Race Course Road: A Novel

by Goswami, Seema

  Would she ever manage to have that with someone in her life? Or would Sunny Mahtani be her first and last attempt at finding love and happiness?

  Almost as if she could read her thoughts, Amma said quietly, ‘I know that Baba was very upset when you broke up with Sunny. And I know that the two of you exchanged some very strong words. But I want you to know, Asha, that he never stopped loving you for a second. He never stopped caring about you. And, of course, he never stopped worrying about you either.’

  Asha felt a familiar tightness seize her chest. ‘Did he tell you about our last conversation?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Amma, ‘he did. But you know, darling, the only reason he was so upset was because he cared so much. He just wanted you to be happy. To have a home and family of your own. And he had thought that you’d found it with Sunny.’

  ‘Yes, I thought that too, Amma,’ said Asha. ‘I thought that for a long time.’

  ‘So, what went wrong?’

  What went wrong? How could she possible explain? It wasn’t one single thing. Or even a few things. It was a series of small niggles, a sequence of slights and fights, all of which had built up an unbearable tension in their relationship.

  Sunny storming out of a party because he thought she had been dancing too close to Mortimer Rotheram. Sunny arriving at her hotel room in Paris at 3 a.m. when she was on a work trip, convinced that she was cheating on him. Sunny smashing her Rosenthal flutes against the walls of her apartment because she wouldn’t agree to take time off to accompany him to the Cannes Film Festival.

  Asha had tried to cope. She had tried to tell herself that he was only behaving like this because he loved her too much. And that she should try harder to make him feel secure in their relationship.

  Until one spring afternoon, when it became clear to her that she was just fooling herself.

  Asha and Sunny had been invited to the Duke of Blandford’s estate in Oxfordshire for the wedding of his son to Natasha Bajaj, a close friend of Asha’s. It had been a brilliant day for a country wedding and Asha, exulting in her role as maid of honour, had quaffed more Dom Perignon than was strictly wise. As the sun went down on the castle, Asha and Sunny loped off to the room assigned to them on the first floor. Asha was so woozy with the after-effects of alcohol that she fell asleep fully dressed on the bed.

  She woke up with a start to find a naked Sunny on top of her, trying to wrestle off her strapless gown. ‘Stop it,’ she hissed, taking care not to raise her voice in case the guests in the next room overheard. ‘I’m really not in the mood. My head hurts…’

  She got no further. Sunny used the back of his hand to slap her face so hard that her ears rang. ‘Your head hurts? I’ll show you what it feels like to hurt.’ With that, he slapped her on the other side of her face, his signet ring opening a cut on her left cheekbone.

  Asha could not believe that this was happening to her. Being hit by a man didn’t happen to girls like her. Domestic violence was the kind of thing that maids and ayahs had to deal with. Not the daughter of the Prime Minister of India. Not a strong, independent woman like her.

  These thoughts had held her in a paralysis of sorts as Sunny rolled off her and—as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened—strolled off into the bathroom.

  Asha had held her torn dress together and hurried out of the room, seeking refuge with one of her girlfriends down the corridor. Almost catatonic with shock, she hadn’t told Miranda what had happened, just shaking her head mutely in response to all questions. But Miranda, who had always had a healthy scepticism about Sunny, took in the situation at a glance.

  Marching off to Asha’s room, Miranda had packed her belongings into her overnight bag, ordered a taxi, and then sat in the back seat, holding Asha’s hand, as they drove back to London in silence. Asha’s phone kept buzzing insistently as they neared London, Sunny’s name flashing up on the display screen. Asha kept disconnecting the calls until an exasperated Mirandra snatched the phone out of her hand and switched it off.

  The next morning, Sunny had turned up at her flat, ringing the bell incessantly and then banging on the door in a wild rage when she didn’t answer. He only left when the neighbours from the floor above threatened to call the police. A shaken Asha packed a bag and moved out to a friend’s country house for a week.

  Then began the begging mails and messages. He was so sorry. He didn’t know what had come over him. He would never behave like that again. He loved her. He begged her forgiveness. Asha had deleted each and every message. She hadn’t responded when his parents made overtures to ‘persuade’ her to make up with him, either.

  A week later, she returned to London to resume her life. As she walked into her office on Monday morning, she found Sunny sitting in the reception area, with a bunch of red roses in his lap. The receptionist, who knew him as Asha’s fiancé, smiled indulgently at this portrait of young love.

