Shining Hero (38 page)

‘And shaped like hair in this place,’ thought Arjuna touching the rock. Its surface was harsh, the water slipping over it seeming almost to fizz as though with mineral, as though it still effervesced with Ganga’s anger … In her rage at being brought down like this she had descended heavily and would have drowned the world if the god Shiva had not stood under her and caught her on his brow. She became divided up into several streams, or rivers, as she flowed through Shiva’s matted yogi locks of hair. Arjuna imagined the madman of the moon-crowned hair standing here, ash-smeared and crazy dancing, holy ascetic, creator and destroyer, with the water of India thundering through his matted tresses.

But the river was not safe yet. A sage had been at prayer and was disturbed as Ganga rushed out of Shiva’s hair, so the holy man drank her up in revenge, leaving the earth dry. The gods implored him to relent and in the end Jhanu allowed Ganga to flow out of his ear.

Arjuna started to feel as though he had drunk the intoxicating juice of Soma, had become the river itself with the blood running through his veins turned into the waters of India. Bliss began to swell in him until he felt that one such moment as this was better than a whole lifetime of ordinary happiness. Perhaps, he thought, this is what the gods felt like when they drank the Soma, the milky-sapped lord of creeping plants. Arjuna had drunk nothing but the cold pure air of the god-filled Himalayas but the golden joy that surged through him and seemed to be filling and swelling in the Universe, felt like Soma in its most holy form. Radiance started to warm Arjuna’s body and he turned to ask Karna, who knew about drugs, if he had ever tasted Soma.

But before he could speak, something rushed across his sight and tightened round his throat.

Karna had bought the scarf from a stall in the village. He had shouted at the salesman who had kept asking him what colour scarf he wanted and had replied angrily, ‘Any colour.’ The scarf seller had never had such a customer before.

Karna now flung the purple rumal round Arjuna’s neck and hauled it tight. Their feet slipped and slithered on the overhang of rock as Karna tried to get purchase and Arjuna fought to save himself. His tongue began to swell, his eyeballs to bulge, as he fought for breath and frantically tried to free himself from the strangling cloth.

Arjuna coughed, choked and staggered then lost his balance, toppled at the edge and grabbed out at Karna. Moments later both young men were plunging down the sheer drop of the mountainside. They seemed to fall for ages, cracking against a rock on this side, smashing headfirst into a tree on that, breath being knocked out of their bodies, sense out of their heads. Sometimes their bodies would briefly pause and proceed again on their downhill rush, tumbling, smashing, stifling. And all the time grasping each other as though they were still battling for dominance in the air.

At last the pair punched into the ground in a puff of snow.

Karna did not know how long he had lain unconscious. His first sensation was one of agony in a hundred places on his body. His back, his shoulders and his legs felt terribly cold. It was a long time before he could open his eyes, and when he did he could make out nothing at all apart from white. Whichever way he looked, only blazing white.

After a while he became aware that there was something under him that was warm, and he wondered if it was a woman he had been making love with, though his body felt more as if it had been beaten with lathis than enjoying sex. The cold was frightful, it scalded round his head and through his legs. His hands and feet had lost all feeling. His buttocks were jabbed with chill. It was gnawing into the back of his neck so that he feared his spinal cord would freeze, grow brittle and then snap. Only his chest and stomach continued to stay warm because of something he lay on. He snuggled closer to it and knew that he would be dead by now if it had not been there. But perhaps he was dead for otherwise what was this glaring whiteness? He lay like this for a long time, vague thoughts wandering through his mind. Sometimes he would fall into a half dream in which he was lying face down on the hot body of his galloping white horse and beating Arjuna round the maidan. Sometimes the dreamy state would place Poopay Patalya underneath him and then he would wake with a jerk of guilt and try to shift away before he degraded the goddess with an act of sex. Sometimes he would dozily imagine he was lying on the bonnet of the car and the warmth was coming from the running engine.

It was a long time before his mind became sufficiently engaged for him to realise that the whiteness was snow and he was burrowed into it. Then, through the veil of snow he thought he saw the outline of a human head. His body was very stiff and when he tried to move, shoots of pain rushed through him. He forced his joints to move and with numb fingers clawed the snow away and revealed the face of Arjuna. There was a deep gash across his forehead. He was quite still and even when Karna touched his cheek he did not stir. The cheek was warm though. Karna gazed on his brother’s closed-down
body. He could not make out what they were doing here. Had the pair of them gone walking through the mountains and had a fall? Why were they not wearing suitable clothes? Neither he nor Arjuna was even wearing gloves.

