A Suitable Boy(561)

And having once made his break, thought Mahesh Kapoor, would he not be displaying the very indecisiveness he usually condemned by returning? After decades of loyalty to one party, he who believed in principle and firmness would have turned his coat twice in the course of a few months. Kidwai may have returned, but Kripalani had not. Whose had been the more honourable course?

Angry at himself for his own uncharacteristic dithering, Mahesh Kapoor told himself that he had had enough time and enough advice to determine twenty such matters. Whatever he decided, there would be aspects of his decision he would find difficult to live with. He should stop fretting, examine the nub of the matter, and once and for all say Yes or No.

Yet what, if anything, was the nub?

Was it the zamindari legislation? Was it his dread of communal hatred and violence? Was it the real and delicious possibility that he, not Agarwal, might become Chief Minister? Was it the fear that if he remained outside the Congress, he would lose his seat – that he could maintain his purity only in the wilderness? Surely all these things pointed in the same direction. What was really holding him back but uncertainty and pride?

He stared unseeingly out from his small office towards the garden of Prem Nivas.

His wife had his tea sent to him; it went cold.

She came to ask him if he was all right and brought another cup for him herself. She said: ‘So you have decided to return to the Congress? That’s good.’

He responded with exasperation: ‘I have decided nothing. What makes you think I have?’

‘After Maan and Firoz nearly –’

‘Maan and Firoz have nothing to do with it. I have been thinking this matter over for weeks without coming to any conclusion.’ He looked at her in amazement.

She stirred his tea once more and placed it on the table, which was easier to do these days, since it was not covered with files.

Mahesh Kapoor sipped it and said nothing.

After a while he said, ‘Leave me alone. I am not going to discuss this matter with you. Your presence is distracting me. I don’t know where your farfetched intuitions come from; But they are more inaccurate and suspect than astrology.’





15.17


LESS than a week after the riots in Brahmpur, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, was shot at a public meeting that he was addressing at Rawalpindi. The murderer was done to death on the spot by the crowd.

At the news of his death, all government flags were lowered to half-mast in Brahmpur. The university court convened a meeting to express its condolences. In a city where the memory of rioting was only a week old, this had something of a sobering effect.

The Nawab Sahib was back in Brahmpur when he heard the news. He had known Liaquat Ali well, since both Baitar House and Baitar Fort had been meeting places for Muslim League leaders in his father’s time. He looked at some of the old photographs of those conferences and read through some of the old correspondence between his father and Liaquat Ali. He realized – though he did not see what he could do about the fact – that he had begun to live increasingly in the past.

For the Nawab Sahib Partition had been a multiple tragedy: many of those he knew, both Muslim and Hindu, had been killed or injured or scarred by the terror of those days; he had lost two parts of his country; his family had been broken up by migration; Baitar House had come under attack through manipulations of the evacuee property laws; most of the great estate surrounding Baitar Fort was soon to be wrested from him under zamindari laws that would have been almost impossible to pass in a united India; the language of his ancestors and favourite poets was under siege; and he was conscious that even his patriotism was no longer readily accepted by many of his acquaintances. He thanked God that he still had friends like Mahesh Kapoor who understood him; and he thanked God that his son had friends like Mahesh Kapoor’s son. But he felt beleaguered and beset by what was happening around him; and he reflected that if this was what he felt, it must be infinitely worse for those of his religion less insulated from the hardships of the world than himself.

I suppose I am getting old, he said to himself, and querulousness is a standard symptom of senility. He could not help grieving, though, for the cultivated, level-headed Liaquat Ali, whom he had personally liked. Nor, though he had hated the thought of Pakistan once, could he turn away from it with unconcern now that it actually existed. When the Nawab Sahib thought about Pakistan, it was about West Pakistan. Many of his old friends were there, many of his relatives, many of the places of which he had warm recollections. That Jinnah should have died in the first year of Pakistan’s life, and Liaquat Ali early in its fifth was no happy augury for a country that needed, more than anything else, experience in its leadership and moderation in its polity, and appeared now to be bereft of both.