The Solitude of Emperors (3 page)

I could hear Srinivas talking to his mother inside the house. A short while later, he came out bearing two plates on which there were squares of the halva the town was famous for, a deep honey colour and glistening with ghee. He handed me a plate, sat down, said the coffee wouldn’t be long, and indicated that I should begin eating. I had just taken my first bite when the coffee arrived. Srinivas’s mother didn’t come out to the veranda, but held out a small round stainless steel tray to her son. He took the two glasses of coffee and before I could get up and greet his mother she had vanished into the depths of the house. Srinivas had handed me my glass, taken his own, and begun blowing noisily on it preparatory to taking a first sip, when I was struck by something about the scene. In any other context I might have set aside what I was witnessing with a shrug, classifying it as yet another aspect of K— that displeased me but not something to make much of. But coming as it did on top of my despondency over my marks, that afternoon in Srinivas’s house was what finally made me determined to leave town, just as soon as I could. And it was all over a plate and a glass, it is often on such small things that lives turn.

I was about to drink my coffee when I noticed how pretty the glass was. It was obviously expensive, with a pretty yellow pattern scrolling around the top half, its sides free of the air bubbles that were common in the cheaper glassware hawked in the bazaar. The plate, which was also made of glass, had the same elaborate texture and scrollwork in yellow, and had I been a visiting professor from Germany, say, here to do research into the musical pillars of the Shiva temple, I might have felt honoured by the fact that my hostess was offering me my coffee and snacks in expensive, virtually new glass crockery while her son made do with a stainless steel tumbler and plate. But I was from K— and I knew exactly what my plate and glass signified—that I was not clean or non-polluting enough to eat and drink from the same crockery that members of the household used. Because I was sort of a Brahmin and a friend of her son, Srinivas’s mother had served me with the glassware I was using, but its fate would be the same as that of anything used by a person who didn’t belong to their religion or their exact caste and sub-caste—it would be gingerly taken to a separate shelf in the kitchen, where it would await the ministrations of a servant who would clean it and put it back in its segregated shelf until it was drafted into use again when the next unclean visitor arrived.

In my rage and humiliation it was all I could do to restrain myself from hurling the plate to the floor. Gently setting it and my glass aside on the small table between our chairs, I rose and left Srinivas’s home without saying goodbye. He knew precisely why I was leaving, and made no move to stop me, nor did he offer me an apology; this was the way things were and you either accepted them or walked away if you could.

I wandered aimlessly for a while, trying to get a grip on myself before I went home. Through my anger I wondered at the fortitude of my parents. What must they have had to put up with, how had they coped with the incivility and insults that would almost certainly have been their lot when they had arrived in K— a couple of decades earlier? Presently I found myself beside a large rectangular tank that abutted the temple. Although it was intended principally for devotees, it was also used by the poor people in town, and the boys from the college would often come here to gawk at the younger prettier women as they bathed fully swathed in their saris. It wasn’t much, but the sight of taut firm buttocks and nipples outlined against thin wet cloth haunted the dreams of K—’s youth, and on certain days it was hard to find standing room on the steps of the tank. It was deserted this evening except for a couple of male devotees who were bathing a little distance away—standing knee deep in the water stripped down to their sacred threads and dhotis, scooping the green scummy water over themselves. But the bathers weren’t what held my attention, it was the fish which lived in the tank and were fed iddlis by the devout. I had once observed a young woman, barely out of her teens, feeding the fish, her hands cupped and delicate as conch shells, flowing out and over the water with the grace of a classical dancer and I had been entranced. But today the pale and monstrously bloated fish revolted me as they writhed like snakes in the opaque water, between the legs of the bathers, over and around themselves, coiling and uncoiling in a gelid white mass. They should have been gliding through some fast-flowing river, I thought, instead of circling sluggishly within the confines of the tank. They seemed to symbolize everything that was wrong with K—.

