White Teeth (30 page)

Samad looked deep into his great-grandfather's eyes. They had been through this battle many times, Samad and Pande, the battle for the latter's reputation. Both knew all too well that modern opinion on Mangal Pande weighed in on either side of two camps:

 

An unrecognized hero

Samad Iqbal

A. S. Misra

A palaver over nuffin'

Mickey

Magid and Millat

Alsana

Archie

Irie

Clarence and Denzel

British scholarship from 1857 to the present day

 

Again and again he had argued the toss with Archie over this issue. Over the years they had sat in O'Connell's and returned to the same debate, sometimes with new information gleaned from Samad's continual research into the matter—but ever since Archie found out the “truth” about Pande, circa 1953, there was no changing his mind. Pande's only claim to fame, as Archie was at pains to point out, was his etymological gift to the English language by way of the word “Pandy,” under which title in the
OED
the curious reader will find the following definition:

 

Pandy
  /'pandi/
n.
2
colloq.
(now
Hist.
) Also
-dee.
M19 [Perh. f. the surname of the first mutineer amongst the high-caste sepoys in the Bengal army.]
1
Any sepoy who revolted in the Indian Mutiny of 1857–9
2
Any mutineer or traitor
3
Any fool or coward in a military situation.

 

“Plain as the pie on your face, my friend.” And here Archie would close the book with an exultant slam. “And I don't need a dictionary to tell me that—but then neither do you. It's common parlance. When you and me were in the army: same. You tried to put one over on me once, but the truth will out, mate. ‘Pandy' only ever meant one thing. If I were you, I'd start playing down the family connection, rather than bending everybody's ear twenty-four hours a bloody day.”

“Archibald, just because the word exists, it does not follow that it is a correct representation of the character of Mangal Pande. The first definition we agree on: my great-grandfather was a mutineer and I am proud to say this. I concede matters did not go quite according to plan. But traitor? Coward? The dictionary you show me is old—these definitions are now out of currency. Pande was no traitor and no coward.”

“Ahhh, now, you see, we've been through this, and my thought is this:
there's no smoke without fire,
” Archie would say, looking impressed by the wisdom of his own conclusion. “Know what I mean?” This was one of Archie's preferred analytic tools when confronted with news stories, historical events, and the tricky day-to-day process of separating fact from fiction.
There's no smoke without fire.
There was something so vulnerable in the way he relied on this conviction, that Samad had never had the heart to disabuse him of it. Why tell an old man that there can be smoke without fire as surely as there are deep wounds that draw no blood?

“Of course, I see your point of view, Archie, I do. But my point is, and has always been, from the very first time we discussed the subject; my point is that this is not the
full story.
And, yes, I realize that we have several times thoroughly investigated the matter, but the fact remains: full stories are as rare as honesty, precious as diamonds. If you are lucky enough to uncover one, a full story will sit on your brain like lead. They are difficult. They are long-winded. They are epic. They are like the stories God tells: full of impossibly particular information. You
don't
find them in the dictionary.”

“All right, all right, Professor. Let's hear
your
version.”

Often you see old men in the corner of dark pubs, discussing and gesticulating, using beer mugs and salt cellars to represent long-dead people and far-off places. At that moment they display a vitality missing in every other area of their lives. They light up. Unpacking a full story onto the table—here is Churchill-fork, over there is Czechoslovakia-napkin, here we find the accumulation of German troops represented by a collection of cold peas—they are reborn. But when Archie and Samad had these table-top debates during the eighties, knives and forks were not enough. The whole of the steamy Indian summer of 1857, the whole of that year of mutiny and massacre would be hauled into O'Connell's and brought to semiconsciousness by these two makeshift historians. The area stretching from the jukebox to the fruit machine became Delhi; Viv Richards silently complied as Pande's English superior, Captain Hearsay; Clarence and Denzel continued to play dominoes while simultaneously being cast as the restless sepoy hordes of the British army. Each man brought the pieces of his argument, laid them out, and assembled them for the other to see. Scenes were set. Paths of bullets traced. Disagreement reigned.

