The Great Indian Novel

The Eighteenth Book: The Path to Salvation

116

It came sooner rather than later. At the peak of her regime of repression, with the press tamed, the sterilizations mounting, the workers terrified and the poor terrorized — and the trains still running on time — Priya Duryodhani surprised the world, if not Krishna, by suspending the Siege and calling free general elections.

No one knew what had prompted this change of heart. Throughout the country, imaginative theories were woven with enough material to make Draupadi a new sari. It was said that Priya Duryodhani had received the visit of a political sage, a dark man from the south. Another suggested she had consulted an astrologer named Krishna, who had prophesied great success if the polls were held on a certain date. (You know, Ganapathi, how in our country marriages are not arranged, flights not planned, projects not inaugurated until astrological charts are drawn up and consulted. An Indian without a horoscope is like an American without a credit-card, and he is subject to many of the same disadvantages in life. Few politicians make their major career decisions without checking on what the stars foretell, so it was not such an improbable theory after all.) Somebody else gave the credit (and later the blame) to the Intelligence agencies: they had told her what she wanted to hear, which was that she was so popular she could sweep the polls. (A lesson to our future rulers, Ganapathi: if your spies only give you good news, something’s terribly wrong.) And then there was the mischievous theory that what really got Priya Duryodhani to turn to the Indian people was the announcement by Zaleel Shah Jhoota across the border in Karnistan of elections in his little tyranny. That Karnistan, whose only political institutions were the coup and the mob, and where Zaleel had ruled since Jarasandha’s death with the liberal use of black handcuffs and white lies, could put on an electoral show for the rest of the world while the ‘world’s largest democracy’ transformed itself into the world’s largest banana republic, was unbearably galling for Dhritarashtra’s daughter. Karnistan was a country whose rulers usually overwhelmed the popular will with their unpopular won’t, but Jhoota would still get international credit for holding an election. And international credit was beginning to matter now to Priya Duryodhani, who didn’t like what foreign cartoonists were doing to her fine Hastinapuri features in their more-black-than-white caricatures of Siege rule.

So elections were called, the stragglers in prison released, the fetters taken off the press. Indians breathed the now unaccustomed air of freedom, and it tickled their lungs sufficiently to provoke them to shout. It was then that they realized they would not be able to shout again after five weeks, if Duryodhani, as she clearly expected to, retained power. That was when a large number of Indians who had not taken the slightest interest in politics — the readers of the newspapers Arjun and I had spoken about — decided there was too much at stake for them to stay on the sidelines. The most participative election campaign in Indian history began.

Elections, as you well know, Ganapathi, are a great Indian tamasha, conducted at irregular intervals and various levels amid much fanfare. It takes the felling of a sizeable forest to furnish enough paper for 320 million ballots, and every election has at least one story of returning officers battling through snow or jungle to ensure that the democratic wishes of remote constituents are duly recorded. No election coverage is complete, either, without at least one picture of a female voter whose enthusiasm for the suffrage is undimmed by the fact that she is old, blind, unlettered, toothless or purdah-clad, or any combination of the above. Ballot-boxes are stuffed, booths are ‘captured’, the occasional election worker/candidate/voter is assaulted/kidnapped/shot, but nothing stops the franchise. And for all its flaws, universal suffrage has worked in India, providing an invaluable instrument for the expression of the public will. India’s voters, scorned by cynics as illiterate and ignorant, have adapted superbly to the election system, unseating candidates and governments, drawing distinctions between local and national elections. Sure, at every election someone discovers a new chemical that will remove the indelible stain on your fingernail and permit you to vote twice (as if this convenience made any great difference in constituencies the size of ours); at every election some distinguished voter claims his name is missing from the rolls, or that someone has already cast his vote (but usually not both). At every election some ingenious accountant produces a set of figures to show that only a tenth of what was actually spent was spent; somebody makes a speech urging that the legal limit for expenditure be raised, so that less ingenuity might be required to cook the books; and everyone goes home happy.

But these elections were somehow different. The high spirits were there — Yudhishtir’s campaign workers made it a point to ask Duryodhani’s candidates to produce their own vasectomy certificates before asking for votes, which raised a few laughs and not a few hackles in the Kaurava (R) camp — but there was a deadly earnestness beneath, as if everyone realized that they were being given a chance no other nation had ever enjoyed. A chance to choose, in a free election, between democracy and dictatorship. Indeed, some even said, between dharma and adharma.

But this facile equation with India’s traditional values troubled me. And when a journalist — one of the very few, Ganapathi, who still thought this battle- scarred old dodderer a likely source of usable copy at this time — asked me, in an allusion to the great battle of the Mahabharata: ‘Don’t you think this election is a contemporary Kurukshetra?’, I erupted.

‘I hope not,’ I barked, ‘because there were no victors at Kurukshetra. Except in the childish popular versions of the epic. The story of the Mahabharata, young man, does not end on the field of battle. What happens afterwards is tragedy, suffering, futility, death. Which underlines the only moral of that battle, and that epic: that there are no real victors. Everyone loses at the end.’

‘But — but what about the great conflict between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, the battle between dharma and adharma, between good and evil?’

‘It was a battle between cousins,’ I snapped back. ‘They were killing each other’s flesh and blood, shooting arrows into their own gurus, lying and deceiving their elders in order to win. There was good and bad, dishonour and treachery, betrayal and death, on both sides. There was no glorious victory at Kurukshetra.’

I saw his bewildered expression and took pity on him.

‘Young man,’ I said, my severity relenting, ‘you must understand one thing. This election is not Kurukshetra; life is Kurukshetra. History is Kurukshetra. The struggle between dharma and adharma is a struggle our nation, and each of us in it, engages in on every single day of our existence. That struggle, that battle, took place before this election; it will continue after it.’

He stumbled away, and wrote no story. I do not know what he told his colleagues at the Press Club, but no other journalist sought to interview me during the campaign.

Just as well, Ganapathi, because in that particular election the issue was indeed an inconveniently non-traditional one: the rout or the restoration of democracy.

Democracy, Ganapathi, is perhaps the most arrogant of all forms of government, because only democrats presume to represent an entire people: monarchs and oligarchs have no such pretensions. But democracies that turn authoritarian go a step beyond arrogance; they claim to represent a people subjugating themselves. India was now the laboratory of this strange political experiment. Our people would be the first in the world to vote on their own subjugation.

Ah, what days they were, Ganapathi! Bliss was it in that spring to be alive, but to be old and wise was very heaven. I saw the great cause of Gangaji and Dhritarashtra and Pandu thrillingly reborn in the hearts and minds of young crowds at every street-corner. I saw the meaning of Independence come pulsating to life as unlettered peasants rose in the villages to pledge their votes for democracy. I saw journalists younger than the Constitution relearn the meaning of freedom by discovering what they had lost when the word was erased from their notebooks. I saw Draupadi’s face glowing in the open, the flame of her radiance burning more brightly than ever. And I knew that it had all been worthwhile.

Through the clamour and confusion of the election campaign Krishna moved with secure serenity. Both sides came to him at the start: the Kaurava Party of Priya Duryodhani, of which he had never ceased to be a member, and the Opposition, in its quest for illustrious defections from the ruling party’s ranks. To both, he reiterated his refusal to contest a seat in Parliament, insisting that his place was in his local legislative assembly, representing his neighbours. Since that was not, however, at stake in the coming election, he was available to campaign in the national contest, and both contenders came back to seek his active support and that of the dedicated party cadres he had so effectively trained. The need of the hour was too great: Krishna could not remain on the sidelines.

‘Both of you say that the other’s victory will be a disaster for the country,’ he mused aloud. ‘Perhaps you are both right. Disaster does not approach its victims wrapped in thunderclouds, dripping blood. Rather, it slips in quietly, unobtrusively, its face masked in ambiguity, making each of us see good in evil and evil in good. There is good and evil in both sides of this argument. Some say that under Priya Duryodhani India faces extinction: others point out that the majority of Indians have never been happier. I have my own views, but who is to say they are right for everyone?’ He turned calmly to the two party representatives before him. ‘It is not easy for me to take sides. I have been the Kaurava Party secretary here for too long to renounce it, but I have also stood for certain principles in my political life too long to renounce them. So let me propose this: one side can have me, alone, not as a candidate, with no party funds, but fully committed to their campaign; the other can have the massed ranks of my party workers, disciplined and dedicated men and women who will heed my instructions to work with undiminished vigour even if they see me on the other side. A fair division? Perhaps not, but I leave it to each of you to choose: which will it be? Me alone — or my cadres, with their experience, their vehicles, their skills?’

