Race Course Road: A Novel

by Goswami, Seema

  But if Karan thought that the rest of the party would fall into formation behind him, he was in for a surprise. For the first time since he had taken over as party president from his father, Karan got pushback from the senior LJP leaders.

  Why, they asked Karan, had he allowed Madan Mohan to resign at such a crucial moment? In times like these, that was tantamount to accepting guilt. He should have asked the Defence Minister to stay on until after the election. The party could have brazened things out for a week or two. And in a fortnight, the voters would have forgotten all about the arms deal and Madan Mohan’s involvement. But by forcing Madan Mohan to quit, Karan had made matters more difficult for the party.

  Before Karan could effectively defend himself from this unexpected attack, the party elders had turned to Asha, sitting quietly between her two brothers.

  Why had she cancelled so many of her appearances over the past fortnight? She hadn’t done a campaign rally for weeks now. She hadn’t scheduled a mahila sabha in three weeks. Even her Facebook page, on which she did regular live chats with voters, had gone quiet.

  Why was that? Did Asha not realize that she was their star campaigner? Couldn’t she see that her absence on the campaign trail was hurting the party? Didn’t she care about getting the LJP back in power? At a time when the party needed all the help it could get, why was Asha sitting on the sidelines? Didn’t she know that even the media were beginning to speculate as to why she had virtually disappeared from view? And that they were putting it down to some sort of family feud?

  Arjun, already smarting at the realization that his masterplan to freeze Asha out had backfired, was moved to remonstrate at this point. ‘Family feud? What are you talking about? Why are you paying any attention to what these media people say? They just like to create a sensation for no reason. There is no family feud.’

  Arjun turned to Asha, looking for her to corroborate his statement. But before she could formulate a response, Karan jumped in. ‘Of course there is no family feud. We are committed as a family to work for the LJP. We are united in our aim of winning the elections for Baba.’

  Asha took her cue finally. ‘Absolutely. There is no question of any family feud. The only reason I stepped back a little was because I wanted to spend more time with Amma. She is still not in a good way.’ Asha paused to get the tremble in her voice under control. ‘But if the LJP needs me, then of course, I am always there for the party. I will do whatever you ask of me.’

  The party faithful had visibly brightened at that, looking more cheerful than they had in weeks. Clearly, they felt that their salvation lay with Asha rather than with the ostensible leader of their party, Karan Pratap Singh.

  Karan felt a fresh flash of irritation as he remembered the look of surprised triumph on Asha’s face as the party leaders petitioned her to get back into the swing of the campaign. He attempted to shake it off as his armoured BMW drove up the hill to his South Block office. Enough brooding about the elections and about Asha. He needed to clear his mind before his first meeting of the day at PMO.

  Frustrated by the lack of progress in the investigation into his father’s assassination, Karan had decided to take matters into his own hand. Today, he had summoned Shankar Roy, the head of his father’s SPG detail and the man on the spot when Birendra Pratap was killed, to his office for a one-on-one meeting.

  Shankar Roy, devastated to lose the Prime Minister on his watch and currently on leave, had been debriefed thoroughly by all the intelligence agencies. He had also been interrogated by the Verma Commission set up to investigate Birendra Pratap’s assassination. And the new Prime Minister had been sent all the reports.

  Karan, however, still had a nagging feeling that the agencies were missing out on something. He didn’t know what it was; only that it was out there. And maybe asking Shankar Roy some questions directly would help him zero in on it.

  But one look at Roy’s distraught face as he was ushered into the Prime Minister’s Office was enough to make Karan put his list of queries away. This was a man in pain; he needed careful handling. Karan walked around his desk to meet Roy halfway down the room. The two men clasped hands and Roy’s eyes immediately grew wet with tears.

  ‘I am so sorry, sir,’ he began, in an unsteady voice. ‘I failed the Prime Minister. And I failed you. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’

  This naked display of sorrow, guilt and vulnerability moved Karan in a way that few condolence visits had so far. He could feel his own eyes begin to well up. Struggling hard to keep his emotions in check, Karan motioned the SPG officer to sit on the couch. Karan himself took the adjoining armchair.

