The Great Indian Novel

The Sixteenth Book: The Bungle Book — Or, The Reign of Error

100

And as with our heroes and heroines, so too our nation’s politics were subject to the confusion, the misunderstandings, the casual couplings and startling intimacies of our story. After an undistinguished and diffident first year in office — during which Priya Duryodhani seemed far more conscious of what she did not know than of what she could find out — the country went to the polls in its fourth general elections. We should not have been surprised at what happened, but we were: though the Kaurava Party retained power thanks to the absence of any real alternative, we lost seats all over the country to a motley array of opposition groups. In half a dozen states non-Kaurava majorities had a chance to form governments, something which had not occurred since Karna took his Muslim Group out of the country. They seized their chance as best they could, cobbling together opposition coalitions based more on arithmetic than principle. From the first day it was apparent that their political miscegenation could not last, but the very fact that these parties had got into bed together at all, and penetrated so far into our citadels of power, was deeply galling.

‘If we had stronger leadership,’ said Yudhishtir bluntly at the post-election meeting of the Kaurava Working Committee, ‘this would not have happened.’

He had grown into a severe, almost ascetic figure, his thinness and baldness reminiscent of Gangaji’s. He was beginning, too, to be known for fads that rivalled the Mahaguru’s, his interest in micturition mirroring Gangaji’s obsession with enemas. But there the resemblance ended. For Yudhishtir’s self-denial did not extend to his conjugal entitlements with Draupadi; his vegetarianism, which included a taste for walnuts, pistachios and Swiss chocolate, could hardly be considered Spartan; and his sense of righteousness gave him a look of perpetual self-satisfaction which contrasted sharply with the doubt-lined wisdom of the Mahaguru’s face.

‘What are you suggesting?’ Duryodhani asked sharply.

I’m not suggesting anything, I’m saying it quite clearly,’ Yudhishtir retorted. ‘I think this party needs to be led from the front if it is not to go on losing elections and state governments.’ He glared at her balefully. Yudhishtir had won his own re-election from Hastinapur quite easily; Priya Duryodhani, though standing in the safe seat her father had arranged for her in his electoral heyday, had witnessed an erosion of her majority.

‘I think that if the elections have shown anything, it is that the people want a change,’ Priya Duryodhani said. ‘I represent that change. The Kaurava Party can’t do without me.’

‘I’m willing to put that to the test,’ Yudhishtir responded.

‘Now, now, calm down, we can’t go on like this,’ I intervened. My own position as the party’s elder statesman had taken a bit of a knock in the elections, for I had been comprehensively defenestrated by a firebrand trade unionist who must have been in short trousers when I first became a minister. But then I was not the only one to have lost his seat by having it pulled out from under a complacent behind. And I had a duty to prevent the party tearing itself apart. ‘There is merit in what both of you are saying.’ I was rewarded by resentful glances from both. ‘We have lost seats, that is an undeniable fact; and as a member of the party’s leadership, it is clear to me that the leadership should accept its responsibility for the defeat.’ I directed these words at Yudhishtir, knowing that steam was issuing from Duryodhani’s ears. ‘At the same time’ — now I turned to our Prime Minister — ‘it is equally true that most of us who have lost are those who have come to be known as the Kaurava Old Guard. Priya Duryodhani is certainly not part of this Old Guard and cannot be associated with its seeming unpopularity.’

‘I should think not,’ the Prime Minister concurred. Scant thanks for my deliberately having omitted to point out that she was, instead, widely regarded as our creation.

‘Dhritarashtra taught us,’ Yudhishtir said self-servingly, ‘to respect the institutions of democracy and the will of the majority. I suggest that we follow the same precepts within the party. It is time we really elected the party leader, instead of leaving it to a small group of elders.’

‘What are you saying, Yudhishtir?’ I was frankly aghast. ‘Are we now to parade our internal differences before the world? Democracy, as you put it, if carried too far in the wrong places, can only jeopardize democracy where it ought to exist. If we reveal dissension in our choice of a leader we shall only strengthen the hands of our enemies. A political party is like a family, Yudhishtir. A family does not decide in the street who will cook its dinner tonight.’

‘So democracy, unlike charity, does not begin at home?’ Yudhishtir asked, his lip curling.

‘If you want to put it that way, yes.’

‘But it’s you who put it that way, VVji.’ Yudhishtir took care to keep his tone mild. ‘And yet, you couldn’t really know, could you, never having had a family yourself?’

That hurt, Ganapathi, I don’t mind telling you. And yet, my pale son’s enforced celibacy had effectively removed the direct genealogical link between Pandu’s heirs and me. Yudhishtir was less my family than Priya Duryodhani was.

‘I don’t mind,’ Duryodhani said. ‘Let us by all means elect a Prime Minister. It may not be such a bad thing to free the Prime Minister from dependence on a small group of unelected elders.’

Her words sent a shiver through me. I heard in them a portent of all that was to come.

‘Yudhishtir, Duryodhani, listen to an old man and be reasonable,’ I pleaded. ‘This is not the time for the Kaurava Party to tear itself apart over an election, whatever be the merits of the argument in favour of one. When we are weak, when we are reeling in pain from the body blows of our opponents, we cannot take a step that might bring us crashing to the ground. There is a compromise possible, and I plead with you both to accept it.’

