The Red Sari: A Novel Read online

  Sonia bursts into sobs. Where is the comfort for her? With which God should she seek it? What God can allow a good man like Rajiv to be blown to pieces by the fanaticism of other men, who also have families, who also have children, who also know how to caress and love? What sense can she make out of all this tragedy? Her children, worried that the mixture of smoke, ash and intense emotion might cause another attack of asthma, stand on either side of her, while she calms down and watches, broken inside, how her dream of living many years of happiness with her husband becomes so much smoke. Ciao, amore, until another life. The whole of India will remember her like this, standing motionless as stone, stoical, indifferent to the cries of the screaming crowd, while fire consumes the body of her husband. She is the living image of controlled grief.

  The roar of an army helicopter drowns out the singing and the cries of the crowd. The people look up into a sky that is white with heat and dust and receive a shower of rose petals that fall from the vehicle going round and round above the pyre. As the body finishes burning, the family goes down from the platform. With hesitant steps and grief- stricken faces, they receive a few words of condolence from the President of the Republic. In very typical Indian disorder, the other personalities crowd closer. They all want to say a few words to Sonia: the American Vice-President, the King of Bhutan, the Prime Ministers of Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, former Prime Minister Edward Heath, the Vice-Presidents of the Soviet Union and China, her old friend Benazir Bhutto, etc. But no one can get close to the widow because suddenly chaos breaks out. And the fact is the body does not belong only to the family, or to the foreign dignitaries. The 15 crowd, of which the first rows are made up of militants and organizers of Rajiv’s party, feels that it also belongs to them. They are only a tiny fraction of the forty million members of the party which, under the banal and rather unattractive name of Congress Party, represents the largest democratic political organization in the world. It was born in the mid-nineteenth century as an association of small political groups to demand equality of rights between Indians and English within the Empire. Mahatma Gandhi turned it into a solid party whose goal was to win independence through non-violence. Nehru was its president, then his daughter Indira, and Rajiv was the latest. In spite of the scorching, unbreathable air, now the militants want a close look at the mortal remains of their leader turning into ashes. They all want to lick the flames of death and memory, so they tear down the wire fences as though they were straw and rush towards the fire shouting: “Rajiv Gandhi is immortal!” The Black Cats, the elite commandos, are forced to intervene. They make a human barrier around the family, and decide to beat a hasty retreat, step by step, amid the hysterical cries of the now unrestrained crowd, until they reach the cars and safety.

  In the following days, in a state of shock, Sonia takes refuge inside herself. She lives engrossed in her memories with Rajiv, breaking into sobs when she comes out of her trance and finds herself face to face with the terrible reality of his absence. She cannot stop thinking about her husband; she does not want to stop thinking about him, as though stopping were another way of killing him. She does not even want to separate herself from those two urns that contain his ashes, but it is part of the ritual that death turns again into life.

  On May 28th, 1991, four days after the cremation, accompanied by her children, Sonia boards a special carriage on a train that takes them to Allahabad, the city of the 16 Nehru family, where everything began over a hundred years ago. In the carriage, which is totally draped in white cloth scattered with marigold and jasmine flowers, the urns are placed on a kind of stand next to the framed photo of a smiling Rajiv. Sonia, Priyanka and Rahul travel sitting on the floor. The train stops at a string of stations packed with people who have come to pay tribute to the memory of their leader. The outpouring of emotion exhausts Sonia, but she would do her utmost to wave at those poor people with bony faces stained with sweat and tears who, in spite of everything, smile to offer her their comfort. The smiles of the poor of India are an immaterial gift, but one which settles in the heart. Nehru, her mother-in-law and her husband all said so: the trust of the people, the warmth of the populace, veneration and, why not? the love they show you make up for all the sacrifices. That is the true nourishment of a politician born and bred, the justification for all the troubles, what gives meaning to his work, to his life. During the twenty-four hours that the train, baptized by the Press with the name The Heartbreak Express, takes to cover the 600 kilometres of the journey, Sonia is able to measure the intensity of the people’s affection towards her in-laws—“the family”, as Indians know them, so popular that it is not necessary to specify which family it is. A family that has governed India for more than four decades, but has been out of power for four years. Sonia looks at her son Rahul, who has fallen asleep between stations. With any luck the family will never come to power again. Priyanka stares ahead in a daydream; she is also exhausted. She looks very like Indira, the same bearing, the same shining, intelligent eyes. God help us.

