The Solitude of Emperors (35 page)

I work as a cashier in a bank. The job is undemanding and unwavering, as is my daily routine. I live alone in a one-bedroom apartment in an inexpensive part of town, and besides my twice-monthly forays to Gerrard Street to stock up on supplies—Indian spices and poppadoms, and occasionally mangoes from the subcontinent—I go nowhere and see no one. My parents have given up on me, they doubt that they will ever see me ‘settled’ as they put it, but I don’t think that’s for me, at least for now. I prefer my solitude and have guarded it obsessively in all the years I have spent writing this book. The only time it was broken was when I was briefly involved with a waitress at the local Tim Horton’s. The affair lasted less than six weeks, and I wasn’t tempted to let anyone into my life after that.

~

One of the lessons Mr Sorabjee taught me was that in a news story there should be no loose ends, and keeping that dictum in mind I will do my best to tidy things up, knowing full well that this is not a news report; when you are trying to reconstruct a life or lives there will inevitably be questions that remain unanswered.

I cannot, for example, tell you exactly why Noah’s death came to mark me so permanently. Anyone would have been traumatized by the violent death of someone they were close to, and felt they were in some way responsible for, but most people would, I think, have come to some sort of acceptance of the tragedy and moved on.

I didn’t because, through some mysterious process, it became the defining moment of my life. Most of us actively search for this key moment, which is why we look for love, for achievement, or whatever it is we think will lend a certain weight and permanence to our days. But for some of us such moments come unexpectedly, as happened to me in Meham, and we have no choice but to configure our lives around them. What we do with the experience is up to us. The heroes in Mr Sorabjee’s book used it to change the world around them for the better, but for most people that is not an option; what we are led to do is infinitely more humble. I, as you know, decided to bear witness. I began the book at Mr Sorabjee’s suggestion, he said I would find the writing of it therapeutic, but along the way it became much more than something I was doing to heal myself. And now that it is finished, I am slowly beginning to take an interest in the world once more. The other day in the bank, when wind chill and freezing rain kept customers away, an unexpected thought came to me—perhaps I should go back to my own country, there was work to be done. I reckoned I had done with all that, it was why I had left India, but I did not immediately suppress the thought as I might have done in years past. I would have liked to have talked things over with Mr Sorabjee, but sadly that was not an option for he had died a year into the new century. No, I would have to make up my mind on my own. There is no rush, though, the wars inspired by the gods will be with us for a long time to come.

~

All that remains for me to do now is to complete the story with a quick recap of the aftermath of the tragedy. I busied myself with routine for the first few days after my return to Bombay, filing my story for the magazine, giving Mr Sorabjee a slightly more detailed account of the incident, and generally immersing myself in the tasks that were allotted to me. I didn’t feel able to talk to Mr Sorabjee about his book or the part it had played in the unfortunate events that had taken place, so I put the manuscript in an envelope, along with a short note saying that I liked it very much and hoped it would be successful, and gave it to Mrs Dastur to pass on. Mr Sorabjee did not bring it up with me, not that I had expected he would.

On my first weekend back I took to my bed at the hostel feeling slightly feverish, but it wasn’t my physical health that was the problem, it was more that I was consumed with guilt over Noah’s death—my final argument with him kept running in a continuous loop through my head. I told myself that if I hadn’t pushed him so hard he would still be alive, and I was furious with myself for straying beyond the boundaries of the assignment that had taken me to Meham. I bottled all of this up, and as my obsession with Noah’s death grew, my health suffered, the nightmares returned and the days crawled by, huge and oppressive, embroidered by thoughts of the calamity. I began to neglect my work at the magazine, even to question our mission. What was the point of fighting on? I asked myself; people would continue to die in the name of God no matter what we did. Even Mr Sorabjee’s decision to keep going after the bombs had gone off no longer resonated with me in my grief. What did it matter if one person was convinced of the message we were trying to propagate, when even the sacrifices of people like Noah would really change nothing? Yet I didn’t want to let Mr Sorabjee and my colleagues down. I knew they believed in what they were doing and I tried to keep on as best I could, but finally I knew it wasn’t working and I resigned. Mr Sorabjee didn’t attempt to change my mind, but when I came to the end of my notice period, he courteously enquired if I was free to have coffee with him at the Taj.

~

We settled into window seats in the Sea Lounge which offered a view of the verminous ooze of pigeons spreading over the cobblestones of the Gateway of India and boats stacked like driftwood in the harbour, but I didn’t see any of this; my gaze was focused inward on a disused cemetery deep within the Nilgiri mountains where a cold river of mist floated angels free of their gravestones. The reserve that I had maintained ever since I had returned broke down, and my remorse, grief, guilt and doubts poured forth, unstoppably. I told Mr Sorabjee in great detail about the disaster, and I asked him insistently why things had transpired the way they had. I talked about his book at length. I told him how I had used the final chapter to bolster my resolve, although in the end it had been of no use. I told him I considered myself a failure because I hadn’t been capable of doing anything to defuse the situation at the shrine or prevent the death of Noah, I hadn’t been able to measure up when it counted, I hadn’t been capable of the final ‘kick’ my father had told me about. I asked him why Noah, ignored and discarded by the world, had been able to do what no one else had done, and most of all I asked him if he thought I was guilty of my friend’s death.

