The Great Indian Novel (59 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duhshasan moved forward to execute the command.

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

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

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

The Pathan grinned evilly, and reached for her blouse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yudhishtir smiled in vindication.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I woke up my ambivalence had gone.

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

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

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

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

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