A Suitable Boy

by Vikram Seth

  5.3

  Because of the instructions of the Home Minister, the greater part of the police was stationed at sensitive points in Misri Mandi. There were only about fifteen policemen left in the main police station in Chowk by evening. As the call for prayer from the Alamgiri Mosque trembled across the evening sky, by some unfortunate chance or possibly intentional provocation, the sound of a conch was heard interrupting it several times. Normally such a thing might have been angrily shrugged off, but not today.

  No one knew how the men who were gathering in the narrow alleys of the Muslim neighbourhood that lay on one side of Chowk became a mob. One moment they were walking individually or in small groups through the alleys towards the mosque for evening prayer, then they had coalesced into larger clusters, excitedly discussing the ominous signals they had heard. After the midday sermon most were in no mood to listen to any voice of moderation. A couple of the more eager members of the Alamgiri Masjid Hifaazat Committee made a few crowd-rousing remarks, a few local hotheads and toughs stirred themselves and those around them into a state of rage, the crowd increased in size as the alleys joined into larger alleys, its density and speed and sense of indistinct determination increased, and it was no longer a collection but a thing—wounded and enraged, and wanting nothing less than to wound and enrage. There were cries of ‘Allah-u-Akbar’ which could be heard all the way to the police station. A few of those who joined the crowd had sticks in their hands. One or two even had knives. Now it was not the mosque that they were headed for but the partly constructed temple just next to it. It was from here that the blasphemy had originated, it was this that must be destroyed.

  Since the Superintendent of Police of the district was occupied in Misri Mandi, the young District Magistrate, Krishan Dayal, had himself gone to the tall pink edifice of the main police station about an hour earlier to ensure that things would remain stable in the Chowk area. He feared the increased tension that Friday often brought. When he heard about the Imam’s sermon, he asked the kotwal—as the Deputy Superintendent of Police for the City was called—what he planned to do to protect the area.

  The kotwal of Brahmpur, however, was a lazy man who wanted nothing better than to be left alone to take his bribes in peace.

  ‘There will be no trouble, Sir, believe me,’ he assured the District Magistrate. ‘Agarwal Sahib himself has phoned me. Now he tells me I am to go to Misri Mandi to join the SP—so I must be off, Sir, with your leave, of course.’ And he bustled off in a preoccupied sort of way, taking two other lower officers with him, and leaving the kotwali virtually in the charge of a head constable. ‘I will just be sending the Inspector back,’ he said in a reassuring manner. ‘You should not stay, Sir,’ he added ingratiatingly. ‘It is late. This is a peaceful time. After the previous troubles at the mosque we have defused the situation, I am glad to say.’

  Krishan Dayal, left with a force of about twelve constables, thought he would wait until the Inspector returned before he decided whether to go home. His wife was used to him coming back at odd hours, and would wait for him; it was not necessary to phone her. He did not actually expect a riot; he merely felt that tension was running high and that it was not worth taking a chance. He believed that the Home Minister had his priorities wrong where Chowk and Misri Mandi were concerned; but then the Home Minister was arguably the most powerful man in the state next to the Chief Minister, and he himself was just a DM.

  He was sitting and waiting in this unworried but uneasy frame of mind when he heard what was to be recalled by several policemen at the subsequent inquiry—the inquiry by a senior officer that is required to be held after every magisterial order to fire. First he heard the coinciding sounds of the conch and the muezzin’s call to prayer. This worried him mildly, but the reports he had had of the Imam’s speech had not included his prescient reference to a conch. Then, after a while, came the distant murmur of shouting voices interspersed by high cries. Even before he could make out the individual syllables, he could tell what was being shouted by the direction from which it came and the general shape and fervour of the sound. He sent a policeman to the top of the police station—it was three storeys high—to judge where the mob now was. The mob itself would be invisible—hidden as it was by the intervening houses of the labyrinthine alleys—but the direction of the heads of the spectators from the rooftops would give its position away. As the cries of ‘Allah-u-Akbar! Allah-u-Akbar!’ came closer, the DM urgently told the small force of twelve constables to stand with him in a line—rifles at the ready—before the foundations and rudimentary walls of the site of the Shiva Temple. The thought flashed through his mind that despite his training in the army he had not learned to think tactically in a terrain of urban lawlessness. Was there nothing better he could do than to perform this mad sacrificial duty of standing against a wall and facing overwhelming odds?

