A Suitable Boy

by Vikram Seth

  I am so tired I could weep.

  Mad bird, for God’s sake let me sleep.

  Why do you cry like one possessed?

  When will you rest? When will you rest?

  Why wait each night till all but I

  Lie sleeping in the house, then cry?

  Why do you scream into my ear

  What no one else but I can hear?

  Her thoughts a whirl of images and questions, Lata read this poem through five or six times. It was far clearer than most of the poems in the book, clearer certainly than the inscription he had written for her, and yet it was far more mysterious and disturbing. She knew the yellow laburnum, the amaltas tree that stood above Dipankar’s meditation hut in the garden at Ballygunge, and she could imagine Amit looking out at its branches at night. (Why, she wondered, had he used the Hindi word for the tree rather than the Bengali—was it just for the sake of the rhyme?) But the Amit she knew—kindly, cynical, cheerful—was even less the Amit of this poem than of the short love poem that she had read and liked.

  Did she even like this poem, she wondered. The thought of Amit sweating disturbed her—he was to her a disembodied and comforting spirit, and it was best that he remained that way. By now it had been dark for more than an hour, and Lata could imagine him lying on his bed, hearing the papiha sing its triple note, and tossing restlessly from side to side.

  She looked at the personalized inscription again. She wondered why he had used the word ‘carve’ in the final line. Was it simply to chime—in a slightly overdone manner, she could not help feeling—with the ‘swerve’ and ‘curve’ of the previous line? A poem could hardly be carved. But this was probably just poetic licence, like the bird’s wings beating a tattoo, or the claim that he was drunk on words.

  Then, suddenly, and for no apparent reason at all, for she was not looking out for such a curious feature as this, she realized, with simultaneous delight and dismay, how carved, how personalized the inscription indeed was, and why, after all, he had not written her name above the poem. It went far beyond the reference to pineapples, to the moment in the cemetery that they had shared. She had only to look down the first letters of each of the four lines in each of the four quatrains to realize how inextricably bound she was not merely to the sentiment but to the very structure of Amit’s poem.

  Part Fourteen

  14.1

  Mahesh Kapoor left for his farm in Rudhia in early August in the company of Maan. Now that he was no longer a Minister, he had a little more free time for his own pursuits. Apart from supervising the work on the farm itself—the main activity at present was the transplantation of rice—he had two other purposes in leaving Brahmpur. The first was to see if Maan, who had proved himself uninterested and unsuccessful in working in Banaras, might possibly be happier and more effectively employed in running the farm. The second was to ascertain from where he could best fight a candidate from the Congress Party for an Assembly seat in the coming General Elections—now that he himself had left it and joined the newly formed Peasants’ and Workers’ Peoples’ Party—the KMPP for short. The obvious rural choice was the constituency that contained his farm—which was in the Rudhia subdivision of Rudhia District. As he walked around his fields, his mind turned once more to Delhi and the great figures of the strife-ridden Congress Party vying with each other for power on the national stage.

  Rafi Ahmad Kidwai, the wise, wily and playful politician from U.P., who had been responsible for a spate of resignations from the Congress, including Mahesh Kapoor’s, was anathema to the Hindu-chauvinist right wing of the party—partly because he was Muslim, partly because he had twice orchestrated opposition to the attempts of Purushottamdas Tandon to become President of the Congress Party. Tandon had been narrowly defeated in 1948, and had narrowly won in 1950—in a dubiously fought battle made more bitter by the knowledge that whoever controlled the Congress Party machine in 1951 would have control over the selection of candidates for the forthcoming General Elections.

