Mahesh Kapoor found himself entirely on the defensive. In any case, his heart lay in Brahmpur now: in a prison cell, in a hospital ward, in the room in Prem Nivas where his wife no longer slept. Increasingly, the fight, which had begun as an irregular ten-pointed star with one huge gleaming point, his own, had polarized into a struggle between two men: the man who tried to project himself as the Nawab Sahib’s candidate and the man who realized that his only chance of victory lay in suppressing his individuality and projecting himself as the candidate of Jawaharlal Nehru.
He talked not about himself now but about the Congress Party. But he was heckled at every meeting and asked to explain the actions of his son. Was it true that he had used his influence to try to get him off? What if the young Nawabzada died? Was this a plot to wipe out the leaders of the Muslims one by one? For one who had spent his life fighting for communal amity, such accusations were hard to bear. If he had not been sick at heart, he would have responded as furiously as he usually did in the presence of aggressive stupidity, and this would have done him less good still.
Not once, either by studied implication or in a fit of anger, did he mention the rumours gathering around the Nawab Sahib. Yet now these rumours too began to float around Salimpur and Baitar and the hinterland of the two small towns. They were more damaging morally than those that touched Mahesh Kapoor, even though what they imputed was two decades old; and the Hindu communalist parties tried to use them as well as they could.
But many people, particularly around Baitar, refused to believe these rumours of illegitimacy and rape. And some, who believed them, held that the Nawab Sahib had been punished enough by God through his grief for his son; and that charity suggested that there was a statute of limitations on one’s sins.
In practical terms too, Mahesh Kapoor was at his wit’s end. He no longer had two jeeps but only one broken-down vehicle provided by the Congress office. His son was no longer with him to provide him with help and support and introductions. His wife, who could have helped him, who could have talked to the shy women of the constituency, was dead. He had hoped at one stage that Jawaharlal Nehru might make time on his whirlwind tour of Purva Pradesh to visit Salimpur, but so certain had his election appeared that he had not pressed his case. And now it seemed that only a visit from Nehru could save him. He telegrammed Delhi and Brahmpur and asked that Nehru’s great progress be diverted his way for just a few hours; but he knew that half the Congress candidates in the province were making similar pleas, and that his chances of persuasion were utterly remote.
Veena and Kedarnath came out to help for a few days. Veena felt that her father needed her more than Maan, whom at best she could visit for a few minutes every other day. Her arrival had some effect in the towns, especially in Salimpur. Her homely but lively face, her warm-hearted manner, and the dignity of her sorrow – for her mother, for her brother, for her beleaguered father – affected the hearts of many. women. When she spoke, they even attended public meetings. Because of the expansion of the franchise, they now formed half the electorate.
The Congress village-level workers campaigned as hard as they could, but many of them had begun to feel that the tide had turned irreversibly against them, and they were not able to disguise how disheartened they were. They could not even be certain of the scheduled caste vote because the socialists were trumpeting their electoral alliance with Dr Ambedkar’s party.
Rasheed had returned to his village to campaign for the socialists. He was disturbed and excitable and he even looked unstable. Every second day he rushed off to Salimpur. But whether he was an asset or a liability to Ramlal Sinha’s campaign was difficult to ascertain. He was Muslim, and religious, and that helped; but he had been disowned by almost everyone in his own village of Debaria – from Baba down to Netaji – and he had no particular standing anywhere. The elders of Sagal in particular mocked his pretensions. One joke that was doing the rounds was that ‘Abd-ur-Rasheed’ or ‘The Slave of The Director’ thought he had lost the head of his name when he had merely lost his own. Sagal had gone solidly into the Independent camp of Waris Khan.
In Debaria the picture was more complicated. This was partly because there were many more Hindus there: a small knot of brahmins and banias and a large group of jatavs and other scheduled castes. Every party – the Congress, the KMPP, the socialists, the communists, and the Hindu parties – could hope to garner votes here. Among the Muslims, matters were complicated by Netaji’s sporadic presence. He exhorted people to vote for the Congress candidate for Parliament, leaving open the question of the race for the Legislative Assembly; but there was bound to be some spillover in the resulting vote. A villager who placed his parliamentary ballot-paper in a green box that carried the symbol of yoked oxen would be very likely to place his other ballot-paper in a brown box carrying the same symbol.