‘What is your compromise?’ Priya Duryodhani asked suspiciously.

‘There will be no change of Prime Minister,’ I said, ‘because at this time it is imperative we show complete loyalty to Duryodhani and faith in our original choice of her.’ I raised a hand to forestall Yudhishtir, who already seemed about to speak. ‘But, in order to accommodate those of a contrary view, I propose that a new post be created, that of Deputy Prime Minister — and that it be offered to Yudhishtir.’

Once again, Ganapathi, I had acted for the greater national interest. But this time I was only to delay the inevitable course of history, not to facilitate it.

Both putative parties to the compromise demurred. But after many hours of argument, everyone else in the room came to the conclusion that the arrangement I had proposed was the least undesirable of the available options. In the end, Duryodhani and Yudhishtir had no choice but to agree. They did so like actors obliged to perform what our Bombay film-wallahs call a love- scene, concealing their mutual detestation only when the cameras roll. At the press conference held afterwards to defuse the prevalent rumours of internecine conflict, Yudhishtir was his unsmiling but correct self. A journalist asked him what exactly his new and unprecedented designation meant. Would he be a sort of functioning chief executive while the Prime Minister presided over the Cabinet like a Chairman of the Board?

‘You can look it up in the dictionary,’ Yudhishtir said humourlessly. ‘A Deputy is a deputy.’

‘I couldn’t have put it better myself,’ concurred Duryodhani, relieved.

And Draupadi Mokrasi, still beautiful, began to appear plump, her instinctive smile creasing the flesh of her face in the slightest suggestion of a double chin. .

101

Of course it could not last. Priya Duryodhani, confirmed in power with the next elections five years away, decided never again to endure the humiliation of having her position determined by others in this manner. She had seen and learned too much over the years to need to be subjected to this.

And she realized, too, that having reconfirmed her as the Prime Minister, the party elders would not proceed against her in a hurry. Her task would be to shore up her position so that by the time they did, she would be ready for them.

Determination had always been Priya Duryodhani’s greatest asset. Once she had made up her mind and realized the strength of her post-election position — there was, after all, only one Prime Minister, and she was it — the change in her style was dramatic. She shook off her uncertainty as a palm tree casts off its fronds. Her public diffidence turned into assertiveness; her insecurity she converted into arrogance.

I saw how my mother was hurt,’ she said once to a foreign interviewer, ‘and I was determined not to let that happen to me.’ She allowed no one to acquire enough power or influence over her to be able to hurt her one day. Strange, Ganapathi, is it not, how the lessons learned by little girls so often go on to defeat the biggest of men.

With the party elders, whose compromise had both saved and embarrassed her, she was increasingly cold and distant. She began to let it be known that she believed it was our traditionalism and conservatism that had reduced the party to its present state.

As for her Deputy Prime Minister, the stiff and straight-backed Yudhishtir, she simply ignored him.

‘I can’t take this much longer,’ he confided to me one monsoon day, as the rain stormed down on to the streets like liquid buckshot. ‘She treats me like a stranger, disdains to respond to my every suggestion. The most I can get out of her is one raised eyebrow, like this.’ He attempted to imitate the arched facial gesture for which Duryodhani was already famous, and succeeded only in giving himself a twitch. ‘I’m Deputy Prime Minister but I know less about what’s going on than my own chaprassi. Hardly any files reach me, and my annotations on the ones that do are never acted upon. What a wonderful “compromise” you got me to agree to, VVji.’

And then one day Yudhishtir found out a Cabinet meeting had been held without his even being aware of it. The Prime Minister’s Office said the usual notification had been sent; his staff swore they had never received one. He demanded an appointment with the Prime Minister to discuss the matter. When after three days she had still failed to grant him one, he did the only honourable thing open to him: he resigned.

‘You’re a fool,’ I told him, echoing Vidur’s advice to Dhritarashtra at the beginning of the global war, advice which if heeded then might have prevented the partition of the country. ‘An empty seat never benefits the one who has vacated it.’

‘It was a question of honour, VVji,’ Yudhishtir said stodgily. They say Priya Duryodhani opened a bottle of champagne at home that night. But these days, Ganapathi, you can never rely on the servants’ gossip as you could when their masters were British.

*

And Draupadi Mokrasi, running a fever, took to bed, complaining of alternating hot flushes and chills. .

102

With her most visible rival out of the way, Duryodhani began openly to promote her own cause within the party. She made speeches about the immense sacrifices made by her father and family for the cause of national independence. She spoke of Dhritarashtra’s socialist ideals, and how they had been betrayed by the ‘reactionary’ elements among the Kauravas. The Kaurava Party, she averred, had to find itself again under her leadership. She appealed to all ‘progressive’ and ‘like-minded’ people outside the Kaurava Party to join her effort.

One of the first to heed her appeal was Jayaprakash Drona’s bearded and populist son, Ashwathaman.