The Kaurava Party representative and the Opposition’s aged envoy looked uncomfortably at each other. It was Krishna himself who broke the silence.

‘In deference to your seniority, VVji, I must invite you to choose first,’ he said. ‘For the Opposition.’

I responded without hesitation. ‘I choose you,’ I said.

And so it was that both Duryodhani and Yudhishtir thought they had done the better out of the division, as the Kaurava Party workers remained true to their allegiances while Krishna went on to animate the Opposition’s national campaign. With his pearly white teeth shining between violet lips and his deep eyes smiling beatifically at the electorate, Krishna brought to the loudspeaker-led hurly-burly of the contest the spirit of an older India, an India where the lilt of the flute called the milkmaids to the river to wash away their innocence before the laughter of their Lord.

Krishna’s most difficult task undoubtedly came when Arjun, on the verge of filing his nomination papers for the Opposition, was assailed afresh by the doubts that had bedevilled his years in journalism. ‘Is it right — should I fight — or if I just write, won’t I cast more light?’ was the nature of his misgivings. ‘If you don’t fight now,’ his brother-in-law told him bluntly, ‘you won’t have anything to write about afterwards.’

I heard something of their exchange when they stopped for a reflective cup of tea at the Ashoka Hotel and failed to notice me at the next table. Ashoka, the great conqueror-turned-pacifist of the third century BC, is the one figure of our history who has most inspired independent India’s schizoid governmental ethos. His tolerance and humanitarianism, his devotion to peace and justice, infuse our declarations of policy; his military might, his imposition of a Pax Indica on his neighbours, inform our practice. Our national spokesmen inherited his missionary belief that what was good for India was good for the world, and in choosing a national symbol our government preferred his powerful trinity of lions to the spinning-wheel advocated by Gangaji. Typically, though, the only institution to which they saw fit to give his name was a five-star hotel. And appropriately enough, it was here that the dialogue took place that was to change Arjun’s life for good, if not for better.

Let us follow it, Ganapathi, in the form that seems most apt for these near- celestial sonnets of sophistry and sense. It is time for one last lapse from prose in this memoir; should we, too, not genuflect at the golden gate of contemporary taste, and pay iambic tribute to the tetrameter?

117

Arjun saw fathers, uncles, cousins

Teachers, preachers, grandsons, friends

Arrayed before him in several dozens

Convinced their means justified their ends.

Pity filled him. He spoke with sadness:

‘Krishna, this is simply madness.

All these foes are our own kinsmen;

Who will wash away their sins, then?

My will fails me. My throat is parched.

I think of it, and feel a shiver.

I’ve always been for life — a liver.

Though I was ready; my bow was arched,

My mind’s in a tumult. I can’t continue.

My resolve trembles in every sinew.

‘I can’t attack them for doing their duty.

Duryodhani is Dhritarashtra’s daughter.

She may not be a thing of beauty

But she’s P M, she’s earned her hauteur.

I admit her rule was not always just –

She betrayed some of us, abused our trust –

But still she is our nation’s Leader:

India’s masses have shown they need her.

If we attack and destroy our queen,

Breaking the traditions of our ancient line,

Won’t it seem acceptable, even fine

To be disloyal to the next one seen?

And then has not the Mahaguru taught us

To hold our peace like the petals of a lotus?’

Krishna took a deep long breath.

‘Why falter now, when we are ready?

Why grieve before a single death?

Why tremble when your grip is steady?

The wise grieve not for the living or dead.

Our selves are more than hands or head.

You, and I, have always been;

Our souls, our spirits, were ever keen;

And we shall never cease to be.

For one soul passes into another.

Death is only rebirth’s brother.

Don’t think too much of what you see.

Transcend; and realize this is meant:

What’s on this earth is transient.

‘Great heat, bitter cold, pleasure and pain,

Victory, defeat; indulgence or fasting;

All come and go like a burst of rain.

None is permanent, none is lasting.

That which is not, shall never please;

That which is, shall never cease.

The Spirit which moves both you and me

Is immortal; it will always be.

The Spirit exists, it does not destroy.

Nor, indeed’, is it ever destroyed.

It was not born, nor made like a toy;

It does not feel, it is never annoyed;

Unborn, enduring, omnipresent,

Only the Spirit is permanent.

‘But the Unchanging Spirit ne’ertheless does change.

Like a cloud that travels amidst great storms,

It spans an enormous physical range,

Altering, discarding its bodies and forms.

The Spirit appears and disappears.

It comes, it goes, it reappears.

The persons and causes it does infuse

(And the Spirit is all-pervasive, diffuse)

Rise and fall, glow and fade, live and die.

But the Spirit goes on, immutably.

Its nature must be treated suitably.

Respect it, Arjun; there’s no cause to cry.

You need not fear knocking your kin to earth:

For birth follows death as death follows birth.

‘In other words, Arjun, don’t waver.

It’s unworthy to neglect your duty.

Duryodhani is the country’s enslaver:

She’s no village belle or city cutie.

You must take a grip on yourself,

Not flap like a maid on the shelf.

Arise, stand, fight like a man;

The police have lifted the ban

On opposing Duryodhani’s government.

So what if you help bring it down?

It’s not the only show in town,

While the Soul of India is permanent.

Others will come and take its place

And they too will soon fall from grace.

‘Of course there will be many fumbles:

Some will run, some will fall, some fail

But that’s the way, lad, the laddoo crumbles.

You don’t have to shudder and wail.

Moral doubts are often an excuse

For those who wish to refuse

To join the fight or the fray;

But I’m telling you, today

You can’t let us down, Arjun.

Victory and defeat don’t matter.

Non-involvement’s just idle chatter.

We need action, and we need it soon.

(Just as a pilot can fly any airbus,

So scripture can be quoted for any purpose.)

‘Put aside gospel, banish all doubts.

Our philosophy holds no attraction

For those who don’t heed the shouts

Of their friends who call them to Action.

Accept good and evil alike;

Acknowledge the real need to strike;

Give up all attachment,

Flow like rain through a catchment

And join the election campaign.

It’s a question of your self-respect.

And Draupadi’s, which you’re sworn to protect:

So don’t let your scruples cause pain.

Think of this as working for peace.

Do right, and your torment will cease.

‘So Arjun, abandon all hesitation.

This is not a cause you can shirk.

You can do just two things for the nation:

Meditate, or take up good work.

In our classics, it is clearly inscribed:

“Arjun, do the duty prescribed.”

Dutiful action, without care of reward

Is the first step you can take toward

Eternal bliss; for what you do

Others will imitate; and thus uplift

Your cause, yourself, and your great gift

For initiating Action in others too.

Look at me; there’s nothing I need to attain,

Yet I act, and inspire this election campaign.

‘It is better to do your own duty, Arjun,

Than another’s. But do it without desire.

The course of Right Action confers a great boon;

But as a womb wraps a babe, as smoke shrouds fire,

The universe is enveloped in sick desire

And the unselfish do-gooder’s often a liar.

To surrender all claim to the result of your deeds

Is the greatness of one who transcends his own needs,

And that’s what we need in a man of right action.

Someone to act in true selflessness,

And restore order to our national mess.

A disinterested sage rising above faction.

Who’ll work, sacrifice, revitalize the nation.

The reward of his action? True realization.

‘No misgivings need beset such an actor

Who acts for the Spirit, not for personal gain;

Who untouched by attachment, or any other factor

Acts for the nation in this election campaign.

He will no more be tainted by the sin of the Daughter

Than the fresh water-lotus is wetted by water.

