The Great Indian Novel

The Seventh Book: The Son Also Rises

36

Just look at that, Ganapathi. I begin a section vowing to stay clear of Gangaji, and what does the man do? He takes over the section. As long as he is around it will be impossible for us to concentrate on other people, to dwell on Pandu’s famous five or to pursue the darker destinies of Gandhari the Grim and the steatopygous Madri. In the olden days our epic narrators thought nothing of leaving a legendary hero stranded in mid-conquest while digressing into sub-plots, with stories, fables and anecdotes within each. But these, Ganapathi, are more demanding times. Leave Ganga to his devices and start telling fables about Devayani and Kacha, and your audience will walk away in droves. The only interruptions they will stand for these days are catchy numbers sung by gyrating starlets, and Kacha isn’t catchy enough, more’s the pity.

So I suppose we may as well continue our tale, Ganapathi: give Gangaji a good run. But in order to do that we have to acknowledge that the Mahaguru was no longer the only runner.

Yes, Ganapathi, as the story of our impending nationalist victory gathers momentum, so too does a cause which Gangaji had barely begun to take seriously. A cause led by a young man whose golden skin glowed like the sun and on whose forehead shone the bright little half-moon that became his party’s symbol. The cause of the Muslim Group.

The Muslims of India were no more cohesive and monolithic a group than any other in the country. Until politics intervened Indians simply accepted that people were all sorts of different things — Brahmins and Thakurs and Marwaris and Nairs and Lingayats and Pariahs and countless other varieties of Hindu, as well as Roman Catholics and Syrian Christians, Anglo-Indians and Indian Anglicans, Jains and Jews, Keshadhari Sikhs and Mazhabi Sikhs, tribal animists and neo-Buddhists, all of whom flourished on Indian soil along with hundreds and thousands of other castes and sub-castes. Indian Muslims themselves were not just Sunnis and Shias, but Moplahs and Bohras and Khojas, Ismailis and Qadianis and Ahmediyas and Kutchi Memons and Allah alone knew what else. These differences were simply a fact of Indian life, as incontestable and as innocuous as the different species of vegetation that sprout and flower across our land.

We tend to label people easily, and in a country the size of ours that is perhaps inevitable, for labels are the only way out of the confusion of sheer numbers. To categorize people is to help identify them, and what could be more natural in a country as diverse and over-peopled as India than the desire to ‘place’ each Indian? There is nothing demeaning about that, Ganapathi, whatever our modern secular Westernized Indian gentlemen may say. On the contrary, the application of such labels uplifts each individual, for he knows that there is no danger of him being lost in the national morass, that there are distinctive aspects to his personal identity which he shares only with a small group, and that this specialness is advertised by the label others apply to him.

So we Indians are open about our differences; we do not attempt to subsume ourselves in a homogeneous mass, we do not resort to the identity-disguising tricks of standardized names or uniform costumes or even of a common national language. We are all different; as the French, that most Indian of European peoples, like to put it, albeit in another context, vive la difference!

And, yes, when there are such differences, we do discriminate. Each group discriminates against the others. Your lot were free to be themselves so long as this did not encroach on my lot’s right to do the same.

Mutual exclusion did not necessarily mean hostility. This was the prevailing social credo of the time, but there was a high degree of constructive interaction among India’s various communities under these rules. It was, of course, Gangaji who taught us that the very rules were offensive. As with much else that he tried to teach the nation, we did not entirely learn to change our prejudices. But we became most adept at concealing them.

At any rate — and this is the point of my little sociological lecture, so you can wipe that the-old-man’s-digressing-again look off your face, Ganapathi — we had never taken our social differences into the political arena. Maharajas and sultans had engaged their ministers and generals with scant regard for religion, creed or, for that matter, national origin. Aurangzeb, the most Islamic of the Mughals, relied on his Rajput military commanders to put down rival Muslim satraps; the Maratha Peshwas, the original Hindu chauvinists, employed Turkish captains of artillery. No, Ganapathi, religion had never had much to do with our national politics. It was the British civil serpent who made our people collectively bite the apple of discord.

