The Great Indian Novel (36 page)

No questions, Ganapathi, because I have no answers. And yours, or anyone else’s, would be as irrelevant as an old man’s nightmares.

But there is one story I ought to mention, just so that you have it, even though I don’t believe it myself for a moment.

It is said, around the smoky fires where villagers in what used to be Hastinapur warm their hands on a winter night, that as Gangaji lay dead, wrapped as in life in his white sheet, a tall figure with a half-moon glowing on his forehead stepped in and sat by his bed. Yes, Ganapathi, Karna.

And Karna spoke - for that is how they sing it in the desert huts of western Rajasthan in the wailing chants of the Langas and the Manghaniyars, how they hear it in the arrack shops below the palm-fronds that fringe Kerala’s highways, as men gather to drink and talk politics - he spoke in a low insistent voice, seeking the Mahaguru’s forgiveness and his blessings. Yes, blessings, for did not the Mahaguru realize that he, Karna, was only doing what he had to in fulfilment of his own karma? Could a man be blamed for performing too well the script of destiny?

Then – and this is where I really part company with the popular version – as the unacknowledged son of Kunti rose to leave, the story goes, a hand slipped out from under the shroud and grazed his shoulder.

Gangaji disagreed with no man more profoundly, yet he would not deny Mohammed Ali Karna his blessing when he asked for it.

That, at least, is the story as it is told; make of it what you will.

The Twelfth Book:
The Man Who Could Not Be King

I
s this all I can recall of the glorious period of our attainment of Independence, I see your elephantine frown ask me. Can death, destruction, and despair be my only recollections of the first flush of national freedom? No, Ganapathi, I too was not oblivious of the excitement of the age, the exhilaration of change. I can and do recall other things about 1947, petty moments, perhaps, which reflected and affirmed that things were no longer the same. I remember Englishmen who edited newspapers in the big cities suddenly discovering virtues in the nationalists they had reviled till noon the previous day. Signs being taken down in exclusive establishments, signs which read ‘Indians and dogs not admitted beyond this point’. Children being born at inconvenient times of the night who would go on to label a generation and rejuvenate a literature. Pink-skinned civil servants with worthless lifetime contracts frantically arranging their own premature retirements and passages home while learning to be attentive and obsequious to Indians who had suddenly been placed above them.

Like Jayaprakash Drona, Minister of State for Administrative Reform, who sat in his saffron robe, black beard flowing messily over his desktop, as perspiring ICS officials pressed him to put his newly valuable signature on to pieces of paper they had drafted with meticulous attention to the interests of their kind.

‘Routine paper, sir. Annual leave chart. The leave’s already been taken, sir.’

‘All right.’ Drona signed suspiciously.

‘Now this file, sir, approves
ex
gratia
compensation payments to all those whose career expectations have been, ah, affected by, er . . . recent events in the country.’

‘No.’

‘But you must, sir! It’s been carefully worked out. On a sliding scale, taking into account seniority, length of service . . .’

‘No.’

The official swallowed, then placed the offending docket in a tray labelled ‘Pending’.

‘This is an altogether simpler matter, sir. An individual case. Civil servant who lost everything, all his possessions, papers, antiques, in a nasty disturbance during the Partition riots. Most unfortunate case, sir, in fact I’ve just seen him this morning at the ministry, pretty distraught as you can imagine. If you’d just sign here, sir, we’d make him a special one-time grant in partial restitution, authorize an advance on his next six months’ salary to get him back on his feet again, and allow him exceptionally to convert into cash the freight costs he would have claimed from the government if all his furniture hadn’t gone up in flames.’ Drona opened the file and picked up a pen. ‘Thank you, sir,’ his Secretary went on. ‘I think you’d really be doing a fine thing for poor Heaslop. He’s spent all his career in India and . . . sir?’

For Drona, who had put pen to paper, had lifted it again and was looking at him with what the poet, some British poet, had called a wild surmise.

‘Did you say his name was Heaslop?’

‘Yes, sir, I . . .’

‘Ronald
Heaslop?’ The Secretary nodded. ‘And you say he is here, now, in the ministry?’ The Secretary nodded again, unhappily. ‘Send him in,’ Drona directed. ‘I want to talk to him.’

Ronald Heaslop was duly ushered in, sporting white ducks a shade too large for him, borrowed from a friend while the only suit that had survived the arsonists was receiving the none-too-tender attentions of a dhobi. The suit accentuated the extent to which he seemed to have shrunk, physically and in spirit.

Drona leaned back, his fingertips steepled in a gesture of greeting or reflection, it was not clear which. ‘Mr Heaslop,’ he asked, ‘do you remember me?’

The Englishman looked at him blankly for a moment, then with an effort summoned up a recollection. ‘Why, of course! Devi Hill - you talked to me about Indian spiritualism.’

‘Amazing what adversity will do for the memory cells, isn’t it, Mr Heaslop?’ Drona asked in his most
swadeshi
voice. He now made a special effort to Indianize his diction with the colonials: they had to realize he had both an axe and an accent to grind. ‘While you are being so amazingly accurate, you would not be able to recall a more recent encounter, no?’

Heaslop looked at him again, hesitated, then slowly began to flush red, like a toilet after the Holi celebrations.

‘Shall I give you clue, Mr Heaslop? A visiting card? A request for help “Ghaus Mohammed, purse
lao
”? Or were there several such incidents in your distinguished career in this country that you are knowing so well?’

