The Solitude of Emperors (11 page)

The scene outside could have been lifted from a tourist brochure—a sky so blue and hard that knives could have been sharpened on it, and light so clear that everything it touched turned to crystal. I am an urban creature through and through, without the least bit of interest in gardens and nature, but even my jaded city eye was momentarily diverted by the beauty that was laid out before me. About half of the garden was given over to flower beds, and the rest was planted with fruit trees. A line of poinsettia bushes, exuberantly coloured, marked the farthest boundary. Paths of beaten red earth laced the garden, and I took one of them. I recognized a few of the flowers—roses of pink-and-gold, thrusting their petals out for inspection, a blaze of yellow marigolds near the garage, hibiscus bushes lining the driveway, and a multitude of other plants and blooms, each individual leaf, petal and sepal distinct and perfect in the relentless clarity of the light. As I walked among the flower beds, my eye was caught by a row of short stumpy shrubs slathered with flowers in arresting colours. They looked like the cheap gaudy earrings a common whore would wear, but despite their seeming tawdriness, they were quite extraordinary to behold. I wondered what they were called, and looked around to see if there was a gardener I could ask. It was then that I caught sight of smoke rising beyond the thick clump of trees that marked the north-eastern corner of the property. As I approached the trees, I saw a short dark man with white hair and white sideburns that curved like riding boots down either side of his face feeding a pile of bluish-violet flowers into the fire. If he noticed me approaching, he gave no sign of it. I watched him for a couple of minutes, and then coughed to attract his attention. He looked up briefly, and then went back to his work. Unsure of what to do in the face of the man’s rudeness, I was about to turn and make my way back to the house, when he said, still not looking up, ‘You’re the dorai from Bombay. Is there anything I can do for you?’

‘No, nothing,’ I said, hastily, and then without intending to sound as peremptory as I did, asked, ‘Why are you burning those flowers?’

‘Because,’ he said slowly, ‘that’s the only way to get rid of them, although you wouldn’t think it to look at them.’ He plucked a flower from the pile and held it out to me. The petals were pale and almost translucent, so delicate they were already shrivelling from being plucked. ‘The morning glory is tough. It’s the weed every gardener in Meham detests. It’ll take over your garden, suck the goodness from the soil and smother every other plant. And it’s virtually indestructible. It can survive pesticides, drought, frost… The only way to get rid of it is to burn it. Very beautiful, very deadly.’

This little rant seemed to have exhausted the gardener, and he lapsed into a moody silence. He wasn’t going to be the most helpful tour guide, I decided, so I left him to his task and continued to explore the garden.

The air was alive with the sound and movement of birds and small animals. By the time I left Meham, I would learn the names of the swifts that darted through the air snapping up insects, the green parakeets that flew as straight as jets at a fly-past, and the two varieties of bulbuls that ravaged the guava trees, but on that first afternoon in the garden, ignorant of almost everything that surrounded me, I felt profoundly out of place. The rural setting, the lack of people I could relate to, even the purity of the air and light unsettled me, and I was suddenly possessed by the desire to flee back to Bombay.

The feeling passed. I plucked a guava from one of the overburdened trees, and savoured the tart, sweet pulp and seeds, plucked another, and yet one more, realizing as I ate them that this was the first time I had actually eaten ripe fruit off a tree. Growing up in K— the best I’d been able to do was sample stolen green mangoes from a neighbour’s grove. I rambled aimlessly around the garden a little longer, and then for want of anything better to do I went back into the house, ensconced myself in a comfortable armchair and picked up Mr Sorabjee’s manuscript. The next thing I knew the butler was gently shaking me awake. Feeling sheepish at passing out fully dressed, I quickly went into the bathroom, washed my face and made my way to the dining room in the centre of which was an enormous teak dining table that seated twelve. A single place was set at the head of the table.

The butler apologized for the simplicity of the meal. He explained that one of his staff was sick and hadn’t been able to go to the market, but it was an unnecessary apology—the rice, sambhar, fried mutton and beans kootu that were served wouldn’t have been out of place in a fancy hotel in Bombay. I ate well, my appetite sharpened by the journey and the mountain air. After dinner, I strolled once more into the garden. The vast blackness of the night was sprayed with the glitter of stars and it was very quiet. To my city-bred ears, the absence of noise was something that took a little getting used to. I stood there for a while longer, thinking about the series of events that had brought me to this mansion on the hill, and I felt curiously distant from everything. The violence and dissonance of men in the cauldron of the city seemed to belong to a different world altogether. And then I remembered the admonitory finger pointing to the heavens, the Tower of God, which I had seen on the journey into town, and realized the peace of the countryside was probably an illusion.