  The constables under his effective command were Muslims and Rajputs, mainly Muslims. The police force before Partition was very largely composed of Muslims as the result of the sound imperialist policy of divide and rule: it helped the British that the predominantly Hindu Congress-wallahs should be beaten up by predominantly Muslim policemen. Even after the exodus to Pakistan in 1947 there were large numbers of Muslims in the force. They would not be happy to fire upon other Muslims.

  Krishan Dayal believed in general that although it was not always necessary to give effect to maximum force, it was necessary to give the impression that you were prepared to do so. In a strong voice he told the policemen that they were to fire when he gave the order. He himself stood there, pistol in hand. But he felt more vulnerable than ever before in his life. He told himself that a good officer, together with a force on which he could absolutely rely, could almost always carry the day, but he had reservations about the ‘absolutely’; and the ‘almost’ worried him. Once the mob, still a few alleys away, came round the final bend, broke into a charge, and made straight for the temple, the patently, pathetically ineffective police force would be overwhelmed. A couple of men had just come running to tell him that there were perhaps a thousand men in the mob, that they were well armed, and that—judging by their speed—they would be upon them in two or three minutes.

  Now that he knew he might be dead in a few minutes—dead if he fired, dead if he did not—the young DM gave his wife a brief thought, then his parents, and finally an old schoolmaster of his who had once confiscated a blue toy pistol that he had brought to class. His wandering thoughts were brought back to earth by the head constable who was addressing him urgently.

  ‘Sahib!’

  ‘Yes—yes?’

  ‘Sahib—you are determined to shoot if necessary?’ The head constable was a Muslim; it must have struck him as strange that he was about to die shooting Muslims in the course of defending a half-built Hindu temple that was an affront to the very mosque in which he himself often prayed.

  ‘What do you think?’ Krishan Dayal said in a voice that made things quite clear. ‘Do I need to repeat my orders?’

  ‘Sahib, if you take my advice—’ said the head constable quickly, ‘we should not stand here where we will be overpowered. We should stand in wait for them just before they turn the last bend before the temple—and just as they turn the bend we should charge and fire simultaneously. They won’t know how many we are, and they won’t know what’s hit them. There’s a ninety-nine per cent chance they will disperse.’

  The astonished DM said to the head constable: ‘You should have my job.’

  He turned to the others, who appeared petrified. He immediately ordered them to run with him towards the bend. They stationed themselves on either side of the alley, about twenty feet from the bend itself. The mob was less than a minute away. He could hear it screaming and yelling; he could feel the vibration of the ground as hundreds of feet rushed forward.

  At the last moment he gave the signal. The thirteen men roared and charged and fired.

  The wild and dangerous mob, hundreds strong, faced with t
his sudden terror, halted, staggered, turned and fled. It was uncanny. Within thirty seconds it had melted away. Two bodies were left in the street: one young man had been shot through the neck and was dying or dead; the other, an old man with a white beard, had fallen and been crushed by the retreating mob. He was badly, perhaps fatally, injured. Slippers and sticks were scattered here and there. There was blood in several places in the alley, so it was apparent that there had been other injuries, possibly deaths. Friends or members of their families had probably dragged the bodies back into the doorways of neighbouring houses. No one wanted to be brought to the attention of the police.

  The DM looked around at his men. A couple of them were trembling, most of them were jubilant. None of them was injured. He caught the head constable’s eye. Both of them started laughing with relief, then stopped. A couple of women were wailing in nearby houses. Otherwise, everything was peaceful or, rather, still.

  5.4

  The next day L.N. Agarwal visited his only child, his married daughter Priya. He did so because he liked visiting her and her husband, and also to escape from the panic-stricken MLAs of his faction who were desperately worried about the aftermath of the firing in Chowk, and were making his life miserable with their misery.

