How to write new history

Fiction

Whenever the Parliament was in session, Rakesh Sharma MP became a different man. Ordinarily he was just a politician from a small town in Himachal Pradesh. He was so ordinary a politician that without Modiji’s magical touch he would have remained a mere boulder on a rustic hillside in Himachal Pradesh. Modiji weaves a magical web with words and a billion insects get trapped. Rakesh Sharma knew that he was a leader of trapped insects. Not that it mattered anyway. It gave him a chance to be in Delhi for a week or so every time the Parliament held a session. And Delhi was the city of delights. Sensual delights.

Rakesh Sharma’s suite would be ready at Hotel Chanakya in Chanakyapuri prior to his arrival in Delhi. A beautiful young woman of foreign origin would be awaiting him with a sensuous smile and seductive attire. Rupeshu Lakshmi, Sayaneshu Veshya. The fact that Lakshmi had foreign blood in her veins boosted Rakesh Sharma’s consciousness of his power. He felt like an invader into alien territories. Power is magic and the ultimate aphrodisiac, he realized with much self-contentment.

“Liza is not your real name, is it?” Rakesh Sharma asked the Chinese woman who was lying stark naked next to him in bed.

“Liza is an erasure. I’m a part of history’s erasures.” She chuckled. “Your country, particularly your party, is interested in erasures now.”

It was their third night together. Rakesh had already learnt many things about her. Not because he was interested in her as a person. She was just another of the many women whom he had savoured for a few days. Or nights. She would be forgotten, just as the others were, soon after her use was over. He had enquired about her just to ensure his own safety. Security of his reputation, rather.

Liza was the daughter of a cousin of Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao’s wife and the last victim of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. “Kill! Kill!” was the Revolution’s slogan. Young boys and girls wearing red armbands and military fatigues went on a killing spree that lasted months. Anyone who looked like a bourgeois was done in brutally. “Kill! Kill!”

They did not spare even cats. Cats were perceived as symbols of bourgeois decadence. Poor people couldn’t afford pets, could they? Cats belonged to the bourgeois class. Mao’s adolescent Red Guard killed every cat they saw along their bloody way.

“Nobody knows the exact figure of deaths – people’s or cats’,” Liza said. “People  could be anywhere between 500,000 and two million.”

“Every dictator has filled the vacuum in his soul with heaps of corpses,” Rakesh Sharma said putting his palm over one of Liza’s big breasts as if he was making a conquest of a hill. “Every corpse adds to the dictator’s self-worth.”

Liza chuckled. “You’re working for a dictator, aren’t you?”

“That’s better than being a corpse, isn’t it?”

“Chairman Mao too became a corpse finally.”

“And history erased the other corpses from their tombs.”

Mao’s sins were placed on Jiang Qing’s head. The Cultural Revolution was not Chairman Mao’s idea, they said taking over power after Mao’s death. It was Jiang Qing who masterminded it all.

“I was Chairman Mao’s dog,” Jiang Qing protested. And they said they would kill her like a dog. She killed herself before they did. She remained a traitor in her country’s history, however.

Traitor. Gaddar.

Desh ke gaddaro ko –

Goli maro salon ko!

The Saffron Guard was baying outside Chanakya Hotel. Rakesh Sharma did not hear it, however. He was embracing the snow-white body of Jiang Qing’s niece, lying under the snow-white quilt in the centrally air-conditioned suite of an international hotel. China was erasing a history under that quilt and India was writing a new history.