  Roy wasn’t done with his apologies yet. ‘Sir, I know you must blame me for what happened. God knows I blame myself every day. But it all happened so fast…’

  Karan cut him off. ‘That’s why I wanted to meet you. I wanted to hear from you in detail what went wrong. I know we had a brief conversation after the funeral but frankly that whole period is a bit of a blur for me.’

  Retrieving his list of questions from his desk, Karan began taking Roy through the sequence of events.

  Why did Birendra Pratap head to that particular part of the crowd?

  He saw a young boy perched on his father’s shoulders carrying a placard saying, ‘Singh is King’. The boy was waving so excitedly with his free hand that Singh wanted to go and greet him.

  Roy had tried to stop Birendra Pratap from heading into the crowd initially. Why? Was there anything that roused his suspicion?

  Not really. It was just easier on security when principals stayed at arms length from crowds of excitable people. You never really knew what nutcases were out there. So the SPG encouraged its protectees to keep the glad-handing at a minimum.

  On reviewing the TV coverage of the incident, had Roy noticed anything amiss? A face that triggered recognition. A movement that seemed suspicious. Anything at all.

  ‘I can’t tell you how hard I have thought back to those moments, Sir,’ said Roy. ‘How many times I have seen the video coverage in the hope that it would trigger some memory. But I come up empty every time.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Karan, not willing to give up just yet. ‘Tell me in your own words what exactly happened.’

  Roy took a deep breath and began.

  ▪

  Along with the Defence Ministry, Madan Mohan Prajapati had given up on his dietician as well. The woman was useless, making him subsist on tasteless pap for weeks, with no discernible effect on the scales. So today, at breakfast, he was comfort-eating his way through a stack of aloo parathas, dipping them in achar-laced dahi and washing them down with endless cups of milky tea.

  There had been an initial flurry of excitement when his resignation had been released, with every media outlet queuing up to interview Madan Mohan about his alleged involvement in the L’Oiseau scandal. Mindful that he was on very shaky ground, Madan Mohan had restricted himself to spouting high-minded platitudes. He was abiding by the principles of propriety by resigning from government until he could clear his name. He was looking forward to establishing his innocence. He would come back to public life cleaner than ever after this ‘agni pariksha’, this trial by fire.

  After a week or so, the media had lost interest and things had quieted down in the Prajapati household. The constant stream of visitors to his Lutyens’ bungalow had dried up quicker than the ink on his resignation letter. Delhi, a city that swore by power, no longer had any time for him now that he was seen as yesterday’s man. And given the severity of the charges against him, nobody gave Madan Mohan a chance in hell of staging a political comeback. So, what was the point of keeping up with him?

  As a result, the former Defence Minister was reduced to leading a rather solitary existence, surrounded only by his loyal PA of thirty years, Pankaj Sareen, and his personal staff. Only a handful of loyalists in the LJP still bothered to keep in touch, but only by telephone; nobody wanted reports of their visits being relayed back to the Prime Minister, who would cert
ainly take it amiss. So, all his political contacts, his chamchas, his chelas, steered clear of the Prajapati residence for fear that Madan Mohan’s misfortune may infect them all.

  The former Defence Minister was thus reduced to rattling around in his sprawling bungalow on his own. His long-suffering wife had died a few years before. His daughter, Devika, had recently been married off to the son of a leading industrialist and had moved to a palatial mansion on Malabar Hill in Mumbai. And his son and daughter-in-law had packed bag, baggage and their two young kids and moved to their new home in Jor Bagh.

  Just thinking of that bungalow in Jor Bagh made the blood rush to Madan Mohan’s head, reminding him as it did of his humiliation at Race Course Road at the hands of Karan Pratap. A humiliation made all the worse for being witnessed by the top intelligence heads of the country. How they must have laughed at him once he had written out his resignation letter and scuttled out. What pleasure they must have taken in seeing him fall.