  Asha had made a quick calculation. It would not do to create a scene at her place of work. So, she had accepted the flowers, smiled as Sunny kissed her on the cheek, and then hustled him out to a nearby café. She needed to be in a public place in case the conversation went badly.

  And, of course it had. Sunny had started out with the intention to charm, plying her with apologies, protesting his love, telling her how he could not live without her. He had cried. He had begged. He had pleaded. But when she had remained unmoved, his mood had turned ugly.

  ‘You will regret this,’ he had shouted as she left the cafe. ‘Remember this day. You will regret it as long as you live.’

  Asha had shrugged him off and headed back to work. And then, she had cut Sunny out of her life with a ruthless precision that her father would have been proud of, if only she could have brought herself to tell Baba why she was breaking up with him.

  Of course, this was not a story she wanted to burden her mother with either. So, Asha came up with a suitably sanitized version, using euphemisms and hoping that her mother could read between the lines. And going by the look of dawning horror on Sadhana Devi’s face, it was clear that she understood exactly what Asha was alluding to.

  But much to Asha’s relief, there wasn’t time to discuss Sunny Mahtani any further. For the glass doors were pushed open impatiently to herald the arrival of Kavya and Karina, chomping at the bit for a taste of their favourite chocolate mousse and baked cheesecake. And once the sugar rush had kicked in, it was time for a bit of light shopping at Hamleys.

  Only after that, once she was back home and in the privacy of her bedroom, would Asha deal with Madan Mohan, and whatever he had to throw at her.

  As it turned out, she needn’t have worried. Madan Mohan was only calling to echo what the other LJP leaders had been saying at the meeting. The party needed Asha. And Asha needed to get back on the campaign trail. Now.

  ▪

  Saturday was movie night in the Sharma household. This day every week (provided Jayesh was in town), the four of them would have an early dinner and then settle down in the den with huge tubs of homemade buttery popcorn in their laps to watch a movie. Jayesh and Malti would bookend the two kids as they cuddled up together on the squishy sofa under a Jaipuri quilt with the air-conditioning turned down as low as it would go. It was the best way they could think of replicating the movie-going experience for their kids without actually heading out to the cinema (with all the security palaver it entailed).

  Today, it was Gayatri’s turn to choose the movie. And she had picked an old favourite, Legally Blonde, the one in which Reese Witherspoon plays a ditzy but brilliant lawyer who is consistently underestimated because of her glamorous looks (Malti, a brilliant and glamorous but far from ditzy lawyer, tried not to take it personally). There had been the ritual groans from Aryan and Jayesh at being made to watch a ‘girlie’ film, but everyone knew that the protests were only for form’s sake. Each one got to pick a movie every week; and everyone else had to go along with it. This was Malti’s iron-clad rule and no one dared flout it.

  Malti’s us
ual reaction when she watched a legal movie or TV series was to start an internal monologue: ‘No, that’s not how things happen in a court of law’; ‘If you said that to an actual judge, you’d be in jail for contempt of court’; ‘Which female lawyer in her right mind would dress like that for work?’ and so on.

  Today, however, her mind was on an entirely different track. As she watched Gayatri snuggle deeper against Jayesh’s shoulder, she flashed back to that scene that had replayed in her head for so many times now. Rajiv Mehta announcing that he had compromising pictures of Asha. That look of suppressed excitement on Jayesh’s face. The glee with which he had reached out for that iPad containing those private, stolen photographs of Asha. The alacrity with which his mind had made peace with using them for political gain.

  What kind of man had she married? How could a man who doted so plainly on his own daughter be so willing to inflict hurt on someone else’s daughter? How could someone who prided himself on his ‘feminist’ credentials see no problem in slut-shaming a young woman if it was to his advantage? What sort of man ditched his own principles at the prospect of momentary political gains?

  Had she been wrong about Jayesh all along? Or had this long stint out of power changed him at some fundamental level?

  Malti was turning these questions over in her head when Jayesh dropped a kiss on Gayatri’s head and looked up at her. His smile faded on seeing that peculiar expression on her face. He raised his eyebrows in silent enquiry. ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ he whispered over the heads of the two children.

