Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘Babaji, I have one for you as well,’ said Dipankar, blinking a little.

‘My question, however, is a shallow one, and yours a deep one,’ said the guru. ‘So I will ask mine first. Why did you choose Krishna?’

‘I chose him because I admire Rama but I find—’

‘Yes, he was after worldly glory too much,’ said Sanaki Baba, completing his thought.

‘And his treatment of Sita—’

‘She was crushed,’ said Sanaki Baba. ‘He had to choose kingship or Sita and he chose kingship. He had a sad life.’

‘Also, his life was one from beginning to end — at least in his character,’ said Dipankar. ‘But Krishna had so many different stages. And at the end, defeated, when he was in Dwaraka—’

Sanaki Baba was still coughing from the incense.

‘Everyone has tragedy,’ he said. ‘But Krishna had joy. The secret of life is to accept. Accept happiness, accept sorrow; accept success, accept failure; accept fame, accept disgrace; accept doubt, even accept the impression of certainty. Now, when are you leaving?’

‘Today.’

‘And what was your question?’ Sanaki Baba said with gentle seriousness.

‘Baba, how do you explain all this?’ Dipankar pointed to the distant smoke from a huge funeral pyre, where hundreds of unidentified bodies were being burned. ‘Is it all the lila of the universe, the play of God? Are they fortunate because they died on this auspicious spot at this auspicious festival?’

‘Mr Maitra is coming tomorrow, isn’t he?’

‘I think so.’

‘When he asked me to give him peace, I told him to return at a later date.’

‘I see.’ Dipankar could not disguise the disappointment in his voice.

Once again he thought of the old man, crushed to death, who had talked of ice and salt, of completing his journey back to the source of the Ganga the following year. Where would he himself be next year, he wondered. Where would anyone be?

‘I did not, however, refuse him an answer,’ said Sanaki Baba.

‘No, you did not,’ sighed Dipankar.

‘But do you want an interim answer?’

‘Yes,’ said Dipankar.

‘I think there was a flaw in the administrative arrangements,’ replied the guru blandly.

The newspapers, which had been consistently lauding the ‘commendably high standard of the administrative arrangements’ came down heavily on both the administration and the police. There were a great many explanations of what had happened. One theory was that a car which supported a float in the procession had overheated and stalled, and that this had started a chain reaction.

Another was that this car belonged not to a procession but to a VIP, and should never have been allowed on the Pul Mela sands in the first place, certainly not on the day of Jeth Purnima. The police, it was alleged, had no interest in pilgrims, only in high dignitaries. And high dignitaries had no interest in the people, only in the appurtenances of office. The Chief Minister had, it was true, made a moving statement to the press in response to the tragedy; but a banquet due to be held that same evening in Government House had not been cancelled. The Governor should at least have made up in discretion what he lacked in compassion.

A third said that the police should have cleared the path far ahead of the processions, and had failed to do so. Because of this lack of foresight the crowd at the bathing spots had been so dense that the sadhus had not been able to move forward. There had been bad coordination, poor communication, and under-staffing. The police had been manned by dictatorial but ineffectual junior officers in charge of groups of policemen from a large number of districts, a motley collection of men whom they did not know well and who were unresponsive to their orders. There had been less than a hundred constables and only two gazetted officers on duty on the bank, and only seven at the crucial juncture at the base of the ramp. The Superintendent of Police of the district had been nowhere in the vicinity of the Pul Mela at all.

A fourth account blamed the slippery condition of the ground after the previous night’s storm for the large number of deaths, especially those that had taken place in the ditch on the edge of the ramp.

A fifth said that the administration should — when organizing the Mela in the first place — have used far more of the comparatively empty area on the northern shore of the Ganga for the various camps in order to relieve the predictably dangerous pressure on the southern shore.

A sixth blamed the nagas, and insisted that the criminally violent akharas should be disbanded forthwith or at any rate disallowed from all future Pul Melas.

A seventh blamed the ‘faulty and haphazard’ training of the volunteers, whose loss of nerve and lack of experience precipitated the stampede.

An eighth blamed the national character.

Wherever the truth lay, if anywhere, everyone insisted on an Inquiry. The Brahmpur Chronicle demanded ‘the appointment of a committee of experts chaired by a High Court Judge in order to investigate the causes of the ghastly tragedy and to prevent its recurrence’. The Advocates’ Association and the District Bar Association criticized the government, in particular the Home Minister, and, in a strongly worded joint resolution, pronounced: ‘Speed is of the essence. Let the axe fall where it will.’

A few days later it was announced in a Gazette Extraordinary that a Committee of Inquiry with broad terms of reference had been constituted, and that it had been requested to pursue its investigations with all due promptitude.

The five judges in the zamindari case maintained strict secrecy about their consultations. From the moment that the case was closed and judgement reserved, their taciturnity exceeded even the regular bounds of judicial discretion. They moved around in the same social world as many of those whose lives and properties were bound up in this case, and they were conscious of the weight that even their casual comments were certain to carry. The last thing they wanted was to be in the eye of a storm of speculation.

Even so, speculation was widespread, active, and furiously inconsistent. One of the judges, Mr Justice Maheshwari, unconscious of the low esteem in which he was held by G.N. Bannerji, had greatly praised the eminent lawyer’s advocacy to a lady at a tea party. He had made some extremely telling points, the judge confided. The news had spread, and the zamindars began to feel optimistic again. But on the other hand it was the Chief Justice, and not Mr Justice Maheshwari, who would almost certainly write the first draft of the judgement.

And yet it had been the Chief Justice who had given the Advocate-General such a grilling. Shastri had rallied, reconsidered his arguments, and accepted that if he maintained the line that had been so successful in the Bihar case, he might jeopardize his chances in the Purva Pradesh case. Here the judges seemed inclined to make different distinctions. But whether his attempt to double back had been successful was anyone’s guess. G.N. Bannerji had, in his final two days of rebuttal, flayed what he called the ‘opportunistic drift of my learned friend’s rudderless raft, which looks to the current stirring about the bench and changes its course accordingly’. It was the general opinion of those present in court on the final two days that he had destroyed the government’s case.

But the Raja of Marh, some of whose lands had been ravaged suddenly one day by a swarm of locusts, saw this as the warning of an unfavourable judgement. Others took note, with more substantial grounds for gloom, of the First Amendment Bill to the Constitution. This bill, which in mid-June received the assent of the President of India Dr Rajendra Prasad (whose father, interestingly, had been the munshi of a zamindar) sought further to protect land reform legislation from challenges under certain articles of the Constitution. Some zamindars believed this to be the final nail in their coffin. Yet others, however, believed that this amendment itself could be challenged — and that the land reform bills it sought to protect could in any case be declared unconstitutional since they infringed other, unprotected, articles — and indeed the spirit of the Constitution itself.