Shashi Tharoor - Show Business

“He knows,” my brother says quietly, blinking behind his glasses. “The Prime Minister’s office just called.”

Now I understand the gloom. “You mean you’ve only just been told they weren’t going to give you the ticket? I’m so sorry, Dad. I naturally assumed you were behind — all this. I had no idea.”

I sit down gently in the chair next to my father’s. Dust rises from it: he has been alone in that room too often. “I’m really sorry about the way they’ve handled this, Dad,” I say. “But the PM seemed in no doubt that you would have lost to Sugriva Sharma. At least they’re not giving your seat to someone else. It’s in the family — and it’s me, your son and heir, doing what you’d always wanted me to do. Aren’t you happy about that?”

“Why are you doing it?” my father asks abruptly.

“Because they asked me to. The Prime Minister asked me to.”

“And why do you think the PM asked you?”

This is hardly the way I had expected the conversation to go, but I humor him. “Because I can win.”

“Correct.” My father’s face shows no signs of pleasure at my answer. “And why do you want to win?”

I stare at him nonplussed, unable to comprehend the question.

“I can understand the party’s motives,” says my father. “I can’t understand yours.”

“But Dad, you’ve been telling me for years I was wasting my time in films! Here’s a chance now to put my years in films to good use, in an area you wanted me to!” My voice is rising.

“I can see that, Ashok, I’m not a fool. But why do you want to do it? The party wants to retain the seat. Why do you want to win it?”

I am again wordless with incomprehension. My father tries a different tack.

“What will you do with your victory? What will you do once you’ve won?”

I get what he’s driving at. After all, I’ve seen Robert Redford in The Candidate. “I’ll do,” I say firmly, “what the party and the government want me to do.”

“What do you believe in?” My father is relentless today.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve just been adopted as the prospective parliamentary candidate of the country’s ruling party,” my father snaps. “What are your beliefs? What do you believe in?”

I try a conciliatory tone. “Come on, give me a break, Dad,” I say. “I believe in what you believe in.”

“And what’s that?”

“Oh, you know, democracy, nonalignment, socialism.”

“I don’t believe in socialism. I’ve tried to tell you that for fifteen years. If I did, or was prepared to pretend I did, I’d still have the party ticket today.”

“Well, whether you believe in it or not,” I snap back, “the party does. It’s part of the officially adopted platform you would have been sworn to uphold if you had been a candidate.”

“So you believe what the party tells you to believe.”

“How does it matter?” I am really exasperated now, and I’m shouting. “When has any of this ever mattered to anybody? Does anyone vote because of what a politician believes? Does he then conduct himself in office according to what he believes? The name of the game, Dad, is winning elections. That’s what the party has taken me on board to do, and I thought you’d at least be happy about it, for Chrissake.”

“Why should I be happy? For nearly twenty years now I have been urging you to join me, to take an interest in my work, to involve yourself in the constituency. You have done none of these things, you have not heeded a single request. Now, when you do, it is at the behest of my enemies in the party — and it is at my expense.”

“Dad, they would have taken the ticket away from you anyway. I heard the way they talked about your chances.”

“You don’t understand a thing, do you?” My father’s voice is already hoarse, his face tired and weak. I realize with a shock that he has become what I had never thought of him as becoming — an old man. “It was I who told the PM I would not be a candidate at these elections against Pandit Sugriva Sharma. I know precisely the reasons why I am vulnerable, foremost among them my age and the sense that I have exhausted my capacity to do anything for the constituency. Especially since it is clear they will never make me a full minister. But I also told the PM who should get the ticket in my place. And till a few minutes ago, I thought the party had concurred with my judgment.”

“Who?” I stand up from the chair and demand belligerently. “Who would you rather have had the ticket than me, your own son?”

“My own son,” he says, and I realize he is not echoing my question but answering it. “Your brother. He has worked long and hard to deserve this opportunity. He has involved himself in the problems of my constituents. He knows the names of hundreds of them, their difficulties, their hopes. He has walked the roads and tramped through the fields; he knows each village by sight. The people recognize him, trust him, and love him — and he does not suffer from my handicaps of age, unrealized ambitions, and unfashionable beliefs. Pandit Sugriva Sharma would not have beaten him.”

I turn around to look at my brother, who stands near the doorway, looking deprived. Christ, I’d had no idea what was going on. “All the more reason,” I say quickly, “why I need you to be my campaign manager, Ashwin. I can’t win without you.” I walk up to him and look him in the eye. “Ashwin — will you help me?”

His eyes drop behind his spectacles. “Of course, Ashok-bhai,” he mumbles.

I turn to my father, who is sitting hollowly in his chair, embittered in defeat. I realize he is waiting for me to ask him the same question. He will then, graciously but grudgingly, extend to me his blessings.

I look at him, slouched sullenly in his chair, his face set in that look of disapprobation I have seen on his face all my life, and decide I am not going to give him the satisfaction.

“You’ll never be able to stop disapproving of me, will you, Dad?” I ask.

Then I walk out of the study, and out — as far as I can help it — of his life.

I am tired. The speeches are all right; that’s like acting a particularly undemanding part. It’s the trudging through the countryside that kills me. In the chappals that are part of my nationalist attire, my feet take a pounding from the hard, unrelenting soil, from the slushy muck of the fields, from the grimy dust in the streets. Once in a while some villager runs up with a lota and washes my feet in ritual welcome. But before the water dries, I am off again, and wet feet seem to suffer much more the depredations of rural pedestrian travel. I am getting increasingly anxious to shake the dust of the Hindi heartland off my toes.

As I walk through villages, trailing behind me the curious crowd of idlers, party workers, and fans (many, alas, too young to vote), as I smile and engage in the rituals of campaigning — talking, questioning, ducking into thatched huts to solicit the peasantry, sitting on charpoys with hookah-puffing farmers to seek their wisdom, standing on the back of the flatbed Tempo to harangue the bazaar through a megaphone — I cannot escape the unworthy suspicion that Ashwin is deliberately putting me through this punishing schedule to get back at me. But when I ask if all this is really necessary, he has a reasonable answer: with an opponent like the Pandit, I can’t leave anything to chance. I need to make myself known to the voters as someone who is not just jetting in from Bombay and expecting to win on my stardom alone.

Maya has come down to help and she is a great hit, wearing simple cotton saris and greeting the women with great respect, not just with folded hands but, in the case of the maternal figures, with an attempt to touch their feet (she rarely has to go through with the whole gesture because the toothless old ladies lift her up in, well, touched gratitude). I watch her in action, ever the dutiful housewife, and realize once more what an asset she is as a wife. To think, for instance, of Mehnaz in this role, with her exquisitely painted face and nails, her silks and her urban chatter, is inconceivable: she would lose me ten votes for every one her glamour obtained. Whereas Maya is, as always in public, perfect in the role.