The Great Indian Novel

The Seventeenth Book: The Drop of Honey — A Parable

108

At last the people rose. Or, as always in India, some of the people rose, led by an unlikely figure who had stepped from the pages — so it almost seemed — of the history books. Jayaprakash Drona emerged from his retreat and called for a People’s Uprising against Priya Duryodhani.

It was a shock, not least because JD’s son Ashwathaman was still in the Kaurava camp, though increasingly on the margin of it. And for the Prime Minister it was a particularly rude shock, since Priya Duryodhani had done nothing to prevent Drona’s name and image from being kept quietly alive, like a musty heirloom on a darkened mantelpiece. Drona had even been allowed a brief recent return to the headlines when he was pressed into service by the government to persuade the fiercely moustachioed dacoits of the wild Chambal ravines to give up their violent ways, just as he had renounced his. Drona’s sincerity was so transparent, his own example so transcendent, that many of the dacoits, men with twenty and thirty murders, rapes and abductions each to their name, had actually listened and been converted. Drona had brought them out from their underground hideouts in mind-boggling ceremonies where they had dropped their rifles and gun-belts at his feet before an applauding audience of their victims’ families — and in exchange for nothing more than the promise of a fair trial.

This, then, was the Drona who rose one day, bathed his feet in the sacred Ganga, and proclaimed that he could not take it any more. He had converted the petty criminals, but the biggest were the ones running the country — and they would not listen to him. The dishonesty and cynicism of the government of Priya Duryodhani was an affront to his conscience that Drona could no longer abide. It was time, he declared, for a People’s Uprising which would restore India’s ancient values to its governance.

Where were all our protagonists at this time? You may well ask, and you would be right, Ganapathi, to do so. The trouble with telling a tale on an epic scale is that sometimes you neglect the characters in the foreground as you admire the broad sweep of the landscape you are painting, just as the overall picture fades occasionally from sight when you focus closely on the smudgy details of individual impressions. Let me, Ganapathi, make amends.

Shall we begin at the top of the ladder of righteousness, with the son of Dharma? Yudhishtir was now a respected leader of the Opposition, sternly adopting the mantle of elder statesman which I was now too inactive to hold (yes, Ganapathi, you can be too old even to be an elder statesman). His earlier criticisms of Duryodhani, his principled resignations, gave him the saintly aura of one who has been right before his time — even though many would have preferred him to be more preoccupied with political, rather than urinary, tracts.

Bhim was still in the army, which he had served so well in the war that destroyed Jarasandha and broke up Karnistan. He had his limitations, but below the neck there was still no one in India or its environs who could stand up to him.

Arjun, perfect Arjun, had at last revealed a major imperfection: in-decisiveness. When the Kaurava Party split he could not find it within himself either to support his increasingly priggish elder brother or to endorse the view of the idealistic, bearded Ashwathaman. On this his self-contented brother-in-law gave him no advice except to do what he thought best. ‘If I knew what was the best thing to do,’ Arjun expostulated to the untroubled Krishna, ‘I wouldn’t be asking you, would I?’ But Subhadra’s brother smilingly declined to go any further in his counsel.

Krishna himself seemed to find in the national convulsions a vindication of his preference for local politics. ‘Your national mainstream,’ he said to Arjun, ‘isn’t clean enough to swim in.’ He remained with the Kaurava Old Guard, one of our few supporters who did not need the blessings of Dhritarashtra’s daughter to retain his seat and who could therefore afford to keep his distance from her both geographically and politically. But Krishna’s opposition to Priya Duryodhani was not active enough to prompt Arjun to emulate him. Nor could Ashwathaman’s increasing irrelevance in the Kaurava ranks inspire Arjun to endorse his friend’s radical idealism. Priya Duryodhani seemed happy enough to keep Drona’s son on her Working Committee to let off occasional bursts of socialist steam, which she continued to ignore in practice as she fuelled her political gas-flames under blacker kettles. So Arjun ignored politics altogether and devoted himself — with great competence, but no greater consequence — to Subhadra, Draupadi and non-political freelance journalism.

Our supporting cast did not benefit from any larger unity of purpose than the principals. Kunti, her hair now almost as white as the widow’s saris she had at last begun to wear, presided over the joint Pandava ménage like a dignified Mother Hubbard. She had given up the Turkish cigarettes of her insecure loneliness and now chewed Banarsi pan with as much red-stained confidence as any other Indian matriarch. Nakul, with his gift for speaking in the plural, had entered the national civil service from which Vidur had at last retired (while retaining enough governmental consultancies not to notice the difference). Sahadev, his silent twin, took his reserve and his gift for allowing himself to be told what to say into the foreign service. And I, Ganapathi, chomping reflectively on the new reality with my toothless gums, watching the few wisps of white on my scalp curl in dismayed betrayal, I sat, and aged, and saw, and dreamt.

109

Drona’s uprising was, of course, a peaceful one, so it was not really an uprising but a mass movement. It was, however, a movement that rapidly caught the imagination of the people and ignited that of the Opposition. Drona preached not only against Duryodhani but against all the evils she had failed to eradicate and therefore, in his eyes; had herself come to represent: venality and corruption, police brutality and bureaucratic inefficiency, rising prices and falling stocks in the shops, adulteration and black-marketing, shortages of everything from cereals to jobs, caste discrimination and communal hatred, neglected births and dowry debts — the whole panoply of national evils, including the very ones against which the Prime Minister had campaigned in the elections. Priya Duryodhani was being held accountable for the pledges she had failed to redeem, the hopes she had betrayed and the miracles she could not possibly have wrought. The sharpest focus of the movement was on herself: she was finally paying the price for her party’s complete identification with its Leader.

Within months the movement had rocked the government to its unstable foundations. It did so by making the country ungovernable. In villages and towns, Drona preached a new civil disobedience, urging students to boycott classes, clerks to withhold their taxes, workers to strike at government-owned plants, legislators to resign from the assemblies to which they had been elected and the police to disobey orders to arrest the disobedient. It became clear that, for all their jingoistic hubris at the breaking in two of Karnistan, the people were judging the Prime Minister by the domestic goods she had failed to deliver rather than the strategic international stature she had diverted the government’s energies to attain.

The Opposition parties quickly jumped on the Drona bandwagon. They gave it some of its lung-power, much of its muscle, and a great deal of its political thrust. With the Kaurava (O) and other parties in its ranks, the People’s Uprising soon turned its attention to specific targets, the most vulnerable of which were the Kaurava (R) state governments. These were led largely by inept minions hand-picked by Duryodhani solely for their loyalty; they were thus easily attacked. In Drona’s home state, the government was so completely paralysed by the need to contain his movement that its police spending reached the colossal sum of 100,000 rupees a day — yes, Ganapathi, one lakh of rupees, or enough to feed 20,000 Indian families and have something left over for dessert. In Hastinapur, after weeks of popular agitation culminating in a highly popular march by housewives banging empty pots and pans outside his residence, Duryodhani’s Chief Minister resigned. When New Delhi showed no inclination to hold elections for a new state assembly — preferring to control Hastinapur directly under ‘President’s Rule’ — Yudhishtir, the state’s most famous political leader, undertook a fast unto death. He hadn’t even lost a kilo before Duryodhani caved in and called new state elections — which her party comprehensively lost. The political tide seemed to be turning decisively away from the Prime Minister.

