A Suitable Boy(497)
I am so tired I could weep.
Mad bird, for God’s sake let me sleep.
Why do you cry like one possessed?
When will you rest? When will you rest?
Why wait each night till all but I
Lie sleeping in the house, then cry?
Why do you scream into my ear
What no one else but I can hear?
Her thoughts a whirl of images and questions, Lata read this poem through five or six times. It was far clearer than most of the poems in the book, clearer certainly than the inscription he had written for her, and yet it was far more mysterious and disturbing. She knew the yellow laburnum, the amaltas tree that stood above Dipankar’s meditation hut in the garden at Ballygunge, and she could imagine Amit looking out at its branches at night. (Why, she wondered, had he used the Hindi word for the tree rather than the Bengali – was it just for the sake of the rhyme?) But the Amit she knew – kindly, cynical, cheerful – was even less the Amit of this poem than of the short love-poem that she had read and liked.
Did she even like this poem, she wondered? The thought of Amit sweating disturbed her – he was to her a disembodied and comforting spirit, and it was best that he remained that way. By now it had been dark for more than an hour, and Lata could imagine him lying on his bed, hearing the papiha sing its triple note, and tossing restlessly from side to side.
She looked at the personalized inscription again. She wondered why he had used the word ‘carve’ in the final line. Was it simply to chime – in a slightly overdone manner, she could not help feeling – with the ‘swerve’ and ‘curve’ of the previous line? A poem could hardly be carved. But this was probably just poetic licence, like the bird’s wings beating a tattoo, or the claim that he was drunk on words.
Then, suddenly, and for no apparent reason at all, for she was not looking out for such a curious feature as this, she realized, with simultaneous delight and dismay, how carved, how personalized the inscription indeed was, and why, after all, he had not written her name above the poem. It went far beyond the reference to pineapples, to the moment in the cemetery that they had shared. She had only to look down the first letters of each of the four lines in each of the four quatrains to realize how inextricably bound she was not merely to the sentiment but to the very structure of Amit’s poem.
Part Fourteen
14.1
MAHESH KAPOOR left for his farm in Rudhia in early August in the company of Maan. Now that he was no longer a Minister, he had a little more free time for his own pursuits. Apart from supervising the work on the farm itself – the main activity at present was the transplantation of rice – he had two other purposes in leaving Brahmpur. The first was to see if Maan, who had proved himself uninterested and unsuccessful in working in Banaras, might possibly be happier and more effectively employed in running the farm. The second was to ascertain from where he could best fight a candidate from the Congress Party for an Assembly seat in the coming General Elections – now that he himself had left it and joined the newly formed Peasants’ and Workers’ Peoples’ Party – the KMPP for short. The obvious rural choice was the constituency that contained his farm – which was in the Rudhia subdivision of Rudhia District. As he walked around his fields, his mind turned once more to Delhi and the great figures of the strife-ridden Congress Party vying with each other for power on the national stage.
Rafi Ahmad Kidwai, the wise, wily and playful politician from U.P. who had been responsible for a spate of resignations from the Congress, including Mahesh Kapoor’s, was anathema to the Hindu-chauvinist right-wing of the party – partly because he was Muslim, partly because he had twice orchestrated opposition to the attempts of Purushottamdas Tandon to become President of the Congress Party. Tandon had been narrowly defeated in 1948, and had narrowly won in 1950 – in a dubiously fought battle made more bitter by the knowledge that whoever controlled the Congress Party machine in 1951 would have control over the selection of candidates for the forthcoming General Elections.
Tandon – a bare-footed, bearded, austere and rather intolerant man, seven years Nehru’s senior and like him, from Allahabad – now headed the organization of the Congress Party. He had chosen his Working Committee largely from the party bosses of the individual states and their supporters, for in most of the states the party machinery was already in the control of the conservatives. Since Tandon had insisted that the Congress President’s choice of his Working Committee should be unfettered, he did not include – and had indeed refused to include – either his defeated opponent Kripalani – or Kidwai, who had planned Kripalani’s campaign. Prime Minister Nehru, already upset by Tandon’s election, which he rightly interpreted as a victory not only for Tandon but for Sardar Patel, his own great conservative rival, had at first refused to join a Working Committee that excluded Kidwai. But in the interests of unity, because he saw the Congress as the only cohesive force in the localized and divided web of Indian politics, he swallowed his objections and joined it.