A Suitable Boy

‘I did not have dinner last night. I was not hungry. I nibbled throughout my journey, and by the time I arrived I was not hungry. Not hungry at all.’

  ‘Did you eat well in Rudhia?’ asked his mother.

  ‘Yes, Ammaji, I ate well, I ate very well, all the time,’ said Maan with a trace of irritation in his voice.

  Veena had a good sense of her brother’s moods. She remembered him following her all around the house when he was a small boy. He had always been good-humoured unless he was both baulked and perplexed. He had a bad temper, but he was seldom irritable.

  Something must have happened to upset or frustrate him recently; she was sure of it. She was about to ask him about it—which would probably only have bothered him further—when Bhaskar, as if waking from a reverie, said: ‘Rudhia?’

  ‘What about Rudhia?’ asked Maan.

  ‘Which part of Rudhia were you in?’ asked Bhaskar.

  ‘The northern part—near Debaria.’

  ‘That is definitely the most favourable constituency among the rural ones,’ pronounced Bhaskar. ‘Northern Rudhia. Nanaji said that a large proportion of Muslims and jatavs were factors in his favour.’

  Mahesh Kapoor shook his head. ‘Be quiet,’ he told Bhaskar. ‘You’re nine years old. You don’t understand anything about all this.’

  ‘But, Nanaji, really, it’s true, it’s one of the best!’ insisted Bhaskar. ‘Why don’t you fight from there—you said that the new party would give you any seat you wanted. If you want a rural seat, that’s the one to choose. Salimpur-cum-Baitar in Northern Rudhia. I haven’t sorted out the urban seats yet.’

  ‘Idiot, you know nothing about politics,’ said Mahesh Kapoor. ‘I need those papers back.’

  ‘Well, I’m returning to Rudhia at Bakr-Id,’ said Maan, siding with Bhaskar. He had cheered up at his father’s discomfiture. ‘People insist I celebrate with them. I’m very popular! And you can come with me. I’ll introduce you to everyone in your future constituency. All the Muslims, all the jatavs.’

  Mahesh Kapoor said sharply: ‘I know everyone, I don’t need to be introduced to them. And it is not my future constituency, let me make that clear. And let me tell you that you are going back to Banaras to settle down, not to Rudhia to make merry at Id.’

  12.19

  Mahesh Kapoor had not left the party to which he had dedicated his life without pain or regret, and he was still assailed by doubts about his decision. His fear and expectation were that the Congress would not lose. The party was too well entrenched both in office and in the people’s consciousness; unless it lost Nehru, how could it fail to win? Dissatisfied though he was with the way things were going, there were other excellent reasons why Mahesh Kapoor should have remained. His brainchild the Zamindari Abolition Act had still to be declared valid by the Supreme Court and to be implemented. And there was the obvious danger that L.N. Agarwal would accumulate yet further power into his hands in the absence of a strong ministerial rival.

  Mahesh Kapoor had taken (or been persuaded to take) a calculated gamble to try to prod Nehru out of the Congress Party. Or perhaps it had been not a calculated but a whimsical gamble. Or perhaps not even whimsical but instinctive. For the real gambler behind the scenes was the Minister of Communications in Nehru’s own Cabinet in Delhi, the adroit Rafi Ahmad Kidwai, who, leaning on his bed like a genial, white-capped, bespectacled Buddha, had told Mahesh Kapoor (who had come to pay him a friendly visit) that if he didn’t jump out now from the drifting boat of the Congress Party, he would never be able to help pull it by its tow-rope back to shore.

  It was a far-fetched image, made more dubious by the fact that Rafi Sahib, for all his immense agility of thought and love of fast cars, had never been addicted to swiftness of movement—or, indeed, exercise of any physical kind, let alone jumping, swimming, and tugging. But he was notoriously persuasive. Canny businessmen lost their canniness in his presence and divested themselves of thousands of rupees, which he promptly disbursed to harassed widows, poor students, party politicians, and even his political rivals if they happened to be in need. His likeableness, generosity, and astuteness had cast a spell over many a more hard-headed politician than Mahesh Kapoor.

