The Red Sari: A Novel Read online

  OPENING

  Lead me from darkness into light, from death to immortality.

  Vedic prayer

  1

  New Delhi, May 24th, 1991.

  Sonia Gandhi simply cannot believe that the man she loves is dead, and she will no longer feel his caresses or the warmth of his kisses. She will never again see that sweet smile that one day swept her off her feet. It has all been so quick, so brutal and so unexpected that she still cannot take it in. Her husband was killed in a terrorist attack two days ago. His name was Rajiv Gandhi; he has been Prime Minister, and he was about to be Prime Minister again, according to the polls, if his electoral campaign had not been cut short in such a tragic way. He was 46 years old.

  Today the capital of India is preparing to say farewell to the remains of this illustrious son of the nation. The coffin containing the body is lying in the great hall of Teen Murti House, the palace residence where he spent his childhood when his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, was Prime Minister of India. It is a small colonial palace, surrounded by a park with large tamarinds and flame trees, their red flowers standing out against a lawn that is yellow from the heat. Originally designed to be the home of the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces, after independence it became the residence of the leader of the new nation, India. Nehru moved in, with his daughter Indira and his grandchildren. The gardeners, cooks and other members of staff, who, together with thousands of fellow Indians, have come today to pay tribute to their assassinated leader, find it hard to believe that the body lying in state here is that of the little boy who used to play hide and seek in those rooms as big as caves, with ceilings six metres high. It seems to them that they can still hear the echoes of his laughter when he chased down those long corridors after his brother, while his grandfather and mother received some head of state in one of the rooms.

  A large photo of Rajiv with a white garland round it stands on the coffin which is covered in a yellow, white and green flag, the nation’s colours. His bright smile is the last image the thousands of people filing through Teen Murti House, in spite of the temperature of 43º, take away with them. It is the image that the members of his family will also take away, because the body of this man that women found so handsome has been so badly disfigured that, in spite of their attempts at reconstruction, the doctors have not managed to put the amorphous mass of flesh left by the bomb back into shape. They say that one of them fainted during the attempts to embalm him. So they have simply used cotton wool and bandages, and plenty of ice so he will last until the day of the cremation.

  “Be careful, please. Don’t hurt him,” says his widow with a grief-stricken look to the men who come periodically to put in fresh ice, because the heat is increasing inexorably, and the temperature will go on rising until the beginning of July, until the monsoon rains come. Her only consolation—that she could well have ended up the same if she had gone with him, as she so often did—does not help her because right now she would like to die too. She would like to be with him, always with him, here and in eternity. She loved him more than she loves herself.

  Her children are by her side. The younger one, Priyanka, 19 years old, is a tall, dark haired girl who is strong both in character and physically. She has taken charge of the funeral preparations and is very attentive to her mother. She insists that she eat something, but just thinking about food makes Sonia feel sick. She has got through the last two days on water, coffee and lime juice. Her old companion, asthma, which has been with her since she was very small, has reappeared. Two nights ago, when they informed her that her husband had been the victim of a terrorist attack, she had such a violent attack that she almost lost consciousness. Her daughter found her anti-histamines and gave them to her, although she could not comfort her. She is worried that the heat and grief may bring on another attack.

  Rahul, the elder, is 21 and has just arrived from Harvard where he is studying. In her son she sees her husband: the same gentle features, the same smile, the same expression of goodness. She looks at him with infinite tenderness. How young he seems to light his father’s funeral pyre, which is the role of the son according to Hindu tradition.

