The Solitude of Emperors

Unusual book

Prologue

They are the invisible ones, the ones who were too small, weak, poor or slow to escape the onrush of history. No obituaries mark their passing, no memorials honour their name and we don’t remember them because in our eyes they never existed. Yet we ignore them at our peril, if only because their fate today could be ours tomorrow; history is an insatiable tyrant.

I have never been much good at ritual or ceremonial homage — I blame this on my parents, who never really taught me — so I have had to invent a private rite of remembrance for Noah, a man who was ignored by almost everyone for as long as he lived, but who, in his death, affected me more powerfully than I would have thought possible. I can picture his mocking smile now, for the ceremony I’m about to conduct takes its inspiration from a somewhat bizarre funeral I saw him preside over all those many years ago. It is the middle of winter in this northern city, and even though the bitter cold would deter most from setting foot outside a heated room, I have always been stubborn and determined once I have decided to do something, and so I shuffle through the wind and snow to the cemetery closest to my house.

Once there, I look for a grave with an angel on its headstone; there is a crust of snow on the grave and I scrape it off, unroll the plastic mat I have brought with me, and sit down. Noah wouldn’t have liked this cemetery, it’s too neat and formal; he believed the dead were entitled to comfortable lived-in surroundings. He would have missed his beloved trees: the great peepul with leaves like flattened spearheads and the jacarandas that flung sprays of blue into the deeper blue of the Nilgiri sky. Here the maples are bare, and the evergreens are too dull and uniform to have appealed to him. But there is nothing I can do about the surroundings, so I begin to unpack the rucksack I have brought with me. I take out a bottle of rum, a cigarette packet (I do not smoke and the cigarettes have been replaced by two joints that I have procured with some difficulty from a Bolivian colleague), a cheap plastic lighter, a CD player and, finally, a manuscript. I sprinkle some of the rum around the grave to propitiate the dead, put the headphones on, and am preparing to light up a joint when I hear the sound of an approaching vehicle. I am grateful for the cover of the snowstorm because I doubt the groundskeeper whose vehicle this must be would understand if he caught me here.

In the twelve years since Noah died, I have performed this ceremony annually — in other cemeteries, other cities, in Madras, Bombay, in London, a city I passed through on my way to Canada — and every time I’ve carried it out surreptitiously, for it is not something that can be explained away easily. The vehicle sweeps past, its driver an indistinct figure in the cab, and silence descends again. I apologize to Grace MacKinnon (1902—1972), whose grave I have temporarily taken over, switch on the CD player, and to the sound of Jim Morrison singing ‘Riders on the Storm’ I light the joint. The first drag sets me coughing uncontrollably; I wait for my agitated lungs to stop protesting, take another hit, then perform the final part of the ceremony. I pull out a torch from the rucksack, switch it on, shake the snow off my manuscript and begin reading aloud the last chapter. I have neither the effrontery nor the imagination to make this the sort of book Noah would have admired, but my years as a journalist have equipped me with enough tools to thread together a coherent, sturdy narrative. In the course of the decade it has taken me to complete the book — by any accounting that would be deemed slow, slightly over a chapter a year, but I should point out that it has gone through five drafts — I think I have finally put down a version of the events of the winter of 1993/4 that I am satisfied with. More importantly, I feel I understand the man at the centre of them better.

Noah told me once that the dead remain with us for as long as we need them and I have begun to see what he meant. I sensed his presence from time to time as I attempted to recreate his life and the events leading up to his death, and the book has benefited as a result. I should say at this point that I am aware that this account is different from the version put out by the police and the government commission of inquiry that investigated his death; in my defence all I can say is that nobody else recorded the witness of the dead.