  Tandon—a barefooted, bearded, austere and rather intolerant man, seven years Nehru’s senior and, like him, from Allahabad—now headed the organization of the Congress Party. He had chosen his Working Committee largely from the party bosses of the individual states and their supporters, for in most of the states the party machinery was already in the control of the conservatives. Since Tandon had insisted that the Congress President’s choice of his Working Committee should be unfettered, he did not include—and had indeed refused to include—either his defeated opponent Kripalani—or Kidwai, who had planned Kripalani’s campaign. Prime Minister Nehru, already upset by Tandon’s election, which he rightly interpreted as a victory not only for Tandon but for Sardar Patel, his own great conservative rival, had at first refused to join a Working Committee that excluded Kidwai. But in the interests of unity, because he saw the Congress as the only cohesive force in the localized and divided web of Indian politics, he swallowed his objections and joined it.

  Nehru sought to protect his policies as Prime Minister from any possible onslaught by the activist Congress President by proposing party resolutions on each of his main policies, all of which had been overwhelmingly passed by the assembled party. But passing resolutions by acclamation was one thing, controlling the personnel of the party—and the selection of candidates—another. Nehru was left with the uneasy sense that the lip service that was being paid to the policies of his government would change once the right wing got its own slate of MLAs and MPs into Parliament and the state legislatures. Nehru’s vast popularity would be used to win the elections, and then he would be left stranded and impotent.

  The death of Sardar Patel, a couple of months after Tandon was elected, had left the right wing without its greatest strategist. But Tandon proved to be a formidable opponent in his own right. In the name of discipline and unity he attempted to suppress dissenting groups within the party, such as the Democratic Front established by Kidwai and Kripalani (the so-called K-K Group), which were outspoken in their criticism of his leadership. Stay in the party and support the Working Committee, they were warned, or get out. Unlike his compliant predecessor in the job, Tandon also insisted that the party organization as represented by its President had every right to advise, and indeed control, the policies of the Congress Government headed by Nehru—down to the question of banning hydrogenated cooking oil. And on every important issue his views were diametrically opposed to those of Nehru or his supporters—men such as Kripalani and Kidwai or, closer to Brahmpur, Mahesh Kapoor.

  Apart from economic differences, the Nehruites and the Tandonites saw the Muslim question in an entirely different light. Throughout the year there had been a great deal of mutual snarling by India and Pakistan across their borders. It had appeared several times that war might be imminent over the problem of Kashmir. While Nehru saw war as a disastrous possibility for the two poor countries, and attempted to come to some kind of understanding with the Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, many embittered members of his party were in favour of war with Pakistan. One member of his Cabinet had resigned, formed his own Hindu revivalist party, and was even talking of conquering Pakistan and reuniting it by force with India. What made things worse was the steady stream of refugees, mainly now from East Pakistan into Bengal, that put an unsupportable burden upon the state. They were fleeing because of ill treatment and insecurity in Pakistan, and several hardliners in India suggested under a theory of reciprocity that for each Hindu migrant from Pakistan a Muslim should be expelled from India. They saw matters in terms of Hindus and Muslims, of collective guilt and collective revenge. So successfully indeed had the two-nation theory—the Muslim League’s justification for Partition—taken root in their own minds that they saw Muslim citizens of India as Muslims first and Indians only incidentally; and were willing to visit upon their heads punishment for the actions of their co-religionists in the other country.

  Such talk repelled Nehru. The thought of India as a Hindu state with its minorities treat
ed as second-class citizens sickened him. If Pakistan treated its minority citizens barbarically, that was no reason for India to do so. He had, after Partition, personally pleaded with a number of Muslim civil servants to remain in India. He had accepted, if not exactly welcomed, into the Congress fold, a number of leaders who had belonged to the Muslim League, which had virtually ceased to exist in India. He had attempted to reassure Muslims who, because of ill treatment and a sense of insecurity, were still migrating to West Pakistan through Rajasthan and other border states. He had preached against communal enmity in every speech he had given—and Nehru was much given to speeches. He had refused to countenance any of the retaliatory actions urged on him by many of the dispossessed Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan, by the right-wing parties, and by the right wing of his own party. He had tried to soften some of the more draconian decisions of the Custodian-General of Evacuee Property, who had often acted more in the interests of those who hankered after evacuee property than of the evacuees themselves. He had signed a pact with Liaquat Ali Khan which had reduced the likelihood of war with Pakistan. All these actions infuriated people who saw Nehru as a rootless, deracinated Indian, whose sentimental creed was a pro-Muslim secularism, and who was divorced from the majority of his own Hindu citizenry.

