The Solitude of Emperors (32 page)

As he read, I took in the scene in front of me: the evening light coiled inside the mist, the complete absence of noise, the great mountains looking oddly humble, their peaks lopped off by low-hanging clouds. Yet, by this time tomorrow, people could be dead or badly injured, the shrine could have been taken over and the calm of this spot destroyed forever. I thought of Menon and the other defenders huddled nervous and frightened within the misty precincts of the shrine, and I wondered, anger flaring through me, what Rajan was up to. Could anyone stop him? Were we doing enough?

Noah broke into my reverie. ‘The old man writes pretty well, should have billions pounding the streets in no time.’

‘He speaks from the heart,’ I said stiffly. ‘I find it inspiring.’

‘Hey, no offence,’ Noah said. ‘Just joking, that’s all.’

We sat in silence for a few minutes, and then I said, ‘So what do you think?’

‘About his argument, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, can’t quarrel with it, but I’m wondering how many people will take it to heart. People can be pretty apathetic, I don’t need to tell you that.’

I told him then of Mr Sorabjee’s comment after the bombs had gone off in Bombay—about his message being worth it, even if it got through to only one person—and Noah nodded.

‘Does it speak to you?’ I asked, trying to sound casual.

‘Not me, my friend,’ he said, sounding just as casual as I did. ‘I belong to the ranks of the apathetic masses, I’m not like you.’

I looked down to conceal my disappointment and my glance fell on my watch. ‘Damn, we should have started ten minutes ago, we’re going to be late. Let’s continue this conversation in the car.’

‘You go ahead, there’s a bus due about now. I’ll take it, and we can talk later.’

~

5. The Meham police station was a small dun-coloured building tucked into a fold of the hillside directly above the bus stop. A blackboard hung on the veranda with numerous columns recording the number of crimes in the town—burglaries, petty theft, pick-pocketing, rape—over the past three years. I couldn’t help noticing that there hadn’t been a single murder in that time.

The building comprised four rooms, the largest of which was an area that opened off the veranda and was crammed with desks, uniformed constables and various people wandering about. A woman, dressed in a faded sari, her hands joined together in supplication, was entreating a constable seated at a desk to do something for her, but he seemed to be ignoring her. Adding to the general air of confusion was the fact that the whole building was in semi-darkness, there having been yet another power cut; it seemed a daily feature of life in this town. I walked up to a constable and asked if I could see the inspector. He asked me what my business was, and when I told him he nodded and disappeared into a passageway that led deeper into the building. As I waited for him to return, I continued to take in the sluggish activity in the police station, and the sense of hopelessness I’d felt as I left the Collector’s office returned. Even if by some miracle the inspector proved to be useful, I doubted whether these slow, paunchy, elderly policemen would be able to do anything to stop Rajan. The constable reappeared and said the inspector would see me now.

As we approached the inspector’s office, I began to have second thoughts about meeting him and suddenly wished I’d listened to Noah. If Shanmugam was planning to arrest Rajan anyway, what was I going to ask him to do? Arrest him twice? The constable ushered me into the inspector’s presence and left, shutting the door behind him. The inspector sat beneath a poster of the Goddess Saraswati. He was dressed in starched khaki trousers and a khaki sweater with epaulettes. A police radio crackled on a table behind him. He was a large man with a bristly moustache, and he looked impatient. He was curt with me. ‘I have been warned about you, Mr Vijay. This is a peaceful town, and I hear that you have been troubling some of our most distinguished residents like Rajan sir. I’m tempted to put you in the lock-up; in fact I would have done so already if the Brigadier hadn’t vouched for you.’

Taken aback, I was trying to recover my composure when the inspector’s manner changed and he said in a friendlier tone, ‘Let me give you some advice. There is nothing for you to write about here. It is true that Rajan sir is going to stage a peaceful demonstration outside the shrine, and soon after that I will have no option but to arrest him. We believe in non-violence here, Mr Vijay, and we will not allow anyone, no matter how important, to create any mischief. You may come to the Tower of God at noon tomorrow if you would like to write about the incident. I have had a biodata of myself prepared for you, also a photograph. Does your magazine print photographs in black and white or in colour?’

