Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

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 on to 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.

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.

Mahesh Kapoor’s own very brief visit to Salimpur at Bakr-Id was not forgotten. Although he was an outsider, people felt that he was not merely interested in them for their votes, a fickle migratory bird visible only at election time.

Maan enjoyed meeting people and asking for their votes on his father’s behalf. At times he felt quite protective of him. Even when Mahesh Kapoor got annoyed, as he sometimes still did when he was very tired, Maan took it in good part. Perhaps I will become a politician after all, he thought. Certainly, I enjoy it more than most other things I’ve done. But even if I do manage to become an MLA or MP, what will I do once I get there?

Whenever he felt restless, Maan would take over from the driver and hurtle the colourfully decorated flag-decked jeep at breakneck speed down roads that were meant at best for bullock-carts. This gave him an exhilarating sense of freedom and everyone else a physical and psychological shock. The jeep, which was meant to accommodate two passengers in front and at most four in the back, was often crammed with ten or a dozen people, food, megaphones, posters, and all sorts of other paraphernalia besides. Its horn blew unceasingly and it trailed impressive clouds of dust and glory. Once, when its radiator began to leak, the driver scolded it and mixed some turmeric into the water. This sealed the leak miraculously.

One morning, they drove towards the twin villages of Debaria and Sagal, which were on the agenda for the day. As they approached the village Maan fell into a sudden depression. He had remembered Rasheed on and off during these last few days, and was glad they had been so busy that the memory had not preyed on him even more. But now he thought of what he was going to have to say to Rasheed’s family. Perhaps they already knew about him. Certainly, neither Netaji nor Qamar had asked about him. But then, when they had met, there had been very little time to inquire.

Some other questions came to Maan’s mind, and instead of humming a ghazal, as he sometimes did when driving, he fell silent. Was Rasheed serious when he had spoken of canvassing for the Socialist Party? What had brought his disturbing rift of delusion about Tasneem to the surface? Again he thought back to the day when they had visited the old and sick man at Sagal. He felt that Rasheed was at heart a good man, not the calculating ogre of Saeeda Bai’s fancy.

It was almost the end of the year, and Maan had not seen Saeeda Bai now for two weeks. During the days he was so busy that she did not often enter his mind. But at night, even though he was exhausted, and just before sleep took over, his mind would turn to her. He would think not of her steely tantrums but of her gentleness and softness, of her unhappiness about Tasneem, of the scent of attar of roses, of the taste of Banarasi paan on her lips, of the intoxicating atmosphere of her two rooms. How strange, he thought, that he had never met her anywhere other than in those two rooms — except twice. It had been nine months since Holi evening in Prem Nivas, when he had first quoted Dagh to her in light-spirited public banter. And it seemed ages since he had tasted the sherbet from her hands. Even for one who continued to feel tenderly towards almost all the women he had had affairs with, it was a new experience for Maan to be obsessed by one woman — sexually and emotionally — for so long.

‘For God’s sake, Maan, drive straight. Do you want to have the election cancelled?’ said his father. There was a rule to the effect that if a candidate died before the poll, it would be countermanded and a new election declared.

‘Yes, Baoji,’ said Maan. ‘Sorry.’

In the event, Maan did not have to say much to anyone about Rasheed. Baba, who had met Mahesh Kapoor on the last visit, took over the reins as soon as they arrived in the village.

‘So you’ve rejoined the Congress,’ he said to the Minister.

‘Yes, I have,’ said Mahesh Kapoor. ‘It was good advice you gave me.’

Baba was pleased that Mahesh Kapoor had remembered.