The Solitude of Emperors (5 page)

‘I might have got the order a bit wrong, but I believe I have covered pretty much everything we talked about. I can see you’re puzzled by my apparent lack of interest in your reasons for wanting to join this magazine, Vijay, but the very fact that you are here for this interview is reason enough. In the course of the next few months I will have plenty of time to explore your credentials, nothing you could have said to me in half an hour would have made a difference. I was a student myself once, and we Indians are the best in the world at soaking up information and spitting it out on demand. No, Vijay, I wanted to discover as many facets of you as I could in the time that we have, and tell you in turn as much as I could about myself, because in my long years with the magazine I have discovered that the core of the battle we’re fighting is this: the fundamentalists have always sought to pare people down to a single dimension, their religious identity, and in doing so exclude everything else about them. What we’re trying to say, in our stubborn way, is that each of us contains worlds within us; we are so multi-faceted that we will not be put into little boxes, segregated and turned against one another.’

He paused, and then said, ‘Do you know why I named this magazine
The Indian Secularist?’

‘Because it champions secularism, sir?’

‘Yes, indeed, but I had something more in mind when I was thinking about a title for it. So let me ask you this: how would you define secularism or better still the word secularist?’

This was one of the questions I had prepared for. ‘The
Concise Oxford Dictionary
defines it as someone who is concerned with the affairs of the world, not the spiritual or the sacred.’

‘Quite so, which is why it was important to me to have both the words
Indian
and
Secularist
in the title because taken together they stand for something far richer and more resonant. The Western interpretation of secularism is the strict separation of Church and State, but as that would never have worked in this country, where religion permeates every aspect of daily life, our founding fathers took it to mean an even-handedness or neutrality towards all faiths. We practise secularism in the Indian sense of the word without quite realizing it—while we remain true to our faith we tolerate every other faith without much of an effort. I don’t necessarily mean that we fraternize with one another, but the unique strength of our society is that over the centuries most of us have developed an innate secularism that allows us to coexist fairly amicably. Unfortunately this secularism has always been under attack by people with a less than savoury agenda and that is where we have a role to play.’

With that, to my amazement, the interview concluded, and Mr Sorabjee told me the job was mine should I want it. I would join the magazine as an editorial assistant on a monthly salary of 3,500 rupees; he would make arrangements for me to stay at a working men’s hostel run by a charitable trust in Colaba and said that it would be most convenient if I could arrange to come on board in the first week of January.

‘You don’t need to give me your answer immediately, Vijay; you may wish to discuss this with your parents.’

‘But I can tell you right now, sir, I would be delighted to take the job. I know my parents will be delighted too. You will not regret this decision, sir.’

‘Very well, then,’ he said with his slow smile. ‘Shall we spend some time on the article that started it all?’ He took my piece from his cluttered desk and over the next forty-five minutes wielded an ancient, broad-nibbed Mont Blanc pen like a scalpel, editing, moulding, shaping, querying, until the article was unrecognizable to me. It was still mine, but it was immeasurably better, I could see that.

‘I’m so pleased you investigated the case of Raju,’ he said, bringing his pen down to cut out an irrelevant phrase. ‘Nothing will illustrate better to our readers what these messengers of hate are trying to do.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, feeling a little guilty that I had no idea where Raju was and that some of the information in the piece had been concocted. What would I say to Mr Sorabjee if he enquired about my sources? I didn’t have long to wait.

‘Is all the information in the piece verifiable?’ he asked me.

I was tempted to try and finesse my way out of the situation, but decided it wasn’t worth it. ‘No sir,’ I admitted. ‘I have no idea where Raju is and some of the facts are speculative.’

‘Umm, can’t have that; let’s have another go at it, shall we?’ He went over the piece again, and by the time he’d finished, it was a mere quarter of its length.

‘We have to be truthful and factual whenever we can, Vijay, because we’re fighting lies, half-truths, beliefs, don’t ever forget that.’

‘I won’t, sir,’ I said, relieved that it hadn’t gone too badly.

