The Great Indian Novel

The Eighth Book: Midnight’s Parents

42

Let us leave them there for a minute, Ganapathi, and take a quick look at the others. The wives and children of politicians may not lead such momentous lives, but that is no reason for us to ignore them. Pandu’s extended family, for instance, flourished in his absence. Though Madri did tend once in a while to look long and wistfully at herself in the mirror, she and Kunti ran a remarkable household for their five sons.

And what sons they were, Ganapathi! Yudhishtir showed every sign of rapidly vindicating his father’s astral prophecies by excelling at his studies, making a habit of standing first in his class at every examination he took. And if he was overly fond of starched shirts and encyclopaedias, neither was likely to do him much harm in the courtroom career for which everyone believed he was destined. Bhim developed stature and musculature with each successive meal, and from the first became the strong-armed protector of his brothers. He was too heavy to swagger, but his lumbering tread was held in dread — no, no, Ganapathi, I am not returning to verse, keep your pen on the same line there — by every would-be juvenile bully. Arjun, of course, was perfection with pimples. Fleet of foot and keen of mind, supple and sensitive, lean and strong, a sportsman and a scholar, Arjun united all the opposite virtues of human nature: he was prince and commoner, brain and brawn, yin and yang. As for the twins, Nakul and Sahadev, they were the right foils for their exceptionally endowed brothers, for each was pleasant, simple, decent and honest, exemplifying all the merits of the amiable mediocrity they shared with millions of their less illustrious countrymen.

And so grew the five brothers, known variously as the Famous Five, the Hastinapur Horde or quite simply as the Pandavas. While all by herself, in Dhritarashtra’s wing of their palatial home, Priya Duryodhani, away from her cousinly brood, cozenly brooded.

She was a slight, frail girl, Ganapathi, with a long thin tapering face like the kernel of a mango and dark eyebrows that nearly joined together over her high-ridged nose, giving her the look of a desiccated schoolteacher at an age when she was barely old enough to enrol at school. She might have even been labelled plain had not Nature, with her marvellous flair for genetic compensation, given blind Dhritarashtra’s disappointing daughter the most striking pair of eyes in Hastinapur. Dark and lustrous, they shone from that pinched face like blazing gems on a fading backcloth, flashing, questioning, accusing, demanding in a manner that transcended mere words.

Not that words were of much use to Priya Duryodhani. She had little feeling for them, and her high-pitched squeaky voice would have made a poor vehicle for any figure of speech. But those eyes more than made up for all her other deficiencies, Ganapathi. They gave her a strength, a dynamism, that everything else belied. Gandhari the Grim, let down by the fates in both the number and the gender of her offspring, had been blessed with savage irony in the one aspect of her daughter she would never be able to appreciate.

Unappreciative and unappreciated, Gandhari wasted away in the home she had hoped to make with her perennially absent husband. She had given up her most precious possession for him, but he was not there to share the darkness with her.

Yet Gandhari refused to accept that her sacrifice had been pointless, and clung to her blindfold with the intensity that only Indian women accord their marital symbols. What sustained her it was impossible to imagine, but it certainly was not her husband. Dhritarashtra addressed all his letters from prison to Priya Duryodhani, well before she was old enough to understand any of them, rather than to the long-suffering wife who had offended by delivering her. As her health deteriorated, Gandhari’s world remained circumscribed by her silken blindfold, and she became withdrawn and increasingly grim.

There are those who make much of Dhritarashtra’s devotion to his daughter and use it to explain her subsequent actions. I prefer to give far more importance, Ganapathi, to the years at her mother’s darkened bedside, to her exposure at so impressionable an age to the sad betrayal of Gandhari’s sacrifice, to her profound realization of her own aloneness. After what she saw in her childhood Priya Duryodhani would never be able to trust another human being, no, not even — especially not — her own father.

Some aspects of her unique character manifested themselves early. Such as the time she decided to get rid of Bhim.

43

Bhim, you will recall, Ganapathi, was one of those disgustingly strong children who are excessively healthy and hearty, and whose good spirits burst out of them to the general inconvenience of others. Growing up with Bhim meant having dust flung in one’s eyes, finding one’s clothes in the river after a swim, being picked up and dropped into slushy puddles, all to the tune of his uproarious laughter — and it also meant having no choice other than to grin and bear it. The experience must have been something along the lines of being a team-mate of Ian Botham on a cricket tour. Boys who climbed trees to pluck fruit were liable to find themselves shaken off the branch, along with the fruit, by Bhim rattling the trunk as if it were a sapling. I can see why Duryodhani, who at the best of times saw little to laugh at in life, found this all a bit tiresome. But her proposed remedy was, even then, a little on the drastic side.

