Shashi Tharoor - The Great Indian Novel

22

So that is how my family entered politics, Ganapathi. Gangaji was more or less already in it, of course, since his crusade for justice had brought him smack up against the injustice of foreign rule, but now Dhritarashtra, with his dark glasses and white cane, and Pandu, whom celibacy had driven to fat, joined the cause full-time.

Vidur, too, might have joined; indeed, he wished to. He came down from Delhi the day after the annexation and the Bibigarh Massacre, and informed Gangaji and his brothers that he had resigned from the Service.

‘What?’ exclaimed Dhritarashtra. ‘Resigned?’

‘Good thing,’ said Pandu. ‘Well done, Vidur. You shouldn’t have joined the bastards in the first place.’

‘Withdraw it at once,’ Gangaji said.

Vidur blinked in astonishment. ‘I beg your pardon, Uncle?’ he asked, for he was a polite young man.

‘Withdraw it,’ Gangaji said tersely. ‘At once.’

‘Withdraw my resignation? But I can’t possibly do that.’

‘Why not? Have they already accepted it?’

‘No,’ Vidur admitted, ‘they haven’t even seen it yet. I’ve put my letter of resignation in the Under-Secretary’s in-tray, and he’ll find it when he comes in on Monday morning.’

‘No, he won’t,’ said Dhritarashtra, who was quick on the uptake, ‘because you’ll go back to Delhi immediately and take it out of his in-tray before he sees it.’

‘But why?’ Vidur asked despairingly. ‘You can’t seriously want me to serve this alien government, a government that has done this to our people!’

‘Whether it is the government you will be serving or the people whom they have harmed is only a matter of opinion,’ said Ganga sententiously. ‘Explain it to him, Dhritarashtra.’

‘Don’t you see, Vidur?’ asked Dhritarashtra, who, despite his blindness (or perhaps because of it), revelled in optical allusions. ‘We need you there. If we’re going to fight the Raj effectively we shall need our own friends and allies within the structure. And if we win,’ he added, his voice acquiring that dreamy quality that women in Bloomsbury had found irresistible during his student days, ‘we shall still need able and experienced Indians to run India for us.’

And so Vidur reluctantly stayed on in the ICS and, because he had many of his father’s good qualities, rose with remarkable rapidity up the rungs of the States Department. His princely upbringing at Hastinapur had given him the knack of dealing with Indian royalty. He understood their whims and wants, indulged their eccentricities and interpreted them sympathetically to the British. In time he became a trusted intermediary between the pink masters and their increasingly assertive brown subjects.

But we must put Vidur aside for a moment, Ganapathi, to look more carefully at Gangaji and his two princely disciples as they, in turn, rose to the peak of the nationalist movement.

Dhritarashtra s disappointment with fatherhood and the failing health of his grim wife drove him wholeheartedly into politics. Here he surprised everyone with his flair for the task. He had the blind man’s gift of seeing the world not as it was, but as he wanted it to be. Even better, he was able to convince everyone around him that his vision was superior to theirs. In a short while he was, despite his handicap, a leading light of the Kaurava Party, drafting its press releases and official communications to the government, formulating its positions on foreign affairs, and establishing himself as the party’s most articulate and attractive spokesman on just about anything on which Cantabrigian Fabianism had given him an opinion.

Gangaji, the party’s political and spiritual mentor, made no secret of his preference for the slim and confident young man. Pandu, in the circumstances, took it all rather well. He saw the world very differently from his blind half- brother. His recent brush with the angels of death and his subsequent immersion in the scriptures had made him more of a traditionalist than the idealistic Dhritarashtra, and the solidity of his appearance testified to one whose feet were staunchly planted on terra firma. Not for Pandu the flights of fancy of his sightless sibling, nor, for that matter, the ideological flirtations, the passionate convictions, the grand sweeping gestures of principle that became the hallmarks of Dhritarashtra’s political style. Pandu believed in taking stock of reality, preferably with a clenched fist and eyes in the back of one’s head. He balanced an hour of meditation with an hour of martial arts. ‘Of course I believe in non-violence,’ he would explain. ‘But I want to be prepared just in case non-violence doesn’t believe in me.

His duties as the party’s chief organizer were indirectly responsible for his political differences with Dhritarashtra. The process of building up a party- structure and a cadre committed to run it in the teeth of colonial hostility convinced him that discipline and organization were far greater virtues than ideals and doctrines. It was the classic distortion, Ganapathi, to which our late Leader would herself one day fall prey, the elevation of means over ends, of methods over aspirations. As long as Gangaji was there he shrewdly harnessed the divergent skills of my two sons to the common cause. But when his grip began to slip. .

But you see, I am getting ahead of my story again, Ganapathi. You mustn’t let me. I haven’t yet told you about Kunti, Pandu’s faithfully infidelious wife, and how she fulfilled her husband’s extraordinary request for progeny. For it was not only Gandhari the Grim who assured India’s next generation of leadership by her exertions in labour. After all, Ganapathi, as you well know, we were to develop a pluralist system, so a plurality of leaders had to be born to run it.

Stop looking so lascivious, young man. I have no intention of offering you a ringside seat by Kunti’s bed. Facts, that is all I intend to record, facts and names. This is history, do not forget, not pornography.

In fact, if you must know, Pandu helped choose the genetic mix his sons would inherit. Kunti’s first post-marital lover (yes, first, there were others, but I shall come to that in a moment) was the youngest Indian judge of the High Court; let us refer to him only as Dharma, so as not to wound certain sensibilities, though those who know who I am speaking about will be left in no doubt as to his real identity. Dharma was learned, distinguished, good-looking in the way that only men become when they start greying at the temples, and of a highly respectable family. A man of principle, he agonized over his adultery, but found himself agonizing even more when Kunti abandoned him abruptly — as soon, in fact (though he was not to know this) as her pregnancy was confirmed.

A son was born of their union, a weak-chinned, gentle boy with a broad forehead, whom they decided to name Yudhishtir. Pandu swears that, meditating while Kunti was in the final stages of labour, he heard a voice from the heavens proclaiming that the lad would grow up to be renowned for his truthfulness and virtue. But I have always suspected that Pandu had simply been reading a biography of George Washington too late into the night and dreamt the whole thing.

When Yudhishtir was born Hastinapur was still in the family’s hands and Pandu was persuaded of the need for more — what shall I call it? — offspring insurance’ to make the succession secure. But he did not want Kunti striking up too long an association with Dharma, and the lady herself was attracted by the idea of variety. (Few women, Ganapathi, fail to be excited by the thought of producing children from different men; it is the ultimate assertion of their creative power. Fortunately for mankind, however, or perhaps unfortunately, fewer still have the courage to put their fantasy into practice.) This time her privileged nocturnal companion was a military man, Major Vayu, of the soon- to-be-disbanded Hastinapur Palace Guard.