Race Course Road: A Novel

by Goswami, Seema

  JVF Associates had started off as a standard-issue PR firm before branching off into what the Fernandos coyly labeled ‘image consultancy’. Now, while still retaining their corporate clients (whom they billed for millions every year), the couple had effortlessly morphed into political strategists and campaign consultants. And when Rajiv Mehta had done the dirty and defected to Jayesh Sharma, Birendra Pratap Singh had signed up JVF Associates in his stead.

  The Fernandos epitomized the phrase ‘power couple’. They had met in mid-life, each of them stars in their own fields (PR and advertising), both fresh off nasty divorces, and had inexorably gravitated towards one another. They had now been married for a decade and were still palpably hot for one another.

  Rare was the Delhi party that did not have Jacob and Vidya groping each other in one dark corner or another. Nobody knew quite what to make of this. It was one thing to make out at parties, quite another to do so with your spouse, whom you could feel up any time you wanted.

  But clearly the Fernandos found it difficult to keep their hands off each other. Even today, they entered hand-in-hand, he in a natty Savile Row suit, she in her trademark handloom sari, parting company only to greet Sadhana Devi and Asha, whom they hadn’t met since Birendra Pratap’s passing.

  Sadhana Devi took their arrival as her cue to leave. Having spent a lifetime retreating from rooms in which business was to be conducted, she had a fine instinct for when she was not wanted. Radhika too bundled off the kids and retired to the private part of the house. Asha, not clear as to what was expected of her, stood up uncertainly, wondering if she should have left with her mother.

  But no, Karan was escorting her to his study, along with Arjun, Jacob and Vidya, for a ‘strategy session’. The only topic of discussion: Asha’s entry into politics.

  Feeling like she was being swept away by a tide that she had no control over, Asha sat through the meeting in a daze. It was a novel feeling to sit and hear people discuss her as if she wasn’t even there.

  What was the best place for Asha to stand? Should she focus her energies on Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh or should they schedule a few stops for her in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh as well? Should she announce her entry into active politics in a press conference at party headquarters in Delhi? Did she need to give a couple of interviews? Should they be in print or on television?

  The discussion raged around her as Asha tried to make sense of this alternative reality she found herself in. How had her life changed so much in so little time? Her father was gone. Her brothers—her half-brothers!—were actually being nice to her. And now, they were actively encouraging her to stand for elections. Until now, she had thought that the only LJP leader who was keen on her fighting for a seat was Madan Mohan. But it seemed that her brothers also thought that this was a good idea.

  How had this come about? Was there a catch to all this? Though, honestly, she couldn’t find any no matter how hard she thought about it.

  Her reverie was broken as she heard her mother’s name being mentioned. Asha forced herself to pay attention to the conversation swirling around her.

  Apparently, a decision had been taken while she had been lost in her own interior dialogue.

  Asha would announce her decision to join active politics at a rally in Bharatnagar. She would also reveal that she would be standing for her father’s parliamentary seat in the coming election. And she would do so while accompanied by her mother, Sadhana Devi, so that the mother-daughter duo presented an image of change with continuity.

  Was that okay with her? Asha thought for a moment, and then nodded ‘yes’.

  SEVEN

  Bharatnagar, the family seat of the Pratap Singh clan, hadn’t changed in a hundred years. The kind of over-development that had ruined cities like Udaipur and Jaipur had entirely passed it by. It still walked on the cobblestone streets that Asha’s ancestors had once ridden over in their horse-driven carriages. The houses were still made of the local sandstone and only rose to a couple of storeys. The women still stayed in purdah, heading out of the house with the pallus of their saris covering their faces. The men still boasted of wondrous moustaches and gathered in the chaupal every evening to smoke their hookahs and dispense justice in their own homespun style.

  If you walked through the streets of Bharatnagar, you could be forgiven for thinking that you had been transported back to the 1890s in a time machine.

