A Suitable Boy

  Mahesh Kapoor frowned: ‘What on earth are you quoting from?’ he asked.

  ‘From a translation of your Mahabharata, Minister Sahib.’

  ‘Well, I wish you wouldn’t,’ said Mahesh Kapoor, annoyed. ‘I get enough of it at home without you—of all people—joining in.’

  ‘I was only making the point, Minister Sahib, that it is the conservatives, and not our liberal Prime Minister, despite his great victory, who are still in control. Or so I think.’

  Abdus Salaam did not sound unduly distressed by what doubtless must have distressed him a good deal. If anything, he sounded light-hearted, as if the pleasure of expounding the logic of his scenario sufficiently counterpoised the grimness of the scenario itself.

  And, Mahesh Kapoor reflected, marvelling a little at the young man’s attitude, things were, if looked at clearly, quite grim. Less than a week after Nehru had defeated Tandon—one of the two crucial resolutions for which had been sponsored by a party boss from West Bengal—the Congress Executive Committee and Election Committee from the state of West Bengal had with miraculous haste begun to deal with the applications for the nomination of candidates. Their purpose was clear: to forestall the effects of any change from the top, and to present the Centre with a fait accompli—a slate of candidates for the General Elections prepared and in place before any possible secessionists could return to the Congress fold and make a bid for candidature. The state Congress bosses had had to be restrained from carrying out their designs by the Calcutta High Court.

  In Purva Pradesh too, the State Election Committee of the Congress had been elected with astonishing speed. Under the Congress constitution this had to consist of the President of the State Congress Committee and not more than eight nor less than four other members. If such haste had really been necessary in order to cope with urgent preliminary work, the entrenched powers could have contented themselves with electing a minimum of four members. But by electing all eight and not leaving a single spot vacant for anyone who might later return to the Congress, they had made it clear that, whatever they said in public in deference to Nehru’s wishes, they were not serious about wishing the seceders to come back. For it was only through the activities of the Election Committee that Congressmen belonging to various groups could hope to get their due share of candidates—and through them their share of privilege and power.

  Mahesh Kapoor could see all this, but he still had faith—or perhaps hope would describe his feeling better—that Nehru would ensure that those who were ideologically close to him would not find themselves displaced and marginalized in the states. This was what he now suggested to Abdus Salaam. Since Nehru faced no one who could pose the least threat to himself in the party, he would surely ensure that the legislatures of the nation would not be filled for the next five years by those who paid no more than lip service to his ideals.

  14.28

  Abdus Salaam stirred his tea, then murmured, ‘Well, from what you have said I can see you are veering towards rejoining the Congress, Minister Sahib.’

  Mahesh Kapoor shrugged his shoulders. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘why are you so dubious about it? How can you be so sure he won’t gain—or regain—a grip on things? He turned the whole party around and seized the reins when no one expected it of him. He may surprise us further.’

  ‘I was at the All-India Congress Committee meeting in Delhi, as you know,’ said Abdus Salaam casually, focusing on a spot in the middle distance. ‘I saw him seizing the reins at close range. Well, it was quite a sight—do you want a first-hand account?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, Minister Sahib, it was the second day. There we were, all of us, in the Constitution Club. Nehru had been elected President the previous day—but of course he had not actually accepted. He said he wanted to sleep over the matter. He asked us to sleep over the matter. Everyone slept over the matter, and the next afternoon we waited for him to speak. He had not accepted, of course, but he was in the chair. Tandon was among the leaders on the dais, but Nehru was in the chair. The previous day he had refused the chair, but today, well, today, perhaps he thought that such extreme delicacy might be misinterpreted. Or perhaps Tandon had put his foot down and refused to sit where he so clearly was not wanted.’

  ‘Tandon,’ admitted Mahesh Kapoor, ‘was one of the few who refused to go along with the decision to divide the country when the Congress Party voted for Partition. No one says he’s not a man of principle.’

  ‘Well,’ said Abdus Salaam in passing, ‘Pakistan was a good thing.’

