A Suitable Boy

  But now, to a background of cheers and jeers and shouts, Kabir faced the final over. He hit a grand cover drive for four, lofted the next ball just over long on for another, and faced the third ball to a complete and petrified silence from spectators of both sides alike.

  It was a good-length ball. He hit it towards mid-wicket, but the moment he realized it was only worth a single, he waved his partner urgently back.

  They ran two on the next ball.

  It was now the last ball but one, with five runs to tie and six to win. No one dared to breathe. No one had the least idea of what Kabir was aiming to do—or the bowler for that matter. Kabir passed his gloved hand through his wavy hair. Pran thought he looked unnaturally calm at the crease.

  Perhaps the bowler had succumbed to his tension and frustration, for amazingly enough his next ball was a full-toss. Kabir, with a smile on his face and happiness in his heart, hit it high in the air with all the force he could muster, and watched it as it sailed in a serene parabola towards victory.

  High, high, high it rose in the air, carrying with it all the joy and hopes and blessings of the university. A murmur, not yet a cheer, arose all around, and then swelled into a shout of triumph.

  But, as Kabir watched, a dreadful thing happened. For Maan, who too had been watching the red grenade ascend and then descend, and whose mouth was open in an expression of trance-like dismay, suddenly found himself at the very edge of the boundary, almost leaning backwards. And, to his considerable amazement, the ball lay in his hands.

  The cheer became a sudden silence, then a great collective groan, to be replaced by an amazed shout of victory by the Old Brahmpurians. A finger moved skywards. The bails were taken off. The players stood dazed in the field, shaking hands and shaking heads. And Maan somersaulted five times for sheer joy in the direction of the spectators.

  What a goof! thought Lata, watching Maan. Perhaps I should elope with him next April 1st.

  ‘How’s that? How’s that? How’s that?’ Maan asked Firoz, hugging him, then rushed back to his team to be applauded as the hero of the day.

  Firoz noticed Savita raise her eyebrows. He raised his eyebrows back at her; he wondered what she had made of the soporific climax.

  ‘Still awake—just about,’ Savita said, smiling at Pran as he came off the field a few minutes later.

  A nice fellow—plucky under pressure, thought Pran, watching Kabir detach himself from his friends and walk towards them, his bat under his arm. A pity. . . .

  ‘Fluke of a catch,’ murmured Kabir disgustedly, almost under his breath, as he passed Lata on his way back to the pavilion.

  15.20

  The Hindu festive season was almost over. But for Brahmpur one festival, observed much more devotedly here than almost anywhere in India, that of Kartik Purnima, remained. The full moon of Kartik brings to an end one of the three especially sacred months for bathing; and since Brahmpur lies on the holiest river of all, many pious people observe their daily dip throughout the month, eat their single meal, worship the tulsi plant, and hang lamps suspended from the end of bamboo poles in small baskets to guide departed souls across the sky. As the Puranas say: ‘What fruit was obtained in the Perfect Age by doing austerities for one hundred years, all that is obtained by a bath in the Five Rivers during the month of Kartik.’

  It is of course also possible that the city of Brahmpur could be said to have a special claim on this festival because of the god whose name the city bears. A seventeenth century commentator on the Mahabharata wrote: ‘Brahma’s festival is celebrated by all, and is held in autumn when the corn has begun to grow.’ Certainly in Pushkar, the greatest living shrine to Brahma in all India (indeed, the only one of any great significance other than Gaya and—possibly—Brahmpur), it is Kartik Purnima that is the time of the great camel fair and the visit of tens of thousands of pilgrims. The image of Brahma in the great temple there is daubed with orange paint and decorated with tinsel by his devotees in the manner of other gods. Perhaps the strong observance of the festival in Brahmpur is a residue of the time when Brahma was worshipped here too, in his own city, as a bhakti god, a god of personal devotion, before he was displaced in this role by Shiva—or by Vishnu in one or other of his incarnations.

