The Great Indian Novel

The Fourth Book: A Raj Quartet

19

The news of the annexation of Hastinapur by the British Raj was announced by a brusque communiqué one morning. There was none of the subtle build-up one might have expected, Ganapathi; no carefully planted stories in the press about official concern at the goings-on in the palace, no simulated editorial outrage about the degree of political misbehaviour being tolerated from a sitting Regent, not even the wide bureaucratic circulation of proposals, notes and minutes that Vidur, now a junior functionary in the States Department, might have seen and tried to do something about. No, Ganapathi, none of the niceties this time, none of the fabled British gentle- manliness and let-me-take-your-glasses-off-your-face-before-I-punch-you-in- the-nose; no sir, John Bull had seen red and was snorting at the charge. One day Hastinapur was just another princely state, with its flag and its crest and its eleven-gun salute; the next morning it was part of the British Presidency of Marabar, with its cannon spiked, its token frontier-post dismantled and the Union Jack flying outside Gandhari’s bedroom window.

Sir Richard, former Resident of Hastinapur, now Special Representative of the Viceroy in charge of Integration, and a hot favourite to succeed the retiring Governor of Marabar himself, breakfasted well that morning on eggs and kedgeree, and his belly rumbled in satisfaction. He had just wiped his mouth with a damask napkin when an agitated Heaslop burst in.

‘Come in; Heaslop, come in,’ said Sir Richard expansively if unnecessarily, for the equerry was already within sneezing distance of the pepper-pot. ‘Tea?’

No, thank you, sir. I’m sorry to barge in like this, sir, but I’m afraid the situation is beginning to look very ugly. Your intervention may be required.’

‘What on earth are you on about, man? Sit down, sit down and tell me all about it.’ Sir Richard reached for the teapot, a frown creasing his pink forehead. ‘Are you sure you won’t have some tea?’

‘Absolutely sure, sir. The people of Hastinapur haven’t reacted very well to the news of the annexation, sir. Ever since this morning’s radio broadcast they have been pouring out on the streets, sir, milling about, listening to street- corner speakers denouncing the imperialist yoke. The shops are all closed, children aren’t going to school nor their parents to work, and the atmosphere in the city centre and the maidan is, to say the least, disturbing.’

Sir Richard sipped elegantly, but two of his chins were quivering. ‘Any violence?’

‘A little. Some window-panes of English businesses smashed, stones thrown, that sort of thing. Not many targets hereabouts to aim at, of course, in a princely state. It’s not as if this were British India, with assorted symbols of the Raj to set fire to. A crowd did try to march toward the residency, but the police stopped them at the bottom of the road.’ Heaslop hesitated. ‘My own car took a couple of knocks, sir, as I tried to get through. Stone smashed the windscreen.’

‘Good Lord, man! Are you hurt?’

‘Not a scratch, sir.’ Heaslop seemed not to know whether to look relieved or disappointed. ‘But the driver’s cut up rather badly. He says he’s all right, but I think we need to get him to the hospital.’

‘Well, go ahead, Heaslop. What are you waiting for?’

‘There’s one more thing, sir. Word is going round that Ganga Datta will address a mass rally on the annexation this afternoon, sir. At the Bibigarh Gardens. People are flocking to the spot from all over the state, sir, hours before the Regent, that is, the ex-Regent, is supposed to arrive.’

‘Ganga Datta? At the Bibigarh Gardens? Are you sure?’

‘As sure as we can be of anything in these circumstances, sir.’

Sir Richard harrumphed. ‘We’ve got to stop them, Heaslop.’

‘Yes, sir, I thought you might want to consider that, sir, that’s why I’m here. I’m afraid we might not be able to block off the roads to the gardens, though. The police are quite ineffectual, and I wouldn’t be too sure of their loyalties either, in the circumstances.’

‘What would you advise, Heaslop?’

‘Well, sir, I wonder if we don’t stand to lose more by trying to stop a rally we can’t effectively prevent from taking place.’

‘Yes?’

‘So my idea would be a sort of strategic retreat, sir. Let them go ahead with their rally, let off steam.’

‘You mean, do nothing?’

