The Solitude of Emperors (2 page)

Noah told me once that the dead remain with us for as long as we need them and I have begun to see what he meant. I sensed his presence from time to time as I attempted to recreate his life and the events leading up to his death, and the book has benefited as a result. I should say at this point that I am aware that this account is different from the version put out by the police and the government commission of inquiry that investigated his death; in my defence all I can say is that nobody else recorded the witness of the dead.

1

The Final Kick

I am of the school that believes a journalist should never become part of the story he is covering, and the only time I broke that rule, the consequences were disastrous and signalled the beginning of the end of my career.

I did not set out to become a journalist. I hadn’t grown up yearning to write about corrupt government ministers or the daily injustices that took place in our teeming cities and villages. All I wanted was a job, any job that would take me out of K—, the small town in Tamil Nadu that I was born and brought up in. I can write about it calmly now, but back in 1990 when I was looking to escape from K—, I was filled with the desperation that anyone who has sought to leave small-town India with a second-class degree from a third-rate college would readily understand.

K— sprawled haphazardly beside one of the national highways. It had the standard-issue refuse-filled streets, open drains, ugly residential sections, hospitals, a cinema or two, clamorous bazaars, open-air barber shops, temples, mosques, churches, the scanty shade of neem trees, cows, crows, bicycles, beggars and sunlight so intense that by mid-morning everything in town was wrapped in a shimmering skin of heat—a stereotypical small town, then, with little to distinguish it from the dozens of others that were strewn across the great South Indian plain. The two things that set it apart from its fellows were a temple and a hospital. The temple, which was dedicated to Lord Shiva, had been constructed sometime in the eighth century by a minor ruler of the Pandyan dynasty, and possessed an unusual architectural feature—in the courtyard that fronted the main shrine stood a dozen stone columns that, when struck, produced the saptha swarangal, the basic notes of Indian classical music. The temple at K— was not as well-known as the Nellaiyappar temple, with over a hundred musical pillars, which lay an hour and a half to the south by bus and attracted hordes of tourists and pilgrims, but it was a source of pride to us and its annual festival during the Tamil month of Aani was the cultural and spiritual highlight of the year.

Our pride in the Shiva temple didn’t extend to its surroundings. It stood at the end of a street full of litter, and just beyond its precincts cows munched placidly on discarded banana leaves and flower garlands, while beggars and stray dogs fought over the right to occupy the best spots to importune worshippers for food and alms. In the evening, their ranks were swelled by what appeared to be the entire male population of K— between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, who waited for the young unmarried girls to appear, chaperoned by their mothers, for evening worship at the temple. The girls would arrive at a set hour, their jewellery and the corrugations of their richly coloured saris catching the dying light and turning them into worthy handmaidens of the Lord. In a marvel of contrivance and skill, they would manage to peer up from beneath their eyelashes at the waiting boys, while simultaneously affecting not to notice them—for the benefit of their mothers—and delicately picking their way through the garbage strewn in their path. The boys would giggle and shuffle their feet and the girls would press on towards the entrance of the shrine, their mothers waddling along beside them, looking severe. The entire process lasted no more than a few minutes but neither side could have done without it, it was the closest thing to public contact between unmarried men and women in town.

If the temple was the epicentre of the arts, spirituality and romance, The Balaji Medical Centre represented the height of modernity. The gleaming new hospital complex on the north-eastern edge of the town had been completed in 1975, seven years after I was born, by a native son who had made good in Austin, Texas. Unacknowledged by his adoptive country, he had decided to memorialize himself in the town he had always congratulated himself on escaping from—until he had turned sixty and had begun to think about how he would be remembered after he was gone. Being a good self-publicist and an even better businessman, he disguised this giant act of the ego with the trappings of patriotism (‘I have long felt the need to do something for India’) while quietly taking advantage of the cheap land prices and tax breaks extended to him by grateful municipal and state governments. Nobody in town had ever been treated in the hospital’s private wards, it was too expensive, but its high white walls and celebrity patients certainly gave K— something to boast about. To find work at the hospital was the goal of the more ambitious of my college classmates.

