The Great Indian Novel (21 page)

The young man himself did nothing to dispel the myths. The mystery of his past served him well, and as he rose dizzyingly to the pinnacle of Bombay’s legal profession it was his future that attracted more attention.

Karna’s poise and confidence were matched by his forensic skill. Few dared debate with him and those who did emerged shorn and shredded by his razor- edged tongue. His success in the courtroom brought him wealthier and more influential clients, invitations to speak at public meetings, and seats on major committees. Before long it began to be said that if there was an Indian of his generation born to shine and to lead, it was clearly the illustrious Mohammed Ali Karna.

Karna had joined the Kaurava Party upon his return from London to set up practice in Bombay as a barrister. He excelled upon its rostrums and soon represented it on various Raj committees and councils. But his view of the nationalist cause was, of course, quite different from Gangaji’s.

Karna’s concerns were those of the Inner Temple lawyer: Indians had a legal right to be consulted in their governance and he intended to obtain and assert those rights through legal means. It was as a skilled advocate of a constitutional brief that Karna approached his politics. Not for him the sweaty trudges through the
mofussil
districts, the mass rallies that Gangaji addressed in one or another vernacular; Karna, always elegant and well-groomed, was comfortable only in the language of his education and in the kind of surroundings in which he had acquired it.

These factors already pointed to a likely divergence from the path the party would take under Gangaji, but the actual incident that prompted Karna’s exit ignited something more visceral in him.

Something that was destined to set our country ablaze.

It was a major meeting of the party’s Working Committee, where Kaurava policy and tactics were being discussed. The Gangaji group, already well on its way to dominance of the organization (these were the days, Ganapathi, when Dhritarashtra and Pandu were still comrades-in-arms) was being prevented from carrying the day only by the defiance of Karna, whose scathing sarcasm about the other side was proving, as always, effective. This party is not going to overthrow the British by leading rabble through the streets,’ he was saying. ‘The mightiest Empire in the world, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers under arms, is not going to be brought down by the great unwashed. There is no Bastille to break open, no feeble king to overrun, but a sophisticated, highly trained, deeply entrenched system of government which we must deal with on its own terms. Those terms, gentlemen’ - and here Karna fixed his audience with that steely gaze above which the half-moon on his forehead seemed to throb with a light all its own - ‘are the terms of the law, of familiarity with British constitutional jurisprudence, of parliamentary practice. We must develop and use these skills to wrest power from rulers who cannot deny it to us under their own rules.’

Karna looked around the table, confirming that every pair of eyes, even the tilt of Dhritarashtra’s unseeing profile, was turned toward him. ‘We cannot hope to rule ourselves by leading mobs of people who are ignorant of the desideratum of self-rule. Populism and demagoguery do not move parliaments, my friends. Breaking the law will not help us to make the law one day. I do not subscribe to the current fashion for the masses so opportunistically advanced by a family of disinherited princes. In no country in the world do the ‘masses’ rule: every nation is run by its leaders, whose learning and intelligence are the best guarantee of its success. I say to my distinguished friends: leave the masses to themselves. Let us not abdicate our responsibility to the party and the cause by placing at our head those unfit to lead us.’

Of course it was arrogant stuff, Ganapathi, but Karna’s was the kind of arrogance that inspires respect rather than resentment. God knows how far he might have gone, and which direction the Kauravas might have taken, were it not for the knock on the door that interrupted him in full flow.

‘Excuse me, Mr Karna, sir,’ coughed an embarrassed
durwan,
‘but there is a man in a driver’s uniform outside who says he must see you. I explained to him that you were busy and could not be interrupted, but he insisted it was very important. I . . . I . . . er . . . asked him who he was, sir, and he said . . . he said . . he was your father.’

Karna’s burnished skin paled during this lengthy explanation, and then a voice sounded outside: ‘Let me in, I say. My son will see me. I must . . .’ And then the door was flung open, and a dishevelled figure appeared in a sweat- stained white uniform, peaked driver’s cap in hand, anxiety distorting his face.

‘Karna,’ he cried in anguish. ‘It is your mother . . .’

The young man was on his feet. ‘I shall come at once, Abbajan,’ he said, his face a yellow pallor.

‘I see,’ said Dhritarashtra mildly before Karna had even reached the door. ‘A driver’s son has been lecturing us on the unsuitability of the masses.’

‘Such ingratitude,’ murmured an obliging sycophant.

‘Are we to let ourselves be swayed by the prejudices of someone who thinks he is too good for his parents?’ asked Dhritarashtra. Karna shot him a look of pure hatred, which spent itself harmlessly on the dark glasses of its target. A hum of approval from around the table was cut short by the slamming of the door. Karna was gone, defeated - like so many of his compatriots - by his origins.

That is how things often work in our country, Ganapathi. If a man cannot be overcome on merit, you can always expose him by uprooting his family tree. Family trees are versatile plants, Ganapathi; in our country incompetence and mediocrity also flourish under the shade of their leafy branches.

So Karna strode out, and I followed him, muttering that I would be back. I still don’t know what animated my impulse. Kunti had told me she would come by the building where we were meeting in order to wait for her husband, and I was seized with the urge to escape the stifling air of our petty quarrels. It would, I thought, do me good to spend a few minutes in more congenial company.

It was just as well. I reached Pandu’s wife on the landing just in time to catch her as she swooned into my arms.

I eased her on to a sofa and wondered, with all the incompetence of the lifetime bachelor, whether it would be appropriate to splash water on to that still exquisitely made-up face. I had not come to a decision when Kunti stirred, and opened eyes whose redness owed nothing to any cosmetic.

