Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘Twenty or thirty people were slaughtered in two minutes — someone’s father, someone’s daughter. . By the greatest of luck a Gurkha regiment was coming from the other side and they began to fire. And, well, the looters fled, and I’m here to tell you the story.’

‘Where was the family?’ asked Haresh. ‘In the other trucks?’

‘No — I’d sent them on by train a little earlier. Bhaskar was only six at the time. Not that the trains were safe either, as you know.’

‘I don’t know if I should have asked these questions,’ said Haresh, feeling atypically embarrassed.

‘No, no — that’s all right. We were fortunate, as these things go. The Muslim trader who used to own my shop here in Brahmpur — well. . Strange, though — after all that happened there, I still miss Lahore,’ said Kedarnath. ‘But you’d better hurry or you’ll miss your train.’

Brahmpur Junction was as crowded and noisy and smelly as ever: hissing clouds of steam, the whistles of incoming trains, hawkers’ shouts, the stench of fish, the buzz of flies, the scurrying babble of passengers. Haresh felt tired. Though it was past six o’clock it was still very warm. He touched an agate cufflink and wondered at its coolness.

Glancing at the crowd, he noticed a young woman in a light-blue cotton sari standing near her mother. The English teacher whom he had met at Sunil’s party was seeing them off on the down train to Calcutta. The mother’s back was turned towards Haresh, so he could not get a proper glimpse of her. The daughter’s face was striking. It was not classically beautiful — it did not catch at his heart as did the photograph he kept with him — but it had a quality of such attractive intensity that Haresh stopped for a second. The young woman seemed to be determinedly fighting back some sadness that went beyond the normal sadness of parting at a railway platform. Haresh thought of pausing for a little to reintroduce himself to the young lecturer, but something in the girl’s expression of inwardness, almost despair, stopped him from doing so. Besides, his train was leaving soon, his coolie was already quite far ahead of him, and Haresh, not being tall, was concerned that he might lose him in the crowd.

Some riots are caused, some bring themselves into being. The problems at Misri Mandi were not expected to reach a point of violence. A few days after Haresh left, however, the heart of Misri Mandi — including the area around Kedarnath’s shop, was full of armed police.

The previous evening there had been a fight inside a cheap drinking place along the unpaved road that led towards the tannery from Old Brahmpur. The strike meant less money but more time for everyone, so the kalari’s joint was about as crowded as usual. The place was mainly frequented by jatavs, but not exclusively so. Drink equalized the drinkers, and they didn’t care who was sitting at the plain wooden table next to them. They drank, laughed, cried, then tottered and staggered out, sometimes singing, sometimes cursing. They swore undying friendship, they divulged confidences, they imagined insults. The assistant of a trader in Misri Mandi was in a foul mood because he was having a hard time with his father-in-law. He was drinking alone and working himself into a generalized state of aggressiveness. He overheard a comment from behind him about the sharp practice of his employer, and his hands clenched into a fist. Knocking his bench over as he twisted around to see who was speaking, he fell on to the floor.

The three men at the table behind him laughed. They were jatavs who had dealt with him before. It was he who used to take the shoes from their baskets when they scurried desperately in the evening to Misri Mandi — his employer the trader did not like to touch shoes because he felt they would pollute him. The jatavs knew that the breakdown of the trade in Misri Mandi had particularly hurt those traders who had over-extended themselves on the chit system. That it had hurt themselves still more, they also knew — but for them it was not a case of the mighty being brought to their knees. Here, however, literally in front of them, it was.

The locally distilled cheap alcohol had gone to their heads, and they did not have the money to buy the pakoras and other snacks that could have settled it. They laughed uncontrollably.

‘He’s wrestling with the air,’ jeered one.

‘I bet he’d rather be doing another kind of wrestling,’ sneered another.

‘But would he be any good at it? They say that’s why he has trouble at home—’

‘What a reject,’ taunted the first man, waving him away with the airy gesture of a trader rejecting a basket on the basis of a single faulty pair.

Their speech was slurred, their eyes contemptuous. The man who had fallen lunged at them, and they set upon him. A couple of people, including the kalari, tried to make peace, but most gathered around to enjoy the fun and shout drunken encouragement. The four rolled around on the floor, fighting.

It ended with the man who had started the fight being beaten unconscious, and all of the others being injured. One was bleeding from the eye and screaming in pain.

That night, when he lost the sight of his eye, an ominous crowd of jatavs gathered at the Govind Shoe Mart, where the trader had his stall. They found the stall closed. The crowd began to shout slogans, then threatened to burn the stall down. One of the other traders tried to reason with the crowd, and they set upon him. A couple of policemen, sensing the crowd’s mood, ran to the local police station for reinforcements. Ten policemen now emerged, armed with short stout bamboo lathis, and they began to beat people up indiscriminately. The crowd scattered.

Surprisingly soon, every relevant authority knew about the matter: from the Superintendent of Police of the district to the Inspector-General of Purva Pradesh, from the Home Secretary to the Home Minister. Everyone received different facts and interpretations, and had different suggestions for action or inaction.

The Chief Minister was out of town. In his absence — and because law and order lay in his domain — the Home Minister ran things. Mahesh Kapoor, though Revenue Minister, and not therefore directly concerned, heard about the unrest because part of Misri Mandi lay in his constituency. He hurried to the spot and talked with the Superintendent of Police and the District Magistrate. The SP and the DM believed that things would blow over if neither side was provoked. However, the Home Minister, L.N. Agarwal, part of whose constituency also lay in Misri Mandi, did not think it necessary to go to the spot. He received a number of phone calls at home and decided that something by way of a salutary example needed to be provided.

These jatavs had disrupted the trade of the city long enough with their frivolous complaints and their mischievous strike. They had doubtless been stirred up by union leaders. Now they were threatening to block the entrance of the Govind Shoe Mart at the point where it joined the main road of Misri Mandi. Many traders there were already in financial straits. The threatened picketing would finish them off. L.N. Agarwal himself came from a shopkeeping family and some of the traders were good friends of his. Others supplied him with election funds. He had received three desperate calls from them. It was a time not for talk but for action. It was not merely a question of law, but of order, the order of society itself. Surely this is what the Iron Man of India, the late Sardar Patel, would have felt in his place.

But what would he have done had he been here? As if in a dream, the Home Minister conjured up the domed and severe head of his political mentor, dead these four months. He sat in thought for a while. Then he told his personal assistant to get him the District Magistrate on the phone.