  In Allahabad, the ashes are placed in Anand Bhawan, the ancestral mansion of the Nehrus, which, when she was named Prime Minister, Indira turned into a museum open 17 to the public. A Moorish-style patio with a fountain in the centre is a reminder of the original owner, a Moslem judge in the Supreme Court. In 1900 he sold the mansion to Motilal Nehru, Rajiv’s great-grandfather, a brilliant lawyer who earned so much money that, according to the legend, he used to send his clothes by ship to a dry cleaners in London. That heavily-built man who always had a thick moustache and dressed like a gentleman, who was outgoing, lavishly generous, bon vivant and witty, adored his son Jawaharlal, perhaps because he was the last son he had, having lost two sons and a daughter beforehand. That intense, reciprocal love was in the origin of the struggle for independence of a sixth of humanity. Motilal wanted his son to develop all his potential, which meant giving him the best possible education, even if it meant being apart from him: “I never thought I would love you so much as when I had to leave you for the first time in England, at the boarding school”, he wrote to him, because he could not get over the anguish of having left him alone, so far away, and only thirteen years old. What Motilal earned in a year would have been enough to start up a business for him and set him up for life. But for the father that was an easy, egoistic point of view: “I think without a trace of vanity that I am the founder of the fortune of the Nehru family. I see you, my dear son, as the man who will be able to build on the foundation I have created and I hope to have the satisfaction of one day seeing a noble venture arise which will reach the skies…” The noble venture ended up being the country’s struggle for independence, in which father and son became involved with all the strength of their convictions.

  The life of the Nehrus changed when Jawaharlal introduced his father to a lawyer who had just returned from South Africa and was organizing resistance against the colonial power of the English. He was a strange man, dressed in dhotis, raw cotton hand- 18 woven pants. He had disproportionately long arms and legs that made him look like a heron. His little black eyes closed when, behind his metal-rimmed glasses, he gave his typical smile, half malicious and half good-natured. Venerated as a saint by his disciples, he was however a skilled politician who possessed the art of simple gestures that could touch the soul of India. Young Nehru considered him a genius.

  And so Mahatma Gandhi came into contact with that family and changed it forever. The extravagant Motilal gave up sophistication in favour of simplicity, and exchanged his flannel suits from Savile Row and his top hats for a dhoti, like Gandhi. He gave his house and fortune to the cause of independence. Motilal changed the huge sitting room into a meeting hall for the Congress Party and the Nehru home gradually became the home of the whole of India. There was always a crowd of sympathizers at the gate hoping to see the father and the son, hoping to have their darshan, the ancient tradition of religious origin that consists of seeking visual contact with a highly venerated person in order to receive their b
lessing in this way, if unable to touch their feet or hands. Towards the end of his life, suffering from fibrosis and cancer, Motilal shared a cell in the Nainital jail with his son, who took care of him as best as he could. The patriarch died without getting to see independence, without knowing that his son, whom the world would come to know as Nehru, would be elected the first Head of State of the nation. He died in this house in Anand Bhawan, one day in February 1931, with his wife beside him and his son cradling his head on his lap.

  The rooms, painted sky blue and cream, hold the same pieces of furniture, the same books and the same photos and knick knacks of the people who lived in them. Mahatma Gandhi’s room has a mattress on the floor, a chest of drawers and a spinning wheel that he used for spinning cotton and which he turned into a symbol of resistance 19 against the English. Nehru’s room has a simple wooden bed, a rug, lots of books and a little figurine of the three monkeys that symbolize the Buddhist commandments: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

  Sonia remembers the first time she ever visited this place. It was Indira, her mother-in-law, who showed it to her. On that visit she had not been able to gauge all the meaning enclosed by the walls of this mansion, in spite of the fact that Indira showed her the secret meeting room, in a cellar, which Nehru and his companions in the incipient Congress Party used when they hid to escape the raids of the British police. Now that she has returned with her husband’s ashes, she sees it all in a different way. This Victorian mansion is not the simple setting of an intense family life; its walls tell of the intrigue, dreams, hopes and setbacks of the struggle for independence. Its walls are modern India. The urn with Rajiv’s ashes, the last object that has arrived today to be added to the others, is like the final full stop in a long sentence that Motilal Nehru began to write in the 19th century when he founded here the local section of a political organization called the Congress Party. The circle has closed.

  At midday Sonia and her children leave the family home, accompanied by a small cortège, and head for the outskirts, for the Sangam, one of the most sacred places in Hinduism, where the brown waters of the Jamuna join the clear waters of the Ganges, at the confluence of another, imaginary, river, the Sarasvati. They come to an enormous esplanade of sand that leads to the river bank, dominated by an old Moslem fort whose walls are covered in ivy and which holds a one hundred-year-old Bengal fig tree. According to legend, anyone who jumps out of its branches can be freed from the cycle of reincarnations. On this esplanade the Kumbha Mela is celebrated every three years, a festival attended by millions of pilgrims from all over India. They come to wash away their sins, making this the most massive religious gathering in the world. There are many people here today too, but the place is so immense it seems deserted. On a platform over the river, pandit Chuni Lal, a priest who is also a friend of the family, makes an offering and intones prayers against the background noise of the tinkling of thousands of little bells and the echo of conch shells, before handing the copper urn to Rahul. The young man takes it, approaches the shore and tips it out slowly, scattering the ashes over the quiet waters which reflect the golden rays of the sun, the same waters that welcomed the ashes of Motilal, Mahatma Gandhi and also Nehru. A certain distance away, Sonia and Priyanka observe the scene, their faces tense, and then they go over to Rahul, and squatting down, caress the water with their hands. Witnesses of this scene, amongst whom is her husband’s secretary, will take away with them the memory of the picture of the three of them huddled together at the water’s edge. Rahul sobbing on one of his mother’s shoulders, Priyanka leaning her head on the other, and Sonia, inconsolable, with her eyes full of tears which form another affluent that flows into the Ganges, the great river of life.

