The Solitude of Emperors (29 page)

~

The impending storm had hastened the onset of darkness, and by the time I was on the road great sweeps of night were suspended from the sky, tinctured by the last sun. Everywhere the landscape glowed red, and not for the first time I was struck by the beauty of the place. But it was a beauty that held no charm for me, as I wondered what the coming days would bring. I had done everything I could to help except make a round of the authorities, which I would do tomorrow. Once that was done, all I could do was hope that people like the Brigadier and Noah were right and that this place would never be a setting for sectarian violence.

As I neared the cemetery I was startled to hear a loud stream of abuse emanating from within it. I broke into a run, Kamath’s stories about Noah’s penchant for getting into fights running through my head. I hoped I would be of some use if he was indeed in a scuffle, I remembered how useless I had been when the rioters had set upon me in Bombay.

When I entered the cemetery I was confronted by an extraordinary sight. The last light of the day illuminated a lone tree before which Noah stood, holding a large hammer. There was no one else about, and the abuse I heard coming from Noah, was, as far as I could tell, directed at the tree. Of medium height, it had slender, wand-like branches that grew in great profusion at the base of the trunk, gradually tapering off towards the crown. Pale green flowers spotted the foliage and in the dim light it seemed the tree was wreathed in green fire. Even as I watched, Noah placed a large nail against its trunk and swung the hammer violently, pounding it deep into the bark, cursing viciously all the while. Had he gone completely mad? What had the tree done to offend him?

Nervously I said, ‘Everything all right, Noah?’

Noah broke off in mid-curse and said, ‘Oh hello, Vijay, I didn’t think you were coming.’

The transition from seeming rage to normality was so instantaneous and total that I began to doubt his sanity all the more.

‘Sure you’re OK?’ I said uncertainly.

He laughed. ‘Oh this. Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you, da, but I was trying a trick an old gardener once taught me. There’s something wrong with this avocado tree. Year after year it flowers on schedule, birds and insects visit it so it’s being pollinated all right, but for some reason it never fruits. The chap I mentioned this to told me that sometimes you needed to give a tree or a plant a little push to get it moving in the right direction. Scare it a bit, and you’ll see the results, he said. I’ve tried it for a couple of years now’—I looked to where he was pointing and saw that the trunk of the tree was pierced by over a dozen evil-looking nails—‘but to no avail. Doesn’t cost me a thing to persist, though… So how did club night go?’

For a moment I didn’t know what he was talking about—my visit to the club seemed already to belong to the distant past—and then all at once Maya’s beautiful face came to me. I wondered if I should tell him that I had met her but decided against it. If his sources had told him she was here, as I was convinced they had, then the information would be superfluous, otherwise it would just create the sort of distraction that I was anxious to avoid. For similar reasons I decided against bringing up any of Kamath’s revelations. From this point onward my main interest in Noah was as an ally, no matter how shaky, until the threat of Rajan was seen off.

‘Hey, what are you thinking about? Did you meet a girl?’ he asked, amusement in his voice. But I was in no mood for banter, so I said abruptly, ‘Your note?’

‘Oh, that. Well, I thought you would be interested to know you were right. I’ve heard from two independent sources that Rajan is planning to do something on the saint’s Feast Day, only there are some aspects of his plan that don’t make any sense at all.’

He had gone to Ooty that morning, he said, and while he was there he’d met an old acquaintance, a stringer for a Madras newspaper, who told him that he had received a call from Mansukhani, telling him to be present outside the shrine at noon on Feast Day, when there would be a big demonstration and Rajan would have a major announcement to make.

‘I don’t know why he bothered with all that eyewash about Republic Day…’ I said.

‘Yes, it’s curious that he has begun to broadcast his plans, but it gets even more intriguing. One of my friends at Meham police station told me that Rajan arrived at the station and was closeted with Shanmugam, the inspector, for over an hour. When he left, my friend learned—you know how it’s impossible to keep things secret in a small-town police station—that Rajan had given the inspector one lakh in cash for himself, and another lakh to be shared between the policemen in the station; to further sweeten the bribe he promised to get the inspector’s son into Presidency College. But here’s where it gets really bizarre: the only thing he wanted the inspector to do was what he would have done anyway if he wasn’t an ivory-skulled, corrupt little prick.’