I watched all this, Ganapathi, in increasing gloom. I was no admirer of Priya Duryodhani or what she stood for, but I was equally distraught about Drona’s Popular Uprising and where it was leading the government. For the independent India that I had spent my life trying to achieve to be wasting itself in demonstration and counter-demonstration, mass rallies and mass arrests, was pitiable. For the government to be devoting all its attention to policing opposition rather than developing the country was tragic. For our precious independence to be reduced to anarchy, betrayal and chaos was downright criminal.

If only they had waited, Ganapathi! The next elections were not so far away; Drona and Yudhishtir could have rallied the Opposition around them, consolidated their organization and swept Duryodhani from power at the hustings. Instead they clamoured for her removal, and that of her party’s state governments, now; and they did so not in the assemblies, where the post- Gelabi Desh electoral wave had left them clinging to the jetsam of just a few seats, but in the streets.

Priya Duryodhani had her back to the wall, and that was the position from which she always fought the hardest. Especially when the wall itself appeared on the verge of crashing down behind her.

Yes, Ganapathi. For right in the midst of this political crisis, an upright if excessively legalistic provincial court found the Prime Minister guilty of a ‘corrupt electoral practice’ for making a campaign speech for her parliamentary seat during the last elections from a platform shared with President Ekalavya. The President being a non-political national figure, Priya Duryodhani should not have ‘exploited his presence for partisan ends’. I don’t know what was more laughable, the suggestion that the Prime Minister stood to gain in the slightest from the President’s political lustre (all of which was reflected from her in the first place) or her conviction for an offence whose triviality was underscored by the far greater crimes perpetrated and perpetuated all around her and her government.

The conviction — which deprived her of her parliamentary privileges pending appeal — gave the Popular Uprising just the spark it needed. They turned their movement into a massive orchestrated cry for her resignation, threatening to court arrest outside her home every day until she quit. More ominously for her, Drona began to talk to a faction within her own party, led conspicuously by his son Ashwathaman, which was calling for her to step down ‘temporarily’ in order to quieten the Opposition demands and give the judicial process time to work.

But if there was one thing Priya Duryodhani had learned from her mother’s wasted sacrifices, it was never to put anything, anything at all, ahead of self- interest. She would not allow anyone to place a blindfold on her blazing eyes. And her instincts were confirmed by her closest advisor, the hand-picked President of the Kaurava (R) Party and the man known as ‘Duryodhani’s Kanika’, the Bengali lawyer Shakuni Shankar Dey.

Shakuni was an immense mountain of a man, oily and slick, with a gleaming bald pate, gleaming gold buttons on his immaculate silk kurta, and gleaming white enamel in place of the teeth he had lost at the hands of a grieving mob (which had expressed its grief with its fists after he had got a murderer off on a technicality). ‘Duryodhani’s Kanika’ flicked a stray speck of lint off his spotless sleeve and turned to the Prime Minister.

‘Don’t resign, even for appearances’ sake,’ he said firmly. ‘Why gratify the howling jackals outside and give time for the opportunists within the party to wrest control from you?’

‘But do I have a choice?’

Shakuni frowned his disapproval of the question. ‘The Prime Minister always has a choice,’ he growled. ‘You don’t have to do anything merely because it’s expected of you. But there is something else you can do,’ he added meaningfully.

‘What?’

Shakuni rested manicured fingers on the prime-ministerial table in front of him. ‘Hit back.’

The Prime Minister looked at him like a schoolmistress whose favourite pupil has given too pat an answer. ‘Obviously,’ she said. ‘But how? I can’t just lock up all those I’d love to put behind bars.’

‘You can.’

‘Oh, of course I can,’ Duryodhani said in exasperation. ‘But I wouldn’t last a day afterwards if I did that.’

‘You might not, if things were allowed to continue as at present,’ Shakuni said carefully. ‘But you could change the rules of the game. You could declare a Siege.’

‘But we already have.’ This was true: the state of Siege declared in the country at the time of the Gelabi Desh war had never actually been lifted.

‘Yes, but that Siege was declared to cope with an external threat which everyone knows has long since passed,’ replied the lawyer. ‘What you could do now is to declare an internal Siege. A grave threat to the stability and security of the nation from internal disruption.’

‘Which is true enough,’ Priya Duryodhani nodded reflectively.

‘No one has ever defined the permissible procedures under an internal Siege, which leaves it more or less up to us to define them,’ Shakuni added. ‘I think they could very safely include the preventive detention of some of our more obstreperous politicians. .’

‘All of them,’ the Prime Minister said firmly.

‘Or, indeed, of all of them,’ Shakuni affirmed. ‘Not to mention censorship of the press, which is nowhere explicitly ruled out in the Constitution, suspension of certain fundamental rights — free speech, assembly, that sort of thing — and measures to put the judiciary in their place.’

‘Go on,’ Duryodhani said, her anxious pinched face brightening. ‘I like the sound of this.’

‘Of course, this plan will need the cooperation, or at least the signature, of the President.’

The Prime Minister’s face took on its famous determined look. ‘It is time,’ she said pointedly, ‘that Ekalavya earned his keep.’

110

While this conversation — or something very like it, Ganapathi, for my sources were no longer as good as in the old days — was taking place, Yudhishtir, flanked by Drona and the assembled luminaries of the Opposition, was addressing a mammoth mass rally at the Boat Club lawns convened by the People’s Uprising movement to call for the exit of Priya Duryodhani.

‘As I get up and stand at this microphone,’ he declaimed, ‘as I stand here and look upon the hundreds and thousands of you gathered here before me, the lakhs of men and women who have come to see us all on the same platform, who have come to sense and feel our unity, our confidence, the strength of our commitment to freedom and justice and change, who have come to hear us because for once we represent your hopes instead of merely your dissatisfactions, as I see all this, I feel a surge in my heart.’ The crowd roared its approval at each pause, its excitement rising as Yudhishtir added clause to heady clause to bring his audience to a crescendo of vocal adulation. ‘I know,’ Yudhishtir declared, ‘I know, standing here, that change is at hand. I know that India can no longer be the same. I offer my respectful salutations in your name to our guru Drona.’ Enthusiastic applause. ‘I look from you to my colleagues on this platform’ — a broad sweep of his hand encompassed his former rivals and critics in other opposition parties and he named some of them, receiving a lusty cheer from each politician’s supporters in the crowd — ‘and I know that from now on there is no looking back’ — roars from the crowd — ‘that our differences are over’ — another roar — ‘that together we are going to seek and attain our supreme goal, the bringing down of this corrupt and iniquitous government.’ Another roar, this time louder than all the rest; the crowd on its feet; slogans raised by Kaurava (O) workers judiciously scattered amongst the throng — ‘Down with Priya Duryodhani! Yudhishtir, Zindabad! Long Live Opposition Unity! People’s Uprising, Zindabad!’