Imagine the situation for yourself, Ganapathi. A dark, introverted, frail Priya Duryodhani shakes free the last dead spider from her dress, wipes off the last mud-stain, or puts the last drenched letter from her father out to dry — and decides to act. Not in haste, mind you — that would not be characteristic of her. She waits till her twelfth birthday is to be celebrated and then invites her cousins to a children’s picnic at Pharmanakoti, on the banks of the river. It is she who has chosen the spot.

What lies behind the pinched face and lustrous eyes of little Duryodhani? She is not normally one for parties, even less for picnics. But neither her parents nor her guests — both relieved at this apparent sign of advancing normality — question her intent. ‘Thweet Priya Duryodhani,’ says her aunt Madri, ‘it ith tho thweet of her to think of thith.’ Little does Madri know that she might just as well have lisped the word ‘think’ too.

Yes, Ganapathi, thinking and sinking are both terms that apply to our heroine’s intentions. For she has found a bottle in her mother’s overflowing medicine-chest whose label reads ‘Poison — keep out of the reach of children.’ Wrapping it carefully in fine lace, Priya Duryodhani takes this with her to the picnic-spot. And she takes care — for she always follows instructions, especially written ones — to keep it out of the reach of the other children.

Think of it, Ganapathi. An idyllic scene from a Basohli painting. The sun shines brightly from a powder-blue sky, while on the thick, moisture-rich grass boisterous princelings play rowdily together. Duryodhani, whose lukewarm interest in the proceedings has led to her gradual exclusion, eases herself, unmissed, out of the group. She walks to where the servants have been busy laying out the contents of the three picnic hampers they have brought. ‘Very good,’ she says after a cursory inspection. ‘You may go now. Return in two hours to clean this up. We should have finished by then.’ It is an interesting choice of words, Ganapathi. There is much that Duryodhani intends to finish.

The boys are still far away as the servants retreat. At one place, as is by now customary, they have served twice as much food as for the others; this is, of course, for Bhim. Priya Duryodhani sits there, taking care to ensure that she has a view of her guests frolicking in the distance. Then, from her own shoulder-bag, from under her books and magazines and the inevitable letter from her father, she takes out a little bottle wrapped in lace. Opening it with care, she liberally douses the serving before her with its contents. Then, carefully closing the bottle, she wraps the lace meticulously around it once more, restores the bundle to her bag, takes out a book and, primly crossing her thin legs, begins to read.

Aha, Ganapathi, I see you thinking, something is not right here. Surely our illustrious Leader-to-be did not commit juvenile homicide? Perhaps there is something wrong about the label on the bottle; or perhaps she has not poured enough of it to do any serious harm; or perhaps, Heaven forfend, she has simply poisoned the wrong serving? I am afraid, Ganapathi, you must think again. The bottle that the diligent Duryodhani has pilfered does indeed contain poison, and there is very little of it left now that it has been put back in her bag. And she has indeed picked the right mound of pilau to soak. And what is more, the undiscriminating Bhim, who would consume anything provided there was enough of it, tucks voraciously into his plateful and before long has eaten it all.

Think of it, Ganapathi! The tranquil scene of your Basohli begins to disintegrate into a Tzara. The bright sun swims before Bhim’s eyes, like an orange disintegrating in a storm. He complains of feeling tired and nauseous. ‘You’ve eaten too much,’ Duryodhani says without sympathy. Through the gathering mists he hears her suggesting a rest by the river bank. While his unsuspecting brothers turn to French cricket, Bhim loses consciousness on the water’s edge.

Out of view of her rumbustious cousins, Duryodhani tiptoes to her sleeping victim. She looks around her: not a leaf stirs. She drops a pebble on his chest, to find out whether he might lightly wake. When this provokes no change in the rhythm of his heavy breathing, she tries a larger, sharper stone. Still there is no reaction. Now acting with unpractised efficiency, she bends to thrust an umbrella under Bhim’s bulk. Using it as a lever, and with surprising strength for one of her frame, she topples him with a splash into the river.

Imagine it, Ganapathi, as a silent film of the 1920s. There stands Priya Duryodhani, a thin cotton dress on her bony frame, contemplating for one jerky moment of uncertainty the riverine ripples eddying from her action. Then it is all swift movement. She looks around with a rapidity only the celluloid of the era can record, to ensure that no one has seen her. Satisfied — imagine the close-up, Ganapathi, at that firmly set mouth, those grim thin lips, that determined face with its blazing eyes — Duryodhani slips quickly away.

You can invent the caption to that shot, young Ganapathi. Bhim has sunk like a boulder; with the poison also working its way inside him, it is a reasonably safe bet that he will not resurface alive. ‘A job well done!’ the titles would say on the screen. Fade and dissolve, to Duryodhani returning to join the others, her expression giving nothing away. Years later an American Secretary of State would sigh with regret at the loss that Priva Duryodhani’s political success had meant to the world of poker.