‘It’s him!’ she gasped.

‘What’s who?’ I asked, taken aback.

‘The young man . . . who just walked out’

‘Mohammed Ali Karna?’

‘Is that who it was? I’ve heard them speak of him, but never seen him before.’ She began to sit up now, the colour slowly pulsing back to her cheek. ‘What do you know about him, VVji?’

I wished I knew more than I did. After all, information was my speciality; with my sources, I knew everything about everybody. But Karna had proved an exception. ‘Nobody knows very much about him, Kunti. He’s a successful Bombay lawyer, London-trained, a little arrogant. And today we have just learned he is the son of a driver.’

There was a little intake of breath. ‘A driver?’

‘You know, a chauffeur. Karna left with him. His mother is apparently very ill.’

Kunti straightened herself on the sofa and pushed a strand of elegantly greying hair absently back from her eyes. ‘His mother,’ she said faintly, ‘is feeling much better now, thank you.’

It was my turn to swallow air. Her words woke me like the first shafts of sunlight through half-open eyes. Of course: the mystery of Karna’s origin was resolved at last.

The error of Kunti’s adolescence, the result of the plausible temptations of a passing foreigner, the offspring of a travelling man of the world, who had travelled out of his mother’s world in a small reed basket, had not perished. He had survived after all; he had been found; and he had grown to become Mohammed Ali Karna.

‘Kunti,’ I breathed.

‘Oh, VVji, he’s alive,’ she said, her eyes glistening. ‘I’m so happy.’

I tend to become the stern sage at the wrong moments. ‘You must never acknowledge him, Kunti,’ I cautioned her.

‘Do you think I don’t realize that?’ The retort was sharp, but I shall never forget the pathos in her voice. ‘Oh, VVji, won’t you find out more about him for me? Who this driver is? What exactly happened?’

‘Of course,’ I reassured her. With that basic clue, I knew that I, Ved Vyas, savant of other people’s secrets, would have no difficulty.

Indeed: a few discreet inquiries confirmed that Kunti’s instinctive faith in her first, lost son’s survival had been entirely justified. The basket had floated gently down the river and become enmeshed in some undergrowth on the right bank. As Fate would have it - for such things, as you well know, Ganapathi, are willed from above - a childless couple was picnicking on the riverside. The husband was a humble modern successor to the noble profession of charioteering, in other words a chauffeur, and he had profited from his employer’s absence to drive his wife to the river for a rare outing. Of such coincidences, Ganapathi, is history made.

The couple found the child and raised their hands heavenwards in praise of Allah, for they were Muslims. And thus it was that the child they adopted, the natural son of Kunti, acquired the basic qualification for membership of the party he would lead so decisively one day: the Muslim Group.

The other elements of his curriculum vitae then fell implausibly into place. Implausibly, for few who saw the Inner Temple barrister would have easily guessed the prosaic facts I discovered or inferred: a slum boyhood; scholarships to secondary school and college; a wealthy patron, his father’s employer - the opulent Indra Deva - to finance a stay in London. Karna was not born to affluence, as everyone thought; and yet, in a curious way, Ganapathi, he was.

But the more I probed, the more the story of Mohammed Ali Karna dissolved again into myth and speculation. Even when the incident of the chauffeur’s arrival at the Kaurava Party meeting became widely known, and the gossips and the rumour-mongers circulated fanciful and malicious versions of it to all who would listen, the golden youth remained untarnished. Instead, though the identity of those he called his parents could not be concealed, there were odd stories, awed stories, circulating about his extraordinary qualities, almost as if to make up for the apparent ordinariness of his ancestry.

These stories stressed not just his brilliance, but the determination and self- control which would one day win him a country. A typical tale, quite probably apocryphal, Ganapathi, told of how he came by his unusual name.

His father, devout Muslim though he was, had been reluctant, the story went, to risk the slightest harm to his golden foundling, and had left the boy uncircumcised. One day the young Mohammed Ali, bathing in the river with his father, asked him why he was different in that crucial respect.

‘Because you are not really my son, the grey-haired chauffeur replied; God allowed me to find you, but that did not give me the right to change the way He had made you.’

‘But I
am
your son,’ the boy declared. ‘I do not care what I was before you found me; my past abandoned me. I
will
be like you.’

Whereupon he seized a knife and circumcised himself.

Hearing of the boy’s deed the chauffeur’s master, Indra Deva, expressed his admiration of the lad. ‘You shall be known, in the glorious tradition of our national epic, as Karna,’ he announced. ‘Karna, the Hacker-Off.’

And thus it was that Mohammed Ali, adopted son of a rich man’s driver, became Mohammed Ali Karna, destined to be Star of the Inner Temple and Defender of the Mosque.

You don’t seem particularly convinced, Ganapathi. Well, neither was I. It is only a story. But you learn something about a man from the kind of stories people make up about him.

Of course one must be wary of history by anecdote.

It would be too facile to suggest that the incident at the meeting alone led to Karna’s resignation from the Kaurava Party. There undoubtedly were a hundred complex reasons that drove Karna out of the party, and that might have led him to leave it at another stage of its development. It was clear, for one thing, that his position was undermined by the demonstrable effectiveness of Gangaji’s methods; he could at best have slowed the capture of the party by the Hastinapuris, but he could not have prevented it. There was, for another, his own ego, which could not have abided the subordinate or at least co-equal role that Dhritarashtra and Pandu, let alone Gangaji himself, would have imposed upon him. Karna was one of those who would rather be king of an island than courtier, or even minister, in a great empire.