And so it went on, with even stiff-necked Yudhishtir provoking the exhilaration of the rallied mass, but there was still something staged, unreal, about this piece of political theatre. The court verdict had, inevitably, stirred the Opposition movement to greater boldness, just as the Hastinapur elections had prompted them towards greater unity. (There the disparate followers of Drona’s Uprising had banded themselves together in a Janata Morcha or People’s Front, which with the linguistic eclecticism of Indian politics had quickly become known as the Janata Front.) The Prime Minister’s court- directed loss of her parliamentary privileges now gave them the one thing they needed: a clear-cut issue on which they could unite.

But their unity seemed purely expedient, their programme severely limited and their theatre all the more unreal. For several days now they had been calling on the Prime Minister to resign without the slightest thought of who or what might take her place. Demonstrations took place in every significant stretch of ground in the country to condemn the government and demand that the Prime Minister step down. To counter them, Shakuni had had busloads of rural peasants wheeled into Delhi from neighbouring farmlands on diverted public transport to express their support for the government in raucous rallies outside the Prime Minister’s residence. Sometimes the two groups had clashed; sometimes the innocent farmers had lent their vocal chords to the wrong cause. But they were not the only ones who had no idea of the rest of the script.

It was, I suppose, heady stuff, grist for the foreign news-magazines which reported on wars and political conflict in the same tone that they reported the goings-on in Hollywood bedrooms, but my own view of it was entirely ambivalent. I knew that in India there were really no blacks and no whites; nor was there a uniformly dingy grey. Instead, political morality and public values were a mystical, blurred, swirling optical illusion of alternating blacks and whites in different shades of depth and brightness. The Prime Minister ruled like a goddess: black to liberal democrats, black to her political opponents (who were not all liberal democrats), white to adoring impoverished sansculottes at rural public meetings, white also to contented corpulent capitalists who shrugged off her strident socialist rhetoric and fuelled her party’s electoral machine with the profits they made through her less-than-socialist policies. An honest judge had disqualified her from office by an impartial (if unimaginative) reading of the statutes: white to those who believed in the rule of law, white to her critics and enemies (who did not all believe in the rule of law), black to those who believed her hand at the helm was essential to steady India’s ship of state, black also to those sycophants and hangers-on who stood to lose personally from her downfall. It was a complex spectrum of blacks, whites and fluid greys; Brahminical ambivalence was therefore nothing to be ashamed of.

My ambivalence, Ganapathi, was to become less and less tenable with time.

111

Yudhishtir’s grand show at the Boat Club received a rousing curtain-call, but there were to be no repeat performances. Later the same night Shakuni’s plans were put smoothly into motion, and teams of red-eyed policemen knocked before dawn at the doors of the Uprising’s leaders to take them away to the prisons and the ‘rest houses’ that would be their home for months to come.

I do not know what saddened me more, the fact of the Prime Minister of free India arresting her political opponents, or the fact of their surprise at their own arrest. Drona’s astonishment at being taken away confirmed the extent to which he was living in the past. All he could bring himself to say was a Sanskrit phrase that had been coined two thousand years earlier, the same phrase that had sprung to Gangaji’s lips at the Bibigarh Gardens all those years ago: ‘Vinasha kale, viparita buddhi.’ You may remember from that occasion, Ganapathi, that the Greeks had an equivalent: ‘Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.’ Questioning the sanity of the victor is the only course open to any civilization defeated by forces it cannot understand.

I was not honoured with a pre-dawn knock on my door. Priya Duryodhani evidently considered me too old to be worth locking up. But that was not why I failed to join the chorus of condemnation that was raised in the Western press and in Indian drawing-rooms about what had happened. You see, Ganapathi, I was sensitive to the excessive formalism of some of the attacks on the Siege: the critics seemed to think that democracy had been overthrown, without paying much heed to the content of that democracy or the results of its abrogation. I could not, at that stage, think of the issue simply as one of freedom versus tyranny. Yes, Duryodhani’s motives in proclaiming a state of Siege, arresting a number of opponents and imposing censorship on the press were primarily cynical and self-serving: without these steps she would not have been able to contain the mounting pressures on her to resign. But I still believed that the political chaos in the country, fuelled by Drona’s idealistic but confused Uprising which a variety of political opportunists had joined and exploited, could have led the country nowhere but to anarchy.

The Siege was accompanied by the declaration of a twenty-point socioeconomic programme which the government seemed determined to implement. With strikes and political demonstrations banned, there was a new sense of purpose where earlier there had been drift and uncertainty. In the slothful, yet oh-so-vital world of officialdom, the officialdom in whose hands rests the hope of progress for so many of our helpless poor, habitual absentees were reporting for work all over the country; in some government offices they suddenly discovered a shortage of chairs, so long had it been since they were last all occupied. I felt (and said openly to an anxious Arjun, whose very expression in those days betrayed the discomfort of his posture on the horns of this dilemma) that if the Siege, however base its basic motive, was going to permit the government to serve the common man far more effectively than before, then people like us, who had lost the freedoms we alone knew how to exercise, had no right to object. The purpose of democratic government was the greatest good of the greatest number, and I had no doubt that more Indians would benefit from the abolition of bonded labour and the implementation of land reforms than would suffer from the censorship of articles, however well Arjun could write them.

And then, Ganapathi, I had the old politician’s regard for the wishes of the people. The declaration of the Siege, the arrests of the agitators, the silence in the streets, had been accepted by non-political India without a murmur. The only sound that replaced the months of clamour appeared to be the deflating hiss of a long public sigh of relief.

‘It’s strange, VVji, this silence,’ said Arjun. ‘Even as a journalist I had come to think that India without politics would be like Atlantis without water.’

‘Why “even”?’ I leaned back comfortably on my bolsters. ‘It’s precisely you journalists who’ve contributed to that feeling. Is there any limit in your newspapers to the amount of space you allocate to politics? Your news columns, and much of your editorial pages, are inundated with reports of speeches, clashes, accusations and counter-accusations, by-elections, resignations, defections, appointments, walkouts, rallies, padayatras, satyagrahas, fasts, demonstrations, attempts to court arrest, charges of breaching party discipline, show-cause notices, expulsions, party splits. Every other day there is at least one account of a provincial political “leader” with several hundred followers (it is always “several hundred”) crossing over to another party and swearing allegiance to his former rivals in the presence of one of its national netas. To someone like me, who can’t get out of this room as often as I used to and who must depend more and more on what the newspapers tell me about the world outside — though, thank God, they are not my only sources — it would seem from the newspapers that Indian life consists almost exclusively of a bewildering variety of forms of political behaviour.’

