its being stripped naked. Of its being turned into a sullied place, no longer anyone’s refuge.
…
His room has been pushed into no-man’s-land. Like other disputed structures, it has a padlock on the door. All it takes, it appears, is a simple little lock to keep history safe.
Shiv tries to picture his ransacked room. He has not been back, but Menon has told him that the table and chairs and bookshelves are broken, the walls defaced. There are torn books everywhere, cupboard and files open-mouthed and in shambles. A jumble of crumpled paper. His nameplate is on the floor i
n a heap of little pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle that will need patience and imagination to put together again. And the pigeons? wonders Shiv. He has hated those noisy, dirty birds all these years, conducted warfare on them. But now the thought of his room without the pigeons at the window makes him feel bereft. Are they back? Or have they been scared away for good?
Now that Arya and his cronies have made sure he cannot go back to the Department, Shiv is a full-time fugitive. Housebound, his own home feels like exile. And the inevitable flurry of reactions has set in—phone calls, meetings, newly set up committees. (“We suggest a committee be set up to constitute a committee …”) At the same time, Shiv’s desecrated room is being pushed into the background; even as he tries to keep it in focus, it blurs, turning into history. What remains, what takes over, is the aftermath—what the enemy will do next; and where (and how) the argumentative battalion of soldiers on his side will march together.
Shiv feels like a body that has been taken over. A body in a lawless country, a body that has somehow unlearnt the law of gravity. There is a sense of surging ahead, of careening; of the wheel having taken over from the hand steering it. Every now and then he braces himself and waits: any moment now the tires will skid and everything will go out of control. The whole world, all of life, blurs into frenetic movement till the imminent crash seems, by comparison, pure mercy.
Fan mail, hate mail. Quotable and unquotable quotes. Questions, interviews, sweat and powder and flashbulbs. Bytes and more bytes, a world of biters and bitten.
Vested interests. Hinduization of the past. History as armor. History as propaganda. History as battleground. History as the seed of hatred. History in the hands of the mob. Conspiracy theories. Rightist conspiracies, leftist conspiracies. Foreign-handed conspiracies. A Babel of voices is trapped in Shiv’s head, a play with a cast of thousands. These characters never stand still; they run from meeting to rally to interview. All of them have something urgent to say, and they say it in as many words as possible.
For instance: Guru Khote is addressing his third seminar of the week. He rounds off his talk with his usual trademark from the Encyclopedia of Great Quotations. He says with an air of supreme profundity, “As Thomas Paine said in The Age of Reason, ‘My own mind is my own church …’ ” (Amita nudges Shiv. “You know what he is called in some circles, don’t you? The Quote Guru.”)
Professor Fraudley, the eminent Indologist no one had heard of till six months back, has flown down to Delhi to make his contribution via newspapers and websites. “As an international expert on all matters Indian, I have no hesitation in saying that Indian Culture has always been spiritual, and it must continue to keep its Spirituality Quotient (SQ) high.”
Amar, committed young activist (CYA), distributes leaflets that scream in 24-point bold type: Is the past up for grabs?
Arya’s hired students put up posters which reply, “Down with Foreign Craze! Long Live Patriotism!”
The erudite old historian Amir Qureishi is helped onto the stage to whisper passionately: “Identities are never permanent. This obsession with identity uses the past to legitimize the political requirements of the present.”
The Manch spokesman froths at the mouth. “Who are these historians to talk when they don’t know the first thing about the past? Man first took birth in Tibet, originally a part of Bharat. All beings were Arya beings. It is from there that they spread out into the fields. It is now 179 million, 19 hundred thousand, and 84 years since man stepped on this earth.”
Guru Quote: “Who speaks for the people or their religious beliefs? As Swift said, we have just religion enough to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another …”
Arya: “Are these foreign-lovers nationals of our land? We will accept only people whose loyalty to our traditions and our heroes down the centuries is undivided and unadulterated.”
Fraudley: “Sanskrit is not a dead or elitist language. It is the symbol of cultural unity, and the ancient wisdom that helps us read horoscopes. Besides, computer scientists agree that Sanskrit is the ideal language for software.”
Qureishi: “The nationalism practiced by these sullen, resentful, intolerant men is very different from the nationalism of the freedom struggle. This new brand of nationalism is monstrous. Look at examples all over the world.”
Manch: “What can even a thousand policemen do when we emotionally charged people take to the streets?”
Amar: “The big picture is out of fashion. Now it is all specificities, a chaos of small pictures. Only caste, or only gender, or only environment. Next it will be a movement devoted just to the right to have an orgasm. All funding is for fragments of the big picture.”