Divide et impera, they called it in the language of their own Roman conquerors — divide and rule. Stress, elevate, sanctify and exploit the differences amongst your subjects, and you can reign over them for ever — or for as near to ever as makes no difference. Imagine the horror of the British in 1857 when their paid Indian soldiers revolted, Hindus and Muslims rallying jointly to the standard of the faded Mughal Emperor, deposed princes and disgruntled peasants making common cause against the alien oppressor. As soon as the national revolt — carefully disparaged by imperial historians as the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ — was put down, British officials rediscovered their Latin lessons. Divide et impera was the subject of closely argued policy-minutes; everything had to be done to drive wedges between Indians in the interests of the whites and Whitehall. The British did not have far to look to place their wedges: they found the perfect opportunities in the religious distinctions which India, in its tolerance, had so long and so innocently preserved.

The strategy was amoral, the tactics immoral. The obvious cleavage to strike upon was between ‘the Hindus’ and ‘the Muslims’. It mattered little that such terms themselves (concealing as they did so many complex divisions and identities) made little sense, nor that they covered groups which had never, in all of India’s political history, functioned as monoliths. It mattered little, because Indians proved only too willing to echo Britain’s political illiteracy and agree to be defined in terms imposed upon them by their conquerors.

So much for the strategy; but then look at the tactics. The British jettisoned or distorted many of their basic democratic precepts before applying them to India. Take elections, for instance. For a long time, there weren’t any. Indians couldn’t be trusted with the vote. Then, when the first set of ‘reforms’ introduced elections (to inconsequential bodies with absurdly limited powers, elected on the basis of a limited franchise, but still elections) a property qualification was required before you could vote. (The stipulation disenfranchised 90 per cent of Indians, and had been abolished decades earlier in the mother country.) When even the affluent voters showed a distressing tendency to vote for the moderate nationalism of the Kaurava Party, the Raj created ‘separate electorates’ for Muslims to vote for Muslim candidates. That was an example of the enlightened administration of the Raj. In their own benighted Britain they would never have thought of making the Jews of Golders Green queue separately to put a kosher koihai into the House of Commons — but such ideas were too good for the primitive, backward natives they were schooling in democracy. If you want to know why democracy is held in such scant respect by our present elite, Ganapathi, you need only look at the way it was dispensed to us by those who claimed to be its guardians.

So we had separate electorates, and inevitably the British encouraged separate political parties as well for each divisible minority interest. It did not take much to put up a few puppets to start a political association of, and for, Muslims. Every one of them was the recipient of a British title, a British subsidy, or (as in the case of their first figurehead, an overweight sybarite called the Gaga Shah) both. The Gaga’s Muslim Group could easily have amounted to something. But the only problem was that he and his gigolous grandees were so embarrassingly grateful to their paymasters that they tripped over themselves to protest their undying loyalty to the British Raj, which didn’t exactly help them win the popular esteem of the Muslim masses. The Gaga and his gang made speeches to each other, presented petitions to the British (to ask for the retention of separate electorates) and sailed off every ‘hot weather’ to spend their privy purses on the race-courses of Europe. Meanwhile, most serious Muslim politicians — and, for that matter, many Parsi and Christian notables — joined, supported and led the Kaurava Party.

So, too, did the man who was one day to lead the Muslim Group to its destiny. Karna emerged on the Kaurava political scene literally out of nowhere. Few things were known about this strange young man whose words glowed like his skin, who maintained a most un-Indian reticence about his origins, his family, his ‘native place’. It was as if he had dawned on the present to shine in the future, while his past existed only in other people’s imagination. But of his brilliance — and ‘brilliant’ was a word universally applied to his appearance, his intellect, his scholastic performance and his speech — there was no doubt.

He first came to national attention as a flourishing lawyer in Bombay, sharp, suave and self-assured, with a bungalow on Malabar Hill and an accent to match the cut of his Savile Row suits. Who he was, and what had made him, no one precisely knew. Mystery continued to swirl about him like mist at a Himalayan sunrise. He lived alone, seemingly without parents, friends, a background such as all Indians take for granted.

Inevitably the guessing-games were played, speculative stories floated, rumour-mills ground, till it became impossible to separate confirmed fact from culpable fantasy. For all one knew he was born into his present position, or rode into it on a white charger with nothing behind him but the sun silhouetted on the horizon.