According to the legend, during the spring of 1857 in a factory in Dum-Dum, a new kind of British bullet went into production. Designed to be used in English guns by Indian soldiers, like most bullets at the time they had a casing that must be bitten in order to fit the barrel. There seemed nothing exceptional about them, until it was discovered by some canny factory worker that they were covered with grease—a grease made from the fat of pigs, monstrous to Muslims, and the fat of cows, sacred to Hindus. It was an innocent mistake—as far as anything is innocent on stolen land—an infamous British blunder. But what a feverish turmoil must have engulfed the people on first hearing the news! Under the specious pretext of new weaponry, the English were intending to destroy their caste, their honor, their standing in the eyes of gods and men—everything, in short, that made life worth living. A rumor like this could not be kept secret; it spread like wildfire through the dry lands of India that summer, down the production line, out onto the streets, through town houses and country shacks, through barrack after barrack, until the whole country was ablaze with the desire for a mutiny. The rumor reached the large unsightly ears of Mangal Pande, an unknown sepoy in the small town of Barrackpore, who swaggered into his parade ground—March 29, 1857—stepping forward from the throng to make a certain kind of history. “Make a fool of himself, more like,” Archie will say (for these days he does not swallow Pandyology as gullibly as he once did).

“You totally misunderstand his sacrifice,” Samad will reply.

“What sacrifice? He couldn't even kill himself properly! The problem with you, Sam, is you won't listen to the evidence. I've read up on it all. The truth is the truth, no matter how nasty it may taste.”

“
Really.
Well, please, my friend, since you are apparently an expert in the doings of my family, please, enlighten me. Let us hear your version.”

Now, the average school student today is aware of the complex forces, movements, and deep currents that motivate wars and spark revolutions. But when Archie was in school the world seemed far more open to its own fictionalization. History was a different business then: taught with one eye on narrative, the other on drama, no matter how unlikely or chronologically inaccurate. According to this schema, the Russian Revolution began because everyone hated Rasputin. The Roman Empire declined and fell because Antony was having it off with Cleopatra. Henry V triumphed at Agincourt because the French were too busy admiring their own outfits. And the Great Indian Mutiny of 1857 began when a drunken fool called Mangal Pande shot a bullet. Despite Samad's opposition, each time Archie read the following he found himself more convinced:

 

The scene is Barrackpore, the date 29 March 1857. It is Sunday afternoon; but on the dusty floor of the parade ground a drama is being enacted which is suggestive of anything but Sabbath peace. There chatters and sways and eddies a confused mass of Sepoys, in all stages of dress and undress; some armed, some unarmed; but all fermenting with excitement. Some thirty yards in front of the line of the 34th swaggers to and fro a Sepoy named Mangal Pande. He is half drunk with bhang, and wholly drunk with religious fanaticism. Chin in air, loaded musket in hand, he struts backwards and forwards, at a sort of half dance, shouting in shrill and nasal monotone, “Come out, you blackguards! Turn out, all of you! The English are upon us. Through biting these cartridges we shall all be made infidels!”

The man, in fact, is in that condition of mingled bhang and “nerves” which makes a Malay run amok; and every shout from his lips runs like a sudden flame through the brains and along the nerves of the listening crowd of fellow Sepoys, as the crowd gets bigger, the excitement more intense. A human powder magazine, in a word, is about to explode.

And explode it did. Pande shot at his lieutenant and missed him. Then he took out a large sword, a tulwar, and cowardly lunged while his lieu-tenant's back was turned, catching him on the shoulder. A sepoy tried to restrain him, but Pande battled on. Then came reinforcements: one Captain Hearsay rushed forward, his son at his side, both armed and honorable and prepared to die for their country. (“Hearsay is precisely what it is! Rubbish. Fabrication!”) At which point Pande saw the game was up, pointed his enormous gun at his own head, and dramatically pulled the trigger with his left foot. He missed. A few days later, Pande stood trial and was found guilty. From the other side of the country, on a chaise longue in Delhi, his execution was ordered by one General Henry Havelock (a man honored, much to Samad's fury, by a statue just outside the Palace Restaurant, near Trafalgar Square, to the right of Nelson), who added—in a postscript to his written instruction—that he
did
hope that this would put an end to all the rash talk of mutiny one kept hearing recently. But it was too late. As Pande swung in the sultry breeze, hanging from a makeshift gallows, his disbanded comrades from the 34th were heading for Delhi, determined to join the rebel forces of what was to become one of the bloodiest failed mutinies of this or any century.