  Rafi Sahib had a taste for a great many things—fountain-pens, mangoes and watches among them—and he also had a taste for jokes; and Mahesh Kapoor, having finally taken the psychological plunge, wondered whether this might not be one of his more zany and disastrous ones. For Nehru had shown no effective sign of leaving the Congress yet, despite the fact that it was his ideological supporters who were bleeding away. Time would tell, however, and timing was the key. Rafi Sahib, who could sit silent and smiling while six conversations swirled all round him, would suddenly latch on to a single sentence of exceptional interest and insight like a chameleon catching a fly. He had a similar instinct for the shifting shoals and currents of politics: the sonar ability to distinguish dolphins from crocodiles even in these murky, silted waters, and an uncanny sense of when to act. Upon Mahesh Kapoor’s departure, he had given him a watch—the spring of Mahesh Kapoor’s own watch had snapped—and had said: ‘I guarantee that Nehru, you and I will fight from the same platform, whatever that may be. At thirteen o’clock on the thirteenth day of the thirteenth month, look at this watch, Kapoor Sahib, and tell me if I was not right.’

  12.20

  Around the time of the elections to the Brahmpur University Students’ Union there was a spurt of political activity both on and off campus. There was a great hodgepodge of issues: cinema concessions on the one hand, and a call for solidarity with primary schoolteachers in their wage bargaining on the other; demands for more employment opportunities together with support for Pandit Nehru’s non-aligned foreign policy; amendments to the rigid code of conduct of the university—and insistence that Hindi be used for the civil service examinations. Some parties—or the leaders of some parties, for where parties ended and leaders began was itself a difficult business to fathom—believed that all India’s ills would be cured by a return to ancient Hindu traditions. Others insisted that socialism, variously defined or felt, was the cure-all.

  There was ferment and fighting. It was the beginning of the academic year, and no one was concentrating on his studies; exams were nine months away. Students chattered in the coffee houses or the delegacy lodges or hostels, gathered in knots outside classes, led small marches, fasted, and beat each other up with sticks and stones. Sometimes they were helped in this by the local parties they were affiliated to, but this was not really necessary. Students had learned how to cause trouble under the British, and there was no reason why hard-earned corporate skills, passed on from batch to batch, should be wasted merely because of the change of dispensation in Delhi and Brahmpur. Besides, the Congress government, by its slow slide into complacency and its inability to solve the country’s problems, was unpopular among the students, who by no means valued stability as an end in itself.

  The Congress Party expected to win by default, as great, shapeless, centrist lumps often do. It expected to win even though its national leadership was riven by differences, even though Congressmen were leaving their party in droves ever since the meeting in Patna, even though the most prominent local Congressman’s name was mud among the students—both as the Treasurer of the university with his manoeuvrings on the Executive Council, and as the lathi-happy Home Minister. The student Congress Party’s theme was: ‘Give us time. We are the party of Independence, of Jawaharlal Nehru, not really of L.N. Agarwal. Even though things have not improved, they will improve if you continue to place confidence in us. If you change horses now, they assuredly will not.’

  But most students were not inclined to vote for the status quo; they had no spouses or children or jobs or income, possible injury to which might counterbalance the excitement of instability. Nor did they trust for the future those who had shown no signs of competence in the past. The country had to beg for food from abroad. The economy, under-planned and over-planned, lurched from crisis to crisis. Th
ere were few jobs waiting for the students themselves after graduation.

  Their post-Independence romanticism and post-Independence disillusionment formed a volatile mixture. The Congress argument was rejected, and the Socialist Party won the election. Rasheed was on the party slate, and became an office-bearer.

  Malati Trivedi, who considered herself an unlikely socialist, but joined in for the enjoyment of it all and because she liked the discussions, and because some friends of hers (including her musician) had been socialists, had no interest whatsoever in office. But she planned to join in the ‘victory-cum-protest’ march that was planned a week after the elections.

