‘Yes,’ said Mahesh Kapoor.
‘But I doubt that the national purse would open itself to help maintain it.’
‘No.’
‘And, thanks to plunderers like you, I certainly can’t any longer.’
Mahesh Kapoor laughed. ‘I was wondering what you were aiming at. Anyway, even if you lose your case in the Supreme Court you’ll still be a few thousand times richer than me. And I work for my living, unlike you – you’re just decorative.’
The Nawab Sahib helped himself to some biryani. ‘You’re a useless person,’ he countered. ‘What does a politician do, in fact, except make trouble for others?’
‘Or counter the troubles that other people make,’ said Mahesh Kapoor.
Neither he nor the Nawab Sahib needed to mention what he was referring to. Mahesh Kapoor had succeeded, while he was still with the Congress, in getting the Minister for Rehabilitation to bend the ear of the Prime Minister to get the government to grant the Nawab Sahib and Begum Abida Khan certificates entitling them to the permanent retention of their property in Brahmpur. This had been necessary in order to counter an order by the Custodian-General of Evacuee Property issued on the grounds that Begum Abida Khan’s husband was a permanent evacuee. Their case was only one of several where similar action had needed to be taken at the governmental level.
‘Well,’ continued the ex-Minister of Revenue, ‘where will you cut back when half your rents disappear? I really do hope that your library won’t suffer.’
The Nawab Sahib frowned. ‘Kapoor Sahib,’ he said, ‘I am less concerned about my own house than those who depend on me. The people of Baitar expect me to put on a proper show for our festivals, especially for Moharram. I will have to keep that up in some fashion. I have certain other expenses – the hospital and so on, the monuments, the stables, musicians like Ustad Majeed Khan who expect to be retained by me a couple of times a year, poets who depend on me, various endowments, pensions; God – and my munshi – knows what else. At least my sons don’t make vast demands on me; they’re educated, they have their own professions, they aren’t wastrels, like the sons of others in my position –’
He stopped suddenly, thinking of Maan and Saeeda Bai.
‘But tell me,’ he continued after the briefest of pauses, ‘what, for your part, are you going to do?’
‘Me?’ said Mahesh Kapoor.
‘Why don’t you run for the elections from here?’
‘After what I’ve done to you – you want me to run from here?’
‘No, really, Kapoor Sahib, you should.’
‘That’s what my grandson says.’
‘Veena’s boy?’
‘Yes. He’s worked out that this consituency is the most favourable for me – among the rural ones.’
The Nawab Sahib smiled at his friend and looked towards the portrait of his great-grandfather. Mahesh Kapoor’s remark had made him think of his own grandsons, Hassan and Abbas – who had been named after the brothers of Hussain, the martyr of the festival of Moharram. He thought for a while of Zainab too, and the unhappiness of her marriage. And, fleetingly and regretfully, of his own wife, who lay buried in the cemetery just outside the Fort.
‘But why do you think it is such a good idea?’ Mahesh Kapoor was asking.
A servant offered the Nawab Sahib some fruit – including custard-apples, whose short season had just begun – but the Nawab Sahib refused them. Then he changed his mind, felt three or four sharifas and selected one. He broke the knobbly fruit in half and scooped out the delicious white pulp with a spoon, placing the black seeds (which he transferred from his mouth to the spoon) on the side of his plate. For a minute or two he said nothing. Mahesh Kapoor helped himself to a sharifa as well.
‘It is like this, Kapoor Sahib,’ said the Nawab Sahib, thoughtfully, putting together the two equal scooped-out halves of his sharifa and then separating them. ‘If you look at the population in this constituency, it is about evenly divided between Muslims and Hindus. This is just the kind of place where Hindu communalist parties can whip people into an anti-Muslim panic. They have already begun to do so. And every day there are fresh reasons for Hindus and Muslims to learn to hate each other. If it isn’t some idiocy in Pakistan – some threat to Kashmir, some plot, real or imagined, to divert the waters of the Sutlej or to capture Sheikh Abdullah or to impose a tax on Hindus – it is one of our own home-grown brilliances like the dispute over that mosque in Ayodhya which has suddenly flared up again recently after lying quiet for decades – or our own Brahmpur version, which is different – but not so vastly different. Bakr-Id is coming up in a few days; someone is certain to kill a cow somewhere instead of a goat, and there’ll be fresh trouble. And, worst of all, Moharram and Dussehra will coincide this year.’