‘In a manner of speaking, yes, sir. But then passions would subside. Once they’ve had their chance to listen to a few speeches and shout a few slogans, they’ll go back to their normal lives soon enough.’

‘Stuff and nonsense, Heaslop. Once they’ve listened to a few speeches from the likes of Ganga Datta and his treacherous ilk, there’s no telling what they might do. Burn down the residency, like as not. No, this rally of theirs has to be stopped. But you’re right about the police. They won’t be able to do it.’

‘That’s what I thought, sir,’ Heaslop said unhappily. ‘Not much we can do, then.’

‘Oh yes, there is,’ Sir Richard retorted decisively. ‘There’s only one thing for it, Heaslop. Get me Colonel Rudyard at the cantonment. This situation calls for the army.’

20

The Bibigarh Gardens were no great masterpiece of landscaping, Ganapathi, but they were the only thing in Hastinapur that could pass for a public park. The plural came from the fact that Bibigarh was not so much one garden as a succession of them, separated by high walls and hedges into little plots of varying sizes. The enclosures permitted the municipal authorities the mild conceit of creating differing effects in each garden: a little rectangular pool surrounded by a paved walkway in one, fountains and rose-beds in another, a small open park for children in a third. There was even a ladies’ park in which women in and out of purdah could ride or take the air, free from the prying eyes of male intruders; here the hedge was particularly high and thick. The gardens were connected to each other and to the main road only by narrow gates, which normally were quite wide enough for the decorous entrances and exits of pram-pushing ayahs and strolling wooers. On this day, however, they were to prove hopelessly inadequate.

One of the gardens, a moderately large open space entirely surrounded by a high brick wall, was used — when it was not taken over by the local teenagers for impromptu games of cricket — as a sort of traditional open-air theatre-cum-Speakers’ Corner. It was the customary venue (since the maidan was too big) for the few public meetings anyone in Hastinapur bothered to hold. These were usually mushairas featuring local poetic talent or folk-theatre on a rudimentary stage, neither of which ever attracted more than a few hundred people. It was the mere fact of having staged such functions that gave the Bibigarh Gardens their credentials for this more momentous occasion.

When news spread of a possible address by Gangaji on the day of the state’s annexation, Bibigarh seemed the logical place to drift towards. Soon the garden was full, Ganapathi; not of a few hundred, not of a thousand, but of ten thousand people, men, women, even some children, squeezed uncomplainingly against each other, waiting with the patience instilled in them over timeless centuries.

When Colonel Rudyard of the Fifth Baluch arrived at the spot with a detachment, it did not take him long to assess the scene. He saw the crowd of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, standing, sitting, talking, expectant but not restless, as a milling mob. He also saw very clearly — more clearly than God allows the rest of us to see — what he had to do. He ordered his men to take up positions on the high ground all round the enclosure, just behind the brick walls.

It is possible that his instructions had been less than precise. Perhaps he was under the assumption that the people of Hastinapur had already been ordered not to assemble for any purpose and that these were, therefore, defiant trouble-makers. Perhaps all he had was a barked command from Sir Richard, telling him to put an end to an unlawful assembly, and his own military mind devised the best means of implementing the instruction. Or perhaps he just acted in the way dictated by the simple logic of colonialism, under which the rules of humanity applied only to the rulers, for the rulers were people and the people were objects. Objects to be controlled, disciplined, kept in their place and taught lessons like so many animals: yes, the civilizing mission upon which Rudyard and his tribe were embarked made savages of all of us, and all of them.

Whatever it may be, Ganapathi — and who are we, all these decades later, to speculate on what went on inside the mind of a man we never knew and will never understand — Colonel Rudyard asked his men to level their rifles at the crowd barely 150 yards away and fire.

There was no warning, no megaphone reminder of the illegality of their congregation, no instruction to leave peacefully: nothing. Rudyard did not even command his men to fire into the air, or at the feet of their targets. They fired, at his orders, into the chests and the faces and the wombs of the unarmed, unsuspecting crowd.