Since their days in the countryside agitating for rural reform with the Pandavas, Drona and his son had disappeared from political prominence. The sage himself had retreated into the honourable obscurity that our country accords to those who have performed their good deeds and voluntarily retired from the fray. Whether it was disillusionment with the slow pace of change that demotivated him, or a simple reluctance to attempt to repeat his unhappy experience in government, Drona set himself up in an ashram with very few followers and devoted himself to detached reflection on the nation’s ills. Though he was still fit and well and his ‘special skills’ had not entirely rusted with disuse, his was a respectable and singularly unthreatening activity. So Drona was left in peace by everyone, surfacing occasionally — very occasionally — in the press with a pious utterance about peace, Gangaism (Drona was a post-Independence convert to the Mahaguru’s dogma of nonviolence) or land reform. Every year in May there would also be a small, three-line item buried on the inside pages of the newspapers, sometimes under the rubric ‘news in brief’ and sometimes, if space was available, under the heading ‘jd celebrates — th birthday’. It was a dutiful acknowledgement of the historical stature of a man who had not yet passed into history, precisely the sort of treatment, Ganapathi, that I am accorded today. And it served then, as it serves now, as an annual reminder to the politicians and the editorialists to brush up their elegies for the day when Yama’s inexorable countdown reaches its predictable end.

Ashwathaman, the inheritor of his father’s political mantle and equally, it seemed, of his distrust for power, grew a beard and joined a small splinter socialist grouping that was remarkable only for the energy with which it maintained its irrelevance. His decision to respond to Priya Duryodhani’s appeal and join the Kaurava Party put his rough, attractive face and sad eyes on the front pages of the newspapers. With his childhood poverty, his impeccable political pedigree and the idealism of his recent career on the socialist fringe (which distinguished him from the rampant opportunism of the office-seekers flocking round the Kaurava Party central office in New Delhi), Ashwathaman’s credentials could not have been better. Duryodhani welcomed him to the party and, while being careful not to find him a seat in government, nominated him to the Kaurava Working Committee.

There Drona’s son became a one-man ginger group, loudly advocating a more socialist direction to party policy. The more the party elders explained why his proposals could not immediately be adopted, the more Ashwathaman insisted upon them, the Prime Minister encouraging him with her silence, and sometimes with her support.

‘Why should we continue to give privy purses to our ex-maharajas?’ he asked. ‘Why should the likes of Vyabhichar Singh be subsidized to the tune of crores of rupees in taxes pressed from the sweat on the brow of the toiling peasant?’

‘The toiling peasant, Ashwathaman,’ Yudhishtir pointed out drily, ‘doesn’t pay any taxes.’ They had agitated together, all those years ago, for the abolition of agricultural taxation, and Shishu Pal had finally granted it in the last budget before his death.

‘But he could benefit from those taxes being spent on him, instead of being paid to these filthy rich oppressors of the people in exchange for their indolence.’

‘It was actually in exchange for their accessions, Ashwathaman.’

‘That was twenty years ago! They have been compensated more than enough. I say we should not pay them another paisa. As from now.’

‘Who is to decide when we have given them more than enough? They gave up their kingdoms to join a republican India. Their privy purses don’t even make up for the revenue they lost by doing so.’

‘Spoken like a true prince, Yudhishtir.’

Yudhishtir’s eyes flashed. ‘I don’t need to remind you, Ashwathaman, that since Hastinapur was annexed by the British before Independence, my family receives no privy purse.’

‘I wasn’t suggesting that you did. But it’s clear where your sympathies lie.’

‘It’s not a question of sympathies!’ Yudhishtir banged the table with a trembling fist. ‘It’s a question of promises. We made a solemn promise as a nation to the princes who joined us that we would pay them an agreed compensation, in perpetuity, for their sacrifice. It’s in our Constitution — a document, Ashwathaman, that I would urge you to read some day.’

‘How dare you suggest I don’t know the Constitution!’ Now it was Ashwathaman’s eyes that blazed. ‘The difference between us, Yudhishtir, is that you quote the letter of the Constitution while I cite its spirit. What about the Directive Principles of the Constitution, eh? What about equality and social justice for all?’

‘What about the credibility of a solemn national undertaking? Is it right to help the poor by breaking your promises to the rich?’

‘Breaking promises? This is not a moral exercise, Yudhishtir. The Kaurava Party is supposed to improve the lot of the common man, not strive for a collective place in Heaven.’

‘I think Ashwathaman is right.’ Priya Duryodhani intervened at last. ‘I am in favour of adding this clause to the party programme. We should introduce legislation to this effect at the next session of Parliament.’

The majority of the Working Committee went along with her. They took their stances with one ear to the ground, and they interpreted the rumblings correctly: it was better in the popular eye to be associated with a broken promise than with the defence of privilege. Ashwathaman’s resolution was passed overwhelmingly.

So what could Yudhishtir do? He resigned from the Working Committee as well.

*

And Draupadi Mokrasi, bolstered with vitamins and tonics, returned a little unsteadily to her household chores. .

103

Matters came to a head over an issue which today, all these years later, seems almost too banal to have provoked such an earthquake. It was the issue of bank nationalization.