‘It’s what the readers want,’ Arjun said defensively. Defensiveness had become something of a second nature to him these days.

‘Nonsense,’ I barked cheerfully. ‘Most Indian readers have learned to skim through such accounts, though they provide considerable fodder for the likes of me The truth is that surfeit has bred cynicism: we have all read and heard too much for too long to take it very seriously.’

‘It wasn’t always like this, was it, VVji?’

‘Not in the nationalist movement. Then, everybody cared.’ I caught myself slipping into the righteousness of the terminally nostalgic, and changed my tone. ‘Of course, the issues were different then. But when we were fighting for independence we were fighting also for participation in the parliamentary democracy from which we felt excluded. When we won freedom it was almost axiomatic that we had won ourselves a parliamentary democracy too. For all Dhritarashtra’s sins and limitations that was one conviction he never betrayed. Even though — or perhaps because — he let no one else come near to being Prime Minister, he constantly reaffirmed and encouraged the institution of parliamentary democracy in the country. But the poor boy couldn’t see that behind the solid facade of the edifice, the rooms were empty.’ I shook my head. ‘We Indians, Arjun, are so good at respecting outward forms while ignoring the substance. We took the forms of parliamentary democracy, preserved them, put them on a pedestal and paid them due obeisance. But we ignored the basic fact that parliamentary democracy can only work if those who run it are constantly responsive to the needs of the people, and if the parliamentarians are qualified to legislate. Neither condition was fulfilled in India for long.’ I smiled a humourless and toothless smile. ‘Today most people are simply aware of their own irrelevance to the process. They see themselves standing hopelessly on the margins while the professional politicians and the unprofessional parliamentarians combine to run the country to the ground.’

I paused, fatigued by my own dismay, and poured myself a tumbler of water from a pitcher beside me. Arjun got up to help me, but I waved him away and went on.

‘What we have done is to betray the challenge of modern democracy. You have to understand, Arjun, that the political and governmental process in our country has always been distant from the vast mass of the people. This has been sanctified by tradition and reinforced by colonialism. The picture of political power portrayed in the Arthashastra is that of a remote authority no more accessible to the common man than the institutions of later imperial rule. Two hundred years of the British Raj underscored the detachment of ordinary Indians from the processes of their own governance. Perhaps Gangaji’s greatest achievement was that he made the people at large feel they had a stake in the struggle for freedom. Under him the nationalist movement inspired a brief surge of enthusiasm which overcame the general apathy, but it has all faded away.’ I shrugged. ‘Indians learned to talk about politics like Englishmen about the weather, expressing concern without expecting to do anything about it.’

‘And now they accept the loss of their politics without demur,’ Arjun mused.

‘Exactly. Not so surprising after all, is it?’ I laughed, without either amusement or bitterness. ‘But Arjun, we Indians are notoriously good at being resigned to our lot. Our fatalism goes beyond, even if it springs from, the Hindu acceptance of the world as it is ordained to be. I must tell you a little story — a marvellous fable from our Puranas that illustrates both our resilience and our self-absorption in the face of circumstance.’ I sat up against my bolsters and assumed the knowingly expectant attitude of those who are about to tell stories or perform card tricks. ‘A man, someone very like you, Arjun — a symbol, shall we say, of the people of India — is pursued by a tiger. He runs fast, but his panting heart tells him he cannot run much longer. He sees a tree. Relief! He accelerates and gets to it in one last despairing stride. He climbs the tree. The tiger snarls below him, but he feels that he has at last escaped its snapping jaws. But no — what’s this? The branch on which he is sitting is weak, and bends dangerously. That is not all: wood-mice are gnawing away at it; before long they will eat through it and it will snap and fall. The branch sags down over a well. Aha! Escape? Perhaps our hero can swim? But the well is dry, and there are snakes writhing and hissing on its bed. What is our hero to do? As the branch bends lower, he perceives a solitary blade of grass growing on the wall of the well. On the top of the blade of grass gleams a drop of honey. What action does our Puranic man, our quintessential Indian, take in this situation? He bends with the branch, and licks up the honey.’

I laughed at the strain, and the anxiety, on Arjun’s face. ‘What did you expect? Some neat solution to his problem? The tiger changes its mind and goes away? Amitabh Bachhan leaps to the rescue? Don’t be silly, Arjun. One strength of the Indian mind is that it knows some problems cannot be resolved, and it learns to make the best of them. That is the Indian answer to the insuperable difficulty. One does not fight against that by which one is certain to be overwhelmed; but one finds the best way, for oneself, to live with it. This is our national aesthetic. Without it, Arjun, India as we know it could not survive.’

But for all my certitudes, I knew, and I knew Arjun knew, that what I had said wasn’t really an answer to his dilemma. He looked at Priya Duryodhani’s Siege and felt the need to make a choice, while I could only explain how to avoid one.

112

And so we talked; and I can tell you, Ganapathi, that we were not the only ones. Duryodhani censored the press, stifled public debate, and placed restrictions even on the reporting of the speeches of the few Opposition stalwarts left in the House to criticize the new laws she was bulldozing through Parliament like the steel-rimmed chakras of an invincible juggernaut. (Yes, spell that the British way, Ganapathi. The juggernaut of their dictionaries has only a distant connection to the Jagannath of our devotees.) Yet everything that it was illegal to say in public was now said in private. Opinions flowed from Indian tongues like the Ganga through Benares: profuse, stimulating and muddied with other people’s waste matter. From village tea-shops to urban coffee houses, Indians gave whispered rein, sometimes punctuated by prophylactic glances over their shoulders, to their imaginations.

Often these opinions, like the people who expressed them, had no visible means of support, but then Indian opinions are rarely founded on any sense of responsibility or any realistic expectation of action. For all her canny cynicism, Duryodhani had failed to make one simple discovery about the people she ruled: that you could let them say what they liked without feeling obliged to do something about it. There was no need for the censorship she had clamped upon the political commentaries of the élite. In India, the expression of private opinions was no proof of the existence of a viable and demanding public opinion.

Yes, Ganapathi, that was one of the ironies of Duryodhani’s experiment with authoritarianism — it was more authoritarian than it needed to be. She could have let the newspapers write what they wanted, and it would have changed nothing. Instead, the very fact that they could no longer write what they wanted became a burning issue to those for whom conversation was now the only outlet.

And as so often in Indian life, Ganapathi, indeed as so often in this story, the really important issues were worked out not in action but through discourse. That is how we seek to arrive at objective perceptions in a land whose every complex crisis clamours for subjectivity. If we were to try to find our ethics empirically, Ganapathi, we would for ever be trapped by the limitations of experience: for every tale I have told you, every perception I have conveyed, there are a hundred equally valid alternatives I have omitted and of which you are unaware. I make no apologies for this. This is my story of the India I know, with its biases, selections, omissions, distortions, all mine. But you cannot derive your cosmogony from a single birth, Ganapathi. Every Indian must for ever carry with him, in his head and heart, his own history of India.

