The Solitude of Emperors (17 page)

‘I told you didn’t I that you can recognize the moment a woman is willing to give herself to you absolutely, right. Well, I saw it that day and I knew everything was going to be fine. When there’s only physical attraction, there is a sort of electric brightness to the eyes you’re looking into, but when it’s something more, it’s as if they are lit from within by lamps or candles, the look is softer. I forgot about the whales and the ocean and was granted a vision of her that was so clear, so intense, that I could see every tiny detail, every pore of her skin, each strand of her eyebrows, the fall of her hair, the fine plane of her nose, the imperfections in her skin, everything about her bathed in the kind of luminescence that makes even the plainest of women beautiful.

‘It wasn’t that this woman needed that sort of alchemy to make her attractive, da, she was stunning, in a delicate sort of way—masses of ash-blonde hair, those amazing eyes, a smile made memorable by the endearing crookedness of her teeth. In any other circumstance I would have wanted to hurry her into bed, but I didn’t feel the least inclination to play things that way, it didn’t even cross my mind to write her an acrostic poem. But I wanted to see her again, and we made a date to meet that evening.’

They had gone to a small bar, crowded with locals and tourists, and had made a space for themselves in a corner, where they had talked without ceasing through that long evening, oblivious to the noise and confusion, telling each other their stories with the kind of intimacy usually reserved for long, deep associations. ‘We took turns getting the drinks from the bar, and I remember once when it was her turn, she could barely get her small perfect hands around the necks of the four bottles she was carrying and she exclaimed, “I wish I had a few more arms.”’ He smiled at the memory, banal, everyday, and I knew he could see it as clearly as when it had first happened.

As the shabby table in front of them grew cluttered with bottles of Stella Artois beer that he had continued to order because Iva was from Europe, Croatia to be precise, their stories grew ever more intimate—he told her about Maya; she told him that she had never really been in love although she had left a boyfriend, sort of, back in Zagreb; he told her about the death of his mother; and she told him about the loss in an accident of a beloved aunt, the relation she was closest to, after her parents split up; he told her about his great passion, modern European poetry; and she told him about her addiction to skiing, the dangers associated with it that made her feel more alive.

As the night wore on, their conversation held them fast in its net. When they parted well after midnight with just a chaste kiss, promising to meet again the next day, he had never felt closer to any woman since Maya had been taken away from him. The next morning he was up early, clear-headed despite the long hours of drinking the night before, smoking a cigarette on the tiny balcony of his room and looking out to where the sea lay grey and unmoving as petrified stone, when he saw a flash of yellow out of the corner of his eye. Even before the young woman on the pier came within hailing distance, he knew it was Iva. He was about to call out to her, but decided not to, she was so beautiful and poised and connected to her lonely private self that to disturb her would be somehow to violate her solitude. He watched her pass, her flounced yellow frock furling and unfurling around her slim body, and he knew that it was an image that he would carry around with him for the rest of his life.

That night, when they walked to her hotel, their bodies touching with every step they took, he knew he wasn’t wrong about his feelings of the previous day. When he eventually slipped off her dress, her body shone golden in the diffused light from the bedside lamp. He gazed at it for a long time, then bent over and traced its perfection with his lips, memorizing every inch. Their love-making was slow and unhurried, and unlike any of his encounters during the previous two years. And when they finally parted the next morning he was free of Maya and no longer needed to sleep with every woman he was attracted to.

‘So what happened to Iva?’ I asked.

‘Oh, we hung out for a couple of magical weeks—I was even inspired to write a poem called “Whalesmorning’’—and then we went our separate ways. You must understand that although this special connection I’m talking about supersedes pretty much every other bond, it doesn’t mean you need to continue with the person who inspires it forever. It’s only that you will remember her for the rest of your days: she sort of seeps all the way into the marrow of your bones, not just your heart and mind.’

After his American sojourn, he had returned to India, and found a job as an editor with a small alternative publishing house in Bombay called Well Found Books which specialized in publishing poetry and obscure novels in translation. It was funded by an elderly Gujarati industrialist who had always wanted to be a published poet; when he found no takers for his verse, he had started his own publishing house instead. His tiny handful of employees accepted that the publishing of their employer’s execrable verse was a small price to pay for the opportunity to publish other excellent poets. ‘I didn’t mind the job at first, da, it gave me the chance to publish the kind of poetry I liked. You know, guys who were trying to do stuff that took its inspiration from the modern European masters, whose work I adored because of its razor-clean rhyme structure and unsentimentality.’