Do I hear you snort, Ganapathi? And well you might. Today we all realize what some of us realized even then, that nationalization only means transferring functioning and successful institutions from the hands of competent capitalists to those of bumbling bureaucrats. The. prevalence of nationalization in the face of widespread evidence of its shortcomings, inefficiencies and failures only affirms the characteristic Indian credo that public losses are preferable to private profits. But in those days our Ashwathamans did not speak of profit or loss: they spoke of service. Nationalized banks, they argued, would serve public purposes that private banks would not. Nationalized banks would go out into the rural areas and give loans to poor peasants, while private banks would ask for security they couldn’t provide. (If anyone suggested that that was why private banks were safer to deposit your hard- earned savings in, he was only being selfish, of course.) Today we know that the good nationalized banks are just as wary of unsecured loans as anyone else, but they have to function in an environment where success is judged by how many debt write-offs you can proudly attribute to the promotion of social uplift. (Again, should anyone suggest that if the bad loans had really served their social purpose they would have been paid back by the uplifted borrowers, he would be considered churlish. Especially by those bank managers into whose capacious pockets some of the irretrievable funds have been siphoned.)

But, yet again, I digress, Ganapathi. Bank nationalization was elevated by Ashwathaman and Duryodhani and others of their ilk alongside motherhood and dal-bhaat as an unquestionable national good. Before the rest of us knew it, Ashwathaman had introduced a private member’s bill on the floor of Parliament. Duryodhani — failing this time to carry a majority of the Working Committee with her — gave it her personal support and called for a free vote in the House. In the absence of a party whip (it had been impossible to agree on one) and with the support of the leftist Opposition parties, woolly-headed socialists and clear-thinking Communists alike, the Bank Nationalization bill was passed.

As the party and the nation erupted in debate on the issue, all eyes turned to the President of the country, the gentle Muslim academic who now occupied the palace where Lord Drewpad’s investiture had taken place. His role was now that of the monarch his predecessors in residence had represented: as the country’s constitutional head, his signature would make the bill an Act. What would he do? The media, politicians, friends, fellow academics and Priya Duryodhani all gave him their advice. All — especially the Prime Minister — did so in the strongest possible terms.

Beset by conflict and controversy, heated by the fieriness of his interlocutors’ convictions and sizzled in the unaccustomed glare of publicity, poor Dr Mehrban Imandar did — as usual — the only decent and dignified thing possible. He died.

*

And Draupadi Mokrasi felt her head swim as one spell of dizziness succeeded another. .

104

The presidential election that immediately followed now became crucial for India’s political future. The Kaurava Working Committee quickly met to choose the party’s candidate for the post. Since the President was elected by the members of the national Parliament and the state Legislative Assemblies — an electoral college in which the Kaurava Party still enjoyed, despite its recent setbacks, a safe majority — the choice of the Kaurava candidate should normally have settled the matter. But it was clear that would no longer necessarily be the case.

For one thing, the Kaurava Old Guard — they had even begun calling themselves that, so used were they to the term of abuse — were determined to use this opportunity to regroup. In Priya Duryodhani they had a Frankenstein’s monster who was suddenly growing out of control. If they could impose a President on her who would not stand too much of her nonsense — who would, for instance, refuse to sign her Bank Nationalization bill — they could rein her in a bit. If, on the other hand, she succeeded in getting herself a sympathetic Kaurava candidate, the Old Guard could bid farewell to their last chance of control, and reconcile themselves to the complete loss of the authority that was already slipping away from their loosening grasp.

That Working Committee meeting was the stormiest I have ever attended, and believe me, I have attended a few. Priya Duryodhani put forward the name of one of her ministers — a son of God with a long record of serving the interests of the downtrodden, especially if they were related to him. The Old Guard balked and proposed me instead. Duryodhani lost.

My adoption as the official Kaurava candidate for President gave me my last chance to play a direct role in the nation’s history. For about twenty-four hours I thought I would be able to end my career as a symbol of national reconciliation and Kaurava unity. Duryodhani appeared to have accepted my nomination with good grace.

Then, on the last day that nominations were to be filed, a young man, a member of our own party barely past the minimum age limit for the presidency, filed his papers as an Independent candidate. There were normally at least a dozen such Independent candidacies, ranging from the local butcher to the surviving flag-bearer of the Society for the Restoration (as it was now renamed) of the Imperial Connection, candidacies which gave journalists amusing copy to submit before a predictable ballot. I idly scanned the list for a laugh and stopped short at the last name.

It was not the name of just another irrelevant Independent. It was the name of Ekalavya.

And his candidacy had been proposed by the incumbent Kaurava Prime Minister.

*

And Draupadi Mokrasi, blinking her eyes, did not know why she felt faint. .

105

Duryodhani’s strategy began smoothly, almost predictably, to unfold. When the horrified party elders asked her to explain her sponsorship of a candidate who was intending to oppose the official party nominee, she said it was only an act of personal loyalty to an old friend. It did not necessarily mean that she would vote for him. In fact she was hoping, she said, to come to an understanding with the official Kaurava candidate about his perception of his role.

Oh? asked the Old Guard. What sort of understanding?

A general sort of understanding, she replied vaguely. About the ceremonial nature of his functions. About his commitment to upholding the will of the people, as expressed through Parliament.

