The Great Indian Novel (37 page)

Drona’s face lightened, as if that had been what he was waiting to hear. ‘I am not,’ he responded equably. ‘That meeting taught me a great deal, Mr Heaslop. In fact, you could almost say that that is why I am here today.’ He smiled, and there was no rancour in his voice. ‘So you see, I am really quite grateful to you.’ He turned the pages of the file before him and looked up from them to the speechless Englishman. ‘I am most distressed to read of your misfortunes, Mr Heaslop. Of course I shall approve the recommendations submitted by Sir Beverley. With one addition.’ He paused, seeking the right paragraph in the dossier before him. ‘The Secretary-sahib has suggested that - where is it now? - “Consideration be given”, that’s right, consideration be given to your transfer to New Delhi, in the circumstances, pending any decision you might wish to make about your future career.’ Drona looked up from the file inquiringly.

‘Yes,’ Heaslop nodded, since confirmation seemed to be called for. ‘It would help me, and I don’t really want to go back to the district, after all. . . all that’s happened.’ He stopped unhappily, aware of the awkwardness of his situation, made no more bearable by the solicitousness of the saffron-robed figure across the desk.

‘I see,’ Drona said. ‘In that case, I will give consideration immediately.’ He wrote on the file as he spoke. ‘You shall be transferred to New Delhi with immediate effect, Mr Heaslop.’ His eyes briefly met those of the Englishman, who was reddening with embarrassment and gratitude. ‘To my department, in fact. As long as you wish to remain in the service of this government, you are welcome here. I believe we shall work very well together.’

Heaslop rose, stretched out his hand, and found the minister’s palms folded in a polite but correct
namaste.
Clumsily, he retracted his own and mirrored the gesture. There seemed to be nothing else to say.

And through this delightful era, what, you may well ask, of the Viscountess Drewpad? Till Drewpad’s final exit she continued to come to my blind son’s arms. There were many opportunities for the relationship to . . . er, fructify, as her husband prepared for the ceremonial handover of his symbolic position, now no longer that of Viceroy but Governor-General, to his Indian successor, the scarred and decrepit but undoubtedly symbolic Ved Vyas. (Who held it, I might add, Ganapathi, for that brief interregnum between Drewpad’s departure and the proclamation of the Indian Republic, when the country was a dominion under an appointed Indian Governor-General. But I had not cut many inaugural ribbons or cracked many coconuts against the hulls of ships when I had to make way, in turn, for an elected President. They say every dog has its day, Ganapathi, but for this terrier twilight came before tea-time.)

But I am getting away from Georgina Drewpad. She came, as I was telling you, to Dhritarashtra, and she came back even after her official position had elapsed. Some exits, Ganapathi, are simply to permit a different sort of entrance. Lady Drewpad had waved a composed official farewell by her husband’s side from the steps of a BOAC Constellation as her husband departed into the relative obscurity of uniformed nepotism. But she came back soon enough, Ganapathi, and often enough, the nation’s unofficial First Tourist, slipping quietly into the country on unpublicized visits to Priya Duryodhani’s widower father.

Nature and history would not be denied. Soon after one of those journeys she returned much earlier than expected. This time she stayed incognito, clad in billowing caftans and noticeably preferring the curtained indoors, for longer than she had ever done before. At last, on 26 January 1950, as the Constitution of the new Republic of India was solemnly promulgated by its founding fathers, Georgina Drewpad, her face awash with tears, delivered herself of a squalling, premature baby.

The infant girl, bearing the indeterminate pink-and-brown colouring of her mixed parentage, a tiny frail creature with strong lungs, used frequently and well was immediately handed over to the faithful low-caste servant who had served Dhritarashtra and his companion throughout this difficult period. She was to be adopted; neither of her natural parents could openly acknowledge the intimacy that had produced her.

The baby was called Draupadi, a subtle Indianization of her mother’s family name, and she took the uncouth patronymic of her adoptive father, Mokrasi. Draupadi Mokrasi. Remember the name well, Ganapathi. You will see a lot more of this young lady as she grows up in independent India.

History, Ganapathi - indeed the world, the universe, all human life, and so, too, every institution under which we live - is in a constant state of evolution. The world and everything in it is being created and re-created even as I speak, each hour, each day, each week, going through the unending process of birth and rebirth which has made us all. India has been born and reborn scores of times, and it will be reborn again. India is for ever; and India is forever being made.

The India of which Dhritarashtra assumed the leadership on 15 August 1947 had just been through a cathartic process of regeneration, another stage in this endless cycle. But you must not think, Ganapathi, that the trauma of Partition represented a disruption of this constant process, a sidestep away from a flowing dance of creation and evolution. On the contrary, it was a part of it, for the world is not made by a tranquillizing wave of smoothly predictable occurrences but by sudden events, unexpected happenings, dramas, crises, accidents, emergencies. This is as true of you or me as of Hastinapur, of India, of the world, of the cosmos. We are all in a state of continual disturbance, all stumbling and tripping and running and floating along from crisis to crisis. And in the process, we are all making something of ourselves, building a life, a character, a tradition that emerges from and sustains us in each succeeding crisis. This is our dharma.

Throughout this unpredictable and often painful process of self-renewal, despite the abrupt stops and starts of the cosmic cycle, the forces of destiny remain unshaken in their purpose. They are never thwarted by the jolting and jarring of history’s chariots. The vehicles of human politics seem to run off course, but the site of the accident turns out to have been the intended destination. The hopes and plans of millions seem to have been betrayed, but the calamity turns out to have been ordained all along. That is how a nation’s regeneration proceeds, Ganapathi, with several bangs to every whimper.

