Jyoti looks unenthusiastic, but Meena prods her. “Come on, Jyoti, be a sport.” Shiv sits down by Meena’s bed.
Jyoti stands in the middle of the room and hams for all she’s worth, reading Atre’s statement as if she is reciting a Sanskrit sloka in a querulous old man’s voice. In the interests of authenticity, Meena supplies the sound effects—punctuating om’s, um’s and aha’s at the end of every sentence.
“It is said: That is Fullness, this is Fullness, from Fullness comes Fullness.” Full-l-l-ness. Jyoti holds the L till fullness swells, growing riper and rounder each time she says the word. “When Fullness is taken away from Fullness, Fullness remains. How many so-called modern thinkers understand this ancient premise of Fullness versus Void? Their shallow interpretations of our culture more than justify the brahmins’ wisdom in keeping sacred texts away from the uninitiated. True Indians, whose souls vibrate to ancient truths, must reject modern errors and misinterpretations. Signed, A. A. Atre, history prof. (retd.).”
Meena hoots as if she has not heard Jyoti read the same thing before Shiv came into the room.
“You should be on the stage,” Shiv says, laughing, but without the enthusiasm Jyoti’s performance deserves. The trouble is that somewhere in the loyal recesses of memory, he can hear his own ancestors—nothing like Atre by any stretch of the imagination—intoning slokas with solemn devotion. Shiv drinks up what is left in his glass and gets up.
“This Aged Atre,” says Meena, flaring her nostrils with contemptuous scorn. “He divides his time between ranting about the Great Indian Zero and the Great Brahmin Foolness.”
But Jyoti is done with the comic possibilities of fullness. She says to Meena dolefully, “We can laugh at the kind of clowns they have now. But sooner or later they’ll manage to acquire some reasonable fellows of their own.”
“You mean the soft types and opportunists,” says Meena, unimpressed.
“That’s what I’d like to believe too, but—” and Jyoti adds with a confiding air that Shiv finds touching, “These communalists have screwed up our heads so badly that I think I’m getting paranoid. I’m also sick of being so fucking PC all the time. The next thing you know, I won’t be able to wear a saffron-colored sari unless it has green stripes.”
“Our paranoia is nothing compared to theirs,” Meena consoles her. “During the 1993 riots in Mumbai, some people drove their cars onto Chowpatty Beach and shone their headlights into the sea. They were actually trying to ward off an imminent Iranian invasion.”
Words, more words. But like everyone else—perhaps more than everyone else if he is to remain entangled with history—Shiv is condemned to wooing what Amar likes to call “the bigger picture.” And the bigger picture, it appears, needs more words, more nitpicking. But which big picture will fit on this canvas that is getting smaller all the time? The world, that vast map of furrowed wisdom his father spread out for Shiv’s delight, shrinks all the time in the wrong climate. An entire continent, or an ocean with its deep secrets waiting to be understood, is captured and tamed. Domesticated. Reduced to a manageable size. History, its layered terrain of past merging into present, shrinks to the size of a module, a black-and-white booklet of lessons. Then that too goes. There is only a lone, orphaned atom left behind, a sullen, impoverished particle of knowledge. The world and its multitudinous mysteries are reduced to precarious survival on a crude seesaw: saint versus leader, saint versus man. Golden Age versus Dark Ages. Hindu versus Muslim, Hindu versus Christian, anti-Hindu, pro-Hindu. Secularist, pseudosecularist, soft Hindu, rabid Hindu.
If there is only one way to know ideas or people or the past, why bother with knowing? Why not take Basava’s suggestion, throw away the mind and the heart rusting from disuse?
Shiv’s mind and heart are very much intact, but he still feels the fear of an endangered species whose natural habitat has been taken over. His savaged room: even its memory, the imagined memory of its ruin, suggests that all hope—of pretending it did not happen, that such a thing could not happen—is an illusion. Shiv’s room in the university has been left in shambles, shards of glass and splinters of wood mingling with the remains of his books and files. The legacy of vandals. The spaces vandals have pillaged and violated lie across the vast stretches of history, doomed to desolation. And what difference now, in the ruins of memory, between Vijayanagar and his university room? Shiv’s room, though a minor city, a city of mundane compromise, joins its grand, monumental ancestors. Perhaps it is only the padlock on his door that keeps out tourists in search of storytelling ruins.
