A Suitable Boy

  ‘And I suppose,’ said Maan, ‘because of his sense of civic duty?’

  Veena frowned and nodded, not sure if the irresponsible Maan was being sarcastic at her expense.

  ‘I remember our days in Lahore—none of this could ever have happened,’ said old Mrs Tandon with tender nostalgia and a look of shining faith in her eyes. ‘The people contributed without being asked, even the Municipal Council provided free lighting, and the effigies we made for Ravana were so frightening that children would hide their faces in their mothers’ laps. Our neighbourhood had the best Ramlila in the city. And all the swaroops were brahmin boys,’ she added approvingly.

  ‘But that would never do,’ said Maan. ‘Bhaskar would never have been eligible then.’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t,’ said old Mrs Tandon thoughtfully. This was the first time she had considered the matter from this angle. ‘That would not have been good. Just because we aren’t brahmins! But people were old-fashioned then. Some things are changing for the better. Bhaskar must certainly get a part next year. He knows half of them by heart already.’

  15.5

  Kedarnath had, in this matter of the actor-deities or swaroops, been surprised to find that one of the leaders of the untouchables was the jatav Jagat Ram from Ravidaspur. It was difficult for him to think of Jagat Ram as having anything to do with local agitation, for he was a fairly sober man who had concentrated, by and large, on his work and his large family; and had played no active role in the strike in Misri Mandi. But Jagat Ram had, by virtue of his relative prosperity—if it could be called that—and the fact that he was at least minimally literate, been pressured by his neighbours and fellow-workers into representing them. He did not want to accept; having accepted, though, he did what he could. However, he felt at a disadvantage in two respects. First, it was only by stretching a point that he could claim to have a stake in what went on in Misri Mandi. Secondly, since his livelihood depended on Kedarnath and other local figures, he knew that for the sake of his family he had to tread carefully.

  Kedarnath for his part was not unsympathetic in a theoretical sense to the general question of opening up the field of actors. But the Ramlila in his eyes was not a competition or a political act but an enactment of faith by the community. Most of the boys who acted in it had known each other from childhood, and the scenes that were represented had the sanction of hundreds of years of tradition. The Ramlila of Misri Mandi was famous throughout the city. To tack on scenes after the coronation of Rama struck him as being pointlessly offensive—a political invasion of religion, a moralistic invasion of morality. As for some sort of quota system among the swaroops, that would only lead to political conflict and artistic disaster.

  Jagat Ram argued that since the brahmin stranglehold over the parts of the heroes had been broken in favour of the other upper castes, it was a logical next step to allow the so-called lower castes and scheduled castes to participate. They contributed to the success of the Ramlila as spectators and even to a small extent as contributors; why not then as actors? Kedarnath responded that it was obviously too late to do anything this year. He would bring up the matter with the Ramlila Committee the following year. But he suggested that the people of Ravidaspur, which was largely a scheduled caste community—and from which the claim largely emanated—should perform a Ramlila of their own as well, so that the demand would not be seen as invasive and mischievous, merely a way of prolonging by other weapons the conflict that had had its first culmination in the disastrous strike earlier in the year.

  Nothing was really resolved. Everything was left in uncertainty. And Jagat Ram was not really surprised. This was his first venture into politics, and he had not enjoyed it. His childhood hell in a village, his brutal adolescence in a factory, and the vicious world of competitors and middlemen, poverty and dirt in which he now found himself had served to turn him into something of a philosopher. One did not argue with elephants in a jungle when they were on the rampage, one did not argue with the traffic in Chowk as it hurtled past in murderous confusion. One got out of the way and got one’s family out of the way. If possible, one retained what dignity one could. The world was a place of brutality and cruelty and the exclusion of people like him from the rites of religion was almost the least of its barbarities.

  The previous year one of the jatavs of his own village, who had spent a couple of years in Brahmpur, had gone back home during the harvest season. After the comparative freedom of the city, he had made the mistake of imagining that he had gained exemption from the generalized loathing of the upper-caste villagers. Perhaps also, being eighteen years old, he had the rashness of youth; at any rate, he cycled around the village singing film songs on a bicycle he had bought from his earnings. One day, feeling thirsty, he had had the brazenness to ask an upper-caste woman who was cooking outside her house for some water to drink. That night he had been set upon by a gang of men, tied to his bicycle, and forced to eat human excreta. His brain and his bicycle had then been smashed to bits. Everyone knew the men who were responsible, yet no one had dared to testify; and the details had been too horrendous for even the newspapers to print.