Heaslop began to speak, but the words would not get past his throat. ‘I . . .

I’m . . .’ he croaked.

‘And now it is your turn to be coming to me in need,’ Drona remarked, with the subtlety of a juggernaut. ‘Now what shall we do, Mr Heaslop? What would
you
do in my place? Shall I, too, summon my Ghaus Mohammed?’

Heaslop remained redly speechless.

Drona pushed a button on his desk. A peon poked his head round the door. ‘Secretary-sahib
ko
bula
do,’
he commanded. Sir Beverley Twitty, kcmg, emerged with a promptness accelerated by apprehension.

‘Ah, Sir Bewerley,’ Drona said expansively. ‘You were putting a certain file before me just now, isn’t it? File of Shri Heaslop? You have it?’

The Secretary handed it over with a set face.

‘Now, let me see.’ Drona examined the paper before him with exaggerated care. ‘What is it you are proposing, Sir Brewerley? “Special one-time grant in partial restitution for losses suffered to private property in performance of service-related functions.” My my, what long sentence, Sir Bewerlily. I must be learning how to write like this soon. Otherwise how I will manage when you and your fellow British are no longer remaining here? What were these losses, Shri Heaslop, that you, er . . . suffered in performance of service-related functions?’

‘They set fire to my house,’ Heaslop replied bitterly. ‘I lost everything I had - or almost everything. Fact is, I was rather lucky to escape with my life at all. I woke up smelling smoke and leapt out of the window. Seconds later the place was gone.’

‘Most unfortunate,’ Drona clucked. ‘So you were asleep in your home at the time this happened?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see. So that was your service-related function - sleep?’

Heaslop looked nonplussed. Sir Beverley, still unsettled by Drona’s waywardness with his name, sprang to his junior’s defence. ‘Well, sir, everyone has to sleep.’

Drona ignored him. ‘There was a riot going on in the city?’

‘Yes,’ replied Heaslop eagerly. ‘Nasty business, it was. Hindus killing Muslims, Muslims butchering Hindus - oh, the Muslims were much worse,’ he added hastily, in deference to Drona’s saffron robes. ‘And probably both sides turning on the British.’

‘A major riot, would you say?’

‘Oh, definitely. Decidedly major.’

‘And you were asleep? A major riot between two sections of His Majesty’s subjects in your district, and you, Mr Heaslop, were sleeping? You surprise me, Shri Heaslop. I would have seen you instead in your official jeep, restoring law and order and sanity to the population.
That
would have been your . . . “service-related function”, would it not?’

‘But -’ Heaslop spluttered. Drona interrupted him ruthlessly.

‘In the circumstances, I am hardly thinking this one-time payment recommended by Sir Brewerly is justified,’ he commented. ‘What is it - 20,000 rupees, is it, Sir Bewarley - 20,000 rupees for being asleep at the wrong time in the wrong place. No, no, Sir Bowerley, goodness gracious, this will not do at all.’ He moved his fingers to the next line on the file. ‘Six months’ salary advance? Six months? But my dear Mr Heaslop, will you be working six months still with this dreadful native government? I am rather thinking not. I am rather thinking that your name will be figuring on the list of those recommended for early termination of service and reversion to the Home cadre.’ Sir Beverley seemed about to speak. Drona added meaningfully, ‘And there may be other names too.’ The Secretary relapsed into silence.

‘Now let us see,’ Drona went on, ‘what else? Exceptional conversion of freight into cash? But I am surprised, Sir Liverbelly. A civil servant recommending exceptions? Never am I hearing before of such a thing. Exceptions in a time of national calamity? I think not.’ He put the file down and wrote across it in bold, decisive letters. ‘I very much regret to be rejecting your recommendation, Sir Lewerbey,’ he said with a pleasant smile. ‘But Mr Heaslop, though I as a minister of the government of India cannot help you, as an individual I am simply overcome with sympathy for your predicament. Sir Weberley, you must start a collection for poor unfortunate Mr Heaslop. Here is my own contribution.’

His hand disappeared into the saffron folds of his garment and produced a fistful of small coins.

Drona got up, leaned over the table and very slowly and deliberately poured them, in a tinkling cascade, into Heaslop’s lap.

No, in fact it didn’t happen that way, Ganapathi. Sometimes I wish it had, that Indians had proved capable of paying the Raj back, if you’ll pardon the metaphor, in its own coin. But I’ve let an old man’s vengefulness get the better of me, and I have been untrue to Drona. Revenge was the one quality conspicuously absent in the way he, and other members of the independent Indian government, treated their former masters.

Forgive me, Ganapathi. What happened was far more prosaic than my fantasy.

‘Mr Heaslop,’ Drona asked, ‘do you remember me?’

‘Why, of course!’ the Englishman responded, after a pause. ‘Devi Hill - you talked to me about Indian spiritualism. I had no idea that you -’

‘No,’ Drona interrupted him mildly. ‘I don’t imagine you did. I believe, though, that you might recall a later encounter.’ He looked directly at Heaslop, who shifted uncomfortably in his chair, but said nothing. ‘Well? Do you?’

‘I. . . I. . .’ Heaslop stammered, his mouth opening soundlessly as it used to during his old exchanges with Sir Richard. Drona’s unflinching gaze seemed to pin him to his seat, nailing his squirming conscience to the truth. ‘Y . . . yes,’ he said at last, miserably. ‘I . . . I say, I’m afraid I behaved most aw . . . awfully. I’m sorry.’