It was beginning to get chilly, so I went back inside. The servants had returned to their quarters, but my bed had been turned down and a fire lit in the fireplace. What luxury, I thought, feeling a little embarrassed. I shrugged away the thought easily enough, changed and got into bed, but found that I wasn’t sleepy because of my unscheduled nap in the evening. Mr Sorabjee’s manuscript had been neatly arranged on the bedside table and, picking it up, I began turning the pages.

THE NEED FOR EMPERORS

Our Gods have always looked after us, through the good times and the bad. All 333 million of them—and I’m not talking here just of the Gods of Hinduism but of all the deities of all the faiths that have found a place in this great land—Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, Judaism and Zoroastrianism. It’s quite a good arrangement, when you come to think of it, because our surfeit of Gods, one for every three or four of us, more than makes up for the lack of doctors, policemen, school teachers, nuclear scientists and judges. We make a few sacrifices to our deities, show them that we love, respect and venerate them, and in return they are expected to take care of all our needs and aspirations in this life and our lives to come. Our compact with the Gods has worked quite well for thousands of years, but it is broken, every now and again, and that’s when we find ourselves in serious trouble.

Why does this happen? If we look at it from the point of view of the Gods themselves, I can think of a couple of reasons. First, our deities have plenty to do in their own world as well as in all the other worlds they are responsible for. As a result, from time to time they take their eyes off the affairs of men and catastrophes result: a tsunami or an earthquake, a train wreck or a building collapse, but these accidents do not threaten the world. More serious are the times when the Gods put forth their power to save mankind and it fails. No one quite knows the reason for this, not even the Gods themselves, and until their power is restored to them, mankind is extremely vulnerable. For this is when the old Gods, the pre-Vedic Gods, the Gods of Jahiliyya, the Gods of Naraham, a few lapsed Gods turned Demons, who were laid off when the new religions arrived on the scene a few millennia ago and have nursed a grudge ever since, stage a comeback. These were Gods of war and devastation whom our distant ancestors worshipped in a time of great turmoil and fear, when a people could be exterminated by any number of things—natural phenomena, more powerful tribes, disease… Naturally they needed pahelwan Gods who could be asked to destroy any threat that appeared. The only problem was that the other tribes worshipped similar Gods, so there was a bit of a stand-off until new faiths were brought into being by religious geniuses of the time in order to put an end to the bloody cycle of destruction and regeneration that existed. The old Gods were abandoned but this didn’t mean they went away; they just bided their time until the power of the new deities faded so they could rise again.

For rioters are nothing but the children of these unholy Gods. They do not lie when they say God is on their side. He is on their lips and in their hearts, and when they kill they do so on His command, this terrible deity striding out of the mists of time. How else could you explain the fact that, when weapons have acquired the sophistication to kill ‘cleanly’ and from a great distance, rioters still prefer to kill the old-fashioned way, with lathis, with choppers, with rocks, with their bare hands? Why do they burn their victims alive? Rioters, it is clear, are not making war; they are performing a holy rite, an act of loving worship to an ancient, terrifying God in which both the murderer and the victim are blessed by the sacrifice. This is why rioters feel no guilt, the men who send them out to kill feel no guilt, and the apathetic majority who watch and do nothing feel no guilt. Surely nobody can be expected to feel guilty for being pious?

The tearing down of the mosque and the riots and bomb explosions in Bombay are only the latest manifestations of our genuflecting to the old Gods and there will be more wanton acts of destruction in the name of religion unless we do something about it. So what is to be done? In order to get rid of the old Gods it is evident that we first need to sort out their proxies. But to rob the fanatics of their power we will first need to understand them, then checkmate them, and kick them out.