  The ‘protest’ part of the title came from the fact that the Socialist Party—together with any other parties that cared to join in—was going to march in protest against the low pay of primary schoolteachers. There were over ten thousand primary schoolteachers, and it was a disgrace that their salaries were as low as they were, certainly not enough for a decent living, lower in fact than those of village patwaris. The teachers had gone on strike after a number of unsuccessful attempts to get themselves heard. A number of students’ federations, including those of the medical and law colleges, had pledged their support to the cause. Education involved them, and it involved the future shape of the university, indeed, the calibre of the citizenry of the country itself. Besides, here was an excellent magnet to which they could attach anything else that came to mind. Some of these federations were interested in stirring up the whole of Brahmpur, not just the university; interestingly enough, one minor hotbed of radicalism was a group of Muslim girls who were still in purdah.

  The Home Minister L.N. Agarwal had made it clear that a peaceful procession was one thing, a disorderly surge of rabble another. He would control it with whatever means were available. If a lathi charge was necessary, he would order it.

  Since the Chief Minister was in Delhi for a few days, a delegation of ten students (Rasheed among them) went to see the Home Minister, who was in charge in S.S. Sharma’s absence. They crowded into his office in the Secretariat. They made brusque demands, as much to impress each other as to hope to persuade him. They did not pay him the respect that he believed was due to their elders, especially those who (unlike them) had suffered blows and ruin and years in jail in order to see their country free. He refused to concede their demands, saying that they should talk either to the Education Minister or to the Chief Minister himself upon his return. Nor did he budge from his stated stance that he would maintain order in the town at any cost.

  ‘Does that mean you will shoot us if we get out of hand?’ asked Rasheed with a malignant look.

  ‘I would prefer not to,’ said the Home Minister, as if the idea was not entirely unpleasant, ‘but, needless to say, it will not come to that.’ At any rate, he added to himself, the legislature is not presently in session to take me to task about it.

  ‘This is like the days of the British,’ continued Rasheed furiously, staring at the man who had justified the police firing in Chowk, and perhaps seeing embodied in him the image of other arbitrariness and authoritarianism. ‘The British used lathis on us, they even shot at us, at us students, during the Quit India movement. Our blood was spilt by the British here in Brahmpur—in Chowk, in Captainganj—’

  The rest of the delegation began to buzz rather angrily in response to his oratory.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the Home Minister, cutting him short. ‘I know it. I lived through it. You must have been a boy of twelve then, watching anxiously in the mirror for the first signs of a man’s hair. When you say “us students” you don’t mean yourselves, it was your predecessors whose blood was spilt. And, I may mention, some of mine. It’s easy enough to lubricate your way to office on others’ blood. And as for Quit India, this is an Indian government now, and I hope you don’t want us to quit India.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Now if you have anything useful to say, say it. Otherwise go. You may not have your books to read, but I have my files. I know exactly what this march is about. It isn’t about the salaries of primary schoolteachers. It is a way of concertedly attacking the Congress government of the state and the country, and trying to spread disaffection and disorder in the town.’ He made a dismissive gesture with the back of his hand. ‘Stick to your books. That is my advice to you as your true friend—and as the Treasurer of the university—and as the Home Minister—and as the Acting Chief Minister; and it is the advice of your Vice-Chancellor too. And your teachers. And your parents.’

  ‘And God,’ added the President of the students’ union, who was an atheist.

  ‘Get out,’ said the Home Minister in a calm voice.

  12.21

  But the evening before the day fixed for the march an incident occurred in town that brought the two sides temporarily together on the same side of an issue.

  Manorma Talkies, the cinema hall in Nabiganj that was showing Deedar, that had indeed been showing Deedar continuously to packed or almost packed houses for months, became the scene of what was almost a student riot.

