Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Mahesh Kapoor had taken (or been persuaded to take) a calculated gamble to try to prod Nehru out of the Congress Party. Or perhaps it had been not a calculated but a whimsical gamble. Or perhaps not even whimsical but instinctive. For the real gambler behind the scenes was the Minister of Communications in Nehru’s own Cabinet in Delhi, the adroit Rafi Ahmad Kidwai, who, leaning on his bed like a genial, white-capped, bespectacled Buddha, had told Mahesh Kapoor (who had come to pay him a friendly visit) that if he didn’t jump out now from the drifting boat of the Congress Party, he would never be able to help pull it by its tow-rope back to shore.

It was a far-fetched image, made more dubious by the fact that Rafi Sahib, for all his immense agility of thought and love of fast cars, had never been addicted to swiftness of movement — or, indeed, exercise of any physical kind, let alone jumping, swimming, and tugging. But he was notoriously persuasive. Canny businessmen lost their canniness in his presence and divested themselves of thousands of rupees, which he promptly disbursed to harassed widows, poor students, party politicians, and even his political rivals if they happened to be in need. His likeableness, generosity, and astuteness had cast a spell over many a more hard-headed politician than Mahesh Kapoor.

Rafi Sahib had a taste for a great many things — fountain-pens, mangoes and watches among them — and he also had a taste for jokes; and Mahesh Kapoor, having finally taken the psychological plunge, wondered whether this might not be one of his more zany and disastrous ones. For Nehru had shown no effective sign of leaving the Congress yet, despite the fact that it was his ideological supporters who were bleeding away. Time would tell, however, and timing was the key. Rafi Sahib, who could sit silent and smiling while six conversations swirled all round him, would suddenly latch on to a single sentence of exceptional interest and insight like a chameleon catching a fly. He had a similar instinct for the shifting shoals and currents of politics: the sonar ability to distinguish dolphins from crocodiles even in these murky, silted waters, and an uncanny sense of when to act. Upon Mahesh Kapoor’s departure, he had given him a watch — the spring of Mahesh Kapoor’s own watch had snapped — and had said: ‘I guarantee that Nehru, you and I will fight from the same platform, whatever that may be. At thirteen o’clock on the thirteenth day of the thirteenth month, look at this watch, Kapoor Sahib, and tell me if I was not right.’

Around the time of the elections to the Brahmpur University Students’ Union there was a spurt of political activity both on and off campus. There was a great hodgepodge of issues: cinema concessions on the one hand, and a call for solidarity with primary schoolteachers in their wage bargaining on the other; demands for more employment opportunities together with support for Pandit Nehru’s non-aligned foreign policy; amendments to the rigid code of conduct of the university — and insistence that Hindi be used for the civil service examinations. Some parties — or the leaders of some parties, for where parties ended and leaders began was itself a difficult business to fathom — believed that all India’s ills would be cured by a return to ancient Hindu traditions. Others insisted that socialism, variously defined or felt, was the cure-all.

There was ferment and fighting. It was the beginning of the academic year, and no one was concentrating on his studies; exams were nine months away. Students chattered in the coffee houses or the delegacy lodges or hostels, gathered in knots outside classes, led small marches, fasted, and beat each other up with sticks and stones. Sometimes they were helped in this by the local parties they were affiliated to, but this was not really necessary. Students had learned how to cause trouble under the British, and there was no reason why hard-earned corporate skills, passed on from batch to batch, should be wasted merely because of the change of dispensation in Delhi and Brahmpur. Besides, the Congress government, by its slow slide into complacency and its inability to solve the country’s problems, was unpopular among the students, who by no means valued stability as an end in itself.

The Congress Party expected to win by default, as great, shapeless, centrist lumps often do. It expected to win even though its national leadership was riven by differences, even though Congressmen were leaving their party in droves ever since the meeting in Patna, even though the most prominent local Congressman’s name was mud among the students — both as the Treasurer of the university with his manoeuvrings on the Executive Council, and as the lathi-happy Home Minister. The student Congress Party’s theme was: ‘Give us time. We are the party of Independence, of Jawaharlal Nehru, not really of L.N. Agarwal. Even though things have not improved, they will improve if you continue to place confidence in us. If you change horses now, they assuredly will not.’

But most students were not inclined to vote for the status quo; they had no spouses or children or jobs or income, possible injury to which might counterbalance the excitement of instability. Nor did they trust for the future those who had shown no signs of competence in the past. The country had to beg for food from abroad. The economy, under-planned and over-planned, lurched from crisis to crisis. There were few jobs waiting for the students themselves after graduation.

Their post-Independence romanticism and post-Independence disillusionment formed a volatile mixture. The Congress argument was rejected, and the Socialist Party won the election. Rasheed was on the party slate, and became an office-bearer.

Malati Trivedi, who considered herself an unlikely socialist, but joined in for the enjoyment of it all and because she liked the discussions, and because some friends of hers (including her musician) had been socialists, had no interest whatsoever in office. But she planned to join in the ‘victory-cum-protest’ march that was planned a week after the elections.

The ‘protest’ part of the title came from the fact that the Socialist Party — together with any other parties that cared to join in — was going to march in protest against the low pay of primary schoolteachers. There were over ten thousand primary schoolteachers, and it was a disgrace that their salaries were as low as they were, certainly not enough for a decent living, lower in fact than those of village patwaris. The teachers had gone on strike after a number of unsuccessful attempts to get themselves heard. A number of students’ federations, including those of the medical and law colleges, had pledged their support to the cause. Education involved them, and it involved the future shape of the university, indeed, the calibre of the citizenry of the country itself. Besides, here was an excellent magnet to which they could attach anything else that came to mind. Some of these federations were interested in stirring up the whole of Brahmpur, not just the university; interestingly enough, one minor hotbed of radicalism was a group of Muslim girls who were still in purdah.

The Home Minister L.N. Agarwal had made it clear that a peaceful procession was one thing, a disorderly surge of rabble another. He would control it with whatever means were available. If a lathi charge was necessary, he would order it.

Since the Chief Minister was in Delhi for a few days, a delegation of ten students (Rasheed among them) went to see the Home Minister, who was in charge in S.S. Sharma’s absence. They crowded into his office in the Secretariat. They made brusque demands, as much to impress each other as to hope to persuade him. They did not pay him the respect that he believed was due to their elders, especially those who (unlike them) had suffered blows and ruin and years in jail in order to see their country free. He refused to concede their demands, saying that they should talk either to the Education Minister or to the Chief Minister himself upon his return. Nor did he budge from his stated stance that he would maintain order in the town at any cost.