Tales of love at a stressful time

Shanti was troubled by her new entanglement, uplifting though it was. In worldly terms, it was a hopeless relationship. How could she team up with Michael, a temporary resident of India, seemingly happily married with a wife and children in the United States? She was not by nature a home-breaker and was in many respects a feminist. How was she to convince herself that she was doing the right thing and was not a party to ruining the lives of an innocent wife and her children? And yet there was no question that she was in love. In some mysterious ways unknown to humankind, love, when it arrives, is no respecter of people and nationalities, of single men and women or married men and women. Look at the tragic love and life of Anna Karenina in Leo Tolstoy's famous novel.

Shanti had often talked about it with Michael in tender moments. He was no great help because he could not convince her of the rationale of this meeting of minds and bodies. Not being of a religious bent, he could not seek an explanation in religious or spiritual terms. He confessed his own devout love to her but had no solutions to offer that would take them out of their predicament.

Yet as his moment of departure approached, there was a desperate edge to their love-making. Shanti was thinking about the historical nature of women being the stronger sex, despite conventional wisdom. George Bernard Shaw had written about it in terms of women being the life force. Other writers had often delineated that in moments of crises or in great endeavours, it is women who take the initiative or find a solution to life's problems.

Shanti decided after a particularly passionate bout of love-making that she would confront him with the hopelessness of their situation.

“Where do we go from here?” she asked. “You know that I can't abandon my wife and family. What would they do without me? She is not a professional,'”he answered. “Then what is in it for me?” “Isn’t it an enriching experience?” “No deal,” was her retort. And the determined woman that she was, she turned her back on him, refusing to allow him to make love to her again. Shanti had many regrets after the break-up. She was still in love with Michael but had felt in recent encounters that he was merely using her for his own pleasure with no regard for the emotional capital she had so heavily invested in him. She simply walked out on him.

Mercifully, the Emergency came to her rescue because there was so much to do to rid the country of it. She told herself that she must decide on new ways to fight it. As she tried to forget her own plight in the country's larger good, she brooded on what had made India so brittle and its political class so crass and selfish. What had happened to the moral fibre of the people? Initially, we had prided ourselves on the unique moral nature of fighting for independence largely through non-violent means. There had been such a leader as Mahatma Gandhi who had shown the way. True, the massacres on both sides of newly created borders between India and Pakistan were a permanent blot on the peoples of the two countries and their leaders. Were there mitigating circumstances such as the suddenness of it all, the loss of traditional homes and land and the passions aroused by mass hysteria, she contemplated.

What worried Shanti more was the docility of professionals and intellectuals at the first sign of a determined leader wielding the stick. It was as if their bravery was a shallow front even as they counted the cost of dissent. Where was the flaunted spirituality of India, the will to sacrifice, the superiority of the Indian's inner strength, compared to Western creeds?

The parting with Michael hurt deeply, but Shanti had taken a decision and would stick to it. There was no going back. If it had been an enriching experience, as Michael had suggested, so be it. It was now time to look to the future and wrestle with the larger problem of Indians’ many failings.

Where and how had her countrymen gone astray? Where were the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who had marched willingly to face the colonial masters’ bullets and lathis (staves) without thought for the morrow? Had the enjoyment of an independent India made these same men and women selfish beings devoted to feathering their own nests? Was it in the earlier instance mass hysteria that had led them to bravery and now, since we were ruled by our own kith and kin, we had become converts to the call of collecting privileges and wealth? Shanti had never understood why men and women who had given themselves to the cause of independence quibbled over the amount of compensation they should receive from the government for their suffering.

There were no easy answers and Shanti lulled herself to sleep.

Iqbal was a product of the so-called composite culture. He was a Muslim, but had scant regard for the tenets of his faith. He liked the good things in life and had a glad eye. Although not handsome in the conventional sense, he was presentable and polished and had imbibed the courtly Mughal culture and graces of Lucknow, once the home of princes and courtesans.

Iqbal’s current girlfriend was a rather large Belgian with an equally large appetite for men and culture. Iqbal therefore was a natural draw, a suave man turning most events into a humorous interlude in a world replete with Urdu couplets. Monique was intrigued by him. He proved to be a passionate lover, but he was also a raconteur and could play the buffoon at the drop of a hat.

Monique was only dimly aware of the dilemmas of being a Muslim in India. Although India was officially a secular state, it was veering more and more towards becoming a Hindu state, driven in part by the mentor of the right-wing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Indian leaders’ imagery was getting more and more Hinduised, which did not sit well with its Muslim population and those belonging to other religious faiths.

Yet Iqbal had been rather successful in charting his career in journalism. He was good at striking up acquaintanceships and built up relations with politicians under the guise of being the funny man taking life as it came along. He was reasonably fluent in his prose and could make his superiors happy by bringing in a constant supply of scoops.

Yet Iqbal was wise enough to realise that his assets as an affable funny man did not match the rigours of the Emergency and sought to persuade Monique to do him a favour: to find him a suitable fellowship in Europe that would help him over the hump of the Emergency so that he could return home after it was over with an unsullied reputation, not having colluded with the Emergency regime.

After a particularly passionate session of love-making, Monique gave him a priceless present. Yes, she had been successful in persuading her friends in Brussels to award him a fellowship to undertake a two-year study on the future relationship between the European Economic Community and significant emerging markets such as India. And a relieved Iqbal set about preparing himself for the journey to safety.

The news of Iqbal’s success spread like wildfire. Brijesh, among others, was jealous. He wished he had been in his friend's shoes, instead of being a hack in the service of the Emergency regime. But Brijesh had got used to his new routine. It was as if he were a technician performing his journalistic chores like an automaton. It was always Indira at the top of the page, with hard-won and rare encomiums from abroad on the front page and all the development work that was seemingly taking place. There were always photographs of Indira and her minions decorating the front page.

