The Solitude of Emperors (25 page)

Mr Khanna’s driver hadn’t yet returned from his holiday, but the butler had managed to arrange a taxi to take me to town, and I set off for my meeting with about an hour to spare. My resolve of the previous night was considerably less sturdy, for I still had little idea of how to tackle Rajan.

I was dropped off just outside the bus stop, where a long line of black and yellow Ambassador taxis, fat and ungainly as bumblebees, were parked by the side of the road. As I got out, I realized I had no idea where Nilgiri Cloth Stores, the location at which I had arranged to meet Rajan, actually was. I had written down some directions when I had talked to Mansukhani on the phone, but I had been expecting to pass them on to Mr Khanna’s driver and when he hadn’t turned up, it had put a crimp in my plans. My taxi driver didn’t know, so I asked one of the others for help. Within minutes I was surrounded by a gesticulating scrum shouting directions at me. Eventually, they arrived at some sort of consensus, and armed with their coordinates I set off to find the shop. I plunged into a side alley as I had been instructed, and within minutes I was lost. The further I penetrated the maze of badly lit streets, the less certain I was of ever reaching my destination. I entered a narrow lane with wooden doorways set into discoloured walls. A small boy squatted over an open gutter, relieving himself. I passed him, my steps dragging, and saw that at the far end of the alley a rectangle of sharp, white light seemed to indicate the end of the maze. I directed my steps towards the opening, and found myself on a street that was busy with people and traffic. As I looked up and down the street, I saw the queue of black and yellow taxis not too far away. I had evidently been going round in circles for nearly an hour. It was time to give up and go home, I thought wearily but not without a sense of relief, for now I wouldn’t have to confront Rajan. Best to leave the whole business alone, as Mr Sorabjee had enjoined me to, enjoy my holiday, or maybe just alert the police to my suspicions and write an article for the magazine when I returned to Bombay.

As I was thinking these thoughts, I had been walking away from the taxi rank, which I had adopted as a sort of landmark, and now I found myself climbing a flight of chipped and broken stone steps that I remembered Rajan’s friend had told me to look out for. At the top of the steps was a pharmacy, and next to it was a tin board on which was painted in red, ‘Nilgiri Cloth Stores’. Outside the shop were two men dressed in crisp white shirts and veshtis, the uniform of political workers in this part of the country. So he was still here. There’s still time to go home, I thought. I paused on the steps, undecided, but then I was swept by a vision of the assault on me in Bombay. I hadn’t thought of it for months, but it came back to me now clear in every detail. I was paralyzed with terror for a couple of moments but instead of making me retreat it only served to make me more determined—no, I couldn’t just stand passively by and let events take their course.

As I approached the sari shop, Rajan’s cohorts glanced at me incuriously, the dark glasses they wore lending a faint air of menace to their presence. I asked them whether Rajan was in, saying I had an appointment to see him, and the heavyset one nodded and gestured for me to go in. Within the long rectangular room, the walls rippled like coloured water in the dim light of candles. The setting could have been lifted from a fantasy, the insubstantial walls of shimmering silk, the hunched figures that emerged from the gloom, the air of mystery that pervaded the place, but the reality was more prosaic—there had been a power cut.

Rajan and his friend Mansukhani sat behind a glass counter on the far side of the room. Beside them was the brightest source of illumination around, an emergency lantern that glowed white in the dark. A shop assistant materialized at my side, but Rajan had already spotted me and waved me over. As I approached the two men, I began apologizing for being late, but Rajan cut me short, ‘Arre, bhai, this is Meham, no hurry, no worry—you should simply enjoy. It’s not like Mumbai, tension everywhere, no time for anything. But if I had to live here I would die. Of boredom.’ He laughed, the sound loud in the quiet confines of the shop, and I laughed dutifully along with him. His hulking friend didn’t even smile. An old-fashioned rotary telephone on the counter, with a lock embedded into the dial, began to ring insistently. Rajan’s friend picked up the receiver, listened in silence to the caller for a minute or two, then spat a couple of words in Hindi into the phone and hung up. He leaned over and whispered something into Rajan’s ear. A frown briefly wrinkled the latter’s forehead, then his expression relaxed and he said to me, ‘What will you have to drink? Chai? Pepsi?’