  But you couldn’t possibly make that mistake if you walked through the massive archways leading to the Pratap Singh haveli and were allowed into the house that Asha had always considered home no matter where she happened to live at that moment.

  The outside may have looked like a traditional structure, a rambling castle complete with domes and cupolas and filigreed windows. But the inside had been renovated to include every modern convenience known to man. The air-conditioning was top-notch, the bathrooms immaculate with their Japanese-style loos and baths, and the all the bedrooms came with their own plasma TVs and Bose sound systems.

  The Pratap Singhs were used to their creature comforts. And they saw no reason why they should be deprived of them in their own ancestral home.

  Growing up, Asha had often regretted the modernization of their medieval-era home. The romantic in her had felt that the upgrades somehow detracted from its old-style charm. But today, as she paced around her bedroom, practising the speech she was due to deliver later that day, she was happy for all the mod cons. Her coffee had come from a Nespresso machine, and was served with a piping-hot croissant, freshly baked by the family cook.

  She was still astonished by how fast events had moved after that meeting with her brothers and the Fernandos. It had only taken a fortnight for the party to organize a massive rally in Bharatnagar for Asha to announce her political debut.

  Asha had also been surprised to discover that she was feeling more than a little nervous about addressing the massive crowd that was sure to gather. It wasn’t just that after three years away in London, her public speaking skills were a little rusty. It was the size of the crowd that she was expected to address that was making her a little anxious.

  Campaigning for her father in Bharatnagar had always been a far more low-key affair. Asha would go from village to village, accompanied by a small entourage, and spend time talking to the constituents in small groups. She would address meetings of women and children in one village, go canvassing door-to-door in another, and speak at public meetings held in the chaupals of others.

  Suddenly, a memory rose unbidden in Asha’s head and she was an eighteen-year-old carefree teenager once again. Amma had spent what seemed like hours draping a sari around her and securing it with a dozen safety pins. Despite that, Asha—who until now had lived in jeans and skirts—couldn’t help but feel that it would unravel that moment she got out of the car to address her first public meeting ever in Bharatnagar.

  Baba had helped her put her speech together, adding rhetorical flourishes the way only he knew how to, and now, having introduced her to the crowd, he sat in the front row, beaming proudly up at her.

  Asha had begun reading tentatively from the paper placed in front of her. But as the crowd began cheering her on, clapping deliriously at some of the better lines in her speech, she soon lost her nervousness. Looking up from the lectern, she began making eye contact with the crowd. She picked out familiar faces in the audience and—just like her father was wont to do—made a few personal remarks to them. And by the time she wound to an end, she realized that she had thoroughly enjoyed an event that she had been dreading for so many days.

  Today, however, would be very different. For starters, there would be a Baba-shaped hole in the front row. And the crowd itself would be in the range of 60,000 rather than the paltry 5,000-odd audiences she had addressed in the past. Not to mention the fact that this speech would be telecast live all across the country. Curiosity surrounding Asha was running high, people wanted to see and hear more of her, and the TV channels were only too happy to
oblige.

  But a public meeting was a public meeting, Asha told herself sternly, as she returned her attention to the speech. How did it matter how many people were watching or listening? The key was to pretend that she was back in that village meeting, with her father watching benignly, and all would go well.

  She had just finished reading through to the end of the speech when there was hesitant knock on the door. ‘What is it?’ Asha cried out impatiently. ‘I told you I didn’t want any interruptions!’

  ‘Beta, it’s me,’ she heard her mother say.

  Instantly contrite, Asha rushed to the door and opened it. Much to her surprise, Amma—who usually spent her entire day wearing a faded old nightie (which had apparently been Baba’s favourite)—was already dressed for the day. In her cream chiffon, paired with a double strand of pearls, matching pearl-drop earrings, and not a scrap of make-up, Sadhana Devi was the epitome of the grieving Hindu widow. She also looked more striking than ever, her air of fragility contributing to her ethereal beauty, which belied her fifty years.