  Well, nobody laughed at Madan Mohan Prajapati for too long and too hard. And all those who sought to humiliate him lived to rue the day. In fact, he chuckled wryly, some of them didn’t even live long enough to do so.

  Having cheered himself up by recollecting all the many nasty ways he had extracted revenge on his enemies in the past, Madan Mohan turned his attention to his current target number one: Karan Pratap Singh. How best to pay him back for all the suffering he had put him through?

  It gratified Madan Mohan no end that the arms scandal that had put paid to his ministerial career had also stalled Karan’s run at the polls. The second and third phase of polling had not gone as well for the LJP as expected. And Madan Mohan saw no shame in taking credit for that. But, wily political creature that he was, Madan Mohan didn’t want the LJP to lose the next two phases as well. His political comeback depended on the LJP getting a respectable number of seats in the next Lok Sabha.

  Madan Mohan had already worked out the mechanics of his masterplan. He would bide his time until the polls were over, working his political contacts on the quiet, and strike just as the results were announced. Given how the Anti-Defection Act worked, Madan Mohan would have to persuade at least one-third of the newly-elected LJP members of Parliament to leave in order to split the party. He had enough money in the coffers to make it worth their while monetarily. But he needed a little extra something that would make this the smart political choice as well.

  And that’s where Asha Devi came in. If he could instigate her to rebel against the leadership of her brother and head the splinter group of the LJP, then the political field would suddenly be thrown wide open. All those who didn’t think they could become part of the Karan Pratap government would join Asha in the hope of gaining a profitable ministry. And if he managed to inveigle enough MPs away, Karan Pratap could no longer take the prime ministership for granted. Asha would be in with a chance—and so would Madan Mohan.

  His mind flashed back to the conversation he had had with Asha the day the L’Oiseau scandal broke. Simmering with anger and resentment at being forced to resign, he had yelled at her for a good ten minutes about what a shit her brother was. She had made some sympathetic noises and tried to calm him down.

  Nearly a month had gone by since that day and they hadn’t managed a face-to-face meeting in all that time. That was mostly down to logistics, though. Madan Mohan was now persona non grata in Race Course Road, so there was no question of scheduling a meeting in Number 3. And Asha could not risk coming to his house for fear that she would be spotted by the media or by political observers who would carry tales back to her brothers.

  In the normal course, Madan Mohan would have set up a clandestine meeting in the home of one of his industrialist friends or even at the house of a political lackey. But with everyone of consequence running scared of any association with the tainted ex-minister, that was no longer an option.

  So, the only way Madan Mohan and Asha could keep in touch was via phone calls and WhatsApp messages. They had had a brief conversation after the second round of polling when Madan Mohan had asked Asha why she had virtually disappeared from public view. She had explained that she’d taken time off to help her mother through the grieving process. Madan Mohan hadn’t pushed the point. The LJP, he had been sure, would recover in the third round.

  When that recovery hadn’t happened, Madan Mohan had hit the panic button. The success of his plan depended on the LJP winning a majority, even if it was wafer thin. And for that, he needed Asha back on the campaign trail. If she didn’t get back to work, there was every chance that there would not be an LJP contingent large enough to be worth breaking.

  It was time to have another conversation with Asha and make her see sense. She needed to get back in the public gaze. She needed to be on TV every night. She needed to up her social media game. She needed to build her profile if she was to become an alternate power centre in the LJP after the elections. And she needed to do that now.

  Madan Mohan picked up his mobile and dialled her number.

  ▪

  Asha stole a quick look at the display of her phone, as it buzzed discreetly on her desk. ‘MMP’ it said. Madan Mohan Prajapati. The former Defence Minister. The man who had helped establish her in the LJP. The politician at the centre of the biggest arms scandal in recent history. The prime suspect in a corruption case.