Noah hadn’t lasted very long in Bombay. After two years he could take his boss’s pedestrian verse no longer, and as his own efforts to fashion the perfect poem had come to nothing, he had quit his job and returned to the Nilgiris. He had only intended to stay in Meham until he had worked out what he might do next with his life, but ten years later he was still here, and I remember thinking, not a little smugly, that the very quality that was so magnetic about him, his refusal to conform or fully engage with the world, could also prove to be a considerable disadvantage when it came to making your way through life. You could drift while others frantically tried to carve out a niche for themselves, but you couldn’t drift forever, and there would come a time when you simply stagnated without any real aim or ambition to keep you moving. As I thought about Noah in this way, I couldn’t help feeling superior to him, because I had a job, I had convictions, I had a mission. I was trying to dilute his mystery, make him ordinary so I could pigeonhole him, I can see that now, and I would feel foolish in just a few days when I would have to revise all my assumptions about him. But I can’t really blame myself; anyone else in my place would have done the same, for it is not easy to truly have the measure of those who live aslant to the rest of us.

8

The Legacy of Martyrs

Later that evening, as we sat drinking tea in a shack just outside town, Noah had a brainwave. He thought we might stop at the house of the chief disciple of the custodian of the shrine. Ravi Menon had been a history professor at Trivandrum University, and had moved to Meham upon his retirement five years earlier. He had been a devotee for over thirty years and could tell me everything I might want to know about the antecedents of the shrine and the dispute in which it was embroiled.

‘He’s over sixty-five but he still visits the shrine twice a week,’ Noah said to me as he parked the scooter at the bottom of a tall stone revetment on top of which the professor’s house was situated.

‘Won’t he mind us just barging in on him like this?’ I asked as we walked up a steep flight of steps.

‘Come on, da, this is Meham; we’re all very informal around here. The professor’s wife is an invalid so he doesn’t go anywhere except to the shrine, and then he pays a nurse to look after her.’

Professor Menon lived in a small neat house that resembled a railway carriage—oblong, with four rooms running one into the other in a straight line. When we knocked on the front door, it was opened almost immediately by a short man with white hair and thick black-framed spectacles. Seeing it was Noah, a smile appeared on his face.

‘Welcome, welcome, haven’t seen you in a long time, thambi,’ he said, and then, gesturing to me, said, ‘Who is your friend?’

‘He’s from Bombay, sir. A journalist. He wanted to talk to you about the shrine, hope you don’t mind?’

‘Of course not, come on in. I’ll get some tea.’

The room was very clean, although the furniture was cheap—wickerwork armchairs and coffee table, a threadbare rug on the floor and in the corner a small dining table covered with a plastic tablecloth.

‘Ra-a-a-a-vi, who is it?’ asked a shrill voice from within the house, ‘Is it Dr Gopinath?’

‘Be back with you in a moment,’ the professor said, wrapping his dhoti more firmly around his waist and leaving to attend to his wife. A smell of antiseptic and urine hung over the room. It wasn’t immediately noticeable, but it was unmistakable, the smell of a small-town hospital ward without adequate ventilation.

Professor Menon returned with two cups of tea, and when I told him I worked for
The Indian Secularist
he said, to my delight, that he knew the magazine—his university had subscribed to it. He said he admired it and Mr Sorabjee. We talked a bit about the Bombay riots, and the convulsions the country was still going through following the demolition of the Babri Masjid. I told him about my employer’s book and the argument he was constructing, and the professor agreed that it was necessary and timely.

He then began to tell me about the troubles Meham was facing. He said the state hadn’t had much trouble with sectarianism for quite some time because it had been ruled by a succession of leaders who hadn’t been inclined that way; it had helped that a few of them had been atheists. What we were seeing now was part of the fundamentalists’ agenda to sow new fields beyond the Hindi heartland and Gujarat with their poisonous seeds. In the 1980s one of their newsletters published a list of around forty shrines, masjids and other places of worship in Tamil Nadu that it claimed had originally belonged to Hindus. The Shrine of the Blessed Martyr, he said, was one of them.