NINE
OCTOBER 1–2
All day the telephone has been ringing for Meena. In between, she makes calls and passes on what she has heard. The night before, while they were being treated to the KGU VC’s latest ideas on univershity shecurity, there has been what Meena calls a “crisis” in KNU. The details pile up with each call; who the characters are and what they did gets more colorful and lurid with each consecutive report.
After the first four calls, Meena tells Shiv, “It was just waiting to happen. Your Manch leader Anant Tripathi was at a boys’ hostel on campus last night. Some of our people gathered outside to demonstrate—we can’t let these fascist goondas spread their propaganda. But it was a peaceful dharna. Or at least it was till their goons went berserk and burnt a motorcycle parked outside the hostel. It seems they also hurt one of our students—they broke his arm.”
After the eighth call, she says, “The trouble started soon after the talk began. Some of their boys were making lewd remarks about our girls who were sitting outside the hostel shouting slogans. Our boys intervened and their lot went crazy. Of course they are now saying it’s secular hooliganism.”
After the tenth call, she says, “They’re going to set up an enquiry committee. Do you want to bet it will be full of fundoos and wimps? The police have already picked up four of our students. They picked up two of theirs but let them off with a warning. Shiv, will you bring me all the newspapers? I want to read every single version.”
Shiv feels he is in the middle of Rashomon or some such cleverly constructed film where the whole truth remains stubbornly elusive. Where even a semblance of truth can only be reached obliquely, by painfully piecing together fragments of stories told by different people of the same event. For instance:
The other side (or “they”): “Now that they have indulged in suppression of speech, the storm troopers of the secular fundamentalists, commies and women’s rights activists are pretending to be innocent victims. These hypocrites pay lip service to freedom of expression but they gathered outside the hostel and tried to force their way inside.”
Our side (also “our people”): “The pro-Manch boys teasing our girls are not even students of KNU. They came in with Tripathi and were inciting our students.”
They: “Why should we spoil our own function? Some of the commie girls were deliberately dressed in provocative clothes when they sat there shouting obscene slogans. And it’s not true that a student’s arm was broken during Tripathijï’s talk. This is sheer secular propaganda. That student broke his arm two weeks back in an accident.”
Our people: “Even some of the bourgeois newspapers support our version. There was a reporter on campus last night and he saw one of their boys setting fire to the motorcycle.”
By the evening, the Manch issues its press release: “We condemn the attempts of secular fundamentalists in KNU to prevent our respected leader Shri Anant Tripathi from engaging in a peaceful, informative discussion with the students. Their ideology of Hindu-bashing, authoritarianism and rumor-mongering now stands exposed.”
Meena is gainfully employed, confabulating downstairs with Amar and his mass base to pin down a few viable slivers of slippery truth. Not one of them noticed when Shiv slipped out of the room.
Outside, the first light or two twinkle in the distant horizon. It is twilight, the hour in which things are not always what they seem. In this state of half-light, half-darkness, it is not diffic
ult to believe that the garden holds an entire hoard of secrets, both dreams and fears.
Tentatively, almost with a fear of being caught in the act, Shiv recalls Rekha’s words the day before.
Rekha does not know about Arya’s heroics in the alleged faculty meeting, but she does know about Shiv’s room being ransacked. She has called several times over the last few days, though most of these conversations have been easily swallowed up by the growing, interminable babble around Shiv. But one call was a little different. That was when he heard the momentary wobble of her voice before she regained self-control, so that he felt almost aghast: was that really the tough, smooth-talking Rekha he knew at the other end of the line?
“I do see you can’t give in so easily,” she said. “It’s not as if I don’t see the principle of the thing. But to be idealistic at such a time, and with such people!” Her voice shook again, then fell almost to a shamed whisper. “Don’t forget, you’re dealing with hoodlums who have pulled down mosques and churches that have stood for so many years. They’ve engineered riots, for god’s sake, what’s a little violence to them? And they’re so powerful now. What can we do—Shiv, don’t you understand? I’m afraid.”