‘Very well, then, you must be anxious to get acquainted with your new colleagues, so let’s go and meet them.’ He levered himself out of his chair, grimacing with pain, took hold of a walking stick made of some silvery metal, and limped out of the office.

The three other members of
The Indian Secularist
’s editorial team worked in a large room, their view brightened by an avenue of flowering gulmohur trees, frothy confections of red, green and gold. The assistant editor was a cheerful woman called Sakshi Vaidya; she was assisted by the copy-editor, an elderly man called Mr Desai whose editing skills I would discover were, if anything, even more exacting than Mr Sorabjee’s, and a young intern, a recent graduate of Sophia College called Meher, the granddaughter of a friend of Mr Sorabjee’s who was spending a year at the magazine before taking off to Columbia University. Once introductions were made, Mr Sorabjee took me back to Mrs Dastur, shook hands with me formally, said goodbye and hobbled back to his room.

Mrs Dastur asked to see my train tickets, which I had fortunately remembered to bring with me, then efficiently counted out a small stack of rupee notes as reimbursement. She then added 400 rupees to the pile.

‘It’s your first time in Bombay, isn’t it?’

When I nodded, she said, ‘Mr Sorabjee thought you should have a little extra money to go out and enjoy yourself.’

~

An antiquated lift, manually operated by an old man in a Gandhi topi and khaki uniform, serviced the five floors of Jehangir Mansion. You could hear it coming from a long way off, the sound of its iron gate being opened and shut echoing through the lift shaft as it rose, slow as melting tar, towards you. That afternoon it was much too slow for me. I took the wide, shallow stairs, one, two at a time, and rushed out on to the road, anxious to share my good fortune with someone. I smiled and nodded and tried to make eye contact with passers-by and was not put off in the least by the fact that nobody in this most indifferent of cities would return my smiles or my desire to establish a bond. I was free of K— that was the most important thing. Bombay belonged to me, whether anyone cared or not. At the bus stop, waiting for the bus to Chowpatty and Marine Drive, I gave a legless beggar perched on a low wheeled platform fifty rupees, much more than I could afford, but it didn’t matter, and I was beside myself with delight to see his warty, sour countenance soften with pleasure for just an instant.

At Chowpatty, I merged into the crowds milling about the beach, bought sweet and frothy sugar-cane juice from a man who fed the purple sticks of cane into an enormous hand-operated juicer, ate pav bhaji and bhel puri and walked until I was exhausted. Night was falling when I took my place on the sea wall among amorous couples, retired people and other solitary men like myself, all looking out to the horizon where the colour was fading from the sky. Behind us Marine Drive circled the bay in a necklace of light and over to the east more lights began to come on in the tall buildings of Nariman Point and Cuffe Parade. Night fell abruptly and the massive promontory of the city that extended into the sea began to resemble nothing so much as a great ocean liner ploughing steadily through the black water. My journey, I thought, had finally begun.

3

In Bombay

Bombay is not an attractive city. It has few tourist sights, its architecture is functional for the most part, the salt air from the Arabian Sea takes its toll on the most expensive buildings, and slums, noise, dense crowds, humidity, crime and pollution further deplete its charms. But it is one of the world’s great cities with a vitality that defies belief, derived from the fourteen million people who call it home. I felt that charge from the minute my train deposited me in the early hours of the morning at VT station; all about me lay what looked like sheeted corpses, transients who slept on the railway platforms because they had nowhere else to go. I took a taxi to the hostel, an expensive luxury but unavoidable because of the enormous suitcase I was carrying, peering out of the window at the people who swarmed the streets, although it was barely light. These were my people, I thought; I was a Bombayite now. I could hardly wait to take the city by its throat. That didn’t happen of course because, as I soon discovered, Bombay’s sense of possibility and adventure was largely an illusion—none of the pretty girls who waited for the buses or the trains showed the least interest in me, no strangers walked up to me on the street and revealed mysterious worlds, but even as I scaled down my expectations the thrill of living in the city did not leave me.

