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| Enduring
Affairs |
Review |
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Published by Viking 1990
1
'Describe him.'
'Tall... .'
'Be precise.'
'American, forty-five years old, six-foot-one-inch,
172 pounds, slim, blond, blue eyes, half inch scar on
nose bridge.'
'No other peculiarities?'
'No sir. Except one coincidence. . . .
R.K. Srinivasan, a Deputy Inspector General of Police
(Intelligence), steeples his fingers, pressing hard, his
secret calisthenics, and watches his political master.
Charlie
V. Jagan, Minister of Home Affairs, holds his breath.
The name is one and the same. It is third down the list,
and even the distance of decades and ten thousand miles
cannot dampen its impact on Charlie V's heart. See how
his hands tremble as he lifts the khaki-colored paper
close to his darkened glasses. Cruel sunlight only haloes
the name. India's furious sun can burn the indigo and
vermilion out of silks, fade the flamboyant designs from
carpets, pulverize boulders" transmute water to dust.
But it doesn't possess the miraculous power of a nepenthe.
Dexter Franklin
Prescott III has an imperial American ring to it and he
should be the son of Dexter Theodore Prescott II and the
grandson of Dexter Ulysses Prescott I, the old rascal
who sold civil war rifles to the Bolivian army, discovered
a goldmine in revolutions and started them whenever he
could.
Capitalism,
like feudalism, longs for dynasties. The descendants of
corporate power shooting from the founder baron's loins
far and deep into futures, trusts, foundations, philanthropies.
Prescott is old money, the eastern kind, not fattening
gently in blue chips and government bonds and prime Manhattan
real" estate but vigorously multiplying itself in
takeovers, corporate raids and multinationalising itself
into a hundred countries.
Charlie V. Jagan turns away to face the sea, as
RK. Srinivasan flicks through his file. But it is already
too late. His curiosity over Dexter Franklin Prescott
III has been marked and filed by Srinivasan. Why, Srinivasan
asks himself as he shuffles his papers, does Charlie V. take such an
interest in this American? How did he know this American
happened to be in the city? What mystery lies in Charlie
V. Jagan's past? For he never asks about other aliens.
Srinivasan
is slyly deferential and astute, bison-like and yet dainty
as a reed practiced in bending and swaying to the gentlest
political breeze. He gives each politician the impression
he is permanent. Of course this is an illusion. It's Srinivasan
who is permanent; the politicians are migratory as the
souls that enter and escape and enter and escape these
impermanent bodies. (Taking with them, like ancient invaders,
as much money, lands, jewelry as they can carry when voted
out). Despite this knowledge, and their belief in maya,
politicians believe that political office lasts forever.
The desert
of blue water outside his window looks deceptively gentle.
Three hundred years back, the Bay of Bengal lapped the
granite walls of this Fort, built in 1640, and filled
the encircling moat. Like Charlie V.'s hair the sea has
receded, leaving a scalp of pretty garden, a bone-white
beach and a jumble of docks. Beneath the Indian flag on
the battlements dinky cannons point to that sea, rusted
magical fingers which once blew holes in the imperial
longings of France and Holland. The sea has seen those ancient, naval
powers battle for this small, granite kingdom. The English
threw the first grappling iron here and hauled themselves
hand over fist onto the Indian ankle. And then, with the
sickening speed of cancer, spread upwards along the rivers
and roads consuming kidneys of kingdoms, livers of states
and finally the ancient, rotting heart of this body, weakly
beating way up north in a magnificent red-walled Fort.
Srinivasan
purging his throat, tries to purge history from Charlie
V.'s mind. But it lingers on, a place of solitude seldom
invaded by the present. He imagines India's history as
a series of locked rooms, doors banging and locks turning,
their echo coming down a millennium-long tunnel. No one
looks back, looks in, the past 1s consigned to darkness;
manuscripts turn to dust, monuments dwindle to broken
piles, deeds are forgotten, mistakes are repeated. Charlie
V. too has a locked room in his life and he can hear the
rusty key turning, the creak of hinges, even as RK. Srinivasan
rustles his papers. |
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