  In the villages, the untouchables were virtually helpless; almost none of them owned that eventual guarantor of dignity and status, land. Few worked it as tenants, and of those tenants fewer still would be able to make use of the paper guarantees of the forthcoming land reforms. In the cities too they were the dregs of society. Even Gandhi, for all his reforming concern, for all his hatred of the concept that any human being was intrinsically so loathsome and polluting as to be untouchable, had believed that people should continue in their hereditarily ordained professions: a cobbler should remain a cobbler, a sweeper a sweeper. ‘One born a scavenger must earn his livelihood by being a scavenger, and then do whatever else he likes. For a scavenger is as worthy of his hire as a lawyer or your President. That, according to me, is Hinduism.’

  For Jagat Ram, though he would not have said this aloud, this was the most misleading condescension. He knew that there was nothing innately worthy about cleaning lavatories or standing in a foul-smelling tanning pit—and being duty-bound to do so because your parents had. But this was what most Hindus believed, and if beliefs and laws were changing, a few more generations would continue to be crushed under the wheels of the great chariot before it finally ground to a bloodstained halt.

  It was with only half a heart that Jagat Ram had argued that the scheduled castes should be allowed to be swaroops in the Ramlila. Perhaps, after all, it was not a question of a logical next step so much as an emotional one. Perhaps, as Nehru’s Law Minister Dr Ambedkar, the great, already almost mythical, leader of the untouchables, had asserted, Hinduism had nothing to offer those whom it had cast so pitilessly out of its fold. He had been born a Hindu, Dr Ambedkar had said, but he would not die a Hindu.

  Nine months after the murder of Gandhi, the constitutional provision abolishing untouchability was passed by the Constituent Assembly, and its members broke out into loud cheers of ‘Victory to Mahatma Gandhi’. However little the measure was to mean in practical as opposed to symbolic terms, Jagat Ram believed that the victory for its formulation lay less with Mahatma Gandhi, who rarely concerned himself with such legalisms, than with quite another—and equally courageous—man.

  15.6

  On the 2nd of October, which happened to be Gandhiji’s birthday, the Kapoor family met at Prem Nivas for lunch. A couple of other guests had dropped in and were invited to join them. One was Sandeep Lahiri, who had come to ask after Maan. The other was a politician from U.P., one of the secessionists from the Congress, who had rejoined, and was attempting to persuade Mahesh Kapoor to do the same.

  Maan arrived late. It was a public holiday, and he had spent the morning at the Riding Club playing polo with his friend. He was getting to be quite good at it. He hoped to spend the evening with Saeeda Bai. After all, the Moharram moon had not yet been sighted.

  The first thing he did when he saw everyone gathered
together was to praise Lata’s acting. Lata, feeling herself suddenly the centre of attention, blushed.

  ‘Don’t blush,’ said Maan. ‘No, blush away. I’m not flattering you. You were excellent. Bhaskar, of course, didn’t enjoy the play, but that wasn’t your fault. I thought it was wonderful. And Malati—she was brilliant too. And the Duke. And Malvolio. And Sir Toby of course.’

  Maan had spread his praise too liberally by now for it to make Lata uncomfortable. She laughed and said:

  ‘You’ve left out the third footman.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Maan. ‘And the fourth murderer.’

  ‘Why haven’t you come to the Ramlila, Maan Maama?’ asked Bhaskar.

  ‘Because it just began yesterday!’ said Maan.

  ‘But you’ve already missed Rama’s youth and training,’ said Bhaskar.

  ‘Oh, oh, sorry,’ said Maan.

  ‘You must come tonight, or I’ll be kutti with you.’

  ‘You can’t be kutti with your uncle,’ said Maan.

  ‘Yes, I can,’ said Bhaskar. ‘Today is the winning of Sita. The procession will go all the way from Khirkiwalan to Shahi Darvaza. And everyone will be out in the lanes celebrating.’

