Bhimsen: Episode 55

[Episode 54] [On writing the war episodes] [The complete archives]

We are faced with a vastly superior force, Dhristadyumna pointed out when we met before dawn on the second day to decide on strategy.

The accepted strategy in war is to concentrate on the main commanders, to kill or capture them at the earliest opportunity and thus render the opposing army leaderless.

That will not work for us here, Dhristadyumna said. The first day’s fighting had given him a good idea of Bhisma’s strategy. Each of the Kaurava generals had been protected by large segments of troops; the harder we tried to get to the leaders, the more losses we sustained against the numerically superior opposing forces.

Starting today, Dhristadyumna said, we had only one goal – to kill indiscriminately, to inflict maximum casualties on the opposing army. We would exert all our energies to stop the Kaurava generals when they looked like causing havoc in our ranks, but outside of that we would ignore the generals and focus our energies on decimating the opposition troops.

Arjuna decreed an eagle in flight as our battle formation for the day.

I would, from the position of the eagle’s beak, lead the formation. Yudhishtira and Virat would be positioned at the throat; Dhristadyumna would be stationed at the left wingtip with Abhimanyu and Sarvadhan, while Arjuna controlled from the right wingtip with Satyaki and Drupada in support. At the feet of the eagle, protecting our rear from surprise attacks, would be Nakula and Sahadeva with the sons of Draupadi, and Rukmi in support.

The Vidharbha king was an unexpected addition to our army. Years ago, Rukmi had planned to marry his sister off to the Chedi king Shishupala, but Rukmini was enamored of Krishna with whom, Arjuna had once told me, she had been carrying on a clandestine correspondence through messengers and pigeons.

When time came for the marriage, Krishna arrived in Vidharbha in the guise of a guest and carried Rukmini off in his chariot. Rukmi gave chase with a band of select troops, but was routed by Krishna and Balarama.

Rukmini’s earnest pleadings saved her brother’s life then, but before letting him go Krishna forced him to shave off half his hair — the ultimate insult for a warrior. He had since made friends with Krishna and, when war was declared, offered his services. “Use him in a defensive role,” Krishna had advised us. “As a warrior, he is not good enough to be in the front rank, but he and his men will help swell our numbers.”

As our army arrayed for battle, I had reason yet again to bless Arjuna for the long years he had spent wandering the country learning strategies and tactics from different lands. The formation he had suggested was the perfect answer to our requirement: it massed our troops in the eagle’s ‘body’, giving me enough backing as I sought to batter my way through the opposition while out on the two wingtips, our leading warriors were able to range free, causing mayhem where and how they could.

This was my kind of battle. Yesterday, I had spent a good part of time and energy trying to break through and get to Duryodhana. Today I didn’t bother with any specific target; at my direction, Visokan drove my chariot straight at the center of the Kaurava army, arrayed for the day in half moon formation. Fighting occasionally from my chariot, often on foot and, when faced with massed troops, from the back of Kesavan the elephant, I gloried in the task of killing all who came before me.

At some point in the midst of my frenzy, I became aware of signs of trouble to my left. I headed in that direction and, from my vantage point on Kesavan’s back, I saw our commander engaged in a terrific struggle against Drona.

Dhristadyumna’s chariot lay shattered around him; as I watched, he rushed forward with his mace only for Drona to cut it to pieces with his arrows. Dhristadyumna continued to advance, swinging his drawn sword to clear a path through the opposing foot soldiers and get at his tormentor, but he was clearly at a disadvantage.

I jumped down onto my chariot and had Visokan charge straight at Drona. The large cutting swords attached to the axle of my chariot churned through the opposing foot soldiers as I concentrated my fury on Drona.

With my first salvo I cut down his flagpole, which is the archer’s first line of defence; even as he turned his attention towards me, I cut his bow in half with another volley of arrows.

Years ago, when we studied war craft under him in Hastinapura, he had contemptuously rejected my skills as an archer and publicly said I was only fit to wrestle for the amusement of the public – today was my opportunity to pay him back.

‘Fat fool!’