Historians have dubbed this event the Hastinapur Massacre. How labels lie. A massacre connotes the heat and fire of slaughter, the butchery by bloodthirsty fighters of an outgunned opposition. There was nothing of this at the Bibigarh Gardens that day. Rudyard’s soldiers were lined up calmly, almost routinely; they were neither disoriented nor threatened by the crowd; it was just another day’s work, but one unlike any other. They loaded and fired their rifles coldly, clinically, without haste or passion or sweat or anger, resting their weapons against the tops of the brick walls so thoughtfully built in Shantanu’s enlightened reign and emptying their magazines into the human beings before them with trained precision. I have often wondered whether they heard the screams of the crowd, Ganapathi, whether they noticed the blood, and the anguished wails of the women, and the stampeding of the frampling feet as panic-stricken villagers sought to get away from the sudden hail of death raining remorselessly down upon them. Did they hear the cries of the babies being crushed underfoot as dying men beat their mangled limbs against each other to get through those tragically narrow gateways? I cannot believe they did, Ganapathi, I prefer not to believe it, and so I think of the Bibigarh Gardens Massacre as a frozen tableau from a silent film, black and white and mute, an Indian Guernica.

The soldiers fired just 1600 bullets that day, Ganapathi. It was so mechanical, so precise; they used up only the rounds they were allocated, nothing was thrown away, no additional supplies sent for. Just 1600 bullets into the unarmed throng, and when they had finished, oh, perhaps ten minutes later, 379 people lay dead, Ganapathi, and 1,137 lay injured, many grotesquely maimed. When Rudyard was given the figures later he expressed satisfaction with his men. ‘Only 84 bullets wasted,’ he said. ‘Not bad.’

Even those figures were, of course, British ones; in the eyes of many of us the real toll could never be known, for in the telling many more bled their lives into the ground than the British and the press and the official Commission of Inquiry ever acknowledged. Who knows, Ganapathi, perhaps each of Rudyard’s bullets sent more than one soul to another world, just as they did the Raj’s claims to justice and decency.

21

Gangaji came later, at the appointed hour of his address, and when he saw what had happened he doubled over in pain and was sick info an ornamental fountain. He stumbled among the bodies, hearing the cries of the injured and the moans of the dying, and he kept croaking to himself in Sanskrit. I was there, Ganapathi, and I caught the words, ‘ Vinasha kale, viparita buddhi’ — our equivalent of the Greek proverb: ‘Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad’.

It was Gangaji’s strength to see meaning in the most mindless and perverse of human actions, and this time he was both wrong and right. He was wrong because the Massacre was no act of insane frenzy but a conscious, deliberate imposition of colonial will; yet he was right, because it was sheer folly on the part of the British to have allowed it to happen. It was not, Ganapathi, don’t get me wrong, it was not as if the British were going around every day of the week shooting Indians in enclosed gardens. Nor was Rudyard particularly evil in himself; his was merely the evil of the unimaginative, the cruelty of the literal-minded, the brutality of the direct. And because he was not evil in himself he came to symbolize the evil of the system on whose behalf, and in whose defence, he was acting. It was not Rudyard who had to be condemned, not even his actions, but the system that permitted his actions to occur. In allowing Indians to realize this lay the true madness of the Hastinapur Massacre. It became a symbol of the worst of what colonialism could come to mean. And by letting it happen, the British crossed that point of no return that exists only in the minds of men, that point which, in any unequal relationship, a master and a subject learn equally to respect.

At the time this was perhaps not so evident. The incident left the population in a state of shock; if you think it provoked a further violent reaction, you would be wrong, Ganapathi, for no father of a family willingly puts himself in the firing-line if he knows what bullets can do to him. After Bibigarh everyone knew, and the people subsided into subordination.

Gangaji told me later that the Massacre confirmed for him the wisdom of the principles of non-violence he had preached and made us practise at Motihari. ‘There is no point,’ he said candidly, ‘in choosing a method at which your opponent is bound to be superior. We must fight with those weapons that are stronger than theirs — the weapons of morality and Truth.’ Put like that it might sound a little woolly-headed, I know, Ganapathi, but don’t forget it had worked at Motihari. The hope that it might work again elsewhere, and the knowledge that nothing else could defeat the might of the Empire on which the sun never set, were what made us flock to Gangaji. In a very real sense Hastinapur gave him the leadership of the national movement.