  At one o’clock in the afternoon, the arrival of three generals, the representatives of their respective armed forces, signals the official start of the State funeral. Just before the soldiers lift the coffin with the help of Rahul and other family friends, Priyanka approaches to caress him, as though she wanted to say goodbye to her father in this way before he starts out on his final journey. Her mother, who has been busy greeting so many personalities, keeps herself a certain distance away, watching the scene with tears in her eyes. She is dressed in a pure white sari, as is customary for widows in India. She has spent more than half her life living here, so she feels Indian. Last February she celebrated her 23rd wedding anniversary with Rajiv having dinner in a restaurant in Teheran, where she was accompanying him on an official visit. She is still very attractive, just as she was at 18, when she met him. Her black hair, streaked with incipient grey, is carefully combed back, tied in a bun and covered by one end of her sari. If they were not swollen with grief, her eyes would be big. They are dark brown in colour, with long, carefully plucked eyebrows. She has a straight nose, plump lips, very white skin and a strong jaw. Today she looks like one of those tragic heroines from an Indian blockbuster movie, although her profile and proud stance evoke a goddess of the Roman pantheon, perhaps because the sari she wears so naturally is similar to the tunic women wore in ancient times. Or perhaps because of her physique. She was born and brought up in Italy. Her maiden name is Sonia Maino, although she is known as Sonia Gandhi, now Rajiv’s widow.

  More than half a million people defy the heat to see the funeral cortège go by on its way to where the cremation will take place, some ten kilometres away, behind the walls that the Mogul emperors erected to protect old Delhi, in splendid gardens on the banks of the River Jamuna. Escorted by five detachments of 33 soldiers, the wheeled platform bearing the coffin decorated with marigolds is pulled along by a military truck, also covered in flowers. On the seats inside it are the heads of the General Staff. After it come the cars carrying the family. Some of the onlookers manage to see Sonia remove her enormous sunglasses in order to wipe her face with a handkerchief and, with a trembling hand, dry her tears. The cortège heads down Rajpath Avenue, bordered with well-tended gardens where generations of city dwellers have strolled in the shade of its huge trees, mostly jambuls over a hundred years old, with black fruit like figs. Most of the trees were planted against the heat, when the English decided to make Delhi into the new capital of the Empire, to the detriment of Calcutta. They built a pleasant garden city with wide avenues and grandiose views, as was appropriate to a capital of the Empire. The vista down the centre of Rajpath, overflowing with a crowd carrying orange flowers, the holy colour for Hindus, brings memories to Sonia of a past of happiness, so close in time and yet so far away now… On this same avenue, opposite India Gate, the local version of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, she stood on January 26th, the national holiday, watching the military parade with Rajiv… How many times has she watched it? Almost as many as the years she has been in India. A whole lifetime. A lifetime coming to an end.

  To add a touch of mockery to the tragedy, her car stops and the driver cannot get it going again. The engines suffer with this heat and at this pace. Sonia and her children leave the vehicle and the crowd immediately hurls itself at them, forcing the Black Cats, the special black-garbed security commandos, to deploy quickly and make a human chain around them to protect them while they move to another car. Then the cortège gets going again, to the measured rhythm of the guards of honour. Later, in the narrow streets near Connaught Place, the crowd becomes a hum
an tide ready to invade everything, as though wanting to swallow up the cortège, and the security system can barely manage to keep it at bay. The faces in that crowd show exhaustion, dripping beads of sweat, and their dark eyes focus on four military trucks full of journalists from all over the world. Men and women, children and old people throw flower petals at the coffin with expressions of grief on their faces and tears in their eyes.

  The cortège reaches the place where the cremation is to take place at half past four in the afternoon, an hour later than expected. There are so many people that today the flowerbeds cannot be seen, only the huge trees, like eternity’s sentries casting their benevolent shade over those present, many of whom are dressed in black, such as John Major or the Prince of Wales, others in military uniform, such as Yasser Arafat, and all of them pouring with sweat. The funeral pyre, made up of half a ton of wood, is ready. Behind, on a platform dominating the pyre and built specially for the occasion, stand the closest members of the family. Some three hundred metres to the north are the 9 mausoleums of Nehru and his daughter Indira, built on the exact site where their cremations took place, and which will never be able to be used again, according to the tradition. Soon Rajiv will have his too, made of stone carved in the shape of a lotus leaf. The family all together in death.