Then he saw the rumal round Arjuna’s neck and started to remember.

Arjuna began to stir, making Karna shift away, embarrassed at the close proximity. The moment he lost contact with Arjuna’s body, the terrible cold seized him, making him shiver violently so that he could hardly breathe. His teeth clashed together audibly as he watched Arjuna slowly open his eyes, Arjuna asked in a voice muffled with bruising and blood, ‘Who won?’ Then, when Karna did not answer, Arjuna put his hand to his neck and felt the rumal there. ‘It looks as though you did.’

Karna stared away over the mountains.

‘You can just go and leave me here,’ said Arjuna. ‘I’ve sprained or broken something and I can’t walk so I won’t have a chance. You don’t have to do anything more.’ He felt sorry that his life was over and that he would never act the part of Arjuna or see Poopay Patalya again.

‘Tell me how to be warm and I will help you,’ said Karna.

‘I don’t want your help. Why should I want that?’

Karna squatted down. ‘This is not the way it should end,’ he said.

Arjuna tried to shrug, let out a yelp of pain, and said, ‘It never is. Go.’

‘I can’t go,’ said Karna. ‘Because heat is coming from your body and without it I will die.’

Arjuna said, ‘There is a sun inside you. That’s what the yogi told us.’ He felt tired and comfortable. ‘After you have found it you will be able to leave me.’ He closed his eyes and waited for Karna to go.

Half an hour later Karna was painfully climbing down the mountainside with Arjuna in his arms.

Down below in the village he could hear faint cries, perhaps of people calling Arjuna. Karna tried to shout back but the bruising of
his fall had drained his lungs and only a whisper would come out. Karna arrived with Arjuna at two in the morning. It had taken him six hours to carry his half-brother down from the mountain.

By the time people came running out at Arjuna’s calls, Karna had gone.

No one could understand why the two young men had not died. No one really believed that Arjuna and Karna had been out there for eighteen hours, wearing only their jeans and T-shirts. There must, everyone secretly thought, be some other explanation. The story passed round gently of some pretty Nepali girls who had entertained the naughty brothers until some romping incident had caused an accident and Arjuna had had to be brought home on the back of Karna.

Little recked the dauntless Karna
if his foe in anger rose
.
Karna feared not face of mortal,
dreaded not immortal foes
.
Nor with all his wrath and valour
Arjun conquered him in war
Till within the soft earth sinking
stuck the wheel of Karna’s car
.

The pony looked out of her stall and neighed at the sight of Karna and he felt shocked because she had become small and old without his noticing. He had not been to see her for a long time. He felt guilty for he knew that he would never ride her again because these days he only rode tall white horses that bucked and pranced. As he rubbed his nose against the pony’s whiskery one, he remembered how furious Arjuna had been when he had called her ‘Poopay’. He fed her a piece of sugar cane and as she scrunched it, he wondered sadly, ‘Why did I save Arjuna on the mountainside? If Arjuna had died, then Poopay would have fallen in love with me. And if there was no Arjuna, then Dilip Baswani would have given me the part of Arjuna again.’ He had so nearly managed to do it. One more moment with the rumal. Or leaving Arjuna to die after they had fallen. But, as the pony munched and dribbled sugar juice, some part of Karna felt glad that he was not the murderer of his brother because if he had done it he would no longer have been worthy of Poopay Patalya and his mother.

‘I was headed for greatness,’ he told the pony. ‘I was nearly there
until Dilip Baswani gave the part to Arjuna, but now I have thought of another way of becoming great.’ He was going to enter politics.

Because his face had been seen on TV and he was now becoming known, people would vote for him. He would stand in Hatipur at first, he decided, because there was not much competition there and also because he knew so many people who would support him.

Shivarani turned away as he came into the Hatibari.

‘You seem annoyed,’ he said.

‘Of course I am. Why didn’t you tell me you where going when I stayed with you in Bombay?’

Karna stared at her. He had forgotten that she had been staying with him. He had not thought of it again till this moment. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘I was going to tell you something,’ she said.

‘What?’

But suddenly she could not bring herself to tell him that DR Uncle had asked her to marry him. Why should Karna be told, who did not behave like her child at all, but like a stranger.

She had been avoiding DR Uncle lately, because, although she had made up her mind to agree to marry him, she could not bring herself to say it.

‘Oh, nothing. I have forgotten what,’ she told Karna, adding, ‘You think of no one but yourself.’

‘When I become a politician, I will be thinking of other people all the time.’ He said it meekly but his words made Shivarani crosser than ever.