In the end it was Shiv who had to play the unfamiliar role of comforting her, protesting that she was imagining the worst. When he called her this morning, she was back to her usual self. Some instinct told him that he should pretend she had never revealed her clay feet. This was the only way he could protect her, not only from her moment of weakness, but also from her fear.
Now though, sitting alone, in the oncoming darkness colored by the day’s remnants and a hesitant, milky moon, Shiv goes back to that one call. Finally, not much was said; but what was said (and left unsaid) has allowed him to see Rekha, and himself, stripped almost to the bone. A tongue feels compelled to explore the strange taste and feel of the cavity left by a fallen tooth. Shiv is that tongue now; he summons Rekha’s words again and again, and the uncertain, almost pleading tone of her voice.
There is something poignant about her admission of fear. About the fact that she is as fearful as he, that they are both equals in vulnerability. That she is willing to share this knowledge with him. He feels oddly protective of this Rekha, who at least for the duration of a single phone call has admitted that she is not always forging ahead purposefully, as if she invariably walks in the sunlit blaze of day.
But still, his faith is shaken. Now there is no way he can tell Rekha her fears are well-placed; that among the anonymous calls he has been getting, there is one caller who knows he has a wife and daughter, and that they are in Seattle. That the caller, a man with an unnaturally gravelly voice, reminded him that no one was out of their reach, and especially not in America, where they have any number of “friends.”
If Rekha too is vulnerable in more ways than one, how is he to negotiate the unknown world ahead? Call on his father, a mere ghost, to guide him, or Basava, a banned history lesson?
In the undergrowth behind him, a peacock cries plaintively, as if calling its mate to come home to roost. Shiv looks at the warm light in Meena’s room that beckons him to a dubious safety. He gets up, goes into the house. But he bypasses Meena’s room and makes his way upstairs to his desk. He must try once again to finish writing the new lesson on the medieval Vijayanagar empire. What else can a teacher do? What other weapons come to hand?
He forces himself to turn to the notes for the lesson that waits on his desk. But this is a lesson he has to write with someone—many strangers, many hostile eyes—looking over his shoulder. He summons Basava’s words for courage: Cripple me, father, that I may not go here and there. Blind me, father, that I may not look at this and that. Deafen me, father, that I may not hear anything else.
Shiv’s own father, loving ghost, beams. His vapory face lights up with approval as it always does when Shiv forces struggling pen to paper.
But Shiv can also see the newspaper clippings of a near future, rows of bold letters that hang before his eyes like a thick curtain. He sees these letters form words, legible words. They condemn—loudly—any image of the past that does not conform to current theology. He can hear, in the refuge of his room, the watchdogs’ interviews. “Professor Murthy has distorted historical fact. He has tainted the glory of the model Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar. He has underplayed the villainous Muslim sacking of Vijayanagar City.”
Shiv turns away from the barking watchdogs. But now he hears the plaintive, wheedling voice of the Head. “What are the facts pertinent to the lesson? One: Vijayanagar was a glorious Hindu empire, a peak, if you like, of the Hindu past and heritage. Two: the empire was defeated in battle and the great city plundered by the Muslim kingdoms. Why not stick to these simple facts?”
Despite Shiv’s contempt for the Head, his stomach contracts. Is it possible to write history—or anything else at all—if you have to worry about your masters’ objections, their venal sentiments? Shiv puts down his pen and waits. Instead of his notes, he consults his own memories of Hampi.
Vijayanagar, now a memory in rock and stone in the Hampi ruins. Shiv visited Hampi in 1996, and despite having read all the travelers’ accounts available, he was unprepared for the scale of the ruins. The stories of Vijayanagar that awaited Shiv, the modern traveler in Hampi, were cast not only in words but also in granite; their plot was a slippery, perpetual engagement between history and myth. The exploits of deities, legendary heroes and heroines, and their human counterparts in history jostled for Shiv’s attention in images painted, sculpted and carved on stone. The overwhelming motif was that of conquest. The recurring visual theme was the majestic man-lion, Narasimha, like a fantastic incarnation of all the qualities the kings who worshipped him wished for themselves; or the mythical Yali, a fearsome combination of a tiger, an elephant and a horse.
