The Solitude of Emperors (24 page)

‘He began his career at the Meham Club?’ I asked in some surprise.

‘No, no.’ Kamath laughed. ‘But he might as well have, his origins were no less lowly than if he had been a marker at the tennis courts. I was just a kid then, but my mother told me that he worked briefly as a salesman in a sari shop in Upper Meham, I think his uncle owned it. Then he got a job in Corporation Bank, as a Class IV employee. He was sacked from there, ran away to Bombay, and that’s where the legend begins.’

Rajan had arrived in Bombay without a paisa to his name, and made his way to Matunga, the stronghold of Tamil immigrants to the city. Obtaining a loan from a moneylender, he paid twenty rupees to the local dada for a four-foot by four-foot space on the pavement from which he hawked handkerchiefs, children’s clothes and cheap trinkets. Within a couple of years he owned three or four handcarts that sold pav bhaji, omelettes and sev puri on Chowpatty Beach and in the mid-town office areas, and after that there was no stopping him. He was soon one of the richest pheriwallahs in Bombay. By the time he was thirty-five, he had made his first crore of rupees, and owned shops and apartments in Matunga, Colaba and Dadar. He became active in the community, built a hall where weddings and festivals could be celebrated, started a school for street kids (‘I’ve heard the one thing he has always regretted is his lack of education. He is supposed to speak six or seven languages fluently—if he’d had the opportunity, he would have earned a triple PhD from Harvard,’ Kamath said enthusiastically, ‘and so he has always tried to help underprivileged kids.’) and generally grew to be a man of influence in the area. ‘Soon enough, the politicians came calling, he became involved in municipal politics, then state politics, and they say he’s very close to the BJP and the Sena.’

‘I know. I’ve heard he was involved in the Bombay riots.’

‘Be careful, my friend, with your allegations,’ Kamath said. ‘If you don’t know anything about Rajan, you shouldn’t be perpetuating the lies people spread about him.’ I was about to retort but held my peace, I still needed to know as much as Kamath could tell me about the man.

‘Why is he leading the agitation against the Meham shrine?’ I asked.

‘Because it is a Hindu temple,’ Kamath snapped irritably. ‘It is time we Hindus showed the minorities their place. They should realize that it is because of us Hindus that they are able to live peacefully and prosper in this country. Do you think if people like us emigrated to a Christian country like Britain or the US and tried to create trouble there, we would be tolerated? No chance, man, we’d be kicked out and told never to come back.’

I was angry now, but my anger was mixed with sadness. What had this country come to, if educated middle-class people like Kamath could harbour such sentiments? Would he think differently if he had read a book like Mr Sorabjee’s during his formative years or was that mere wishful thinking? Controlling my emotions, I said, ‘This is not America, Kamath. The people who are being attacked are not newcomers or immigrants, they have lived here for centuries just like you and I. They put their faith in the constitution, in the law—’

‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘But forget it, yaar, this is too boring, let’s go in and have another drink. It’s nearly time to bring in the New Year.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But you still haven’t told me why Rajan is leading the agitation against the shrine. I’ll need some background for my interview tomorrow.’

‘Well, he’s a man of some influence here, you know. He owns shops and is said to have made a substantial contribution to one of the hospitals. People respect him, and that is why the Kadavul Katchi roped him in to help.’ He began to talk about the political scene in Tamil Nadu, and compare it to the politics of his native Karnataka. Realizing that I was not going to get any more useful information from him, I suggested we go back inside as he had proposed.

We couldn’t get further than the entrance to the bar for the place was now heaving. Everyone in the club had crammed into the room as the midnight hour approached and there wasn’t space for even the waiters to circulate. A group of teenagers began to count down the hour, and at the stroke of midnight a large pile of fireworks stacked on the tennis court was set alight. I could hear the Brigadier’s baritone boom out, ‘
Should auld acquaintance be forgot. And never brought to mind…’

Three score voices joined in, singing lustily and tunelessly. Beside me Kamath was singing too, caught up in the immediacy of the moment. I left him and the other members of the club to their revels and wandered out into the crisp, cold night. The stars were raining down from the heavens and rising up to meet them was the sound of church bells calling the faithful to midnight mass. I walked to the very edge of the property and looked towards the Tower of God but the dark was too absolute for me to see anything.