It is not difficult to understand how the fundamentalists gained power; they have always been around, like their masters the Gods of destruction, and again just like their masters they have had to bide their time before coming to power. When we—men and women of different faiths, classes and castes—gained independence and dreamed of a new India, we would not be swayed by the religious ideologues and mischief makers who threatened our tolerance, pluralism and stability—that way lay the road to another country, a country bedevilled by obscurantism, hate and religion gone mad. This, despite the violence of partition and the assassination of Gandhi. For what the great men who brought us our freedom did not forget was that India had always been the most plural of countries, a country that contained the world. Our people had come from everywhere: they were descended from central Asian tribes, Mongol warlords, Portuguese adventurers, Arabian seamen, Chinese travellers, Buddhist princes, Jewish wanderers, British traders, Christian apostles, Macedonian soldiers, and although it hadn’t always been easy to adjust, we had managed to do so. I am reminded here of a story that was told about my own people. When we first landed on the shores of Gujarat, the local ruler didn’t want to let us in—his kingdom was already full, and he didn’t want his own people to lose their livelihood or have to put up with strange rituals and customs. Our leader asked for a tumbler of milk and a handful of sugar. He dissolved the sugar in the milk and said to the ruler, this is what we will be like. You will notice, Your Highness, that not a drop of the milk has spilled, but that it is now sweeter and even tastier to drink. We will merge with your society and our advent will make it better. If that was true of the Parsis, it is also true of those who came from elsewhere, every community has added its colour and flavour and is essential to this ancient land. Our art, our music, our architecture, our wealth, our philosophy, all this and more has been created by Indians belonging to every faith, every caste and every creed. When you contemplate a great painting, or listen to a great musician, or read a great book, or send your child to a great educational institution, or even buy a bag of cement to build your house, you don’t pause to think about whether its creator is Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsi, Sikh or Jain; you merely enjoy it for what it is and at some level are thankful that all these great Indians have given generously of their talent for the benefit of us all. That is why when the fundamentalists seek to portray one Indian as somehow being more Indian than another their lies need to be flung back at them, and it is they who should be asked to leave this country, before their nefarious designs spell the end of India.

So why are we facing this time of darkness especially when the country’s prospects have never looked so good? It would take a book several times the length of this one to adequately explain all the reasons that have brought us to this place but I will try and provide an overview. There are several proximate causes of course—incompetent, corrupt politicians who have made appalling decisions, local rivalries, ancient feuds that have never been properly resolved—but none of these are enough in themselves to explain the emergence of fundamentalism on a national scale.

Historians and economists tell us that nations are ripe for ethnic and sectarian war when a combination of things happens at once—the blurring of ethnic boundaries which arouses the ire of puritans, the absence of enlightened government, but most of all the advent of sweeping economic change. It is at times like these that we are at our most vulnerable, and therefore liable to fall under the spell of false demagogues and prophets. This was true of Hitler’s Germany and it is true of India today. There is a popular misconception that it is only when a country is on the ropes that citizen turns on citizen and a nation devours its own but history does not bear this out. Rather, it is in periods of great volatility brought about by an upsurge in economic activity when millions of people are severed from their moorings, when the great divide between the haves and have-nots deepens, when large sections of the population begin to feel powerless and confused as the gap between their expectations and reality increases, as the machinery of the state begins to break down, it is then that the rabble-rousers and politicians who promise security in the name of religion come into their own. When you are alone and far from home, frustrated by life at every turn, denied the comfort of your caste fellows and the minutely ordered web of village life, it is comforting to think that things will be better if only those pestilential adherents to a different faith could be shown their place. You don’t pause to think how exactly your life would be better if someone else’s place of worship were destroyed (does that put food in your stomach, make your own place of worship more sacred?) or an innocent or two from another religion raped (does that make your wife or mistress any sexier?) or killed (will that give you the office job that you have always coveted but aren’t qualified for?) or how your religion alone will sort out all your problems because these politicians are clever, they are convincing, and they tell you exactly how to think. But they don’t want you to think too much because you might then wonder how almost 800 million Hindus could possibly be threatened by a little over 100 million Muslims, who are often poorer and more wretched than any other community in the subcontinent, or by twenty million Christians whose numbers are actually dwindling, although the fundamentalists would have you think that they are doubling their population every five years through conversion. Or ask how it is that Hindus are any more indigenous than Indian Buddhists, Muslims, Christians or Jews, when most reliable historians agree that the precursors of the Hindus came to this land many millennia ago from the central Asian steppe. Just like everyone else. Or ponder how this country would be any better off as a theocracy when everywhere we find examples of nations which regressed when they took that route—Pakistan, Iran, the Balkans… Or question how the depredations of past rulers of the country can be laid at the door of fellow citizens whose only crime appears to be that they belong to the same faith. No, the right-wing politicians don’t want you to think too much because if you did you would find they don’t care as much about religion as they would like you to, oh no, they are as secular as the pseudo-secularists they excoriate. They are modern men who wish to get ahead, get power, get riches, and the easiest way to do that is to come up with religious symbols and populist slogans that will influence the millions who are rootless, impoverished and looking for a quick solution to their problems. However, to be fair to the politicians, it might be too much to expect them to deal with the real problems of this country—almost a quarter of a billion people below the poverty line, many hundreds of millions who are illiterate, several hundred million more without basic healthcare, drinking water and so on and so forth; they are not supermen after all.