Ah, the legends that built up around that young man, Ganapathi! Women gushed that he glowed like the sun from the heavens, and his imperviousness to them only made him more refulgent in their eyes. The matronly housewife in the adjoining bungalow swore that the sun emerged each morning from his window, and that on a grey afternoon he had only to appear on the verandah for the clouds to be dispelled. When he walked, crowds parted naturally, and people kept a reverential distance from him as if afraid to be singed by his warmth. The servants whispered that he used no soap or ointment to maintain that golden lustre, which shone untended by human hand. It was said he had all the skills of a classical warrior: some claimed he practised archery in the garden, and could shoot a single mango from a cluster without disturbing the others in the bunch; others spoke of his prowess at riding, recounting how one look from those blazing eyes could quell the most insubordinate of horses at the Mahalakshmi stables. If anyone, in the hushed discussions about him that animated every social gathering so much as breathed curiosity about his unknown origins, someone was bound to retort that there was no point in trying to judge a mighty river by its source. In any case, Karna’s was clearly no common pedigree, and his radiance was only the brighter for being encircled by the lambent touch of the unknown.

The young man himself did nothing to dispel the myths. The mystery of his past served him well, and as he rose dizzyingly to the pinnacle of Bombay’s legal profession it was his future that attracted more attention.

Karna’s poise and confidence were matched by his forensic skill. Few dared debate with him and those who did emerged shorn and shredded by his razor- edged tongue. His success in the courtroom brought him wealthier and more influential clients, invitations to speak at public meetings, and seats on major committees. Before long it began to be said that if there was an Indian of his generation born to shine and to lead, it was clearly the illustrious Mohammed Ali Karna.

Karna had joined the Kaurava Party upon his return from London to set up practice in Bombay as a barrister. He excelled upon its rostrums and soon represented it on various Raj committees and councils. But his view of the nationalist cause was, of course, quite different from Gangaji’s.

Karna’s concerns were those of the Inner Temple lawyer: Indians had a legal right to be consulted in their governance and he intended to obtain and assert those rights through legal means. It was as a skilled advocate of a constitutional brief that Karna approached his politics. Not for him the sweaty trudges through the mofussil districts, the mass rallies that Gangaji addressed in one or another vernacular; Karna, always elegant and well-groomed, was comfortable only in the language of his education and in the kind of surroundings in which he had acquired it.

These factors already pointed to a likely divergence from the path the party would take under Gangaji, but the actual incident that prompted Karna’s exit ignited something more visceral in him.

Something that was destined to set our country ablaze.

37

It was a major meeting of the party’s Working Committee, where Kaurava policy and tactics were being discussed. The Gangaji group, already well on its way to dominance of the organization (these were the days, Ganapathi, when Dhritarashtra and Pandu were still comrades-in-arms) was being prevented from carrying the day only by the defiance of Karna, whose scathing sarcasm about the other side was proving, as always, effective. This party is not going to overthrow the British by leading rabble through the streets,’ he was saying. ‘The mightiest Empire in the world, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers under arms, is not going to be brought down by the great unwashed. There is no Bastille to break open, no feeble king to overrun, but a sophisticated, highly trained, deeply entrenched system of government which we must deal with on its own terms. Those terms, gentlemen’ — and here Karna fixed his audience with that steely gaze above which the half-moon on his forehead seemed to throb with a light all its own — ‘are the terms of the law, of familiarity with British constitutional jurisprudence, of parliamentary practice. We must develop and use these skills to wrest power from rulers who cannot deny it to us under their own rules.’

Karna looked around the table, confirming that every pair of eyes, even the tilt of Dhritarashtra’s unseeing profile, was turned toward him. ‘We cannot hope to rule ourselves by leading mobs of people who are ignorant of the desideratum of self-rule. Populism and demagoguery do not move parliaments, my friends. Breaking the law will not help us to make the law one day. I do not subscribe to the current fashion for the masses so opportunistically advanced by a family of disinherited princes. In no country in the world do the ‘masses’ rule: every nation is run by its leaders, whose learning and intelligence are the best guarantee of its success. I say to my distinguished friends: leave the masses to themselves. Let us not abdicate our responsibility to the party and the cause by placing at our head those unfit to lead us.’

Of course it was arrogant stuff, Ganapathi, but Karna’s was the kind of arrogance that inspires respect rather than resentment. God knows how far he might have gone, and which direction the Kauravas might have taken, were it not for the knock on the door that interrupted him in full flow.

‘Excuse me, Mr Karna, sir,’ coughed an embarrassed durwan, ‘but there is a man in a driver’s uniform outside who says he must see you. I explained to him that you were busy and could not be interrupted, but he insisted it was very important. I. . I. . er. . asked him who he was, sir, and he said. . he said. he was your father.’