  A residue is all it is, however, because for most of the year one would not suspect Brahma to be a presence in Brahmpur at all. It is his rivals—or colleagues—of the trinity who hold the limelight. The Pul Mela or the Chandrachur Temple speak of the power of Shiva, whether as the source of the Ganga or as the great sensual ascetic symbolized by the linga. As for Vishnu: the notable presence of numerous Krishna devotees (such as Sanaki Baba) and the fervent celebration (by those like Mrs Mahesh Kapoor) of Janamashtami bear witness to his presence as Krishna; and his presence as Rama is unmistakable not only during Ramnavami early in the year but during the nine nights culminating in Dussehra, when Brahmpur is part of an island of Rama worship in a sea of goddess worship that extends from Bengal to Gujarat.

  Why Brahma, the Self-Created or Egg-born, the overseer of sacrifice, the Supreme Creator, the old four-faced god who set in motion the triple world, should have suffered eclipse over the centuries is unclear. At one time even Shiva is shown cringing in the Mahabharata before him; and it is from a common root with Brahma himself that the words not only for ‘brahmin’ but also for ‘brahman’, the world-soul, derive. But by the time of the late Puranas, not to mention modern times, his influence had waned to a shadow.

  Perhaps it was because—unlike Shiva or Rama or Krishna or Durga or Kali—he was never associated with youth or beauty or terror, those well-springs of personal devotion. Perhaps it was because he was too far above suffering and yearning to satisfy the longing of the heart for an identifiably human ideal or intercessor—one perhaps who had come down to earth to suffer with the rest of mankind in order that righteousness might be established. Perhaps it was because certain myths surrounding him—for instance his creation of mankind by intercourse with his own daughter—were too difficult to accept by a constant following over long ages and changing mores.

  Or perhaps it was that, refusing to be turned on and off like a tap by requests for intercession, Brahma at last refused to deliver what was asked of him by millions of upraised hands, and therefore fell out of favour. It is rare for religious feeling to be entirely transcendent, and Hindus as much as anyone else, perhaps more so, are eager for terrestrial, not merely post-terrestrial, blessings. We want specific results, whether to cure a child of disease or to guarantee his IAS results, whether to ensure the birth of a son or to find a suitable match for a daughter. We go to a temple to be blessed by our chosen deity before a journey, and have our account books sanctified by Kali or Saraswati. At Divali, the words ‘shubh laabh’—auspicious profit—are seen on the walls of every newly whitewashed shop; while Lakshmi, the presiding goddess, smiles from a poster as she sits on her lotus, serene and beautiful, dispensing gold coins from one of her four arms.

  It must be admitted that there are those, mainly Shaivites and Vaishnavites, who claim that Brahmpur has nothing to do with the god Brahma at all—that the name is a corruption of Bahrampur or Brahminpur or Berhampur or some other such name, whether Islamic or Hindu. But for one reason or another these theories may be discarded. The evidence of coins, of inscriptions, of historical records and travellers’ accounts from Hsuen Tsang to Al-Biruni, from Babur to Tavernier, not to mention those of British travellers, provide ample evidence of the ancient name of the city.

  It should be mentioned in passing that the spelling Brumpore, which the British insisted on imposing on the city, was converted back to its more phonetic transcription when the name of the state itself was changed to Purva Pradesh under the Protected Provinces (Alteration of Name) Order, 1949, which came into operation a few months before the commencement of the Constitution. The spelling Brumpore was the source, however, of not a few errors by amateur etymologists during the two centuries of its prevalence.

  There are ev
en a few misguided souls who assert that the name Brahmpur is a variant of Bhrampur—the city of illusion or error. But the proper response to this hypothesis is that there are always people willing to believe anything, however implausible, merely in order to be contrary.

  15.21

  ‘Pran darling, please turn off that light.’

  The switch was near the door.

  Pran yawned. ‘Oh, I’m too sleepy,’ was his response.

  ‘But I can’t sleep with it on,’ said Savita.

  ‘What if I had been sitting in the other room, working late? Wouldn’t you have been able to do it yourself?’

  ‘Yes, of course, darling,’ yawned Savita, ‘but you’re closer to the door.’

