A Suitable Boy, Page 37

  He then got up, and walked rather wearily to the Assembly canteen. In the old days his wife used to send him a tiffin-carrier containing his simple food prepared exactly the way he liked it. Now he was at the mercy of indifferent cooks and their institutional cooking. There was a limit even to asceticism.

  As he walked along the curved corridor he was reminded of the presence of the central chamber that the corridors circumscribed—the huge, domed chamber whose height and majestic elegance made almost trivial the frenetic and partisan proceedings below. But his insight did not succeed, except momentarily, in detaching his mind from this morning’s events and the bitterness that they had aroused in him, nor did it make him regret in the least what he had been planning and preparing a few minutes ago.

  5.9

  Though it had been less than five minutes since he had sent off the peon to fetch his Parliamentary Secretary, Mahesh Kapoor was waiting in the Legal Remembrancer’s Office with great impatience. He was alone, as he had sent the regular occupants of the office scurrying about to get various papers and law-books.

  ‘Ah, Huzoor has brought his presence to the Secretariat at last!’ he said when he saw Abdus Salaam.

  Abdus Salaam did a respectful—or was it ironical?—adaab, and asked what he could do.

  ‘I’ll come to that in a moment. The question is what you’ve done already.’

  ‘Already?’ Abdus Salaam was nonplussed.

  ‘This morning. On the floor of the House. Making a kabab out of our honourable Home Minister.’

  ‘I only asked—’

  ‘I know what you only asked, Salaam,’ said his Minister with a smile. ‘I’m asking you why you asked it.’

  ‘I was wondering why the police—’

  ‘My good fool,’ said Mahesh Kapoor fondly, ‘don’t you realize that Lakshmi Narayan Agarwal thinks I put you up to it?’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes, me!’ Mahesh Kapoor was in good humour, thinking of this morning’s proceedings and his rival’s extreme discomfiture. ‘It’s exactly the kind of thing he would do—so he imagines the same of me. Tell me’—he went on—‘did he go to the canteen for lunch?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘And was the Chief Minister there? What did he have to say?’

  ‘No, Sharma Sahib was not there.’

  The image of S.S. Sharma eating lunch seated traditionally on the floor at home, his upper body bare except for his sacred thread, passed before Mahesh Kapoor’s eyes.

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ he said with some regret. ‘So, how did he appear?’

  ‘You mean Agarwal Sahib? Quite well, I think. Quite composed.’

  ‘Uff! You are a useless informant,’ said Mahesh Kapoor impatiently. ‘Anyway, I’ve been thinking a little about this. You had better mind what you say or you’ll make things difficult for both Agarwal and myself. At least restrain yourself until the Zamindari Bill has passed. Everyone needs everyone’s cooperation on that.’

  ‘All right, Minister Sahib.’

  ‘Speaking of which, why have these people not returned yet?’ asked Mahesh Kapoor, looking around the Legal Remembrancer’s Office. ‘I sent them out an hour ago.’ This was not quite true. ‘Everyone is always late and no one values time in this country. That’s our main problem. . . . Yes, what is it? Come in, come in,’ he continued, hearing a light knock at the door.

  It was a peon with his lunch, which he usually ate quite late.

  Opening his tiffin-carrier, Mahesh Kapoor spared half a moment’s thought for his wife, who, despite her own ailments, took such pains on his behalf. April in Brahmpur was almost unbearable for her because of her allergy to neem blossoms, and the problem had become increasingly acute over the years. Sometimes, when the neem trees were in flower, she was reduced to a breathlessness that superficially resembled Pran’s asthma.

  She was also very upset these days by her younger son’s affair with Saeeda Bai. So far, Mahesh Kapoor himself had not taken the matter as seriously as he would have had he realized the extent of Maan’s infatuation. He was far too busy with matters that affected the lives of millions to have much time to go into the more irksome regions of his own family life. Maan would have to be brought to heel sooner or later, he thought, but for the moment he had other work to attend to.

  ‘Have some of this: I suppose I’ve dragged you away from your lunch,’ said Mahesh Kapoor to his Parliamentary Secretary.