‘Don’t seem to like the inspector much, do you?’ I said.

‘Oh, I guess he’s no better or worse than anyone else, it’s just that he arrested an old friend of mine—remember I told you about Arumugam, the flower thief—just because he had to fill some arrest quota for the month. Sure, Arumugam is a repeat offender, but he’s so old now the only thing he could possibly steal is milk from his goat.’

Lies again, I thought. But I managed to control myself with the thought that in the light of the greater threat that loomed, Noah could be a liar, a thief, none of it mattered, I couldn’t afford to lose him…

‘So here’s the really weird thing,’ Noah was saying. ‘Rajan wanted Shanmugam to arrest him as soon as the demonstration got under way, even rough him up a little. I would have thought he’d want to evade arrest until he had breached the shrine.’

‘True,’ I said. ‘You can see why he’d want to be beaten up or arrested, he’d become an instant martyr to the fundamentalist cause, but what good would that do if the shrine was left undisturbed? No, we’re missing something. Perhaps we should go and see the inspector ourselves.’

‘I doubt he’d tell us what Rajan was planning,’ Noah responded, ‘even if he knew, and I doubt he knows very much.’

‘Then the only thing we can do is make sure security around the shrine is so tight that not even a cockroach can get in.’

‘The police here certainly don’t have enough manpower to achieve that, even if they were willing; only the army could do that.’

‘So let’s get the army,’ I said. ‘The Brigadier was telling me earlier today that for the army to get involved in civilian law and order, the head of the district administration would need to speak to the General in Madras—’

‘And you’re going to get all these high-powered people to jump to do your bidding on the basis of your piddling little suspicions? Come on, be realistic, da.’

‘So would you rather do nothing?’ I said irritably.

‘There might be nothing we need to do. Rajan will have his little demonstration, get arrested, become a hero to the fundoos; the shrine will continue to flourish, Meham will revert to its sleepy everyday state, you will go back to Bombay, get laid, lose your youthful idealism, and life will go on…’

‘But what if I’m right? You know Rajan, you know the man is not just talk. He wants to do this, not just for the sake of his brand of politics, but to settle a personal score.’

‘You mean the tamasha at the bank?’

I nodded and said, ‘The Brigadier didn’t think the matter was so serious that it would have stayed with him all these years.’

‘The Brigadier is an old fool with his head stuck so far up his arse that if it went any deeper he could see through his mouth. No, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and what’s more, he didn’t see what I did. That manager was a bastard, a conniving, slimy, casteist son of a bitch, even though he was some sort of Pentecostalist. He was one of the congregation that prayed ineffectually over my mum and I saw more of him than I liked at one time. Anyway, he wanted to get one of his jati into the bank, so he threw this poor bugger out, had him charged at the police station with theft. I think he might even have had to serve a little time before he disappeared to Bombay, but the whole thing stank, da, and when you’re nineteen, twenty, every humiliation, every setback cuts deeper than anything that can happen to you in later life. I have no doubt Rajan remembers every minute of his shame as clearly as if it had happened to him yesterday. I could tell you what happened to me at that age without forgetting a single detail. If he could have taken it out on that bank manager, I’m sure he would have, except the fucker died of a heart attack about ten years ago. But the man was a great supporter of the shrine, made donations to it and prayed there all the time, hoping his sins would wash off, no doubt, so I think Rajan would get a lot of satisfaction if he did decide to take it over.’

‘There, you’ve said it yourself,’ I said quickly.

‘I said
if
,’ he said. ‘All I think he’s going to do is give everyone a good scare… and that will be that.’

‘And if you are wrong, would you want any harm to come to Brother Ahimas, the professor, all those inoffensive pilgrims?’

‘Listen, da, don’t drag me into it, OK.’

‘Even if your friends are affected…’

‘You’re not listening to me, Vijay.’