You mean, I asked, you want him to agree in advance to sign every bill you submit to him?

Not really, she said. Not exactly. Well, yes.

You can’t seriously expect me to give you this kind of undertaking, I said.

I do, she replied. What a pity.

The next day the papers carried two simultaneous announcements: the Kaurava Party had issued an official notice to Shri Ekalavya asking him to show cause why he should not be expelled for breach of party discipline, and the Prime Minister had stated that the time had come in India, too, for the torch to be passed to a new generation.

Ekalavya, cocky as ever, replied to the ‘show-cause notice’ with a letter he released simultaneously to the press. ‘When the Kaurava Party, at this hour of national crisis, confronted with the responsibility of naming a helmsman to stand at the bridge of the ship of state to assist its captain, our dynamic young Prime Minister, to steer it through the muddy waters of communalism, capitalism and casteism, takes refuge behind the nomination of its oldest member for this arduous task, one wonders toward which century the party intends the ship to be steered,’ he read aloud, to appreciative laughter from the whisky-plied hacks at the press conference. Mind you, what I’m quoting is only part of one sentence of his letter, and the other sentences were even longer, but I think you can get the drift of his ship of state from that specimen.

That warning shot across our bows indicated very clearly what their ammunition was made of. The reference to the three c’s that constituted the pet aversions of the Ashwathaman left, the attack on my age and presumed conservatism, the interpretation of the role of the President as one who was supposed to ‘assist’ the Prime Minister, all pointed very clearly to the nature of their electoral message. The point was, how many in the Kaurava Party would listen?

The Working Committee of the Kaurava Party expelled Ekalavya from its primary membership and called upon all its members to desist from lending support to any other than the party’s official candidate for the presidency.

The Prime Minister then called for a ‘conscience vote’ in the presidential election. The issues at stake, she declared, were far too serious to be brushed under the carpet of party discipline.

The Working Committee took strong exception to her statement and asked her to explain herself.

The Prime Minister said it was not exactly unconstitutional to uphold the sanctity of the secret ballot.

The Working Committee met for six hours and was unable to come up with an agreed statement in response.

The Prime Minister urged all ‘modern and progressive forces’ in politics to vote for Shri Ekalavya for President. The Communist and socialist parties endorsed her call, and pledged their votes to him.

The Kaurava Party asked Priya Duryodhani to show cause why she should not be expelled for breach of party discipline.

Priya Duryodhani did not reply.

The Kaurava Party repeated its question, and gave her forty-eight hours in which to reply.

Priya Duryodhani ignored them.

At the end of the forty-eight-hour deadline, the Working Committee met to discuss her reply, found there was none to discuss, and scheduled a meeting for the following week to discuss the issues arising from the lack of a reply.

The day before this meeting was to take place, the presidential election was held. It resulted in a narrow victory — half a percentage point — for Shri Ekalavya, who thus became the youngest President in independent India’s brief history, and the first one not to have been the official nominee of the Kaurava Party.

The next day, the Working Committee of the Kaurava Party, meeting with several empty chairs, voted to expel Prime Minister Priya Duryodhani from the primary membership of the party.

An hour later, a group of people calling themselves the ‘real Working Committee of the Kaurava Party’, meeting at Priya Duryodhani’s house and under her chairmanship, voted to expel all those who had attended the first meeting from the primary membership of the ‘real’ Kaurava Party — all, that is, except the three or four who had changed their minds in time and gone from the first meeting to the second.

And thus, over the essentially trivial issue of the election of a national figurehead, the political equivalent of the dragon on the bowsprit of a Viking ship, and ostensibly provoked by the even more trivial question of whether the fattest bankers in the country should draw government salaries or private ones, the great Kaurava Party, the world’s oldest anti-colonial political organization, sixteen years away from its centenary, split.

The majority called themselves the Kaurava (R), the R standing for Real, or Ruling, or Rewarded by Priya Duryodhani, depending on your degree of cynicism. The rest of us, at first a not insubstantial rump, were dubbed the Kaurava (O), the O standing for Official, or Old Guard, or Obsolete, depending on the same thing. For the first time, the Prime Minister of the country represented a party which did not have an overall majority in Parliament. But the short-sighted ideologues of the Opposition Left supported her in the House, thinking this would give them some influence over her. It did — in her rhetoric: the very rhetoric which would then enable her to capture their seats at the next general election.

The poor idiots. It was, I declared with feeling, the first time I had seen goats opting for an early Bakr-Id. When they were no longer useful to Priya Duryodhani, there would be no one to hear their bleats as they were led off to the electoral slaughterhouse.

What more is there to say, Ganapathi, about this phase of my eclipse into irrelevance? Let us draw a discreet veil over the gradual but steady haemorrhage from the Kaurava (O) to the Kaurava (R), the self-serving prime- ministerial attacks on big business and ‘monopoly capital’, the increasing unproductive frustration of the Old Guard, the brilliant manoeuvre of calling a snap general election that caught all of us at our unready worst, the even more brilliant campaign slogan ‘Remove Poverty’ (as if she hadn’t had the power to do anything about poverty so far) to which we were stupid enough to retort ‘Remove Duryodhani’ (as if we cared less about poverty than power). At the end of it all, Priya Duryodhani stood alone amongst the ruins of her old party, having smashed to pieces all the pillars and foundations that had supported her in the past. Alone, but surrounded by the recumbent forms of newly elected supplicants prostrating themselves amidst the rubble, the ciphers whose empty heads collectively gave Duryodhani a bigger parliamentary majority than even Dhritarashtra had ever enjoyed.

