A Suitable Boy(615)

By and large, even those villagers who stood to benefit from the abolition of landlordism maintained an attitude of respect for the Nawab Sahib and his wishes. ‘Remember,’ said Waris, wherever they went, ‘the Nawab Sahib is asking for your vote not in my name but in the Minister Sahib’s. So put your ballot-paper in the box marked with the two bullocks, not in the one marked with a bicycle. And remember to put it inside the box, through the hole in the top. Don’t just put it on the top of the box, or the next person who enters the booth will be able to put your ballot-paper into any box he chooses. Understand?’

The Congress volunteers and village-level workers, who were very pleased and honoured to see Mahesh Kapoor, and who garlanded him repeatedly, told him which villages they were going to canvass support in and where and when he should try to appear, either with or – and they implied that this was preferable – without Waris. They, being unfettered by a retainer of the Nawab Sahib, were able to play the powerful anti-Zamindari card in a much more Hery manner than the author of the Zamindari Abolition Act himself. They walked about in groups of four or five from village to village, with nothing more than a stick, a water-bottle, and a handful of dried cereal, gathering potential voters together, singing party, patriotic, or even devotional songs, and dinning into any ears that were willing to listen the great achievements of the Congress Party since its inception. They spent the night in the villages, so that no money was spent out of Mahesh Kapoor’s accountable funds. The one thing that disappointed them was that his jeep had not come laden with Congress posters and flags, and they made Mahesh Kapoor promise to provide these in large numbers. They also filled him in on events and issues that were important to particular villages, specific caste structures in various areas, and – as important as anything else – local jokes and references that would go down well.

From time to time Waris would shout out various names, almost at random, in order to stir up the crowd:

‘Nawab Sahib –’

‘Zindabad!’

‘Jawaharlal Nehru –’

‘Zindabad!’

‘Minister Mahesh Kapoor Sahib –’

‘Zindabad!’

‘Congress Party –’

‘Zindabad!’

‘Jai –’

‘Hind!’

After a few days of such electioneering in the cold and heat and dust, everyone’s voice was painfully hoarse. Finally, after promising to return to the Baitar area in due course, Mahesh Kapoor and his son said goodbye to Waris and, taking a jeep from the Fort with them, made for the Salimpur area. Here their headquarters was the home of a local Congress Party official, and here again they did the rounds of the caste leaders of the small qasbah town: the Hindu and Muslim goldsmiths who were the heads of the jewellery bazaar, the khatri who ran the cloth market, the kurmi who was the spokesman of the vegetable sellers. Netaji, who had inveigled himself onto the local Congress Committee, drove up on his motorcycle, pasted over with Congress flags and symbols, to greet Maan and his father. He embraced Maan like an old friend. One of his first suggestions was that the leaders of the chamars be sent two large tins of locally brewed liquor to sweeten their taste for the Congress. Mahesh Kapoor refused to do any such thing. Netaji looked at Mahesh Kapoor in astonishment, wondering how he had managed to become such a big leader with so little common sense.

That night Mahesh Kapoor confided in his son: ‘What country is this that I have had the misfortune to be born into? This election is worse than any previous one. Caste, caste, caste, caste. We should never have extended the franchise. It has made it a hundred times worse.’

Maan said, by way of consolation, that he thought that other things mattered as well, but he could see that his father was deeply disturbed, not by his own chances of winning, which were virtually unassailable, but by the state of the world. He had begun to respect his father more and more as the days passed. Mahesh Kapoor worked as hard and straightforwardly and tactlessly at his campaign as he had worked at the various clauses of the Zamindari Bill. He worked cannily, but with a sense of principle. And this work, besides being much more physically gruelling than the work in the Secretariat, began at dawn and often ended after midnight.

Several times he mentioned that he wished that Maan’s mother had been there to help him; once or twice he even wondered about her health. But he never complained that circumstances had forced him out of the security of his constituency in Old Brahmpur into a rural district he had hardly even visited, let alone cultivated, before.





17.8


IF MAHESH KAPOOR had been surprised by Maan’s popularity during his Bakr-Id visit, not only he but Maan himself was amazed to discover how popular he now was in the area around Salimpur. While no word had leaked out in Baitar about his attack on the munshi, Maan’s stay in Debaria earlier in the year had passed from fact into rumour into a kind of myth, and many exploits of his visit were recounted to him which he found hard to recognize. While in Salimpur he had looked up the spindly and sarcastic schoolteacher Qamar, and had introduced him to his father. Qamar had told Mahesh Kapoor laconically that he could count on his vote. What struck Maan as somewhat odd about this conversation was that neither Mahesh Kapoor nor Maan had asked him for his vote yet. He did not know that Netaji had mentioned rather contemptuously to Qamar Mahesh Kapoor’s attitude towards bribing the chamars with liquor, and that Qamar had said forthwith that Mahesh Kapoor, though a Hindu, was the man he would vote for.