But no, Ganapathi, do not fear the worst. A reasonably safe bet, it certainly was; but she was quickly to learn that with the Pandavas there are no reasonably safe bets.

Pan our film back to the shot of the riverside. As Bhim rolls into the water — slowly here, it is over in an instant — he is bitten by a venomous snake. Thus does Fate protect her favourites, Ganapathi, for the scheming Priya Dury-odhani had poured the contents of a poisonous snake-bite antidote into her victim’s lunch. The sharp fangs wake Bhim from his drugged stupor just as the serpent’s venom encounters its antidote in his bloodstream — and neutralizes it. Bhim, instantly awake and cured, takes a deep breath as he goes under, comes back to the surface and swims back to the shore in a few strong strokes. Applause, Ganapathi, from the cinema floor, from the youths in the 25-paise seats. Cat calls and cheers as Bhim hauls his bulk out of the water and wrings his singlet dry.

Cut! Turn to Priya Duryodhani, twelve years old, and cheated of her best birthday present. As the screen fills with her sallow face Duryodhani does not betray the slightest hint of astonishment when Bhim rejoins her group), soaking and as large — quite literally — as life. ‘Been taking a swim, brother?’ she asks casually, her heart pounding for fear that he had seen her.

Bhim laughs, his customary reaction to most questions. ‘Must have dozed off and rolled into the river in my sleep,’ he says, tossing water off his forelocks. ‘Unless one of you. .’ but he dismisses the unspoken thought with another laugh, and any fears of discovery that Duryodhani may have are soon drowned in the squeals of the others as Bhim proceeds to chase them towards the river for a fraternal dunking.

There I must end our little film sequence. But you see what I mean, Ganapathi. Priya Duryodhani acted only according to the dictates of her own conscienceless mind. Even at the age of twelve, overkill was already her problem.

Perhaps things might have been different had Dhritarashtra taken her in hand, rather than his pen. But he did not, and there is no point in speculating about what might have happened if he had. History, after all, is full of ifs and buts. I prefer, Ganapathi, to seek other conjunctions with destiny.

44

With their father away on political errands or in prison, the Pandavas also lacked a stable paternal presence in the home. Kunti was determined not to let them suffer in this regard, and began looking for a regular tutor to take them in hand. But the wilful boys proved more than a handful for the various forlorn Bachelors of Arts Kunti engaged, and after several such failures she realized they would only respect a tutor they chose themselves. Yet none of the prospective candidates who answered her advertisements met with the boys’ approval, and Kunti despaired of ever finding them a suitable guru.

One day the Pandavas were playing their favourite sport — cricket, of course, Ganapathi: that most Indian of organized pastimes, with its bewilder-ingly complex rules that are reduced in practice to utter simplicity, its underlying assumption of social order, its range and subtlety that so suit our national temperament — when a mighty swipe by Bhim sent the ball high over the others’ heads, soaring out of the ground and landing with a loud splash in a disused well. Five sheepish ex-princelings were soon gathered round the brick structure, helplessly watching the red cork-and-leather object float twenty feet below-them. It was a sheer drop; the fungus- and slime-covered wall offered no purchase, no crevice or projection, for a descent down its slippery side. There was not even a bucket attached to the threadbare rope that dangled uselessly from the wooden cross-beam above the well. The boys leaned despairingly over the edge, seeing their prospects of an innings ebbing with the water around their irretrievable ball.

‘What have you lost, sons of Hastinapur?’ asked a gravelly voice. They turned, startled, to discover a saffron-robed sadhu, his full beard still more black than grey, the staff and bowl of his calling in each hand, surveying them with an amused smile.

‘Our ball,’ replied Yudhishtir, the most direct. ‘But how do you know who we are?’

‘I know a great deal, my boys,’ came the answer. ‘A ball, eh?’ He looked with casual curiosity into the well. ‘Is that all? You call yourselves Kshatriyas, and you can’t even recover a ball from a well?’

‘Actually, we don’t call ourselves Kshatriyas, because our family doesn’t believe in the caste system,’ Yudhishtir replied, revealing yet again the obsessive earnestness, the desire to lay all his cards on the table face up, that was to become his best-known characteristic.

‘And if you think we’re so stupid, can you do any better?’ asked Bhim a little more aggressively.

‘Why, certainly, if you wish,’ the sadhu said, unoffended by the challenge. ‘But my services don’t come for nothing. If I can get your ball out for you, will you give me dinner tonight?’

‘Just dinner?’ Yudhishtir asked in surprise. ‘I’m sure we can offer you something that will last longer than that.’

‘Dinner will do for now,’ the saffroned savant smiled. ‘A sadhu’s lot is a hungry one.’

