Shashi Tharoor - The Great Indian Novel

119

Sahadev pushed his way through the milling crowd outside the newspaper office. The noise was deafening: shouts, exhortations, muttering, even prayers, rose from the throng. The election results were filtering in, and this was the place to get them as they came. No one believed the radio any more.

Now there, Ganapathi, lay a sad irony. Despite being controlled by the government, Akashvani — the voice from the sky — was also the voice of millions of radio-receivers, transistors and loudspeakers blaring forth from puja pandals and tea-shops. Its ubiquitousness reflected the indispensability of radio in a country where most people cannot read, its content — despite the often heavy hand of bureaucracy on its programmes — the range of the nation’s concerns. From the anodyne cadences of its newsreaders to the requests for film-songs from Jhumri Tilaiya and other bastions of the country’s cow-belt, All-India Radio mirrored the triumphs and trivialities that engaged the nation. But its moderation also meant mediocrity, and during the Siege it came to mean mendacity as well. It is Priya Duryodhani’s legacy, Ganapathi, that today when an Indian wants real news, he switches on the BBC; for detailed analyses, he turns to the newspapers; for entertainment, he goes to the movies. The rest of the time, he listens to Akashvani.

A small peon in khaki shirt and white pyjamas, standing on the top rung of a rickety ladder, was putting up the letters on the display board with excruciating slowness. ‘D — H - A — N - I.’ That made Priya Duryodhani. What next? People at the front of the crowd were yelling to the man to let them know the news first, orally, before he put up the remaining letters. He remained impervious to their pleas. Perhaps he couldn’t hear them above the din. He had the aluminium letter-boards he needed to hang up: maybe he wasn’t sure what they meant himself. It was possible that he knew just enough of the English alphabet to put up the headlines on the ‘Spot News’ board every day without understanding what the newspaper was announcing through him.

‘W,’ Nakul said next to him. ‘W for Wins.’

‘D,’ Sahadev replied as the letter went up.

‘Declares Victory?’ Nakul asked. All-India Radio had been announcing substantial wins for Duryodhani’s party in some states.

D. E. Then, as the crowd seemed to hold its collective breath, F.

An immense cry of exultation rose from the crowd.

‘Could be “Defeats Opponent,”’ Nakul ventured. ‘You know, in her constituency.’

‘No way, bhai-sahib.’ Sahadev was grinning from ear to ear: he had suddenly realized what he had wanted all along. ‘He doesn’t have enough letters with him for that.’

The crowd was already roaring its approbation. Scattered cheers rent the air. People were slapping each other’s backs in delight. E. A. T. Then, finally, the khaki-skirted meghdoot speeding up his pace as the task neared completion, E and D. DEFEATED. Priya Duryodhani had been defeated.

‘Janata Front!’ somebody shouted. ‘ Zindabad!’ Came the answering roar: ‘Janata Front, Zindabad!’ The chant picked up variety, and rhythm. ‘Drona, Zindabad! Yudhishtir, Zindabad! Janata Front, Zindabad!’

‘I knew it, I knew it,’ Sahadev found himself squeezing Nakul’s shoulders in triumph. ‘Oh, I’m so glad I took my home-leave now, Nakul. This is great! It’s simply great!’

Nakul still seemed to be absorbing the news. Around them, the chant was vociferous; some energetic youths had begun dancing an impromptu bhangra. Members of the crowd were flinging coins and rupee notes at the peon who had put up the headline. The little man in the khaki skirt was catching them in dexterous ecstasy.

‘I was wrong,’ Nakul said slowly, abandoning the plural for perhaps the first time. ‘It’s all over.’

‘No it isn’t, brother,’ his twin contradicted him with uncharacteristic confidence. ‘It’s only just begun.’

120

They were both wrong. Something had passed whose shadow would always remain, and something had begun that would not endure. For it is my fate, Ganapathi, to have to record not a climactic triumph but a moment of bathos. The Indian people gave themselves the privilege of replacing a determined, collected tyrant with an indeterminate collection of tyros.

I was partially responsible, but only partially. When the elections were over there was a general desire to avoid a contest among the victorious constituents of the Janata Front. It was resolved that Drona and I, the Messiah and the Methuselah, would jointly designate the nation’s new Prime Minister, who would then be ‘elected’ unanimously by the Janata legislators. At the time this seemed a sensible way of avoiding unseemly conflict at the start of the new regime. Only later did I realize the irony of beginning the era of the restoration of democracy with so undemocratic a procedure.

And it was not just ironic. In our ageless wisdom Drona and I had failed to realize what most college students know: that if you begin an examination by avoiding the most difficult question it raises, it is that very question that will eventually guarantee your failure.

The two of us spoke individually with the leaders of each of the political parties that made up the Front. There were several of them, each with his claims to overall leadership: political parties, after all, Ganapathi, grow in our nation like mushrooms, split like amoeba, and are as original and productive as mules. Most of these leaders had at one time or another been in the Kaurava Party, but had left — or been pushed out — at various stages of the party’s takeover by Priya Duryodhani. Drona and I surveyed the unprepossessing alternatives and decided to go for the only one among them whose honesty and sincerity was as unquestionable as his seniority: Yudhishtir.

I made the suggestion knowing only too well how little these very qualities suited my grandson for kingship. Drona agreed because, typically, he was more anxious to make a moral choice than a political one. Yet we were political enough to make a gesture of appeasement to the many who disagreed with the conservatism of the new Prime Minister: almost immediately after announcing our view that Yudhishtir would be the Front’s consensual choice for the nation’s leadership, we asked the populist Ashwathaman to preside over the Front’s party organization

There was, Ganapathi, one brief shining moment of hope, when the Front’s leaders, the euphoria of their unprecedented victory still mollifying their egos, gathered together before that symbol of the nation’s enduring greatness, the Taj Mahal, and swore a collective oath to Uphold India’s glory and its traditional values. Draupadi was present that day, as an honoured guest, and her skin glowed with a health and inner beauty that it had lacked for many years. She smiled then, dazzling onlookers with the strength and whiteness of her teeth. Even I could not guess how weak the roots were under that sparkling display of oral confidence.

It seemed strangely appropriate, Ganapathi, that the Front had chosen the Taj for this public reaffirmation of their democratic purpose. The Taj Mahal is the motif for India on countless tourist posters and has probably had more camera shutters clicked at it than any other edifice on the face of this earth. Yet how easily one forgets that this unequalled monument of love is in fact a tomb, the burial place of a woman who suffered thirteen times the pain of childbirth and died in agony at the fourteenth attempt. Perhaps that makes it all the worthier a symbol of our India — this land of beauty and grandeur amidst suffering and death.