  L.N. Agarwal’s daughter lived in Old Brahmpur in the Shahi Darvaza area, not far from Misri Mandi where her childhood friend Veena Tandon lived. Priya lived in a joint family which included her husband’s brothers and their wives and children. Her husband was Ram Vilas Goyal, a lawyer with a practice concentrated mainly in the District Court—though he did appear in the High Court from time to time. He worked mainly on civil, not criminal cases. He was a placid, good-natured, bland-featured man, sparing with his words, and with only a mild interest in politics. Law and a little business on the side was enough for him; that and a calm family background and the peaceful ratchet of routine, which he expected Priya to provide. His colleagues respected him for his scrupulous honesty and his slow but clear-headed legal abilities. And his father-in-law the Home Minister enjoyed talking to him: he maintained confidences, refrained from giving advice, and had no passion for politics.

  Priya Goyal for her part was a fiery spirit. Every morning, winter or summer, she paced fiercely along the roof. It was a long roof, since it covered three contiguous narrow houses, connected lengthways at each of the three storeys. In effect the whole operated as one large house, and was treated as such by the family and the neighbours. It was known locally as the Rai Bahadur’s house because Ram Vilas Goyal’s grandfather (still alive at eighty-eight), who had been given that title by the British, had bought and restructured the property half a century ago.

  On the ground floor were a number of storerooms and the servants’ quarters. On the floor above lived Ram Vilas’s ancient grandfather, the Rai Bahadur; his father and stepmother; and his sister. The common kitchen was also located on this floor as was the puja room (which the unpious, even impious, Priya rarely visited). On the top floor were the rooms, respectively, of the families of the three brothers; Ram Vilas was the middle brother and he occupied the two rooms of the top floor of the middle ‘house’. Above this was the roof with its washing lines and water tanks.

  When she paced up and down the roof, Priya Goyal would picture herself as a panther in a cage. She would look longingly towards the small house just a few minutes’ walk away—and just visible through the jungle of intervening roofs—in which her childhood friend Veena Tandon lived. Veena, she knew, was not well off any longer, but she was free to do as she pleased: to go to the market, to walk around by herself, to go for music lessons. In Priya’s own household there was no question of that. For a daughter-in-law from the house of the Rai Bahadur to be seen in the market would have been disgraceful. That she was thirty-two years old with a girl of ten and a boy of eight was irrelevant. Ram Vilas, ever placid, would have none of it. It was simply not his way; more importantly, it would cause pain to his father and stepmother and grandfather and elder brother—and Ram Vilas sincerely believed in maintaining the decencies of a joint family.

  Priya hated living in a joint family. She had never done so until she came to live with the Goyals of Shahi Darvaza. This was because her father, Lakshmi Narayan Agarwal, had been the only son to survive to adulthood, and he in his turn had only had the one daughter. When his wife died, he had been stricken, and had taken the Gandhian vow of sexual abstinence. He was a man of spartan habits. Although Home Minister, he lived in two rooms in a hostel for Members of the Legislative Assembly.

  ‘The first years of married life are the hardest—they require the most adjustment,’ Priya had been told; but she felt that in some ways it was getting more and more intolerable as time went on. Unlike Veena, she had no proper paternal—and more importantly, maternal—home to run away to with her children for at least a month a year—the prerogative of all married women. Even her grandparents (with whom she had spent the time when her father was in jail) were now dead. Her father loved her dearly as his only child; it was his love that had in a sense spoiled her for the constrained life of the Goyal joint family, for it had imbued her with a spirit of independence; and now, living in austerity as he did, he could not himself provide her with any refuge.

  If her husband had not been so kind, she felt she would have gone mad. He did not understand her but he was understanding. He tried to make things easier for her in small ways, and he never once raised his voice. Also, she liked the ancient Rai Bahadur, her grandfather-in-law. There was a spark to him. The rest of the family and particularly the women—her mother-in-law, her husband’s sister, and her husband’s elder brother’s wife—had done their best to make her miserable as a young bride, and she could not stand them. But she had to pretend she did, every day, all the time—except when she paced up and down on the roof—where she was not even permitted to have a garden, on the grounds that it would attract monkeys. Ram Vilas’s stepmother had even tried to dissuade her from her daily to-ing and fro-ing (‘Just think, Priya, how will it look to the neighbours?’), but for once Priya had refused to go along. The sisters-in-law above whose heads she paced at dawn reported her to their mother-in-law. But perhaps the old witch sensed that she had driven Priya to the limit, and did not phrase her complaint in a direct manner again. Anything indirect on the matter Priya chose not to understand.