How easily we Indians see the several sides to every question! This is what makes us such good bureaucrats, and such poor totalitarian. They say the new international organizations set up by the wonderfully optimistic (if oxymoronic) United Nations are full of highly successful Indian officials with quick, subtle minds and mellifluous tongues, for ever able to understand every global crisis from the point of view of each and every one of the contending parties. This is why they do so well, Ganapathi, in any situation that calls for an instinctive awareness of the subjectivity of truth, the relativity of judgement and the impossibility of action.

Yet one day, at the end of another intense conversation with an increasingly troubled Arjun, I found it impossible to sustain my comfortable ambivalence.

I was in full flow about the state of Indian politics, trying to convince myself as much as Arjun that what had been lost was not worth keeping — that Indian democracy had become so atrophied and the people so divorced from it that Priya Duryodhani’s Siege didn’t really deserve to be condemned. (It was, Ganapathi, a typical case of mind over matter — if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.) Then, suddenly, Arjun spoke in a tone of greater conviction than he had ever used in the preceding months of one-woman rule. You’ve got to be wrong, VVji,’ he said with infinite sadness. You’ve got to be wrong, or the whole world wouldn’t make sense any more.’

113

The whole world wouldn’t make sense any more. I think it was those words, spoken in soft sincerity by the purest of the Pandavas, that penetrated my conscience so deeply that they shattered the careful equilibrium I had constructed there, fragmented my complacency like a breaking mirror. Did my world, I found myself silently asking, make sense any more? Had I, in my Brahminical ambivalence, twisted and turned so cleverly that I had failed to stay in the same place, slipping unnoticed to a different mooring? Had I not seen, or worse, pretended not to see, that the sun and the moon and the stars of my world were no longer shining where they had always shone before?

Oh, Ganapathi, there was no escaping from these questions! I tried to tell myself that the answers were irrelevant, that the questions simply had to be asked differently. But I knew, as you too may well have guessed, that however flexibly I had sought to define the truth, however safely I had delimited my world, I had spent too long avoiding all thought of one facet of my world, one shining visage, one person. Yes, Ganapathi, you are right, you have caught me in my self-deception: for too many hours now, and too many pages, I have failed to make any reference to Draupadi.

What can I tell you, Ganapathi? Can I look into the hurt in her eyes and claim it didn’t matter? Can I acknowledge the little cuts and bruises and burns I had spotted on her arms and hands and face at each visit to her home and dismiss them, as Kunti did, as minor kitchen mishaps? Can I admit the terrible suspicion that her own husbands were ill-treating her, exploiting her, neglecting her, even ignoring her, and still excuse myself for having done nothing about it? Can I recall the sagging flesh that had begun to mask her inner beauty, the lines of pain that had begun to radiate from those crystal-clear eyes, the tiredness in the normally firm voice, and allow myself to pretend that I had noticed none of it, that none of these things, perhaps not even Draupadi herself, was real?

I cannot, Ganapathi, and yet I must turn away from reality. Because when Arjun’s gentle words smashed my mental equipoise and forced me to think of Draupadi, I began again to dream.

114

I dreamt once more of legends past, of shimmering palaces and moustachioed men in shining brass armour and princesses glowing with gold bangles and scented garlands; of glorious Hastinapur, home of my ancestors. I dreamt of long-dead Dhritarashtra, restored to unseeing life, on a kingly throne; of sharp-faced Duryodhani, his crowned heiress; of righteous Yudhishtir and the Pandava brothers; and of the beautiful, fresh-faced Draupadi, their common wife.

I dreamt, too, of Karna, the Hacker-Off, strong and proud; of his unacknowledged mother, the widowed Kunti; of the brilliant smile of Krishna, still distant in Gokarnam, but with his far-seeing eye never straying from the events in Hastinapur. And I dreamt of the sinister slimy Shakuni, rubbing hands from which a profusion of rings gleamed, as he approached the Princess Duryodhani in a sibilant whisper.

‘I have a plan,’ he breathed. ‘A plan that will trap the Pandava brothers like five fish in a net.’

‘Oh, tell me, Shakuni,’ Duryodhani responded eagerly.

‘You want to defeat Yudhishtir, but he cannot so easily be beaten on the battlefield. For this reason we have been searching for another stratagem. I believe I have found it.’

‘Yes?’ Duryodhani could have been a maiden waiting for the announcement of a suitor’s name, so excited did she sound.

‘Yudhishtir likes to play dice.’ Shakuni saw the blank look on the princess’ face and spelt the word for her. ‘Dee — eye — she — eee, dice. You know, the little ivory cubes with dots on them.’

‘Ah, yes. But what has his playing dice got to do with. .?’

‘Everything. As a noble of Hastinapur, he cannot in all honour refuse to accept a challenge from me to play dice. For stakes. Very high stakes.’ Shakuni’s eyes rolled heavenwards.

‘I think I’m beginning to understand.’ Duryodhani’s voice took on a girlish tremor. ‘I suppose you play dice rather well, Shakuni.’

‘Rather well!’ Shakuni giggled incongruously, his jowls trembling with pleasure. ‘I am unbeatable. Simply unbeatable. I have,’ he explained, lowering his voice to a confidential croak, ‘a very special pair of dice. And in our traditional rules, it is the challenger who has to provide the dice.’

‘Bless the traditional rules,’ Duryodhani said. ‘I’m delighted, Shakuni. I’ll give you whatever support you need.’

‘First there is your father to be thought of,’ Shakuni pointed out. ‘Will Dhritarashtra permit the game in his palace? That is the only location which would make the challenge respectable, and where Yudhishtir would not be able to refuse, even if he were advised to.’

‘Hmm,’ Duryodhani said. ‘I’ll try.’ And she hurried, floating through my dream like an animated wraith, to her father. Dhritarashtra was seated on his golden throne, the white umbrella of kingship wobbling unsteadily above his thinning hair.

‘A game of dice?’ Dhritarashtra asked. ‘I’m not sure that’s entirely in the spirit of the rules I’ve drawn up for the kingdom, Duryodhani. There’s nothing explicitly against it, though. I’ll tell you what, my dear one. This is the sort of thing on which I normally consult the officials. Let me ask Vidur and see what he has to say.’

‘Don’t!’ Duryodhani pouted. ‘He will be against it, I know. You know how these bureaucrats are — they don’t like anybody to have fun. Why not let it remain a matter for your ministers? Shakuni thinks it’s all right, and he’s a minis-

The blind king sighed, as he often did in the face of his daughter’s insistent demands. ‘All right, then,’ he said at last, the words echoing hollowly in my suspended mind. ‘Have it your own way.’

