A Suitable Boy, Page 86

  Since it was in part a cloth shop, Maan was mildly interested to see how it was run. He noticed that there were no customers.

  ‘Why is there so little business here today?’ asked Maan.

  ‘Market day—very little activity in any of the shops,’ said the goldsmith. ‘Just the occasional yokel from out of town. That’s why I’ve deserted my own. Anyway, I can keep an eye on it from here.’

  To the shopkeeper he remarked: ‘What is the SDO from Rudhia subdivision doing here in Salimpur today?’

  Netaji, who had been lying as still as a corpse, suddenly perked up when he heard ‘SDO’. Salimpur had its own SDO, who was in effect administrative prince of this fief. A visit from a Sub-Divisional Officer of a different subdivision was news indeed.

  ‘It must be the archives,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘I heard someone saying that someone was being sent over from somewhere to look at them.’

  ‘You donkey,’ said Netaji, before falling back exhausted on to the bench, ‘it’s nothing to do with the archives. It has to do with coordinating the process of notification in the various subdivisions once the Zamindari Act comes into force.’

  In fact Netaji had no idea why the SDO was in town. But he decided immediately to make it his business to meet him.

  A spindly schoolteacher also dropped in for a few minutes, made the sarcastic comment that he did not have the whole day to spend in idle chatter like some people he knew, looked at the prone figure of Netaji with contempt, frowned slightly and quizzically at Maan, and left.

  ‘Where’s the guppi?’ the Bear asked suddenly. No one knew. He had disappeared. He was found a few minutes later, staring in slack-jawed fascination at a display of bottles and pills that an aged quack doctor had arranged in a semicircle in the middle of the street. A crowd had gathered, and was listening to the quack’s patter as he held up a bottle containing an opaque and viscous lime-green liquid:

  ‘And this amazing medicine, truly a panacea, was given to me by Tajuddin, a great baba, and very close to God. He spent twelve years in the jungles of Nagpur, eating nothing—he just chewed leaves for their moisture, and kept a stone against his stomach for food. His muscles rotted, his blood dried, his flesh wasted away. He was mere bone and black skin. Then Allah said to two angels, “Go down and give him my salaams”—’

  The guppi, who was staring open-mouthed and listening with absolute conviction to this nonsense, almost had to be dragged away from the scene and back into the shop by the Bear.

  10.2

  As the tea, paan and newspaper went around, the conversation turned to politics at the state level, especially the recent communal troubles in Brahmpur. The prime object of hatred was the Home Minister, L.N. Agarwal, whose defence of the police firing on the Muslim mob near the Alamgiri Masjid had been widely reported in the newspapers—and who was known to be a strong supporter of the construction—or, as he would have had it, reconstruction—of the Shiva Temple. Rhymed slogans such as the following, which were popular in Brahmpur among the Muslims, had found their way to Salimpur and were repeated with relish:

  Saanp ka zahar, insaan ki khaal:

  Yeh hai L.N. Agarwal!

  The poison of a snake, the skin of a man:

  This is L.N. Agarwal!

  Ghar ko loot kar kha gaya maal:

  Home Minister Agarwal!

  He robbed our Home, and devoured our substance:

  Home Minister Agarwal!

  This might have been a reference to his ‘cold steel’ order, under which overzealous policemen had confiscated not merely axes and spears but even household knives, or it might have referred to the fact that L.N. Agarwal, being a member of the Hindu shopkeeping community, was the most important collector of funds for the Congress Party of Purva Pradesh. His origins were also referred to slightingly in the following slogan:

  L.N. Agarwal, wapas jao,

  Baniye ki dukaan chalao!

  L.N. Agarwal, go back,

  Go and run your bania’s shop!

  The walls, however, might have echoed the uproarious laughter that greeted this final couplet at the expense of the laughers themselves. For it was taking place in a shop, and Maan, being a khatri, was no stranger to trade.

