The Great Indian Novel (48 page)

Shishu Pal then sat at the conference table and meticulously gave back everything our boys had won on the battlefield.

‘Peace demands compromise,’ he murmured, as he signed away the very passes and bluffs and salients on which our best soldiers had earned their posthumous mentions in despatches. But he agonized over each square inch he returned, seeming to weigh the amount of Indian blood soaked into each clump of soil that he tossed back into Karnistan.

At last, the night that he signed the peace treaty, aware that at home the jackals were again baying, ‘Betrayal,’ but convinced that his dharma placed the preservation of life above the exaction of revenge, Shishu Pal tossed and turned his way into an eternal sleep. It was almost as if dying was the only means he had of showing the widows and cripples how intimately he suffered for their wasted sacrifice.

And so Shishu Pal passed from the nation’s front pages as unobtrusively as he had entered them. If a war had broken Dhritarashtra’s heart, a peace had broken his.

And so, too, we sat down together again in my house, the members of the Kaurava Working Committee, the collective husbands of Indian democracy, and asked ourselves a question we had hoped not to ask again so soon: ‘What do we do now?’

Someone suggested the same formula: that one of us be elected to rule as
primus
inter
pares,
just as Shishu Pal had been. But as soon as names were broached it became apparent that no one could attract even the minimal ‘no objection’ consensus which had given that good man the job that had cost him his life.

At last I spoke the words that had lain dormant in me all those years, the words I had hoped I would be able to suppress when the time came, the words I knew I was fated to speak from the moment that Gandhari the Grim had rested her sweat-soaked head upon her pillow and refused to look at her new-born baby.

‘There is only one possible solution to our dilemma,’ I said, the words emerging by themselves from my vocal chords. ‘Priya Duryodhani.’

‘A woman?’

Imagine, Ganapathi, that was all they found to say; that was the principal objection of the guardians of our nation to the forces of destiny. ‘A woman!’ they said, as if they were not all born of them.

‘Precisely,’ I replied, speaking as I was willed to speak. ‘We want a Prime Minister with certain limitations, a Prime Minister who is no more than any minister, a Prime Minister who will decorate the office, rally the support of the people at large and let us run the country. None of us can play that role as well as Priya Duryodhani can. She is easily recognizable, she is known as her father’s daughter, and she will be more presentable to foreign dignitaries than poor little Shishu Pal ever was. And if we ever decide we have had enough of her - well, she is only a woman.’

What can you expect, Ganapathi? My irrefutable eloquence carried the day. Priya Duryodhani was sworn in as the third Prime Minister of independent India. And once again I had acted as the agent of forces stronger than myself, leaving my smudgy thumbprint on those pages of history that it had been my task to turn.

Do you, Ganapathi, know the story of Tilottama?

Tilottama was an
apsara,
the most ravishing of celestial nymphs, and she was sent down to earth to perform a task even the gods found impossible - the destruction of the invincible twin sovereigns Sunda and Upasunda.

The twins were absolute monarchs and absolutely inseparable; they ruled the same kingdom, sat on the same throne, ate off the same plate and slept on the same bed; and they enjoyed a boon that decreed they could die only by each other’s hand. They were so close that this seemed an improbable prospect, but the gods knew a thing or two about men. They sent Tilottama down on her terrestrial mission, and within days - not to mention nights - she had the twins so maddened by jealousy of each other that they fought over her, fatally.

Imagine, Ganapathi: they had, in the modern phrase, everything going for them, and yet they killed each other for exclusive possession of a calculatingly desirable woman.

There are many lessons one can derive from this story, including the basic one that twins should beware of women called Tilottama, but the moral that the Pandavas took to heart from my recitation of the tale was more constructive: that when many men desire one woman they must take all possible precautions against the slightest risk of similar self-destruction. Accordingly the Five drew up elaborate schedules and procedures for the sharing of Draupadi, dividing their proprietary rights with due heed to the privileges of seniority and the inconveniences of her time of month. And they concluded with a rule as inflexible as the one that bound them to filial obedience: should any one of them interrupt Draupadi in the embrace of another, the intruder would be banished from the household for twelve months.

A remarkable rule, that, but they were a remarkable quintet, Ganapathi. Some day their lives and beliefs will be studied by bright young scholars across the country, so let us look at them now, in the early years of their adulthood, as a textbook might. A school textbook, for they personified the hopes and the limitations of each of the national institutions they served; a school textbook, with portraits drawn in clear simple lines, and accompanying text in large bold letters.

First, inevitably, would be Yudhishtir, clearly the inheritor of the Hastinapur political legacy. Maturely serious and prematurely bald, he qualified as a lawyer but made politics his only vocation, rising with steady inevitability up the party’s ranks. The fact of seniority and the assumption of authority made him extremely sure of himself, to the point, indeed, where he did not always stay on the right side of the borderline between self-confidence and smugness. Oh, he was polite, courteous to elders, truthful, honest, dutiful. But certitudes came too easily to him, doubts almost never. Like many an eldest son in India, he believed he invariably knew what was best for his juniors and expected automatically to be obeyed by them. This meant that the older he grew, the fewer were those to whom he needed to defer, and the less accommodating he became. Secure in his integrity and righteousness, he was impervious to the corruption and injustice around him; he sought to be right rather than to do right.