  ‘No, thank you, Minister Sahib, I’d finished when you sent for me. So do you think that everything is going well with the bill?’

  ‘Yes, basically—at least on the floor, wouldn’t you say? Now that it has come back from the Legislative Council with only a few minor changes, it shouldn’t be difficult to get it repassed in its amended form by the Legislative Assembly. Of course, nothing is certain.’ Mahesh Kapoor looked into his tiffin-carrier. After a while he went on: ‘Ah, good, cauliflower pickle. . . . What really concerns me is what is going to happen to the bill later, assuming that it passes.’

  ‘Well, legal challenges should not be much of a problem,’ said Abdus Salaam. ‘It’s been well drafted, and I think it should pass muster.’

  ‘You think so, do you, Salaam? What did you think about the Bihar Zamindari Act being struck down by the Patna High Court?’ demanded Mahesh Kapoor.

  ‘I think people are more worried than they need to be, Minister Sahib. As you know, the Brahmpur High Court does not have to follow the Patna High Court. It is only bound by the judgements of the Supreme Court in Delhi.’

  ‘That may be true in theory,’ said Mahesh Kapoor, frowning. ‘In practice, previous judgements set psychological precedents. We have got to find a way, even at this late stage in the passage of the bill, of amending it so that it will be less vulnerable to legal challenge—especially on this question of equal protection.’

  There was a pause for a while. The Minister had high regard for his scholarly young colleague, but did not hold out much hope that he would come up with something brilliant at short notice. But he respected his experience in this particular area and knew that his brains were the best that he could pick.

  ‘Something occurred to me a few days ago,’ said Abdus Salaam after a minute. ‘Let me think about it further, Minister Sahib. I might have a helpful idea or two.’

  The Revenue Minister looked at his Parliamentary Secretary with what might almost have been an amused expression, and said:

  ‘Give me a draft of your ideas by tonight.’

  ‘By tonight?’ Abdus Salaam looked astonished.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mahesh Kapoor. ‘The bill is going through its second reading. If anything is to be done, it must be done now.’

  ‘Well,’ said Abdus Salaam with a dazed look on his face, ‘I had better go off to the library at once.’ At the door he turned around and said, ‘Perhaps you could ask the Legal Remembrancer to send me a couple of people from his drafting cell later this afternoon. But won’t you need me on the floor this afternoon while the bill is being discussed?’

  ‘No, this is far more important,’ replied the Minister, getting up to wash his hands. ‘Besides, I think you’ve caused enough mischief for one day on the floor of the House.’

  As he washed his hands, Mahesh Kapoor thought about his old friend, the Nawab of Baitar. He would be one of those most deeply affected by the passage of the Zamindari Abolition Bill. His lands around Baitar in Rudhia District, from which he probably derived two-thirds of his income, would, if the act went into effect, be vested in the state of Purva Pradesh. He would not receive much compensation. The tenants would have the right to purchase the land they tilled, and until they did so their rents would go not into the coffers of the Nawab Sahib but directly into those of the Revenue Department of the State Government. Mahesh Kapoor believed, however, that he was doing the right thing. Although his was an urban constituency, he had lived on his own farm in Rudhia District long enough to see the immiserating effects of the zamindari system on the countryside all around him. With
his own eyes he had seen the lack of productivity and the consequent hunger, the absence of investment in land improvement, the worst forms of feudal arrogance and subservience, the arbitrary oppression of the weak and the miserable by the agents and musclemen of the typical landlord. If the lifestyle of a few good men like the Nawab Sahib had to be sacrificed for the greater good of millions of tenant farmers, it was a cost that had to be borne.

  Having washed his hands, Mahesh Kapoor dried them carefully, left a note for the Legal Remembrancer, and walked over to the Legislative Building.

  5.10

  The ancestral Baitar House, where the Nawab Sahib and his sons lived, was one of the most handsome buildings in Brahmpur. A long, pale yellow facade, dark-green shutters, colonnades, high ceilings, tall mirrors, immensely heavy dark furniture, chandeliers, oil portraits of previous aristocratic denizens and framed photographs along the corridors commemorating the visits of various high British officials: most visitors to the huge house, surveying their surroundings, succumbed to a kind of gloomy awe—reinforced in recent days by the dusty and uncared-for appearance of those large sections of the mansion the former occupants of which had left for Pakistan.