  ‘Yes, Maan, do—we’ll look forward to it,’ said Kedarnath. ‘And then have dinner with us afterwards.’

  ‘Well, tonight, I—’ Maan stopped, sensing that his father’s eyes were upon him. ‘I’ll come when the monkeys first appear in the Ramlila,’ he finished lamely, patting Bhaskar on the head. Bhaskar, he decided, was more monkey than frog.

  ‘Let me hold Uma,’ said Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, sensing that Savita was tired. She looked at the baby, trying to work out for the thousandth time which features belonged to her, which to her husband, which to Mrs Rupa Mehra and which to the photograph so often pulled out these days for reference, comparison or display from Mrs Rupa Mehra’s bag.

  Her own husband, meanwhile, was saying to Sandeep Lahiri: ‘I understand you got into trouble this time last year over some pictures of Gandhiji?’

  ‘Er, yes,’ said Sandeep. ‘One picture, actually. But, well, things have sorted themselves out.’

  ‘Sorted themselves out? Hasn’t Jha just managed to get rid of you?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been promoted—’

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s what I meant,’ said Mahesh Kapoor impatiently. ‘But you’re very popular with everyone in Rudhia. If you weren’t in the IAS, I’d have made you my agent. I’d win the elections easily.’

  ‘Are you thinking of standing from Rudhia?’ asked Sandeep.

  ‘I’m not thinking of anything at the moment,’ said Mahesh Kapoor. ‘Everyone else is doing my thinking for me. My son. And my grandson. And my friend the Nawab Sahib. And my Parliamentary Secretary. And Rafi Sahib. And the Chief Minister. And this most helpful gentleman,’ he added, indicating the politician, a short, quiet man who had shared a cell with Mahesh Kapoor many years ago.

  ‘I am only saying: We should all return to the party of Gandhiji,’ said the politician. ‘To change one’s party is not necessarily to change one’s principles—or to be unprincipled.’

  ‘Ah, Gandhiji,’ said Mahesh Kapoor, not willing to be drawn out. ‘He would have been eighty-two today, and a miserable man. He would never have reiterated his wish to live to be a hundred and twenty-five. As for his spirit, we feed it with laddus for one day of the year, and once we’ve performed his shraadh we forget all about him.’

  Suddenly he turned to his wife: ‘Why is he taking so long making the phulkas? Must we sit here with our stomachs rumbling till four o’clock? Instead of dandling that baby and making it howl, why don’t you get that halfwit cook to feed us?’

  Veena said, ‘I’ll go,’ to her mother and went towards the kitchen.

  Mrs Mahesh Kapoor once more bowed her head over the baby. She believed that Gandhiji was a saint, more than a saint, a martyr—and she could not bear that anything should be said about him in bitterness. Even now she loved to sing—or to hear sung—the songs from the anthology used in his Ashram. She had just bought three postcards issued by the Posts and Telegraph Department in his memory: one showed him spinning, one showed him with his wife Kasturba, one showed him with a child.

  But what her husband said was probably true. Thrust to the sidelines of power at the end of his active life, his message of generosity and reconciliation, it seemed, had been almost forgotten within four years of his death. She felt, however, that he would still have wanted to live. He had lived through times of desperate frustration before, and had borne it with patience. He was a good man, and a man without fear. Surely his fearlessness would have extended into the future.

  After lunch, the women went for a walk in the garden. It had been a warmer year than most, but this particular day had been relieved by a little morning rain. The ground was still slightly moist, and the garden fragrant. The pink madhumalati creeper was in bloom near the swing. Mixed with the earth beneath the harsingar tree lay many small white-and-orange flowers that had fallen at dawn; they still held a trace of their fugitive scent. A few gardenias remained on one of two sporadically bearing trees. Mrs Rupa Mehra—who had been singularly quiet during lunch—now held and rocked the baby, who had fallen fast asleep. She sat down on a bench by the harsingar tree. In Uma’s left ear was a most delicate vein that branched out into smaller and smaller ones in an exquisite pattern. Mrs Rupa Mehra looked at it for a while, then sighed.

  ‘There is no tree like the harsingar,’ she said to Mrs Mahesh Kapoor. ‘I wish we had one in our garden.’