  In sharp contrast to L.N. Agarwal, Mahesh Kapoor, though a Hindu, was well known for his tolerance towards other religions—his wife would have said that the only religion he was intolerant towards was his own—and was liked and respected among knowledgeable Muslims. This was why, for example, when Maan and Rasheed first met, Rasheed had been well disposed towards him. He now said to Maan:

  ‘If it were not for people like Nehru at the national level, or your father at the state level, the situation of the Muslims would be even worse than it is.’

  Maan, who was not feeling particularly well disposed towards his father, shrugged.

  Rasheed wondered why Maan was being so inexpressive. Perhaps, he thought, it was the way he had put it. He had used the words ‘the situation of the Muslims’ rather than ‘our situation’ not because he did not feel a part of his community, but because he examined even an issue as close to his heart as this through almost academically balanced categories. It was his constant habit to try to make objective sense of the world, but of late—especially since his rooftop discussion with his father—he felt more and more disgusted by it. He had hated his own deception—or perhaps prevarication—with the patwari, but knew that he had had no alternative. Had the patwari believed that Rasheed’s family was not behind him, nothing would have protected Kachheru’s right to his land.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ said Netaji, sitting up and speaking in as leader-like a voice as his nickname required. ‘We must get ourselves together. We have to work together for the good of things. We must get things off their feet. And if the old leaders are discredited, it requires young men—young men like—like we have all around us—who know how to get things done, of course. Doers, not impractical dreamers. Those who know the people, the top people of every subdivision. Now everyone respects my father, he may have known the people who mattered in his day, I don’t deny that. But his day is, everyone will agree, now almost over. It is not enough to—’

  But what it was not enough to do went unheard. The loudspeaker cart advertising Ease-for-the-Soul Hair Oil, which had been quiescent for a few minutes, now suddenly blared out its ear-splitting melodies from directly outside the shop. The din was so deafening—far worse than it had been in its earlier location—that they had to clap their hands to their ears. Poor Netaji went almost green and clutched his head in agony, and they all poured into the street to suppress the nuisance. But just at that moment Netaji noticed in the crowd a tall figure with an unfamiliar, rather weak-chinned young face under a pith helmet. The SDO from Rudhia—for Netaji with his unerring antennae knew instantly who this must be—looked disdainfully towards the source of the sound before being guided swiftly away by two policemen through the crowd and towards the railway station.

  As the three heads (one turban on each side of the sola topi) bobbed through the crowd and disappeared, Netaji clutched at his moustache in panic at losing his quarry. ‘To the station, to the station!’ he screamed, forgetting his headache, and with such desperate urgency that even the loudspeaker could not stifle his cry. ‘The train, the train, you will all miss your train. Grab your bags and run! Hurry! Hurry!’

  All this was said with such conviction that no one questioned Netaji’s authority or information. Pushing their way through the crowd, sweating and yelling, cursing and being cursed by turns, the convoy arrived at Salimpur Station in ten minutes. There they found that the train was not due for another hour.

  The Bear turned with some annoyance towards Netaji. ‘Why did you rush us like that?’ he asked.

  Netaji had been looking up and down the platform anxiously. Now suddenly his face broke into a smile.

  The Bear frowned. Cocking his head gently to one side he looked at Netaji and said:

  ‘Well, why?’
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br />   ‘What? What did you say?’ asked Netaji. He had just noticed the sola topi at the far end of the platform, near the stationmaster’s office.

  But the Bear, annoyed, and annoyed that he was annoyed, had turned away.

  Netaji, his lust for a new contact aroused, now collared Maan and virtually frog-marched him towards the other end of the platform. Maan was so astonished that he didn’t even protest.

  With unembarrassed aplomb Netaji went straight up to the young SDO and said:

  ‘SDO Sahib, I am so pleased to meet you. And so honoured. I say this from the bottom of my heart.’

  The weak-chinned face under the sola topi looked at him in displeased puzzlement.

  ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’ The SDO’s Hindi, though tolerable, had a Bengali intonation.

  Netaji continued: ‘But, SDO Sahib, how can you say that? The question is how I can be of service to you. You are our guest in Salimpur tehsil. I am the son of a zamindar of Debaria village. My name is Tahir Ahmed Khan. The name is known here: Tahir Ahmed Khan. I am a youth organizer for the Congress Party.’