~

I got home at half past one in the morning. Although it had been a long day, I found it difficult to drop off. There had been so much incident and revelation that had come my way that I found it hard to absorb it all: the very real fears of Menon, the stories about Noah, my meetings with Maya and Rajan. I could feel myself being swept headlong into the lives and affairs of people I had barely met, and there was no question but that I was struggling to maintain my composure and balance. I longed to go to someone for advice, Mr Sorabjee, even my father if it came to that, but I knew that I would be told not to get involved. Yet how could I not? By nature I am level-headed and pragmatic, but when something has been brewing in me for a while I can be impetuous. It was so when I made up my mind to leave K—, and that was why I had decided to try to cover the riot in Bombay. In Meham all the things that could be expected to get me going were present in full measure; if anything they were more pronounced than ever before in my life. I still hadn’t fully emerged from the trauma of the attack on me in Bombay, I was haunted by the destruction I had witnessed in the wake of the riots and explosions, and I was convinced that something like that should never be allowed to take place again. How then could I sit by and watch as Rajan and his cohorts attacked people like Professor Menon and Brother Ahimas? Even as I felt myself getting pulled into the situation, I was aware of how ill-equipped I was to deal with it.

I would have liked to have talked to Noah, but after my meeting with Kamath I wasn’t sure I could bank on someone who appeared to be generally untrustworthy. I would need a much more reliable ally if I was looking to take on Rajan. As I thought about my impending interview with him I grew nervous, for it was clear that I was up against a formidable adversary. Finally, more to distract myself than anything else, I picked up Mr Sorabjee’s manuscript although I suppose I also had the vague notion that I might find some information in it that might come in useful if I was to get into a debate with Rajan the following day. It struck me as I began reading that it was a clear indication of how slender my resources were that all I could come up with for my encounter with Rajan was a book written for teenagers, but I consoled myself with the thought that at least I had Mr Sorabjee speaking into my ear.

MAHATMA GANDHI

Emperor of Truth

Every city, small town, and village (for all I know) in this country has a Mahatma Gandhi Road or Salai or Chowk. His statues are crammed into hundreds of public squares, his visage adorns currency, shop fronts and a variety of consumer brands, and we all religiously take 2 October off to celebrate the day of his birth. But pigeons desecrate his bust with their shit, the streets that bear his name fill with rubbish, and the empty homilies chanted in his name make a mockery of the legacy he bequeathed to our nation.

The Mahatma may be the most famous Indian who ever lived, but although more has been written about him and by him—there are a hundred volumes of his
Collected Works
—his message has been forgotten, and I doubt that anyone under the age of twenty-five really knows what he stood for. So, who was this man, what did he stand for, and why is it important that his message be heeded in these ungodly times?

The other emperors I have written about, Ashoka and Akbar, were men of their time, but their greatness lay in being ahead of their time. However, Gandhi was perhaps the only one who truly transcended time, his message was not only for the age he lived in, but for all time to come. In my eyes, he is the greatest of the three because, unlike the others, he was not born to greatness; he did not inherit an empire, he had no armies to command, treasuries to fund his campaigns or the power of life or death over his subjects. He hadn’t killed another human being or living thing in combat or sport and, importantly, he held no title when he was at his most powerful. Yet millions were ready to be brutally injured or to die at his command, he defeated the strongest empire of his time, and kings and presidents and heads of state came calling on him.

What made him such a force to reckon with? I intend to skim over his great civil, social and political strategies, they have been covered in exhaustive detail elsewhere. Nor do I intend to discuss his eccentricities, or his contentious economic theories and ideas of governance, this is not the forum to debate them. Instead, after sketching the man in the simplest of terms, I would like to let him speak himself on the subject that is at the core of this book.