How had she done it? We were all too much in a state of shock to answer the question coherently, but there was no lack of random theorizing. It was her father’s magic, some said; but then to anyone who knew the family it was obvious she took not after Dhritarashtra, but after the undeservingly unknown Gandhari the Grim. It was the privy-purse question and bank nationalization, others suggested; but then how many of the country’s electorate understood what was involved in these issues, or cared? No, Ganapathi, I think it was innocence. Not hers, for what little she had been born with had dried with the sweat on Gandhari’s satin blindfold, but ours, India’s innocence. She had tapped the deep lode of it that still ran through our people, the innocence which had led 320 million voters to cast their ballots for a slogan (‘Remove Poverty’) devoid of sincerity, merely because for the first time a Prime Minister had bothered to imply that their votes served a purpose and, even better, that they could actually make a difference to the fulfilment of that purpose. ‘Remove Poverty’ indeed! Priya Duryodhani could as well have declaimed ‘Invade Mars’ for all the difference it made to her real intentions; but she did not, and in ‘Remove Poverty’ she found the two words that innocent India took to its heart and into its polling-booths.

So India had a new Queen-Empress, anointed a hundred years after the last one. And for a year, maybe two, the Empress’s new clothes shone so brightly, so dazzled the eyes of her observers, that it was impossible to tell what they were made of or whether they were made of anything at all. But then, Ganapathi, they began to unravel.

*

And Draupadi Mokrasi was diagnosed as asthmatic, her breath coming sometimes in short gasps, the dead air trapped in her bronchia struggling to expel itself, her chest heaving with the effort to breathe freely. .

106

But before then, before Duryodhani’s raiment, and the nation’s hopes, began to come apart at the seams, there was the brief moment of national glory that came to be known as the Gelabi Desh War.

When Karnistan was hacked off India’s stooped shoulders by the departing Raj’s pencil-wielding butchers, it was carved like two pieces of prime human meat from the country’s two Muslim-majority areas, choice Islamic cuts for the carnivorous Mohammed Ali Karna. But even if the appropriate Koranic verses were chanted during the operation and the resultant bleeding mess was undoubtedly halal, in the matter of economic and political development — the seasoning, as it were, of Karna’s consecrated cuisine — the two halves were not treated the same way on the national cooking-range. They may both have had their steaks in the Islamic roast, but as far as development went, one was well-done and the other decidedly rare.

The half that did well was — inevitably — West Karnistan, where Karna had settled during his brief life as a Karnistani. It boasted the best infrastructure, the most important roads, canals and factories. It even had the most vigorous people — the perpetrators and survivors, indeed, of the bloodiest carnage at the time of Partition. The other half of Karnistan, the half where economic bounty was rare, lay in the swampy, humid east, where paddy-fields ripened gradually under an ageless sun, where ancient boats ferried people across terrain so wet the roads had sunk, where art, and music, and song, and culture and — why not admit it? — sleep were valued more highly than energy and industry and killing. The land that became East Karnistan had, in fact, been the site of one of Gangaji’s few successful attempts at communal peace-making before Partition.

For nearly two and a half decades the people of East Karnistan, who were all ethnically Gelabins (a name that happened to be an anagram, as the West Karnistanis ever hastened to point out, of those notoriously stupid and lazy people, the Belgians) had put up with being despised, neglected and exploited as a concomitant of their shared Islamic nationhood. They had seen the profits of their jute exports pay for luxury car factories in the western half of their country, the bulk of their taxes swell the coffers of western provincial governments, the bodies of their women fill the brothels of the western cities, and the boots of western soldiers tramp their fields and streets in defence of a legal and constitutional order imposed by West Karnistan. They had honoured their moral and economic share of the national loans taken to finance the increasing prosperity of that better half. They had accepted the marginalization of the Gelabin language (which no West Karnistani ever learned, but which several imitated by pouring half a glass of water into their mouths and making bubbling round-lipped sounds, like the fish on which the Gelabins thrived). They had even patiently resigned themselves to the jibes that the West Karnistani creators flung at the eastern procreators. (Sample: ‘When is the only productive period in East Karnistan? Night.’ ‘What is the difference between rabbits and Gelabins? Gelabins are browner.’ ‘Why should electricity never come to East Karnistan? Because if you could put the lights on after dark you would curtail the Gelabins’ principal activity.’ And so on.)