  ‘Good. Glad to meet you,’ said the SDO in a voice that was utterly unglad.

  Netaji’s heart did not sink at this lack of enthusiasm. He now produced his trump card.

  ‘And this is my good friend, Maan Kapoor,’ he said with a flourish, nudging Maan forward. Maan looked rather sullen.

  ‘Good,’ said the SDO, as unenthusiastically as before. Then a slow frown crossed his face and he said, ‘I think I have met you somewhere before.’

  ‘Oh, but this is the son of Mahesh Kapoor, our Revenue Minister!’ said Netaji with aggressive obsequiousness.

  The SDO looked surprised. Then he frowned again in concentration. ‘Ah yes! We met very briefly, I believe, at your father’s place about a year ago,’ he said in a fairly amiable voice, speaking now in English and, as a result, unintentionally cutting Netaji out of the conversation. ‘You have a place near Rudhia too, don’t you? Near the town, that is.’

  ‘Yes, my father has a farm there. In fact, coming to think of it, I should be visiting it one of these days,’ said Maan, suddenly remembering his father’s instructions.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ asked the SDO.

  ‘Oh, nothing much, just visiting a friend,’ said Maan. Then, after a pause, he added: ‘A friend who is standing at the other end of the platform.’

  The SDO smiled weakly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m off to Rudhia later today, and if you want to go to your father’s farm and don’t mind a very bumpy ride in my jeep, you’re most welcome to come with me. I have to do a bit of wolf-hunting myself: an activity, I should add, for which I am utterly untrained and unfit. But because I’m the SDO I have to be seen to be handling the menace myself.’

  Maan’s eyes lit up. ‘Wolf-hunting?’ he said. ‘Do you really mean that?’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said the SDO. ‘Tomorrow morning is when we go. Are you fond of hunting? Would you care to come along?’

  ‘That would be wonderful,’ said Maan with great enthusiasm. ‘But I don’t have anything except kurta-pyjamas to wear.’

  ‘Oh, I should think we could get you togged up if necessary,’ said the SDO. ‘Anyway, it’s nothing formal—just a beat to try to flush out a few man-eating wolves that have been bothering some villages in my subdivision.’

  ‘Well, I’ll speak to my friend,’ said Maan. He realized that fortune had delivered him three gifts simultaneously: the chance to do something he loved, the release from a journey he did not wish to make, and a responsible excuse for effecting that release.

  He looked at his unexpected benefactor in the friendliest way and said: ‘I’ll just be back. But I don’t think you mentioned your name.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, you’re quite right. I am Sandeep Lahiri,’ said the SDO, shaking Maan’s hand warmly and entirely ignoring the injured and fuming Netaji.

  10.3

  Rasheed was not unhappy that Maan could not come with him to his wife’s village, and was glad to see how enthusiastic Maan was to go to his father’s farm.

  The SDO was pleased to have company. He and Maan agreed to meet in a couple of hours. After he had finished some work at Salimpur Station—involving a consignment of vaccines for an inoculation programme in the area—Sandeep Lahiri sat down in the stationmaster’s office and pulled Howards End out of his bag. He was still reading it when Maan found him there. They set out almost immediately.

  The jeep ride southwards was as bumpy as Sandeep Lahiri had promised, and very dusty as well. The driver and a policeman sat in front, and Maan and the SDO at the back. They did not talk much.

  ‘It really does work,’ said Sandeep at one point, taking off his sola topi and looking at it with appreciation. ‘I never believed it until I started work here. I always thought that it was part of the mindless uniform of the pukka sahib.’

  At another point he told Maan a few demographic details about his subdivision: what percentage of Muslims, Hindus and so on there were. The details immediately slipped out of Maan’s mind.

  Sandeep Lahiri had a pleasant, rather tentative way of producing his occasional, well-rounded sentences, and Maan took a liking to him.