That long ago taunt rang in my ears. As Drona hurriedly strung his spare bow, I cut it into pieces; before he could re-arm himself I sent a volley of arrows between the shafts of his chariot, cutting the bindings. Freed of their traces, his horses bolted, overturning the chariot as they broke free.

As the old man tumbled out of the chariot and scrambled in the dust, I laughed out loud in triumph.

I flung aside my bow, grabbed my mace and was about to leap out of the chariot and close with him when Visokan warned of danger approaching from my right. The Kalinga king Srutayu, mounted on a mammoth tusker and leading a large force of elephants and men, was rushing to Drona’s aid.

Visokan told me later that he had never been as alarmed as when he saw me leap off the chariot and, mace in hand, run straight at Srutayu’s elephant.

Years ago, in the paddocks of Hastinapura, the old mahout who was my mentor had taught me of this one fatal weakness of the elephant: between the two masses of bone on its forehead there is a very small, unprotected gap where its nerve endings are clustered, and where it is most vulnerable to pain.

Approaching the elephant at a dead run, I timed my jump and grabbed its tusk with my left hand. In the same motion, using the momentum to augment my strength, I swung the mace at that precise spot on its forehead I had been taught so long ago.

Maddened by the pain, Srutayu’s elephant reared on its hind legs while I hung on for dear life. As his front feet hit the earth I swung again, smashing the mace repeatedly onto that spot. Squealing in pain and rage, the beast swung around in a circle, shaking its head violently to dislodge me; the other elephants panicked at the sight of the enraged tusker and stampeded straight into the midst of their own troops.

Srutayu jumped off the back of his elephant and straight into my path; before he could recover his balance, I swung my mace in a crushing blow at his skull and roared in triumph as I felt the splatter of his blood on my face and arms.

The Kalinga forces, already scattered by the berserk fury of the elephants and now leaderless, turned tail and ran; I raced back to my chariot and set off in pursuit, slaughtering at will till the sudden blare of trumpets sounded the onset of dusk and the end of the day’s battle.

Dhristadyumna hugged me as I walked into his lodge for our evening review. “We had a good day today,” he said. “The battle went exactly as I had hoped; we inflicted heavy losses on their troops and took few losses of our own. I don’t think they’ve understood what we are trying to accomplish – they kept throwing their soldiers at us, which is exactly what I hoped they would do.”

Dhristadyumna had once told me that the war would be won not by the seasoned generals and the acharyas, but by the young – and it was increasingly easy to see why. He was breaking away from established strategies and tactics, adapting to the fact that we were outnumbered and finding his own solution to the problem while Bhisma, the most experienced warrior on either side, continued to operate within the confines of convention.

To my surprise, I saw Krishna stretched out on a plank bed on the floor of Dhristadyumna’s lodge, with attendants applying herbal salves to multiple wounds on his arms and chest. Arjuna was pacing the floor furiously; Abhimanyu walked beside him, talking earnestly to his father.

Noticing my look of surprise, Dhristadyumna pulled me aside. “That is the other thing I hoped would happen today,” he said when we were out of earshot. “For all Krishna’s advice, Arjuna has been reluctant to fight. He is fine when facing the troops, but the minute he catches sight of one of the gurus he loses his will.”

My brother was ranging free on the right, slaughtering soldiers in their dozens when Bhisma charged up in his chariot to oppose him. Arjuna lost his fervor; the grandsire however held nothing back in a ferocious attack.

“Arjuna would have turned his chariot about rather than fight, but by then some of Bhisma’s arrows wounded Krishna,” Dhristadyumna told me. “The sight of Krishna bleeding drove your brother into a fury; he forgot who he was fighting, and my father tells me Arjuna fought so brilliantly, many on both sides nearby stopped to watch. The old man was forced to turn his chariot about and race away from the field, they tell me.”

Abhimanyu walked with me as I returned to my lodge that night. “Valiyacha [father’s elder brother],” he said as we walked, “your son Sarvadhan is amazing! Trigartha and his men attacked us today while uncle Dhristadyumna was battling Drona – you should have seen Sarvadhan fight, oof! He routed them all on his own, and I saw Trigartha fall wounded in his chariot. You must tell my uncle to put Sarvadhan with cheriyachan [father’s younger brother] Nakula – we are somewhat weak in that section.”

