White Teeth

Palace Restaurant, Trafalgar Square, to the right of Nelson), who added – in a postscript to his written instruction – that he did hope that this would put an end to all the rash talk of mutiny one kept hearing recently. But it was too late. As Pande swung in the sultry breeze, hanging from a makeshift gallows, his disbanded comrades from the 34th were heading for Delhi, determined to join the rebel forces of what was to become one of the bloodiest failed mutinies of this or any century.

This version of events – by a contemporary historian named Fitchett – was enough to send Samad into spasms of fury. When a man has nothing but his blood to commend him, each drop of it matters, matters terribly; it must be jealously defended. It must be protected against assailants and detractors. It must be fought for. But like a Chinese whisper, Fitchett’s intoxicated, incompetent Pande had passed down a line of subsequent historians, the truth mutating, bending, receding as the whisper continued. It didn’t matter that bhang, a hemp drink taken in small doses for medicinal purposes, was extremely unlikely to cause intoxication of this kind or that Pande, a strict Hindu, was extremely unlikely to drink it. It didn’t matter that Samad could find not one piece of corroborating evidence that Pande had taken bhang that morning. The story still clung, like a gigantic misquote, to the Iqbal reputation, as solid and seemingly irremovable as the misconception that Hamlet ever said he knew Yorick ‘well’.

‘Enough! It makes no difference how many times you read these things to me, Archibald.’ (Archie usually came armed with a plastic bag full of Brent Library books, anti-Pande propaganda, misquotes galore.) ‘It is like a gang of children caught with their hands in an enormous honey jar: they are all going to tell me the same lie. I am not interested in this kind of slander. I am not interested in puppet theatre or tragic farce. Action interests me, friend.’ And here Samad would mime the final zipping up of his lips, the throwing away of a key. ‘True action. Not words. I tell you, Archibald, Mangal Pande sacrificed his life in the name of justice for India, not because he was intoxicated or insane. Pass me the ketchup.’

It was the 1989 New Year’s Eve shift in O’Connell’s, and the debate was in full swing.

‘True, he was not a hero in the way you in the West like your heroes – he did not succeed except in the manner of his honourable death. But imagine it: there he sat.’ Samad pointed to Denzel, about to play his winning domino. ‘At the trial, knowing death was upon him, refusing ever to reveal the names of his fellow conspirators-’

‘Now, that,’ said Archie, patting his pile of sceptics, Michael Edwardes, P. J. O. Taylor, Syed Moinul Haq and the rest, ‘depends what you read.’

‘No, Archie. That is a common mistake. The truth does not depend on what you read. Please let us not get into the nature of truth. Then you do not have to draw with my cheese and I can avoid eating your chalk.’

‘All right, then: Pande. What did he achieve? Nothing! All he did was start a mutiny – too early, mind, before the agreed date – and excuse my French, but that’s a fucking disaster in military terms. You plan, you don’t act on instinct. He caused unnecessary casualties. English and Indian.’

‘With respect, I don’t believe that to be the case.’

‘Well, you’re wrong.’

‘With respect, I believe I am right.’

‘It’s like this, Sam: imagine here’ – he gathered a pile of dirty plates that Mickey was about to put in the dishwasher – ‘are all the people who have written about your Pande in the last hundred-and-whatever years. Now: here’s the ones that agree with me.’ He placed ten plates on his side of the table and pushed one over to Samad. ‘And that’s the madman on your side.’

‘A. S. Misra. Respected Indian civil servant. Not a madman.’

‘Right. Well, it would take you at least another hundred-and-whatever years to get as many plates as I have, even if you were going to make them all yourself, and the likelihood is, once you had them, no bugger would want to eat off them anyway. Metaphorically speaking. Know what I mean?’

Which left only A. S. Misra. One of Samad’s nephews, Rajnu, had written to him in the spring of ’81 from his Cambridge college, mentioning casually that he had found a book which might be of some interest to his uncle. In it, he said, could be found an eloquent defence of their shared ancestor, one Mangal Pande. The only surviving copy was in his college library, it was by a man named Misra. Had he heard of it already? If not, might it not serve (Rajnu added in a cautious P. S.) as a pleasant excuse to see his uncle again?

Samad arrived on the train the very next day and stood on the platform, warmly greeting his soft-spoken nephew in the pouring rain, shaking his hand several times and talking as if it were going out of fashion.

‘A great day,’ he repeated over and over, until both men were soaked to the skin. ‘A great day for our family, Rajnu, a great day for the truth.’

Wet men not being allowed in college libraries, they spent the morning drying off in a stuffy upstairs cafe, full of the right type of ladies having the right type of tea. Rajnu, ever the good listener, sat patiently as his uncle babbled wildly – Oh, the importance of the discovery, Oh, how long he had waited for this moment – nodding in all the right places and smiling sweetly as Samad brushed tears from the corners of his eyes. ‘It is a great book, isn’t it, Rajnu?’ asked Samad pleadingly, as his nephew left a generous tip for the sour-faced waitresses who did not appreciate overexcited Indians spending three hours over one cream tea and leaving wet prints all over the furniture. ‘It is recognized, isn’t it?’

Rajnu knew in his heart that the book was an inferior, insignificant, forgotten piece of scholarship, but he loved his uncle, so he smiled, nodded and smiled firmly again.

Once in the library, Samad was asked to fill in the visitors’ book:

Name: Samad Miah Iqbal

College: Educated elsewhere (Delhi)

Research project: Truth

Rajnu, tickled by this last entry, picked up the pen, adding ‘and Tragedy’.

‘Truth and Tragedy,’ said a deadpan librarian, turning the book back round. ‘Any particular kind?’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Samad genially. ‘We’ll find it.’

It took a stepladder to reach it but it was well worth the stretch. When Rajnu passed the book to his uncle, Samad felt his fingers tingle and, looking at its cover, shape and colour, saw that it was all he had dreamt of. It was heavy, many paged, bound in a tan leather and covered in the light dust that denotes something incredibly precious, something rarely touched.

‘I left a marker in it. There is much to read but there is something I thought you’d like to see first,’ said Rajnu, laying it down on a desk. The heavy thud of one side of the book hit the table, and Samad looked at the appointed page. It was more than he could have hoped for.

‘It’s only an artist’s impression, but the similarity between-’

‘Don’t speak,’ said Samad, tracing his fingers across the picture. ‘This is our blood, Rajnu. I never thought I would see… What eyebrows! What a nose! I have his nose!’

‘You have his face, Uncle. More dashing, naturally.’

‘And what – what does it say underneath. Damn! Where are my reading glasses… read it for me, Rajnu, it is too small.’

‘The caption? Mangal Pande fired the first bullet of the 1857 movement. His self-sacrifice gave the siren to the nation to take up arms against an alien ruler, culminating in a mass-uprising with no parallel in world history. Though the effort failed in its immediate consequences, it succeeded in laying the foundations of the Independence to be won in 1947. For his patriotism he paid with his life. But until his last breath he refused to disclose the names of those who were preparing for, and instigating, the great uprising.’

Samad sat down on the bottom rung of the stepladder and wept.