~

I spent all of the next year studying with a vengeance, and narrowly missed a first. It was a better result than I might otherwise have hoped for but who was going to hire someone with a second-class degree in economics? Nevertheless, I began frantically applying to every company I could think of. I wasn’t discriminating in the least—anyone who advertised for candidates with an undergraduate degree received an application from me, along with perhaps a hundred thousand other small-town graduates. I didn’t receive a single invitation to even a preliminary interview for any of the positions I applied for.

Months went by, and then, in the way these things sometimes happen, everything fell into place quite accidentally. Besides his glancing interest in communism, there was only one thing that truly interested my father, and that was the news. Before he set out for college every morning, he would spend an hour with
The Hindu
and his morning coffee, and not even my mother, who ruled his life in every other way, dared to interrupt his daily communion with his newspaper. He would pore over every page, reading aloud editorials he thought were well fashioned, disagreeing vehemently with others, excoriating the paper’s subeditors for lapses in grammar and style and finishing off the exercise by tackling the crossword. Although he would dutifully plod through the business and sport pages, he was only really interested in the news and the editorial page. He would scrutinize and ponder every word in these sections carefully, to the point that I sometimes wondered if he should have been a journalist and not a college professor. Perhaps that was what lay behind the eagerness with which he fastened on to the news-worthiness of our disappearing servant, seeing a story there that none of us had quite thought about.

Raju had come to us when he was fourteen—a sullen, clumsy boy who had run away from his poverty-stricken village, some sixty miles south of K—. The third son in a family of fourteen and therefore entirely without prospects, he had been recommended to my mother by Savitri, one of the women she went to the temple with. In the two years he had been employed by us, he had displayed no aptitude for cooking, and cleaned with little or no application, but he came cheap and was reasonably clean and honest, so he was given a mat and some utensils of his own, and wages that he never saw because he was always borrowing against them.

On the morning of his disappearance my father complained loudly about having to drink black coffee, and my mother explained that it was because Raju hadn’t yet brought the milk from the government dairy. In fact, she said, she hadn’t seen him since the previous night. He normally slept in the courtyard outside the house but he wasn’t there and his mat was neatly rolled up and stored in a corner of the kitchen; the utensils he used were still in their usual place but the cheap cardboard suitcase that my mother had bought him for Deepavali the previous year was gone. We hurriedly searched the rest of the house to make sure that nothing else was missing, then I got on my bicycle and pedalled to the dairy to get the milk, cursing Raju for being so inconsiderate as to leave before he had finished his morning duties. What was the world coming to, my mother lamented, servants came and went these days, they had none of the loyalty of retainers of the old school, who willingly sold themselves into servitude for generations, why her parents had had their Gopal for forty-five years, and so on and so forth. We’d heard it all before: Raju was the third servant we’d employed in five years. Someone else would turn up in due course, and there the matter would have rested, except for a curious fact. Two days after his departure, my mother announced, upon her return from the temple, that Raju wasn’t the only servant who had disappeared; Savitri’s cook had gone as well. Apparently, a recruiter from a Hindu right-wing organization had happened upon a group of young men who were either unemployed or held low-paid jobs and persuaded some of them to participate in a scheme to manufacture and transport consecrated bricks to Ayodhya, a dusty town far in the north, where they would be used to build a magnificent temple to Lord Ram.

For months now we had been hearing about this and other initiatives by sectarian political parties, including a massive procession on wheels that had passed through numerous small towns and villages drumming up support for the building of the Ram temple on the site of a sixteenth-century mosque, which, it was alleged, had been constructed by a Muslim invader after he had destroyed the temple which had originally stood on the spot. This campaign in particular alarmed most of the people we knew, because it seemed calculated to bring ordinary Hindus out on to the streets to avenge themselves on their Muslim neighbours for a centuries-old insult that neither party had had anything to do with. For days my father had muttered and seethed at the breakfast table about ‘barbaric northerners whipping up communal sentiments’ but now that the issue was no longer academic he exploded. I cannot remember too many occasions on which my father became truly angry, but this was one of them. The first sign that he was about to lose his temper was that his ears would redden. They did so now, and my mother and I braced ourselves.