  Seeing Mahesh Kapoor look shocked, he said: ‘For one thing, with the Muslim League wielding so much power in an undivided India neither could you have got rid of princely states like Marh nor forced through the abolition of zamindari. Everyone knows this, yet no one says so. But all this is water under the bridge, history, spilt milk. So there we were, Minister Sahib, looking reverently upwards at the dais, expecting the conqueror to tell us that he would take no nonsense from anybody, that he would make sure that the party apparatus responded to his slightest touch, that the candidates for the elections would all be his men.’

  ‘And women.’

  ‘Yes. And women. Panditji is keen on female representation.’

  ‘Go on, go on, Abdus Salaam, get to the point.’

  ‘Well, instead of getting a commander’s battle cry or even a pragmatist’s plan, we got a speech about the Unity of the Heart. We should think above divisions, splits, cliques! We must pull along like a team, a family, a battalion. Dear Chacha Nehru, I felt like saying, this is India, Hindustan, Bharat, the country where faction was invented before the zero. If even the heart is divided into four parts can you expect us Indians to divide ourselves into less than four hundred?’

  ‘But what did he say about candidates?’ asked Mahesh Kapoor.

  Abdus Salaam’s answer was not reassuring.

  ‘What would he say, being Jawaharlal? That he just did not know and did not care who belonged to which group. That he entirely agreed with Tandonji that the right way to choose a candidate was to choose a man who did not apply for the slot. Of course, he could see that this might not always be possible in practice. And when he said this, Agarwal, who was sitting near me, visibly relaxed—he relaxed and he smiled. I can tell you, Minister Sahib, I did not feel very reassured by the nature of that smile.’

  Mahesh Kapoor nodded and said, ‘And then Panditji agreed to accept the Presidency?’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Abdus Salaam. ‘But he said he had thought about it. Luckily for us, he had been able to obtain some sleep that night. He confided in us that the previous day, when his name had been put up and accepted at once, he did not quite know what to do. Those were his words: “I did not quite know what to do.” But now, having slept over it, he told us that he realized that it was not an easy matter for him to escape from this responsibility. Not an easy matter at all.’

  ‘So all of you breathed a sigh of relief.’

  ‘That, Minister Sahib, is correct. But we had breathed too early. A niggling doubt had struck him. A minor doubt, but one that niggled. He had slept, and made up his mind. Or almost, yes, almost made up his mind. But the question was: had we slept and made up our minds again—or at least not changed our minds? And if we had, how could we show him that we meant it? And how could we make him believe it?’

  ‘Well, what did you do?’ asked Mahesh Kapoor rather shortly. He found Abdus Salaam’s mode of narration far too leisurely for his tastes.

  ‘Well, what could we do? We raised our hands again. But that was not enough. Then some of us raised both our hands. But that would not do either. Panditji wanted no formal show, no revoting with hands or feet. He wanted a demonstration of our “minds and hearts”. Only then could he decide whether to accept our request or not.’

  Abdus Salaam paused, awaiting a Socratic response, and Mahesh Kapoor, realizing that things would not move without it, supplied it.

  ‘That must have put you in a quandary,’ he said.
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  ‘It did indeed,’ said Abdus Salaam. ‘I kept thinking: seize the levers of power; select your candidates. He kept talking about minds and hearts. I noticed Pant and Tandon and Sharma looking at him in perplexity. And L.N. Agarwal kept smiling his twisted little smile to himself.’

  ‘Go on, go on.’

  ‘So then we clapped.’

  ‘But that did not do either?’

  ‘No, Minister Sahib, that did not do either. So then we decided to pass a resolution. But Pandit Nehru would have none of it. We would have shouted “Long live Pandit Nehru!” till we were hoarse, but everyone knew that that would have put him in a temper. He does not care for personality cults. He does not care for flattery—for patent or vociferous flattery. He is a democrat through and through.’

  ‘How was the problem resolved, Salaam? Will you please tell your story, without waiting for me to ask you questions?’