  Begum Abida Khan too used to live here once with her husband, the Nawab Sahib’s younger brother. She spent years chafing in the women’s quarters before she persuaded him to allow her more reasonable and direct access to the outside world. There she had proved to be more effective than him in social and political causes. With the coming of Partition, her husband—a firm supporter of that Partition—had realized how vulnerable his position was in Brahmpur and decided to leave. He went to Karachi at first. Then—partly because he was uncertain of the effect his settling in Pakistan might have on his Indian property and the fortunes of his wife, and partly because he was restless, and partly because he was religious—he went on to Iraq on a visit to the various holy shrines of the Shias, and decided to live there for a few years. Three years had passed since he had last returned to India, and no one knew what he planned to do. He and Abida were childless, so perhaps it did not greatly matter.

  The entire question of property rights was unsettled. Baitar was not—like Marh—a princely state subject to primogeniture but a large zamindari estate whose territory lay squarely within British India and was subject to the Muslim personal law of inheritance. Division of the property upon death or dissolution of the family was possible, but for generations now there had been no effective division, and almost everyone had continued to live in the same rambling house in Brahmpur or at Baitar Fort in the countryside, if not amicably, at least not litigiously. And owing to the constant bustle, the visiting, the festivals, the celebrations, in both the men’s and the women’s quarters it had had a grand atmosphere of energy and life.

  With Partition things had changed. The house was no longer the great community it had been. It had become, in many ways, lonely. Uncles and cousins had dispersed to Karachi or Lahore. Of the three brothers, one had died, one had gone away, and only that gentle widower, the Nawab Sahib, remained. He spent more and more of his time in his library reading Persian poetry or Roman history or whatever he felt inclined to on any particular day. He left most of the management of his country estate in Baitar—the source of most of his income—to his munshi. That crafty half-steward, half-clerk did not encourage him to spend much time going over his own zamindari affairs. For matters not related to his estate, the Nawab Sahib kept a private secretary.

  With the death of his wife and his own increasing years the Nawab Sahib had become less sociable, more aware of the approach of death. He wanted to spend more time with his sons, but they were now in their twenties, and inclined to treat their father with affectionate distance. Firoz’s law, Imtiaz’s medicine, their own circle of young friends, their love affairs (of which he heard little) all drew them outside the orbit of Baitar House. And his dear daughter Zainab visited only rarely—once every few months—whenever her husband allowed her and the Nawab Sahib’s two grandsons to come to Brahmpur.

  Sometimes he even missed the lightning-like presence of Abida, a woman of whose immodesty and forwardness the Nawab Sahib instinctively disapproved. Begum Abida Khan, MLA, had refused to abide by the strictures of the zenana quarters and the constraints of a mansion, and was now living in a small house closer to the Legislative Assembly. She believed in being aggressive and if necessary immodest in fighting for causes she considered just or useful, and she looked upon the Nawab Sahib as utterly ineffectual. Indeed, she did not have a very high opinion of her own husband who had, as she thought, ‘fled’ Brahmpur at Partition in a state of panic and was now crawling around the Middle East in a state of religious dotage. Because her niece Zainab—of whom she was fond—was visiting, she did pay a visit to Baitar House, but the purdah she was expected to maintain irked her, and so did the inevitable criticism of her style of life that she faced from the old women of the zenana.

  But who were these old women after all?—the repository of tradition and old affection and family history. Only two old aunts of the Nawab Sahib, and the widow of his other brother—no one else remained of that whole busy zenana. The only children in Baitar House were the two who were visiting, the six- and three-year-old grandchildren of the Nawab Sahib. They loved visiting Baitar House and Brahmpur because they found the huge old house exciting, because they could see mongooses sliding under the doors of locked and deserted rooms, because much was made of them by everyone from Firoz Mamu and Imtiaz Mamu to the ‘old servitors’ and the cooks. And because their mother seemed much happier here than at home.