He had heard of it while he was still teaching in Trivandrum, and when his wife had fallen ill and become paralyzed, he had come here, as he’d heard the custodian of the shrine could heal the sick. She hadn’t been cured as he had hoped, but he had been impressed by the custodian, Brother Ahimas, and over time he had become one of his most ardent supporters.

No one knew exactly when the shrine had been established, the Professor said, all that people could agree on was that it had come into being many centuries previously during a time of much strife in the lowlands, with all sorts of caste wars going on. To make things even more interesting, there were numerous foreign missionaries in the mix trying hard to convert as many of the locals as they could. One could barely travel a few miles in any direction without bumping into one of them—Jesuits, French Capuchins, English Protestants, Lutherans, Americans, Belgians—and some of them even grew to be quite well known, people like Francis Xavier and Robert de Nobili. One of the most famous was a Jesuit called John de Britto, who became one of South India’s first martyrs; he had such a hold upon his disciples that the ruler of the kingdom in which he lived, the Raja of Ramnad, decided to do away with him. To make absolutely sure the future saint—he was canonized a few centuries after his death—wasn’t going to rise inconveniently from the dead, the raja had him tortured, beheaded and impaled upon a stake. As an extra precaution he had his arms and legs cut off as well. This didn’t stop a cult forming around the martyr, and several shrines dedicated to him were soon established.

About 200 years ago, or maybe 300 (it all depended on who you talked to, the Professor said; that was the thing about myth, it was like plasticine, you could mould it into any shape you wanted to), a wandering Christian mystic called Gnanasundaram, a disciple of de Britto, came up into the mountains and decided to pray and meditate on the Tower of God. His only possession of any value was a piece of wood from the stake on which the saint had been martyred which the fakir had fashioned into a crude cross. One day, a tribal elder who was suffering from leprosy came to the holy man for help and was cured. News of the miracle spread, and soon there was a steady stream of pilgrims making their way to Meham, where a shrine was put up by devotees of the holy man. The pilgrimage was a hazardous undertaking back then—the area was teeming with tigers, leopards and all manner of poisonous snakes and insects—but that did not seem to deter the faithful or the desperate. The mystic turned no one away from the shrine, no matter what their religion was, because the faith he propounded was a curious mixture of non-denominational Christianity, Hinduism and mystical Islam. Then he offended one of the local headmen—an occupational hazard for mystics and holy men, it seemed to me—and was beheaded. According to legend, no sooner did his head touch the ground than it was transformed into a mound of jasmine flowers. As the holy man’s body dematerialized, the chief who had cut his head off repented, and the cult of the Blessed Martyr of Meham was born.

For hundreds of years thereafter there was peace, but then, during the time of the British, the first signs of trouble emerged. In the 1920s an obscure Hindu sect from the plains petitioned the British Collector of the district to demand the return of the martyr’s shrine to Hindus because it rightfully belonged to the followers of Lord Shiva. Needless to say the petition astonished devotees of the shrine. According to the sect, the Tower of God was shaped like a lingam, and this was physical proof that the place was holy to the lord of creation and destruction. A shrine to Lord Shiva had once existed on the spot, the sect claimed, but it had been demolished in the eighteenth century by a general of the Mysore Sultan, Hyder Ali. This was the spot the mystic Gnanasundaram had apparently chosen to set up his shrine, and as the Muslims weren’t as opposed to Christians as they were to Hindus they had encouraged him to do so. There was obviously no proof of any of this, the professor said, but the beauty of myth and supposition was that there was no need for proof—your myth was as good as mine, and all that mattered was whether your voice was loud enough to drown out mine. The British Collector dismissed the sect’s petition, but in an act of monumental stupidity, or perhaps as a result of the prevailing policy to keep people from different religious communities at each other’s throats, he allowed the sect to build a temple to Lord Shiva a few hundred feet below the shrine. Since then, every few decades the Hindus would demand retribution and the Christians would resist just as fervently. Through all this, ordinary devotees—Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Buddhists in their hundreds—had continued to visit the shrine and pray at the cross blessed by the martyr. Some people had even claimed that they had seen the cross bleed on days holy to Gnanasundaram, such as his Feast Day, but the Professor thought that was just another example of the myths that had sprouted around the shrine.