  Mrs Mahesh Kapoor nodded. A modest, unhandsome tree by day, the harsingar became glorious at night, full of a delicate fragrance, surrounded by enchanted insects. The tiny, six-petalled flowers with their orange hearts wafted down at dawn. And tonight it would again be full, and the flowers would again float down as the sun rose. The tree flowered, but kept nothing for itself.

  ‘No,’ agreed Mrs Mahesh Kapoor with a grave smile. ‘There is no tree like it at all.’ After a pause she added: ‘I will have Gajraj plant a seedling in the back garden at Pran’s house, next to the lime tree. Then it will always be as old as Uma. And it should flower in two or three years at the most.’

  15.7

  When Bibbo saw the Nawabzada, she quickly thrust a letter into his hands.

  ‘How in heaven’s name did you know I would be coming here tonight? I wasn’t invited.’

  ‘No one can be uninvited tonight,’ said Bibbo. ‘I thought the Nawabzada might be alive to the opportunity.’

  Firoz laughed. Bibbo loved intrigue, and it was good for him that she did, because it would have been impossible otherwise for him to communicate with Tasneem. He had seen her only twice, but she fascinated him; and he felt that she must surely feel something for him, for although her letters were gentle and discreet, the very fact that she wrote them without her sister’s knowledge required courage.

  ‘And does the Nawabzada have a letter in exchange?’ asked Bibbo.

  ‘Indeed, I do; and something else besides,’ said Firoz, handing her a letter and a ten-rupee note.

  ‘Oh, but this is unnecessary—’

  ‘Yes, I know how unnecessary it is,’ said Firoz. ‘Who else is here?’ he continued. He spoke in a low voice. He could hear the sound of a lament being chanted upstairs.

  Bibbo reeled off a few names including that of Bilgrami Sahib. To Firoz’s surprise there were several Sunnis among them.

  ‘Sunnis too?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Bibbo. ‘Saeeda Begum does not discriminate. Even certain pious women attend—the Nawabzada will admit that that is unusual. And she does not permit any of those mischievous imprecations that mar the atmosphere of most gatherings.’

  ‘If that is the case I would have asked my friend Maan to come along,’ said Firoz.

  ‘No, no,’ said Bibbo, startled. ‘Dagh Sahib is a Hindu; that would never do. Id, yes, but Moharram—how would that be possible? It is a different matter altogether. Outdoor processions are open to ev
erybody, but one must discriminate somewhat for a private gathering.’

  ‘Anyway, he told me to give his love to the parakeet.’

  ‘Oh, that miserable creature—I would like to wring its neck,’ said Bibbo. Clearly some recent incident had reduced the bird’s lovability in her eyes.

  ‘And Maan—Dagh Sahib, I mean—also wondered—and I too am wondering—about this legend of Saeeda Begum quenching the thirst of travellers in the wilderness of Karbala with her own fair hands.’

  ‘The Nawabzada will be gratified to know that it is not a legend,’ said Bibbo, feeling a little annoyed that her mistress’s piety was being questioned, but then suddenly giving Firoz a smile as she remembered the ten-rupee note. ‘She stands at the corner of Khirkiwalan and Katra Mast on the day the tazias are brought out. Her mother, Mohsina Bai, used to do it, and she never fails to do it herself. Of course, you wouldn’t know it was her; she wears a burqa, naturally. But even when she is not well she keeps that post; she is a very devout lady. Some people think one thing precludes another.’

  ‘I do not doubt what you say,’ said Firoz seriously. ‘I did not mean to give offence.’

  Bibbo, delighted with such courtesy from the Nawabzada, said:

  ‘The Nawabzada is about to get a reward for his own religiosity.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘He will see for himself.’

  And so Firoz did. Unlike Maan, he did not pause to adjust his cap halfway up the stairs. No sooner had he entered the room where Saeeda Bai—in a dark-blue sari with not a jewel on her face or hands—was holding her session than he saw—or, rather, beheld—Tasneem sitting at the back of the room. She was dressed in a fawn-coloured salwaar-kameez. She looked as beautiful, as delicate as the first time he had seen her. Her eyes were filled with tears. The moment she saw Firoz she lowered them.