The Great Indian Novel (35 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes?’ Sarah-behn asked.

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

‘Who are you?’ Sarah-behn asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah-behn screamed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Thirsty,’ he uttered in a fading voice.

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

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

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

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

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