17.23
‘PRIYA, promise me you’ll talk to your father.’
This time it had been Veena who had suggested going up onto the roof. She could not bear the looks of satisfaction, distaste, and pity that she had had to face in the Goyal household below. It was a cold afternoon, and they were both wearing shawls. The sky was slate-coloured, except for an area across the Ganga where the sands had been whipped up by the wind into a dirty yellow-brown haze. Veena was crying blindly and pleading with Priya.
‘But what good will it do?’ said Priya, wiping the tears from her friend’s face and her own.
‘All the good in the world if it saves Maan.’
‘What is your father doing?’ asked Priya. ‘Hasn’t he spoken to anyone?’
‘My father,’ said Veena bitterly, ‘cares more for his image as a man of principle than for his family. I spoke to him; do you think it had any effect? He told me that I should be thinking of my mother, not of Maan. Only now do I realize what a cold man he really is. Maan will be hanged at eight o’clock, and he’ll be signing his files at nine. My mother is beside herself. Promise me you’ll speak to your father, Priya, promise me. You’re his only child, he’ll do anything for you.’
‘I’ll speak to him,’ said Priya. ‘I promise.’
What Veena did not know – what Priya did not have the heart to tell her – was that she had spoken to her father already, and that the Home Minister had told her that there was nothing he would do to interfere. This was, in his words, an unimportant matter: one ruffian trying to kill another in an infamous establishment. That their fathers were who they were had nothing to do with the business. It touched upon no affairs of state; it provided no excuse for intervention; the local police and magistracy could handle it adequately. He had even gently upbraided his daughter for attempting to use his influence in this manner, and Priya, who was not used to being upbraided by her father, had felt both unhappy and ashamed.
17.24
MAHESH KAPOOR was unable to bring himself to do what had been suggested to him over the phone: to try to bring pressure to bear directly or from above on the investigating officer, in this case the Sub-Inspector in charge of the Pasand Bagh Police Station. It went against his grain to do so. Indeed, the just implementation of his own Zamindari Abolition and Land Reforms Act would depend on how far he could prevent landlords from bringing their influence to bear on village record-keepers and local officers. He did not relish the way the politician Jha was undermining the administration near Rudhia town, and he did not see himself as ever being tempted to do the same. So when his wife asked him whether he could not ‘talk to someone, even to Agarwal’, Mahesh Kapoor told her abruptly to be quiet.
For her the shock and grief of the last two days had been almost unbearable. When she thought of Firoz lying in hospital and Maan in the police lock-up, she could not sleep. Once Firoz had become conscious he had been allowed a very few visitors – including his aunt Abida and his sister Zainab. Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had begged her husband to speak to the Nawab Sahib – to express his grief and regret, and to ask if they could visit Firoz. This he had tried to do. But the Nawab Sahib, being in the hospital, was not available on the phone. And his apologetic, embarrassed, excessively polite secretary Murtaza Ali had made it clear that the Nawab Sahib had indicated from his remarks that a visit by Maan’s family at this time would be unwelcome.
The rumour mills, meanwhile, were busy. What was a mere paragraph in the Calcutta papers was the staple of the Brahmpur press and Brahmpur conversation, and would continue to be so for days, despite the alternative attractions of elections and electioneering. The police were still unconscious of the connection between Saeeda Bai’s establishment and the Nawab Sahib’s. They had still not learned of the monthly stipend. But Bibbo had begun to put two and two together, and was unable to resist casting dark and proud hints about Tasneem’s ancestry in the strictest (and thus leakiest) confidence to a couple of her closest friends. And a reporter from the Hindi press who was well known for muck-raking had interrogated an old and retired courtesan who had known Saeeda Bai’s mother in the days when they had been part of a joint, establishment in Tarbuz ka Bazaar. This old woman was induced by money and the promise of more money to describe all she knew about Saeeda Bai’s early life. Some of her facts were true, some embroidered, some false, almost all interesting to the journalist. She stated calmly and authoritatively that Saeeda Bai had lost her virginity when she had been raped at the age of fourteen or fifteen by a prominent citizen who had been drunk; it was Saeeda Bai’s mother who had told her so. What lent some likelihood to this particular assertion was that the old woman admitted that she did not know who this man was. She had her ideas, that was all.