The Solitude of Emperors (26 page)

The smile faded, and the impassivity settled back into his eyes.

‘I don’t understand the question.’

‘I think you do, sir. You have not denied your links with right-wing Hindu parties, and you don’t seem unduly perturbed by the barbaric murders of our fellow countrymen who just happen to be Muslim, Christian or Sikh. You claim to be a patriot who is prepared to die for his country, but you do not seem to mind killing your own. That is not being a patriot in my eyes; I would prefer to think of people who think and act like that as traitors. They and anyone who associates with them are the enemy within, not the poor luckless souls they target. You should know by now that people who are trying to lead their meagre lives as best they can have no option but to fight when they are cornered. You know that the bomb blasts in Bombay would never have taken place if the riots hadn’t happened. Don’t you see that if you continue in this vein, you will have a hundred Kashmirs, a million Bombays, everywhere in the country?’

‘So you are a patriot after all. I like your spirit, bhai.’

Rajan’s reaction astonished me. I had expected him to be annoyed with me, or at the very least defensive, but he did not seem in the least put out.

‘We need more young people like you, Vijay bhai, passionate if a little misguided. But you are quite right, if the minorities are targetted, there will in all likelihood be further casualties as and when they fight back. But I don’t agree with you that India will be finished; we will have enough people and resources to rebuild the country once peace is restored. But we must not shrink from our task because the only way to make this nation mighty is by removing things that weaken it. You look surprised, my young friend. Don’t be. I will prove to you why it is possible to be a patriot and one who craves a strong Hindu nation at one and the same time. But first put away your notebook and pen because I know who you are and what you are doing here. You do not work for the
Times of India
, you are employed by
The Indian Secularist.
I know of Mr Sorabjee, I think he’s a good man, but he will eventually pass on without having achieved any measure of success. He and people like him are largely irrelevant in today’s India. They had a small role in leading the country’s battle for independence, but today’s challenges are different. The country is poised for greatness, and the only way it will achieve this is if we are resolute and move forward in a united fashion. And that will only happen if the majority leads the way; no nation is strong that has its people pulling in all different directions. If the majority community is powerful and determined, the minorities will automatically fall into line, and then we can all coexist peacefully.’

‘That is a complete fantasy, sir. No country which targets its own people has ever prospered, and you need only to look to history to see how wrong you are. Most fundamentalist regimes have fallen sooner or later, after creating fear and mistrust, and ruining their countries—’

‘Why look to history alone, bhai, shouldn’t we look at our present situation as well? We have spent so long pandering to the minorities that we have neglected the majority community; it has been weakened, and that is why we don’t rule the world.’

I was about to remonstrate but he gestured to indicate that I wasn’t to interrupt him just yet. ‘Let me tell you a story, Vijay bhai, about an ordinary man, an inoffensive, hard-working man, the sort of person we will need to support and strengthen if we are to secure the future of this country. A man who went about his business for thirty-three years without saying an unkind word about or to anyone, who followed the dictates of his caste and religion faithfully, who was never late for work, who fulfilled all his duties as a householder. A good man, you might say, slightly dull but a man you would want at your back if you had to fight your way out of trouble. He must have had hopes and dreams when he was young—all of us, no matter how wretched our place on earth, can dream if only for a few precious moments.