But suddenly, indeed unexpectedly, after two decades of military rule — stripes and stars on starched uniforms having been the Karnistani equivalent of the electoral tallies that determined India’s political dispositions — the jaded general in power at the time of Duryodhani’s triumph in the battle of the hustings, Jarasandha Khan, decided to call elections. Not having been entirely sober at the moment the decision was made, Jarasandha had omitted to figure out that elections were inconveniently based on the computation of votes, and that therefore the leaders with the most followers came out on top. Since the one inequality in Karnistan that could not be denied was its population balance, and since there were inescapably more Gelabins in Karna’s bifurcated new country than any other group, the attempt at giving Karnistan electoral legitimacy meant that the biggest disadvantage of East Karnistan — its overpopulation — became suddenly its biggest asset. If its people played their electoral cards right, they could win a majority of seats in the new Karnistani Parliament, and they could rule all of Karnistan.

They did, they did, and they couldn’t.

They voted overwhelmingly for the Gelabin People’s Party, which won all but one seat in East Karnistan and thus, by sheer arithmetic, a numerical majority in the Karnistan Parliament. The prospect of being ruled by their chattering brown compatriots, however, so appalled the politicians of West Karnistan — and in particular the mercurial Zaleel Shah Jhoota, a procacious autocrat who had managed to convince a majority of West Karnistani voters that he was really a precocious socialist — that they persuaded Jarasandha Khan to declare the election results null and void, declare martial law in the East and lock up all the Gelabin politicians the Karnistani Army could lay their hands and batons on. The few who escaped incarceration promptly reacted by declaring the secession of Gelabi Desh from Karnistan.

India had no choice but to be involved in the business from the start. For one thing, it separated the two halves of Karnistan the way a surfacing whale separates waves. For another, the repression of the Gelabins following the imposition of martial law sent a panic-stricken flood of brutalized humanity flooding across our borders to create, on Indian soil, the biggest refugee problem the world has ever known.

I do not know if they moved Priya Duryodhani, those millions of ragged men, ravaged women and ragtag children who with tragic dignity suffered and trudged and struggled their way into the world’s consciences. I do not know if it made her sad or angry to see them huddled under trees, in tents, in enormous lengths of unused piping, wherever they could find shelter from the relentless monsoon and the unrelenting humanitarianism of Occidental zoom- lenses. I do not know if she raged as the world showered platitudes and offers of charity at her while the refugees kept flowing from the bleeding wounds inflicted by Karnistan’s Western Army. I do not know if it was with bitterness or contempt that she spurned these Band-Aids and tranquillizers the world proved more willing to give than the tourniquet she sought, the strong international pressure that alone might force Jarasandha Khan to withdraw his bayonets from the soft Gelabin flesh in which they were so grotesquely stuck. I do not know, Ganapathi, what she felt. But we all know what she decided to do.

Priya Duryodhani may not have meant it when she declared that all she wanted was for Jarasandha Khan to restore to the Gelabins the basic human decencies that would, above all, prevent more of them fleeing their homes and, in due course, encourage those who had fled to India to return. Her enemies outside the country and her admirers within it suggest these were merely time-buying pieties meant to lull diplomatic opinion while the troops prepared for war. Whatever the truth of the matter, it soon became apparent that Jarasandha, with the menacing figure of Zaleel Shah Jhoota hissing behind him like an under-age Rasputin, had no intention of relaxing his grip on what the Americans so charmingly call the short and curlies of his eastern compatriots. If India wanted to resolve the deadlock, ease the refugee burden on her soil and in the process teach Karnistan the kind of lesson India itself had had to learn not so long ago from Chakra, it would have to march in.

It did. Priya Duryodhani was no angel,’ but she ordered the Indian Army to strike in what was, in my view, one of only two wars in this century of carnage that can be morally justified. Seventeen days was all it took to sweep across the fields and rivers of East Karnistan and give the miserable millions their Gelabi Desh. For a short while it was to make them less miserable, and for a slightly shorter while it made Priya Duryodhani a national heroine.

Yes, Ganapathi, India accorded Duryodhani its ultimate accolade: she was not just deified, she was maternalized. This woman who had never married, and who looked incapable of producing or sustaining human life, became known as ‘Ma Duryodhani’ and ‘Duryodhani Amma’ to a people who saw in her the embodiment of the female principle of Shakti, the power and the strength of a national Mother Goddess.

It was about this time that my dreams started. They were extraordinarily vivid dreams, in full costume and colour, with highly authentic dialogue delivered (for they were clearly set in the epic era of our national mythology) in Sanskrit. Yes, Ganapathi, I dreamt in Sanskrit, and I dreamt of our traditions. Yet my dreams were populated not by the Ramas and Sitas of your grandmother’s twilight tales but by contemporary characters transported incongruously through time to their oneiric mythological settings.

I dreamt, for instance, of Karnistan’s Jarasandha coming into being like the son of our mythical king Brihadratha — the fruit, quite literally, of his twin wives. Brihadratha’s wives had conceived after years of childlessness by each eating half of a mango given as a boon to their husband by the sage Kaushik, and each had produced half a boy. The two halves had fused into the strong and independent Jarasandha, whose great physical prowess was limited by one fatal flaw — the fact that his body, being a fusion of two separate parts, could, one day, be broken into two again.

And in my dream Duryodhani was a queen who resolved to conduct the Rajasuya sacrifice and crown herself Empress. She could not do so, however, as long as the wicked and powerful Jarasandha reigned in his twin kingdom; so she sent an expedition, consisting of Bhim the soldier, Arjun the spy and Krishna the thinker (no, Ganapathi, don’t pause, there is no thailor to follow) to destroy Jarasandha.