He reached up for the old rope hanging above them, which in better days would have carried a bucket into the depths.

‘If that’s your plan, forget it,’ said Arjun, who had so far remained silent. The rope is old and frayed. We’ve already worked out that it won’t support the weight of one of us, let alone an adult like you.’

The sadhu gave him a darting, sidelong look, as if briefly acknowledging the perspicacity of the speaker. But he did not reply, and the smile was still on his face as he looped one end of the rope and balanced the decaying hemp in his hand. Then, with the briefest of glances at the position of the ball, he tossed the rope in a casual curve into the water, tightening the loop as it landed. When he hauled the rope up, the ball, its redness dulled by the soaking, was safely imprisoned in the knot he had made.

As the boys stared at him in astonished gratitude, he slipped the ball free and tossed it to Yudhishtir. ‘Next time,’ he said, sounding at last like a sage, be more careful.’

‘That’s fantastic!’ the twins exclaimed in one breath. ‘Can you teach us how to do that, sir?’

‘Don’t be silly, Nakul and Sahadev,’ began an embarrassed Yudhishtir, turning to the sadhu. ‘Thank you, sir. .’

‘Why not?’ the sage cheerfully addressed the little twins. ‘And many other things besides, if you’re only willing to learn.’

‘Can you teach him to bat properly?’ Nakul pointed at his twin. ‘He was out for zero again.’

‘Zero?’ the sadhu laughed. ‘Well, that is nothing to be ashamed of. The English game of cricket would never have taken shape without the Indian zero.’

‘What do you mean?’ This was Arjun, intrigued but wary.

‘It’s quite simple,’ the sadhu replied. ‘While some of our historical-scientific claims (to have discovered the secret of nuclear fission in the fourth century AD, for instance) are justly challenged by Western scholars, no one questions the fact that our ancestors were the first to conceive of the zero. Before that mathematicians, from the Arabs to the Chinese, left a blank space in their calculations; it took Indians to realize that even nothing can be something. Zero; shunya, bindu, whatever you call it, embodies the unchanging reality of nothingness.’

‘But zero’s still zero,’ Nakul said.

The sadhu roared with laughter. ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘The Indian zero is no empty shell. It reflects the perpetual intangibility of the eternal, it embodies the calm centre of the whirling tornado of life, it stands for the point where our verifiable values are transcended by the enigma of the void. Yes, young man, it is empty of numerical value. But it is full of non-empirical possibilities. It is nothing and everything; it is the locus of the universe.’ He chuckled at the puzzlement on the twins’ faces, even as he took in the sharper look of insight that had appeared in Arjun’s and Yudhishtir’s eyes. ‘Now do you see, my friends, why your zero is really something very special, very Indian?’

‘But can you teach him to bat?’ asked Nakul, as his elder brothers burst out laughing.

‘Perhaps,’ side-stepped the sage. ‘But first, what about that dinner?’

45

So they took him home, Ganapathi, and sat around him in an adoring semicircle as he deftly did justice to an appetite as prodigious as his skills. In between courses, he told Kunti and the Pandavas his story.

‘My name is Jayaprakash Drona,’ he said. ‘I was born a Brahmin, and believed from my youth in the great tradition of Brahmin learning, unrelated to any profession or material gain. When I felt ready I took leave of my family and, adopting the robes of a mendicant, set forth into the world. All my knowledge and skills I acquired from a rishi at the foot of the Himalayas, and as for my food, I was given whatever I wanted by those to whom I extended my empty bowl, since I believed, in the tradition of our great sages, that my material needs were irrelevant, for a Brahmin’s upkeep is the responsibility of society. Having learned all that my rishi had to teach me, and upon his advice, I returned to the plains, there to impart some of my learning to those who sought it, asking in exchange nothing more than the occasional bowl of rice and dal.

‘In the course of my wanderings I came across an Englishman, who was then visiting the remote district in which I happened to be travelling. He was a civil servant sent out to administer justice in a complicated matter involving land. (How ironic, is it not, my sister, that the British, those great usurpers of land in this country, presume to tell us Indians what to do with the little they have left us?) Anyway, this Englishman clearly found his stay onerous and had little to do in his spare time in that place, until he chanced upon me. He spoke our language, after a fashion, and we talked. He professed interest in our ancient practices and customs, our traditional knowledge and skills. I answered his questions, and he seemed greatly interested in what I had to tell him. During the time that he remained in that district I saw him for at least an hour every day. When he left he said that he owed all that he knew of India to me, and that he would never forget it. He gave me his personal card and said that if ever I needed assistance I should not hesitate to call on him.