Neither the temple nor the hospital complex made me like the place of my birth any better. There were things in general that contributed to my disenchantment such as the lack of opportunity, the slow pace of life, the petty jealousies and small concerns of the people I associated with, but besides these there were specific things that stoked my desperation.

The first of these had little to do with me but with my parents and their romance. My mother taught physics at the women’s college and my father economics at the government arts and sciences college I went to, and I felt they lacked the ambition and the guile to advance any further in their careers. Or perhaps they were happy just as they were, muddling along with no real expectations of life, part of the generation of Indians born on the cusp of independence, with no big ideas to fight for, as the previous generation had had, and without the breathtaking ambition of succeeding generations. Their greatest achievement, as far as I could tell, because we didn’t talk about such things, was getting married to one another. For they had married for love, and more audaciously across the caste divide—a titanic achievement in small-town India in 1967. My father was a Brahmin, and my mother belonged to the Chettiar caste, and they had attended the same college in Salem, their home town, where they had fallen in love. When they announced their intention to marry, my father’s family promptly disowned him, and my mother’s father, a thin-lipped old martinet who was the headmaster of a secondary school, and whose progressiveness extended only as far as letting his daughter attend college, locked her up in her room and began scheming with the extended family to send her to the most distant relative he could think of. For three days she had endured the lashings he administered with a belt and a diet of kanji, and then, in a plot line borrowed from Tamil cinema, she had sneaked out of the house—aided by her browbeaten mother—while her father had his afternoon siesta, wearing two saris and carrying a bottle of scented coconut oil and a large black umbrella, the only things she could think of taking with her in the nerve-racking excitement of her escape. Soon after they were married in secret, the couple left Salem for K—, where they had lived quietly ever since. In my more charitable moments I would grant that the drama and tension of their marriage might have so depleted my parents that they had no option but to spend the rest of their lives just getting by.

My father’s family eventually came round, especially after he assured them that I would be raised a good Brahmin, although he didn’t intend to do much about it, a legacy of his having been a closet communist as a student. My mother’s father never forgave her, not even when I arrived on the scene, which she’d hoped would be the occasion for at least a modest reconciliation. I never met my maternal grandfather as a result, and the few memories I have of my grandmother, who died a few years after her husband, are of a faded woman who dressed always in white, and took me to the Murugan temple every time we visited her in Salem.

My parents’ crossing of caste lines had not only largely cut me off from my extended family—something that everyone else in town seemed to possess—it also marked me out as an oddity, a mongrel. It wasn’t so bad because I was still a Brahmin and did not have to endure the various humiliations someone lower down the caste ladder would undoubtedly have had to put up with, but I would never fit well into K— society. This was a condition somewhat exacerbated by my parents’ unconventional attitude to religion. My father’s brief flirtation with communism had further diluted any lingering effects of his religious upbringing. I cannot remember him ever going to the temple in the years that my mother turned her back on religion, but neither did he believe in communism enough to delete religion entirely from his life. My mother, from whom I have inherited my stubbornness and a slow-burning temper, had been so enraged by her own family’s treatment of her that she shut religion—which she blamed for her father’s inflexibility—out of her existence and mine for the longest time. She allowed my mild-mannered father to fulfil his promise to his family by investing me with the sacred thread and other outward accoutrements of Brahminism, but beyond these token gestures I grew up without religion except for my periodic visits to my grandmother in Salem. By the time my mother had got over her fury, and the house began to fill with the strains of M.S. Subbulakshmi singing bhajans through the speakers of a cheap two-in-one cassette player, and the sweet scent of incense filled the storeroom that had been converted into a puja room, I was in my teens and it was too late. I would occasionally accompany her to the temple, and dutifully munch on the sweet prasadam that was handed out, but I developed no more than a nominal interest in religion.

This, more than anything else, kept me from feeling completely at home in K—, for it was around caste and religion that the lives of its families and community revolved. In school and in college the Brahmin boys hung out together, the various non-Brahmin Hindus, depending on their numerical strength, formed their own groups, the Christian boys were separate, and had there been any Muslims in the educational institutions I studied in I have no doubt that they would have stayed within their own community. Most of the boys I knew went to the temple regularly and observed without question the myriad prohibitions and injunctions imposed upon them by the hierarchy of their faith. I was only tolerated, as I have said, because I was still an upper-caste Hindu.