  This liking increased when, at his bungalow that evening, he became more expansive. Although Maan was a Minister’s son, Sandeep made no bones about his dislike of the politicians in his own subdivision and the way they interfered with his work. Since he was the judicial as well as the executive head of his subdivision—separation of powers had not yet been fully realized in Purva Pradesh—he had more work than a human being could be expected to handle. In addition, there were all kinds of emergencies that cropped up: like the wolves or an epidemic or the visit of a political bigwig who insisted on being shepherded around by the SDO himself. Strangely enough, it was not his local MLA who gave Sandeep Lahiri the most trouble but a member of the Legislative Council whose home was in this area and who treated it as his private domain.

  This man, Maan learned over a nimbu pani laced with gin, saw the SDO as a competitor to his influence. If the SDO was compliant and consulted him on everything, he was content. If the SDO showed any independence, he tried quickly to bring him to heel.

  ‘The problem is,’ said Sandeep Lahiri with a rueful glance at his guest, ‘that Jha is an important Congressman—the Chairman of the Legislative Council and a friend of the Chief Minister. Nor does he miss an opportunity to remind me of this. He also reminds me periodically that he is more than twice my age and embodies what he calls “the wisdom of the people”. Oh well. In some respects he’s quite right, of course. Within eighteen months of appointment we’re put in charge of an area of half a million people—handling revenue work and criminal work, quite apart from keeping law and order and managing the general welfare of the subdivision and acting as father and mother of the population. No wonder he feels annoyed whenever he sees me, fresh from my training at Metcalfe House and my six months’ field experience in some other district. Another?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘This bill of your father’s is going to make a vast amount of additional work for us, you know,’ said Sandeep Lahiri a little later. ‘But it’s a good thing, I suppose.’ He sounded unconvinced. ‘Oh, it’s almost time for the news.’ He went over to his sideboard, on which rested a large radio in a handsome polished wooden cabinet. It had a great many white dials.

  He turned it on. A big green valve-light slowly began to glow and the sound of a male voice singing an evening raag gradually filled the room. It was Ustad Majeed Khan. With a grimace of instinctive distaste Sandeep Lahiri turned the volume down.

  ‘Well,’ he said to Maan, ‘I’m afraid there’s no getting around this stuff. It’s the price of the news, and I pay it for a minute or two every day. Why can’t they put on something listenable, like Mozart or Beethoven?’

  Maan, who had heard western classical music perhaps three times in his life, and had not enjoyed the experience, said:

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bsp; ‘Oh, I don’t know. Most people here wouldn’t enjoy it.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ said Sandeep. ‘I feel they would. Good music is good music. It’s just a question of exposure, I feel. Exposure, and a little bit of guidance.’

  Maan looked doubtful.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Sandeep Lahiri, ‘I’m sure they don’t enjoy this awful stuff. What they really want is film songs, which All India Radio will never give them. As for me, if it weren’t for the BBC, I don’t know what I’d do out here.’

  But as if in response to these remarks a series of pips now sounded and a distinctly Indian voice with a distinctly British veneer announced:

  ‘This is All India Radio. . . . The news, read by Mohit Bose.’

  10.4

  The next morning they drove out for the hunt.

  A few cattle were being herded along the road. When they saw the white jeep approach at high speed they scattered in alarm. As the jeep came closer, the driver leaned on the horn for a good twenty seconds, increasing their panic. When it passed them it raised a great cloud of dust. The herdboys coughed in admiration: they recognized the jeep as the SDO’s. It was the only motor vehicle on the road, and the driver raced along as if he were absolute king of the highway. Not that the road was a highway exactly: it was a fairly solid dirt road, which might be more difficult to negotiate once the monsoon broke, but was fine for the present.

  Sandeep had lent Maan a pair of khaki shorts, a khaki shirt, and a hat. Leaning against the door on Maan’s side was the rifle that was kept at the SDO’s bungalow. Sandeep had (with distaste) learned to fire it once but was not at all keen to fire it again. Maan could stand in for him.

  Maan had gone hunting for nilgai and deer a number of times with friends from Banaras, had hunted wild boar too, and had once, without success, hunted for leopard. He had greatly enjoyed it. He had never hunted wolf before, and was not sure how exactly it would be managed. Presumably there would be beaters. Since Sandeep did not seem to be knowledgeable about matters of technique, Maan asked him about the background to the problem.