  The Brahmpur University ordinances forbade students from going to the second or late-night show, but this was an ordinance that hardly anyone paid any heed to. In particular, those students who lived outside the university hostels flouted it whenever they saw fit. Deedar was an immensely popular movie. Its songs were on everyone’s lips, and it appealed to old and young alike; it may well have happened that on some evening Dr Kishen Chand Seth and the Rajkumar of Marh sobbed their hearts out to it simultaneously. People saw it several times over. It had an unusually tragic ending, but one which did not make one wish to tear the screen apart or set fire to the theatre.

  What caused the trouble was that on this evening the management had given exceptionally strict instructions to the ticket office not to honour student concessions if they got enough ticket-buyers at the full price. It was the early evening show. Two students, one of whom had seen the film before, had been told that the house was full. From past experience they had learned to mistrust the management. When several others who came after them were sold tickets, they began to harangue first the people in the ticket queue—when one woman told them to shut up, they told her the ending of the film—and then began to yell at the employees at the box office. The employees went about their business unperturbed—until the students, one of whom had an umbrella, became desperate enough to smash the glass panes of the doors of the cinema hall. Some of the patrons started shouting and threatening to call the police, but the management was not keen that the police be called. The employees got the projectionist and a few other people together, beat the students up, and threw them out. The mild mêlée was over in a few minutes, and did not disturb too deeply the subsequent mood of the audience.

  By the time the first show ended, however, there was a crowd of about four hundred angry students demonstrating threateningly against the illegal actions of the management—and particularly the manhandling of their two fellows. They had driven away from the box office all those who were thinking of buying tickets for the second show or who, having bought their tickets in advance, were seeking to enter the lobby.

  It had begun to drizzle, but the students refused to leave. They were angry, and yet they were elated, for here they were, displaying their might in front of the portals of the infamous Manorma Talkies which, because of the continuing success of Deedar in attracting customers at the full price, and also because of its hard-headed manager, who cared less for law than profits, had been discriminating against them for months. Refreshed by their vacation, excited by the recent student elections, and indignant at the attack on their pride and their pockets, the students shouted that they would show the management what stuff they were made of, that the cinema hall must ‘either learn or burn’, and that sticks would teach the employees what passes couldn’t. The sorrowful and subdued patrons of the first show began to come out. They were astonished to be faced by a belligerent crowd which condemned their acquiescence in the earlier violence. ‘Shame! Shame!�
�� shouted the students. The audience, among them old people and even children, looked perplexedly at them with tear-stained faces.

  The scene began to grow ugly. There was no violence, but some of the patrons were not allowed to enter their cars, and hurried away, fearing that if they stayed, their own safety would be threatened. Finally the District Magistrate, the Deputy Superintendent of Police, and the Proctor of the university all arrived on the scene. They tried to ascertain the nature of the problem. All of them felt that the management was to blame but that the students should have taken their complaint through the proper channels. The Proctor even tried to make the point that the students had no right to demonstrate before the second show, but it was clear that when facing four hundred angry students on a rainy night, he could not immediately exercise his normally awesome authority. His voice was drowned out by the shouting. When he perceived that the students would not be pacified or persuaded about the adequacy of the proper channels except by office-bearers of their own union, he tried to seek them out. Two of them, though not Rasheed, happened to be in the crowd. But they made it clear that they would not act unless the Treasurer appeared on their behalf as a representative of the Executive Council in order to show that the Council in general acted to protect, not merely to impose its will on the student body. This was a way of demanding L.N. Agarwal’s presence.

  The manager, who had gone home just after the students had been thrashed and before the crowd had collected, came hurriedly to the scene when he heard that the police would protect his person from injury but that only he could protect Manorma Talkies. He was abject. He called the students ‘my dear dear friends’. He wept when he saw the bruises on the arms and back of one of the students. He talked about his own student days. He offered them all a special showing of Deedar. It would not do. ‘Our university Treasurer will represent us,’ insisted the students’ union. ‘Only he knows how to restrain us.’ As a matter of fact, they themselves were keen that the incident should not turn violent, because it would affect the next day’s victory-cum-protest march, and they did not want it to be perceived by the public at large that students demonstrated only for their own trivial privileges and not for the good of society.