Durbar Read Free

hundreds of people there by then and the cul-de-sac had been closed off. Party workers, reporters, TV crews and ordinary people had gathered in large numbers, and the atmosphere was tense because of Bhagat and his men. They were no longer shouting their slogans but whispering among themselves about how it had to be the Sikhs who had done it. We did not know then who had killed Rajiv but the crowds outside his house assumed that it was Sikhs. Rajiv had made no known enemies in the nearly two years that he had been leader of the opposition and in his time as prime minister the only people who had hated him were the Sikhs because they blamed him for allowing the 1984 massacres and justifying them afterwards. I remember thinking that if the Sikhs were responsible for his assassination, there really would not be a Sikh left alive in Delhi this time. I thought it might be best for me to go home before the mourners turned violent, but as I was about to leave a colleague told me that the Congress Party’s working committee had met and a decision had been taken to make Sonia party president.
    ‘But she is a foreigner,’ I gasped, ‘she doesn’t even speak Hindi. She never reads the newspapers. It’s a crazy idea.’
    The colleague who gave me the news of Sonia’s new political role said he was going next door to the Congress Party’s office to get more details of the working committee’s decision. I went with him. It was close to midnight but the lights were on in all the rooms of the squat, yellow-washed bungalow and the grounds were filled with party workers. They were mostly villagers and had probably been camping in the party office because the election campaign was not yet over. Somehow we found our way through the crush of workers and in the hectic corridors of the party office located a general secretary who told us that Arjun Singh, former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, had proposed Sonia’s name for party president and the working committee had unanimously decided that she would be the best choice. He gave us a copy of the working committee’s resolution.
    The next day Rajiv Gandhi’s remains arrived in Delhi in a big wooden coffin, which was placed in Teen Murti House, where his grandfather had lived as India’s first prime minister and where Rajiv and his brother Sanjayhad spent their childhood years. It was one of those Delhi summer days when the heat is so intense it becomes incandescent. Outside Teen Murti House the queues were long and the mourners angry. Plump, middle-aged women and grey-haired government servants talked of the need for revenge. It was not clear yet who was behind Rajiv’s assassination and the general assumption remained that it must have been Sikhs.
    The queue I stood in moved slowly. It took me an hour to get into the high-ceilinged hall where the closed coffin lay, a large portrait of Rajiv at its head. Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Sikh priests sat beside it murmuring a babel of prayers and the scent of burning sandalwood filled the room. Sonia, her daughter and other ladies of the family sat in white saris on the floor. Sonia’s dark brown hair was tied back and covered with her cotton sari and her face was carefully made up. Even the lower eyelashes she painted on to make her eyes look bigger were in place. I reached out and held her hand, but she pretended to greet someone else. When our eyes met, she looked at me as if I were a total stranger.
    How much had changed. What a long way we had come from those days of long lunches in my little flat in Golf Links when she would laugh and gossip and urge me to tell her what was going on in the city. There were so few people, she used to say, who dared speak freely to her and she had got tired of listening to sycophants. Did they think she was so stupid that she could not see through their lies?
    After Rajiv became prime minister, our friendship lasted for the first two years and then deteriorated for reasons that to me remained obscure.