  2

  “Madam, these are the times of the flights to Milan.” Sonia does not remember having asked her husband’s secretary for that information. Perhaps she did, in the confusion at the beginning, when she sought protection from the enormity of the tragedy. When she suddenly thought of seeking comfort from her family, the warmth of her own people, the safety of the little town of Orbassano, just outside Turin, where she lived in her youth until the day she got married. She remembers that as soon as they got back with the remains of her husband from where the attack took place, in the south of India, she talked to her family in Italy on the phone and she was trembling. Her older sister Anushka told her they were no longer answering the phone because journalists from all over the world were calling to ask for details of what had happened and they did not know what to tell them. “We still don’t know,” Sonia explained to her, “it might be the Sikhs who killed Indira, or the Hindu fundamentalists who killed Gandhi, or Moslem extremists from Kashmir … who knows. He was on the blacklist of at least a dozen terrorist organizations…” And now Sonia is sorry she did not force him to demand better safety measures from the government. Rajiv did not believe in them: “If they want to kill you, they’ll kill you,” he said.

  When she got her mother on the other end of the phone, Sonia went to pieces. Her mother was in Rome, at Nadia’s house, her younger sister, who had been married to a Spanish diplomat. “Perhaps you should come back to Italy,” she told her.

  Sonia did not answer.

  So many questions! She thinks that leaving would be like killing a part of herself, but it is true that she came to India, adopted the customs and fell in love with the people out of love for Rajiv. Now, what sense is there in staying? Is she not tired of living surrounded by bodyguards who, when the fatal moment arrives, are incapable of avoiding the worst? She remembers when, concerned for the children’s safety, Rajiv thought about sending them to study at the American School in Moscow. Sonia did not like the idea of being separated from them at all. The British tradition, later adopted by the wealthier classes in India, of sending the children to a boarding school, completely clashed with her view of herself as an Italian mamma. So they kept them at home, in New Delhi, and first of all tutors came to the house every morning and later they went to school with an escort to be educated in a “normal” environment, which society considered as an act of audacity, such was the weight of the threats that hung over the Prime Minister’s family.

  Her mother’s suggestion that she return to Italy touches a sore spot. Sonia faces a conflict which she finds impossible to resolve, at least for the moment. A cruel conflict, because on one hand there is the greatest concern, the safety of her children, and it would seem logical to undertake a family move back to Italy, a total change of lifestyle, the abandonment of the whole of her husband’s family tradition; and on the other hand the inertia of all the years she has spent here bearing the crushing weight of the name of Nehru-Gandhi, and to stay as they are, in the same house, as guardians of the memory, surrounded by the forever faithful friends, enveloped in the affection of so many people, knowing how hard it is to escape the web of Indian politics. In sum, to choose between safety, an anonymous life and the uprooting of a self-imposed exile or to carry on in the limelight, which could lead to one of her children one day becoming Prime Minister and, perhaps, also being assassinated. Like Indira or Rajiv. Then she thinks, yes, it is best to change lifestyle to be safe, to forget the politics she so hates, to flee from the power she has always despised and which is destroying her.

  But … can you fight destiny? She feels very Indian, she has learned to love the people of this country, and she feels loved by them. How can she break that link to the memory of her husband as represented by friends, colleagues and the love of the people of India? It would be a little like losing her heart. Besides, the body does not lie: her gestures, her way of walking, of shaking her head to say yes when it looks like no—so typical of Indians—her way of putting her hands together, of looking, of listening, her accent … all her body language evokes that of a genuinely Indian person. What would she do in Italy? What kind of life would await her in Orbassano, apart from the company of her closest family? Her circle of friends is here, her world is here, 23 years of intensely happy life a
re here. Besides, her children are no longer small … And will they want to go and live in a place that they have only visited on holiday? After having been brought up in the homes of two Prime Ministers of India, first that of grandmother Indira and then that of their father Rajiv, with everything that that means, could they get used to living an anonymous life in the outskirts of a provincial Italian town? It is true that they speak Italian fluently, they are half Italian, but they feel one hundred percent Indian. They have been brought up here, here they have learned from their father to love this immense, difficult and fascinating country; here they have taken in the values of their great- grandfather Nehru, the great hero of independence and founder of modern India, values that have to do with integrity, tolerance, contempt for money and the cult of service to others, especially to those most needy. Here they have been brought up, in the home of grandmother Indira, who might give them a hug while she had tea with Andrei Gromyko or Jacqueline Kennedy or help them with their homework at the kitchen table. Would her children be content with a prosperous and comfortable life at best, but far away from all they had imbibed since they were born? And for her, would it not be a defeat to go back to the town she had left behind?

  “I think my life is here, Mother …” Sonia ends up saying when she recovers her ability to speak.