And what of Colonel Rudyard, the great British hero of Bibigarh? His superiors in Whitehall were embarrassed by his effectiveness: there is such a thing, after all, as being too efficient. Rudyard was prematurely retired, though on a full pension. Not that he needed it; for across the length and breadth of the Raj, in planters’ clubs and Empire associations, at ladies’ tea parties and cantonment socials, funds were raised in tribute by patriotic pink-skins outraged by the slight to a man who had so magnificently done his duty and put the insolent natives in their place. The collections, put together and presented to the departing Colonel at a moving ceremony attended by the best and the whitest, amounted to a quarter of a million pounds, yes, Ganapathi, 250,000, two and a half lakhs of pounds sterling, which even at today’s depreciated exchange rate is forty lakhs of rupees, an amount it would take the President of India thirty-five years to earn. It took Rudyard less than thirty-five minutes, much less. The gift, which his government did not tax, brought him more than £160 per Indian dead or wounded; as one pillar of the Establishment was heard to murmur when the figures were announced, ‘I didn’t think a native was worth as much as that.’

In some ways this gesture did even more than the Massacre itself to make any prospect of Indian reconciliation to British rule impossible. It convinced Gangaji, who derived his morals as much from the teachings of Christianity as from any other source, that the Raj was not just evil, but satanic. The Massacre and its reward made Indians of us all, Ganapathi. It turned loyalists into nationalists and constitutionalists into revolutionaries, led a Nobel Prize- winning poet to return his knighthood — and achieved Gangaji’s absolute conversion to the cause of freedom. He now saw freedom as indivisible from Truth, and he never wavered again in his commitment to ridding India of the evil Empire. There was to be no compromise, no pussyfooting, no sellout on the way. He would think of the phrase only years later, but his message to the British from then on was clear: Quit India.

Rudyard retired to a country home in England. I wonder whether he was ever troubled by the knowledge of how much he was reviled and hated in the country he had just left. Or by the fact that so many hotheaded young men had sworn, at public meetings, in innumerable temples and mosques and gurudwaras, to exact revenge for his deed in blood. I like to think that Rudyard spent many a sleepless night agonizing if a stray shadow on the blind was of an assassin, starting at each unexpected sound in fear that it might be his personal messenger from Yama. But I am not sure he did, Ganapathi, because he knew, just as Ganga did, the limitations of our people in the domain of violence. The young men who swore undying revenge did not know how to go about exacting it, or even where. Only two of them finally had the intelligence and the resources to cross the seas in quest of their quarry. And when they got to Blighty, and made inquiries about an old India hand with an unsavoury Hastinapur connection, they found their man and, with great éclat and much gore, blew him to pieces.

Do not rejoice, Ganapathi, for it was not Rudyard whose brains they spattered over High Street, Kensington. No, not Rudyard, but a simple case of mistaken identity; to a sturdy Punjabi one British name is much like another, the people they questioned were themselves easily confused, and it was not Rudyard, but Kipling they killed. Yes, Kipling, the same Professor Kipling who had been careless enough to allude to the canine qualities of the Indian people, and who, for that indiscretion, had already been struck by my pale, my rash son Pandu. It makes you wonder, does it not, Ganapathi, about the inscrutability of Providence, the sense of justice of our Divinity. Our two young men went proudly to the gallows, a nationalist slogan choking on their lips as the noose tightened, blissfully unaware that they had won their martyrdom for killing the wrong man. Or perhaps he was not the wrong man: perhaps Fate had intended all along that Kipling be punished for his contempt; perhaps the Great Magistrate had decreed that the sentence of death fall not on the man who had ordered his soldiers to fire on an unarmed assembly but on he who had so vilely insulted an entire nation. It does not matter, Ganapathi; in the eyes of history all that matters is that we finally had our revenge.

22

So that is how my family entered politics, Ganapathi. Gangaji was more or less already in it, of course, since his crusade for justice had brought him smack up against the injustice of foreign rule, but now Dhritarashtra, with his dark glasses and white cane, and Pandu, whom celibacy had driven to fat, joined the cause full-time.

Vidur, too, might have joined; indeed, he wished to. He came down from Delhi the day after the annexation and the Bibigarh Massacre, and informed Gangaji and his brothers that he had resigned from the Service.