Karna’s burnished skin paled during this lengthy explanation, and then a voice sounded outside: ‘Let me in, I say. My son will see me. I must. .’ And then the door was flung open, and a dishevelled figure appeared in a sweat- stained white uniform, peaked driver’s cap in hand, anxiety distorting his face.

‘Karna,’ he cried in anguish. ‘It is your mother. .’

The young man was on his feet. ‘I shall come at once, Abbajan,’ he said, his face a yellow pallor.

‘I see,’ said Dhritarashtra mildly before Karna had even reached the door. ‘A driver’s son has been lecturing us on the unsuitability of the masses.’

‘Such ingratitude,’ murmured an obliging sycophant.

‘Are we to let ourselves be swayed by the prejudices of someone who thinks he is too good for his parents?’ asked Dhritarashtra. Karna shot him a look of pure hatred, which spent itself harmlessly on the dark glasses of its target. A hum of approval from around the table was cut short by the slamming of the door. Karna was gone, defeated — like so many of his compatriots — by his origins.

That is how things often work in our country, Ganapathi. If a man cannot be overcome on merit, you can always expose him by uprooting his family tree. Family trees are versatile plants, Ganapathi; in our country incompetence and mediocrity also flourish under the shade of their leafy branches.

So Karna strode out, and I followed him, muttering that I would be back. I still don’t know what animated my impulse. Kunti had told me she would come by the building where we were meeting in order to wait for her husband, and I was seized with the urge to escape the stifling air of our petty quarrels. It would, I thought, do me good to spend a few minutes in more congenial company.

It was just as well. I reached Pandu’s wife on the landing just in time to catch her as she swooned into my arms.

I eased her on to a sofa and wondered, with all the incompetence of the lifetime bachelor, whether it would be appropriate to splash water on to that still exquisitely made-up face. I had not come to a decision when Kunti stirred, and opened eyes whose redness owed nothing to any cosmetic.

‘It’s him!’ she gasped.

‘What’s who?’ I asked, taken aback.

‘The young man. . who just walked out’

‘Mohammed Ali Karna?’

‘Is that who it was? I’ve heard them speak of him, but never seen him before.’ She began to sit up now, the colour slowly pulsing back to her cheek. ‘What do you know about him, VVji?’

I wished I knew more than I did. After all, information was my speciality; with my sources, I knew everything about everybody. But Karna had proved an exception. ‘Nobody knows very much about him, Kunti. He’s a successful Bombay lawyer, London-trained, a little arrogant. And today we have just learned he is the son of a driver.’

There was a little intake of breath. ‘A driver?’

‘You know, a chauffeur. Karna left with him. His mother is apparently very ill.’

Kunti straightened herself on the sofa and pushed a strand of elegantly greying hair absently back from her eyes. ‘His mother,’ she said faintly, ‘is feeling much better now, thank you.’

It was my turn to swallow air. Her words woke me like the first shafts of sunlight through half-open eyes. Of course: the mystery of Karna’s origin was resolved at last.

The error of Kunti’s adolescence, the result of the plausible temptations of a passing foreigner, the offspring of a travelling man of the world, who had travelled out of his mother’s world in a small reed basket, had not perished. He had survived after all; he had been found; and he had grown to become Mohammed Ali Karna.

‘Kunti,’ I breathed.

‘Oh, VVji, he’s alive,’ she said, her eyes glistening. ‘I’m so happy.’

I tend to become the stern sage at the wrong moments. ‘You must never acknowledge him, Kunti,’ I cautioned her.

‘Do you think I don’t realize that?’ The retort was sharp, but I shall never forget the pathos in her voice. ‘Oh, VVji, won’t you find out more about him for me? Who this driver is? What exactly happened?’

‘Of course,’ I reassured her. With that basic clue, I knew that I, Ved Vyas, savant of other people’s secrets, would have no difficulty.

Indeed: a few discreet inquiries confirmed that Kunti’s instinctive faith in her first, lost son’s survival had been entirely justified. The basket had floated gently down the river and become enmeshed in some undergrowth on the right bank. As Fate would have it — for such things, as you well know, Ganapathi, are willed from above — a childless couple was picnicking on the riverside. The husband was a humble modern successor to the noble profession of charioteering, in other words a chauffeur, and he had profited from his employer’s absence to drive his wife to the river for a rare outing. Of such coincidences, Ganapathi, is history made.