  Pran got out of bed, switched off the light, and staggered back.

  ‘The moment Pran darling appears,’ he said, ‘a use is found for him.’

  ‘Pran, you’re so lovable,’ said Savita.

  ‘Of course! Anyone would be who dances attendance. But when Malati Trivedi finds me lovable. . . .’

  ‘As long as you don’t find her lovable. . . .’

  And they drifted off to sleep.

  At two in the morning the phone rang.

  The insistent double ring pierced their dreams. Pran woke up with a shock. The baby woke up and started crying. Savita hushed her.

  ‘Good heavens! Who could that be?’ cried Savita, startled. ‘It’ll wake up the whole house—at—what’s the time?—I hope it’s nothing serious—’

  Pran had stumbled out of the room.

  ‘Hello?’ he said, picking up the receiver. ‘Hello, Pran Kapoor here.’

  There was the sound of thick breathing at the other end. Then a voice rasped out:

  ‘Good! This is Marh.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Pran, trying to keep his voice low. Savita had got out of bed. He shook his head to reassure her that it was nothing serious and when she returned to bed he closed the dining room door.

  ‘This is Marh! The Raja of Marh.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I understand. Yes, Your Highness, what can I do for you?’

  ‘You know exactly what you can do for me.’

  ‘I am sorry, Your Highness, but if this is about your son’s expulsion, there’s nothing I can tell you. You’ve received a letter from the university—’

  ‘You—you—do you know who I am?’

  ‘Perfectly, Your Highness. Now it is somewhat late—’

  ‘You listen to me, if you don’t want something to happen to you—or to someone who matters to you. You rescind that order.’

  ‘Your Highness, I—’

  ‘Just because of some prank—and I know that your brother is just as—my son tells me he turned him upside down and shook the money out of his pockets when he was gambling—you tell your brother—and your land-robbing father—’

  ‘My father?’

  ‘Your whole family needs to be taught a lesson—’

  The baby started to cry again. A note of fury appeared in the voice of the Raja of Marh.

  ‘Is that your baby?’

  Pran was silent.

  ‘Did you hear me?’

  ‘Your Highness, I would like to forget this conversation. But if you phone me up again at this hour without cause, or if I receive any further threats from you, I will have to report the matter to the police.’

  ‘Without cause?—you expel my son for a prank—’

  ‘Your Highness, this was not some prank. The university authorities made the facts quite clear in their letter to you. Taking part in a communal riot is not a prank. Your son is lucky that he is still alive and out of jail.’

  ‘He must graduate. He must. He has bathed in the Ganga—he is now a snaatak.’

  ‘That was somewhat premature,’ Pran said, trying to keep the scorn out of his voice. ‘And your distress on that count cannot be expected to outweigh the decision of the committee. Goodnight, Your Highness.’

  ‘Not so quick! You listen to me now—I know you voted to expel him.’

  ‘That is neither here nor there, Your Highness—I saved him from trouble once before, but—’

  ‘It is very much here and there. When my temple is completed—do you know that it will be my son, my son whom you are trying to martyr, who will lead the ceremonies—and that the wrath of Shiva—’

  Pran put down the phone. He sat down at the dining table for a minute or two, staring at it and shaking his head.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Savita when he returned to bed.

  ‘Oh, no one, some lunatic who wanted to get his son admitted to the university,’ said Pran.

  15.22

  The Congress Party was hard at work selecting its candidates. Throughout October and November the State Election Committees worked on, while festivals came and went, and disturbances erupted and subsided, and white-and-orange blossoms floated down from their twigs at dawn.

  District by district they selected those they believed should be given Congress tickets for the Legislative Assemblies and for Parliament. In Purva Pradesh the well-packed committee guided by L.N. Agarwal did its best to keep the so-called seceders out of the running. They used every ploy imaginable—procedural, technical, and personal—in order to do so. With an average of six applicants for every ticket, there were grounds enough to tilt a decision towards candidates of one’s own political persuasion without creating obvious evidence of bias. The board worked hard, and to good effect. It sat for ten hours a day for weeks on end. It balanced caste and local standing, money power and years spent in British jails. Most of all it considered whose faction a particular applicant belonged to and the chances of his (or, rarely, her) electoral success. L.N. Agarwal was well satisfied with the list. So was S.S. Sharma, who was happy to see the popular Mahesh Kapoor back but keen that he should not rejoin with too long a tail of followers.