‘It was not long after that I found a good woman to bear me a son. I called him Ashwathaman, and his birth obliged me, if not to settle down, at least to acquire a dwelling where I could leave him as I set forth each day. The responsibilities of parenthood are not meant for us who have taken saffron; and yet I must confess that my son became the be-all of my life, much as I imagine these fine young boys are to you, sister.

‘At first I never doubted that I could provide all that Ashwathaman might need. I could offer him learning, and for food he shared what I was given each day; as for clothing, its lack never bothered me, for what does a Brahmin need but his sacred thread? Or so I thought; but sages, alas, sister, do not know everything.

‘The needs of the son are sometimes the making of the father. I did not want, and so assumed I had brought my son up not to want. But one day Ashwathaman asked me — sister, you will understand this — he asked me for a glass of milk. He had seen rich children drinking this thick white liquid, and he too wanted to have some.

‘Well, sister, I had none to give him. Who in my position would have? You know the price of milk, you know the purposes for which it is used, for tea and sweets and cheese, all luxuries beyond the means of a humble man of learning. But I could not bring myself to tell my son this.

‘I promised him I would get him some, and set out the next morning with but that one purpose in mind. But you know, sister, how people are these days. They will gladly give a sadhu some of the rice and dal they cook in abundance each day, but milk is too valuable a commodity to be wasted on such as me. In the old days a holy man could have knocked on the first sizeable door and be given a cow if such was his need, but I could not get so much as a glassful. Household after household turned me away. “Milk, indeed!” some said. “What do you need milk for?” Or “Haiya, what will these sadhus expect next? Rice-bowls made of gold or what? Really, there’s a limit, I tell you.” When at last, weary and disheartened, I came home, I found Ashwathaman with a glass in his hand, his eyes shining with excitement. “Father, father, I have tasted milk at last!” he exclaimed. “I asked my friends, and they gave me some.” I took the glass from him, sister, and put my lips to it. What Ashwathaman had been given to drink was cheap rice-flour mixed with water.

‘I could not bear to look at the child, gazing at me with an expression of such simple joy in his wide eyes. The pain and hurt that suffused my heart stifled my breathing. That my learning and wisdom had brought my son to this! It is all very well to renounce the material pleasures of the world but one has no right to renounce them for another. I resolved never again to beg for a living. I would find myself a patron, I vowed, and bring my son up to know the good things of life, not just the important ones.

‘I thought instantly of the Englishman who had given me his card. He was now an official of even greater importance in the province. Taking my son with me, I went to his residence. At first the guards would not even let me past the gate, but when I produced the card, a little bent and soiled and curling at the edges, but still unmistakably his card, I was allowed in. Mr Ronald Heaslop, for that was his name, himself met me on the steps of his porch. He was wearing a silk dressing-gown and had a glass in his hand, and he was weaving slightly as he walked, but his speech was clear and his grip on the glass was firm.

‘”Yes,” he said as I approached, “what can I do for you?”

‘I did not like the brusqueness of his tone, but I put it down to the manner of superiority that all Englishmen seem to have instilled in them at an early age, and which they mistake for a sign of good breeding. The haughty stare, the taciturn manner, are simply, I thought, their equivalent of the politeness and respect for elders we teach our children to show. “You remember me, Mr Heaslop,’ I began, and saw from his unchanged expression that he did not. “You gave me this card.”

‘He took it, almost snatched it, from me. “What of it? I give my card to hundreds of people. You could have picked it up from the ground.”

‘My bile was rising, sister, but having come so far I felt I could not simply turn away. “You gave it to me,” I said, “on your departure from Devi Hill taluk six, seven summers ago, in return for all the knowledge and instruction I imparted to you, on the subject of the holy shastras and our tradi —”

‘”Knowledge? Instruction?” he interrupted me derisively. “You have no knowledge you can instruct me in, black man. I remember now — yes, I gave you the card. A lot of superstitious twaddle you told me, and I found it amusing, a diverting way to pass the time. But I was much younger then. I’m afraid I no longer find your kind of prating very interesting. Is that all you came here about? Because I’m afraid I really don’t have time for this.”

‘I was smarting at these words, sister, but I was determined not to slink away like some wounded dog. “I came,” I said with as much dignity as I could muster, “because I was in need, and I thought I could call upon our past friendship — ”

‘”Friendship?” he interrupted me again. “Don’t be stupid. We are not here to be your friends, black man; we are here to rule you. There is no friendship possible in this world between the likes of you and such as me; not now, not here, not yet, not ever. You say you are in want; it is no concern of mine, but here — Ghaus Mohammed! Bring me my purse!”

‘I should have turned on my heel and left at that very instant, but exhaustion and astonishment kept me rooted to the spot. The Englishman’s servant arrived with the purse; Heaslop put his hand in and stretched out a fistful of change towards me. Not in the name of any supposed friendship, of course, nor even in acknowledgement of our past contact, but because this gesture defined the proper relations between a British national and a native beggar. I could not bear to move; little Ashwathaman, his eyes wide in fear and discovery, clung to my leg as I stood transfixed. Heaslop waited for a brief moment, saw me immobile; then with a casual, almost careless flick, he flung the coins in my face.

‘Thunder rolled within my breast, sister, lightning flashed through my mind, a storm drenched my eyes. The skies opened, and through the rain that poured down upon us I saw Heaslop returning a little unsteadily to his house. And little Ashwathaman scrabbling in the mud for the fallen coins.

‘A rage filled me such as I cannot begin to describe. “No!” I bellowed. “No!” I seized Ashwathaman by the scruff of the neck and began shaking him in fury. “Not one of those coins, boy, not a single one!” I screamed. His little hands unclenched, and one by one the coins, some big, some small, began to fall out of his grasp. The last one to fall was a rupee coin — yes, sister, more than enough to buy him a glass of milk. But I was determined my son would not drink of an Englishman’s charity.

‘Still holding him by the neck, I propelled my son out of the compound. Ashwathaman, snivelling, kept trying to look behind us. I turned briefly to see the servant Ghaus Mohammed bend to pick up the fallen coins.

‘We walked on, sister, and from that moment a new determination was born in my heart. Of what purpose is our cultural and philosophical heritage, our learning and our history, if it condemns us to being offal at the feet of a Heaslop? I vowed to work for the defeat and expulsion of Heaslop and the government he represents, not only by supporting the Kaurava Party in its just struggle against the oppressor, but by educating and training those who will one day rise to lead our people when we replace the alien system they have thrust upon us.’

‘Will you educate and train us, Dronaji, sir?’ asked Yudhishtir.

‘It will please me,’ Kunti added, ‘if you would accept.’

‘Certainly,’ said Drona equably. ‘Indeed, I should have been quite embarrassed had you not asked. For it is this very task that has brought me here. Gangaji engaged me as your tutor last week.’

46

One day, Ganapathi, when I was visiting the home of one of our younger party leaders — never mind his name — I found myself the object of the curiosity and admiration of his little son, aged, oh I don’t know, maybe seven. He was sitting at my feet, chin cupped in his hands, and at one stage when his parents were both out of the room, he said to me, ‘Dadaji, won’t you tell me a story?’

No one had asked me to do that before, Ganapathi — one of the hazards of the peripatetic procreation I had practised was the loss of any claims to grandfatherhood — and I was touched by the request. ‘Certainly,’ I said, and embarked upon a story. It was a tale from our ancient annals, the Panchatantra or the Hitopadesha, I am no longer sure which, and I was telling it rather well, spinning the yarn along with a fluency worthy of a real grandfather, when the boy cut in to ask: ‘But Dadaji, what happened in the end?’

What happened in the end? The question drew me short. The end was not a concept that applied particularly to that story — which, as it happens, involved one of the characters embarking upon another story in which one of the characters tells another story and. . you know the genre, Ganapathi. But even more important, ‘the end’ was an idea that I suddenly realized meant nothing to me. I did not begin the story in order to end it; the essence of the tale lay in the telling. ‘What happened next?’ I could answer, but ‘what happened in the end?’ I could not even understand.

For what, Ganapathi, was the end? I know where our modern Indians have acquired the term. It is a contemporary conceit that life and art must be defined by conclusions, consummations devoutly to be wished and strived for. But ‘the end’ isn’t true even in the tawdry fictions that reified the phrase. You want one of those Hollywood films that conclude with the hero and heroine in a passionate clinch, you watch the titles on the screen announce ‘The End’, and you know perfectly well even before you have left the hall that it is not the end at all: there are going to be more clinches, and a wedding, and more clinches, and tiffs and arguments and quarrels and perhaps saucers flying against the wall; there will be the banalities of breakfast and laundry and house-cleaning, the thoughts of which have never crossed the starry-eyed heroine’s mind; there will be babies to bear and burp and birch, with flus and flatulence and phlebitis to follow; there are the thousand mundanities and trivialities that are sought to be concealed by the great lie, ‘they lived happily ever after’. No, Ganapathi, the story does not end when the screenwriter pretends it does.

It does not even end with the great symbol of finality, death. For when the protagonist dies the story continues: his widow suffers bitterly or celebrates madly or throws herself on his pyre or knits herself into extinction; his son turns to drugs or becomes a man or seeks revenge or carries on as before; the world goes on. And — who knows? — perhaps our hero goes on too, in some other world, finer than the one Hollywood could create for him.

There is, in short, Ganapathi, no end to the story of life. There are merely pauses. The end is the arbitrary invention of the teller, but there can be no finality about his choice. Today’s end is, after all, only tomorrow’s beginning.

I was struggling inarticulately with these thoughts when the boy’s mother returned to drag him off to bed. Saved by the bed! ‘I shall tell you tomorrow,’ I promised the impatient child. But of course I never did, and I fear the boy thought me a very poor story-teller indeed.

Or perhaps he grew to understand. Perhaps, Ganapathi, he came to manhood with the instinctive Indian sense that nothing begins and nothing ends. That we are all living in an eternal present in which what was and what will be is contained in what is. Or, to put it in a more contemporary idiom, that life is a series of sequels to history. All our books and stories and television shows should end not with the words ‘The End’ but with the more accurate ‘To Be Continued’. To be continued, but not necessarily here. .

Ah, Ganapathi, I see I disappoint you once more. The old man going off the point again, I see you think; how tiresome he can be when he gets philosophical. Do you know what ‘philosophical’ means, Ganapathi? It comes from the Greek words phileein, to love, and sophia, wisdom. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, Ganapathi. Not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling defect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes. Whereas wisdom, true wisdom, is eternal, immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.

I do not pretend to such wisdom, Ganapathi. I am no philosopher. I am a chronicler and a participant in the events I describe, but I cannot accord equal weight to my two functions. In life one must for ever choose between being one who tells stories and one about whom stories are told. My choice you know, and it was made for me.

My choice you know, and it was made for me.

Does the river ask why it flows to the sea?

I share with you a fragment of experience -

Embellished no doubt, a figment of existence;

But it is true.

It moves me, I do not control it.

When the pantheon marches, can the police patrol it?

It is a shard of ancient pottery -

Awarded to a spade as if by lottery;

But it is true.

The song I sing is neither verse nor prose.

Can the gardener ask why he is pricked by the rose?

What I tell you is a slender filament,

A rubbing from a colossal monument;

But it is true.

I claim no beginning, nor any end.

Does a tree in the wind know why it must bend?

The picture I show you has colour and cast

A snip from a canvas impossibly vast;

But it is true.

I am not potter, nor sculptor, nor painter, my son.

Do the victor or loser know why the race must be won?

I am not even kiln, not hand, no, not brush;

My tale is recalled, words plucked from the crush -

But it is true.

It is my truth, Ganapathi, just as the crusade to drive out the British reflected Gangaji’s truth, and the fight to be rid of both the British and the Hindu was Karna’s truth. Which philosopher would dare to establish a hierarchy among such verities?

Question, Ganapathi. Is it permissible to modify truth with a possessive pronoun? Questions Two and Three. At what point in the recollection of truth does wisdom cease to transcend knowledge? How much may one select, interpret and arrange the facts of the living past before truth is jeopardized by inaccuracy?

I see once again the furrow of incomprehension on your brow Ganapathi, wrinkled there by the frown of impatience. The old man is being wilfully obscure, your forehead grumbles.

Do not seek to answer these questions, my friend. I shall not pose them again.

Instead, Ganapathi, we shall return to the story.

47

But to which story shall we return?

Shall I tell of Karna’s dramatic rise to national importance through his dominance of the Muslim Group? Of the mass meetings he began to address, in impeccable English, with robed and bearded mullahs by his side, speaking to Muslim peasants to whom he seemed as foreign as the Viceroy, and who yet — another Indian inconsistency — hailed him as their supreme leader? Shall I speak instead of Gangaji, unwithered by increasing age, but often resting one arm on his sturdy Scottish sister as he walked to his prayer-meetings, Gangaji whose message turned increasingly to love and peace and brotherhood, even as foreign journalists and photographers clustered round him in droves to make him a global legend? Or of Dhritarashtra, the man to whom the Mahaguru left the political leadership of the Kaurava Party while he devoted his own time to the moral and spiritual values that informed his cause? Dhritarashtra, who derived his ultimate authority from a man whose basic beliefs he did not share, but whose benediction had made him the unquestioned heir-apparent to the Kaurava crown? Or should I turn instead to Pandu, my disenchanted son, and tell you of the rebellion of the man whose victory, unlikely though it always seemed, might have changed the course of our history?

He was no smooth politician, my pale son; he had no head for the philosophical niceties of his trade, the intellectual arguments over right and left and right and wrong. Pandu was in the Kaurava movement to overthrow the British, and he was not convinced that Gangaji’s methods — endorsed, as he saw it, opportunistically by Dhritarashtra — were working, or working quickly enough. As we have seen, the anointment of his blind half-brother as Crown Prince rankled deeply; but it was the abandonment of the mango agitation just when it seemed to be achieving results that led Pandu to break ranks. He announced his candidacy for the presidency of the Kaurava Party at its next annual session.

‘What do we do now?’ Dhritarashtra, leaning heavily on his cane, his voice laden with anxiety, asked the Mahaguru. ‘I had thought my re-election was assured.’ He sucked in his sallow cheeks in an expression of dismayed petulance. ‘Unopposed,’ he added.

‘So had I, my son,’ Gangaji replied, untroubled. ‘This is most unfortunate. But do not worry about it.’

‘Do not worry?’ Dhritarashtra almost choked on the words. ‘Do you know the kind of support he can muster on his rabble-rousing platform? I could even — lose.’ He spoke the unmentionable word with a shudder: it expressed an unthinkable thought.

‘A possibility that has occurred to me,’ the Mahaguru responded equably.

‘We can’t allow it to happen,’ Dhritarashtra said. ‘You must speak to him.’

‘I have already done so.’ The Mahaguru’s response was casual.

‘And?’ Dhritarashtra could not keep the eagerness out of his voice.

‘He will not be moved.’ The Mahaguru held himself very still when he spoke these words. ‘He assured me of his complete respect and devotion — that is always a very bad sign, V.V., is it not? — but told me very gently and firmly that his candidacy was irrevocable.’

‘On what grounds?’

This time it was I who answered. ‘Time for a change. Need for renewal in the party. New ideas about the direction of the movement. His slogan is “A Time for Action”. People are listening to him.’

Dhritarashtra let out a long and bitter sigh. ‘The bastard,’ he breathed.

‘So are you, don’t forget,’ Gangaji retorted, allowing himself an idiosyncratic chuckle. ‘Eh, V.V.? And the legitimacy of his aspirations is not in doubt. But do not worry, my son. I have no intention of risking your humiliation at the election.’

I imagined Dhritarashtra’s eyes lighting up behind those dark glasses. ‘So you will speak to some leaders — make it clear you support me for the post?’

‘I have no intention of risking my own humiliation either,’ Gangaji replied briskly. ‘No, that is not what I had in mind.’

‘Then what, Gangaji?’ the note of despair was back in his tone.

‘You will step down,’ the Mahaguru said. ‘Gracefully.’

Dhritarashtra looked as if he had been struck by his own cane.

‘You will behave as if you never had any intention of seeking re-election,’ the Mahaguru went on. ‘You will explain that you do not believe it is healthy for the party that one man hold the presidency for too long. A single one- year term, for instance, would be preferable. Perhaps two. Of course, you have had three, but that was wrong and you do not want to see the mistake repeated. You welcome other candidacies.’

‘You just want me to give in,’ Dhritarashtra breathed.

Gangaji ignored the remark. ‘There will, of course, be another candidate. Not you. Not, in fact, anyone particularly well-known in the country. Perhaps an Untouchable — I mean a Child of God. He will be a more appropriate symbol for the party than another former princeling. And I shall let it be known that that is my view.’

A glimmer of understanding lightened my sightless son’s features. ‘So you’re not going to let Pandu get away with this.’

‘I think this would be the most judicious way of meeting this challenge to the authority of the party leadership,’ Gangaji said. ‘I do not know whether my discreet support for the other candidate will prevent an undesirable result. But should it fail, it will not be my closest follower and — what is the word they use? — protégé who will have been defeated.’

‘And should it succeed?’ I asked.

‘Why, we shall have just the sort of president we need,’ Gangaji said. ‘A symbol. What, after all, is the presidency? It is a title that confers a degree of presumed authority on the holder. The British King, too, has such a title. But he is not the most powerful man in England.’

‘Of course’, said Dhritarashtra. The colour was returning to his cheek.

‘Whoever wins the presidency, the party must prepare itself for the future,’ the Mahaguru went on. ‘There are changes in the offing, constitutional changes, for which the party must be ready. My last talk with the Viceroy has paved the way for the establishment of a new political system. Partial democracy, it is true. But our friends in the civil service have helped advocate our cause. Vidur has done his work well. Indians will hold elected office in the provinces, even if with limited powers. All our efforts have come to some good. The British know they cannot continue to arrest us, to lathi-charge us. They have to give us a share in their system. The passage of the Government of India Act by the British Parliament now seems assured.’

We knew all this already, but Gangaji undoubtedly had a good reason for reminding us of what we knew. ‘Our sights must now be set on the governments to be formed in the provinces. They are a stepping stone to a central government one day, a dominion government for all of India, a government of Indians. The Indians who will make up that national government of the future are the ones the British will want to talk to. It will not matter what title they hold — certainly not that of a rotational party presidency. The British, my dear Dhritarashtra, will be less interested in who is president today than in who might be prime minister tomorrow.’

‘Of course, Gangaji,’ my blind son replied humbly.

Of course. For the Mahaguru was right, as always. Dhritarashtra could afford to step aside from the presidential fray, and aim higher.