The couple found the child and raised their hands heavenwards in praise of Allah, for they were Muslims. And thus it was that the child they adopted, the natural son of Kunti, acquired the basic qualification for membership of the party he would lead so decisively one day: the Muslim Group.

The other elements of his curriculum vitae then fell implausibly into place. Implausibly, for few who saw the Inner Temple barrister would have easily guessed the prosaic facts I discovered or inferred: a slum boyhood; scholarships to secondary school and college; a wealthy patron, his father’s employer — the opulent Indra Deva — to finance a stay in London. Karna was not born to affluence, as everyone thought; and yet, in a curious way, Ganapathi, he was.

But the more I probed, the more the story of Mohammed Ali Karna dissolved again into myth and speculation. Even when the incident of the chauffeur’s arrival at the Kaurava Party meeting became widely known, and the gossips and the rumour-mongers circulated fanciful and malicious versions of it to all who would listen, the golden youth remained untarnished. Instead, though the identity of those he called his parents could not be concealed, there were odd stories, awed stories, circulating about his extraordinary qualities, almost as if to make up for the apparent ordinariness of his ancestry.

These stories stressed not just his brilliance, but the determination and self- control which would one day win him a country. A typical tale, quite probably apocryphal, Ganapathi, told of how he came by his unusual name.

His father, devout Muslim though he was, had been reluctant, the story went, to risk the slightest harm to his golden foundling, and had left the boy uncircumcised. One day the young Mohammed Ali, bathing in the river with his father, asked him why he was different in that crucial respect.

‘Because you are not really my son, the grey-haired chauffeur replied; God allowed me to find you, but that did not give me the right to change the way He had made you.’

‘But I am your son,’ the boy declared. ‘I do not care what I was before you found me; my past abandoned me. I will be like you.’

Whereupon he seized a knife and circumcised himself.

Hearing of the boy’s deed the chauffeur’s master, Indra Deva, expressed his admiration of the lad. ‘You shall be known, in the glorious tradition of our national epic, as Karna,’ he announced. ‘Karna, the Hacker-Off.’

And thus it was that Mohammed Ali, adopted son of a rich man’s driver, became Mohammed Ali Karna, destined to be Star of the Inner Temple and Defender of the Mosque.

You don’t seem particularly convinced, Ganapathi. Well, neither was I. It is only a story. But you learn something about a man from the kind of stories people make up about him.

38

Of course one must be wary of history by anecdote.

It would be too facile to suggest that the incident at the meeting alone led to Karna’s resignation from the Kaurava Party. There undoubtedly were a hundred complex reasons that drove Karna out of the party, and that might have led him to leave it at another stage of its development. It was clear, for one thing, that his position was undermined by the demonstrable effectiveness of Gangaji’s methods; he could at best have slowed the capture of the party by the Hastinapuris, but he could not have prevented it. There was, for another, his own ego, which could not have abided the subordinate or at least co-equal role that Dhritarashtra and Pandu, let alone Gangaji himself, would have imposed upon him. Karna was one of those who would rather be king of an island than courtier, or even minister, in a great empire.

And then there was the altogether more complicated matter of religion. Don’t get me wrong — Mohammed Ali, for all that he had earned his ‘Karna’, bore no resemblance to the robed-and-bearded ayatollahs of current Islamic iconography. He disdained the mullahs and disregarded their prohibitions. Where Dhritarashtra learned to brew his own tea in England, Karna acquired a taste for Scotch and cocktail sausages. Far from praying five times a day, he prided himself on his scientific, and therefore agnostic, cast of mind. His outlook was that of an Englishman of his age and profession: ‘modern’ (to use an adjective that has outlived more changes of connotation than any other in the language), formalist, rational, secular. It was not Islam that separated him from Gangaji, but Hinduism.

I see from the look of astonishment on your face that I shall have to explain myself. It is really very simple, Ganapathi. Karna was not much of a Muslim but he found Gangaji too much of a Hindu. The Mahaguru’s traditional attire, his spiritualism, his spouting of the ancient texts, his ashram, his constant harking back to an idealized pre-British past that Karna did not believe in (and was impatient with) — all this made the young man mistrustful of the Great Teacher. The very title in which Gangaji had acquiesced made Karna uncomfortable: in his world there were no Mahagurus, only Great Learners. And Gangaji’s mass politics were, to Karna, based on an appeal to the wrong instincts; they embodied an atavism that in his view would never take the country forward. A Kaurava Party of prayer-meetings and unselective eclecticism was not a party he would have cared to lead, let alone to remain a member of.

