The Great Indian Novel (32 page)

‘What you want shall come to pass,’ said an ethereal voice that echoed round the spaces of her mind. ‘But know this: under the boon conferred by his father, Ganga Datta will only leave this world when he no longer wishes to remain in it. When such a moment comes, he can be destroyed - but only by a man made unlike all other men.’

And then the voice was gone, leaving only the vibrations of its message in her mind, so that when Amba opened her eyes and saw the haze swirling around her it was as if she had been touched by the intangible, as if she had been possessed by the ineffable, as if she had been filled up by an absence.

She remained as she was for many hours after that, savouring the texture of the experience through all her senses, giving herself up to the meaning of that moment. Finally, she knew, and she rose to her feet with a terrible purpose etched into her will.

Amba would have her revenge at last. But it would not be as Amba, the betrayed beauty of Bhumipur, that she would exact it.

In a small disreputable clinic in the back-streets of Bombay, behind the quarter where the transvestites flaunt their gender at perspiring clients, beyond the dark betel-stained stairways ascended by pairs of swaying hermaphrodites, Amba stood naked before a sharp-toothed figure in a grimy white coat.

She spoke to the surgeon in a voice hoarse with strain.

‘Take from me these milkless breasts, doctor, seal this unseeded womb. Make me a man, doctor. A man made unlike all other men.’

The war was over. The destruction, the fire-bombing, the rocket blitzes, the lingering deaths on the battlefields, all ended with a bullet in a Berlin bunker and a thousand suns exploding over Japan. But in India, Ganapathi, the violence was just about to begin.

It was clear that this was one victory which would cost Britain as much as defeat. The old Empire had been brought to its knees by the effort of self- preservation, like a householder crippled in his successful resistance to a burglar. At the moment of victory, as he was sharing his triumph with his allies, the Prime Minister who symbolized John Bull’s indomitable will was unseated by an electorate that wanted eggs rather than empire and valued indoor gas over imperial glory. When Labour came to power it was evident even to the purblind members of the Society for the Preservation of the Imperial Connection (SPIC) and its marginally more progressive rival the Society for the Promotion of an Anglophile Nationalism (SPAN) that the days of the Raj were numbered. Wearied by war, Britain no longer had the stomach for colonial conflict. His Majesty’s grasp on the reins of his Indian Empire was now noticeably feeble.

Freed from their disastrous incarceration, the leaders of the Kaurava Party blinked at the sunlight of a new reality. They discovered a nation whose nationalism had been left directionless too long, and a rival organization unrecognizably stronger than it had ever been, newly wise in the ways of power, tested by office and already flexing muscles developed while the Kauravas’ were atrophying in jail. Suddenly, the Independence stakes were a two-horse race, with the two horses aiming for different finishing-posts.

Elections were called: the democratic way out of the dilemma. The Kauravas did well, but not as well as before. It was not possible to make up for six years away from the field in six weeks of energetic campaigning. The Mahaguru’s men still won a majority of the provinces, but the Muslim Group emphatically carried most of the Muslim seats. In all but one of the provinces where their co-religionists were in a majority, they triumphantly assumed the reins of office - and demanded separation.

At the twilight hour, the Raj realized what it had done.
Divide
et
impera
had worked too well. A device to maintain the integrity of British India had made it impossible for that integrity to be maintained without the British.

In a gesture so counter-productive it might almost have been an act of expiation, the Raj clumsily gave the warring factions a last chance of unity. It decided to prosecute Pandu’s traitors, the soldiers who had discarded their Britannic epaulettes for the swastikas of the OO’s Swatantra Sena. Pandu himself was gone, though there were still die-hards who insisted he had not died in the plane crash and was lurking underground on some tropical island waiting to re-emerge at the right time. In either case, the Supreme Leader was not available to be tried, and the Raj had to find scapegoats amongst his lieutenants. In a desire to appear even-handed amongst the main communities, the British chose to place three Panduites on trial in Delhi’s historic Red Fort: a Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh.

The result was a national outcry that spanned the communal divide. Whatever the defects and the derelictions of Pandu’s unfortunate followers, they had not been disloyal to their motherland. Each of the three defendants became a symbol of his community’s proud commitment to independence from alien rule. Neither the Muslim Group nor the Kaurava Party had any choice but to rise to the trio’s defence. For the first time in their long careers Mohammed Ali Karna and Dhritarashtra accepted the same brief. The OO trials were the last issue on which the two parties took the same stand. Pandu brought them together in death as he could not have done in life.

But the moment passed. The defence of three patriots was no longer enough to guarantee a common definition of patriotism. The rival lawyers for the same cause hardly spoke to each other. Karna began to lose interest when he discovered that his Muslim guinea-pig was no fan of Karnistan (indeed, Ganapathi, he was to stay on in India and die a minister). The ferment across the country made the result of the trial almost irrelevant. The men were convicted, but their sentences were never carried out, because by the time the trial was over it was apparent that the ultimate treason to the British Raj was being contemplated in its own capital. London, under Labour, was determined to liquidate its Indian Empire.

By this stage, Ganapathi, the vultures had scented the dying emanations and were already beating their wings for pieces of the corpse. Karna made it clear he had no desire to content himself with a few provincial satrapies. He wanted a country: he wanted Karnistan. When it briefly seemed that the sentimental British were unwilling to contemplate the break-up of the dominion they had so assiduously built, he exhorted his followers to ‘Direct Action’. Several thousand cadavers, burning vehicles, gutted homes, looted shops and rivulets of blood later, everyone except the Mahaguru began thinking about the unthinkable: the division of the motherland.