As for whether Priya is adored by the masses,

Don’t worry — too often, the masses are asses.

He who acts for the Spirit must aim much higher,

Knowing his action will purify the soul;

Content that salvation will come from his role,

As the act of flying fulfils the flyer.

It is not right in this to shirk obligation.

To avoid action through pity is wrong renunciation.

‘So Arjun, stop doubting; rise and serve India.

Serve me, the embodiment of the Spirit of the nation.

I am the hills and the mountains, Himalaya — Vindhya;

I am the worship, the sacrifice, the ritual oblation;

I am the priest, the sloka, the rhythmic chant:

The do and the don’t, the can and the can’t.

I am the ghee poured into the fire, I am indeed the fire;

I am the act of pouring, I am the sacred pyre.

I am the beginning and the end,

The aimer and the goal;

The origin, the part, the whole,

The bender and the bend.

I am lover, husband, father, son, Being and Not-Being;

1 am nation, country, mother, eye, Seeing and All-Seeing

‘Serve me, Arjun, like the warriors of yore.

If you can treat both triumph and disaster

As impostors (but someone’s said this before)

You will have acted like a true master.’

Arjun turned, and his eyes were bright:

His jaw was firm, for he’d seen the light.

‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘Thanks, dear Krishna!

For playing vicar to my weak parishioner.

I was silly to be so irresolute.

Instead of thinking of the Spirit

And acting without heed to merit,

I’d wept and whined like a broken flute.

That’s all over now! I’m ready to act –

Let’s get the Opposition into an electoral pact!’

118

They did; as in Hastinapur before the Siege, the various Opposition factions got together in a People’s Front. They were joined soon enough by the rats (and the Rams) deserting Priya Duryodhani’s sinking ship, as well as by those of her erstwhile supporters, like Ashwathaman, whom she had mistreated and jailed during the Siege. The electoral battle raged intensely. Even I rose from my bed to deliver speeches in the hoarse voice of wisdom that age and late passion had given me.

Everyone took sides: there were few abstainers. Only the bureaucracy hesitated. This was, of course, in the fitness of things. Bureaucracy is, Ganapathi, simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art-forms. No other country has elevated to such a pinnacle of refinement the quintuplication of procedures and the slow unfolding of delays. It is almost a philosophical statement about Indian society: everything has its place and takes its time, and must go through the ritual process of passing through a number of hands, each of which has an allotted function to perform in the endless chain. Every official act in our country has five more stages to it than anywhere else and takes five times more people to fulfil; but in the process it keeps five more sets of the potentially unemployed off the streets. The bureaucratic ethos dictated our administrators’ roles in the campaign as well. They stayed in their offices and waited for the outcome.

Nakul and Sahadev, like their peers, took no part in the political conflict. Both had been requested by Krishna, for reasons very similar to the Mahaguru’s in respect of Vidur all those years ago, to remain in their functions, but unlike Vidur our bureaucratic twins had not leapt to submit their resignations. Nakul, if truth be told, was still far from certain his resignation was warranted; he was cynical, or sophisticated, enough to think things could be worse. Sahadev’s honest rejection of the government’s domestic policies fell afoul of his diffidence. (Our diplomatic corps, Ganapathi, is full of sincere people who feel they are so out of touch with the masses they can only speak for them abroad.) Both agreed, therefore, with alacrity to stay cool in their jobs as the electoral flames blazed and crackled around them.

As for Bhim, there was a rumour at one stage that he might be tempted to intervene; but everyone urged against it, even Yudhishtir, and he remained in his military cantonment, keeping a baleful eye on the Kaurava campaign. I suspect, though, that he managed at least one leave. One morning when popular wrath against the excesses of the Siege was at its highest, Duhshasan was found tied to a tree not far from Delhi’s most famous red-light area. His pyjama trousers were down to his ankles, and the remainder of his elegant kurta-sherwani ensemble hung in tatters from his drooping shoulders. His bare behind was criss-crossed with the livid stripes of swelling red weals. He had, apparently, been mercilessly flogged just before dawn with a wet knotted sari whose pallav had then been flung derisively on to his genitals, to provide him with a shred of incongruous modesty.

The Duryodhani camp emitted muted howls of outrage. The Prime Minister even spoke darkly of assassination attempts by the forces of violence and anarchy upon her supporters. But Duhshasan himself proved singularly unwilling to press charges, or even to identify his aggressor. Nothing similar recurred, and the episode was soon forgotten. It left its only trace in the smile of Draupadi Mokrasi, the smile of a woman who knows she will not easily be tampered with again.

On election night I had another dream.

This was a dream of Arjun: of Arjun, perhaps, on his Himalayan wanderings during those months of self-imposed exile that had brought him his mentor and his wife. And in my dream Arjun sat on a rock, clad in the loincloth of penitence, his hair long and matted with neglect, his ribs prominent with starvation, his eyes red with ascetic wakefulness. Prayer and self-denial on the mountaintop, Ganapathi: how many of our legends have not portrayed this scene, as a hero seeks an ultimate boon from the gods?

But in my dream, no god appeared to disturb Arjun’s meditation. Instead, an animal shimmered across his consciousness, a Himalayan deer, dancing playfully before him as if offering herself to the starving man. The Arjun of my dream picked up his bow and shot the deer, but before he could pick up his trophy, a strange apparition interposed itself — a primitive hunter, dressed in bearskins, also bearing a bow. Before an astonished Arjun, the hunter picked up the deer, heaving it lightly on to his immense shoulders. Arjun protested, laying claim to his animal: in the clear wordlessness of the dream, the hunter spurned his imprecations. Arjun, enraged, shot his arrows, but the hunter contemptuously side-stepped them, and when the young hero flung himself bodily on the intruder, he found himself spinning back in my dream to crash senseless on to the ground. The hunter laughed. Arjun awoke, returned to his prayers, and invoked the name of the god to whom he had been offering his austerities: Shiva. And then, in the kind of transformation only a miracle or a dream can bring about, the hunter turned into the god. Shiva himself, most powerful of the gods, blue-skinned Shiva clad in gold instead of bearskin, with his hunter’s bow metamorphosed into a trident.

Arjun prostrated himself in my dream, begging forgiveness for having fought with no less a being than Shiva in his ignorance. And the god, victorious, pleased with the ascetic privations of his supplicant, forgave him and asked him to seek his boon. Arjun raised his head, all the power of his spirit shining through his gaze, and asked for the one favour Shiva had never before been called upon to grant — the use of Pashupata, the ultimate weapon, the absolute.

The god tried not to show his surprise: no one had dared to ask for such a potent instrument of destruction before, one which required no launchpad or silo, no control-panel or delivery-system, but could be imagined by the mind, primed with a thought, triggered by a word, and which flew to its target with the speed of divinity, inexorable, invincible, irresistible.

And Arjun said: ‘I know all this, but still I ask, O Shiva, for this weapon.’

And Shiva replied, his third eye opening, ‘It is yours.’

in my dream, Ganapathi, the very Himalayas shook with the gesture, the mountain ranges trembled as the knowledge of Pashupata descended to mortal hands, whole forests swayed like leaves, the wind howled, tremors passed through the earth. The figure of Shiva ascended to the heavens, atop a blazing golden chariot, emanating shafts of fire, dispersing singed clouds, and as the circle of flame made a halo for the chariot, Arjun rose to mount it. The stars shone in the lustre of the day, meteors fell and shot their sparks in fiery trails across the sky, the planets were illuminated, flaming spheres of transcendence, and still Arjun rose with the chariot, his unblinking gaze fixed on a spot on earth far below him. And just one word resounded like the echo of a thousand thunderclaps through the firmament: ‘Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!’

119

Sahadev pushed his way through the milling crowd outside the newspaper office. The noise was deafening: shouts, exhortations, muttering, even prayers, rose from the throng. The election results were filtering in, and this was the place to get them as they came. No one believed the radio any more.