  L.N. Agarwal came dressed as always in an immaculately starched (but not fancy) kurta, dhoti and Congress cap. Below the white cap could be seen his curve of curly grey hair but not the baldness it enclosed. Whenever he ventured out to Shahi Darvaza he kept his cane handy to scare away the monkeys that frequented, some would say dominated, the neighbourhood. He dismissed his rickshaw near the local market, and turned off the main road into a tiny side-lane which opened out into a small square. In the middle of the square was a large pipal tree. One entire side of the square was the Rai Bahadur’s house.

  The door below the stairs was kept closed because of the monkeys, and he rapped on it with his cane. A couple of faces appeared at the enclosed wrought-iron balconies of the floors above. His daughter’s face lit up when she saw him; she quickly coiled her loose black hair into a bun and came downstairs to open the door. Her father embraced her and they went upstairs again.

  ‘And where has Vakil Sahib disappeared?’ he asked in Hindi.

  He liked to refer to his son-in-law as the lawyer, although the appellation was equally appropriate to Ram Vilas’s father and grandfather.

  ‘He was here a minute ago,’ replied Priya, and got up to search for him.

  ‘Don’t bother yet,’ said her father in a warm, relaxed voice. ‘First give me some tea.’

  For a few minutes the Home Minister enjoyed home comforts: well-made tea (not the useless stuff he got at the MLA hostel); sweets and kachauris made by the women of his daughter’s house—maybe by his daughter herself; some minutes with his grandson and granddaughter, who preferred, however, to play with their friends on the heat of the roof or below in the square (h
is granddaughter was good at street cricket); and a few words with his daughter, whom he saw rarely enough and missed a great deal.

  He had no compunction, as some fathers-in-law had, about accepting food, drink and hospitality at his son-in-law’s house. He talked with Priya about his health and his grandchildren and their schooling and character; about how Vakil Sahib was working far too hard, a little about Priya’s mother in passing, at the mention of whom a sadness came into both their eyes, and about the antics of the old servants of the Goyal household.

  As they talked, other people passed the open door of the room, saw them, and came in. They included Ram Vilas’s father, rather a helpless character who was terrorized by his second wife. Soon the whole Goyal clan had dropped by—except for the Rai Bahadur, who did not like climbing stairs.

  ‘But where is Vakil Sahib?’ repeated L.N. Agarwal.

  ‘Oh,’ said someone, ‘he’s downstairs talking with the Rai Bahadur. He knows you are in the house and he will come up as soon as he is released.’

  ‘Why don’t I go down and pay my respects to the Rai Bahadur now?’ said L.N. Agarwal, and got up.

  Downstairs, grandfather and grandson were talking in the large room that the Rai Bahadur had reserved as his own—mainly because he was attached to the beautiful peacock tiles that decorated the fireplace. L.N. Agarwal, being of the middle generation, paid his respects and had respects paid to him.

  ‘Of course you’ll have tea?’ said the Rai Bahadur.

  ‘I’ve had some upstairs.’

  ‘Since when have Leaders of the People placed a limit on their tea-consumption?’ asked the Rai Bahadur in a creaky and lucid voice. The word he used was ‘Neta-log’, which had about the same level of mock deference as ‘Vakil Sahib’.

  ‘Now, tell me,’ he continued, ‘what is all this killing you’ve been doing in Chowk?’

  It was not meant the way it sounded, it was merely the old Rai Bahadur’s style of speech, but L.N. Agarwal could have done without direct examination. He would probably get enough of that on the floor of the House on Monday. What he would have preferred was a quiet chat with his placid son-in-law, an unloading of his troubled mind.