I stood still for long moments, bemused by the self-confidence of this boy who was yet to turn 16. His deeds today were, I was told, so prodigious Dhristadyumna had decided to invite him to represent the younger generation in our daily council of war.

Abhimanyu, Sarvadhan, Sutasoman, Prativindhyan… young boys of fifteen and sixteen who should by rights be enjoying their youth, basking in the attentions of the palace maids and who instead were fighting beside us as equals, and making us proud with their deeds.

They were, I realized at that moment, the real future of our race. In time to come, perhaps, our chief claim to fame would be that we were their fathers; when they spoke of me it would be as the father of Sarvadhan, as Abhimanyu’s uncle…

We sat down to our meal. Like the boy he really was, he spoke with enthusiasm of all that he had seen that day – but I noticed that even in the full flight of his excitement, he never once spoke of his own part in the day’s battle.

A terrific clamor interrupted our meal. Visokan came running in. “A new group has come to join us,” he announced, smiling broadly. “The whole army has turned out to watch the fun – soldiers in carts drawn by bulls bigger than you have ever seen… dozens and dozens of wild horses… and they’ve even brought their own food – pigs, cows… come, see, it’s a big tamasha…”

Visokan darted out again. Moments later, a tall young man stepped through the door and prostrated at my feet.

“News travels slowly to us who live in the forest,” Ghatotkachan said as I raised him to his feet and looked at him in wonder – not least because I had to look up at him.

He had grown considerably since that last time I saw him, when he had with casual indifference gifted Yudhishtira Jatan’s head wrapped in a leaf and walked off into the forest without a word. His voice, when he spoke, was that of a man full grown.

“I am here to fight on your side, father – and I have brought an army with me.”

“I’ll take our brother to the lodge where we are staying,” Abhimanyu said, touching Ghatotkachan’s feet.

“No, no one needs to worry about us – we are most at home sleeping on the ground, under the stars, and we have brought our food with us,” Ghatotkachan smiled. “Father, I’ll see you in the morning – tell me what you expect of me, and it will be done.”

He turned and strode out without a glance, while Abhimanyu and I looked at each other in bemusement.

PostScript: I am travelling this week and will not be accessing the net for the duration. The next episode, and regular blog updates on cricket and all else, resume Monday July 6. See you here then; be well, meanwhile.

PPS: For those asking, no, I am not doing a game by game round up on the India-Windies series, but will do an end-of-series post on some off the ball thoughts when I get back from my travels. Later, peoples…

Blogger on a break

Right, folks, I’m off for a bit — some travel ahead of me, to deal with family-related issues. I’ll be gone tomorrow through July 4; will try and get one episode of Bhimsen in on Monday, but outside of that, blogging resumes next weekend.

Be well, all — see you when I get back.

Potty about the potty

He also reportedly autographed the toilet he used on a visit to local politician and Hindu nationalist firebrand Bal Thackeray, who invited him to the city. Thackeray is said to still proudly point out the signed loo.

In a statement, Thackeray, now 83, recalled Jackson’s dancing. “How many people can dance that way? You’d break your neck… He represents certain values in America that India should not have qualms in accepting,” he said.

For your WTF files. Incidentally — anyone care to ask Thackeray to spell out those American values MJ represents that we should accept? Didn’t someone say there’s no fool like an… forgot what I was going to say.

The perverse perfection of tyranny

We are participants in the sense that we are moral observers in this morass where we may also have our sympathies, clear notions of who is right and right, which side is more correct than the other. But ultimately we are not, nor can we be, soldiers—that is a condition that lies on the other side of a very clear boundary line, at least in my mind.

But back to Saddam’s Iraq, the Iraq of Kamel Sachet’s life, which Steavenson explores so searchingly in this book. The thing about the citizens —really, they were subjects, not citizens—of Saddam’s Iraq is that they were both victims and victimizers. Saddam had forced them to be. There is an analogy in my mind with the sickening story of that Austrian man who raped his daughter and then kept her, and then their many offspring, locked in a basement for twenty-four years. In other words, Saddam brutalized his own people at will, and he also forced them to sleep with him and to kill one another and to stay silent about it all.