Brijesh knew better than to be sentimental about life. In his days of innocence as an anarchist, he had been sentimental and emotional. In fact, he had fallen madly in love with fellow anarchist Kamla and after a rather brief relationship, he had been brought back to earth, with the platoon leader threatening him with expulsion if he did not cease indulging in such degenerate bourgeois attributes as love-making with a fellow Maoist. And he had shamefacedly obeyed the order seeking solace in conducting more daring acts of anarchy. Yet Brijesh had in secret rebelled at the horrible practice of senior Maoist leaders deflowering teenage village girls abducted for their pleasure before they were forcibly inducted into the ranks of Maoist fighters.

Sometimes Brijesh wondered whether in his evolution from being an anarchist to a Left-wing socialist and now a newspaper hack, he had missed something in life. Like any thinking person in a country plagued by gross levels of inequality and poverty, Brijesh was a Leftist, but he had been forced to earn a living from a relatively young age after his father had given up on him for his anarchist ways. And holding a job, he knew from experience, required prudence, particularly in difficult times such as during the Emergency.

Shanti was born long after India had attained Independence. But she had been told a lot about it by her family and older relations and had voraciously set about acquiring as much knowledge as she could. Her family had told her about the Partition violence in sorrowful and hurt terms, mourning the loss of dear ones and empathising with the tragedies on the other side of what seemed a mad carnage that took so many mangled bodies as if human beings were playing at being demons. The fires of hell seemed to come alive to envelop whole populations in villages and towns in their sweep unmindful of any suggestion of humanity or fellow feeling.

Shanti had metaphorically fallen in love with Jawaharlal Nehru. He was such a sensitive and civilised man, so well read and so conscious of the heavy burden the country had placed on him. In his Discovery of India, he had taken a wide sweep of history and India’s place in it. Perhaps he was romanticising India’s historical role and future prospects. After all, he was a romantic at heart and there was a whole body of credible reports about his affair with Lady Mountbatten, a ménage-a-trois that admirably suited the principals involved and was a bonus for the British government in surmounting many delicate moments in the Independence drama underlying the break-up of its Indian Empire.

Yet it needed foreign observers and writers to call a spade a spade and point to a romantic link that was common knowledge, unspoken as it was. At one level, her countrymen were such hypocrites, at another vulgar and salacious. Shanti preferred Nehru’s Autobiography. He was more his inner self as he analysed himself and his stirrings. Shanti had often thought about what she never fully understood: the relationship between Nehru and the Mahatma, involving as it did the former’s blind devotion to the latter, despite the very different make-ups of the two. In the former's case, his British and European-inspired socialism and a scientific outlook on life, and the latter often listening to his inner voice and talking in religious and spiritual terms. Perhaps the common thread was that they both sought the country's Independence and taking it forward. But the future had different connotations for them.

Nehru himself had confessed to being torn about complying with the Mahatma’s wishes. The latter's Hindu imagery in what amounted to state policy sat ill with Nehru the scientific socialist. Yet in the end Nehru had surrendered; it was Nehru who was anointed by him as the future leader of the country. In a sense, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who was instrumental in bringing in scores of princely states (some of them forcibly) into the new nation, would have made a better prime minister. His shrewd head was squarely fixed on his broad shoulders and he was eminently unsentimental. Yet Shanti felt the Mahatma had made the right decision because Nehru the romantic had charisma and he could sway populations through his rambling speeches; he was no orator in the conventional sense.

Perhaps Nehru’s greatest contribution was to lay the solid foundations of a parliamentary democracy which his daughter Indira sought to destroy by imposing the Emergency. From all Shanti had read, he was meticulous about attending parliamentary sessions, listening to Opposition spokesmen, pitifully small in number as they were. He punctiliously answered questions in the Question Hour in the lower House and even as his favourite minister V. K. Krishna Menon, later to be disgraced by the disastrous Indian showing in the 1962 border war with China, spoke on disarmament over the heads of most Members of Parliament, he listened attentively.

The Mahatma had divined that Nehru’s love for his people was amply reciprocated in a manner the stern Sardar could never replicate with the masses. Shanti had read enough to know that Nehru became an icon in his lifetime. Given his studies in Britain and his travels, Nehru had a grasp of international affairs. He was, indeed, a one-man foreign policy institution and was obsessed with India and China being the engines of a new Asian century of the future. So convinced was he of the rightness of his perspective that he disregarded Chinese hints and threats and belligerence, grievously overlooked the weakness of India’s armed forces and in effect sent them to their doom.

Nehru, Shanti felt, had never quite recovered from the shock of the bitter medicine the Chinese had administered, despite his handing over Tibet to China on a platter, as it were. Perhaps his inner self was telling him that it was time to say good bye. Yet Nehru for Shanti was a great man, a patriot, a visionary on his own terms and a man who had set India firmly on the path of democracy. Lal Bahadur Shastri, a party apparatchik, was physically diminutive and metaphorically more so, but it was ironical that Nehru’s daughter Indira, who succeeded Shastri after his untimely death, took the unprecedented step of imposing a countrywide emergency against all democratic canons. Yet Shanti, together with all Indians, had feted Indira in how she had conducted herself in bringing independence to Bangladesh, first by listening to the counsel of the armed forces and meanwhile minding her international flank by touring Western capitals while securing the Indo-Soviet Treaty to ward off peremptory calls in the United Nations Security Council.

The leader of the main Opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, Atal Behari Vajpayee, had famously compared her to the all-powerful mythical Goddess Durga for India's victory in the Bangladesh Liberation War. Later, facing acute domestic problems and a High Court judgment, the same Indira had sought to remain in office by imposing the Emergency.