  Some soldiers take Rajiv’s body out of the coffin and place it on the funeral pyre, with his head to the north, according to the ritual. Then the generals of the three armed forces carefully fold the flag that wraps the mutilated body and cut the strings of the white shroud that holds it. The family is standing side by side. The priest, an old man with a long beard as white as snow, looking as though he has come out of an ancient tale, goes through the steps of the Vedic rites and says a short prayer: “Lead me from the unreal to the real, from darkness into light, from death to immortality…” He is an old friend: he also presided over Indira’s funeral. He hands Rahul, dressed in a white kurta, a small jug full of holy water from the Ganges. The young man, barefoot and with his head lowered, is lost in thought behind his black framed glasses. He walks three times round the pyre as he splashes drops of water over his father, thus carrying out the rite of purification of the soul. Then he kneels beside the remains and weeps inside, without anyone being able to see. He weeps for a father who was always tolerant and compassionate and who adored his children. Dry tears well from a wound which, he feels, will never close. His mother and sister Priyanka, whose serene dignity moves those present, approach the pyre and carefully position the logs of sandalwood and rosary beads on the body, in gestures that are recorded on television all over the world.

  Now it is time to say goodbye. Sonia places an offering on the body, over the heart. It is made of camphor, cardamom, cloves and sugar and it is supposed to help remove the imperfections of the soul. Then she touches the feet in a sign of veneration, as is customary in India, places her hands together at breast height, and bows to her husband for the last time before stepping back. Through the television cameras the world discovers this stoic woman who reminds everyone of Jacqueline Kennedy twenty-eight years before in Arlington. It is five twenty in the afternoon.

  Five minutes later, her son Rahul walks seriously and decisively three times round the pyre before placing the flaming torch in his hands among the sandalwood logs. His hands do not tremble: it is his duty as a good son to help his father’s soul to free itself from its mortal body and get to heaven. For a few seconds it is as though time has stopped. There is no smoke or flames to be seen; only the Vedic psalms can be heard among the crowd. Sonia has hidden her face behind her sunglasses again. They must not see her cry. She has to keep herself composed, as she has done until now, whatever the cost may be. As composed as Rajiv was when it was his duty to light the funeral pyre of his mother Indira Gandhi, only seven years ago, while little Rahul cried in his arms. As composed as Indira herself when she attended the cremation of her father Jawaharlal Nehru, and then that of her son Sanjay, the apple of her eye, her designated heir, killed when his plane crashed one sunny Sunday morning, eleven years ago now. A date that Sonia cannot forget, because after that day nothing was ever the same as before.

  She has had to find strength from the very depths of her being to be here today, because some Hindu priests would have preferred not to allow her to be present at the cremation. It is not the custom for the widow to be there, even less if she is of another religion. But here Sonia was inflexible. She reacted as her mother-in-law Indira would have done. Under no circumstances would she stay at home while the whole world went to witness her husband’s second death. That is what she told the funeral organizers.

  But now she has to rise to the occasion. No hesitating, no fainting, no losing heart. Go on living, even if it is difficult to do it when the only thing you want to do is die. How 11 hard it is not to let oneself be overcome by emotion when the Vedic psalms give way to cannon salvoes, and the soldiers, standing in perfect line, present weapons to the sound of cornets and fire at the ground as a sign of mourning. When the dignitaries who have come from all over the world, the generals in their jackets full of colour with so many medals and the representatives of the Indian government, with their cotton clothes wrinkled and soaked after having waited so long in the midday sun, stand up in unison, immobile, like stone, in a brief, final homage. When the friends, who have arrived from Europe and America to say their last farewells, cannot hold back their tears, Sonia recognizes Christian von Stieglitz among them, the friend who introduced her to Rajiv when they were students at Cambridge. He is there with Pilar, his Spanish wife.