  ‘Well,’ said Abdus Salaam, ‘there was only one way to resolve it. Exhausted, and unwilling to sleep over anything again, we turned to Nehruji himself. We had racked our brains and thought ourselves thin, and none of our offerings had been acceptable to him. Perhaps he would grace us with a suggestion himself. What would satisfy him that our hearts and minds were with him? At this, our supreme leader looked perplexed. He did not know.’

  ‘He did not know?’ Mahesh Kapoor could not help exclaiming.

  ‘He did not know.’ Abdus Salaam’s face took on one of Nehru’s more melancholy expressions. ‘But after a few minutes of thought he found his way out of the difficulty. We were all to join him in a patriotic shout of “Jai Hind!” That would show him that our hearts and minds were in the right place.’

  ‘So that was what you did?’ said Mahesh Kapoor with rather a rueful smile himself.

  ‘That was what we did. But our first shout was not full-throated enough. Panditji looked unhappy, and we could see the Congress and the country collapsing before our eyes. So we raised another shout, a mighty cry of “Jai Hind!” such as almost caused the Constitution Club to collapse about our ears. And Jawaharlal smiled. He smiled. The sun came out and all was well.’

  ‘And that was that?’

  ‘And that was that.’

  14.29

  Every year at the time of shraadh, Mrs Rupa Mehra had a struggle with her eldest son, which she, after a fashion, won. Every year, Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had a struggle with her husband, which she lost. And Mrs Tandon had no struggle at all, except with her memories of her husband; for Kedarnath performed his father’s rites in full accordance with his duty.

  Raghubir Mehra’s death had fallen on the second day of a lunar fortnight, and therefore, on the second day of the annual ‘fortnight of the ancestors’, pandits should have been called to the house of his eldest son to be feasted and given gifts. But the thought of plump, bare-chested, dhoti-clad pandits sitting around in his Sunny Park flat, chanting mantras and gobbling down rice and daal, puris and halwa, curds and kheer, was anathema to Arun. Every year Mrs Rupa Mehra tried to persuade him to perform the rites for his father’s spirit. Every year Arun dismissed the whole farrago of superstitious nonsense. Mrs Rupa Mehra next worked upon Varun and sent him the necessary money for the expenses, and Varun agreed—partly because he knew it would bother his brother; partly because of love for his father (though he had a hard time believing, for instance, that the karhi, which was one of his father’s favourite foods, and that he was therefore supposed to include in the pandits’ feast, would eventually get to him); but mainly because he loved his mother and knew how badly she would suffer if he refused. She could not perform the shraadh herself; it had to be done by a man. And if not by the eldest son, then by the youngest—or, in this case, the younger.

  ‘I will have no such shenanigans in this house, let me tell you that!’ said Arun.

  ‘It’s for Daddy’s spirit,’ said Varun, with an attempt at belligerence.

  ‘Daddy’s spirit! Utter rubbish. Next we’ll have human sacrifice to help you pass your IAS exams.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that about Daddy!’ cried Varun, livid and cowering. ‘Can’t you give Ma some mental satisfaction?’

  ‘Mental? Sentimental!’ said Arun with a snort.

  Varun didn’t talk to his brother for days and slunk around the house, glaring balefully; not even Aparna could cheer him up. Every time the phone rang he jumped. Eventually it got on Meenakshi’s nerves, and at last even Arun in his native-proof casing began to feel slightly ashamed of himself.

  Finally Varun was allowed to feed a single pandit in the garden. He donated the rest of the money to a nearby temple with instructions that it should be used to feed a few poor children. And he wrote to Brahmpur to tell his mother that everything had been performed properly.

  Mrs Rupa Mehra read the letter to her samdhin, translating as she went along, with tears in her eyes.

  Mrs Mahesh Kapoor listened sadly. Her annual battle was fought not with her sons but with her husband. The shraadh for her own parents was satisfactorily performed each year by her late brother’s eldest son. What she wanted now was that the spirits of her father-in-law and mother-in-law should be similarly propitiated. Their son, however, would have nothing to do with it and rebuked her in his usual manner:

  ‘Oh, blessed one, you’ve been married to me for more than three decades and you have become more ignorant with each passing year.’

  Mrs Mahesh Kapoor did not answer back. This encouraged her husband.