  The only problem for his critics was that his citizenry loved him and would almost certainly vote for him, as it had done ever since his great tour in the 1930s, when he had travelled around the country, charming and stirring up vast audiences. Mahesh Kapoor knew this—as, indeed, did anyone with the faintest knowledge of the political scene.

  While walking around his farm, discussing with his manager irrigation problems in a season when rainfall had been disappointing, Mahesh Kapoor’s mind often turned to Delhi and to the momentous events that, he felt, had left him no choice but to leave the party to which he had given his allegiance for thirty years. He, like many others, had hoped that Nehru would come to see how futile were his efforts to maintain his policies in the face of Tandon’s activities and would take some firm measure of control; but Nehru, though his own supporters were haemorrhaging away from his party as it drifted into its right-wing orbit, refused to leave the Congress or to take any positive action other than to plead, in meeting after meeting of the All-India Congress Committee, for unity and reconciliation. As he vacillated, his supporters floundered. Eventually, by late summer, a point of crisis had been reached.

  In June a special convention of the Congress Party was held in Patna. There, at a parallel convention, the fledgling KMPP was established by several leaders, including Kripalani, who had recently resigned from the Congress, accusing it of ‘corruption, nepotism and jobbery’. Kidwai, without actually resigning from the Congress, had been elected to the Executive Committee of the KMPP. This action brought down upon him the wrath of the right-wingers; for how (as one of them wrote to Tandon) could he continue to be a Central Minister of the Congress government and simultaneously belong to the executive of the party that was one of its most vociferous opponents—one which, indeed, hoped to supplant the Congress itself? Kripalani had tendered his resignation as a member of the Congress Party to Tandon, but Kidwai had not. Surely, argued his critics, he had better do so at once.

  In early July the Working Committee and then the All-India Congress Committee met once again in Bangalore. Kidwai was asked to explain himself by the Working Committee. He hedged, claimed in his easy-going way that he had no immediate intention of resigning from the Congress, stated that he had tried to get the KMPP session postponed but had failed to do so, and expressed his hope that the Bangalore session of the Congress would make his anomalous position and the atmosphere in general much clearer.

  The Bangalore session, however, did no such thing. Nehru, seeing at last that resolutions in his support were not enough, demanded something much more concrete: a complete reconstitution of the two most powerful committees of the Congress—the Working Committee and the Central Election Committee—so as to reduce their domination by the right wing. At this, Tandon offered to resign together with the whole of his Working Committee. Fearing a permanent split in the Congress, Nehru backed down. A few more conciliatory resolutions were passed. Some pulled in one direction, some in another. On the one hand the Congress disapproved of groups within its ranks; on the other, there would be an open door back to the party for those ‘seceders’ who agreed with the general aims of the Congress. But rather than rejoin the Congress, two hundred more Congressmen resigned and joined the KMPP at Bangalore. The atmosphere remained as murky as ever, and Rafi Ahmad Kidwai decided that the time for vacillation had passed. The battle had to be joined.

  He returned to Delhi and wrote a letter to the Prime Minister, resigning both from the Cabinet as Minister of Communications and from the Congress Party. He made it clear that both he and his friend Ajit Prasad Jain, the Minister for Rehabilitation, had resigned because they could not stand Tandon or his policies or his undemocratic method of functioning. They emphasized that they had no quarrel with Nehru himself. Nehru pleaded with them to reconsider their decision, and this they did.