‘What?’ exclaimed Dhritarashtra. ‘Resigned?’

‘Good thing,’ said Pandu. ‘Well done, Vidur. You shouldn’t have joined the bastards in the first place.’

‘Withdraw it at once,’ Gangaji said.

Vidur blinked in astonishment. ‘I beg your pardon, Uncle?’ he asked, for he was a polite young man.

‘Withdraw it,’ Gangaji said tersely. ‘At once.’

‘Withdraw my resignation? But I can’t possibly do that.’

‘Why not? Have they already accepted it?’

‘No,’ Vidur admitted, ‘they haven’t even seen it yet. I’ve put my letter of resignation in the Under-Secretary’s in-tray, and he’ll find it when he comes in on Monday morning.’

‘No, he won’t,’ said Dhritarashtra, who was quick on the uptake, ‘because you’ll go back to Delhi immediately and take it out of his in-tray before he sees it.’

‘But why?’ Vidur asked despairingly. ‘You can’t seriously want me to serve this alien government, a government that has done this to our people!’

‘Whether it is the government you will be serving or the people whom they have harmed is only a matter of opinion,’ said Ganga sententiously. ‘Explain it to him, Dhritarashtra.’

‘Don’t you see, Vidur?’ asked Dhritarashtra, who, despite his blindness (or perhaps because of it), revelled in optical allusions. ‘We need you there. If we’re going to fight the Raj effectively we shall need our own friends and allies within the structure. And if we win,’ he added, his voice acquiring that dreamy quality that women in Bloomsbury had found irresistible during his student days, ‘we shall still need able and experienced Indians to run India for us.’

And so Vidur reluctantly stayed on in the ICS and, because he had many of his father’s good qualities, rose with remarkable rapidity up the rungs of the States Department. His princely upbringing at Hastinapur had given him the knack of dealing with Indian royalty. He understood their whims and wants, indulged their eccentricities and interpreted them sympathetically to the British. In time he became a trusted intermediary between the pink masters and their increasingly assertive brown subjects.

But we must put Vidur aside for a moment, Ganapathi, to look more carefully at Gangaji and his two princely disciples as they, in turn, rose to the peak of the nationalist movement.

Dhritarashtra s disappointment with fatherhood and the failing health of his grim wife drove him wholeheartedly into politics. Here he surprised everyone with his flair for the task. He had the blind man’s gift of seeing the world not as it was, but as he wanted it to be. Even better, he was able to convince everyone around him that his vision was superior to theirs. In a short while he was, despite his handicap, a leading light of the Kaurava Party, drafting its press releases and official communications to the government, formulating its positions on foreign affairs, and establishing himself as the party’s most articulate and attractive spokesman on just about anything on which Cantabrigian Fabianism had given him an opinion.

Gangaji, the party’s political and spiritual mentor, made no secret of his preference for the slim and confident young man. Pandu, in the circumstances, took it all rather well. He saw the world very differently from his blind half- brother. His recent brush with the angels of death and his subsequent immersion in the scriptures had made him more of a traditionalist than the idealistic Dhritarashtra, and the solidity of his appearance testified to one whose feet were staunchly planted on terra firma. Not for Pandu the flights of fancy of his sightless sibling, nor, for that matter, the ideological flirtations, the passionate convictions, the grand sweeping gestures of principle that became the hallmarks of Dhritarashtra’s political style. Pandu believed in taking stock of reality, preferably with a clenched fist and eyes in the back of one’s head. He balanced an hour of meditation with an hour of martial arts. ‘Of course I believe in non-violence,’ he would explain. ‘But I want to be prepared just in case non-violence doesn’t believe in me.

His duties as the party’s chief organizer were indirectly responsible for his political differences with Dhritarashtra. The process of building up a party- structure and a cadre committed to run it in the teeth of colonial hostility convinced him that discipline and organization were far greater virtues than ideals and doctrines. It was the classic distortion, Ganapathi, to which our late Leader would herself one day fall prey, the elevation of means over ends, of methods over aspirations. As long as Gangaji was there he shrewdly harnessed the divergent skills of my two sons to the common cause. But when his grip began to slip. .