Entering his kingdom in disguise, our trio, after the inevitable moments of deception and temporizing diplomacy to put Jarasandha at ease, finally confronted the tyrant. Bhim challenged him to a duel.

Jarasandha fought bravely, but he was no match for the immense Bhim, who twice tore him apart in the middle and flung him in two to the ground, only to find the pieces fusing together again and Jarasandha returning refreshed to the fray. At last Krishna, the political advisor, caught the dismayed Bhim’s eye, picked up a straw, broke it in half and cast the two pieces in opposite directions. Bhim, catching on immediately, seized Jarasandha with a cry wrenched him apart and flung the two bits away on either side, making it impossible for the halves to reunite.

Thus, Ganapathi, was Jarasandha slain in my dream, and thus, when I opened my eyes, was Karnistan, the Hacked-Off Land, itself hacked in two.

*

And Draupadi Mokrasi knew moments of good health, entire periods when her breath came sweet and clear into her lungs and the radiance of living reddened her cheeks. .

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My dreams continued, while in the real world around me, Duryodhani dissipated her goodwill, her adulation, her position by revealing she did not know what to do with any of it. Nothing changed in the daily lives of ordinary Indians, who still tilled and toiled to scratch an existence from the country’s exhausted soil or sought pitiable betterment in the foetid city slums. The majority of our people remained illiterate; an overlapping majority remained below a poverty-line drawn lower and lower by Duryodhani’s experts; and an overwhelming majority resigned themselves to being overwhelmed — by their fate, by disease and malnourishment and exploitation, and by the heartless ineptness of the one in whom they had placed their trust.

It angered me then, as it angers me now, to read Western accounts of Indians ‘starving to death’. If they starved to death, Ganapathi, there wouldn’t be a problem, for they wouldn’t survive to constitute one. They didn’t starve to death, because they slaved and swept and sowed and stood and served and scratched in order to slake the hunger in their bellies, and found just enough to keep alive — underfed, undernourished, undergrown, underweight, un-derclad, undereducated, underactive, underemployed, undervalued and underfoot, but alive. Yet how sympathetically their underdevelopment was understood by Duryodhani’s underlings! Her speech-writers peppered her rhetoric with dutiful obeisance to the wretched of the Indian earth, she proclaimed her democratic pedigree and socialist convictions from every lectern and platform — and she acquired more and more power in their name.

Ah, Ganapathi, the causes the poor of India lent themselves to in her hands! She squeezed the newsprint supplies of the press because they were ‘out of touch’ with the masses (you see how she remembered Kanika’s conversation with her father), she fettered the judiciary by demanding they be ‘committed’ to the people (whose true needs she, of course, and she alone, represented), she emasculated her party by appointing its state leaders rather than allowing them to be elected (for she alone could judge who best would serve the people). And all this, Ganapathi, while the poor remained as poor as they had ever been, while striking trade unionists were beaten and arrested, while peasant demonstrations were assaulted and broken, all this while more and more laws went on to the statute books empowering Priya Duryodhani to prohibit, proscribe, profane, prolate, prosecute or prostitute all the freedoms the national movement had fought to attain during all those years of my Kaurava life.

And I dreamt then, Ganapathi, of the great forest fire of our epic. Of Arjun and Krishna, seated by the banks of the Jamuna, being approached by a resplendent figure taller than a coconut tree, his golden skin glowing like a sacrificial flame, his eyes flashing sparks. ‘I am Agni, God of Fire,’ he announces in a portentous voice. ‘Help me consume this forest.’ And our two heroes, the one dark like the night sky, the other fair like the stars, stand at each end of the wood as Agni rages within, preventing the Fire God’s victims from fleeing, slaughtering those who stumble their agonized way towards them, their weapons swinging, scudding, scything through their victims in a blur of light and motion, as Agni burns and crackles and devours each branch, each tree, each jungle creature, and the smoke rises and the trunks fall and the jungle streams boil, and the animals wail as homes become pyres, mynah birds shriek as their singed wings strangulate their song, tigers roar as the flames lacerate their stripes, deer close their gentle eyes and leap in graceful thanatop-sis into the swelling furnace, and Arjun and Krishna, Krishna and Arjun, doing their duty to divinity, refuse to permit escape, turn back the snakes slithering away from the sizzling grass, bar the way to the bears whose charred tails propel them screaming from the cinders of their lairs, kill the howling jackals who try to bound out of the searing circle of heat that engulfs them. And at last, at the end, when Agni is satisfied, and all that remains of the forest is a pile of faintly smoking ashes smouldering blackly amidst the devastation, the Fire God turns to our heroes and thanks them for their faithful defence of his slaughter.

‘Tell me what you want,’ he says, ‘ask me for a boon, and you shall have it.’

It was Arjun who spoke, but Krishna, I believe, who inspired the thought.

‘Give us, Agni, the power to create as we have the strength to destroy,’ he said.

‘You shall have it,’ Agni responded, ‘but not yet.’

And then the shining figure of the Fire God shimmered away from them, and my dream was over.