  ‘Are you done with your practice?’ she asked her daughter, gesturing to her speech.

  Asha threw the pages aside. She had spent countless days and nights worrying over each word, every turn of phrase, cutting and pruning, and then adding sections. This was going to be the most important speech of her political life. She needed to get it just right. And it was hard to tell if she had; she had lost perspective on what she had written and now that Baba was gone, there was nobody whose opinion she respected enough to go forth and seek it.

  ‘Yes, Amma, I am done. If I have to read through the damn thing one more time, I think I will lose it.’

  ‘You know what your Baba always said, Asha?’

  Asha shook her head.

  ‘He said that once you’ve written a speech and internalized it, you should put it away. Never over-rehearse. It is important to have a sense of spontaneity when you finally deliver it.’

  Asha had to admit that it made sense. She didn’t want to sound as if she was mouthing lines she had memorized the night before. She wanted to sound as if she was speaking from the heart, the way she had when she was addressing smaller, more intimate, gatherings. That was the only way to appeal to an audience that was looking to make a human connection with her.

  She set the speech aside and sat down beside her mother on the sofa. It took her a moment to realize that Sadhana Devi was weeping quietly, the tears running down her pale cheeks faster than she could wipe them away. Asha took her mother into her arms, patting her back as you would an inconsolable child, and let her own tears flow.

  It was better to cry herself out in the privacy of her bedroom than risk breaking down in public in front of all Bharatnagar. Baba would have wanted her to preserve her dignity above all. And after a lifetime of letting him down, she wanted to make him proud at any cost.

  ▪

  Like every other channel in the country, NTN had also suspended its regular programming to carry Asha Devi’s speech live. And now, with only an hour left for her appearance before the Bharatnagar crowd, its correspondent, Saijal Teri, was reporting live from the site of the rally.

  The crowd was immense, a sea of humanity stretching as far as the television camera’s eye could see. There was a profusion of colourful turbans, patterned lehengas and sequinned dupattas; clearly the people in the erstwhile feudal state had turned out in record numbers to show solidarity to the bereaved daughter.

  As the studio feed cut to Saijal, he was trying to conduct an interview with one of the village elders in attendance. But the noise level of the crowd was such that he couldn’t even hear himself speak, let alone make sense of his interviewee’s answers. And it didn’t help that the guy kept lapsing into the local dialect in a thick, incomprehensible accent. After a couple of tries, Saijal gave this up as a lost cause and started doing his piece to camera as he walked around the crowd, ignoring all the pushing and shoving as he delivered a pithy report he made up on the spot.

  Watching from his office, Gaurav Agnihotri had to admit that the guy had skill. It took some concentration to ad lib a piece to camera while a crowd bayed and shouted all around you. He must look into getting Saijal a promotion and ask if he was interested in a transfer to the Delhi office. He could do with a guy like him instead of all the morons who were currently in his employ.

  In another corner of the same rally ground, Manisha Patel was filing her own report for AITNN. Not for her the sitting around in studios, conducting panel discussions with the same set of talking heads while the action took place elsewhere. She wanted—no, strike that, she needed—to be in the thick of things to feel fully alive. She needed to talk to the people at the heart of every story. She needed to remind herself why she had become a journalist in the first place.

  Today, Manisha had managed to corral the panchayat heads from the ten neighbouring villages into a small enclosure, and was asking them for their perspective on Asha Devi, her entry into politics and how they saw her career progressing.

  Given that this was deep within Pratap Singh territory, nobody had a bad thing to say about the family. Instead, they related stories of Asha as a young child, how she had accompanied her father on his election campaign, sitting goggle-eyed beside him on the stage, stealing the show with her toothy grins. They remembered her as a naughty teenager, who would run amok on the unpaved streets on her brother’s mobike. And their memories of her campaigning for Birendra Pratap in the last election were fresh on their minds. Asha had covered the length and breadth of Bharatnagar in her open jeep, seemingly oblivious to the heat and dust. And every election promise she had made to them last time had been fulfilled in record time.