Gangaji refused to be reconciled to the new reality. He walked in vain from riot-spot to riot-spot, trying to put out the conflagration through expressions of reason and grief But the old magic was gone. Where he was effective it was in very specific areas for very limited periods of time; against the scale and magnitude of the carnage that was sweeping across the country, he was broadly ineffectual. It was almost as if the Mahaguru and his message had only touched a corner of the national consciousness, a corner reserved for the higher attributes of conscience and historical memory, but one unrelated to the dictates of reality or the needs and constraints of the present.

History was catching up with itself, and it was running out of breath.

As the communal strife - the American news-magazines and the British tabloids were already calling it a ‘civil war’ - swept across the country, the British government decided to bring matters to a head. In fact, to a different head: they changed the Viceroy, appointing a new representative with a mandate to negotiate an orderly transfer of power.

Viscount Drewpad was the right man to give away a kingdom. Tall, dapper, always elegantly dressed, he wore his lack of learning lightly, cultivating a casual patter that impressed anyone he spent less than five minutes with - which was almost everybody. It helped, of course, that in their ruling classes the British valued height more than depth. It helped even more that he was related in at least three ways to the royal family, whose patronymic (like his) had been changed from the German during the unpleasantness of 1914.

‘In-jyah! How exciting!’ exclaimed his wife Georgina when he straightened his collar before one of three bedroom mirrors and gave her the news. ‘Aren’t you rather young to be ruling a continent?’

‘I won’t be ruling it, dear, just giving it away,’ her husband replied, patting cologne on to his cheek. ‘And, besides, I think they’ve chosen me
because
I’m young. We’re the glamour brigade, you see, marching forth to the skirl of bagpipes. They can’t send an old dodderer who’d make it look as if we were only leaving India because we haven’t the strength to carry on.’

‘Why
are
we leaving India, then?’

‘Because we haven’t the strength to carry on.’ Lord Drewpad picked up a small pair of silver scissors and delicately trimmed the black moustache which, along with his tweezered eyebrows, framed an aquiline nose like the two bars of the capital letter ‘I’. ‘But there are ways and means of pulling out. We’re going to do it in style.’

‘Oh, good,’ said Georgina. ‘India,’ she said dreamily. ‘You took me there on our honeymoon.’

Lord Drewpad adjusted a cuff and turned to give her an affectionate look. ‘And I wasn’t the only one to, ah,
take
you there either,’ he pointed out. ‘Now, that sort of thing won’t do, Georgina. You’ll have to remember we’ll be far more visible this time.’

‘Bertie, you’ve got a wicked mind!’ Georgina trilled girlishly. Over the years she had bounced on some of the best mattresses in England, with her husband’s amused consent. Now . . . ‘The beds i’ the East are soft,’ she quoted mischievously.

‘If you must think of Shakespeare, choose
The
Taming
of
the
Shrew,’
her husband retorted, combing a recalcitrant curl back into place. ‘Look, Georgina, we have appearances to maintain. I mean, when we’re in India we won’t be just anybody. We’ll be there in a symbolic capacity.’

‘Oh, really?’ Georgina gurgled. ‘And what will we be symbolizing?’

‘Surrender,’ replied Lord Drewpad, putting down the comb and squinting critically at the mirror.

‘Oh, I don’t mind symbolizing that at all,’ said his wife, lying back languorously on her bed.

‘Now, Georgina, none of that,’ her husband warned her waggishly. ‘Remember, withdrawal is the larger theme of our presence.’ He lifted his chin so that the light fell more clearly on it. The shaved skin was still smooth, complementing the first-person-first emblem of the prominent I on the middle of his face. He nodded to himself in approval.

‘Tell me about it, dear,’ his wife went on. ‘What does it all mean?’

‘In a nutshell, headlines in the papers, footage in the newsreels, tea with the holy Mahaguru in Delhi, a cavalry escort in turbans and braid, and an army of servants,’ Lord Drewpad replied, practising a toothy grin into the mirror. Dissatisfied the first time, he bared his teeth again, more successfully. ‘Jolly good, what?’

‘And the work?’ Lady Drewpad asked. ‘Will there be a lot?’

‘Good God, they’re not sending me out there to
work,
Georgina,’ the Viceroy-designate grimaced. ‘There are plenty of civil servants to do that. They re sending me there to give the Raj a great big grand farewell-party. With colour, and music, and lights and costume, and enough pomp and circumstance for the natives to remember us by for a long, long time.’

‘Is that what the
Labour
government wants you to do, Bertie?’ Georgina could not keep the astonishment from her voice.

‘Well, not exactly,’ Lord Drewpad admitted, critically examining his fingernails. ‘I have an idea they’d probably prefer me to set an example in self- restraint for the ration-ridden populace at home. But once I’m in India, there’s not much they can do about it. You see, the Viceroy doesn’t live off the British taxpayer. Indian revenues are considerable, and I intend us to enjoy them considerably.’

Lady Drewpad sighed in anticipatory wistfulness. It all sounds delightful,’ she murmured.

‘Hmm,’ her husband agreed, busying himself with an emery-board. ‘And the thing is, we’ll be making everybody happy at the same time. The government here, because they want the problem off their hands. The British in India, because after a long time they’ll have a Viceroy - and Vicereine - who will dazzle the natives with an unstinting display of imperial glory. And the Indians, because they know they’ll be getting their country back at the end of it all.’