Oh, but I am, I thought to myself. I am listening to you and I wonder why you are determined not to get involved, no matter what. Is it because of something in your past that you haven’t told me, or is it because this is the way you are? I thought about everything that he had said, everything that others had told me about him, and I still couldn’t get an accurate fix on him. What is the key to your mystery, Noah? I wondered, but this was hardly the time to probe, so I changed tack.

‘Look, if you don’t want to get involved directly, maybe you could just help me with a couple of things…’

Mr Khanna’s driver still hadn’t returned, and I didn’t want to be at the mercy of local taxi drivers as I crisscrossed the district, especially now there wasn’t much time left. It would be good to have a local around, not only to help me get to the various officials I wanted to meet, but to lend weight to my arguments should that become necessary. Noah may not have been the perfect back-up but he was the only one I had. With these thoughts running through my head, I said to him, ‘You’re from here. I promised Menon I would call on the Collector and the inspector, and it would be great if you could accompany me to see them.’

‘What are you going to tell these people? That you suspect Rajan is about to do all sorts of awful things? Don’t forget he’s a bit of a hero in this town. And you don’t want me with you, da; they will throw you out if they see my face.’

‘Look, Noah, I’m a stranger here and we don’t have much time. If you don’t want to come in with me that’s OK, but at least take me to their offices. You know your way around.’

‘And what are you going to say to them that the Brigadier hasn’t already said? Just trot out your suspicious? Don’t forget nothing has actually happened so far besides that demonstration that fizzled out.’

‘That’s why the Rajans of the world always win—we wring our hands once something happens, we don’t do anything beforehand. You saw all the pious proclamations after the Babri Masjid was destroyed. What if people had actually done something to prevent it from being destroyed?’

‘Hey, you’re the hero.’

‘Noah, all I’m asking for is one day of your time, nothing more…’

There was a long pause, and then he said, ‘You’re one stubborn fucker, I’ll give you that. I’ve got some work planned for tomorrow, so we’ll go the day after, there’s enough time. But let’s agree here and now that that will be the end of it. I will take you to see these guys, nothing more.’

As I was leaving I pointed to the threatening sky and asked if he thought the weather might come to the rescue. He laughed and said, ‘Don’t bank on it. An acquaintance of mine, a retired weatherman who lives nearby, once said to me that you can always rely on the weather to let you down, it’s the only thing that’s more unreliable than humankind.’

~

I am no great believer in karma or predestination, shaped as I was in my early years by a father who was for the most part a rationalist and an empiricist. But as I think back to my time in Meham, I wonder if I had any choice at all in the way events unfolded. Take something as simple as my decision to read Mr Sorabjee’s manuscript once more that evening. Why did I decide to do that? I had already read it once, and although I wanted to read it again in one go, to have a better sense of its narrative flow, I can’t fully explain why I decided to reread it that very evening. I’m sure I could have found something else to read in Mr Khanna’s study to pass the time if I had looked hard enough (he did not own a television, and the records that were stacked next to the old-fashioned Philips radiogram did not interest me) but after a cursory glance at the bookshelves, I picked up the envelope in which I had deposited Mr Sorabjee’s manuscript, extracted the pages and began reading. When I came to the end of the chapter on Gandhi, I found I had missed something on my first pass—a concluding chapter that gave its name to the book and had somehow got stuck in the envelope.

THE SOLITUDE OF EMPERORS

We do not know what to do with one of our most precious resources, solitude, and so we fill it with clutter. Perhaps this is not entirely our fault, for it is within our deepest solitude that the bogeys that we are otherwise able to ignore and the cold fires of madness lurk. Solitude, true solitude, can drive us insane, so sensibly we turn our backs on it and pursue the superficial concerns of our daily lives. And perhaps that is how life is meant to be for the vast mass of us, the followers and wannabes who will never be. Perhaps that is what the one who created us proposed all along, it was never his intention that every one of us would amount to something or make a difference, if that were so it would disrupt the natural order of things, which would be intolerable. But those who are driven enough or bold enough or mad enough or exalted enough to look without flinching into the emptiness within will find in it insights vouchsafed only to the select few.