Shashi Tharoor - The Great Indian Novel

‘Piffle, Heaslop, piffle.’ Sir Richard’s tone was firm. ‘That case wouldn’t have been withdrawn if the indigo market weren’t already in the doldrums. Your nationalist hero simply provided a good excuse to withdraw a regulation that wasn’t needed any more, and earn the goodwill of some of these babus.’ Sir Richard glowered at the thought. ‘And don’t make the mistake of assuming that Delhi thinks with one mind on a question like this. Not a bit of it. For every Lieutenant-Governor Scott with a soft spot for the uppity natives, there are ten on the Viceroy’s staff who believe in putting them in their place. Besides, Paul Scott and his ilk can’t tie our hands on a matter concerning the princely states. It’s simply none of their damn business.’

‘If you say so, sir.’ Heaslop tried to keep the anxiety he felt out of his voice. He was beginning to feel like Pandora after casually opening the box. ‘What exactly do you propose to do, sir? I mean, there isn’t much point in demanding his ouster as Regent, is there, when we know perfectly well he isn’t Regent any more?’

‘Ouster? Who in damnation spoke about demanding his ouster, Heaslop?’ ‘Well, you said, sir, I mean no one, sir, but you did say that if he were still Regent you would —’

‘Have his hide for a carpet.’ Sir Richard recalled his metaphor. ‘I’m not foolish enough to ask for his dismissal from functions he no longer exercises, Heaslop. It’s not a symbolic victory I’m looking for. I want to teach Mr Datta, and any others like him, a lesson they’ll never forget.’

‘May I ask how, sir?’ Heaslop’s voice was faint.

‘You may indeed, Heaslop, and I will answer you in one word,’ Sir Richard replied, rubbing his hands in anticipatory satisfaction. ‘Annexation.’

14

‘I’m not sure I want a hundred sons,’ Dhritarashtra said to his bride. ‘But I’d be happy to have half a dozen or so.’

They were reclining on an enormous swing, the size of a sofa, which hung from the ceiling of their royal bedroom. The unseeing prince lay on his side, propped up against a bolster, his head supported partly by an elbow and partly by Gandhari’s sari-draped lap. His new princess, playing idly with strands of his already thinning hair, did not smile at his words, nor did she look at him. Gandhari the Grim, as this frail, dark beauty was already being called in the servants’ quarters, could not, for her eyes were completely covered by a blindfold of the purest silk.

‘You shall have a son,’ she said softly, ‘who shall be strong and brave, a leader of men. And he shall see well enough and far enough for both of us.’

Her husband sighed. ‘Dearest Gandhari,’ he whispered, his free hand reaching for her face and feeling the satin bandage around it. ‘Why must you do this to yourself?’

‘I have already told you,’ she replied, decisively moving his hand away. ‘Your world is mine, and I do not wish to see more of it than you do. It is not fitting that a wife should possess anything more than her husband does.’

A fragrance of the attar of roses wafted slowly down to him as she spoke. It was one of the signs by which he could tell her from any other presence in a room, that and the silvery tinkle of the payals at her ankle. ‘How often must I tell you that you would be more useful to me the way you are?’ Dhritarashtra asked sadly.

He never ceased to marvel at the strength of this woman’s resolve. For a young girl, embarking on adulthood and marriage, to vow never to see the world again! What it must have meant to her to make this sacrifice, to blot out the world to conform to an idea of matrimony even fiercer and more intense than that handed down over the generations. What was it that drove her to this extreme act of self-denial? Not just tradition, for even the tradition of the dutiful wife, the Sati Savitri of myth and legend, did not demand so much. Not love, for she had never set eyes on Dhritarashtra before; nor admiration, for the days of his greatness still lay ahead. No, it was some mysterious inner force that led this young girl to will herself into blindness, to give up the glory of the sunlight and the flowers, to renounce the blazing splendour of the gulmohars or the gathering thunderclouds of the monsoons, to have to judge a sari by its feel rather than its colour, a space by its sound rather than its size, a man by his words rather than his looks. It was a sacrifice few, let alone this delicate wisp of a woman, would be thought capable of making.

‘Useful? It is not a wife’s role to be useful.’ Gandhari tossed her determined head. ‘If that is all you want, you can hire any number of assistants, secretaries, readers and scribes, cooks and servants and even women of pleasure. As I am sure you have done whenever you have felt the need.’ She ran her fingers through his hair to remove any hint of offence. ‘No, my lord, a dharampatni is not expected to be useful. Her duty is to share the life of her husband, its joys and triumphs and sorrows, to be by his side at all times, and to give him sons.’ A note of steely wistfulness crept into her voice. ‘A hundred sons.’

Dhritarashtra had never known a woman like this in England. He tried to inject a note of playfulness into the conversation. ‘Not a hundred. That would be exhausting.’

His quiet wife did not. laugh. This was not a subject on which she entertained levity. ‘Who knows? That is what the astrologer has foretold. It would take a long time, to produce a hundred sons.’

‘And so it would.’ Dhritarashtra the sceptic, with his Cambridge-taught disbelief that the stars could be read any more accurately than the tea leaves he constantly brewed, chuckled, and reached for his wife. This time his hands touched a different fabric, and felt a responsive warmth beneath. ‘So what are we waiting for?’

His fingers tickled her and at last she laughed too. The swing rocked with their love, at first slowly, then with accelerating rhythm, casting moving shadows on the walls that neither could see.

15

Behave yourself, Ganapathi. What do you mean, how could I know? You don’t expect me to spell out everything, do you? I just know, that’s all. I know a great many things that people don’t know I know, and that should be good enough for you, young man.

Meanwhile, as they say in those illustrated rags which I suppose are all your generation reads these days, Pandu was having the time of his life with his two wives. The scandal-burdened Kunti was every bit as delectable as her reputation suggested, and the steatomammate Madri, if less symmetrically proportioned, more than made up for this with the inventiveness of her love- making. Pandu was always something of a physical soul, if you get my meaning, and he revelled in the delights of bigamy, taking due care to ensure that his pleasures were not prematurely interrupted by pregnancy.

It was, of course, too good to last. That, Ganapathi, is one of the unwritten laws of life that I have observed in the course of a long innings at the karmic crease. It is just when you are seeing the ball well and timing the fours off the sweet of the bat that the unplayable shooter comes along and bowls you. And it is because we instinctively understand this that we Hindus take defeat so well. We appreciate philosophically that the chap up there, the Great Cosmic Umpire, has a highly developed sense of the perverse.

Didn’t think I knew much about cricket, did you? As I told you Ganapathi, I know a great deal about a great deal. Like India herself. I am at home in hovels and palaces, Ganapathi, I trundle in bullock-carts and propel myself into space, I read the vedas and quote the laws of cricket. I move, my large young man, to the strains of a morning raga in perfect evening dress.