The Mahatma returned to India from South Africa just before he turned forty-six, having spent almost half his life outside the country, first in England, where he had studied to become a barrister, and then in South Africa, where he had gone to work as a lawyer. The trials and triumphs of his formative years, the temptations of the flesh and spirit, the early attempts to formulate and implement a political strategy, his identification with the poorest of the poor, all these are well known, as are the staggeringly ingenious tactics that brought the British to a standstill: the satyagraha in Champaran in 1917, the agitations in Ahmedabad and Kheda in 1918, against the Rowlatt Act in 1919, the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920-2, the Dandi March of 1930 and the Quit India Movement of 1942.

But it isn’t because of these achievements that he fits into my pantheon of emperors. The reason I include him is because he was unambiguous about the need for India to be a tolerant, non-sectarian, multi-faceted and harmoniously plural society. Writing in his book
Hind Swaraj
he stated, ‘In reality, there are as many religions as there are individuals, but those who are conscious of the spirit of nationality do not interfere with one another’s religion … In no part of the world are one nationality and one religion synonymous terms; nor has it ever been so in India.’

And towards the end of his life he said, ‘Right from childhood I have been taught that in Ramrajya or the kingdom of God no person can be unworthy just because he follows a different religion.’ He repeated this in January 1948, weeks before he was shot and killed by a Hindu fanatic precisely because he held such beliefs: ‘When I was young I never even read the newspapers. I could read English with difficulty and my Gujarati was not satisfactory. I have had the dream ever since then [of] Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians, and Muslims [living] in amity not only in Rajkot but in the whole of India.’ The crucial thing to note about him was that even while he expressed these sentiments for the country and its people he never gave up being a believing Hindu (just as Ashoka continued to be a Buddhist and Akbar remained a Muslim while proclaiming the virtues of secularism) and never thought of India as anything but a deeply religious land. Therein lay his genius—articulating his strategies for winning freedom and maintaining the secularism of the nation through the medium of his faith. If he hadn’t been a pious Hindu, the nation and the world would never have heard of satyagraha (truth force) and ahimsa (nonviolence); believing the latter was Hinduism’s greatest contribution to the world, he used it brilliantly as a weapon. He wrote in
Harijan
, ‘The hardest metal yields to heat. Even so must the hardest heart melt before a sufficiency of the heat of non-violence. And there is no limit to the capacity of non-violence to generate heat.’ And he saw his mission as ‘to convert every Indian whether he is Hindu, Muslim or any other, even Englishmen and finally the world to non-violence for regulating mutual relations whether political, economic, social or religious’.

Even more than ahimsa, Gandhi worshipped the truth. According to his grandson and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi, ‘His truth had four meanings: truth as the Universe’s reality (the sat or satya of Hindu thought), truth about facts, truth to a view or resolve, and the truth of the voice within.’ He wielded truth, love and non-violence as weapons, and showed India and the world how these could be more effective than mere guns or steel. Today, those who would rule us are using lies, hate and violence to achieve their ends. Would that another Gandhi rise amidst us, we have never had more need of someone of his strength and sagacity, a man of God who saw his God for what he truly was: ‘God is Life, Truth, Light. He is Love. He is the Supreme Good.’

~

And there the manuscript ended. It had concluded rather abruptly; I would point that out to Mr Sorabjee, I thought, and switched off the light. Lying in the dark, I worried again about my interview with Rajan tomorrow. I felt I was no match for him, I even thought I should duck it, and then my stubborn nature reasserted itself: I would go through with it, do the best I could. If I was going to help the people who depended on me, if I wanted to be worthy of my father, Mr Sorabjee and my own ambition to be someone who had done something with his life, then there was no way I could give up. The decision taken I began to relax and presently sleep claimed me.

11

The Rioter