A Suitable Boy(531)

14.25


NETAJI planned to hold a party the next night – a feast of meat for which he had another goat handy – in honour of various people of importance in the subdivision: police and petty administration officials and so on. He was trying to persuade Qamar to get the headmaster of his school in Salimpur to come. Qamar not only flatly refused, but made no secret of his contempt for Netaji’s transparent attempts to ingratiate himself with the worthy and the influential. Throughout the afternoon Qamar found some way or other of needling Netaji. At one point he turned to Maan with new-found friendliness and said, ‘I suppose that when your father was here, he was unable to shake off our Netaji.’

‘Well,’ said Maan, resisting a smile, ‘Baba and he very kindly showed my father around Debaria.’

‘I thought it might be something like that,’ said Qamar. ‘He was having tea with me in Salimpur when he heard from a friend of mine, who had dropped in, that the great Mahesh Kapoor was visiting his own native village. Well, that was the end of tea with me. Netaji knows which cups of tea contain more sugar. He’s as smart as the flies on Baba’s sputum.’

Netaji, affecting to be above such crude taunts, and still hopeful that he might be able to bag the headmaster, refused to get outwardly annoyed, and Qamar retired, disappointed.

Not long after this late lunch Maan took a rickshaw to Salimpur in order to catch the train back to Baitar. He didn’t want to arrive after Firoz had left. Although it was easier for Firoz, given his profession, to get away from Brahmpur than it was for Imtiaz, he might well turn out to have some date in court or some urgent call from a senior for a conference that would cut short his visit.

An attractive young woman with hennaed feet was singing a song to herself in the local accent as the rickshaw passed her. Maan caught just a few lines as he turned around to get a glimpse of her unveiled face:

‘O, husband, you can go but get me something from the fair –

Vermilion to overfill the parting in my hair.

Bangles from Firozabad, jaggery to eat –

And sandals made by Praha for my henna-coloured feet.’



She gave Maan a glance that was at once amused and angry as he gazed at her without embarrassment, and the memory of her look kept him in good spirits all the way to Salimpur Station.





14.26


NEHRU’S coup was not followed by wholesale subservience to his desires.

In Delhi, in Parliament, opposition by MPs from all sections of the House, including his own, forced him to abandon his attempt to pass the Hindu Code Bill. This legislation, very dear to the Prime Minister’s heart – and to that of his Law Minister, Dr Ambedkar – aimed to make the laws of marriage, divorce, inheritance and guardianship more rational and just, especially to women.

Nor were the more orthodox Hindu legislators by any means on the defensive in the Legislative Assembly at Brahmpur. L.N. Agarwal had sponsored a bill that would make Hindi the state language from the beginning of the new year, and the Muslim legislators were rising one by one to appeal to him and to the Chief Minister and to the House to protect the status of Urdu. Mahesh Kapoor, who had returned to Brahmpur from the country- side, took no active part in the debate, but Abdus Salaam, his former Parliamentary Secretary, did make a couple of brief interventions. Begum Abida Khan, of course, was at her oratorical best:





Begum Abida Khan: It is all very well for the honourable Minister to take the name of Gandhiji when espousing the cause of Hindi. I have nothing against Hindi, but why does he not agree to protect the status of Urdu, the second language of this province, and the mother-tongue of the Muslims? Does the honourable Minister imagine that the Father of the Nation, who was willing to give his life to protect the minority community, would countenance a bill like the present one which will cause our community and our culture and our very livelihood to die a lingering death? The sudden enforcement of Hindi in the Devanagari script has closed the doors of government service on the Muslims. They cannot compete with those whose language is Hindi. This has created a first-class economic crisis among the Muslims – many of whom depend on the services for their livelihood. All of a sudden they have to face the strange music of the P.P. Official Language Bill. It is a sin to take the name of Gandhiji in this context. I appeal to your humanity, you who have shot us and hunted us down in our houses, do not be the author of further miseries for us.

The Hon’ble the Minister for Home Affairs (Shri L.N. Agarwal): I will ignore, as I am sure the House would wish me to, this last remark, and simply thank the honourable member for her heart-felt advice. If it were equally brain-thought, there might have been grounds for accepting it. The fact of the matter is that duplication of all government work in two languages, two scripts, is utterly impracticable and unworkable. That is all there is to it.