  Finally, with an eye towards the approval of the Prime Minister and the committees in Delhi which would screen their list, the P.P. Election Committee made a token gesture towards the seceders by inviting three of their representatives (among them Mahesh Kapoor) to the last two days of their meetings. When the seceders saw the list prepared by the committee, they were appalled. It contained almost no one from their group. Even sitting MLAs had been dropped as candidates if they belonged to the minority faction. Mahesh Kapoor himself had been deprived of his urban constituency and told that he could not have Rudhia either—it had been promised to a Member of Parliament who was returning to the state to rejoin the Legislative Assembly. If Mahesh Kapoor had not left the Congress (so the committee said) they would not have given his seat away; but by the time he rejoined the party it was too late, and they could do nothing. But instead of forcing him to accept a seat of their choosing, they would be accommodating and allow him a choice of the few seats still unsettled.

  The three representatives of the seceders walked out of the meeting in disgust on the morning of the second day. They said that these meetings at the tail-end of the selection process, held in a hostile and partisan spirit when the list was almost complete, had been a waste of time—a farce aimed at duping Delhi into believing that they had been consulted. The election board for its part issued its own statement to the press, stating that it had sought the seceders’ opinions earnestly and in a spirit of reconciliation. The board had ‘given them every opportunity for cooperation and advice’.

  It was not merely the seceders who were disgruntled. For every man or woman selected, there were five others who had had to be rejected, and many of them made haste to smear the names of their rivals before the scrutiny committees that met in Delhi to examine the lists.

  The seceders too took their case to Delhi; there the bitterness continued. Nehru, among others, was almost sickened by the naked desire for power, the willingness to injure, and the unconcern for the effect on the party itself, that characterized the process of scrutiny and appeal. The Congress offices in Delhi were besieged by all manner of applicants and supporters who thrust petitions into influenti
al hands and flung mud promiscuously about them. Even old and trusted Congress workers, who had spent years in jail, and had sacrificed everything for their country, now grovelled before junior clerks in the election office in an attempt to get a seat.

  Nehru was on the side of the seceders, but the entire business had grown to be so filthy with ego, greed and ambition that his fastidiousness prevented him from championing them properly, from entering the gutter to wrestle with the entrenched powers in the state machines. The seceders grew alarmed and optimistic by turns. Sometimes it appeared to them that Nehru, exhausted by his earlier battle, would be happy to leave politics altogether and retire into his roses and reading. At other times Nehru tilted furiously at the state lists. At one point it appeared that an alternative list presented by the seceders from Purva Pradesh would actually displace the official list submitted by the State Election Committee. But after a talk with S.S. Sharma, Nehru changed his mind once again. Sharma, that wise psychologist, had offered to accept the unwelcome list and even to campaign for it if that was what Nehru wanted, but he begged in that case to be relieved of the office of Chief Minister or any other office in Government. This, as Nehru realized, would never do. Without S.S. Sharma’s personal following and his adroitness at coalition-building and campaigning, the Congress Party in Purva Pradesh would be in deep trouble.

  So factious and prolonged had been the selection of candidates at every stage that the Congress Party lists were finalized in Delhi just two days before the deadline for the filing of nominations in Purva Pradesh. Jeeps rushed around the countryside, telegraph wires hummed frantically, candidates rushed about in a panic from Delhi to Brahmpur or from Brahmpur to their allotted constituencies. Two of them even missed the deadline, one because his supporters were so keen to smother him with marigold garlands along his route to the station that he missed his train. The other entered the wrong government offices twice before he finally found the correct one and rushed inside, waving his nomination papers. It was two minutes past the deadline of three o’clock. He burst into tears.