‘Abominable,’ he ranted. ‘These people are giving every one of us Hindus a bad name. But now they have gone too far, pouring their poison into the ears of a simpleton like Raju who can’t read or write or count. What do they intend to do with him, transform him into someone who can be controlled at will? Their plan should be exposed.’

This wasn’t the moment to point out that my father wasn’t being original; it was precisely what a number of editorialists and TV commentators had said, so my mother and I simply exchanged glances and did not contradict him.

‘We must do something, get a reporter here to do a human interest story, a view from the front line.’

His audience of two didn’t bother pointing out that the national media had other priorities, especially now. Riots had broken out in many of the towns and villages that the procession had passed through, thousands had been arrested, and it was doubtful that anyone would be interested in the story of a sixteen-year-old domestic from K—. But we had underestimated the depth of my father’s outrage. He wrote to the editors of
The Hindu
and the
Indian Express
suggesting they send a reporter out to K— to follow the trail of Raju and others who had been brainwashed into making common cause with the extreme right wing. When neither newspaper bothered to send him a response, he had another idea.

‘Why don’t you write the article?’ he said to me one evening while we were gathered in our small, cluttered living room watching the news on television.

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. Your command of English is adequate, you can do the research, you’re from here, and you’re not doing anything at the moment.’ He paused, casting around for the clincher. ‘And I will help you,’ he said. It was thus that I was launched on a career that I hadn’t even thought about till then.

Raju’s trail had long gone cold, but this was of no importance to my father. He sent me off every morning to interview anyone who might have known him or Savitri’s former servant, and in the evening he would bring me books, borrowed from the college library, by famous journalists—Khushwant Singh, Frank Moraes, James Cameron, Kuldip Nayar—all of which he insisted I read to get a feel for journalistic prose and the art of constructing a good piece. Initially it was my father’s enthusiasm that propelled the project along, but I was soon fully committed as I began to channel my own simmering rage and frustration into the story.

In the end, it wasn’t an especially good article; we were amateurs, and simply did not have the skill to craft a great piece of journalism. I did not keep a copy of it, but I still recall its rather baroque opening line, which owed more to my father than it did to me: ‘On 6 October 1990, P. Raju travelled further than he had ever done in his young life, a journey both temporal and spiritual.’ I remember we looked in our battered
Concise Oxford Dictionary
to get the exact meaning of ‘temporal’ and several other words that were much too ornate and ponderous to feature in a normal piece. It didn’t exactly surprise me that none of the major newspapers and magazines that we sent the story to bothered to reply, with the exception of
Time
magazine’s office in New Delhi, which sent us a standard two-line letter of rejection. Undeterred, my father set his sights lower, and we sent out another batch of photocopies of the article with the same result.

Some months after we had first sent out the article, he came home from work, visibly excited. He pulled from his briefcase a very unglamorous magazine, printed entirely in black and white with no perceptible attempt at design, not even a proper cover, merely the title in a rather becoming shade of green over the table of contents.
The Indian Secularist
, the masthead read, and beside it, in smaller letters, Vol. 20: Issue 11.

The magazine, which he had discovered in the college library, comprised forty-eight pages of closely set black type rather like an academic journal. Most of the articles were semi-academic in nature and concerned themselves with issues of sectarian unrest. Besides these, there was a round-up of international and domestic news and on the last page an editorial by Rustom Sorabjee, the paper’s editor, printer and publisher. But what had especially caught my father’s attention was a column entitled ‘View from the Front Line’, in which various committed citizens, and occasionally the paper’s regular contributors, wrote about instances of communal conflict or amity they had witnessed in their daily lives. ‘This is where your article will appear,’ he said; ‘there couldn’t be a better match.’