‘This man’s dream ended when he was eighteen and his father died. He was suddenly responsible, as the eldest son, for seven siblings and his widowed mother. To be an eldest son is in many ways the worst possible thing that can happen to you in a country like ours. Vijay bhai, are you an eldest son? Yes, I can tell you are, I am one too, and I am sure you know exactly what I mean when I say it is a terrible thing to be an eldest son. Everyone bemoans the plight of women in our country, and I admit that the lot of women is deplorable, but I mean something different when I talk of how hard it is to be a first-born boy. I’m sure you understand, Vijay bhai, I can see you nodding, because I’m talking about the weight of expectations placed on you by your parents, your family. All through your childhood and youth you have been spoiled and exalted, even if you come from a poverty-stricken background, and then suddenly you’re an adult, and you are magically expected to turn into a mighty banyan tree under which your family can shelter for generations to come. It doesn’t happen that way, does it now? Think then of the frustration and self-loathing that it engenders in those who are placed in such a situation. But they are the lucky ones, Vijay bhai, the ones who can afford to indulge in self-loathing and whine about their bad karma. There are others who simply have to lock up their dreams in a cheap trunk and quietly get on with the business of surviving and providing for their families, with no accolades or praise or gratitude. That is what the man in my story had to do, Vijay bhai. He may have been a moderately bright student, or a dullard or a genius, no one ever knew, but I was told once that his only dream had been to earn a college degree—it was a badge of honour for men of his caste—but that didn’t happen because he had to go to work the day after his father was cremated. I suppose he was granted some small measure of luck, in that he found a job, a very small job, in a mill in Coimbatore, first as a storekeeper, then for thirty-two years as a clerk in the proprietor’s office. It was a thankless job, I’m sure, but it was a job his entire family was grateful for.

‘I have said that he was a deeply devout man, but I haven’t told you just how devout he was. Every day he would bathe early in the morning, before anyone else in the house had even woken up, and bare-chested in his wet dhoti he would perform his devotions to Lord Shiva in a corner of his tiny house that had been converted into a puja room. He would stand motionless, chanting his prayers. He was a frail man and it would have broken your heart to see his concave, almost hairless chest, everything about him was so thin and weak, yet he was determined to serve his Lord, his family. He was a man who did his dharma no matter what.

‘One day, three weeks before he was due to complete his thirty-third year with the mill, he was called into the proprietor’s office and told that he should not come to work the next day. He thought there was some festive occasion or perhaps a death in the proprietor’s family, as a result of which the mill would be closed for the day. He didn’t ask any questions, that was not his nature; he did what was asked of him, he never questioned anything, never, and I think that was his undoing. As he was leaving, the proprietor, a fat man who paraded around in a gold-bordered veshti and angavastram with rings on every finger, told him to pick up that week’s wages from the payroll office. A festival then, he thought. But when he met the accountant, he was told that the mill was being sold; it had been in the red for years and was now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

‘I wish he had shouted then, showed some vestige of manliness, stormed into the owner’s office, spat in his face, asked him whether all that he was worth after thirty-three years of service—sorry, thirty-two years, eleven months and a week of service—was eighty-two rupees, one week’s wages. Even the mill workers were better off, the union managed to get them some sort of settlement, but he was white-collar, a clerk, he had always been proud of that, and it gave him no protection when it mattered. When he returned to his house that day, he took his eldest son aside and told him that should anything happen to him, it was his dharma to look after the family, and most important to repay the seventy thousand rupees he still owed to moneylenders and various family members, money he had borrowed for the dowry and marriage expenses of his daughters. He had never been a demonstrative man, and so, even in his moment of crisis, he didn’t break down or show any form of emotion that might have been construed as a cry for help.

‘For the next two years his family watched as his dignity was eroded day by day, by the creditors who came calling, the various small-time merchants and shopkeepers who treated him like dirt just because they paid him a pittance to do their accounts for them, the members of the extended family who cut him off. He put up with it all, he would do whatever was necessary to provide for his family. He wouldn’t let his boys stop their schooling, he was determined that they should have the education he never had, and even though there was no money, the minimal fees were paid at the government school the boys attended, and textbooks were bought. His daily devotion continued, his faith in his Lord did not diminish one bit.