And Guru Q, coming up on stage to deliver “the vote of thanks”: “If I may be allowed one last quote … h’mm—”
Arya: “They are all against Indian philosophy! We should not let them speak!” (The hired students kick aside chairs and rush to the stage and grab the mike.)
Ministers, lefties, righties, bandwagonwallas, touts, students, student leaders, spokesmen, spokeswomen. Rent-a-quote swamis, and their estranged cousins, rent-a-quote imams. Historians, journalists turned politicians, engineers turned linguists, computer experts turned archeologists.
In the middle of this dizzying circle, in the lone eye of the storm, Shiv waits with clammy hands and a weak heart. The beast is preparing to charge him, the beast with many heads, many masks, many voices. Is there no escape? Shiv could extend his leave, resign, then slip out of sight. His supporters, grateful as he is to them, unsettle him. The others, the fanatical revisionists, terrify him, bewilder him. What has happened to history, the history his uncle thought was a dull, safe choice of subject? It has become a live, fiery thing, as capable of explosion as a time bomb.
“It’s got nothing to do with history, they’re just goondas looking for publicity,” says Amar’s friend Manzar.
“I’m not sure it’s so simple,” says Amar. “This lot know how important it is to use the past in the present.”
“I hate the thought of what their vigilance squad will find in the past next,” says Meena.
“We can make a good guess,” says Amar wryly. “They’ll want caste and beef to do the vanishing trick, but we’ll see Aryans sprouting all over the place.”
“You mean the old made-in-India complex,” interrupts Jyoti. “Next they’ll be arresting anyone who doesn’t think the first Aryans were born in India.” She says to Shiv as if she has just made a discovery, “It’s a battle for minds.”
Shiv looks pleased and a little surprised that they should think alike. “Yes it is, isn’t it?” Then he adds gloomily, “And perverting the collective memory may not help to write good history, but it helps to build national monuments.”
“Forget all this endless going round and round,” announces Meena. “The judgment is simple enough to fit into a few words. The Manch—your bloodthirsty munchies—will break and devour everything we have if we don’t stop them.”
Shiv’s daily quota of love letters seems to prove Meena right. It’s as if Arya has opened a tutorial agency for a whole army of letter-writers. Dear Sir, If the Muslims can have their fundamentalists, why can’t we? Have we forgotten that Hindus have stood the test of time like no one else? Our fundamentalists have been around longer than theirs have. So we have to show the world we are superior to them in every way.
But there is, as always, the occasional lone voice or two. One for instance inquires plaintively, Dear Professor, What is all this needless noise? What does it have to do with Basava?
Less and less, as controversy’s noisemaking machine drowns out the voices of Basava and his truth-telling river. Basava is no longer the cause though his name is bandied about by a few overnight experts. No one really remembers him—no one is struck by the stark, astonishing parallels between his time and the present—in the midst of argument and counterargument, threat and retaliation.
It is left to Shiv to play Basava’s keeper. Though the les
son on Basava makes it to the papers and the television every other day, it seems to Shiv that he alone goes back to Basava as to an unmentionable secret.
What would Basava have done in his situation? Shiv has no answer to this absurd question he asks himself lying sleepless in bed late in the night. But the question does summon a series of fragmentary images, which when put together recall how fiercely Basava fought against the dissent-haters. Against his own version of the Manch and its cohorts. When did Basava first come face-to-face with his Manch? When did he see the temple’s clay feet, decide that confrontation was the only option? “Look,” Shiv wants Basava’s ghost to tell him, “this is how it’s done.” But Basava is in the midst of the demanding crowds of his own world. It is for Shiv to seek the clues he so desperately needs, pick up those fabled lessons of history so that the same mistakes are not made again.
Going back to 1168, to an unsafe past that threatens to leak into the present, Shiv sees two images side by side, condemned to be coupled forever. There, to the left, is Basava confronting his Manch, standing up to what he passionately believes in; confidently leading his men and women through the intricacies of ideology and politics. To the right is the second image inexorably tailing the first. Basava’s city Kalyana in the throes of descent into anarchy; into chaos that will mark the end of an era, of the city’s brief season of greatness.
But the self (and the present) intrudes as always. In New Delhi, in his own city caught in a distinctly ignominious season, Shiv is in a meeting once again, though not the sort he has learnt to navigate in the Head’s regimented, bureaucratic paradise. This is Meena’s sort of meeting, attended by twenty “like-minded” people who seem to have spent most of their lives disagreeing with each other on their common beliefs. The meeting is held on neutral ground outside the university campus, in a grimy, characterless “conference room” rented by the hour.
In Times of Siege Page 12