I began demurring but he brushed my protestations aside and told his friend to order us some tea and the delicious pakoras that the hotel across the street made daily. Mansukhani bellowed instructions across the room to one of the shop assistants then the two men settled back into their seats and waited for me to begin. For a few agonizing moments I had nothing to say to them, all the questions I had rehearsed for the interview had evaporated from my mind. This wasn’t a wholly unusual occurrence, there had been moments in the past when a combination of nerves and excitement had made interviews go awry, but this was different. Rajan sensed my confusion and stepped into the breach.

‘Have you seen the sights, bhai? Coonoor, Ooty, you should see the Botanical Gardens, Doddabetta…’

When I didn’t answer immediately, he added, ‘Mansukhani can organize a taxi for you.’

I forced myself to speak and said a friend had taken me around. He nodded and said in Hindi, ‘Achcha, achcha, this place is so beautiful, not like the hill stations in the north, Nainital, Mussoorie, all ruined, ugly buildings everywhere, the forests cut down…’ I would never have taken Rajan for an environmentalist, and grew even more confused in my sense of him.

‘You should have come last year, my friend, when the kurinji was flowering. You know the kurinji?’

I nodded. Noah had told me that in the years when the kurinji flowered the peaks of the district seemed to emerge from lakes of blue, which was how the Nilgiris or Blue Mountains had got their name.

‘It was fantastic. Everywhere you looked the place was covered with flowers, especially towards Mukurti. Now you’ll have to wait twelve years for it to flower again.’

As he rambled on about the sights of the Nilgiris, my mind finally settled down, and the questions I had formulated began to come back. I had thought I would start by asking about his early years in Bombay, just to get him talking, then move on to the riots, where I hoped to trap him into some sort of admission that he had been involved, before steering him around to the agitation he was about to lead on the Shrine of the Blessed Martyr. If I could pin him down, uncover his plans, I could give the Brigadier and the authorities something to work with. It would not be easy, but I would have to try. Just as I was about to begin, the tea and pakoras arrived. Rajan urged me to try a pakora; I almost scalded my tongue, it was so hot, and he smiled kindly at me, and all at once I was as comfortable as I was ever going to be. I opened my notebook, and said, ‘Sir, please tell me briefly about your early years in Bombay.’

His account fitted almost exactly with Kamath’s: the arrival in the city without money or contacts, the passage to Matunga, the early years as a pheriwallah, the growing prosperity. There were some facts he added to the ones I already knew: he had served a term as a municipal corporator and, besides his charity work in the Tamil community in Mumbai, he was thinking of setting up a school in Coimbatore for underprivileged children. ‘By God’s grace I have made money—’

‘They say you’re a crorepati, a wealthy man,’ I interjected, but he continued smoothly on, pausing only to smile modestly.

‘I have tasted political power as a corporator, and now my only desire is to serve the people. I started with nothing—’

I didn’t know how long I had and I was getting a politician’s patter, so it was time to speed things up a little. I interrupted him.

‘Sir, is it true that you were involved in the killing of Muslims in the Bombay riots?’

Something moved, far back, in the cool impersonal gaze that Rajan had fixed on me. I had got through to him, I thought exultantly, but any advantage I might have secured was taken away immediately as Mansukhani blundered in.

‘Lies, bloody lies,’ he blustered, ‘Mind, Mr Mumbai journalist, what you say about Rajan sir. How dare you—’

Any discomfiture Rajan might have felt was gone, and he moved in calmly to defuse the tension. He put a restraining hand on Mansukhani’s shoulder, murmured, ‘Friends… friends,’ and then resumed the conversation in an unflustered tone.

‘I am a small man who is trying in his own way to do something. People will always make up stories, try to put me down, people who are envious, people who for their own reasons might think I have done them some harm, people who have nothing to do but create mischief…’

The lights came on, startling us all.

‘Sir, I have been told that on the ninth of January you were part of a Hindu mob which set fire to a Muslim man in Dharavi, while shouting slogans that this would be the fate of all Muslims in Bombay to avenge the murder of a Hindu family in Radhabai Chawl.’