  She knew she should take the call. This was a man who had reached out to her in her darkest hour and backed her against her brothers. Without Madan Mohan, she would not have a political career to begin with. If he hadn’t stepped forward as her mentor, where would she be? In the wilderness, that’s for sure, whether it was in India or in London.

  She owed Madan Mohan. There was no getting around that. But Asha knew that she wasn’t up to speaking to him today. Her mind was still racing to make sense of how events had unfolded at the emergency party meeting she had just attended.

  Like everyone else in the party, Asha had been shaken by how quickly the LJP numbers had fallen. She’d heard all those clichés about public memory being short but she hadn’t bargained for the fact that the sympathy wave engendered by her father’s death would begin to ebb in just three months. Or that the L’Oiseau scandal would have such a big impact on the second and third phases of polling.

  She couldn’t help but feel flattered that senior LJP leaders had ascribed the disappointing performance of the party to her absence on the campaign trail. But she didn’t know just how seriously to take that. Would her rallies have made any difference if people were upset about corruption and bribe-taking in government? Would her stirring speeches have tracked attention away from murky arms deals and dodgy defence ministers? Asha was not sure about that.

  She also wasn’t sure how she felt about the ‘Bring Asha Back’ campaign. What if she went back on the campaign trail and it made no difference to the party’s numbers? What if her rallies didn’t push up support for the LJP? What if the numbers continued on their current downward trend?

  That would bust the ‘Asha is our secret weapon’ myth once and for all. No, she needed to think hard before she plunged right back into the action.

  She also needed time to rethink her relationship with Madan Mohan. Would a continued association with a tainted politician harm her image in the public eye? Or would people appreciate that she was standing by someone who had stood by her in hard times? What made for better optics? Integrity or loyalty?

  Asha was still mulling this over when the call went into voice mail. She knew that Madan Mohan, technologically challenged as he was, would not be leaving a voice message for her.

  Oh well, she would call him in the evening when she had a better handle on things. Today was ‘Amma Day’—as Asha had dubbed the days she kept aside exclusively for Sadhana Devi—and she had planned a whole raft of things to do with her mother.

  First up, mother and daughter were going for lunch to one of Sadhana Devi’s favourite restaurants: Town Hall in Khan Market. Asha had invited Radhika to come along, but
her sister-in-law had declined, pleading a previous engagement (with a syringe of Botox, no doubt, thought Asha). Radhika had, however, promised to send Kavya and Karina directly from school, in time for dessert (which was, frankly, the only part of a meal they considered worthy of their interest).

  In deference to her mother’s chronic shyness, Asha had booked one of the private dining rooms in the back of the restaurant. As they settled down on their leather armchairs and ordered sushi and dim sum, their SPG contingents stood guard outside the glass-paned door cutting them off from the rest of the diners.

  The moment the food was served, Asha gestured to the waiters to leave them alone. She used her chopsticks to dexterously transfer two pieces of sushi on to her mother’s plate, dabbed some wasabi alongside, poured out some soya sauce in the bowl and instructed her to eat.

  Sadhana Devi popped a tuna nigiri in her mouth and the sharp kick of wasabi took her right back to the last trip she had taken with her husband: a state visit to Tokyo. She remembered Birendra Pratap looking at her anxiously as she cast a suspicious eye on her first course at the state banquet. Putting aside her queasiness, she had picked up a slimy bit of what looked like a water snake and popped it into her mouth. The sheer relief on her husband’s face when she managed to get it down had brought a smile to her own.

  The memory of that night made her smile yet again. Looking at her wistful expression, Asha asked, ‘What are you thinking about, Amma?’

  Sadhana Devi related the story to her, following it up with many others retelling the adventures Baba and she had had in Japan, in Brazil, in Australia, as they travelled the world both for work and pleasure. Asha, who had always seen her parents as two distinct individuals who never really had much in common, realized for the first time that they had, in fact, been a couple. A couple who laughed together, who had private jokes that only they could understand, who had a shared history that was unique to them.