In other words, Karna found the Kauravas under Gangaji insufficiently secular, and this made him, paradoxically, more consciously Muslim. Gangaji’s efforts to transcend his Hindu image by stressing the liberalism of his interpretation of it only made matters worse. When the Mahaguru, in one of his more celebrated pronouncements, declared his faith in all religions with the words, ‘I am a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Zoroastrian, a Jew,’ Karna responded darkly: ‘Only a Hindu could say that.’

This doesn’t mean, Ganapathi, that Karna slammed the door on the Kauravas and went off straight away to join the Gaga’s discredited Group.

When, in his absence, the Kauravas passed the policy resolution that committed the party firmly to Gangaji’s line, Karna, humiliated and bitter, felt he could no longer return to the cause. Yet he still believed, like almost everyone else, that the Kauravas were the nationalists’ only hope. If they were going to persist in error, Karna decided, then he had no party left. He did not simply return to his law practice; he packed his bags and set sail for England.

Karna was never a man for half-measures. Once he had decided to make a break it was always a clean break, and a complete one. It was a characteristic that would have a profound and lasting impact upon the nation.

39

For it was obvious to anyone who had followed his career that Karna could not be kept out of Indian politics for ever. He was in London when the Mahaguru and his motley crew of Round Tablers conferred so fruitlessly, and he found himself unable to hold back in public the contempt he felt for the state of the nationalist organizations. ‘As an Indian,’ he said to an inquiring reporter, ‘I am ashamed and disgusted to see my fate and that of my country being discussed and resolved by such a collection of has-beens, never-wases and never-will-bees.’

‘If you feel so strongly,’ asked the journalist, ‘why do you not return to Indian politics yourself?’

Karna’s unblinking gaze directed the questioner to his notebook. ‘I am waiting,’ he said, ‘for the right invitation.’

The right invitation. There was the tragedy of divide et impera. If the British had not sought to split up our people along sectarian lines, the invitation Karna was so openly soliciting might have come from, say, a Conservative Nationalist Party, one differing from the Kauravas on issues of political principle rather than religion. Instead the call came from the Gaga Shah, head of the Muslim Group: a gilt-edged card requesting the pleasure of Karna’s company for tea at the Savoy.

40

‘So glad you could come, old chap,’ the Gaga said, half-rising, with great effort, from his capacious chair. Karna took his hand unsmilingly. ‘Sit down, won’t you, there’s a good fellow. Tea?’

Steaming cups were poured, not by a Savoy waiter, but by a menial in a cummerbund who bowed as he handed the refreshment to his master. Karna declined with a curt shake of the head the offer of a silver tray laden with pastries. The Gaga looked astonished. ‘Really?’ he asked, as he stuffed a glazed pink object into his mouth and, almost in the same gesture, helped himself to a cream puff. ‘Don’t know what you’re missing, old chap.’

Karna remained pointedly silent.

‘Must eat, you know,’ the Gaga went on bonhomously. ‘All in the cause of duty for me, of course. My followers weigh me against gold and diamonds every birthday, and it wouldn’t do to let them down by placing a sylph-like figure on the scales. Ruins the spectacle, don’t you know. And doesn’t make for much of a birthday present, either.’ He guffawed into his tea. Karna seemed incapable even of a polite smile. The Gaga decided to try again. ‘One of my wives, can’t remember which one — put pearls around their neck and they’re all alike, ha-ha — used to go on and on at me about my eating. Don’t take this, put that down, not another helping, you know the sort of thing. Till I told her that each bite of foie gras meant another sapphire for her collection. Quite literally. And then I couldn’t stop her shovelling the stuff on to my plate.’ He chuckled at the memory, then noticed Karna sitting, stiff and unmoved, his cup untouched on the table by his side.

The attempt at banter past, the Gaga took an elaborate sip of tea, one pudgy and bejewelled little finger held delicately in the air. ‘S’pose you’re wondering why I asked you here,’ he said at last.

‘The question had occurred to me,’ Karna said drily.

The cup rattled in the Gaga’s hand. This was not a tone of voice he was accustomed to hearing. ‘Quite,’ he exhaled sharply. ‘Quite.’ He reached for a chocolate éclair and munched it reflectively. ‘Fact is, we’d like you back in India.’