And I had my own niche, the magazine I worked for, without which I might have felt the indifference of the city more keenly. Every morning at 8.15 I would take the bus from Colaba Causeway to Tardeo, which was a short walk from the office. And every day, even when it was very hot or traffic was slow or the queues for the communal bathrooms at the hostel had been very long, the sight of Jehangir Mansion never failed to lift my spirits. Just a few hundred feet away was the unceasing roar of Warden Road, but in this blessed corner of the city there was peace—the squirrels flickering their tails as they raced up the trunks of the gulmohar trees, the harsh cries of crows clattering down on the delicate gold tracery of fallen leaves and the passage of the occasional car were the only things that disturbed the tranquillity of the place. The creaking lift would deposit me on the fifth floor and I would make my way to the office, where I was usually the first to arrive. I would head straight to my desk to read through the thick files bulging with government reports or newspaper clippings that Mr Sorabjee or Mr Desai had cut out and marked for my attention as one of my jobs was to put together a brief digest of sectarian violence in India and around the world.

Once a month I was expected to put the magazine to bed. On press nights I would eat supper at Olympia, a local restaurant famous for its brain masala, perfectly cooked and soaked in rich gravy. I had only begun to eat meat in Bombay, because it wasn’t cooked at home, but I had developed a liking for it very quickly. Finishing my meal with a paan that I would purchase from a vendor across the street from the restaurant, I would leave at about ten for the press, which was located just behind the paper merchants’ quarter in the Fort area. During the day the place heaved with noise and activity—squadrons of businessmen and clerks and secretaries scurried to and from the cliffs of office buildings that surrounded the open square on three sides, while traffic flowed slowly and noisily through the clogged streets—but at this hour it was usually deserted. I would walk in through the loading dock at the back of the building, nodding to the chowkidar, who no longer bothered to check my pass, and negotiate my way carefully up a rickety wooden staircase to the compositors’ room where the typesetting machines clattered away, lead filings drifting down like silver rain. The press where the magazine was composed and printed was one of the very few that had survived the onslaught of computerized phototypesetting, and it had about it an almost prehistoric air. The typesetters, dressed in shorts and banians because of the oppressive heat of the room, their eyes protuberant and enormous behind the thick lenses of their spectacles, would pound furiously at their keyboards and small boys would run off long sheets of coarse paper on which the proofs were printed, and bring them damp with ink and sweat to a long ink-splotched table at which I would read them. At around two in the morning I would finish up and go home, passing through the colonnaded archways of Flora Fountain as the city swooned in a half-sleep, deserted except for a few freelance whores who were either too ugly or too old to have a pimp or room of their own, and other people of the night—homeless petty criminals and those whose shifts started early. I was entitled to the day off when I was on press duty, but I couldn’t bear to sit around in my room at the hostel so I would doze off for a few hours and then make my way to Jehangir Mansion at noon.

It was at the magazine that I began to develop a real appreciation for my own faith and the other religions that had flowered in India. Sakshi, who was working towards a PhD in comparative religion, would spend hours talking to me about the evolution of Hinduism, the various reform movements that had swept in, the ways in which Islam and Christianity had become Indianized, the origins of Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism. I even started to look upon K— a little more kindly when she told me that she would love to see the musical pillars at the temple. One of the rooms at Jehangir Mansion had been converted into a library. It was crammed full of books on religion, and under Sakshi’s tutelage I began reading translations and interpretations of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Koran and the Bible among others with greater insight than I had back in K— when I was preparing for my interview with Mr Sorabjee.

As the months passed and I became an integral part of the editorial team, I no longer had much time to read because there was always work to do, research for Sakshi and Mr Sorabjee, sub-editing under Mr Desai’s expert guidance, correspondence to be dealt with, phones to be answered and files to be kept up to date. As the two most junior people in the office, Meher and I quickly formed a bond. We would help each other out and often take a few minutes during the morning tea break, when Divakar the peon served us all tea and Marie biscuits, to chat and joke and trade harmless gossip. But even my liking for her and my appreciation of my other colleagues paled into insignificance when compared with the presence of Mr Sorabjee in my life.