  And then the murmur that suddenly increases, like a groundswell in the distance, coming from the furthest corners of the city and perhaps from the remotest parts of the immense country. It becomes a single cry, terrible and guttural, the cry from thousands of throats that seem to become aware of the irreversibility of death as the fire suddenly catches in an explosion of flames and in a few minutes envelops the shroud in a fatal embrace. Rahul steps back a few paces. Sonia sways. Her daughter puts an arm round her shoulders and holds her until she regains her strength. Through the wall of flames, the three of them witness the ancient, tremendous spectacle of seeing how the person they most love is consumed and turns into ash. It is like another slow and penetrating death, so that the living may remember that no one can escape the inevitability of destiny. Because it is a death that comes in through the five senses. The smell of burning, the bright colours of the living through the scorching air rising from the blaze lifting up swirls of ash, the taste of sweat, of dust and smoke that sticks to the lips, and then the cries of “Long live Rajiv Gandhi!” that emerge from the crowd, make up a scene that is renewed 12 and eternal at the same time. As the flames rise, Rahul gets ready to carry out the last part of the ritual. Armed with a bamboo stick about three metres long, he strikes a symbolic blow to his father’s skull, so that his soul can go up into heaven to await its next reincarnation.

  For Sonia there are no words to describe what she is seeing, the enactment of the terrible sense of loss that is tearing her apart inside, as though an invincible force were ripping at her entrails. Never more than at this moment has she understood the deeper meaning of this ancestral custom. She remembers that she pulled a face in disgust when, as soon as she arrived in India, she heard about the existence of suttee. How horrible, how barbaric! she thought. In olden times, the people adored widows who had the courage to hurl themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre in order to set out on the journey towards eternity together with their loved one. Those that gave themselves heroically to the flames were considered deities and were worshipped as such for years, some for centuries. The rite of suttee, which has its origin in the noble Rajput families, the warrior caste from Northern India, then became popular among the lower classes, and finally became corrupted. The English prohibited it, as did the first democratic government of India later, because of the abuses committed in its name. But in its origin, becoming suttee was the supreme proof of love whi
ch a woman can only understand when she sees the body of her adored husband burning. Like Sonia at this instant, seeing the fire as a kind of liberation, as the only way to put a stop to that total grief that overwhelms her soul.

  “React”, she tells herself. You mustn’t let yourself be dragged down by death. Life is a struggle, as she well knows. Physical contact with her children comforts her. Then, with her strength renewed, opposing feelings spring up: a desire for justice, wishes for 13 revenge for what has been done to her husband, and a deep-seated feeling of revulsion, because what has happened is unacceptable. Could it have been avoided? she asks herself all the time. She tried as far as she was able, scrutinizing the faces of everyone who came near her husband at electoral rallies, trying to make out the revealing bulge of a weapon under a shirt, or the suspicious gesture of a potential assassin. Because she always knew that something like this could happen. She knew it from the day Rajiv gave in to what his mother, Indira Gandhi, then Primer Minister, asked of him, and got into politics. That is why, two days ago, when the phone rang at ten to eleven at night, such an odd time, Sonia turned over in bed and covered her ears as though to protect herself from the blow she knew she was about to receive. The worst news of her life was actually expected news. It was even more expected since Sonia found out that the government had taken away the degree of maximum security from Rajiv, which was his right as an ex-Prime Minister. In bureaucratic jargon, he was category Z, and that gave the right to protection from the SPG (Special Protection Group), which would have protected him from a terrorist attack. Why was that taken away from him, however much she had demanded it? Out of carelessness? Or because that so-called “lapse” was in line with the designs of his political adversaries?

  A hard, sharp, indescribable sound brings her back to reality. It sounds like a gunshot. Or a small explosion. Anyone that has attended a cremation knows what it is. Some people lower their heads, others look up, yet others are so captivated by the spectacle that they appear to be hypnotized and keep looking. The skull has exploded from the pressure of the heat. The soul of the dead man is now free. The ritual is over. The people throw flower petals into the flames, as another disturbing sight emerges. The long, fine hands 14 that caressed his children or repaired an electronic device or signed international treaties are exposed and show blackened fingers that rise and curl in a heartbreaking parting from the other side. Goodbye, farewell.