Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

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.

When Mahesh Kapoor, after long and dusty hours of campaigning, arrived in Debaria with Kedarnath one evening, Baba met him and greeted him hospitably, but told him plainly that the situation had greatly changed.

‘And what about you?’ asked Mahesh Kapoor. ‘Have you changed? Do you believe that a father should be punished for an offence of his son’s?’

Baba said: ‘I have never believed that. But I do believe that a father is responsible for the manner in which his son behaves.’

Mahesh Kapoor forbore from remarking that Netaji had not proved a great credit to Baba. The point was irrelevant, and he had no energy to argue. It was perhaps at that moment that he felt most acutely that he had lost the fight.

When he got back to Salimpur late at night, he told his son-in-law that he wished to be alone. The electricity in the room was weak, the bulbs low and flickering. He ate by himself and thought about his life, attempting to dissociate his family life from his public life, and to concentrate on the latter. Now more than ever he felt that he should have dropped out of politics in 1947. The sense of determination he had had when fighting the British had dissipated in the uncertainties and feeblenesses of Independence.

After dinner he looked through his post. He picked up a large envelope containing details of local electoral rolls. Then he picked up another local letter, and was startled to see King George VI’s face on the stamp.

For a minute he stared at it, completely disoriented, as if he had seen an omen. Very carefully he placed the envelope down upon the postcard below: a postcard displaying a portrait of Gandhi. He felt as if he had unconsciously trumped his own best card. He stared once again at the stamp.

There was a simple explanation, but it did not occur to him. The Posts and Telegraph Department, under pressure of the great demands of election mail, and concerned about possible shortages, had issued instructions that old stocks of the King George series be put on sale at post offices. That was all. King George VI, from his sick-bed in London, had not visited Mahesh Kapoor in the watches of the night to predict that he would see him again at Philippi.

The next morning Mahesh Kapoor arose before dawn, and took a walk through the unwoken town. The sky was still starry. A couple of birds had just begun to sing. A few dogs barked. Over the faint voice of the muezzin’s call to prayer, a cock crowed. Then again everything was silent except for the occasional birdsong.

‘Rise, traveller, the sky is light.

Why do you sleep? It is not night.’

He hummed the tune to himself and felt a renewal, if not of hope, at least of determination.

He looked at the watch that Rafi Sahib had given him, thought of the date, and smiled.

Later that morning, he was about to set out on the election round, when the Sub-Divisional Officer of Salimpur came up to him in a great hurry.

‘Sir, the Prime Minister will be coming here tomorrow afternoon. I was instructed by telephone to inform you. He will be speaking at Baitar and at Salimpur.’

‘Are you sure?’ said Mahesh Kapoor impatiently. ‘Are you absolutely sure?’ He looked amazed, as if his improvement of mood had of itself brought about an improvement of fortune.

‘Yes, indeed, Sir. I am sure.’ The SDO looked both excited and extremely anxious. ‘I have made no arrangements at all. None at all.’

Within an hour the extraordinary news was all over town, and by midday had percolated into the villages.

Jawaharlal Nehru, amazingly young-looking for his sixty-two years, dressed in an achkan which was already taking on the colour of the dust of the constituency roads, met Mahesh Kapoor and the Congress parliamentary candidate in the Circuit House at Baitar. Mahesh Kapoor could still hardly believe it.

‘Kapoor Sahib,’ said Nehru, ‘they told me I shouldn’t come here because it was a lost battle. That made me even more determined to come. Take these things away,’ he said irritably to a man standing near him, as he bent his neck and freed himself of seven marigold garlands. ‘Then they told me some nonsense about some trouble your son had got himself into. I asked if it had anything to do with you — and it clearly hadn’t. People put too much emphasis on the wrong things in this country.’

‘I cannot thank you enough, Panditji,’ said Mahesh Kapoor with grateful dignity; he was very moved.

‘Thank? There is nothing to thank me for. By the way, I am very sorry about Mrs Kapoor. I remember meeting her in Allahabad — but that must have been — what? — five years ago.’

‘Eleven.’

‘Eleven! What is the matter? Why are they taking so much time to set things up? I’ll be late in Salimpur.’ He popped a pastille into his mouth. ‘Oh, I meant to tell you. I am asking Sharma to come and join my Cabinet. He can’t keep refusing me. I know he likes being Chief Minister, but I need a strong team in Delhi too. That is why it is so important that you win here and help to handle things in Purva Pradesh.’

‘Panditji,’ said Mahesh Kapoor with surprise and pleasure, ‘I will do my best.’

‘And of course we cannot have reactionary forces winning sensitive seats,’ said Nehru, pointing in the general direction of the Fort. ‘Where is Bhushan — is that his name? Can’t they organize anything?’ he continued impatiently. He stepped on to the verandah and shouted for the man from the District Congress Committee who was in charge of logistics. ‘How can we expect to run a country if we can’t get together a microphone and a platform and a few policemen?’ When he heard that the irksome and interminable security arrangements were finally secure, he ran down the steps of the Circuit House two at a time and jumped into the car.

The cavalcade was stopped every hundred yards or so by adoring crowds. When they reached the grounds where he was due to talk, he ran up the steps of the flower-strewn podium before doing namaste to the vast throng gathered below. The people — townsfolk and villagers alike — had been waiting for him with growing anticipation for more than two hours. When they sensed his arrival, even before they saw him, an electric shiver ran through the huge, excited audience, and they shouted: