The Great Indian Novel

The Eleventh Book: Renunciation — Or, The Bed of Arrows

65

‘Gentlemen,’ announced Viscount Drewpad, ‘I have summoned you here today to tell you that His Majesty’s Government — in other words, I — have had enough.’

He looked around the table at the representatives of the three parties the British had chosen to deal with: the Kauravas (Dhritarashtra, the ebullient Mohammed Rafi and myself), the Sikhs (Sardar Khushkismat Singh, whose stock of jokes about his community was rivalled only by other people’s anecdotes about him) and the Muslim Group (Karna, a robed mullah in a hennaed beard and a surrogate for the Gaga Shah, who was himself already out of the country arranging his post-Independence future abroad). We all looked back at the Viceroy, but none of us spoke: with this superficial and supercilious man even Karna was at a loss for words.

‘Whitehall has formulated, and successive Cabinet missions have presented, a number of plans to you all relating to a possible transfer of power from British rule to Indian self-government,’ he went on. ‘Each and every one of them has foundered on the intractable opposition of one or other of you.’ To avoid giving gratuitous offence with those words he fixed his gaze directly on the Sardar, who had, in fact, cheerfully given his assent to each and every variant of the Independence formulae thus far proposed. But he might as well have looked at Karna, because we had tried to bend as far as we could to accommodate him, and each time he had balked. Various schemes had been drawn up, grouping the Muslim provinces separately, proposing ‘lists’ of states in a weak confederation, devising elaborate guarantees of minority rights and communal representation. Each had foundered on the rocks of Karna’s intransigence. At one point Gangaji — who no longer came himself to these negotiations, saying he preferred to give us moral guidance from outside — suggested that as the price of keeping India united we should simply offer Mohammed Ali Karna the premiership of all India. So central was Karna’s personal ambition to his political stand that it might even have worked, but this time it was Dhritarashtra who refused to countenance the suggestion. Drewpad was really speaking for all of us as he went on: ‘We cannot, with the best will in the world, go on indefinitely like this.’

Karna glowered at him. ‘We have not come here, Viceroy, to be lectured at like errant schoolchildren,’ he snapped.

‘I have not finished.’ Drewpad fixed him with an amiable gaze. ‘I wish to tell you today that I, for my part, have decided to wash my hands of your squabbling. You all agree on one thing: that in the end you want the British out Very well, we shall proceed on that basis. Whether you agree on anything else or not, the British will pull out — on August the fifteenth, 1947.’

To say that the seven of us around the table gasped in astonishment might seem a cliché, but like most clichés this too was true. ‘But that’s barely eight months away!’ Karna, as usual, was the quickest to recover. ‘What made you choose such a date?’

‘It’s my wedding anniversary,’ Drewpad responded innocently.

‘This is preposterous!’ Rafi was shouting. ‘You can’t do this!’

Lord Drewpad picked up his papers and drew his chair back. ‘Oh, yes? As our American cousins say, Mr Rafi, can’t I just!’

And before we knew it he was striding out of the room.

The deadline was impossible. ‘Leave us,’ Gangaji had written to Drewpad’s predecessor when he was jailed for his Quit India call. ‘Leave us to God or to anarchy.’ It had sounded good at the time; but now, when the British seemed to be about to do precisely that, we felt sick to the pits of our stomachs.

We met, the Kaurava Working Committee, at the Mahaguru’s feet the next day. It was one of his days of silence, which meant that he would listen sagely to what we were saying, then scrawl a few words on the back of an envelope that Sarah-behn would read aloud to the rest of us. ‘One hell of a way to chair a meeting,’ Rafi breathed in an aside to me as we sat cross-legged on the floor. ‘Especially the most important meeting of our lives.’ But of course, Gangaji wasn’t chairing it at all; Rafi was the President of the party. Yet everyone knew whose view mattered the most in our conclaves.

‘The first thing to be sure of is, does he mean what he says?’ someone asked.

‘From what I have seen of Drewpad,’ responded Dhritarashtra wearily, and without irony — you know how he was for ever speaking in visual images — he strikes me as the kind of person who always means what he says.’

‘In that case we have our backs against the wall.’ This was Rafi. ‘All that Karna and his cohorts have to do is to stick obstinately to their demand for a separate state. With the British scheduled to leave for certain by a specific date, they know that sooner or later we’ll have to give in.’

It was a difficult thing for Rafi to say, because as a Kaurava Muslim he was amongst the party’s strongest opponents of the demand for Karnistan. If a separate Muslim state came into being it would, after all, leave him and his co-religionists in the Kaurava camp isolated, on both sides of the communal divide.

A hubbub of comment followed, largely tending to agree with the President. Gangaji raised his hand. We were all silent as he traced words on to a scrap of paper in his spiky pencilled hand.

‘You must never give in,’ Sarah-behn read, ‘to the demand to dismember the country.’

‘Gangaji, we understand how you feel,’ Dhritarashtra said. ‘We have fought by your side for our freedom, all these years. We have imbibed your principles and convictions. You have led us to the brink of victory.’ He paused, and his voice became softer. ‘But now, the time has come for us to apply our principles in the face of the acid test of reality. Rafi is right: Karna and his friends will simply dig in their heels. Separation or chaos, they will say; and on Direct Action Day last year they showed us they can create chaos. How much worse will it be without the British forces here? Might it not be better to agree in advance to a — the words stick in my throat, Gangaji — civilized Partition, than to resist and risk destroying everything?’

The Mahaguru had already started writing before Dhritarashtra had finished. ‘If you agree to break the country, you will break my heart,’ he wrote.

‘It will break many hearts, Gangaji,’ his chosen heir said sadly. ‘Mine, and all of ours, included. But we may have no choice.’

‘Then I must leave you’ now,’ Sarah-behn read in a quavering voice. ‘I cannot be party to such a decision. God bless you, my sons.’

The Mahaguru waited until the last word was read, then nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing visibly like a painful lump in his throat. He slowly got up and, with one hand on Sarah-behn’s shoulder, hobbled out of the room. Nobody spoke; and nobody tried to stop him.

His departure, as we had all known it would, made the rest of the meeting much easier. Misgivings were voiced on all sides, but we had struggled too long for freedom to want to tarnish it when it was within our grasp. It was better to give Karna what he wanted and build the India of our dreams in peace and freedom without him.

That evening, the Working Committee of the Kaurava Party resolved unanimously to accept in principle the partition of the country. It was the first time we had ever gone against the expressed wishes of Gangaji. His era was over.

66

Some people said later that we had acted too hastily; that in our greed for office we sacrificed the integrity of the country; that had we been willing to wait and to compromise, Partition would never have occurred; that Karna was the most surprised man in India when our resolution was passed because he was only asking for the mile of separation in order to have the yard of autonomy and we should have called his bluff. To all these theorists, Ganapathi, I say: That’s absolute cow-dung. Or its male equivalent. We gave in to Partition because Karna’s inhuman obduracy and Drewpad’s indecent haste left us no choice.

Of course, there was a great deal we didn’t know, although the whole horde of hindsight historians act as if we did. We had no idea that the sun was burning out behind Mohammed Ali Karna’s increasingly pallid skin, and that within nine months of the vivisection of our land the half-moon on his forehead would throb feebly into eclipse. We could not have imagined, either, that Partition, which we accepted as a lesser evil, would lead to a carnage so bloody that anything, even the chaos of an unresolved Independence settlement, might have been preferable to what actually happened.

Nor could we have even begun to guess what the practical process of partitioning the country would involve. The appointment, for instance, of a political geographer who had never in his life set foot on any of the territories he was to award either to India or to the new state of Karnistan.

‘It’s really quite easy,’ the stout, bespectacled academic announced, standing with a pointer before a small-scale map. ‘One takes a given cartographical area — there — one checks the census figures for religious distribution and then one applies the basic principles of geography, choosing natural features as far as possible for the eventual boundary, studying elevation and relief — see these colours here? — not forgetting, of course, heh-heh, the position of these thin lines, which are roads or rivers, and then. . then one draws one’s boundary line v-e-ry carefully, like this.’ Lips pursed in concentration, he proceeded to trace, in a shaky hand, a sharp slim line on the map. That, ladies and gentlemen,’ he declared, ‘will be the new frontier between India and Karnistan in this area.’ He put down the pointer and half-bowed, as if expecting applause.

‘Congratulations, Mr Nichols!’ A veteran administrator named Basham rose to his feet. ‘I have lived and worked in that very district for the last ten years, and I must take my hat off to you. You have just succeeded in putting your international border through the middle of the market, giving the rice-fields to Karnistan and the warehouses to India, the largest pig-farm in the zilla to the Islamic state and the Madrassah of the Holy Prophet to the country the Muslims are leaving. Oh, and if I understand that squiggle there correctly,’ he added, taking the pointer from the open-mouthed expert, ‘the schoolmaster will require a passport to go to the loo between classes. Well done, Mr Nichols. I hope the rest of your work proves as — easy.’

‘Of course,’ stammered a beet-faced Nichols, ‘given the cir. . circumstances in wh. . which we’re working, and the short dead. . deadlines, m. . m. . mistakes are possible.’

‘Of course,’ commiserated the old India hand.

‘Field visits are out of the question. Simply not feasible, in the circumstances. We have no choice but to work from maps.’

‘Quite so,’ sympathized Basham. ‘Field visits out of the question, of course I understand. Just think, Mr Nichols, if only Robert Clive had felt the same way about field visits at the time of Plassey, you wouldn’t even have this problem, would you now?’

Yet somehow, Ganapathi, it all went on. Fat little Nichols drew his lines on his maps, and each stroke of his pencil generated other lines, less orderly and less erasable lines, lines of displaced human beings leading their families and animals away from the only homes they had ever known because they were suddenly to become foreigners there, lines of buses and bullock-carts and lorries and trains all laden with desperate humanity and their pathetic possessions, lines too of angry vicious predators with guns and knives flashing as they descended on the other lines, lines now of shooting hitting wounding raping killing looting attackers ripping apart the lines of stumbling fleeing bleeding crying screaming dying refugees. . In those days, Ganapathi, lines meant lives.

67

There were other lines too. Lines of glittering socialites queuing up to be received at one of the numerous soirées and balls organized at the Viceroy’s house (‘almost as if he wants to spend the rest of the government-hospitality budget while he still has one,’ a cynic commented). Lines of journalists and cameramen queuing outside his study for quotographs as he emerged after his breezy summits with a succession of dignitaries (‘almost as if he only meets them for the sake of the pictures afterwards’). Lines of stiff soldiers in starched uniforms, ceremonial swords at the ready, to welcome him to airfield after airfield on his whirlwind tours of the country (‘almost as if he wants to see it all before they take away his plane’). Lines of nawabs, maharajas and allied potentates anxious to wheedle some assurance out of him that they wouldn’t have to merge their principalities into either the new democracy or the emerging Karnocracy (‘now there he did the right thing by us: he told the princelings they wouldn’t get a pop-gun out of Britain if they sought to resist’).

At last Vidur came into his own. He was by now sufficiently senior in the States Department, the organ of government that dealt with the princely states, and Drewpad needed an Indian in his higher councils on the eve of a transition from British to Indian rule. Within a short while — and remember a short while was as much as Drewpad gave anybody — he was amongst the Viceroy’s closest advisors. It was he who did the meticulous paperwork that allowed Drewpad to deliver his startling pronouncements on everything from princely privilege to constitutional prerogative. And if occasionally he slipped away to brief Dhritarashtra or myself in advance of an impending development of some importance to the future of the country, he was only doing his larger duty — to the nation, rather than just to the government. As a result of which India did not do too badly out of the partitioning of the army or the division of governmental assets. Vidur, as always, did his work well.

Ah, Ganapathi, those were proud paternal days for me, unacknowledged father though I was. One son was poised to inherit the first free government of India, another had been martyred in the attempt and was revered in almost every Indian home, and the third stood side by side with the British Viceroy as the last arrangements were made for the withdrawal of colonialism. There were few fathers, Ganapathi, who could say, as I could, that history had sprung from their loins.

But I would rather procreate history than propagate it. There are moments in my own story I would rather forget, and that terrible year of 1947 was full of them. For the last time I took to the dusty roads in my sandals to see and learn what was happening, and I saw too much, Ganapathi, I heard too much. The killing, the violence, the carnage, the sheer mindlessness of the destruction, burned out something within me. I could not understand, Ganapathi, even I could not understand, what makes a man strike with a cleaver at the head of someone he has never seen, a son and husband and father whose sole crime is that he worships a different God. You tell me, Ganapathi. What makes a man set fire to the homes and the animals and sometimes the babies of people by whose side he has lived for generations? What makes a man tear open the modesty of a girl he has never noticed, spread her legs apart with a knife to her throat, and thrust his hatred and contempt and fear and desire into her in a spewing bloody mess of possession? What madness leads men to seek to deprive others of their lives for the cut of their beards or the cuts on their foreskins? Where is it written that only he who bears an Arabic name may live in peace on this part of the soil of India, or that raising one’s hand to God five times a day disqualifies one from tilling another part of the same soil?

Yet such were the assumptions and actions of ordinary men in those days, Ganapathi (I will not add the obligatory ‘and women’ because for the most part they did not perpetrate the madness, they were caught up in it, they were the victims of it). And those of us who saw it as madness, who saw it destroy everything we had lived and struggled for, were powerless to stop it. We tried, each in our own way, where we could, but found it too strong for us. Like Gangaji, we walked rather than wept, preached and prayed rather than giving up in despair. But each time we opened our eyes it was to a new anguish, a new despair, which ground its heel into the already unbearable torment of our nation’s suffering.

If only — if only we had said no to Drewpad, and not obliged people to flee! It is flight that makes men vulnerable, it is flight that makes them violent; it is the loss of that precious contact with one’s world and one’s earth, that pulling up of roots and friendships and memories, that creates the dangerous instability of identity which makes men prey to others, and to their own worst fears and hatreds. Those of us whose spirits are moored in a sense of place, whose minds can still climb up the leafy branches of family trees with roots plunged deep into the soil, who from those branches can wave to other friends, neighbours, cousins, rivals similarly perched on theirs, who can recognize the countryside around and name the seeds from which the surrounding fruit had grown — we do not murder other people’s children, burn their homes or slaughter their cattle. But those who have been deprived of such security are prompted by their anxiety and bitterness into the roles of either perpetrators or victims — yes, both, because it is often the man who has lost everything who is also the most convenient target, for he is faceless, homeless, placeless, and his lack of identity invites and seems to mitigate attack. After all, no one mourns a nobody.

But we cannot blame only Drewpad. He had a job to do, and that job was to exit, pursued by a bear; if the bear was of his own creation rather than the cause of his departure, it was a bear none the less, and we, as its hereditary keepers, remained responsible for its appetites. Gangaji recognized this, and took upon himself the tragedy of the nation. He saw the violence across the land as a total repudiation of what he had taught. All his later life he had seemed ageless; suddenly he looked old.

It was at this stage that he turned to that unfortunate nocturnal experiment which was to cause so much needless controversy amongst his later biographers. In his despair, in his dejection over the state of the country, and in his resultant ageing, he seemed to have lost that incredible physical self-sufficiency that had let him stride up the steps of Buckingham Palace in the English winter in his dhoti. He now trembled as he stood up, needing to lean on both his stick and Sarah-behn; and at night he was given to terrible fits of shivering. Perhaps that was what sparked it off — an old man feeling the cold at night — but Gangaji attributed no such simple motive to the decision that he, with characteristic lack of embarrassment, announced to his entourage one morning.

‘Many of you,’ he said, with that combination of simplicity and shrewdness that was uniquely his, ‘will notice a change in my sleeping arrangements from tonight. Sarah-behn will sleep in my room from now on — and in my bed.’ He paused, seemingly oblivious to the consternation his words had engendered. ‘Some of you may wonder what I am doing. What has happened, you may ask, to that terrible vow of old Bhishma, and the principles of celibacy he has enjoined on all of us? Do not fear, my children. Sarah-behn is like a younger sister to me. But I have asked her to join me in an experiment that will be the ultimate test of my training and self-restraint. She will lie with me, unclad, and cradle me in her arms, and I shall not be aroused. In that non-arousal I hope to satisfy myself that I have remained pure and disciplined. And not merely that. It is my prayer that this test will help me to rediscover the moral and physical strength that alone will enable me to defeat the evil designs of that man Karna.’

The Mahaguru, at his venerable age — an age when most normal men should have been dandling great-grandchildren on their arthritic knees — thinking, and speaking, of testing his capacity for arousal! It was, to many, downright indecent, and the thought of their saintly sage wrapped up in the commodious pink flesh of the formidable Sarah-behn was more than most of his followers could bear. Various whispered explanations were discussed, from the obvious one of senility — that this was simply eccentricity compounded by age — to the more esoteric one of Shunammitism, that Gangaji was decadently seeking his rejuvenation through the ministrations of a younger woman. There was no consensus on the matter, but there was rapid agreement on one thing: the story had to be kept from the press. A tight blanket of loyal self-censorship descended on all of us, covering our own discomfort and our leader’s nakedness.

But inevitably, word leaked out about Gangaji’s latest experiments in self- perfection. And while it never circulated verifiably enough to appear in print, it attracted a fair amount of both vicious gossip and sincere curiosity. I think it was in the latter category that the eminent American psychoanalyst, who had questioned the Mahaguru periodically since Budge Budge, came up to him and asked in all earnestness:

‘Could it be that your inability to become the Father of a united India drives you to seek maternal solace in British arms?’

68

Dhritarashtra was the one man who was equal to the situation. His affliction, of course, spared him the worst scenes of horror and devastation. Not for him the walks through burning villages; not for him the sight of a corpse-laden train, steaming into the station with every man, woman and child in it butchered in the very vehicle of their escape by the people from whom they were fleeing. Instead, Dhritarashtra busied himself in the committees and meetings that planned the end of the empire and the birth of the nations that would replace it. He frequented the conference-rooms and situation-rooms from where what could be controlled of the country was controlled. And he developed a relationship with Lady Drewpad that curiously — and usefully — made him all the more welcome in the Viceroy’s antechamber.

They made a strange pair, those two — the blond patrician and the blind politician, engaged in animated conversation in the rose garden as the world turned itself upside-down around them. Sometimes they would walk, and I saw the deepening lines on Dhritarashtra’s face soften as her words soothed his spirit, heard her infectious laughter dissolve the perennial frown on his prominent forehead, sensed her gently take his hand to lead him over the unfamiliar steps into her life.

Georgina Drewpad, amatory adventuress of libellous renown, might not have had the most impeccable credentials of all our vicereines — women who themselves, thanks to their marriages, had slipped into the history of our country on their backs — but she changed India, and India changed her. She eased the tragic tension that might otherwise have destroyed our first Prime Minister, and restored to him the faith and the will he needed to take on the burden that would soon be his. And despite the almost insuperable handicap of being married to a man shallower than the River Punpun in drought, vainer than a priapic peacock in heat and less sensitive than a Kaziranga rhinoceros in the summer, Georgina revealed a remarkable capacity for constructive caring. When she was not with Dhritarashtra — and sometimes even when she was — she was busy coordinating charity collections for the victims of the violence, visiting the injured in hospitals and touring the slums in her official jeep to bring succour to women whose God-given maladies (from cholera to kala-azar) had been neglected in the face of the overwhelming man-made calamity around them.

But some things, about both people and places, do not change. No woman who had given and taken the currency of love as had Georgina Drewpad could have remained indefinitely untouched by the blind temptations of foreign exchange. No country whose colonists’ imagination had created an Adela Quested and a Daphne Manners could have denied its seed to the most yielding of its vicereines.

And so it happened; on the soft capacious bed of the Vicereine’s private suite, within four posts of fragrant sandalwood, cushioned by the finest down ever stuffed by colonized fingers, my blind son of India took possession of all that Britannia had to offer him. And as the passion and the coolness of their coupling, the touch and the withdrawal of their contact, the tenderness and the rage of their caresses, mounted into a dizzying, tearing burst of final release, the fireworks burst white, saffron and green in Dhritarashtra’s mind. Midnight exploded into dawn. He was free.

69

So it was over, and we had won. India had conquered Great Britain; Gangaji’s khadi-clad coolies, his homespun hordes, had triumphed over the brass-and-braid brigades of the greatest empire the world had ever known. You cannot imagine, Ganapathi, and I mean that literally, you cannot imagine the excitement, the exhilaration, the exultation of that midnight moment when the nationalist tricolour rode up the flagpole and Dhritarashtra, his voice breaking with emotion, announced to the nation in the most enduring of his visual metaphors:

‘At the hour of darkness, as the world slumbers, India awakes to the dawn of freedom.’

When the clock struck twelve that night it struck for the hopes in all our hearts. The cheers that resounded from the massed ranks of the legislators in the Constituent Assembly found their echo in the crowds on every city street, in every village panchayat, atop every lorry, aboard every train. They were cheers, Ganapathi, of the kind that greets the end of a Ram-Lila performance at a maidan, when the demon has been slain and the giant effigy of Ravana, the alien king who has crossed the sea to usurp and ravish India’s innocence, is ceremonially set alight. That is when you shout in an affirmation of triumph, truth and teleology; you cheer the fact that you knew what would happen, and you cheer the fact that its happening has confirmed your faith in the world.

But one man was not cheering that night. Gangaji sat on the cold floor of a darkened room, sunk into his white wrap, his lower lip extended in a gloomy pout, his long arms listless by his side. Almost alone among his colleagues, the Mahaguru saw no cause for celebration. Instead of the cheers of rejoicing, Ganapathi, he heard the cries of the women ripped open in the internecine frenzy; instead of the slogans of triumph, he heard the shouts of crazed assaulters flailing their weapons at helpless victims; instead of the dawn of Dhritarashtra’s promise, he saw only the long dark night of honor that was breaking his nation in two. The bright lights of the gaily coloured bulbs strung across all the celebratory shamianas of Delhi could not illuminate that darkness, Ganapathi, nor could they shine in his eyes as brightly as the blazing thatched homes of the poor peasants. He had preached brotherhood, and love, and comradeship in struggle, the strength of non-violence and the power of soul-force. Yet it was as if he had never lived at all, never preached a word.

He saw the shadow fall across him before he saw the haggard man framed in the doorway. He looked up at the tall awkward figure without curiosity.

‘Yes?’ Sarah-behn asked.

‘Do you remember me, Bhishma?’ the visitor asked in a ragged choking voice. Something stirred in Gangaji’s eyes.

‘Who are you?’ Sarah-behn asked.

The visitor coughed redly into a stained handkerchief. He looked in wonder at his own blood, his indeterminate features twisting in pain. ‘I now call myself Shikhandin. Shikhandin the Godless. Bhishma will understand.’ The lips parted in a crooked smile. ‘He knew me as Amba, princess and bride. Did you not, Bhishma?’

Gangaji looked at him in widening comprehension, but said nothing.

‘I have been through much to get here, Bhishma.’ The voice was unsteady, and one hand was holding in the side of his stomach as if to keep the guts from falling out. ‘The butcher who unmade my womanhood hasn’t left me much time. But some things are easier for a man. Just travelling here, walking through the streets of this flaming city, entering this compound — Amba could not have done it.’

Sarah-behn was staring in horrified fascination at the gaunt figure with the indeterminate voice. But she, like the few others in the room, did not — could not — move. And Gangaji sat calmly looking at the unnatural apparition, an ineffable peace lightening his face.

‘What a wreck you are, Bhishma!’ the voice went on. ‘What a life you’ve led. Spouting on and on about our great traditions and basic values, but I don’t see the old wife you ought to be honouring in your dotage. Advising everyone about their sex life, marrying people off, letting them call you the Father of the Nation, but where is the son you need to light your funeral pyre, the son of your own loins? I’ve been looking everywhere, Bhishma, but he’s nowhere to be found!’ The visitor spat redly on the floor. ‘You make me sick, Bhishma. Your life has been a waste, unproductive, barren. You are nothing but an impotent old walrus sucking other reptiles’ eggs, an infertile old fool seeking solace like a calf from the udders of foreign cows, a man who is less than a woman. The tragedy of this country springs from you — as nothing else could after that stupid oath of which you are so pathetically proud. Bhishma, the pyre has already been lit for you in the flames that are burning your country. You have lived long enough!’

The twisted figure bent sideways in pain, then straightened itself with a visible effort of will. ‘They say, Bhishma, that you will go only when you no longer wish to live,’ Amba/Shikhandin coughed. ‘Look at the mess you’ve made.’ A hand swept out to the world beyond. ‘You don’t still want to live, do you?’

Gangaji looked steadily at his nemesis and slowly, wearily, emotionlessly shook his head.

‘I thought so.’ The hand swept back. It was holding a gun.

Sarah-behn screamed.

Three bullets spat out in quick succession. The screaming did not stop; it was joined by other screams, which dissolved into wails and sobs. For a second it seemed that the occupants of the room were all frozen in shock, and that all that moved were the waves of grief from the screaming women. Then everyone sprang into motion. Sarah-behn ran to Gangaji. Two or three of his male followers seized Shikhandin, who did not resist. The assassin leaned on his captors like a bride reluctant to leave her father’s home, but there was defiance in his weakness, and his arms were pinioned behind his back. Shikhandin looked with bitter satisfaction at the Mahaguru, lying crumpled on the floor, life oozing from his wounds.

‘Gangaji.’ It was Sarah-behn, frantic with grief and fighting to conceal it, beside herself and beside him. ‘Don’t worry. The doctors are coming. Everything will be all right.’

The Mahaguru smiled with effort, as though at the absurdity of the proposition.

Or at least I imagine he did: that is the way in which I have heard the story. For I was not there, Ganapathi. I, who had spent so many of Gangaji’s waking hours with him, who had trudged by his side through the indigo fields of Motihari and the mango groves before Chaurasta, I could not reclaim that place as he lay mortally wounded amidst his followers.

I have had nightmares about that moment since, and in my nightmares the Mahaguru fell, pierced not by bullets but by arrows, sharp shafts that cut deeply into his body and his being. ‘Let Ganga Datta die in a manner befitting his life,’ I heard an ethereal voice saying, perhaps his own, and then a hundred hands were raised to lift the Mahaguru from the floor where he had fallen and carry him gently to his deathbed. And when they placed him on it I realized in my nightmare that it was a bed of a hundred arrows, all planted firmly in the stony ground, their sharp triangular heads embedded in Gangaji’s back, his lifeblood pouring from each in a crimson flow that merged and mingled with the darker trickle from his assassin’s weapon, till it was impossible to tell which he was dying from, the injury inflicted by the killer or the unremitting incisions of the bed of arrows on which he was lying — the bed which was all that a torn and jagged nation could offer its foremost saint to rest on.