‘That’s the thing about you, Karna. All you ever think of is your own glory.’

Karna gazed at her. ‘You were always trying to get Arjuna to go into politics. Why is it different if it is me?’

‘What do you expect to be able to do then?’ she demanded.

‘Open hostels for pavement dwellers to sleep in,’ he said hopefully. ‘Provide free hospital beds and medicine for people who can’t afford it.’ He paused, and said sadly, ‘My mother would still be alive today if there had been such things available for her.’

She tried to go on being grumpy but instead felt touched with pity.

When Arjuna arrived at the Hatibari and was told that Karna was one of the Hatipur district candidates in the coming local election, he began to laugh at first. ‘Karna standing for election here? What on earth does he think he’s playing at? This is my ancestral place and nothing to do with Karna at all.’

‘You ought to stand too,’ laughed Parvathi. ‘Because it would be funny if Karna became MLA when you are zamindar.’

‘Me?’ Arjuna was taken aback. Then grew thoughtful.

‘But I won’t know who to vote for,’ Parvathi giggled. ‘None of us in the village will, because you’ll both be famous film stars by then.’ She was terribly excited about the filming of the Mahabharata, the battle scene of which was taking place on the Calcutta maidan in the following month.

Something fluttered inside Arjuna’s stomach. Here was another chance to compete with Karna. Here was yet another way of making Poopay proud of him. He and Karna fighting it out at the polls. The thought filled him with excitement.

Quite quickly, although there were other candidates and other parties contesting the election, the Karna Party and the Arjuna Party, as they were popularly known, became the only two that anyone considered in the area. Both candidates had had badges distributed and now most people for miles around had pinned to their clothes either a gold plastic button in the shape of a K or a silver steel pin in the shape of an A. The other candidates might not have existed for the attention the people of this area gave them.

Arjuna commissioned the village carpenter to build a scaffold on his car and fix great posters to it showing himself dressed in his film role, in silver and white and holding a bow and arrow. He put on
the costume he would wear when he acted in the film as well, then, with a loudspeaker attached to the roof, he toured Hatipur with a silver flag bearing his logo streaming from the bonnet of his car. Children pressed their faces against the hero’s windows leaving snotty marks on the glass. Hatipur residents struggled to get near. The misti wallah forgot that this was the man who had punched his son on his wedding day and could only see the glittering figure of Arjuna of the Mahabharata.

Arjuna was only into the first ten minutes of his speech when another loudspeaker was heard, roaring so loudly that it obliterated Arjuna’s voice. Coming towards him till they met in the middle of the main street was Karna’s car. Beside Karna and at the back sat his friends who were acting as his bodyguards. They were boys who had been in his kigali gang and had now become goondas. They carried mobile phones and cradled AK-47 guns which Karna had managed to obtain from his Bangladesh contacts. Karna had instructed them on how they must behave in Hatipur, forbidding beatings no matter how provoked. ‘Also you should smile when you talk to these villagers,’ he added. Two of the goondas had to be taught this skill, never having performed it before, but the other two were eager to show off their gold stoppings, which, if Karna got in, they hoped to add to.

The street was not wide enough for overtaking. Karna and Arjuna met face to face and for a while shouted speeches that no one could hear. For a while the two loudspeakers blared, wiping each other out, till at last the politicians laid down their microphones and, leaning from their open car windows, began to shout at each other with increasing fury, demanding withdrawal. The crowd gazed with open-mouthed delight. There was one bad moment when a goonda bodyguard suddenly thrust a gun butt out of Karna’s car window. There followed a brief tense moment as the gun trained on Arjuna’s chest, then some word from Karna persuaded the man to withdraw his weapon. The two cars were shoved this way and that by the excited crowd. They rocked and bounced as the people heaved and pressed against them, but neither was able to progress.

Arjuna had an idea. He would continue his speech from the middle
of the river. Half an hour later he was holding forth from the great Hatibari boat, with the crowds thronging the banks to hear him.

DR Uncle was taken to the riverside and sat in a chair that had been brought for him. He needed to be near, because his hearing was fading. ‘Bravo, bravo, Arjuna,’ he shouted shrilly.

Arjuna was in mid-speech when another boat appeared, being punted swiftly along, carrying Karna surrounded by his goonda bodyguards. They looked incongruous with their long pony-tails, dark glasses, drainpipe trousers and menacing weapons.

Bridges, banks, trees and rooftops had never been so crammed since the day the Sun God had swum into the Hatibari.

‘I am of the family of zamindars,’ shouted Arjuna. ‘For generations my family has looked after this place. We are bred to care for you. Karna cannot even read. I will be far better at looking after this village and its people than the illiterate son of a rickshaw wallah and a dhobi woman.’