Turn the page of our primer, Ganapathi, and you would find a large, muscular figure in battle fatigues. Bhim embodied the physical strength without which the new nation could not have defended itself. He joined the army; to many of us, he
was
the army. His pureness of heart and spirit, his courage and bravery, the depth of his convictions, were at the nation’s disposal at the borders, and - in times of emergency - wherever it was needed within the country. Belying the profuse moustache whose bristles he proudly groomed, Bhim was gentle and considerate with those in his care, especially his mother and Draupadi Mokrasi. But he was as thick-skinned and unimaginative, as incapable of original initiative, as the strongest ox in a fertile field.

Our textbook would probably devote most space to the paragon of perfection, Arjun. There he would stand, straddling two pages, his shining gaze as steady as his strong legs. I thought of Arjun, with his paradoxical mixture of attributes, as the spirit of the Indian people, to which he so ably gave voice as a journalist. India could not be India without the loud, vibrant, excited babel of contending opinions that its free press expresses. Arjun, himself a man of contradictions, perfectly reflected both the diversity and the discordance of the Indian masses, whose collective heartbeat he heard and echoed. His gentleness of expression, his frequently troubled frown of reflection, mirrored the doubts and questions that were as much a part of his nature as the decisive flurries of action he undertook when circumstances generated their own certainties.

Madri’s twins Nakul and Sahadev - can one ever speak of them separately? - were destined early for the twin pillars of India’s independent governance; the administrative and diplomatic services. Nakul’s quickness and agility kept him always a step ahead of his brother. He spoke with breathtaking speed, the words tripping out as if only the act of utterance could give them stability and coherence. Nakul was made, Yudhishtir drily said, for diplomacy, since he could speak a lot without saying anything. Sahadev was both opposite and complementary: quiet, reflective, willing to let Nakul speak for him - until and unless he was sure of his own view, in which case his diffidence quietly gave way to clarity and firmness. One might have imagined that, with these attributes, it would be Nakul who would articulate the glib banalities of diplomacy and Sahadev who would confront the agonizing dilemmas of administration. But Fate, and a shrewd Public Services Commission interviewing panel, willed otherwise, and each went into the profession seemingly suited for his brother.

These, then, were the five who shared Draupadi Mokrasi, who gave her sustenance and protection, and who guaranteed their unity by the rigid rule that punished any intrusion with a year’s banishment.

It was a good rule as far as it went, but like all inflexible rules it suffered from the great disadvantage of leaving no room for exceptions. And so it happened that one day I stopped by and asked Arjun for the manuscript of a speech whose text he had been revising for me; I had to leave sooner than expected to deliver it and needed it immediately. I had no idea, of course, that Arjun had left it in the bedroom where at that very moment Yudhishtir and Draupadi were locked in connubial bliss. For a moment he weighed in the balance the certainty of the penalty against the certainty of letting me down, and made his dutiful choice. Perhaps he was, in some subconscious way, restlessly yearning for exile.

Arjun entered the bedroom quietly, not wishing to disturb his brother, and slipped the text off the bedside table unnoticed by the ecstatic couple. But when I had gone he waited for Yudhishtir to emerge and confessed he had violated their mutual undertaking.

‘Well, in that case I guess you’ll have to go,’ Yudhishtir said righteously. ‘Pity - it was going to be your turn tomorrow, since Bhim’s away.’

‘You can have my shift,’ said Arjun, without resentment. ‘Draupadi seems happy enough in your company.’

‘That’s dangerous talk,’ his elder brother said sharply. ‘In fact, I intend to rearrange everyone’s schedule to share your turn equally amongst the others, if you must know. But Arjun - watch your tongue. Remember Sunda and Upas-unda.’

‘I know.’ Arjun was instantly ashamed. ‘I’m sorry.’

But despite everything - and though he fully appreciated the objective necessity for the arrangement they had made and the exile it now imposed upon him - Arjun could not help wondering, as he took his leave of a tearful Draupadi, whether Yudhishtir would have been able to win Draupadi’s hand by himself

And think of Draupadi: abandoned by the man she had loved and wanted to marry, because of his unavoidable violation of a rule that itself served only to limit his access to her. It was not that the others displeased her; but Arjun was always her favourite, the reason why she was a Pandava bride at all, and now she would have to do without him altogether for a year.

It is, Draupadi Mokrasi thought as she submitted again that night to Yudhishtir’s studious caresses, a curiously unjust world.

Arjun embarked, on the rebound, on one of the great erotic sagas of our history. Travelling around the country to spend his exile as a roving correspondent for his paper, he restlessly sought an elusive fulfilment in the arms of a succession of remarkable women. Each dateline on the despatches he mailed or cabled back to the capital concealed a night, or a week, of passion.

In Hardwar, for instance, by the sacred Ganga, there was Ulupi, a Naga beauty who taught him underwater pleasures omitted in his adolescent swimming lessons. In Manipur, source of a story about the great indigenous school of classical dance, he found Chitrangada, a skilled
danseuse
who performed startling duets to his percussion instrument. At Khajuraho, from where he mused in print about the nation’s most sensuous tourist attraction, he succumbed to the dusky Yaga, who practised on him the results of her extensive study of temple sculpture. At each halt he left behind something of himself, but he grew immeasurably as well. He moved on, driven by an urge he could not describe and did not fully comprehend, knowing only that he had not yet found what he was seeking.