In the helpless horror of my nightmare I watched his life ebb away, unable to move an arm, lift a finger, raise a voice to change anything that was happening. Yet Gangaji was in no torment. He bore his fatal impalement calmly, as another campaigner for justice and peace had accepted the catharsis of crucifixion. And when he called for that final sip of water which is the dying Hindu’s last prerogative on earth, a lustrous youth stepped forward to shoot another arrow into the ground by the Mahaguru’s head. The arrow sprang from his bow as if released from an unbearable tension, flew through the air and imbedded itself quivering in the earth.

From that spot, Ganapathi, gushed the best and the worst of all the water of India, its crystals clear with the sparkle of love and truth and hope, its flow muddied by the waste and the offal that are also flung into the holiest of our rivers. This water spurted up near Gangaji, bathing and soothing and inflaming his wounds, and dropping in thirst-quenching rivulets on to his parted lips.

As Gangaji drank, my nightmare faded into received memory, and the Mahaguru was back in the arms of his sobbing Scottish sister on that cold unforgiving floor, with Shikhandin’s bullets bleeding the life out of him.

‘Thirsty,’ he uttered in a fading voice.

A boy brought him a tumbler. ‘I am Arjun, Pandu’s son,’ he said softly. I was just arriving when I heard the shots. Look, I have brought some water for you. Pure Ganga-jal, from Hastinapur. Please drink it.’

The Mahaguru, Ganga Datta, bent forward gratefully for a sip, placing a weak hand of benediction on the youth’s head. Then he turned his cow-eyes of infinite sadness to his constant companion.

‘I. . have. . failed,’ he whispered. And then he was gone, and the light, as Dhritarashtra was to say, went out of our lives.

70

No obituaries, Ganapathi. You won’t get those from me. Anyone who wants eulogies can look them up in the local library — ‘generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked the earth’ (Einstein), ‘the noblest Roman of them all’ (Sir Richard), ‘a great loss to the Hindu community’ (Mohammed Ali Karna). What I feel about Gangaji can’t be put into words, and in a sense everything I have been telling you, and everything we are living today, is the Mahaguru’s funeral oration.

No questions, either. I will not ask whether Amba/Shikhandin was truly responsible for the Mahaguru’s death, or whether it was not India collectively that ended Gangaji’s life by tearing itself apart. Nor will I ask you, Ganapathi, to reflect on whether Ganga Datta might in fact have been the victim of an overwhelming death-wish, a desire to end a life that he saw starkly as having served no purpose, a desire buried deep in the urge that had led him, all those years earlier, to create and nurture his own executioner.

No questions, Ganapathi, because I have no answers. And yours, or anyone else’s, would be as irrelevant as an old man’s nightmares.

But there is one story I ought to mention, just so that you have it, even though I don’t believe it myself for a moment.

It is said, around the smoky fires where villagers in what used to be Hastinapur warm their hands on a winter night, that as Gangaji lay dead, wrapped as in life in his white sheet, a tall figure with a half-moon glowing on his forehead stepped in and sat by his bed. Yes, Ganapathi, Karna.

And Karna spoke — for that is how they sing it in the desert huts of western Rajasthan in the wailing chants of the Langas and the Manghaniyars, how they hear it in the arrack shops below the palm-fronds that fringe Kerala’s highways, as men gather to drink and talk politics — he spoke in a low insistent voice, seeking the Mahaguru’s forgiveness and his blessings. Yes, blessings, for did not the Mahaguru realize that he, Karna, was only doing what he had to in fulfilment of his own karma? Could a man be blamed for performing too well the script of destiny?

Then — and this is where I really part company with the popular version — as the unacknowledged son of Kunti rose to leave, the story goes, a hand slipped out from under the shroud and grazed his shoulder.

Gangaji disagreed with no man more profoundly, yet he would not deny Mohammed Ali Karna his blessing when he asked for it.

That, at least, is the story as it is told; make of it what you will.