Now there, Ganapathi, lay a sad irony. Despite being controlled by the government, Akashvani — the voice from the sky — was also the voice of millions of radio-receivers, transistors and loudspeakers blaring forth from puja pandals and tea-shops. Its ubiquitousness reflected the indispensability of radio in a country where most people cannot read, its content — despite the often heavy hand of bureaucracy on its programmes — the range of the nation’s concerns. From the anodyne cadences of its newsreaders to the requests for film-songs from Jhumri Tilaiya and other bastions of the country’s cow-belt, All-India Radio mirrored the triumphs and trivialities that engaged the nation. But its moderation also meant mediocrity, and during the Siege it came to mean mendacity as well. It is Priya Duryodhani’s legacy, Ganapathi, that today when an Indian wants real news, he switches on the BBC; for detailed analyses, he turns to the newspapers; for entertainment, he goes to the movies. The rest of the time, he listens to Akashvani.

A small peon in khaki shirt and white pyjamas, standing on the top rung of a rickety ladder, was putting up the letters on the display board with excruciating slowness. ‘D — H - A — N - I.’ That made Priya Duryodhani. What next? People at the front of the crowd were yelling to the man to let them know the news first, orally, before he put up the remaining letters. He remained impervious to their pleas. Perhaps he couldn’t hear them above the din. He had the aluminium letter-boards he needed to hang up: maybe he wasn’t sure what they meant himself. It was possible that he knew just enough of the English alphabet to put up the headlines on the ‘Spot News’ board every day without understanding what the newspaper was announcing through him.

‘W,’ Nakul said next to him. ‘W for Wins.’

‘D,’ Sahadev replied as the letter went up.

‘Declares Victory?’ Nakul asked. All-India Radio had been announcing substantial wins for Duryodhani’s party in some states.

D. E. Then, as the crowd seemed to hold its collective breath, F.

An immense cry of exultation rose from the crowd.

‘Could be “Defeats Opponent,”’ Nakul ventured. ‘You know, in her constituency.’

‘No way, bhai-sahib.’ Sahadev was grinning from ear to ear: he had suddenly realized what he had wanted all along. ‘He doesn’t have enough letters with him for that.’

The crowd was already roaring its approbation. Scattered cheers rent the air. People were slapping each other’s backs in delight. E. A. T. Then, finally, the khaki-skirted meghdoot speeding up his pace as the task neared completion, E and D. DEFEATED. Priya Duryodhani had been defeated.

‘Janata Front!’ somebody shouted. ‘Zindabad!’ Came the answering roar: ‘Janata Front, Zindabad!’ The chant picked up variety, and rhythm. ‘Drona, Zindabad! Yudhishtir, Zindabad! Janata Front, Zindabad!’

‘I knew it, I knew it,’ Sahadev found himself squeezing Nakul’s shoulders in triumph. ‘Oh, I’m so glad I took my home-leave now, Nakul. This is great! It’s simply great!’

Nakul still seemed to be absorbing the news. Around them, the chant was vociferous; some energetic youths had begun dancing an impromptu bhangra. Members of the crowd were flinging coins and rupee notes at the peon who had put up the headline. The little man in the khaki skirt was catching them in dexterous ecstasy.

‘I was wrong,’ Nakul said slowly, abandoning the plural for perhaps the first time. ‘It’s all over.’

‘No it isn’t, brother,’ his twin contradicted him with uncharacteristic confidence. ‘It’s only just begun.’

120

They were both wrong. Something had passed whose shadow would always remain, and something had begun that would not endure. For it is my fate, Ganapathi, to have to record not a climactic triumph but a moment of bathos. The Indian people gave themselves the privilege of replacing a determined, collected tyrant with an indeterminate collection of tyros.

I was partially responsible, but only partially. When the elections were over there was a general desire to avoid a contest among the victorious constituents of the Janata Front. It was resolved that Drona and I, the Messiah and the Methuselah, would jointly designate the nation’s new Prime Minister, who would then be ‘elected’ unanimously by the Janata legislators. At the time this seemed a sensible way of avoiding unseemly conflict at the start of the new regime. Only later did I realize the irony of beginning the era of the restoration of democracy with so undemocratic a procedure.

And it was not just ironic. In our ageless wisdom Drona and I had failed to realize what most college students know: that if you begin an examination by avoiding the most difficult question it raises, it is that very question that will eventually guarantee your failure.

The two of us spoke individually with the leaders of each of the political parties that made up the Front. There were several of them, each with his claims to overall leadership: political parties, after all, Ganapathi, grow in our nation like mushrooms, split like amoeba, and are as original and productive as mules. Most of these leaders had at one time or another been in the Kaurava Party, but had left — or been pushed out — at various stages of the party’s takeover by Priya Duryodhani. Drona and I surveyed the unprepossessing alternatives and decided to go for the only one among them whose honesty and sincerity was as unquestionable as his seniority: Yudhishtir.

I made the suggestion knowing only too well how little these very qualities suited my grandson for kingship. Drona agreed because, typically, he was more anxious to make a moral choice than a political one. Yet we were political enough to make a gesture of appeasement to the many who disagreed with the conservatism of the new Prime Minister: almost immediately after announcing our view that Yudhishtir would be the Front’s consensual choice for the nation’s leadership, we asked the populist Ashwathaman to preside over the Front’s party organization

There was, Ganapathi, one brief shining moment of hope, when the Front’s leaders, the euphoria of their unprecedented victory still mollifying their egos, gathered together before that symbol of the nation’s enduring greatness, the Taj Mahal, and swore a collective oath to Uphold India’s glory and its traditional values. Draupadi was present that day, as an honoured guest, and her skin glowed with a health and inner beauty that it had lacked for many years. She smiled then, dazzling onlookers with the strength and whiteness of her teeth. Even I could not guess how weak the roots were under that sparkling display of oral confidence.

It seemed strangely appropriate, Ganapathi, that the Front had chosen the Taj for this public reaffirmation of their democratic purpose. The Taj Mahal is the motif for India on countless tourist posters and has probably had more camera shutters clicked at it than any other edifice on the face of this earth. Yet how easily one forgets that this unequalled monument of love is in fact a tomb, the burial place of a woman who suffered thirteen times the pain of childbirth and died in agony at the fourteenth attempt. Perhaps that makes it all the worthier a symbol of our India — this land of beauty and grandeur amidst suffering and death.

I stayed on after the ceremony, after the shamianas had been dismantled and the shamas, their songs over, had flown away I sat before the marble whiteness of the monument, already yellowing with the sulphur dioxide from the fumes of a near-by oil refinery, and watched the darkness drape itself round the familiar dome like an old shawl. Night had fallen many times upon the Taj; many times had dawn broken the promises of the last sunrise. But it had endured; chipped and vandalized and looted and trampled upon and scrubbed and admired and loved and envied and exploited, it had endured. And so would India.

The hopes raised by that moving ceremony were soon betrayed. Krishna went back to his southern district and it was almost as if he had taken with him Agni’s boon of creative accomplishment. The Front began rapidly to dissipate its energies in mutual competition and recrimination. Yudhishtir was as stiff and straight-backed and humourless as his critics had always portrayed him, and his colossal self-righteousness was not helped by his complete inability to judge the impression he made on others. As the ‘strongmen’ of his Cabinet — a term they assiduously encouraged the media to employ — quarrelled querulously at every meeting, the Prime Minister remained tightly self-obsessed, seemingly unaware that half of those who sat on the executive branch with him were busily engaged in sawing it off.

Yudhishtir suffered particularly from the failing of expecting everyone to take him as seriously as he took himself. When, in response to a question from an American television interviewer, the first journalist indiscreet enough to ask in public what her peers had cheerfully confirmed in private — ‘Mr Prime Minister, is it true that you drink your own urine every day?’ — when, Ganapathi, before a prime-time audience of 80 million incredulous Americans, quintupled by satellite newsfeeds to every television channel in the world with the money and the lack of taste to broadcast it, when, with the same lack of reflection he had shown in accepting Shakuni’s challenge, Yudhishtir launched into a sanctimonious homily on the miraculous properties of auto- urine therapy, he dropped the dice of government back at the Kauravas’ feet.