The jackals howled again, Ganapathi, the vultures wheeled overhead and screeched, the crows beat their black wings against the window-panes of the palace, and the sky turned grey, the colour of ashes on a funeral pyre. Priya Duryodhani skipped happily to Shakuni and announced the king’s consent.

‘You can leave the rest to me,’ the minister said.

In my dream it was Vidur who arrived at Yudhishtir’s palace to invite him for the game.

‘I don’t like the sound of it one bit’ the civil servant said. But I’m afraid it’s my duty, Yudhishtir, to ask you to come.’

‘Oh, I’ll come,’ Yudhishtir said impassively. ‘It is my duty, too, in all honour, to accept Shakuni’s challenge. Besides, I’m not too bad at dice myself.’

And so the five brothers and wife set out for Hastinapur, to the tune of a farewell song which rang arhythmically in my mind:

Yudhishtir said, ‘It’s time to go

To keep a date

With Fate;

Fate beckons; we mustn’t be slow

Or hesitate –

We’ll be late!

I realize that in this thing

I have no voice,

No choice;

We’re just puppets on a string,

To be thrown thrice –

Fate’s dice.’

They reached Dhritarashtra’s palace, and bent before his throne to touch his feet in ritual homage. Mynahs chirped in the trees as they entered, and the sweet fragrance of frangipani blossoms wafted before Draupadi with each tinkling step of her hennaed feet.

‘Welcome,’ Dhritarashtra said. ‘I understand, Yudhishtir, that you have accepted Shakuni’s challenge.’

‘It is my duty,’ Yudhishtir said simply.

‘You don’t have to, you know,’ the aged king responded sharply. ‘You can leave now, if you prefer.’

‘My honour obliges me not to flee from a challenge,’ Yudhishtir replied. ‘Besides, I am in the hands of Fate, as are we all.’

‘Not me,’ said Priya Duryodhani, the ultimate beneficiary of Shakuni’s skills. I’ll watch.’

‘I really don’t think this is a good idea,’ Vidur said from behind the throne. ‘When we drew up the rules of the kingdom, Dhritarashtra, we did not envisage anything like this.’

Go ahead, Yudhishtir!’ blazed old Drona, standing up at the sidelines. ‘Defeat rotten Shakuni and win his treasures in the name of the people! You can do it.’

‘I think so too,’ agreed Yudhishtir, seating himself before the bald and gleaming minister. Throw the dice, Shakuni.’

And in my dream, the clouds, which had lifted for Draupadi’s entrance, closed in once more, and the skies darkened again. And Shakuni boomed, ‘What do you wager?’

‘I wager my palace, my position, my share of the Kaurava kingdom,’ Yudhishtir responded, throwing the dice.

Shakuni threw, and announced, ‘I win.’ A great wail rose in the distance, like the lowing of a thousand wolves in a moonlit forest. The players remained oblivious of it. ‘And what do you wager next?’

‘I wager the Constitution, the laws, the peace of the people,’ Yudhishtir proclaimed stiffly, and threw.

‘I win. Next?’

‘I wager my own freedom, together with that of ten thousand faithful party workers, the support of the press and the prospect of the next elections,’ he said.

Shakuni threw again, and the pockmarks on the ivory cubes gleamed dully at Yudhishtir, like the scabs of a virulent rash. ‘I win.’

The eldest Pandava sat very still, looking straight into the eyes of his victor. ‘I am ruined,’ he said evenly. ‘I have nothing else to wager.’

‘Oh, yes, you do.’ The massive bald pate inclined towards the five figures of Yudhishtir’s appalled family along the wall. ‘You have them.’

A thin line of perspiration, like a row of transparent beads, appeared on Yudhishtir’s upper lip. He seemed about to say something, then stopped.

‘I stake my brothers,’ he said in a strained voice.

‘You’ve got to stop them, sir,’ Vidur pleaded with his blind half-brother. ‘Dhritarashtra, this mustn’t go on. Damnation will visit us all. Shakuni is not playing an honest game. Yudhishtir is trapped. You must stop it, or the whole country will be ruined.’

But Priya Duryodhani was within earshot. ‘Don’t listen to him, Daddy,’ she urged. ‘He’s always been on their side, even when he pretended to be helping you. Shakuni knows what he’s doing. And as for the country, we can manage it just as well without the Pandavas. Probably better.’

Dhritarashtra was too absorbed in the contest to reply to either of them. Vidur lapsed into a sullen silence, his arms folded across his chest, disassociating himself from the proceedings his invitation had initiated.

‘I throw for your brothers.’ Shakuni flung the dice, which landed mockingly at Yudhishtir’s feet, their unbeatable dots face up.

‘They are now your prisoners,’ Yudhishtir conceded, his staring eyes downcast, avoiding the looks of impotent betrayal his brothers were directing at him from their hopeless places on the sidelines.

‘There is still,’ Shakuni said pointedly, ‘Draupadi. Wager her, Yudhishtir, and you might win your own freedom back. Who knows how the dice will fall?’

At these words the howling started up again, Ganapathi, the fluttering resumed outside, and thunder rolled in the heavens. ‘Close the windows,’ Duryodhani commanded.

In my dream Yudhishtir never looked at his wife as she cowered at the wall. He spoke in a hoarse low voice. ‘My wife Draupadi, most desirable of all women, in the full flower of her youth, pride of our nation and mother of our fondest hopes — I stake her.’ And Karna’s golden face, the half-moon throbbing on its forehead, parted in a mirthless ghostly laugh that echoed around the room.

The dice flew from Shakuni’s fingers in a flash of his wrist. ‘I have won!’ he exclaimed. ‘Draupadi is mine.’

As the howls rose again in the distance, a streak of lightning at the window illuminated the glee on Priya Duryodhani’s pinched face, lit up the horror on the faces of the Pandava brothers and threw a shadow on to Draupadi, cringing against Arjun’s shoulder.

‘Go and bring them to the centre of the room,’ Duryodhani said to Vidur, who was sitting near the throne with his head in his hands. ‘Let everyone see what Yudhishtir has lost.’

‘No,’ he groaned in the only refuge of bureaucrats. ‘It is not my job to do that.’

A guard instead went forward to summon the Pandavas. Draupadi alone stayed where she was, refusing to move.

‘Ask Yudhishtir,’ she said, ‘by what right he staked me as his wager, when he had already lost himself? Can a fallen husband pledge his wife when he himself is no longer a free man?’

The guard repeated the question before the hushed gathering.

‘How dare she waste our time with such questions!’ Duryodhani snapped. She turned to a faithful retainer, the organizer of the palace fairs, a man of unquestioning loyalty and unquestionable coarseness. ‘Go, Duhshasan, and bring her to us.’

Duhshasan, with his red eyes and Pathan nose, his cruel moustache and vicious tongue, strode towards Draupadi Mokrasi, who with a terrified gasp ran towards the women’s quarters. But the villain was too quick for her; with a lunge he caught her by her long dark hair and began dragging her to the centre of the room.