Hampi. Setting of the Hindu Vijayanagar empire in medieval India, designed to be a showpiece of Hindu might. A fortress capital city as the focal point of the empire, a city full of triumphal arches, aqueducts, thriving bazaars and trade, roads, palaces. Temples and more temples. Blocks of stone, rock, everything on a scale intended to dwarf and diminish the individual citizen. A city planned to flaunt its glory, intimidate the subjects into subjection. And all the grandeur, like its kindred great cities, invariably built on the blood and sweat of hovels swallowed up by time. Grandeur coupled with a single-minded quest for power, inextricable from images of violence. Behind the façade—the spectacle of the wonder-city, the palaces and poetry, the dancing girls dripping with jewels, the treasuries and temple-coffers overflowing with precious metals and stones—an age-old recurring motif of other, darker associations. Tribute, arrears, massacres with fire and sword, revenge, slaughter. Imperial glory, intimate with the landscape of the battlefield. Then fall, decay, and ruin.
That is the larger picture, the images and associations the historian on a field trip took in.
But Shiv also remembers: on his last evening in Hampi, he took an auto up a hill overlooking the river and the Vittala temple. The auto groaned its way up and spluttered to a halt. The driver, Suban, a namesake of one of the Deccan sultans, climbed the rocks with Shiv. Suban told Shiv about the loan he had taken to buy his auto, his three daughters between the ages of two and four, then pointed out a cluster of tiny stone gateways. Couples who want to conceive, Suban said, set up two vertical stones and a third on top like a roof. When the child is born, they return to remove the roof, leaving a miniature ruin.
Shiv sat with young Suban, looking at the spread of ruins before them. The sun had almost set behind the dark, brooding gopurams and boulders. Then Suban said, tentatively, “It must have been beautiful, they shouldn’t have broken it down.”
By “they” he meant Muslims, his ancestors, what he had now been given to understand as his “side.” And he was offering Shiv an apology; Shiv was, in his eyes, a representative of the Hindu side. Shiv’s name, and his knowledge of the stories he had told Suban about the Narasimha and Ganesha statues they s
aw earlier in the day, were enough to make Shiv a custodian of a mythicized Hindu past. A past reconstructed, complete with its glories and its suffering at the hands of foreign invaders, both equally evocative.
Suddenly, all of Shiv’s reading and scholarly training, all his understanding of history as a social science, dissipated into the gathering darkness around them. He was naked, unprotected. He had forgotten who exactly he was; all the collective progress of the last fifty years had been torn off his body in an instant. It was as if recent Indian history, the recent history of his father’s time and his own, never happened. As if Gandhi and Nehru and Ambedkar and Bose and all the other unnamed heroes of the recent past had never lived. As if they were, like some epic heroes, entirely products of an inspired collective imagination.
And Shiv’s father: was that his lost, wandering ghost standing behind Suban and Shiv, his wordless sadness a question and a challenge? Shiv could hear him ask the questions that always haunted him: What kind of country poisons the minds of children, of its youth? And did we fight for freedom so we could divide this teeming, hungry house forever?
…
Shiv gets up, restless. It seems he is trapped one way or the other. If he goes down, he will have to enlist in the army Amar and Meena are organizing for battle. If he remains upstairs at his desk, he will have to write the lesson, separate the Hampi he saw in 1996 from the City of Vijayanagar it held more than four hundred years before.
He puts down his pen and stares out of the window. The moon has retreated behind a cloud. Now the night is dark and sulky, the kind that leaves stars entirely to the imagination. The sky hangs over the world with all its unfathomable emptiness, supremely indifferent to Shiv. He turns away from the window. How is he to write about Vijayanagar City—either its glory or its fall—as if it exists in a safe vacuum, as if Basava and his Hall, Shiv’s university and its history department, do not intrude? He remembers how puzzled the young auto driver in Hampi was when Shiv tried to explain to him that they did not belong to two different sides. The driver, who had been friendly and chatty all day, withdrew into suspicious, uncomfortable silence after Shiv’s attempted lesson. On the one hand, there is this teasing memory of the auto driver in Hampi, willing to bear an unnecessary burden of guilt, seeing himself as part of a battle in the past he knows nothing about. On the other, there is Shiv’s own Manch, with their clamorous claims to Basava’s legacy though they are ignorant of him and his times; though they stand for everything Basava fought against to his last breath. Shiv sighs. Is there a connection here he is missing?
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