  ‘How can you believe in such idiocy? In those grasping pandits and their mumbo jumbo? “So much food I set aside for the cow. So much for the crow. So much for the dog. And the rest I will eat. More! More! More puris, more halwa.” Then they belch and hold out their hands for alms: “Give according to your grace and your feelings for the departed one. What? Only five rupees? Is that the extent of your love for them?” I even know of someone who gave snuff to a pandit’s wife because his own dead mother liked snuff! Well, I won’t disturb my parents’ souls with such mockery. All I can say is that I hope no one dares to perform shraadh for me.’

  This stung Mrs Mahesh Kapoor into protest. She said: ‘If Pran refuses to perform shraadh for you, he will be no son of mine.’

  ‘Pran has too much good sense,’ said Mahesh Kapoor. ‘And I’m beginning to think that Maan is a sensible boy too. Don’t talk just of me—they wouldn’t even perform it for you.’

  Whether Mahesh Kapoor took delight in baiting and hurting his wife or not, he certainly couldn’t stop himself. Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, who could bear much, was almost in tears. Veena was visiting when this argument broke out, and her mother said to her:

  ‘Bété.’

  ‘Yes, Ammaji.’

  ‘If such a thing happens, you will tell Bhaskar that he is to perform shraadh for me. Invest him with the sacred thread if necessary.’

  ‘Sacred thread! Bhaskar will not wear a sacred thread,’ said Mahesh Kapoor. ‘He’ll use it to fly a kite with. Or as Hanuman’s tail.’ He chuckled rather maliciously at the sacrilege.

  ‘That is for his father to decide,’ said Mrs Mahesh Kapoor quietly.

  ‘He is too young anyway.’

  ‘That also is for his father to decide,’ said Mrs Mahesh Kapoor. ‘Anyway, I’m not dying yet.’

  ‘But you certainly sound determined to die,’ said Mahesh Kapoor. ‘This time every year we go through the same stupid kind of talk.’

  ‘Of course I am determined to die,’ said Mrs Mahesh Kapoor. ‘How else can I go through my rebirths and finally end them?’ Looking down at her hands she said, ‘Do you want to be immortal? I can imagine nothing worse than to be immortal, nothing worse.’

  Part Fifteen

  15.1

  Less than a week after her letter from her younger son, Mrs Rupa Mehra received a letter from her elder son. It was, as always, illegible—and illegible to the extent that it seemed almost to amount to contempt for any possible reader. The news it contained was important, however; and it did no good to Mrs Rupa Mehra’s hi
gh blood pressure as she tried desperately to decipher bits of it through a forest of random curves and spikes.

  The surprising news related mainly to the Chatterji children. Of the two women, Meenakshi and Kakoli, one had lost a foetus and the other had gained a fiancé. Dipankar had returned from the Pul Mela still uncertain, ‘but at a higher level’. Young Tapan had written rather an unhappy but unspecific letter home—typical adolescent blues, according to Arun. And Amit had let it drop when he had called around one evening for a drink that he was rather fond of Lata, which, given his extreme reticence, could only mean that he was ‘interested’ in her. Making sense of the next few squiggles, Mrs Rupa Mehra was shocked to understand that Arun did not think this was such a bad idea. Certainly, according to him, it would take Lata out of the orbit of the entirely unsuitable Haresh. When the idea was put before Varun, he had frowned and said, ‘I’m studying,’ as if his sister’s future mattered not at all to him. But then, Varun was becoming moodier and moodier since his IAS preparations had restrained his Shamshuing. He had behaved most oddly over Daddy’s shraadh, attempting to turn the Sunny Park house into a restaurant for fat priests, and even asking them (Meenakshi had overheard him) if shraadh could be performed for a suicide.

  With a few remarks about the impending General Elections in England (‘At Bentsen Pryce we consider it Hobson’s choice: Attlee is puerile and Churchill senile’) but none about the Indian elections, with a casual admonition to Mrs Rupa Mehra to mind her blood sugar, and to give his love to his sisters, and to assure everyone that Meenakshi was fine and had suffered no lasting harm, Arun signed off.