‘Leave me alone,’ she pleaded. ‘Do not humiliate me. Can’t you see I’m bleeding?’

‘Bleeding or dry, you’re ours now, my lovely,’ the Pathan snarled, still tugging, as Draupadi’s tinkling silver payals broke and cascaded to the floor.

‘How can you all allow this to happen?’ she screamed despairingly, and her words struck Yudhishtir and echoed round the room, hurtling in rage against the unseeing Dhritarashtra, the irresolute Arjun, the fist-clenching Bhim, the shaking Vidur, the broken Drona. But none of them replied; none of them could reply.

‘This is wrong.’ It was Ashwathaman, stepping forward for the first time. ‘I have supported you so far, Duryodhani, but common decency — ’

‘Guards, arrest this man.’ Priya Duryodhani’s command cut through the bearded figure’s voice, amputating his hoarse plea. Ashwathaman was dragged away, too shocked to resist.

‘How can you?’ It was a last desperate cry, for Duhshasan was now rolling Draupadi’s hair up in his hands, winding the wife of the Pandavas inexorably closer to him as her five husbands stood gritting their teeth in impotent fury.

‘They can,’ Shakuni said, ‘because I have won you, my dear. On behalf of everyone assembled here. You, Draupadi Mokrasi, are our slave.’

A shout rose from Duryodhani’s men in the court, almost loud enough to drown the insistent howling of the jackals outside.

‘No!’ Draupadi implored, as Duhshasan’s arm snaked round her waist. ‘Yudhishtir didn’t know what he was doing. He was playing by his old code, and he was cheated.’

‘Silence!’ Priya Duryodhani snapped. ‘How dare you accuse our distinguished minister Shakuni of cheating! Silence, slave!’

And in my dream the weeping Draupadi turned to the blind king and his assembled court, extending her fair bruised arms in tearful supplication. But Dhritarashtra could not see, and the others, especially after what had happened to Ashwathaman, dared not intervene.

‘Please,’ she whimpered, as Duhshasan’s fingers spread across her midriff. ‘They entrapped him.’

A roar of fury from Bhim stopped even Duhshasan for a moment. His red eyes bulged from their rage-suffused sockets. Bhim’s hate-knotted muscles stood out in places where other men don’t even have places. ‘Even a whore would not have been risked in so shoddy a wager. How could you do this, Yudhishtir, to our precious Draupadi Mokrasi? We have always considered you to be right in anything you did, but this was wrong, unforgivably wrong. You should have done nothing that could put Draupadi in such a position. Bring me fire, Sahadev, and I shall burn those piss-holding hands that lost Drau-padi!’

Sahadev blanched, but he did not need to interpret his brother’s command too literally, since he was as much a prisoner as Bhim was. And Arjun was already speaking soothingly to his burly brother, as Bhim trembled to control his fury.

‘You mustn’t shout like that. Yudhishtir was only doing what he has been brought up to believe is right. He played of his own free will, and honestly. What is there to reproach him for? Fate decided the rest.’

With an effort that shook his mountainous frame like a palm tree in a breeze, Bhim remained silent.

Karna it was who spoke now, the half-moon on his forehead throbbing with an eerie glow. ‘How is it that these slaves, defying custom, stand fully clad before their betters? Their clothes too are lost, and belong to Shakuni. Duhshasan, take them off.’

Duhshasan moved forward to execute the command.

There is no need,’ Yudhishtir spoke. ‘We know the customs, and do not need help.’ The five brothers proudly, in honour, removed their upper garments and flung them at Shakuni’s feet.

Draupadi alone stood still, dismay and disbelief battling with each other on her face.

‘It seems Draupadi Mokrasi needs your help, Duhshasan,’ Karna said in my dream.

The Pathan grinned evilly, and reached for her blouse.

‘No!’ she screamed, a cry that rent the air, as the fleshy paw of her tormentor tore hook and material off in one savage gesture, baring Draupadi’s pale breasts to the court.

‘No — please — don’t do this to me,’ she wept, shame flowing down her cheeks. ‘I am your slave, but do not. . humiliate me like this.’

‘Humiliation?’ It was Karna again. ‘Fine word, from the much-savoured lips of a woman with five husbands! You are no chaste innocent, Draupadi Mokrasi, but an object of many men’s pleasure. Well, you are our pleasure now. Strip her, Duhshasan!’

And the jackals howled again, Ganapathi, the wolves bayed, the braying of donkeys rose above the clamour, the vultures screeched outside as their wings resumed their insistent beat on the window-panes, the claws of unknown creatures scratched gruesomely on the glass, but inside the court there was only the deathly unnatural silence of spectators at a public flogging as Duhshasan caught hold of the pallav of Draupadi’s sari and wrenched it off her shoulder.

Draupadi cried out as she twisted away from his evil grasp: ‘Krishna! I need you now, Krishna! Come to me!’

And then she was running, trying to escape her pursuer, but Duhshasan was pulling at the unravelling sari. Draupadi slipped and fell on to the floor. Duhshasan laughed maliciously, continuing to pull, and the sari unwound as Draupadi rolled away from him. .

‘It’s a bloody long sari,’ Duhshasan said.

And indeed there were already yards of material in his hands, certainly more than the regulation six, but Draupadi was still rolling, and the sari was still unwinding, and in my dream the whole court swam before my eyes, Duhshasan with his pupils popping as the material flowed into his fingers, Dhritarashtra’s ears cocked like a spaniel trying to identify a distant sound, Duryodhani’s thin lips bared in a chilling smile of excitement, Karna’s half- moon glowing, pulsating as he watched the slow disrobing, and the sounds outside echoed in my mind, mixed with the hoarse cackle of a thousand demented geese, the bleating of a lakh of tortured lambs, the mooing of a million milkless cows, as Draupadi’s breasts swung tantalizingly in and out of view as she turned, and the sari continued to unravel, and faces leapt off the walls to look at her in my dream, Lord Drewpad pointing. Sir Richard, florid as ever, with a large black camera on his shoulder, Heaslop laughing with his head tossed back, Vyabhichar Singh grinning beneath a halo as a brown behind bobbed between his legs, Vidur placing his palms across his eyes and then parting two fingers for a peep, Drona shaking a sad head as if to drive the scene out of his vision, Ashwathaman in manacles weeping his self- reproach, the five brothers powerless in their anger, as Duhshasan kept pulling, and the material of the sari was strewn all over the floor, and Draupadi kept twisting and turning and rolling away from him, and in my dream her cry was no longer for Krishna, but for me. .