  The Nawab Sahib did not at all like to be disturbed when he was reading, but he made more than an exception for his grandsons. Hassan and Abbas were given a free run of the house. No matter what mood he was in, they lifted it; and even when he was sunk in the impersonal comfort of history, he was happy to be brought back to the present world, as long as it was personally through them. Like the rest of the house, the library too was running to seed. The magnificent collection, built up by his father and incorporating additions by the three brothers—each with his different tastes—was housed in an equally magnificent alcoved and high-windowed room. The Nawab Sahib, wearing a freshly starched kurta-pyjama—with a few small squarish holes in the kurta which looked a bit like moth-holes (but what moth would bite quite so squarely?)—was seated this morning at a round table in one of the alcoves, reading The Marginal Notes of Lord Macaulay selected by his nephew G.O. Trevelyan.

  Macaulay’s comments on Shakespeare, Plato and Cicero were as trenchant as they were discriminating, and the editor clearly believed that the marginalia of his distinguished uncle were well worth publishing. His own remarks were openly admiring: ‘Even for Cicero’s poetry Macaulay had enough respect to distinguish carefully between the bad and the less bad,’ was one sentence that drew a mild smile from the Nawab Sahib.

  But what, after all, thought the Nawab Sahib, is worth doing, and what is not? For people like me at least things are in decline, and I do not feel it worth my while consuming the rest of my life fighting politicians or tenants or silverfish or my son-in-law or Abida to preserve and maintain worlds that I find exhausting to preserve or maintain. Each of us lives in a small domain and returns to nothing. I suppose if I had a distinguished uncle I might spend a year or two collating and printing his marginal notes.

  And he fell to musing about how Baitar House would eventually fall into ruin with the abolition of zamindari and the exhaustion of funds from the estate. Already it was becoming difficult, according to his munshi, to extract the standard rent from the tenants. They pleaded hard times, but underneath the pleas was the sense that the political equations of ownership and dependence were inexorably shifting. Among those who were most vocal against the Nawab Sahib were some whom he had treated with exceptional leniency, even generosity, in the past, and who found this difficult to forgive.

  What would survive him? It occurred to him that although he had dabbled in Urdu poetry much of his
life, he had never written a single poem, a single couplet, that would be remembered. Those who do not live in Brahmpur decry the poetry of Mast, he thought, but they can complete in their sleep many of the ghazals he has written. It struck him, with a start, that there had never been a truly scholarly edition of the poems of Mast, and he began to stare at the motes in the beam of sunlight that fell on his table.

  Perhaps, he said to himself, this is the labour that I am best fitted for at this stage of things. At any rate, it is probably what I would most enjoy.

  He read on, savouring the insight with which Macaulay unsparingly analysed the character of Cicero, a man taken over by the aristocracy into which he had been adopted, two-faced, eaten up by vanity and hatred, yet undoubtedly ‘great’. The Nawab Sahib, who thought much of death these days, was startled by Macaulay’s remark: ‘I really think that he met with little more than his deserts from the Triumvirs.’

  Despite the fact that the book had been dusted with a white preservative powder, a silverfish crawled out of the spine and scuttled across the band of sunlight on the round table. The Nawab Sahib looked at it for an instant, and wondered what had happened to the young man who had sounded so enthusiastic about taking charge of his library. He had said he would come over to Baitar House but that had been the last that the Nawab Sahib had heard of him—and it must have been at least a month ago. He shut the book and shook it, opened it again on a random page, and continued reading as if the new paragraph had led directly on from the previous one:

  The document which he most admired in the whole collection of the correspondence was Caesar’s answer to Cicero’s message of gratitude for the humanity which the conqueror had displayed towards those political adversaries who had fallen into his power at the surrender of Corfinium. It contained (so Macaulay used to say) the finest sentence ever written:

  ‘I triumph and rejoice that my action should have obtained your approval; nor am I disturbed when I hear it said that those whom I have sent off alive and free will again bear arms against me; for there is nothing which I so much covet as that I should be like myself, and they like themselves.’