‘Black and white,’ I replied automatically, quite stunned by the speed and direction of the meeting.

‘That’s good. Passport size will do?’

I nodded, then tried to steer the conversation back to the subject of Rajan.

‘Inspector,’ I began, ‘It’s good that you will be arresting Rajan, but…’ I stopped there, for I had nothing else to say, or rather nothing I could say to the inspector without being clapped into a prison cell. Why did he bribe you? I thought as I looked into the inspector’s face. What is he planning? Do you know? Or has he outsmarted us all?

It was only as I was walking down the path carved out of the red earth of the hillside that I realized I had completely forgotten to ask the inspector’s permission to hold a peaceful procession of my own. I consoled myself with the thought that it wouldn’t have done me any good; even if it had been allowed, there was no way we could have organized it in the space of a few hours. Before I got in the taxi, I stopped at a little open-fronted restaurant and bought a dozen fresh vadais and chutney for dinner.

Just short of the point where the road branched off to the cemetery, I spotted Noah by the roadside. I asked the driver to drop me off and said I would walk back home later. When we got to the open ground in front of the cemetery, Godless bounded up barking and slobbering. His master grinned and asked me to toss the dog a vadai. ‘Bloody unsentimental bastard,’ he said, as the pack followed their leader out of the shadows. ‘But in his case I guess it pays to be one. One of his bitches dies this morning and is replaced in the evening by five others.’

‘Perhaps, like you, he sees no difference between the living and the dead. For all you know, he’s got a bunch of spirit dogs mingled in with the living ones.’

He looked at me sharply, and muttered, ‘Maybe…’

Then, as the dogs converged on us, he asked me for a couple more vadais, threw them at the pack, and then said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ I followed him into the cemetery, and we made our way to the peepul tree.

~

6. A couple of years ago I was working on the penultimate draft of this book in K—, where I was on holiday, when I had to take my mother to see the ophthalmologist, as cataracts had clouded over the vision in her left eye. To explain what was happening to her, the doctor pointed to a bronze sculpture of a reclining man on his desk, and said that whereas a normally sighted person would see the depth and subtlety of the figure, to my mother it would seem flat and one-dimensional. He said that with surgery he could restore her sight almost fully. As we left his clinic I remember wondering whether our ability to see the nuances in a situation is similarly affected when we are in the grip of an obsession or fear or panic. In Meham I was beginning to be assailed by all three, and if that hadn’t been the case, I doubt that I would have talked to Noah as I did that night. It is something that I will regret all my life—all I can say is that it was not given to me to see in advance how he would react.

As soon as we had finished our vadais, I launched into my attack. The day had gone badly, I had accomplished nothing, and the despair and frustration that had been gathering within me made me speak more stridently than I had intended. ‘So are you going to help me or not?’

‘Hey, nothing’s going to happen, I know my Meham.’

‘But you don’t know Rajan, have you met him recently?’

Noah said mildly, ‘Relax, da, if Rajan’s going to have his way, he’s going to have his way; there’s nothing you or I or God Almighty can do about it. Fuck, I haven’t had a smoke all day—want a drag?’ He pulled out a joint and lit it. Seeing him like that, so utterly relaxed, leaning insouciantly against the bole of the peepul, finally set me off.

‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ I screamed into the quiet of the cemetery. From across the wall I heard the sound of Godless’s deep bark. Once, twice and then he was quiet. ‘You can take the trouble to bury some stray mongrel, but you don’t seem to care that within twenty-four hours friends of yours, Brother Ahimas, Menon, others you must know, will all be dead or wounded… Come on, man, aren’t you in the least bit concerned?’

‘So what if I was concerned? What do you expect me to do?’ I think it was the fact that he continued to remain calm in the face of my anger that provoked me even more.

‘Well, a lot more than just run away from the problem.’

‘Easy, Vijay,’ he said, still unflustered, but with an edge to his voice now. I told myself to calm down.