Duhshasan stopped, exhausted. The walls swam slowly back into focus. My sleeping mind cleared. The court stood back in silence as Duhshasan looked stupidly at the end of the sari still in his hands and the flowing, multicoloured cloth that littered the marble ground. He stared again disbelievingly at the half-naked figure of the recumbent Draupadi, her bleeding womanhood still not uncovered, and surrounded by enough resplendent material to clothe her for years. Shamed, he sat down heavily amidst the pile of clothes.

Yudhishtir smiled in vindication.

‘By all the oaths of my ancestors,’ Bhim swore, ‘I’ll get you for this, Duhshasan.’

And then Krishna’s face appeared on the ceiling, just above Duryodhani’s startled eyes. His dark face shimmered against the light from the chandelier.

‘However hard you try, Priya Duryodhani,’ he said in a calm, deep voice, you and your men will never succeed in stripping Draupadi Mokrasi completely. In our country, she will always have enough to maintain her self- respect. But what about yours?’

And then he was gone. But his message had been heard by every pair of ears in the room, including a chastened Duryodhani’s.

This time, to my surprise, it was Arjun who spoke.

‘One more dice game will give us a last chance to regain our self-respect and freedom,’ he said evenly. ‘You owe us that much, in the name of honour.’ He addressed himself to Dhritarashtra, silent upon his throne.

‘I agree,’ the king said, before his daughter could raise her voice.

‘Yudhishtir has lost to Shakuni. But I. . I wish to play your heir, Duryodhani.’ Arjun’s voice was firm.

‘I agree,’ Dhritarashtra said. Duryodhani shook her head, but it was too late.

Karna snorted. ‘Fine specimen of the Kaurava race,’ he said. ‘Playing dice with a woman.’

‘I shall play you, Arjun,’ Duryodhani said quietly, as if sensing one last way to restore her credibility. She moved forward to pick up Shakuni’s pair of dice, which the minister leaned forward to give her.

‘Not with those dice,’ Arjun stopped her. ‘It was my challenge, remember?’ Duryodhani stopped, and dropped the loaded weapons with a clatter on to the floor. Sixes blazed uselessly from their polished surfaces.

‘We have brought no dice with us,’ Arjun said. ‘King Dhritarashtra, could you call for dice from Within your palace?’

‘I’ll attend to it,’ responded Vidur, the guardian of conventions, disappearing indoors. He emerged with two new cubes, large-sided, their markings highly visible. They looked as if they had been made with paper, the material of ballots, but when Vidur tossed them in a trial spin they exuded an air of solidity — and landed with a highly promising thud. ‘Let me throw them first,’ Duryodhani said.

She picked up the dice, then looked at them, at Arjun, and at the silent faces around the room. And as she prepared to throw them, Ganapathi, I realized, even in my sleep, that I didn’t need to dream any more. Her strained face, her staring eyes, the trembling of her hands as she picked up the instruments of her fate, told their own story. She was going to lose.

115

When I woke up my ambivalence had gone.

Sometimes, Ganapathi, dreams enable you to see reality more clearly. I looked around me and found the evidence everywhere I had failed to search. I sent Arjun to speak to Krishna. I summoned Nakul from the Home Ministry to give me the information he was paid to conceal; I wrote to Sahadev in Washington for the information he was paid to rebut. Even lying in my Brahminical bed, I realized how Duryodhani and her minions had been stripping the nation of the values and institutions we had been right to cherish.

The picture that emerged, Ganapathi, was sickening. The Siege had become a licence for the police to do much as they pleased, settling scores, locking up suspects, enemies and sometimes creditors without due process, and above all, picking up young men at the village tea-shops to have their vasa cut off in fulfilment of the arbitrary sterilization quotas that Shakuni had persuaded the Prime Minister to decree. As it wore on, it became painfully apparent, even sitting in my room as I was, that the reason for which I had been willing to suspend my criticism was simply not tenable. The poor were not getting a better deal as a result of the suspension of the freedoms of the relatively privileged; if anything, they were worse off than before. They were now subject to random police harassment, to forced displacement from their homes in the interests of slum-clearance and urban renewal, to compulsory vasectomies in pursuance of population-control campaigns on which they had never voted. Even the abolition of bonded labour had simply added to the pool of the floating unemployed. The slave who had toiled for no reward but a roof over his head and two square meals a day found he was free to sleep in the streets and starve.

And throughout it all there was no outlet for the frustration and humiliation of the disinherited. They could not seek redress for injustice in the courts (which had even declared that habeas corpus was not a fundamental right) and they had no recourse to the polling-booths. Nor could the silenced media reflect their grievances. By the time Arjun and Krishna turned decisively against it, when it had lasted a year, it was clear beyond all doubt that the Siege could no longer be justified in their name.

Duryodhani had made Parliament supreme because she could control it, and claimed that this was in the British political tradition we had inherited. She did not realize that the concept of the primacy of Parliament came from a very superficial reading of British constitutional history. It is not Parliament that is supreme, but the people: the importance of Parliament arises simply from the fact that it embodies the supremacy of the people. Duryodhani did not understand that there is no magic about Parliament in and of itself, and that it only matters as an institution so long as it represents the popular will. The moment that connection is removed, Parliament has no significance as a democratic institution. A Parliament placed above the people who elected it is no more democratic than an army that turns its guns upon the very citizens it is supposed to protect. That is why Priya Duryodhani’s parliamentary tyranny was no better than the military dictatorships of neighbouring Karnistan.

It took me some time to realize this, but ironically, Ganapathi, Indians like myself were changing our Brahminical minds at just about the time that the Western, and specifically the American, media were beginning to change theirs — in the opposite direction. When we were willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt the American analysts had no doubt at all; they condemned the abrogation of constitutional rights, the arrest of opponents, the end of press freedom. These were concepts they understood and on which there could be no compromise. But as they got used to the Siege regime they began to see virtues in it: industrial discipline, more openings for US business, decisive action on the population front, no more of the stultifying slowness of the ‘soft state’ that developing India had been. And when the jailed opponents were gradually released, the press allowed to censor itself and the Constitution reconciled to the new situation, American reporters came to see India as no different from other autocratic non-Communist regimes which they had covered without outrage. Vital though I had found the American news sources about India that came to me through Sahadev, this was a pointed lesson in the limitations of the neutral and objective foreign correspondent.

No, Ganapathi, Draupadi was Indian; she was ours, and she had to wear a sari. We could not place her in universal beauty contests to be judged as her Occidental sisters were, by the shape of her legs or the cut of her costume. If she had been like the others, if she had been wearing the skirts or dresses or even the trousers of Western democratic women, she might have been far more easily disrobed.

Krishna rose against what Duryodhani was doing, and his firm and decisive opposition at last converted the irresolute Arjun. When a chastened Yudhishtir and a mortally ill Drona were released from jail, Krishna counselled against rash conduct, urging them to bide their time. Bhim spoke of leaving the army with enough explosives in his kit-bag to send Duryodhani back to her ancestors. Both Arjun and Krishna had to calm him down.

‘Sooner or later,’ Krishna said, ‘our time will come.’