  The next day they both announced that they had decided not to resign from the Cabinet after all. They also announced, however, that they would continue to work against the Congress, at any rate against the Congress President and his cohorts, whose views and strategies ran counter to every important resolution or declaration of the party. Their statement explaining their decision was a startling one, coming as it did from two Ministers of the Government:

  Is there a parallel in the world where the executive head, i.e. President of an organisation, is the very antithesis of everything that the organisation stands for? What is there in common between Shri Purushottamdas Tandon and the policies of the Congress—economic, communal, international and refugees? Even at this juncture when our ways parted, we wished and hoped that the working of the Congress would fall in line with its profession.

  Tandon and the old guard, goaded by what they perceived as rank disloyalty and indiscipline, demanded that Nehru call his Ministers to heel. There was no way that the dissidents could be allowed to function as Ministers and attempt at the same time to do down their own party. Nehru was forced, sadly, to agree. Jain remained in the Cabinet, agreeing not to issue further provocative statements. Kidwai, unable to agree to such a constraint, offered once more to resign. This time Nehru realized that it would be fruitless to plead with his old colleague and friend, and accepted his resignation.

  Nehru was now more isolated in his own party than ever. Together with all the crushing burdens of the Prime Ministership—the food problem, the warmongering on both sides of the border, the Press Bill and the Hindu Code Bill and the endless legislation to be passed through Parliament, the relations between the Centre and the states (which had come to a boil with the declaration of direct Central rule in Punjab), the day-to-day running of the administration, the working out of the First Five-Year Plan, foreign affairs (an area that particularly exercised him), not to mention endless emergencies of one kind or another—Nehru was weighed down by the hard realization that his ideological opponents in his party had, in effect and at last, defeated him. They had elected Tandon, they had forced Nehru’s supporters to leave the Congress in droves and form a new opposition party, they had taken over the District Congress Committees and Pradesh Congress Committees and the Working Committee and Central Election Committee, they had forced the resignation of the Minister who, more than any other, was sympathetic to his way of thinking, and they were poised to select their own conservative candidates for the impending General Elections. Nehru’s back was to the wall; and he may perhaps have reflected that it was his own indecisiveness that had helped put it there.

  14.2

  Certainly, Mahesh Kapoor thought so. He was in the habit of unburdening himself to whoever was at hand, and it happened to be Maan with whom he was walking through the fields on a tour of inspection.

  ‘Nehru has finished all of us—and himse
lf in the process.’

  Maan, who had been thinking about the wolf-hunt he had enjoyed when he was last in the area, was brought back to earth by the despair in his father’s voice.

  ‘Yes, Baoji,’ he said, and wondered how to go on from there. After a pause he added, ‘Well, I’m sure something will work out. Things have swung so far this way that they have to correct themselves.’

  ‘You are a fool,’ said his father shortly. He recalled how annoyed and disappointed S.S. Sharma had been when he and some of his colleagues had said they were resigning from the party. The Chief Minister liked to balance the Agarwal and Kapoor factions of his party against each other, so that he himself had maximum freedom of action; with one wing missing, his craft listed uncomfortably and his own decision-making abilities were necessarily more constrained.

  Maan was silent. He began wondering how he could get away to pay a visit to his friend the Sub-Divisional Officer, who had organized the hunt a couple of months earlier.

  ‘That things will swing back into order once they’ve been displaced is an optimistic and childish conceit,’ said his father. ‘The toy you should be thinking of is not the swing but the slide,’ he continued after a pause. ‘Now Nehru cannot control the Congress. And if he cannot control it, I cannot rejoin it—nor Rafi Sahib, nor any of the rest. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘Yes, Baoji,’ said Maan, taking a mild swipe at a tall weed with his walking stick, and hoping that he was not going to be treated to a long lecture on the rights and wrongs of various party positions. He was in luck. A man came running across the fields to announce that the jeep of the Sub-Divisional Officer Sandeep Lahiri had been sighted heading towards the farm.

  The ex-Minister growled: ‘Tell him I’m taking a walk.’

  But Sandeep Lahiri appeared a few minutes later, walking gingerly (and without his accompanying policemen) along the little ridges between the fields of emerald-coloured rice. On his head was his sola topi, and there was a nervous smile above his weak chin.