His positive response was quoted in every one of India’s resurgent newspapers. Cartoonists and cocktail-party wags combined Yudhishtir’s confession with his well-known stance in favour of Prohibition (‘If I drank what he drinks, I’d be for Prohibition too’; ‘Would you ever invite the Prime Minister to a Bring-a-bottle party?’). Graffiti appeared on public lavatories across the country, more than one entrance signboard being repainted to read ‘Yudhishtir Juice Centre’. As the Prime Minister unsmilingly continued to make himself the laughing-stock of the nation, his coalition gradually unravelled beneath his feet. Write it on his epitaph, Ganapathi: our Hero piddled while home burned.

Not that the unravelling Front had ever been very tightly knit. Within weeks of its assumption of office it had become the vehicle for the personal ambitions of at least three veteran politicians besides the Prime Minister. With their adeptness at camouflaging petty self-interest under wordy speeches on the uplift of (depending on the precise nuances of their electoral bases) the ‘backward classes’, the ‘backward castes’ or the ‘backward strata of society’, they rapidly acquired for their party the sobriquet ‘the Backward Front’. As they stumbled from argument to argument, lawlessness erupted, prices spiralled upwards, government offices sank beneath dusty cobwebs of red tape, and every policy decision was hamstrung by factional disagreement. Their ineptness helped Priya Duryodhani rapidly to recover from the shock of her ouster. ‘The Backward Front government can move the nation neither backward nor forward,’ she was able to declare to uneasy applause at surprisingly well-attended public meetings. ‘It is merely awkward.’

That she was free at all to lavish such scathing contempt on her conquerors was one more instance of the weakness of the Front’s combination of virtue and avarice in the face of so formidable an adversary. Just across the border, chaos following charges of intimidation, ballot-stuffing and vote-rigging in Karnistan’s show election had led to Zaleel Shah Jhoota’s being toppled and jailed by his generals; his military tormentors were now debating whether to have him publicly flogged for his misdeeds or hanged or both. In India, however, the Front had decided to take the former Prime Minister to court on the esoteric charge of détournement de pouvoir, which was a polite legalistic way of saying she had subverted the Constitution. Since everyone who had lived in India for the last three years with his eyes open knew she had subverted the Constitution, it did not seem to be a charge that required much proof. Yet the chosen means did not serve the choicest ends: the lawcourts, Ganapathi, with the solitary recent exception of post-Falklands Argentina, are not the place for a people to bring their former rulers to account. Priya Duryodhani and her skilled lawyers (minus Shakuni, who was now loudly asserting his democratic credentials and disavowing the Siege, the ex-Prime Minister and all her works) ran circles of subtlety around the Front’s witnesses.

It was all like an elaborate game between teams of unequal strength. Law, of course, rivals cricket as the major national sport of our urban élite. Both litigation and cricket are slow, complex and costly; both involve far more people than need to be active at any given point in the process; both call for skill, strength and guile in varying combinations at different times; both benefit from more breaks in the action than spectators consider necessary; both occur at the expense of, and often disrupt, more productive economic activity; and both frequently meander to conclusions, punctuated by appeals, that satisfy none of the participants. Yet both are dear to Indian hearts and absorb much of the country’s energies. The moment the law was chosen as the means to deal with the former Prime Minister, it was clear that the toss had gone Priya Duryodhani’s way.

As with cricket, the problem with law is one of popular participation. The lawcourts of India, Ganapathi, are open to the masses, like the doors of a five-star hotel. Priya Duryodhani could afford to command the best in the profession; ‘the people’, on the other hand, though she was being prosecuted in their name, could not always find a place in the courtroom where she was questioned about her crimes against them. Whatever purpose her trial served, it was not that of popular justice.

The case dragged on and, after the first few sensational revelations, lapsed into unreality. Duryodhani’s lawyers so effectively turned it into a showcase for their forensic skills that the issues behind their legalistic hair-splitting were soon forgotten. The fatal turn occurred: people became bored. Their ennui banalized her evil.

The trial was in its fourteenth meandering month when the crisis within the Front, hopelessly riven over conflicts of its own making, came to a head.

The issue that brought the simmering pot of mutual dislike to a boil was ostensibly the government’s attitude towards the Untouchables — Gangaji’s Harijans, or Children of God. It all started with a sage whom Yudhishtir went to see, an ochre-robed godman whose vocabulary was as out of date as his garments.

Godmen are India’s major export of the last two decades, offering manna and mysticism to an assortment of foreign seekers in need of them. Once in a while, however, they also acquire a domestic following, by appealing to the deep-seated reverence in all Indians for spiritual wisdom and inner peace, a reverence rooted in the conditions of Indian life, which make it so difficult for most of us to acquire either. These backyard godmen, unlike the made-for-export variety, are largely content to manifest their sanctity by sanctimoniousness, producing long and barely intelligible discourses into which their listeners can read whatever meaning they wish. (If religion is the opium of the Indian people, Ganapathi, then godmen are God’s little chillums.)

The godman whom Yudhishtir approached came into this category, advocating measures either so unexceptionable (regular prayer) or so exceptional (regular consumption of one’s own liquid wastes) that his following was confined to a small number of devoted devotees. Indeed, no one might have paid him any attention at all, were it not for the fact that the Prime Minister was discovered one day at one of his speeches. At a speech, in fact, in which the godman carelessly, or unimaginatively, or perversely — it really doesn’t matter which — referred to the nation’s traditional outcastes as ‘Untouchables’.

That was all, mind you. He didn’t suggest that they deserved to be where they were, didn’t imply they had to be barred from temples or from our daughters’ bedrooms; he simply called them ‘Untouchables’ instead of the euphemism Gangaji had invented in an effort to remove the stigma of that term. And Yudhishtir committed, in the eyes of his most radical critics, the unpardonable sin of neither correcting him nor walking out of his audience.

Now you know as well as I do, Ganapathi, that words are among India’s traditional palliatives — we love to conceal our problems by changing their names. It mattered little to the men and women at the bottom of the social heap whether they were referred to by the most notorious of their disabilities or by the fiction of a divine paternity they supposedly shared with everyone else (which was almost as bad, because if everyone was a Child of God, why were they the only ones branded as such?). But to the professional politicians anxious to score points against my insensitive grandson, Yudhishtir’s silence when the term was employed in his hearing meant acquiescence in a collective insult. The government, they declaimed to Priya Duryodhani’s enthusiastic endorsement, was anti-Harijan.

Ashwathaman, the Front’s radical leader, was foremost in his criticism of the Prime Minister. He could not, in all conscience, he announced, continue to support a government which had thus revealed its casteist cast. Yudhishtir’s rivals, scenting his blood on the trail of their own ascent to his throne, agreed.

Suddenly the fragile unity of the Front began to crumble. One legislator declared he would no longer accept the party whip; another demanded that the Front expel its ‘closet casteists’. There was open talk of forming a new Front, purged of ‘reactionary’ elements. A majority of the ruling party’s legislators were just waiting, it was said, for a signal to abandon Yudhishtir. The signal had to come from the man whose Uprising had first started them on their ascent to power — Drona.

121

But the new Messiah lay on his sickbed, his liver devastated by the privations of Priya Duryodhani’s prisons. Ill, exhausted, bitterly disappointed by the way in which the popular tide of his dreams had dribbled wastefully into the arid sands of sterile conflict, Drona lay torn between loyalty to the government he had created and the son for whom he had, all those years ago, changed his life.

‘I can’t afford to lose him to the other side,’ Yudhishtir said to me. ‘I must get him to issue a statement in my favour before Ashwathaman returns from his tour of the southern states and beats me to it.’

‘Yama, the god of death, might beat you both to it,’ I said. My own advancing years had made my imagery even more traditional, at least on the subject of mortality. ‘I saw him this morning and felt he wouldn’t last till tomorrow. But if he does, Yudhishtir, he is not going to support you against his son.’

‘I realize that. And if he adds his voice to Ashwathaman’s, I am finished,’ Yudhishtir said matter-of-factly. ‘The time has come for me to act as our ancestors would have done.’ Without responding to my raised eyebrow, the Prime Minister beckoned to his youngest brother. ‘Sahadev, I want you to go to Drona’s house now and tell him Ashwathaman’s plane back to Delhi has crashed.’