I had made up the story on the spur of the moment, substituting Rajan for the thug who had been accused of the crime and whom I had interviewed for my magazine during our coverage of the riots, but to my amazement Rajan didn’t deny the allegation immediately. Wasn’t his hesitation proof of his involvement, I thought, if not in Dharavi, then somewhere else? He let the silence build for a few moments, and then said calmly, ‘Do you know, Mr Vijay (it was the first time he had addressed me formally this morning), that I personally distributed food to scores of Muslims who were affected by the riots and the bomb blasts. Muslims work in my factory, they work in my shops; I have my hair cut by a Muslim barber. How can you accuse me of harming them?’

I could have told him about the many suspected killers I had interviewed, others who had been asked to appear before a commission of inquiry, who all said much the same thing, who talked in public about their Muslim friends, lovers, colleagues, but who in private admitted that that hadn’t prevented them from murdering other Muslims.

‘There are many people who are accused of murdering Muslims who say the same thing,’ I said.

‘So you are accusing me…’

‘No, sir, all I am saying is that you are known to be close to the Shiv Sena, who were accused of systematically targeting and killing Muslims during the riots, and that your name has also come up in that connection.’

‘It is true that I am close to the Sena, but that does not mean I killed Muslims.’

‘But do you think it was right to target the Muslims in Mumbai and elsewhere in the country? They have done no wrong…’

Mansukhani, who had been restraining himself, could hold back no longer.

‘All Muslims should be sent back to Pakistan where they belong…’

‘So should you. Isn’t your ancestral homeland, Sindh, in Pakistan?’

He gave a strangled yelp. I thought I’d gone too far, I was sure to be thrown out now, but Rajan was quick to intervene. He spoke to Mansukhani, and the big man got up and left, but not before throwing me a murderous look.

‘My question, sir, is why do people like you, and the parties you belong to, target Muslims, Christians, other minorities? That is not the spirit of Hinduism?’

‘Does the spirit of Christianity allow you to kill people from another faith? Or the spirit of Islam? We Hindus have suffered at the hands of brutal rulers from these religions—do you not find that reprehensible?’

‘Of course I do, sir, any sane person would, but all that was a long time ago. The people belonging to those faiths are not responsible for what their ancestors did; that is an unreasonable argument.’

He said calmly, ‘I don’t dispute that…’ and then before I could put my next question to him, he asked me an unexpected one. ‘Are you a patriot, Vijay bhai?’

It was a question that I would have mocked in years past, it seemed such an antiquated and simple-minded way of describing oneself, but since the attack and the subsequent year at
The Indian Secularist,
my idea of myself had changed. And as my concern for my country and countrymen had grown, questions such as the one Rajan posed no longer seemed irrelevant. Rajan mistook my silence.

‘I see you are hesitating,’ he said, ‘and that is part of the problem with today’s youth. If we don’t feel passionately about our country, then how will it ever achieve the greatness that is written into its destiny? That is the difference between you and me, Vijay bhai.’

‘I may not call myself a patriot, sir, but I feel very deeply about my country. In fact that’s why I feel proud to be working for…’ I hadn’t been sure that my ploy of passing myself off as a
Times of India
journalist would work with someone as astute as Rajan, but it seemed to have done the trick, and it would be silly if I gave myself away now. Indeed, it was quite possible that our interview would be abruptly terminated if Rajan came to know that I worked for Mr Sorabjee’s magazine. Or perhaps not, you never knew with people like him, but it seemed sensible not to take the risk.

He didn’t seem to notice my slip, and continued with a smile, ‘Ah, you young people. You think patriotism is an old-fashioned word, but I don’t mind so long as you are committed to this country. Speaking for myself, I am proud to call myself a patriot. When I was around your age we were at war with Pakistan, and I wasted no time in applying to join the army. At that moment all thought of my future vanished from my head. All I wanted to do was fight for my country and if death was to be my reward, so be it. I was turned down because I failed my medical. I had a heart murmur, they said, but I would have given anything to have been sent to the border. I would die for my country, Vijay bhai, the integrity of Bharat is well worth dying for.’

‘So why are you trying to destroy it from within?’ I asked.