  Were they happy that Asha was at last entering politics officially, asked Manisha. After all, in these parts, women stayed within the home while the men ventured out.

  One venerable old white-mustachioed man took it upon himself to answer. ‘Ab zamaana badal gaya hai, aaj kal betiyaan betey kay barabar hoti hai.’

  Yes, thought Manisha, the world has changed and daughters are the equal of sons. But how refreshing to hear this from a man who had to be at least eighty. Maybe there was hope for this country yet.

  Do you think Asha Devi should stand for election from Bharatnagar, she asked another village elder. Or should Birendra Pratap’s seat go to his elder son and heir, Karan?

  No, came the prompt reply. Asha beti had always had a special bond with this constituency. Her father had always left it to her to manage his own elections. She knew every village sarpanch in every district, she knew every single party worker by name, she even knew the names of their wives and children.

  Asha Devi belonged to Bharatnagar just as Bharatnagar belonged to her. And it was only fitting that she should come back home to claim what was hers to begin with.

  ▪

  Asha took one last look at herself in the mirror before heading out. In a pale-pink chiffon sari paired with a three-quarter-sleeve blouse, her only jewellery one long string of pearls, she was the epitome of the demure feudal daughter.

  She picked up a lipstick in a shade of plum and ran it quickly on her mouth. A slash of kohl around her eyes, a tiny felt red bindi between her eyebrows, and she was ready to face the world.

  No, that wasn’t quite right. There was something missing in the picture that reflected back at her. Asha paused, and then pulled the pallu of her sari over her head, covering it as she was expected to do in the confines of her ancestral estate, and headed out of the door.

  As they drove to the rally grounds, she was grateful for her mother’s quiet. She needed these moments to collect herself, as memories of Baba threatened to overwhelm her.

  There was the tree under which she had first attended a public meeting alongside him. That was the tea stall at which they had always halted to have a cup of masala chai and a natter with the locals. There was the mandir where Baba always prayed before launching his election campaign.

  This was Baba’s world.
How could she ever hope to make it her own?

  As the motorcade neared the rally grounds, she could hear the roar of the distant crowds. And then, that great mass of humanity hoved into view, all 60,000 of them, waving the party flag and shouting full-throated slogans as they caught sight of her car.

  Desh ki neta kaisi ho? Asha Devi jaisi ho!

  Asha felt a sudden rush of adrenaline surge through her body. The excitement of the crowd was so palpable that it felt as if she could reach out and touch it. She gracefully swung out of the car, readjusted the pallu that had half-fallen off her head and greeted her reception party with folded hands. Then, mother and daughter walked side-by-side to the dais that awaited them.

  As the two ladies made their appearance on the stage, a sudden hush fell upon those waiting. They watched in silence as Asha solicitously helped her mother sit on the chair placed for her, positioning a glass of water on the table so that it was within her reach. Only after she was sure that her mother was comfortable did Asha turn around to greet the crowds.

  Her simple ‘Namaste’ set off a fresh round of cheering, which seemed to go on for minutes. Finally, Asha held up her hands in a gesture she had seen her father make ever so often, asking for quiet.

  The crowd finally hushed and Asha moved to the lectern to begin speaking.

  ‘If Baba was alive today, he would have been overjoyed to see how all of Bharatnagar has turned out in support of my mother, my family and me. Of course, if he hadn’t been snatched away from us so cruelly, we would not be gathered together on these vast grounds to pay homage to his memory. But he is now with the Almighty and I would like all of you to join me in a moment of prayer for his soul.

  ‘My father always began every task he undertook by reciting the Gayatri Mantra. Today, as I take my first step into public life to begin serving Bharatnagar on my own just as I had done earlier on behalf of my father, I would like to recite that same mantra to evoke the blessings of both God and Baba. If you like, you can join in.’