I was numbed by his words. ‘You can’t possibly do this,’ I protested as soon as I had recovered my breath.

‘Tell him also,’ Yudhishtir went on obliviously, ‘that I am on my way over to give him the news myself. I shall follow you in about ten minutes. Make sure no one else is with you when you say this, or when I enter.’

‘But Yudhishtir,’ I expostulated, ‘you’ve never told a lie in your life!’

‘And I never will,’ my grandson replied piously.

‘Drona knows that,’ I pointed out. ‘And he is bound to ask you for the truth of Sahadev’s information.’

‘Precisely.’ Yudhishtir seemed undisturbed.

‘You can’t lie to him then! A dying man — your own guru. .’

‘Don’t worry, VVji,’ Yudhishtir said. ‘I won’t lie.’

I went with him to Drona’s house. The old man lay in a darkened room, surrounded by the medicines and equipment that kept him alive. Sahadev was crouched miserably at his bedside; I was shaken to see that the Messiah was weeping.

As we entered, he turned to Yudhishtir with a desperate anxiety even his frailty could not efface. ‘He tells me this terrible fate has befallen my son,’ Drona said. ‘Tell me, Yudhishtir, is it true? I cannot believe it unless it comes from you. Tell me, is Ashwathaman safe?’

A look of genuine sadness appeared on the Prime Minister’s face. ‘I am sorry, Dronaji,’ Yudhishtir said. ‘Ashwathaman is dead.’

Even I believed him then, for Yudhishtir simply did not lie. His honesty was like the brightness of the sun or the wetness of the rain, one of the elements of the natural world: you simply took it for granted.

‘Ashwathaman,’ he repeated softly, ‘is dead.’

A terrible cry rose from Drona’s lips. He turned his face away from us, towards the white-plastered wall, his voice drained of all emotion. ‘Then I have nothing more to live for.’ His eyes closed.

‘I am sorry, Drona, to ask you this at this painful time,’ the Prime Minister whispered, ‘but will you not support the unity of the Front you did so much to create and place in power?’

The Messiah did not look at him. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘Of course.’

I saw the triumph in Yudhishtir’s eyes at the same time that I saw the light fade from Drona’s. Within minutes, the old guru was gone.

We stood in vigil as the life ebbed away from him, and I felt regret flood my spirit. Throughout his life, during his days of violence and of peace, his years of teaching and of withdrawal, Drona had been one of India’s simplest men. ‘The new Mahaguru’, a Sunday magazine had dubbed him, but he was a flawed Mahaguru, a man whose goodness was not balanced by the shrewdness of the original. He had stood above his peers, a secular saint whose commitment to truth and justice was beyond question. But though his loyalty to the ideals of a democratic and egalitarian India could not be challenged, Drona’s abhorrence of power had made him unfit to wield it. He had offered inspiration but not involvement, charisma but not change, hope but no harness. Having abandoned politics when he seemed the likely heir-apparent to Dhritarashtra, he tried to stay above it all after the fall of Dhritarashtra’s daughter, and so he let the revolution he had wrought fall into the hands of lesser men who were unworthy of his ideals. Now he was dying, and the nation did not know what it would mourn.

‘”J.D.,” our modern Messiah, is no more,’ Yudhishtir announced outside when it was all over. ‘And his last words were a stirring plea for unity amongst us in the Front. It is no secret that he was deeply saddened by the troubles that have affected the government — his government, a government he did more than anyone else to make possible. It is sadly true that Dronaji died a deeply disappointed man, but his legacy lives on in the hearts of the Indian people — to whom, in the last analysis, he taught their own strength.’ Yudhishtir paused, his voice breaking. ‘I plead with all his followers and heirs today — let us not dissipate that strength. On this tragic occasion I shall call on every member of the Front, and in particular on Dronaji’s son Ashwathaman, our party’s President, to rededicate ourselves to the cause J.D. held so dear.’

‘Ashwathaman?’ I asked Yudhishtir later when we were alone. ‘I thought you told the old man he was dead.’ I shook my head in disappointment. ‘You, Yudhishtir; you of all people. I believed you could never lie.’

‘You believed right, VVji,’ Yudhishtir said implacably. ‘I didn’t lie this time either. When I said Ashwathaman was dead, I was speaking the truth. Before leaving the house I caught a cockroach in the closet, named it Ashwathaman, and crushed it under my prime-ministerial despatch-box. So you see, VVji, I did not lie to Drona. I never said it was his son who had died.’

I stared at him, breathless at his sophistry. ‘Your words, Yudhishtir,’ I said at last, ‘took away the last spark of life from the old man. In effect, they killed him.’

‘You are being most unjust, VVji,’ Yudhishtir replied. ‘He was ill; he was dying. Perhaps his grief hastened his end, but is it not said that the time of our going is determined from our births? I may not have spoken the whole truth, but I spoke no untruth, and my words may have helped sustain a greater truth by prompting him to endorse my plea for unity. Would it have been better to allow his tremendous moral authority to have been manipulated by the radical rabble to bring down the government that has restored Indian democracy? I believe, VVji, that I acted righteously, in full pursuit of dharma. Dharma, you know, is a subtle thing.’

‘But not as subtle as that, Yudhishtir,’ I replied sadly. ‘I do not believe you will profit from your deception. Our national motto is “Satyameva Jayate,” Truth will Prevail. Not your truth or mine, Yudhishtir; just Truth. A truth too immutable to be uttered only in the letter and violated in the spirit.’ I rose, clenching my walking stick so tightly my palm hurt. ‘Goodbye, Yudhishtir. You shall not see me again.’

I did not turn to see if my exit had even momentarily shaken his complacency.

122

It did not matter, for of course I was right. Drona’s dying benediction achieved no more than his lifetime’s crusades. A majority of the Front’s MPs left the Prime Minister’s emunctory embrace. The government fell; and in the elections that followed, Priya Duryodhani was returned overwhelmingly to power. The still unresolved case against her was discreetly withdrawn. Dharma had turned full circle.

123

What remains to be said, Ganapathi? There is, of course, the question of expectations. This story, like that of our country, is a story of betrayed expectations, yours as much as our characters’. There is no story and too many stories; there are no heroes and too many heroes. What is left out matters almost as much as what is said.

Let me, as so often in our story, digress once more. There is, Ganapathi, a curious parallel. To most foreigners who know nothing of India, the one Indian book they know anything about is the Kama Sutra. To them, it is the Great Indian Novelty. The Kama Sutra may well be the only Indian book which has been read by more foreigners than Indians. Yet it is for the most part a treatise on the social etiquette of ancient Indian courtship, and those who think of its author Vatsyayana as some sort of fourth-century pornographer must surely be sorely disappointed to go through his careful catalogue of amatory activities, which reads more like a textbook than a thriller. But what a far cry it is from the precision of the Kama Sutra to the prudery of contemporary India! It never ceases to amaze me, Ganapathi, that a civilization so capable of sexual candour should be steeped in the ignorance, superstition and prurience that characterize Indian sexual attitudes today. Perhaps the problem is that the Kama Sutra’s refined brand of bedroom chivalry cannot go very far in a country of so many women and so few bedrooms.

It is no better with the great stories of our national epics. How far we have travelled from the glory and splendour of our adventurous mythological heroes! The land of Rama, setting out on his glorious crusade against the abductors of his divinely pure wife Sita, the land where truth and honour and valour and dharma were worshipped as the cardinal principles of existence, is now a nation of weak-willed compromisers, of leaders unable to lead, of rampant corruption and endemic faithlessness. Our democrats gamble with democracy; our would-be dictators do not know what to dictate. We soothe ourselves with the lullabies of our ancient history, our remarkable culture, our inspiring mythology. But our present is so depressing that our rulers can only speak of the intermediate future — or the immediate past.