‘Quite so, quite so,’ agreed DR Uncle.

‘See how he despises us poor people,’ shouted Karna. ‘I know your needs because I have been poor myself. I am the only one that can help you.’

‘Quite right, Karna. Bravo, bravo,’ cried DR Uncle who could not hear anything but felt his nephews needed encouraging.

It was growing dark. People began to light little lamps of wick and oil, and set them floating on the water as though it was Diwali.

‘Do you want someone who despises dhobis to be your minister?’ bellowed Karna, ‘Or me, who respects you, will listen to your troubles and understand your problems? I do not scorn people who have been denied education. I pity them. And as for the zamindars, my mother was poor but she was a much, much better person than any one of them. She was kind, gentle, never told a lie in the whole of her life and did not despise anybody. Unlike these zamindars.’

Mosquitoes started to fly. People began to scratch, but could not drag themselves away from the riverside.

‘Karna talks of morality and goodness,’ shouted Arjuna. ‘But he dealt in drugs and was a thief.’

‘And Arjuna is a cheat. If he had not cheated me I would have had the leading part in the Mahabharata instead of him. If he had not cheated me I would have been the one to eat the bread and Amul butter.’

Karna and Arjuna were vanishing into the night until you could only tell where they were by their voices. People looked from one hero to the other, persuaded by the first, then by the second. Then by the first again.

‘What do you think?’ Arjuna asked Shivarani next morning. ‘Do you think they’ll vote for me or Karna?’ Karna had already gone back to Calcutta with his goondas.

Shivarani sighed. ‘Will your rivalry with Karna ever end? Do you think the two of you will go on fighting for the rest of your lives?’

‘Perhaps there will come a day when we are too old for hatred.’

‘There is no such day,’ sighed Shivarani.

‘Perhaps a day will come when one of us beats the other so convincingly that there is nothing more to fight about,’ suggested Arjuna.

‘That is a good idea,’ said Shivarani. ‘For as long as you and Karna are imprisoned in hatred you will never know freedom.’

‘What should we do then?’ asked Arjuna.

‘You have answered that question yourself. Set up one final competition that will finish your rivalry for ever. Have one last great contest and then get on with your own lives without thinking about each other for like this neither of you can ever truly know happiness or even love.’

All the way back to Bombay, Arjuna kept going through this idea in his mind.

When he next met Karna, he told him. ‘Do you think Shivarani is right? Is it possible that we could have a contest which ends all contests? Do you think it is possible that one of us can beat the other so convincingly that we never need to compete again?’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ Karna said coldly.

‘I have been thinking ever since the time on the mountain and the way that you saved me, that it is time we ended our rivalry.’

Karna stared at Arjuna bitterly. ‘It is you who keep it burning.
You have stolen my part and the woman I love. You have cheated me out of every win.’

‘Come on, Karna, it was not my fault. Dilip made that decision not me. And as for Poopay, can I help it if she finds me attractive?’

‘Swine,’ said Karna. ‘Bastard.’

‘Hush. Now listen. I have an idea. We are grown up. This bickering is not suitable for men of our age. Let’s race each other from Bombay to Calcutta to arrive on the first day of filming. If you win I will go away. I will not be there to play Arjuna. I will never see Poopay again.’

Karna gazed at him in disbelief. ‘Why should you do that?’

Arjuna shrugged. ‘There are other women. There are other parts. I might even give up films and become a full-time politician. Do you accept the challenge?’

Karna shrugged. ‘How can I trust you? You cheated before.’

‘Things are different now. May the goddess curse me if I break this promise.’

‘OK,’ said Karna, hope starting to fill him like sunshine after rain.

‘But you must swear that you will go away if I win, as well.’

‘I swear on the head of my mother, Dolly. How shall we race?’ Karna visualised swimming, riding, running. Already his muscles were tightening for the contest.

‘In our cars?’ suggested Arjuna.

‘Which cars? Will you buy a new one?’

‘We will stay as we are. You in yours and me in mine.’

Karna smiled. He owned a brand-new Triumph Herald and Arjuna only had the old Ambassador.

These were cars that had been manufactured in India after the Indian government stopped the import of foreign goods and for thirty years had been made from the original Morris Oxford template. Slow and reliable, they were the only car available in the country apart from a few fragile Western cast-offs and much later, the Fiat 1100. They were also almost indestructible but all the same, thought Karna, even before he had tinkered with the one now owned by Arjuna, it had not had much life left in it.