Mr Sorabjee’s response was measured and caring. After expressing his grief over both the deaths in Meham, he told me that I wasn’t responsible for Noah’s final actions, he had acted of his own accord. I might have nudged him towards something he had been waiting for his entire life, but that did not make me guilty; he would have done something similar sooner or later. He explained that we spend our early, untried lives floating around in a fog of doubt, making our mistakes, having our certainties eroded, and in this way we finally come to a sense of ourselves. But once we come to that knowledge, sooner or later, depending on the luck or tragedy of our lives, we act entirely on our own where truly important matters are concerned.

He said that I shouldn’t consider myself a failure, I had done everything I could, and in so doing had enabled Noah to find within himself what he felt called upon to do. He called Noah a true hero, an Emperor of the Everyday, and quoted Western philosophy and Eastern scripture and myth in support of his definition, saying that while most of us, after a period of youthful rebellion or flight—such as my escape from K— devote ourselves to burrowing into society, building safety nets, surrounding ourselves with barricades like family and possessions against the unsettling nature of life, mavericks such as Noah retain the lightness of unburdened youth; it is this that enables them to soar up above the rest of us and perform feats that we would find impossible. Our role, he said, was to provide the springboard, usually unbeknown to ourselves. He said it saddened him to accept my resignation, but he understood why I wanted to leave. We talked then about what I might do next. I said I wanted to return to K— for a while to think about things, spend some time with my parents, before I got on with the rest of my life.

Towards the end of the evening we returned to the subject of Noah. He said, and this seems a fitting note on which to end the book, that it is only when people close to us die that we begin to learn how to live as we should. No matter how much we think we know about how to cope with the death of those we love—through the experience of others, our reading and our faith or lack of it—nothing quite prepares us for it. It is impossibly shocking and we feel it’s the first time death has ever occurred. But sooner or later we begin painfully to engage with it, and eventually move past it, and onward. And without our realizing it, imperceptibly, the one who has passed on fuses with us, and we become a different person altogether. It is a condition of life that our beloved dead will never be forgotten.

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to my wife Rachna who helped at every stage of the writing of this novel. My father Eddy Davidar gave me the benefit of his vast knowledge of the Nilgiris where much of the action takes place.

My agents David Godwin, Nicole Aragi and Kerry Glencorse were brilliant as always.

The editorial suggestions of some of the best publishers in the business—Kirsty Dunseath, Doug Pepper, Ravi Singh and Thomas Abraham—helped improve the book, every writer should be so lucky.

Four friends—Bipin Nayak, Nirmala Lakshman, Kiran Desai and Ramachandra Guha—went out of their way to assist, it’s something I’ll always be thankful for.

For helping in a myriad different ways I must thank Vinod Gideon, Yasmin Kotawala, Colonel Raghu Shastri (retd), Noor Mohammed, Air Vice Marshal Gurunathan (retd) and Ravi Matthews in the Nilgiris; Ruth and Rajendra Swamy in Madras; Aparajita Pant, Bena Sareen, Diya Kar Hazra, Hemali Sodhi, K.D. and Nini Singh, Mooma, Mallika and Arjun Nath, Aienla Ozukum, Ritu Vajpeyi-Mohan, Rajkumari John and Chander Shekhar in Delhi; Katie Hambly, Pia and Dilsher Sen in London; and Allan Reynolds and Ashley Dunn in Toronto.

I would like to thank
The Hindu
for permitting me to use the author photograph by S. Subramanium.

My understanding of sectarianism, secularism, pluralism, as also Ashoka, Akbar and Gandhi was deepened by the following books and authors:
The Great Transformation
and
The Battle for God
by Karen Armstrong;
Identity and Violence
and
The Argumentative Indian
by Amartya Sen;
Secular Common Sense
by Mukul Kesavan;
On Identity
by Amin Maalouf;
The Good Boatman
by Rajmohan Gandhi;
Gem in the Lotus
and
The Last Spring: The Lives and Times of The Great Mughals
by Abraham Eraly;
The Bastion of Believers
and
Sacred Spaces
by Yoginder Sikand;
The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins;
The End of Faith
by Sam Harris;
No god But God
by Reza Aslan;
Early India
by Romila Thapar;
The Concerned Indian’s Guide to Communalism
edited by K.N. Panikkar and
Hindutva
by Jyotirmaya Sharma
.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Penguin Books India, New Delhi, for the excerpts from:

The Weaver’s Songs
by Kabir, translated by Vinay Dharwadker; and
Collected Poems
by Dom Moraes.

Penguin Books Ltd, London and SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic Inc. for the excerpt from the poem XXXIII, from
A Little Larger than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems
by Fernando Pessoa. Edited and translated by Richard Zenith. © Richard Zenith.

W. W. Norton, New York for excerpts from
The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy,
translated by Aliki Barnstone.

The Navajivan Trust for excerpts from the
Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.

This is a novel about the misuse and misinterpretation of religion so I have taken extra care not to offend any religious community or faith. In order to avoid unnecessary controversy I should also state explicitly that with the exception of actual historical events that find a place in the narrative such as the demolition of the Babri Masjid and incidents from the lives of Ashoka, Akbar and Gandhi, this is a work of fiction and that names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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