Whatever our ancestors expected of India, Ganapathi, it was not this. It was not a land where dharma and duty have come to mean nothing; where religion is an excuse for conflict rather than a code of conduct; where piety, instead of marking wisdom, masks a crippling lack of imagination. It was not a land where brides are burned in kerosene-soaked kitchens because they have not brought enough dowry with them; where integrity and self-respect are for sale to the highest bidder; where men are pulled off buses and butchered because of the length of a forelock or the absence of a foreskin. All these things that I have avoided mentioning in my story because I preferred to pretend they did not matter.

But they matter, of course, because in our country the mundane is as relevant as the mythical, Our philosophers try to make much of our great Vedic religion by pointing to its spiritualism, its pacifism, its lofty pansophism; and they ignore, or gloss over, its superstitions, its inegalities, its obscurantism. That is quite typical. Indeed one may say it is quite typically Hindu. Hinduism is the religion of over 80 per cent of Indians, and as a way of life it pervades almost all things Indian, bringing to politics, work and social relations the same flexibility of doctrine, reverence for custom and absorptive eclecticism that characterize the religion — as well as the same tendency to respect outworn dogma, worship sacred cows and offer undue deference to gurus. Not to mention its great ability to overlook — or transcend — the inconvenient truth.

I have been, on the whole, a good Hindu in my story. I have portrayed a nation in struggle but omitted its struggles against itself, ignoring the regionalists and autonomists and separatists and secessionists who even today are trying to tear the country apart. To me, Ganapathi, they are of no consequence in the story of India; they seek to diminish something that is far greater than they will ever comprehend. Others will disagree and dismiss my assertion as the naivety of the terminally nostalgic. They will say that the India of the epic warriors died on its mythological battlefields, and that today’s India is a land of adulteration, black-marketing, corruption, communal strife, dowry killings, you know the rest, and that this is the only India that matters. Not my India, where epic battles are fought for great causes, where freedom and democracy are argued over, won, betrayed and lost, but an India where mediocrity reigns, where the greatest cause is the making of money, where dishonesty is the most prevalent art and bribery the most vital skill, where power is an end in itself rather than a means, where the real political issues of the day involve not principles but parochialism. An India where a Priya Duryodhani can be re-elected because seven hundred million people cannot produce anyone better, and where her immortality can be guaranteed by her greatest failure — the alienation of some of the country’s most loyal citizens to the point where two of them consider it a greater duty to kill her than protect her, as they were employed to do.

Perhaps they were right. Or perhaps it is simply that I can no longer distinguish between right and wrong, real and unreal. For as I arrived near the end of my telling of this story, Ganapathi, I again began to dream.

I dreamt again of Hastinapur. Not, this time, of the glorious palace of the princely era, resplendent in its prosperity and basking in the warmth of the people’s adulation, but of a drab township with squalid streets and peeling walls, with rancid rubbish accumulating in the open spaces of what had been the Bibighar Gardens. In my dream great hot winds blew into the town, filling it with swirling clouds of gritty dust. The sun disappeared from sight. Out of the breath-choking haze emerged, at savage random, flying objects that sprang from the sky and smashed in splinters on the ground, aimlessly mutilating passers-by and pavement-sleepers. In the murky half-light of dawn and dusk, hands outstretched as if groping for direction, roamed a hundred headless figures, the gaping emptiness at their necks suppurating horribly. The sacred river that flowed by the palace backed up in a surging torrent that swept it against nature, returning it toward its source.

I groaned in my sleep as I saw these things, Ganapathi, but my tossing and turning would not drive the images from my fevered brain. Hastinapur crumbled before my eyes. Fierce-toothed rodents scurried through the town, gnawing and nibbling at the stocks of grain, the vegetation, the electrical wiring and the fingers of the maimed street-dwellers. The milk on every stove boiled over, reeking of the odour of charred flesh. Pots and plates developed cracks; white vessels became black in the washing. The purest milk turned watery and ripe mangoes tasted more bitter than gourds. Sacks of rice were found to contain more stones than grain. The most carefully prepared food turned out to be crawling with maggots. Wells turned brackish, roads broke up into rubble, roofs caved in. I was dreaming, Ganapathi, of the worst kind of devastation — that which occurs when nature turns upon itself.

Even the full moon could not be seen on its appointed night. Instead the koyals, songbirds once, never stopped crowing; cows brayed like donkeys and whelped mules rather than calves; and jackals howled in the streets as if they belonged to the houses of Hastinapur rather than to the jungles surrounding it.

I could see, even in my sleep, that the process could not be overcome; it could only be escaped from. In the distant hills overlooking Hastinapur loomed the snow-covered top of a gleaming mountain, and from it, a celestial peace on their visages, Gangaji, Dhritarashtra and Pandu smiled and beckoned. From the debris of the town, looking up at that shining light on the mountain, our recent protagonists decided to embark on the ascent.

They had not even begun their march when Krishna fell to the ground, a deep wound oozing in his heel. He clutched his foot, his face contorted in agony. ‘I cannot move,’ he gasped. Krishna’s dark features were sallow with pain. ‘I can sit, I can speak, I can give you advice, but I cannot walk on with you. Go without me.’

And so, as the others sorrowfully turned away, Krishna’s life oozed into the earth of my dream. And a voice from the mountain-top echoed in my mind: ‘He could have prevented all this, but he chose not to act. He remained content with his little fief, giving advice and verse to Arjun, and then went back to his comforts and allowed all this to happen. India has too many Krishnas. His brilliance burned itself out without illuminating the country. He cannot reach the top.’

Leaving him behind, the others set out across rock and ravine, valley and hill, towards the foot of the mountain. A little dog attached itself to them, and trotted beside Yudhishtir. Onward they walked, then upward, till each step seemed unbearably heavy and the thin air rasped in their lungs. Then Draupadi collapsed to the ground.

‘Why her?’ I asked the faceless voice in my dream.

‘Democracy always falters first,’ came the echo. ‘She can only be sustained by the strength of her husbands. Their weakness is her fatal flaw. She cannot endure to the mountain-top.’

The others walked on After hours of trudging through the mire of my mind, Sahadev stumbled and fell. In my dream, I no longer needed to ask the question: the unseen voice answered the unspoken query.

‘He knew what was right, but did nothing with his knowledge,’ it said. ‘He stayed outside the country, saw its greatness and its failings in perspective, but did not involve himself in its true struggle for survival. He cannot stride to the mountain-top.’

Nakul was the next to give up.

‘He was too willing to serve institutions rather than values. Dharma consists of more than just doing one’s duty as narrowly defined by one’s immediate job. There is a larger duty, a duty to a greater cause, that Nakul ignored. He will not see the mountain-top.’

When Arjun fell, I remember the shock radiating even through my dream. But Arjun — the paragon of virtue, who by the unanimous wish of the people succeeded Priya Duryodhani! How can he fall?’

‘He believed himself to be perfect,’ resonated the reply, ‘and allowed others to believe it. But India defeats perfection, as the rainclouds obscure the sun. His arrogance tripped him up when his gaze aimed even beyond the peak. He will never get to the mountain-top.’

They were still some way from the crest when Bhim sank heavily to his knees.

‘He protected the Pandavas and the country, but that was not enough. He did not do enough to shield Draupadi Mokrasi from abuse, because he saw himself as only one of her guardians and placed his commitment to his brothers above his commitment to her. He will not stand on the mountain-top.’

Yudhishtir, unflagging, climbed on steadily, alone except for the little dog still trotting by his side. ‘Why him?’ I asked. ‘Yudhishtir, with his priggish morality, his blind insensitivity to others, his willingness to gamble Draupadi away, his self-serving adherence to the letter of honesty rather than its spirit? How can he be allowed to climb on when all the others have fallen?’

The voice seemed surprised by the question. ‘But he was true to himself throughout,’ it said. ‘He was true to dharma.’

And indeed, Yudhishtir at last reached the top of the mountain, and looked around him, seeing the peaks and the valleys below, at a level with the fluffy white clouds that floated past like gossamer from nature’s veil.

One of the clouds swooped down upon him in my dream. Upon it was seated a splendid figure of godlike magnificence, wearing a golden crown on his smooth and unwrinkled brow.

‘I am Kaalam, the god of Time,’ he said with a dazzling smile. ‘You have reached the mountain-top, Yudhishtir; your time has come. Mount my chariot with me and let us travel to the court of History.’