I faced numerous little indignities, none of them dramatic or interesting enough to dwell on, but over the years they deepened my sense of alienation, and made me even more eager to escape to the big cities where I’d heard you could do as you pleased, marry who you liked, go wherever you wanted. An incident that took place during my second year in college made my decision to leave emphatic.

~

The results of our year-end exams had just been posted on the college noticeboard and I was mortified to discover that I had only managed a second class. Although I didn’t yet have a clear idea of how I was going to find employment once I had graduated, I knew these marks weren’t good enough.

The boys who had done well were planning to celebrate with ghee dosais at Saravana Bhavan, a popular restaurant in the main bazaar, before going on to a film at Gaiety Talkies, a ramshackle three-storey cinema painted a lurid shade of pink that was the best of the movie theatres in town. Although a couple of boys I knew invited me to join them, I declined. I simply wasn’t in the mood.

Disconsolately I set off for home. We lived about a mile away from the college, just off a large open stretch of ground called Gandhi Maidan on the western side of town. Although it was just after five in the evening, it was still very hot. The road ran straight as a ruler between the dirty red shell of earth and sky. All about me, the town moved to its usual torpid rhythm. Farmers rattled along in bullock carts, clicking their tongues and twisting the tails of their bullocks as they attempted to get the ponderous beasts to move faster, an occasional auto rickshaw buzzed past and everywhere there were dense throngs of people on bicycles or on foot returning from work or going to the bazaar or temple whose gopuram towered over the buildings that surrounded it. I noticed none of this. My mind was wrapped around the low marks I had scored, and how much harder I would have to work in my final year if I was going to raise my percentages.

I reached the maidan and briefly surveyed the scene in front of me—a group of boys playing cricket in the middle distance, a fiercely contested hockey game in the far corner of the enormous field, a buffalo herder travelling along in the wake of his lumbering beasts, elderly gentlemen taking their evening constitutional either singly or in pairs. I heard the tinkle of a bell behind me, and stepped aside to let the cyclist pass, but he dismounted instead. It was Srinivas. We had been through school and college together, and a shared dislike of sports like cricket and hockey and the mindless pranks of the more boisterous elements among the Brahmin boys had fostered our friendship. Both of us were very studious and determined to succeed, but while my ambitions were still rather vague, Srinivas had focused with remarkable intensity on getting into the Indian Administrative Service. He was not fazed by the fact that hundreds of thousands sat the entrance exams to the IAS each year; he was sure he would get in and if his marks were any indication, there was no doubt that he would, because he always came first in class. When he heard about my results, he commiserated with me, and then to my surprise he invited me over for coffee. In all the years I had known him, he had never once invited me home, which I’d found odd because one of the features of small-town life was the amount of time people spent visiting each other to trade gossip, news, and just pass the time. Even I, despite my mixed-caste status, was a regular in the homes of the boys I was friendly with.

Srinivas’s parents were ultra-orthodox Iyengars who lived deep within the agraharam, the Brahmin quarter. I had been introduced to his father, an ascetic-looking schoolmaster, whom I would see from time to time around town, resplendent in a turban, caste marks, and a long, high-collared coat that he wore buttoned up to the throat even on the hottest days, but I had never met his mother, and so as we plunged deeper into the twisting lanes of the agraharam my gloom began to be replaced by a sense of anticipation. When we arrived at his place, a row house indistinguishable from the others that surrounded it, except that the kolam drawn outside the front steps was more elaborate than any of the others in the street, Srinivas put his bicycle on its stand, preceded me up the steps into the house, and asked me to sit in the enclosed front veranda while he went and got the coffee. This was the usual practice during visits to the homes of non-family members, and I thought nothing of it. I made myself as comfortable as I could on the stiff-backed folding chair, balanced my bag against the wall so that its contents wouldn’t spill out, and waited.