This constant rebirth is never a simple matter of the future slipping bodily from the open womb of history. Instead there is rape, and violence, and a struggle to emerge or to remain, until circumstances bloodily push tomorrow through the parted, heaving legs of today.

So it was in our story: Gangaji died, his assassin Shikhandin was hanged, Karnistan was hacked off the stooped shoulders of India, Dhritarashtra attained the prime ministry of a land racked with chaos and carnage, and out of this all, Draupadi Mokrasi was born, cried and, not without struggle, grew up - into an admirable, beautiful, complicated, desirable (I could do this for another twenty-two letters of the alphabet, Ganapathi, but I won’t) creature whose life gives meaning to the rest of our story.

The India of those early years of Independence was a state of continual ferment. It was constantly being rethought, reformed, reshaped. Everything was open to discussion: the country’s borders, its internal organization, its official languages, the permissible limits of its politics, its orientation to the outside world.

One of the first issues confronting the new government was the future of the ‘princely states’ - the hundreds of fiefdoms and kingdoms that had nominally remained outside British rule, as had Hastinapur before Gangaji incurred the Raj’s wrath. Even before the British left they had made it clear to the nawabs and maharajas of these principalities that they were obliged to accede either to India or to Karnistan. Most made their choice according to the dictates of geography and common sense, but one or two of the bigger states dragged their constitutional feet in the hope that they might be able to hold out for their own independence. One of these was the large, scenically beautiful and chronically underdeveloped northern state of Manimir.

Manimir, with its verdant valley and its snowy mountain peaks, had been linked politically to the rest of India since the sixth century AD. Its Maharaja, in fact, traced his descent from the Rajput warrior-kings of western India, though this was elaborated in the officially inspired myth to imply a higher ancestry, both geographically and spiritually (the Maharaja numbered the sun and the god Shiva amongst his progenitors, and Shiva, at least, made his celestial home on the top of Mount Kailash in the Himalayan ranges to the north of Manimir). Whatever his genealogy, though, Maharaja Vyabhichar Singh was a soft-jowled hedonist, with pudgy hands and a taste for Caucasian carnality that had already dragged him at least once through the British courts. (There the Indian Office had succeeded in having him referred to throughout as ‘Mr Z’, an expedient which, far from concealing his identity, only presented his numerous detractors with another epithet of abuse.)

While princes to the south of him, with varying degrees of good grace, merged their possessions into the Indian Union and accepted ambassadorships and seats in Parliament as revised symbols of contemporary status, Vyabhichar Singh obstinately refused to cede either throne or title. He declared himself to be independent, a condition no other nation recognized, and sent ‘ambassadors’ to India and to Karnistan, who were ostentatiously ignored by all except the printers of visiting cards.

All this might have been mildly amusing, were it not for two inconvenient facts about Manimir. One, it was sandwiched between the border of what remained of India and what had emerged from Mr Nichols’ tender mercies as the new state of Karnistan. Two, its population was overwhelmingly Muslim, while the religion of the Maharaja, inasmuch as sybaritism did not qualify as one, was Hinduism.

‘We can’t let that concupiscent coot get away with this much longer,’ Mohammed Rafi, his aristocratic lip curling, said with feeling in the Prime Minister’s study. ‘The longer that fool Vyabhichar Singh takes to make up his mind, the more time Karna and his minions have to stir up communal feeling for the state’s accession to Karnistan. And,’ he added, ‘we can’t afford to lose Manimir.’

The ‘we’ was, let’s be frank, as much a personal pronoun as a patriotic one: the greater the number of his co-religionists on Karna’s side of the population ledger, the lower the credibility and influence in India of party President Rafi and his fellow Kaurava Muslims. Already it was clear that they were doing none too well from the haemorrhaging exchange of populations that was taking place in the wake of Partition, particularly on the western border. But even politicians have principles, and Rafi’s concerns about Manimir were more than mere electoral mathematics. The future of India as a secular nation depended on its ability to integrate a Muslim-majority state successfully, to nail Karna’s lie that India’s Muslims needed a country of their own in order to breathe free and flourish.

‘With respect,’ said a quiet voice. ‘I believe the Maharaja thinks he
has
made up his mind.’ Vidur’s tone was the epitome of the senior civil service: his voice contained an omniscient reserve, as if concerned that the knowledge it carried might be frightened away by too dramatic an octave. ‘He wishes to remain Independent in perpetuity. Of course, he is not being very realistic.’

‘He is being a damned fool,’ Dhritarashtra said. ‘What’s worse, of course, is that for years we have supported the Manimir National Congress of Sheikh Azharuddin against Mr Z’s undemocratic rule, and now the Sheikh is likely to find his support being cut from under his feet by the Muslim fanatics clamouring for merger with Islamic Karnistan. What can we do, Vidur?’

Not a great deal, I’m afraid, Prime Minister.’ The Principal Secretary for Integration, as he now was, was always scrupulously correct in official meetings with his half-brother. ‘As you know, in the course of my missions to most of the wavering princes in 1947 I pointed out rather forcefully, with Lord Drewpad’s acquiescence, the unviability of the independence option to those who were contemplating it. In most cases the palace guard was the only armed force in these princely states, arid they could easily have been overwhelmed by a small detachment from the nearest police-station in British India, so the princes did not require much persuasion. In Manimir, regrettably, though the palace guard is even more effete and less effective than most, the Maharaja did not possess enough, ah, good sense to make the decision he should have.’