‘I am greatly honoured,’ our hero replied. ‘May this dog come with me?’

‘No, he may not,’ Kaalam said with some distaste. ‘History has no place for dogs. Come, we must hurry.’

‘I am sorry,’ Yudhishtir pursed his lips. ‘This dog has been my faithful companion throughout my long ascent. I cannot abandon him now that I have reached the top.’

‘Then I shall have to leave without you,’ Kaalam said impatiently.

‘Leave then, if you must,’ Yudhishtir’s jaw was set. ‘I shall not come without the dog. It would not be dharma to repay devotion in this manner.’

‘You must be crazy,’ Kaalam exclaimed. ‘You wish to turn down a place in history for the sake of a mere dog? A creature associated with unclean things, in whose presence no meal is eaten, no ritual performed? How did the noble and upright Yudhishtir form such a peculiar attachment?’

‘I have never forsaken any person or creature who has been faithful to me,’ Yudhishtir said. ‘I will not start now. Goodbye.’

And as he looked down at the little dog, it transformed itself, in my dream, into the resplendent Dharma, god of justice and righteousness. Yudhishtir’s true father.

‘You have passed the test, my son,’ Dharma proclaimed. ‘Come with me to claim History’s reward.’

The three of them boarded Kaalam’s cloudy chariot and floated serenely to History’s court. There Yudhishtir had his first shock: for seated on a golden throne, fanned by nubile attendants, sat his late tormentor, Priya Duryodhani.

‘I don’t understand,’ he stammered when he had caught his breath. ‘This tyrant, this destroyer of people and institutions, this persecutor of truth and democracy, seated like this on a golden throne? I do not wish to see her face! Take me to where my brothers are, where Draupadi is.’

‘History’s judgements are not so easily made, my son,’ Dharma replied. ‘To some, Duryodhani is a revered figure, a saviour of India, a Joan of Arc burned at the democratic stake by the ignorant and the prejudiced. Abandon your old bitterness here, Yudhishtir. There are no enmities at History’s court.’

‘Where are my brothers?’ Yudhishtir asked stubbornly. ‘And my pure and long-suffering wife? Why don’t I see them here, where Duryodhani holds court?’

‘They are in a separate place, my son,’ said Dharma. ‘If that is where you wish to go, I shall take you.’

He led Yudhishtir down a rough and pitted pathway, over rubble and broken glass. The pair picked their way through brambles and strings of barbed wire, past rotting vegetation and smouldering pyres. Yudhishtir braved the smoke, the increasing heat, the stench of animal decomposition. Mosquitoes buzzed about his ears. His feet struck rock and sometimes bone. But still, in my dream, he trudged unwaveringly on.

Dharma stopped suddenly. ‘Here we are,’ he said, though they seemed to have arrived nowhere in particular. The darkness closed in round Yudhishtir like the clammy hands of a cadaver. Despite the intense heat, he shivered.

And then a wail rose around him from the darkness, a cry joined by another and yet another, until Yudhishtir’s mind and mine seemed nothing but the echo-chamber for a plaintive, continuous lament. As it went on he could make out the voices begging pitifully for his help — Bhim’s, Arjun’s, the twins’, even Draupadi’s. .

‘What is the meaning of this?’ he burst out. ‘Why are my brothers and my wife here, in this foul blackness, while Duryodhani enjoys the luxuries of posthumous adulation? Have I gone mad, or has the world ceased to mean anything?’

‘You are quite sane, my son,’ Dharma said calmly. ‘And you can prove your sanity by leaving this noxious place with me. I only brought you here because you asked for it. You do not belong here, Yudhishtir.’

‘But nor do they!’ Yudhishtir expostulated. ‘What wrong have they done that they should suffer like this? Go — I shall stay with them, and share their unmerited suffering.’

At these words, the darkness lifted, the filth and the stench disappeared. Yudhishtir’s brow was cooled by a gentle breeze and his senses calmed by a fragrant aroma of freshly flowering blossoms, as his eyes opened to a refulgent assembly of personages from our story.

Yes, Ganapathi, they were all there in my dream: gentle Draupadi and genteel Drewpad, boisterous Bhim and blustery Sir Richard, grim Gandhari and grimacing Shikhandin; the Karnistanis and the Kauravas; the British and the brutish; pale Pandu embracing his wives; blind Dhritarashtra and blond Georgina. And they were smiling, and laughing, and clapping. ‘You have passed your last test, Yudhishtir!’ Dharma proclaimed. ‘It was all an illusion, my son. You will no more be condemned to an eternity of misery than Duryodhani will enjoy perpetual contentment. Everyone must have at least a glimpse of the other world; the fortunate man samples hell first, the better to enjoy the taste of paradise that follows. All those you see around you have passed through these portals before; tomorrow you will stand amongst them to greet a new entrant as he comes in. And the illusions will go on.’

‘The tests you put me through,’ Yudhishtir asked, frowning. ‘Has everyone here gone through them?’

‘Yes, but very few have passed them as you have,’ Dharma said.

‘And what were they meant to prove?’

‘Prove?’ Dharma seemed vaguely puzzled. ‘Only the eternal importance of dharma.’

‘To what end? If it makes no difference to all these people, who all have their place here. .’

‘Everyone,’ Dharma said, ‘finds his place in history, even those who have failed to observe dharma. But it is essential to recognize virtue and righteousness, and to praise him who, like yourself, has consistently upheld dharma.’

‘Why?’ Yudhishtir asked.

‘What do you mean,’ Dharma replied irritably, ‘ “why”?’

‘I mean why?’ Yudhishtir replied, addressing everyone gathered before him. ‘What purpose has it served? Has my righteousness helped either me, my wife, my family or my country? Does justice prevail in India, or in its history? What has adherence to dharma achieved in our own story?’

‘This is sacrilege,’ his preceptor breathed. ‘If there is one great Indian principle that has been handed down through the ages, it is that of the paramount importance of practising dharma at any price. Life itself is worthless without dharma. Only dharma is eternal.’

‘India is eternal,’ Yudhishtir said. ‘But the dharma appropriate for it at different stages of its evolution has varied. I am sorry, but if there is one thing that is true today, it is that there are no classical verities valid for all time. I believed differently, and have paid the price of being defeated, humiliated, and reduced to irrelevance. It is too late for me to do anything about it: I have had my turn. But for too many generations now we have allowed ourselves to believe India had all the answers, if only it applied them correctly. Now I realize that we don’t even know all the questions.’

‘What are you saying?’ Dharma asked, and Yudhishtir saw to his astonishment that the resplendent deva beside him was changing slowly back into a dog.

‘No more certitudes,’ he called out desperately to the receding figure. ‘Accept doubt and diversity. Let each man live by his own code of conduct, so long as he has one. Derive your standards from the world around you and not from a heritage whose relevance must be constantly tested. Reject equally the sterility of ideologies and the passionate prescriptions of those who think themselves infallible. Uphold decency, worship humanity, affirm the basic values of our people — those which do not change — and leave the rest alone. Admit that there is more than one Truth, more than one Right, more than one dharma. .’

I woke up to the echo of a vain and frantic barking.

I woke up, Ganapathi, to today’s India. To our land of computers and corruption, of myths and politicians and box-wallahs with moulded plastic briefcases. To an India beset with uncertainties, muddling chaotically through to the twenty-first century.

Your eyebrows and nose, Ganapathi, twist themselves into an elephantine question-mark. Have I, you seem to be asking, come to the end of my story? How forgetful you are: it was just the other day that I told you stories never end, they just continue somewhere else. In the hills and the plains, the hearths and the hearts, of India.

But my last dream, Ganapathi, leaves me with a far more severe problem. If it means anything, anything at all, it means that I have told my story so far from a completely mistaken perspective. I have thought about it, Ganapathi, and I realize I have no choice. I must retell it.

I see the look of dismay on your face. I am sorry, Ganapathi. I shall have a word with my friend Brahm tomorrow. In the meantime, let us begin again.

They tell me India is an underdeveloped country. .