This was the perverse perfection of his tyranny. He created a society of victims, a society that, toward the end, lived in order to exalt him for victimizing them and to laud him for keeping them as his hostages. He created a wall of fear around his people and a national belief that only he could protect them from the terrible world that waited outside.

Former Cricinfo staffer and currently Open magazine correspondent Rahul Bhatia sent me this link to a fascinating discussion in the New Yorker —  and the first thought that struck me as I read was that if you substituted ‘Saddam’ with ‘BCCI’, you’d still be on the money.

The link came appropos. Two days ago, while writing this post on conflict of cricketing interests, I needed to refresh my memory on the connection between Suresh Chellaram and Lalit Modi. I called a very good friend, who happened to be travelling on BCCI-related work just then.

‘Are you alone? Can you talk?’, I asked. ‘Of course,’ he said. So I asked him what I needed to know. ‘What kind of question are you asking?’, he said, and the line went dead. He called me back after a few minutes, presumably from a more santized environment, and even so answered my question in a rush, and called off saying he’d get in touch with me ‘later’, when he was done with his work.

The inherent paranoia in his reaction was hardly novel. In my years of covering cricket for Rediff, I’ve encountered it repeatedly, at all levels of the cricket hierarchy. Senior players who had gold-plated guarantees of their place in the side and in the public’s affections have called to talk of things that concerned them/the team, and almost every such conversation invariably ended with ‘Please don’t quote me by name, don’t even identify me as a senior member of the side or whatever’.

On one occasion I called a very senior administrator and asked if I could get a copy of the BCCI’s statement of accounts [a document that is, or should be, in the public domain]. He hung up. Two days later, I got a call from someone who identified himself as a friend of this administrator, and asked me to meet him in a bar known to be a gay hangout, in one of the bylanes behind the Taj. I sat at a table, waiting, at the appointed hour; this stranger walked up, sat opposite me, refused refreshment, slipped me a bulky brown-paper parcel, and left after telling me to open it after I got home. It was the kind of scene you would expect in a John le Carre novel, not one you encounter as a reporter doing a harmless story on cricket and its finances.

The BCCI controls the media, Shekhar Gupta had said in his article, to which you can only add, and how! As a direct result of some stories we did at the time based on those statements of accounts, the BCCI banned Rediff from stadiums in India. The organization didn’t need to send out an official memo; it merely kept turning down our applications for accreditation to cover Tests and ODIs; when we asked why, we got official sounding guff for the record about the ‘internet’ not being recognized, but off record, the officials — including then secretary JY Lele — told us the orders came from ‘the top’, and was linked to our coverage of the BCCI.

There in essence is the cricket journalist’s dilemma. You can make a career out of endlessly recycling the sort of pap that will not give cause for official offense; look squiggle eyed at its activities, though, and the BCCI will freeze you out, deny you access to the sport you are supposed to cover. So which reporter, knowing his job depends on it, is going to go out of his way to look under the rocks to see what crawls out from under? Far easier to write about the consuming importance of an essentially pointless one day series, or create tales of dressing room friction [the BCCI has no problem, note, with players copping flak from the media; it only bars commentary and criticism of its own activities].

That is why the real story of Indian cricket in its most seminal phase, from the 1990s through the 2000s, will never be written — and we are all the poorer for that silence: the fans, the players involved, cricket literature in general and yes, even the BCCI.

The shadow and substance

John McWhorter, who teaches in Columbia University’s Department of English and Comparative Literature and writes extensively on race relations, has a piece in Forbes on the passing of Michael Jackson worth your while because it differs from the flood of capsule biographies and evaluative tributes and frames MJ against the backdrop of race.

He wanted to be something else. Just what he wanted to be was hard to say. We got used to him over the years, but in the long view, it was downright odd how comfortable all of America was with a black man from Gary who made himself look as much like a white woman as possible, spoke in falsetto, and cherished the company of little boys to an extent which was, whatever one’s verdict on you-know-what, distinctly peculiar.

