A Suitable Boy(425)

Mahesh Kapoor shook his head. ‘Be quiet,’ he told Bhaskar. ‘You’re nine years old. You don’t understand anything about all this.’

‘But, Nanaji, really, it’s true, it’s one of the best!’ insisted Bhaskar. ‘Why don’t you fight from there – you said that the new party would give you any seat you wanted. If you want a rural seat, that’s the one to choose. Salimpur-cum-Baitar in Northern Rudhia. I haven’t sorted out the urban seats yet.’

‘Idiot, you know nothing about politics,’ said Mahesh Kapoor. ‘I need those papers back.’

‘Well, I’m returning to Rudhia at Bakr-Id,’ said Maan, siding with Bhaskar. He had cheered up at his father’s discomfiture. ‘People insist I celebrate with them. I’m very popular! And you can come with me. I’ll introduce you to everyone in your future constituency. All the Muslims, all the jatavs.’

Mahesh Kapoor said sharply: ‘I know everyone, I don’t need to be introduced to them. And it is not my future constituency, let me make that clear. And let me tell you that you are going back to Banaras to settle down, not to Rudhia to make merry at Id.’





12.19


MAHESH KAPOOR had not left the party to which he had dedicated his life without pain or regret, and he was still assailed by doubts about his decision. His fear and expectation were that the Congress would not lose. The party was too well-entrenched both in office and in the people’s consciousness; unless it lost Nehru, how could it fail to win? Dissatisfied though he was with the way things were going, there were other excellent reasons why Mahesh Kapoor should have remained. His brain-child the Zamindari Abolition Act had still to be declared valid by the Supreme Court and to be implemented. And there was the obvious danger that L.N. Agarwal would accumulate yet further power into his hands in the absence of a strong ministerial rival.

Mahesh Kapoor had taken (or been persuaded to take) a calculated gamble to try to prod Nehru out of the Congress Party. Or perhaps it had been not a calculated but a whimsical gamble.

Or perhaps not even whimsical but instinctive. For the real gambler behind the scenes was the Minister of Communications in Nehru’s own Cabinet in Delhi, the adroit Rafi Ahmad Kidwai, who, leaning on his bed like a genial, white-capped, bespectacled Buddha, had told Mahesh Kapoor (who had come to pay him a friendly visit) that if he didn’t jump out now from the drifting boat of the Congress Party, he would never be able to help pull it by its tow-rope back to shore.

It was a far-fetched image, made more dubious by the fact that Rafi Sahib, for all his immense agility of thought and love of fast cars, had never been addicted to swiftness of movement – or, indeed, exercise of any physical kind, let alone jumping, swimming, and tugging. But he was notoriously persuasive. Canny businessmen lost their canniness in his presence and divested themselves of thousands of rupees, which he promptly disbursed to harassed widows, poor students, party politicians and even his political rivals if they happened to be in need. His likeableness, generosity and astuteness had cast a spell over many a more hardheaded politician than Mahesh Kapoor.

Rafi Sahib had a taste for a great many things – fountain-pens, mangoes and watches among them – and he also had a taste for jokes; and Mahesh Kapoor, having finally taken the psychological plunge, wondered whether this might not be one of his more zany and disastrous ones. For Nehru had shown no effective sign of leaving the Congress yet, despite the fact that it was his ideological supporters who were bleeding away. Time would tell, however, and timing was the key. Rafi Sahib, who could sit silent and smiling while six conversations swirled all round him, would suddenly latch onto a single sentence of exceptional interest and insight like a chameleon catching a fly. He had a similar instinct for the shifting shoals and currents of politics: the sonar ability to distinguish dolphins from crocodiles even in these murky, silted waters, and an uncanny sense of when to act. Upon Mahesh Kapoor’s departure, he had given him a watch – the spring of Mahesh Kapoor’s own watch had snapped – and had said: ‘I guarantee that Nehru, you and I will fight from the same platform, whatever that may be. At thirteen o’clock on the thirteenth day of the thirteenth month, look at this watch, Kapoor Sahib, and tell me if I was not right.’





12.20


AROUND the time of the elections to the Brahmpur University Students’ union   there was a spurt of political activity both on and off campus. There was a great hodgepodge of issues: cinema concessions on the one hand, and a call for solidarity with primary schoolteachers in their wage bargaining on the other; demands for more employment opportunities together with support for Pandit Nehru’s non-aligned foreign policy; amendments to the rigid code of conduct of the university – and insistence that Hindi be used for the civil service examinations. Some parties – or the leaders of some parties, for where parties ended and leaders began was itself a difficult business to fathom – believed that all India’s ills would be cured by a return to ancient Hindu traditions. Others insisted that socialism, variously defined or felt, was the cure-all.