But you see, I am getting ahead of my story again, Ganapathi. You mustn’t let me. I haven’t yet told you about Kunti, Pandu’s faithfully infidelious wife, and how she fulfilled her husband’s extraordinary request for progeny. For it was not only Gandhari the Grim who assured India’s next generation of leadership by her exertions in labour. After all, Ganapathi, as you well know, we were to develop a pluralist system, so a plurality of leaders had to be born to run it.

Stop looking so lascivious, young man. I have no intention of offering you a ringside seat by Kunti’s bed. Facts, that is all I intend to record, facts and names. This is history, do not forget, not pornography.

In fact, if you must know, Pandu helped choose the genetic mix his sons would inherit. Kunti’s first post-marital lover (yes, first, there were others, but I shall come to that in a moment) was the youngest Indian judge of the High Court; let us refer to him only as Dharma, so as not to wound certain sensibilities, though those who know who I am speaking about will be left in no doubt as to his real identity. Dharma was learned, distinguished, good-looking in the way that only men become when they start greying at the temples, and of a highly respectable family. A man of principle, he agonized over his adultery, but found himself agonizing even more when Kunti abandoned him abruptly — as soon, in fact (though he was not to know this) as her pregnancy was confirmed.

A son was born of their union, a weak-chinned, gentle boy with a broad forehead, whom they decided to name Yudhishtir. Pandu swears that, meditating while Kunti was in the final stages of labour, he heard a voice from the heavens proclaiming that the lad would grow up to be renowned for his truthfulness and virtue. But I have always suspected that Pandu had simply been reading a biography of George Washington too late into the night and dreamt the whole thing.

When Yudhishtir was born Hastinapur was still in the family’s hands and Pandu was persuaded of the need for more — what shall I call it? — offspring insurance’ to make the succession secure. But he did not want Kunti striking up too long an association with Dharma, and the lady herself was attracted by the idea of variety. (Few women, Ganapathi, fail to be excited by the thought of producing children from different men; it is the ultimate assertion of their creative power. Fortunately for mankind, however, or perhaps unfortunately, fewer still have the courage to put their fantasy into practice.) This time her privileged nocturnal companion was a military man, Major Vayu, of the soon- to-be-disbanded Hastinapur Palace Guard.

Vayu was a large, strong, blustery character, full of drive and energy but mercurial in temperament. He breezed into Kunti’s life and out of it, his ardour more gusty than gutsy, leaving in her the seed of Pandu’s second son, Bhim. Bhim the Brave, he came to be called in the servants’ quarters, but also, among the exhausted ayahs, Bhim the Heavy, for his was a muscular babyhood. His narrow forehead, close-set eyes and joined eyebrows made it clear that he would never share his older brother’s intellectual attainments nor inherit any part of his mother’s looks; but it was also clear that in strength he would have few equals. The doctor delivering him fractured a wrist before deciding upon a Caesarian; Kunti gave up nursing him when she found herself unable to rise after a minute’s suckling; a cot of iron had to be manufactured for him after he had demolished two wooden cribs with a lusty kick of his foot; and a succession of bruised ayahs had finally to be replaced by a male attendant, a former Hastinapur all-in wrestling champion. The last of the ayahs resigned after an incident she never ceased talking about; apparently she had accidentally dropped the unbearably heavy infant on to a rock in the garden and had watched in horror as the stone crumbled into dust. This time the voice from the heavens only said one word, Ganapathi: ‘Ouch.’

But Pandu, absentee landlord of his wife’s womb, was still not content; he wanted a son who would combine the brain of Yudhishtir with the brawn of Bhim. He went deeper and deeper into yoga and meditation, mastered the heaven-pleasing asana of standing motionless on one leg from dawn till dusk, asked Kunti to conserve her energies for an entire year (which, with Bhim on the premises, she was only too happy to do) and prayed for such a son. Finally, when he judged the moment to be right, he invited the revered Brahmin divine, Devendra Yogi, to partake of the pleasures of his wife’s bed. The godlike yogi’s expertise made the experience rewarding for Kunti in more ways than one. And thus, Ganapathi, was born Arjun, Arjun of lissom figure and sinewy muscle, Arjun of sharp mind and keen eye, Arjun of fine face and fleet foot. Oh, all right, I know I’m getting carried away again, but the boy deserves it, Ganapathi. The voice from the heavens proclaimed that Pandu’s third son would be beloved of both Vishnu, the Preserver, and Shiva, the Destroyer. And this time Kunti heard the voice too, as she lay drained upon the delivery bed; the rishis on the Himalayan mountain-slopes heard it; the workers in the factories looked up from the clanging wheels of their machinery and heard it; and I, I paused in the midst of a stirring speech of sedition to a village panchayat and heard it. And Ganapathi, oh, Ganapathi, it filled us all with joy.