‘But when a man is down on his luck, nobody, not even God, has much time to spare for him. The daily jobs began to peter out and finally there wasn’t enough money to buy textbooks for the new school year. When the boys stopped going to school and the father finally had no work to do, their two-room house in a street where the open gutters flowed with shit grew too small for them all to be together. The boys began to roam the streets. The younger one, who was eleven, began to run with a gang of pickpockets and street urchins, but the older one tried to find work, so that at least some money found its way home. But it was never enough, and finally the man who owned the miserable house told them that if they didn’t pay the rent, they would have to leave. He was a compassionate man and they were given a month to find the money. But of course there was no miracle forthcoming, although the man’s faith in his Lord was unwavering. He had reached a stage now where I think he might even have taken a job as a sweeper or scavenger, which as you know would have been worse than death for someone of his caste, but even there the competition was too intense. So he did the only thing he could do—he died. There would be one less mouth to feed, and his wife could throw herself on the mercy of her relatives.

‘He was only fifty-three when his heart gave out on him. As he was washed and readied for cremation, his eldest boy, now nineteen, found that his father’s malnourished body was so light he could lift it without any effort whatsoever. Many years later, his mother told him that in the desperate years to keep the boys in school his father had reduced his intake of food to one small bowl of kanji a day.’

Mansukhani came up in his ponderous, flat-footed way, and told Rajan that it was time to go to his next meeting, but he was waved away.

‘I hope I’m not boring you, Vijay bhai. Let me assure you there is a point to this story and one that should answer some of your questions about me and why I do what I do.’ His mesmerizing eyes were fixed on me, there was no sign of any emotion on his face, and it wasn’t as though he were asking my permission to tell the story; it was what he intended to do, and there was no doubt in his mind that I would listen for as long as he wished.

‘It is not an uncommon story and not even an especially grim one. There are millions of stories that are worse in this country of ours—our hundreds of millions of Gods are greedy for sacrificial victims—but this story had a very powerful impact on me because, as must have become obvious by now, that man was my father. I was the nineteen-year-old boy who lit his pyre, and every decision I have taken in my life has been informed by his struggle to do his dharma, to be unwavering in his devotion to his Lord.’

‘In what way?’ I asked. ‘I can understand your determination to succeed, but I do not understand your hatred of Muslims and Christians, your condoning of the deaths of thousands at the hands of bloodthirsty mobs, the spreading of hatred and divisiveness among the various communities.’

‘I am not a criminal or a murderer,’ he said, ‘and I do not condone the killing of anybody, but I did applaud when that so-called masjid was torn down. I support every movement to recover the lost glories of Hinduism in Hindustan. And I’ll tell you how that relates to my father. In him I saw the silent, voiceless, powerless face of the majority, the 800 million who have silently borne the depredations of the invading Muslims and Christians, and I will tell you right now that if he had been alive in December 1992 my father would have rejoiced in the breaking of the structure. Do you know why? I don’t think he had anything against Muslims or Christians beyond the prejudices and conditioning of his generation. No, he would have rejoiced because he would have participated vicariously in the victory of the God he had served all his life. That is the power we are about to unleash, the energy of the majority, the hundreds of millions without dreams or any means of rising above their dismal lives. And can you imagine the effect that torrent of energy will have on this country’s fortunes? We could be the greatest superpower the world has ever known—’

‘Or you could be burnt to a cinder. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see the trail of destruction that has ensued from the moment that mosque was brought down? You talk, Mr Rajan, of harnessing the power of the majority, but if you do that by trying to destroy millions of your countrymen, you will bring this country to its knees. You will not have Ram Rajya, you will have a war that lasts a thousand years instead.’

I was shaking by now. The spell Rajan had cast on me as he told me the story of his early years was broken, and I was enraged by what this man and others like him were trying to do. Mansukhani hurried up, but Rajan himself, cool and impassive as ever, gestured to his friend that he was all right.

‘Calm yourself, Vijay bhai, it is pointless to get emotional; we are only talking among ourselves as friends.’

I fought to control my anger. I had come here with a purpose, and if I was going to have any chance of finding out his intentions regarding the shrine I would have to humour him, at least for a while.