‘We?’ Karna sat still, one eyebrow raised in interrogation.

‘The Muslim Group,’ the Gaga explained. ‘Our party needs men like you.’

‘Oh?’ Karna seemed to want him to go on. How much easier it was, the Gaga thought, to deal with men of the turf. They were content with a pat and a nod, and the occasional packet of cash. This cold, aloof lawyer with the arrogant eyes was another sort of customer altogether. And yet — he was just the sort of jockey needed to spur an overweight, complacent thoroughbred into purposeful motion. The Gaga sighed.

‘You are aware of the current political position in India,’ he began.

‘I have been following events, yes,’ Karna confirmed.

The Gaga sensed an opportunity to let the other do the talking. ‘Good,’ he breathed his relief. ‘And how do you assess the situation?’

‘I believe it is quite deplorable,’ the lawyer replied. ‘Ganga Datta and his Kaurava Party are the only actors of any consequence on the stage, and they stand for all that is retrogressive and populist in Indian politics. If they are to triumph we shall witness neither democracy nor progress but mobocracy and anarchy in India.’

‘Hindu mobocracy,’ the Gaga added.

‘Perhaps. Though rioters have no religion, as we have seen during this wretched mango business. It galls me to see the leadership of India fall into hands stained by mango juice.’

‘Well put,’ the Gaga said, thinking enviously of the mangoes wasted on the agitators. They were his favourite fruit, and he had made an annual practice of sending a basket of choicest Alphonso to every Englishman of distinction he sought to cultivate. The unusual gift, accompanied by a crested card bearing the calligraphed compliments of the Gaga Shah, had opened the doors of many a stately home for him in the past. This year, thanks to Gangaji’s bad taste, they had had a disastrous effect. Few new invitations had been prompted by what some saw as a symbol of sedition, and in two cases his baskets had been sent back to him, their contents intact. Next year, the Gaga sighed, he would have to think of something more appropriate to give.

‘I’m afraid I don’t believe any of the other parties have covered themselves with glory either,’ Karna added. ‘The Muslim Group. .’

‘. . is moribund,’ the Gaga completed the sentence for him. ‘Quite. But then what can you expect from a gathering of nawabs and zamindars? We have wealth, we have status, we have positions of influence. But I will be candid with you, my dear Karna, we lack energy.’ He helped himself to a madeleine. ‘That is why I have asked you here today, old chap. The Muslim Group needs you.’

Karna looked at him in silence for a long moment. ‘What exactly are you proposing?’ he asked at last.

The Gaga looked nonplussed. ‘Why, that you should come back, of course. And join the Group, dear fellow. Give us the benefit-of your perception. Your advice.’

‘Advice.’ Karna looked hard at his host, and the Gaga noticed how the half- moon glowed at him, like a third eye.

‘Yes And. . and. . counsel.’

Karna rose to his feet. ‘In that case, we have nothing to discuss, Your Highness,’ he said curtly. ‘Your proposal is of no interest to me. Good day.’

The Gaga, struggling free of the enveloping embrace of the cushions into which he had sunk, nearly choked. ‘But. . here. . where are you going? I don’t understand.’

‘I shall make myself perfectly clear. I have no desire to offer advice, as you put it, or counsel, to an ineffective covey of irrelevant old men. If you’ll pardon my language, sir. And now I shall take my leave. I have other pressing matters to attend to.’

The Gaga, to Karna’s surprise, chuckled, restraining the young man with a pudgy hand. ‘Come, come,’ he said, pushing the lawyer with surprising strength back towards the chair. ‘Pardon your language!’ he gave vent to a throaty chortle. ‘I shall do nothing of the kind. That is precisely the kind of language we need to hear more of in the Muslim Group. Sit down, dear chap, and tell me what you think you could do for us. Apart from giving us advice, that is.’ He laughed heartily and clapped his hands for more pastries. Karna, mollified, his half-moon fading to blend with the golden skin around it, allowed himself to be steered to a seat.

‘Good,’ said the Gaga, subsiding once again into the upholstery. ‘Now, tell me.’

‘I have given the matter some thought,’ the lawyer said. ‘At first I hesitated even to come here; I have never had a very high opinion of the political achievements of your Group, despite my personal regard for many of its members.’ The Gaga acknowledged the courtesy, and the criticism it modified, with a gracious nod. ‘In the ordinary course I would have been reluctant to identify myself solely with one community. But I do not like the direction that the Kaurava movement is taking, and I am forced to acknowledge that of the available political alternatives, the Muslim Group, which at least enjoys a certain prestige in the eyes of the Raj, has the best potential.’