‘OK, I’m sorry I shouted at you, but, you know, it’s so frustrating. I still feel something terrible might happen tomorrow.’

Noah didn’t reply, just continued working on his joint.

‘I was thinking of turning up at the Tower of God at nine or so, to help in any way I can. I want to be there in plenty of time for Rajan’s arrival. Will you come with me?’

‘Look, Vijay,’ he said. ‘We agreed that I’d come with you today and that would be it.’

‘I know we did, but I’m not asking you to
do
anything, just come to the shrine with me tomorrow.’

That’s how it all starts, doesn’t it. I learned a long time ago that the best course of action is to stay put, mind my own business.’

‘Do you really think you’ll be safe when things start to go wrong? First, it’ll be the shrine, then something else. Rajan will never stop until he has put every one of us under. Have you any idea what he thinks of us?’

‘Don’t look at me,’ he said. ‘Speak for yourself. I hang out quietly in this cemetery, with the dead for company for fuck’s sake—you can’t get more inoffensive than that.’

‘Oh, come on…’ I said irritably. ‘I’ve heard that once upon a time you were quite a guy, fearless, would take on anybody, anything. What happened, Noah?’ The anger was starting to build again.

‘Listen, Vijay,’ he said, putting out the joint and getting to his feet. ‘Come here, there’s something I want to show you.’ He led me by a path to another corner of the cemetery from where we could see a slim dagger of light between two hills. He pointed to it and said, ‘That’s Coimbatore, the first city on the plains. Beyond that lie Bombay, America and all the other exciting places that I’ve lived in and voluntarily left behind. Do you know why?’

‘You said something about not fitting in.’

‘Right, but do you know how I realized that and why I live my life the way I do now? Remember Dom Moraes, the poet?’

‘Yes, I do, he’s famous. Why?’

‘Know why his poetry is so great? Not just because of the craft or the lyricism, the guy had a way of looking beneath the surface of things that could really make you think. One day I was actually present at the making of one of his best poems. I’ll just recite the relevant part, won’t take long.

Choose your rock, seamate, stay with it.

Lose your shadow, it’s of no use.

The last bronze bird puts you down,

Tidier than a horse, final.

Ashes and marred walls deface you.

Where is this wind from,

Sinbad, defining its own course?

Some of us never know home.

‘On the night that inspired the poem, we had been drinking in Dom’s flat in Sargent House. I had just quit my job and didn’t know what I was going to do with myself, there was nothing I really wanted to do. At around ten o’clock the booze ran out, so we walked across to the Harbour Bar at the Taj and continued drinking there. Dom had just been paid for some major article he’d written, he always asked to be paid in cash, so he kept hauling these wads of hundred-rupee notes out of his trouser pockets and handing them to me to pay for each round. He was too drunk to count the money, but so was I, so I kept shoving these fistfuls of rupees at our waiter, who grew kinder and kinder as the evening wore on.

‘And we drank and we talked or rather we drank and I talked because in addition to quitting my job I had just broken up with my latest girlfriend, and between bouts of cursing her for being a stupid bitch, I would tell Dom about all the women I had ever romanced or slept with. And we would drink some more, and I would rant some more, and he would listen patiently, murmuring “my dear boy” at intervals, and at some point we must have left the bar and somehow got to his flat in Colaba, where I passed out. Two days later, when I visited him again, he handed me a poem that he had just typed out on his old manual typewriter, saying in his understated way, “I thought this might interest you.” It was “Sinbad” and I read it and was so taken with it that it would keep coming back to me as I thought about my life, and within the next couple of months I had left Bombay, and had come back here to this place.’

‘So what are you trying to say?’

‘I’m saying that I’ve tried pretty much everything I wanted to try; nothing quite worked, but now I think I’ve found my rock, and I’m going to cling to it.’

‘Haven’t you listened to one word I’ve been saying, Noah? Men like Rajan don’t think people like you and I belong here. You can cling to your rock all you want, but you won’t be able to escape.’

‘I’ll worry about that when I have to.’

I felt the anger rise within me, a clean, powerful emotion born of frustration and a sense that I had nothing left to gamble with.