This version of events—by a contemporary historian named Fitchett—was enough to send Samad into spasms of fury. When a man has nothing but his blood to commend him, each drop of it matters, matters terribly; it must be jealously defended. It must be protected against assailants and detractors. It must be fought for. But like a Chinese whisper, Fitchett's intoxicated, incompetent Pande had passed down a line of subsequent historians, the truth mutating, bending, receding as the whisper continued. It didn't matter that bhang, a hemp drink taken in small doses for medicinal purposes, was extremely unlikely to cause intoxication of this kind or that Pande, a strict Hindu, was extremely unlikely to drink it. It didn't matter that Samad could find not one piece of corroborating evidence that Pande had taken bhang that morning. The story still clung, like a gigantic misquote, to the Iqbal reputation, as solid and seemingly irremovable as the misconception that Hamlet ever said he knew Yorick “well.”

“Enough! It makes no difference how many times you read these things to me, Archibald.” (Archie usually came armed with a plastic bag full of library books, anti-Pande propaganda, misquotes galore.) “It is like a gang of children caught with their hands in an enormous honey jar: they are all going to tell me the same lie. I am not interested in this kind of slander. I am not interested in puppet theater or tragic farce. Action interests me, friend.” And here Samad would mime the final zipping up of his lips, the throwing away of a key. “True action. Not words. I tell you, Archibald, Mangal Pande sacrificed his life in the name of justice for India, not because he was intoxicated or insane. Pass me the ketchup.”

It was the 1989 New Year's Eve shift in O'Connell's, and the debate was in full swing.

“True, he was not a hero in the way you in the West like your heroes—he did not succeed except in the manner of his honorable death. But imagine it: there he sat.” Samad pointed to Denzel, about to play his winning domino. “At the trial, knowing death was upon him, refusing ever to reveal the names of his fellow conspirators—”

“Now,
that,
” said Archie, patting his pile of skeptics, Michael Edwardes, P. J. O. Taylor, Syed Moinul Haq, and the rest, “depends what you read.”

“No, Archie. That is a common mistake. The truth does
not
depend on what you read. Please let us not get into the nature of truth. Then you do not have to draw with my cheese and I can avoid eating your chalk.”

“All right, then: Pande. What did he achieve? Nothing! All he did was
start a mutiny—too early, mind, before the agreed date—and excuse my French, but that's a fucking disaster in military terms. You
plan,
you don't act on instinct. He caused unnecessary casualties. English
and
Indian.”

“With respect, I don't believe that to be the case.”

“Well, you're wrong.”

“With respect, I believe I am right.”

“It's like this, Sam: imagine here”—he gathered a pile of dirty plates that Mickey was about to put in the dishwasher—“are all the people who have written about your Pande in the last hundred-and-whatever years. Now: here's the ones that agree with me.” He placed ten plates on his side of the table and pushed one over to Samad. “And that's the madman on your side.”

“A. S. Misra. Respected Indian civil servant.
Not
a madman.”

“Right. Well, it would take you at least another hundred-and-whatever years to get as many plates as I have, even if you were going to make them all yourself, and the likelihood is, once you had them, no bugger would want to eat off them anyway. Metaphorically speaking. Know what I mean?”

Which left only A. S. Misra. One of Samad's nephews, Rajnu, had written to him in the spring of '81 from his Cambridge college, mentioning casually that he had found a book that might be of some interest to his uncle. In it, he said, could be found an eloquent defense of their shared ancestor, one Mangal Pande. The only surviving copy was in his college library, it was by a man named Misra. Had he heard of it already? If not, might it not serve (Rajnu added in a cautious P. S.) as a pleasant excuse to see his uncle again?