He paused here to look meaningfully at the Gaga, who nodded, a lemon tart between his cheeks making other communication difficult.

‘I say potential, Your Highness, and I use the word advisedly,’ Karna continued. ‘Because I do not believe the Group as it is at present constituted has any prospect worth the name, except to serve as a forum for the landed Muslim interest and to speak for the secular concerns of the community from time to time — without, that is, wielding any real political power. The only positions the Group has gained are those to which the British have chosen to appoint its members. We must be grateful for that, but we cannot afford to be content with it.’

‘Quite so,’ the Gaga concurred, hastily swallowing a morsel. ‘Quite so.’

‘We are reasonably secure under the British, but we must think of the future,’ Karna went on. ‘A future under Ganga Datta’s Kauravas does not bear thinking about. Neither you nor I would have any place in the kind of India they are likely to construct.’

‘I quite agree,’ the Gaga intoned. ‘Go on.’

‘That is why we must prepare our battlements now,’ the young man concluded. ‘And that is why you do not need advice. You need leadership.’

‘Leadership which you can provide?’ the Gaga asked.

‘Leadership,’ Karna said firmly, ‘that only I can provide.’

The Gaga was silent for a long moment, weighing the implications of the words as if they were diamonds he was being called upon to give away. ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘Name your terms. I believe we can meet them.’

Karna pulled a piece of paper out of the inside pocket of his double- breasted jacket. ‘I thought this might be required,’ he said impassively. ‘Here they are.’

The Gaga took the sheet from him and read it carefully, and this is where my narrative falters, Ganapathi, for the young man in the cummerbund, standing discreetly attentive behind a thick curtain, could not make out the writing from where he stood. Yes, Ganapathi, he was one of my men. I have told you repeatedly, haven’t I, that I have my sources. They were everywhere, even on the Gaga Shah’s personal staff. I am glad to see that how-could-he- possibly-have-known look, which you have been wearing ostentatiously throughout this scene, disappear from your face. A little more faith, Ganapathi, a little more respect, a small suspension of disbelief, and you will find our story sailing smoothly on, without all these breaks for justification and explanation which your furrowed brow periodically imposes upon me.

41

As it happens, we do not need the contents of that piece of paper to be able to guess what Karna’s terms were. For within months of his return to India everything had become clear. He was introduced into the Muslim Group and made its President with almost indecent haste. The Committee of Elders, which had hitherto guided the activities — such as they were — of the party, was reconstituted into an advisory panel named by President Karna and serving at his pleasure. The party’s Constitution was redrafted to confirm the President’s supreme position and to proclaim a new objective: the advancement (not just the defence) of the rights and interests of India’s Muslims. Using the immense resources of its patrons, the Group established offices, and launched membership campaigns, in every district of the country. Karna was creating his constituency.

I said earlier that in the country’s political race for independence the Mahaguru was not the only one doing the running. Karna’s Group declared itself for the first time in favour of freedom from the British. It was no longer pleading and pledging its loyalty to the colonial masters in exchange for favours: it was now a nationalist movement in its own right, like the Kaurava Party. The only difference was that the Group considered nationalism to be divisible. ‘Independence without Hindu domination’ was Karna’s new slogan. If that seemed less than consistent with his previous non-sectarianism, he couched it in constitutionalist terms, speaking glibly of the need for a new form of federalism, the protection of minority rights, the importance of each community being able to advance unobstructed by the others. Some, at least, refused to take him at his word. ‘What he really means is the importance of Mohammed Ali Karna wielding power over at least one part of the country, unobstructed by anyone else,’ Dhritarashtra said mordantly to the Kaurava Working Committee. ‘You can hardly accuse him of inconsistency in that. He’s never believed in anything else.’

Picture the situation then, Ganapathi. The Kaurava Party, riven by the dissent of the Panduites, its most successful popular movement of civil disobedience suspended in the wake of the Chaurasta deaths, its eccentric but charismatic leader continuing to thumb his nose at the Raj. And in the opposite corner, the Muslim Group, richly endowed, favourably looked upon by the rulers, decisively led. The clash was as inevitable as its outcome was uncertain.