I think it was the startling discovery of celestial interest in her maternity that finally prompted Kunti to call a halt to her amatory experiments. Pandu, she was alarmed to note, was even prouder of his sons than he might have been had he personally fathered them, and he was speaking speculatively of a fourth candidate to cuckold him when Kunti put her pretty foot down. ‘It’s all very well for you,’ she said bluntly, ‘but you’re not the one who has to grow, and swell, and become heavy, and retch into the sink in the morning, and give up biryanis and wine and swings because they make you sick, and suffer the pain and the heaving and the agony of a thousand hot fingers pulling out your insides.’ Kunti shuddered. She had become an elegant woman of the world; as she spoke she inserted a Turkish cigarette into an ebony holder and waited, but Pandu disapprovingly refrained from lighting it for her. ‘I don’t think even your sages would demand more of me.’

Pandu was on the verge of drawing himself up self-righteously when Kunti drove home the clincher. ‘I’ve been doing some reading of the shastras myself,’ she said tellingly, ‘and I find that the views you quoted aren’t the only ones on the subject. As far as I can tell, the scriptures say a woman who gives herself to five men is unclean and one who has slept with six is a whore. You haven’t overlooked that, by any means, have you, my lord?’

Pandu opened his mouth as if to speak, then shut it with a sigh. ‘All right, have it your way,’ he said.

He might have been a great deal more insistent had it not been that Madri, his inventive second wife, had already come to him with a gentle admonition. ‘I don’t mean to thound as if I’m complaining or anything,’ the large-hearted princess lisped, ‘but it does seem as if you think much more of Kunti, who was only an adopted daughter of a mahawaja, anyway. I mean I’m not comparing or anything, but I am a real pwinceth and I do think you might want to have an heir thwough me too.’

Pandu had initially fobbed her off with gentle words of love and protestations about his reluctance to sully her chastity (which were all quite true, for Pandu did not relish the prospect of being cuckolded by both his wives) but following Kunti’s rebellion he changed his mind. ‘All right, Madri,’ he told his heavy-breasted helpmeet. ‘But just one affair, that’s all, or my name will be the laughing-stock of Hastinapur.’

‘Oh, thank you, my poor dear Pandu,’ Madri gushed, her conspicuous cleavage wobbling in excitement. (Pandu felt a twinge and looked away.) ‘Just one affair, I pwomise.’

Madri did indeed confine herself to just one affair, as promised. But she was nothing if not imaginative: she seduced a pair of identical, and inseparable, twins. Since Ashvin and Ashwin did everything together, Madri had the double satisfaction of adhering to her promise and enjoying its violation. The result of her efforts was also doubly gratifying: not one, but two sons. Pandu, rejecting Lav and Kush, the names of the legendary Ramayana twins, as too predictable, called Madri’s boys Nakul and Sahadev.

‘Oh, aren’t you pleased, Pandu dear?’ Madri beamed over the twins’ cradle. ‘Twinth! Now the nasty Bwitish can’t do anything to the succession. Or do you think, Pandu, do you think,’ — and here her little round eyes gleamed at the pwospect — ‘that just to be safe, I should try once more? Just once?’

‘Don’t you dare let her,’ warned Kunti when she heard of the request. ‘She’ll produce triplets next, and then where will I be? Don’t forget that I am your first wife, after all. Ever since she came into the house this Madri has been trying to steal a march on me. Scheming woman.’

And there, Ganapathi, as you can well imagine, we had the makings of a first-rate family drama, with steamy romance and hot flushing jealousy. But it was all cut short by the one event that made the entire issue of heir- conditioning redundant: the annexation of Hastinapur.