Shashi Tharoor - The Great Indian Novel

I remember, Ganapathi, I still remember the night our late Leader was born. It was a monsoon night, and the rain lashed down upon us, while a howling wind tore branches off trees and ripped roofs off shacks, turned our pathetic parasols inside out and drove the water into our homes. I entered the palace dripping, handed the shambles of my umbrella to the bowing servitor and mounted the stairs towards the women’s quarters. A female attendant came out of Gandhari’s room just as I reached the landing. Something about her expression led me to fear the worst. I asked her quietly, ‘How is she?’

‘Still in labour, sir.’

I nodded, both troubled and relieved. Still in labour: but it had been twenty-four hours already, time enough for me to receive the news and make my way through the mounting rage of the storm to the palace. And still she lay there; Gandhari the Grim lay there and sweated and suffered. I had a vision of that small, frail, delicately proportioned body stretched out and arched in the most grotesque of contortions, as a hundred lustily bawling sons fought their way out of her half-open womb. .

And then, from behind Gandhari’s closed door just down the corridor, there emerged a single, long, wailing sound. We both stood transfixed. It was a baby’s cry and yet it was more than that; it was a rare, sharp, high-pitched cry like that of a donkey in heat, and as it echoed around the house a sound started up outside as if in response, a weird, animal moan, and then the sounds grew, as donkeys brayed in the distance, mares neighed in their pens, jackals howled in the forests, and through the cacophony we heard the beating of wings at the windows, the caw-caw-cawing of a cackle of crows, and penetrating through the shadows, the piercing shriek of the hooded vultures circling above the palace of Hastinapur.

‘What was that, sire?’ the woman servant asked, fear writ large on her face.

‘Dhritarashtra’s heir has been born,’ I said.

I was right. For when the doctor emerged from Gandhari’s room he was ashen with the strain. It had been the most difficult delivery of his life, he said, and it had taken a terrible toll on the brave young mother. She had survived, but she could never have children again. This one child would be her only offspring.

‘A boy, of course?’ Dhritarashtra, anxiously leaning on a cane, his dapper features strained with anticipation, asked the doctor. For weeks the midwives had said that all the signs pointed to a male heir: the shape of Gandhari’s breasts in the eighth month, the sling of her uterus in the ninth. ‘How is he?’

‘A girl,’ the doctor said shortly. ‘And she’s very well.’

The cane slipped with a clatter from Dhritarashtra’s hand. A servant bent to pick it up and the new father leaned against the wall, breathing heavily.

I slipped quietly into the room and shut the door behind me. ‘It is I, my child,’ I said. ‘I have come a long way to congratulate you.’

‘A girl!’ Gandhari’s head was sunk into her pillow and the beads of perspiration had yet to dry on her face. She had refused to take off her blindfold even to see her own infant, and it clung wetly to her closed eyelids. Her customary grimness was accentuated by a startling pallor, as if all the blood had been drained out of her in the delivery. ‘Is that all I shall have to show, Uncle, for the hundred sons you once promised me?’

I looked at her, pity overwhelming the admiration I had always felt for this spirited woman. I felt the exhaustion of that long wet night, the fatigue of that long hard birth; and my mind is still haunted by the image of poor grim Gandhari, head sunk into the pillow because she had failed to create the son her husband needed. History, Ganapathi, is full of savage ironies.

‘Your daughter, Gandhari,’ I said, taking her hand in mine, ‘will be equal to a thousand sons. This I promise you.’

I could not see into those closed eyes; I knew she did not believe me. Nor would she have believed what destiny had in store for her painfully wrought child. Gandhari would not live to know it, but her sombre-eyed daughter, Priya Duryodhani, would grow up one day to rule all India.

19

The news of the annexation of Hastinapur by the British Raj was announced by a brusque communiqué one morning. There was none of the subtle build-up one might have expected, Ganapathi; no carefully planted stories in the press about official concern at the goings-on in the palace, no simulated editorial outrage about the degree of political misbehaviour being tolerated from a sitting Regent, not even the wide bureaucratic circulation of proposals, notes and minutes that Vidur, now a junior functionary in the States Department, might have seen and tried to do something about. No, Ganapathi, none of the niceties this time, none of the fabled British gentle- manliness and let-me-take-your-glasses-off-your-face-before-I-punch-you-in- the-nose; no sir, John Bull had seen red and was snorting at the charge. One day Hastinapur was just another princely state, with its flag and its crest and its eleven-gun salute; the next morning it was part of the British Presidency of Marabar, with its cannon spiked, its token frontier-post dismantled and the Union Jack flying outside Gandhari’s bedroom window.

Sir Richard, former Resident of Hastinapur, now Special Representative of the Viceroy in charge of Integration, and a hot favourite to succeed the retiring Governor of Marabar himself, breakfasted well that morning on eggs and kedgeree, and his belly rumbled in satisfaction. He had just wiped his mouth with a damask napkin when an agitated Heaslop burst in.

‘Come in; Heaslop, come in,’ said Sir Richard expansively if unnecessarily, for the equerry was already within sneezing distance of the pepper-pot. ‘Tea?’

No, thank you, sir. I’m sorry to barge in like this, sir, but I’m afraid the situation is beginning to look very ugly. Your intervention may be required.’

‘What on earth are you on about, man? Sit down, sit down and tell me all about it.’ Sir Richard reached for the teapot, a frown creasing his pink forehead. ‘Are you sure you won’t have some tea?’

‘Absolutely sure, sir. The people of Hastinapur haven’t reacted very well to the news of the annexation, sir. Ever since this morning’s radio broadcast they have been pouring out on the streets, sir, milling about, listening to street- corner speakers denouncing the imperialist yoke. The shops are all closed, children aren’t going to school nor their parents to work, and the atmosphere in the city centre and the maidan is, to say the least, disturbing.’

Sir Richard sipped elegantly, but two of his chins were quivering. ‘Any violence?’

‘A little. Some window-panes of English businesses smashed, stones thrown, that sort of thing. Not many targets hereabouts to aim at, of course, in a princely state. It’s not as if this were British India, with assorted symbols of the Raj to set fire to. A crowd did try to march toward the residency, but the police stopped them at the bottom of the road.’ Heaslop hesitated. ‘My own car took a couple of knocks, sir, as I tried to get through. Stone smashed the windscreen.’

‘Good Lord, man! Are you hurt?’

‘Not a scratch, sir.’ Heaslop seemed not to know whether to look relieved or disappointed. ‘But the driver’s cut up rather badly. He says he’s all right, but I think we need to get him to the hospital.’