Shashi Tharoor: The Great Indian Novel

Then it all happened very suddenly. No one heard anything above the screeching of tyres, but Ganga’s hand appeared briefly through a half-open window and Salva staggered back, his Hispano-Suiza collapsing beneath him as the air whooshed out of its tyres. The Rolls drove quietly off, engine purring complacently as the Raja of Saubal shook an impotent fist at its retreating end.

‘So tiresome, these hotheads,’ was all Ganga said, as he sank back in his seat and wiped his brow.

6

Vichitravirya took one look at the women his regent had brought back for him and slobbered his gratitude over his half-brother. But one day, when all the arrangements had been made in consultation with his — my — mother Satyavati, the invitations printed and a date chosen that accorded with the preferences of the astrologers and (just as important) of the British Resident, the eldest of the three girls, Amba, entered Ganga’s study and closed the door.

‘What do you think you are doing, girl?’ the saintly Regent asked, snapping shut a treatise on the importance of enemas in attaining spiritual purity. (‘The way to a man’s soul is through his bowels,’ he would later intone to the mystification of all who heard him.) ‘Don’t you know that I have taken a vow to abjure women? And that besides, you are pledged to another man?’

‘I haven’t come. . for that,’ Amba said in some confusion. (Ever since his vow Ganga had developed something of an obsession with his celibacy, even if he was the only one who feared it to be constantly under threat.) ‘But about the other thing.’

‘What other thing?’ asked Ganga in some alarm, his wide reading and complete inexperience combining vividly in his imagination.

‘About being promised to another man,’ Amba said, retreating towards the door.

‘Ah,’ said Gangaji, reassured. ‘Well, have no fear, my dear, you can come closer and confide all your anxieties to your uncle Ganga. What seems to be the problem?’

The little princess twisted one hand nervously in the other, looking at her bangled wrists rather than at the kindly elder across the room. ‘I. . I had already given myself, in my heart, to Raja Salva, and he was going to marry me. We had even told Daddy, and he was going to. . to. . announce it on that day, when. . when. .’ She stopped, in confusion and distress.

‘So that’s why he followed us,’ said the other-worldly sage with dawning comprehension. ‘Well, you must stop worrying, my dear. Go back to your room and pack. You shall go to your Raja on the next train.’

For Gangaji’s sake I wish that were the end of this particular story, but it isn’t. And don’t look at me like that, young Ganapathi. I know this is a digression — but my life, indeed this world, is nothing more than a series of digressions. So you can cut out the disapproving looks and take this down. That’s what you’re here for. Right, now, where were we? That’s right, in a special royal compartment on the rail track to Saubal, with the lovely Amba heading back to her lover on the next train, as Ganga had promised.

If Gangaji had thought that all that was required now was to reprint the wedding invitations with one less name on the cast of characters, he was sadly mistaken. For when Amba arrived at Saubal she found that her Romeo had stepped off the balcony.

‘That decrepit eccentric has beaten, humiliated, disgraced me in public. He carried you away as I lay sprawling on the wreck of my car. You’ve spent God knows how many nights in his damned palace. And now you expect me to forget all that and take you back as my wife?’ Salva’s Cambridge-stiffened upper lip trembled as he turned away from her. ‘I’m having your carriage put back on the return train. Go to Ganga and do what he wishes. We’re through.’

And so, a tear-stained face gazed out through the bars of the small-windowed carriage at the light cast by the full moon on the barren countryside, as the train trundled imperviously back to Ganga’s capital of Hastinapur.

‘You must be joking, Ganga -bhai, I can’t marry her now,’ expostulated Vichitravirya, ripping the flesh off a breast of quail with his wine-stained teeth. ‘The girl’s given herself to another man. It was hardly my idea to have her shuttling to and from Saubal by public transport, in full view of the whole world. But it’s done: everyone knows about her disgrace by now.’ He took a quick swallow. ‘You can’t expect me, Vichitravirya of Hastinapur, son of Maharaja Shantanu and Maharani Satyavati, soon to be king in my own right and member of the Chamber of Princes, to accept the return of soiled goods like some Porbandar baniya merchant. You can’t be serious, Ganga- bhai.’ He rolled his eyes in horror at his half-brother and clapped loudly for an attendant. ‘Bring on the nautch-girls,’ he called out.

‘Then you must marry me yourself,’ said the despairing Amba when Ganga had confessed the failure of his intercession with the headstrong princeling. ‘You’re the one who’s responsible for all this. You’ve ruined my life, now the least you can do is to save me from eternal disgrace and spinsterhood.’

Gangaji blinked in disbelief. ‘That’s one thing I cannot do,’ he replied firmly. ‘I cannot break my vow, however sorry I may feel for you, my dear.’

‘Damn your vow,’ she cried in distress. ‘What about me? No one will marry me now, you know that. My life’s finished — all because of you.’

‘You know, I wouldn’t be so upset if I were you,’ replied Gangaji calmly. ‘A life of celibacy is a life of great richness. You ought to try it, my dear. It will make you very happy. I am sure you will find it deeply spiritually uplifting.’

‘You smug, narcissistic bastard, you!’ Amba screamed, hot tears running down her face. ‘Be like you, with your enemas and your loincloths? Never!’ And she ran out of the room, slamming the door shut on the startled sage.

She tried herself after that, imploring first Vichitravirya, then Salva again, equally in vain. When six years of persistence failed to bring any nuptial rewards, she forgot all but her searing hatred for her well-intentioned abductor, and began to look in earnest for someone who would kill him. By then, however, Gangaji’s fame had spread beyond the boundaries of Has-tinapur, and no assassin in the whole of India was willing to accept her contract. It was then that she would resolve to do it herself. .

7

But I am, as Ganapathi indicates by the furrow on his ponderous brow, getting ahead of my story. Amba’s revenge on Gangaji, the extraordinary lengths to which she went to obtain it, and the violence she was prepared to inflict upon herself, are still many years away. We had paused with Vichitravirya committing bigamy, bigamy inspired by Gangaji and sanctioned by religion, tradition, law and the British authorities. Another instance of Ganga’s failure to judge the real world of flawed men, for his debauched half-brother needed no greater incentive to indulgence than this temple-throbbing choice of nocturnal companions. Ambika and Ambalika were each enough for any king, with ripe rounded breasts to weigh upon a man and skins of burnished gold to set him alight, bodies long enough to envelop a monarch and full hips to invite him into them; together, they drove Vichitravirya into a fatally priapic state. Yes, it was terminal concupiscence he died of, though some called it consumption and a variety of quick and quack remedies were proposed in vain around his sickbed. He turned in his sceptre just seven years into his reign, in what the British Resident, in his letter of condolence, was to describe as the ‘prime of life’, and he died childless, thus giving me a chance to re-enter the story.