Shashi Tharoor - The Great Indian Novel

The godman whom Yudhishtir approached came into this category, advocating measures either so unexceptionable (regular prayer) or so exceptional (regular consumption of one’s own liquid wastes) that his following was confined to a small number of devoted devotees. Indeed, no one might have paid him any attention at all, were it not for the fact that the Prime Minister was discovered one day at one of his speeches. At a speech, in fact, in which the godman carelessly, or unimaginatively, or perversely — it really doesn’t matter which — referred to the nation’s traditional outcastes as ‘Untouchables’.

That was all, mind you. He didn’t suggest that they deserved to be where they were, didn’t imply they had to be barred from temples or from our daughters’ bedrooms; he simply called them ‘Untouchables’ instead of the euphemism Gangaji had invented in an effort to remove the stigma of that term. And Yudhishtir committed, in the eyes of his most radical critics, the unpardonable sin of neither correcting him nor walking out of his audience.

Now you know as well as I do, Ganapathi, that words are among India’s traditional palliatives — we love to conceal our problems by changing their names. It mattered little to the men and women at the bottom of the social heap whether they were referred to by the most notorious of their disabilities or by the fiction of a divine paternity they supposedly shared with everyone else (which was almost as bad, because if everyone was a Child of God, why were they the only ones branded as such?). But to the professional politicians anxious to score points against my insensitive grandson, Yudhishtir’s silence when the term was employed in his hearing meant acquiescence in a collective insult. The government, they declaimed to Priya Duryodhani’s enthusiastic endorsement, was anti-Harijan.

Ashwathaman, the Front’s radical leader, was foremost in his criticism of the Prime Minister. He could not, in all conscience, he announced, continue to support a government which had thus revealed its casteist cast. Yudhishtir’s rivals, scenting his blood on the trail of their own ascent to his throne, agreed.

Suddenly the fragile unity of the Front began to crumble. One legislator declared he would no longer accept the party whip; another demanded that the Front expel its ‘closet casteists’. There was open talk of forming a new Front, purged of ‘reactionary’ elements. A majority of the ruling party’s legislators were just waiting, it was said, for a signal to abandon Yudhishtir. The signal had to come from the man whose Uprising had first started them on their ascent to power — Drona.

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But the new Messiah lay on his sickbed, his liver devastated by the privations of Priya Duryodhani’s prisons. Ill, exhausted, bitterly disappointed by the way in which the popular tide of his dreams had dribbled wastefully into the arid sands of sterile conflict, Drona lay torn between loyalty to the government he had created and the son for whom he had, all those years ago, changed his life.

‘I can’t afford to lose him to the other side,’ Yudhishtir said to me. ‘I must get him to issue a statement in my favour before Ashwathaman returns from his tour of the southern states and beats me to it.’

‘Yama, the god of death, might beat you both to it,’ I said. My own advancing years had made my imagery even more traditional, at least on the subject of mortality. ‘I saw him this morning and felt he wouldn’t last till tomorrow. But if he does, Yudhishtir, he is not going to support you against his son.’

‘I realize that. And if he adds his voice to Ashwathaman’s, I am finished,’ Yudhishtir said matter-of-factly. ‘The time has come for me to act as our ancestors would have done.’ Without responding to my raised eyebrow, the Prime Minister beckoned to his youngest brother. ‘Sahadev, I want you to go to Drona’s house now and tell him Ashwathaman’s plane back to Delhi has crashed.’

I was numbed by his words. ‘You can’t possibly do this,’ I protested as soon as I had recovered my breath.

‘Tell him also,’ Yudhishtir went on obliviously, ‘that I am on my way over to give him the news myself. I shall follow you in about ten minutes. Make sure no one else is with you when you say this, or when I enter.’

‘But Yudhishtir,’ I expostulated, ‘you’ve never told a lie in your life!’

‘And I never will,’ my grandson replied piously.

‘Drona knows that,’ I pointed out. ‘And he is bound to ask you for the truth of Sahadev’s information.’

‘Precisely.’ Yudhishtir seemed undisturbed.

‘You can’t lie to him then! A dying man — your own guru. .’

‘Don’t worry, VVji,’ Yudhishtir said. ‘I won’t lie.’

I went with him to Drona’s house. The old man lay in a darkened room, surrounded by the medicines and equipment that kept him alive. Sahadev was crouched miserably at his bedside; I was shaken to see that the Messiah was weeping.

As we entered, he turned to Yudhishtir with a desperate anxiety even his frailty could not efface. ‘He tells me this terrible fate has befallen my son,’ Drona said. ‘Tell me, Yudhishtir, is it true? I cannot believe it unless it comes from you. Tell me, is Ashwathaman safe?’

A look of genuine sadness appeared on the Prime Minister’s face. ‘I am sorry, Dronaji,’ Yudhishtir said. ‘Ashwathaman is dead.’

Even I believed him then, for Yudhishtir simply did not lie. His honesty was like the brightness of the sun or the wetness of the rain, one of the elements of the natural world: you simply took it for granted.

‘Ashwathaman,’ he repeated softly, ‘is dead.’

A terrible cry rose from Drona’s lips. He turned his face away from us, towards the white-plastered wall, his voice drained of all emotion. ‘Then I have nothing more to live for.’ His eyes closed.

‘I am sorry, Drona, to ask you this at this painful time,’ the Prime Minister whispered, ‘but will you not support the unity of the Front you did so much to create and place in power?’

The Messiah did not look at him. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘Of course.’

I saw the triumph in Yudhishtir’s eyes at the same time that I saw the light fade from Drona’s. Within minutes, the old guru was gone.

We stood in vigil as the life ebbed away from him, and I felt regret flood my spirit. Throughout his life, during his days of violence and of peace, his years of teaching and of withdrawal, Drona had been one of India’s simplest men. ‘The new Mahaguru’, a Sunday magazine had dubbed him, but he was a flawed Mahaguru, a man whose goodness was not balanced by the shrewdness of the original. He had stood above his peers, a secular saint whose commitment to truth and justice was beyond question. But though his loyalty to the ideals of a democratic and egalitarian India could not be challenged, Drona’s abhorrence of power had made him unfit to wield it. He had offered inspiration but not involvement, charisma but not change, hope but no harness. Having abandoned politics when he seemed the likely heir-apparent to Dhritarashtra, he tried to stay above it all after the fall of Dhritarashtra’s daughter, and so he let the revolution he had wrought fall into the hands of lesser men who were unworthy of his ideals. Now he was dying, and the nation did not know what it would mourn.

‘”J.D.,” our modern Messiah, is no more,’ Yudhishtir announced outside when it was all over. ‘And his last words were a stirring plea for unity amongst us in the Front. It is no secret that he was deeply saddened by the troubles that have affected the government — his government, a government he did more than anyone else to make possible. It is sadly true that Dronaji died a deeply disappointed man, but his legacy lives on in the hearts of the Indian people — to whom, in the last analysis, he taught their own strength.’ Yudhishtir paused, his voice breaking. ‘I plead with all his followers and heirs today — let us not dissipate that strength. On this tragic occasion I shall call on every member of the Front, and in particular on Dronaji’s son Ashwathaman, our party’s President, to rededicate ourselves to the cause J.D. held so dear.’