This was the King of Pop? What did it say about America that this was the man who made the best-selling album of all time, and whose later albums, like Bad and Dangerous, had sales that would have made superstars of any newcomer, but only seemed like letdowns in comparison to the once-in-a-lifetime success of Thriller? What it said was something we are more recently familiar with in the Obama phenomenon.

War reporting

Comments appended to the previous episode of Bhimsen, sent in mail and posted on Twitter indicate a fair degree of ambivalence among readers. Exemplars:

Prahlad Rao: Honestly, I was a tad disappointed with the latest Bhim. May be my expectation was too much. I was expecting more details of the war on Day 1.

Aarushi Chakravarti: You have not yet mentioned anything about sanjay’s role in “live commentary”. I was sort of hoping that there would be some demystifying explanation would come from you.

Those are not the only comments by a long way, but they are typical: What the reader looked for and failed to find [Suresh Anchal wrote in to say he had been "impatiently waiting" for the war to begin, so he could read the descriptors] is detail.

I’d earlier planned on doing an extensive post at the end of the series, addressing a whole heap of issues, but I now reckon a couple of points need to be made if the upcoming episodes are not to invite a similar sense of disappointment in you.

The first, and most obvious, point is about the detailing of the war. When I got to this bit [and I'll admit to dragging my feet a bit, and making two episodes out of one, simply to postpone the moment when I had to get into 'war reporting'], I had two directions to go.

Clearly, there is a difference between a fly-on-the-wall narrative that assumes omniscience on the part of the narrator, and permits him to be everywhere, see everything and describe it all in the round, and an individualistic, point of view-driven narrative where the focus would be narrower and events outside the narrator’s experience would not form part of the narrative, no matter how crucial such events were.

There is, for instance, no way Bhim would have had the faintest notion what Krishna was telling Arjuna ahead of the battle, so unlike the many Vyasas who together composed the Mahabharat as we know  it today, there was no room for me to get into an extended treatise based on the Gita.

When Bhim fights, what he sees is the enemy immediately ahead and, at best, what is happening in his immediate vicinity — he couldn’t tell you how Arjuna fought Bhisma, or how Drona repeatedly cut the bow of Dhristadyumna, or any of the other incidents that highlight the traditional narrative. The story here is POV-driven, so the trick for me is to keep the narrative limited to what Bhim could have known about or been part of.

I toyed initially with the idea of using the daily evening strategy meetings as a device to talk of the war outside of Bhim’s own immediate experience. In those meetings, I could have the others narrate what they had seen and heard, and thus fill in the blanks.

I blocked out a couple of episodes that way and then jettisoned them. MT Vasudevan Nair, whose novel Randaamoozham provides the source material for this recreation, apparently came to the same decision — he too skims lightly over the details of the larger war, and throughout keeps the narration in tight focus.

The reason — and I hope that will become apparent in future episodes — is because unlike the Mahabharat, Randaamoozham [and its loose recreation here] is not so much the story of a war as it is of a family.

In an extensive footnote appended to his book, MT says he is merely “giving voice to the many silences” in the original.

“Giving voice to the silences” is a speaking phrase; it is the thought I’ve kept in front of me while writing successive episodes. The exhaustive details of the war are, for those who want them, easily available in print and on the net. I didn’t go there in the episode in question, and I’ll be going there even less in the episodes to come.

What is missing from the existing narrative is the sense of what happened behind the scenes. Forget the traditional trope of this being a battle between good and evil — what it is, when stripped down to its essence, is the story of a family fighting for survival.

Bound tight by ties of blood and of shared suffering, such a family would come together against the perceived enemy, yes. But even so, as the pressures mount and stress escalates, there will be disagreements — even violent, bitter quarrels, recriminations.

The popular version of the Mahabharat occasionally glances at such; this version will focus more closely on these, at times in extreme close-up. It will, in that sense, “give voice to the silences” and, in the process, paint a picture not of children of god on a divinely ordained mission where the outcome is a given, but of a group of human beings with their own unique strengths and weaknesses, united by a shared mission yet occasionally divided by their own personalities, their world views.

Long story short, what you won’t find in the episodes going forward is exhaustive detail of who fought who how; what you will find — I hope — is a narrative that slips into the silences that lurk beneath the sounds of war.