  Her thoughts? She didn’t want to acknowledge them to herself, let alone air them out aloud. Malti smiled and shook her head. ‘They are quite worthless,’ she said lightly. ‘Not worth even a penny.’

  Aryan, who liked to watch his movies in absolute silence, shushed them loudly, throwing up his hands in such exaggerated exasperation that both his parents dissolved in laughter.

  The moment passed but Malti’s doubts lingered, surfacing again a couple of hours later as the Sharmas sat down to meet with their campaign team after putting the kids to bed.

  There were the usual suspects ranged around the table. Jayesh’s PS and confidant, Kalyan Abhyankar; the SPP number two, Sanjeev Satyarthi; Rajiv Mehta, the head of Poll Vault; his deputy Anisa Ahmed; and the two Sharmas themselves.

  The latest internal poll numbers post the third phase of elections were passed around. The bump in SPP support after the Madan Mohan Prajapati resignation was holding firm. It was most noticeable among voters in the age group between eighteen and thirty, the millennials who cared about issues like corruption more than their parents and grandparents. Those between the ages of thirty and forty-five had also shown a marginal increase in their preference for Jayesh. But the needle was stubbornly refusing to move in the forty-five and above demographic.

  How could they possibly fix this?

  Then, there was the problem of the rural-urban divide. While Jayesh Sharma polled extremely well in urban, upper middle class areas where his clean image and family values were highly prized, his popularity was lost in transition when it came to the villages of India. Outside of his own constituency, Khewat, and beyond the borders of his family fiefdom, Jayesh just didn’t seem to appeal to rural voters in the way that the Pratap Singh clan did.

  Was there any way—even at this late stage—to enhance his appeal across the board?

  Malti had a few ideas. They needed to lay more emphasis on rural development and poverty alleviation schemes; they must promise to waive all farm loans if they came to power. As for appealing to older voters, how about promising the abolition of property tax? That should go down like a dream among this segment. Also, this might be a good time to highlight the fact that the SPP was committed to passing the Women’s Reservation Bill (which the LJP had consistently waffled on).

  Jayesh came up with a few suggestions, as did Rajiv and Kalyan. Anisa restricted herself to taking copious notes on her laptop, while Sanjeev maintained his customary silence.

  And not one of them mentioned the one sure-shot way of winning over every single demographic group, even though it was all they were thinking of. Those pictures of Asha Devi, still saved on the hard drive of Rajiv’s computer. If they were released into the world, the political landscape would look completely different when the dust settled.

  But as long as Malti was at the table, that option was off it.

  ▪

  Jacob Fernando was a worried man. His team had just mailed him the internal polling numbers from the areas going to the polls in the fourth phase. The LJP vote percentage had dropped a further four points here, going from 38 per cent to 34 per cent. If the trend held till polling day, the LJP projected seat count in that phase could well go from 65 to 50 or even less.

  So, they had around ten days to arrest the slide before such major states as Orissa, Rajasthan and Karnataka went to the polls in the fourth phase. And then, they had another fortnight before the final phase of polling on 6 September. If they didn’t get their act together in next few weeks, the majority they had been counting on could well disappear. And then they would be reduced to cobbling together another rag-tag coalition.

  But that wasn’t the only problem that Jacob had to contend with. He had another cross to bear. It was clear from their interval surveys that wherever Karan had addressed a rally, the numbers had got worse for the LJP.

  It wasn’t just that Karan wasn’t connecting with people like his sister did (though there was that too). It was that the ordinary voter had begun to associate the L’Oiseau arms scandal with Karan Pratap. Jayesh Sharma’s propaganda push had worked. Now, most ordinary people thought that Birendra Pratap must have had something to do with that arms deal. And if the father was involved, then how could the son—who was his right-hand man—be innocent?

  So, it wasn’t just that the party needed Asha Devi back in the field to recover lost ground. It also needed Karan Pratap off it to prevent further damage.

  But how did he tell Karan this without causing mortal offence? Everyone knew that the new Prime Minister had a particular penchant for shooting the messenger when he didn’t like the message. So, Jacob didn’t really rate his chances for survival if he became the bearer of bad news. And yet, if the party was to survive, he needed to get this message across to Karan. So, how should he play this?

  When Jacob posed this question to his wife, Vidya, she came up with a solution almost immediately. If he needed to tell Karan anything he didn’t want to hear, there was just one person to go through: his wife. Radhika could do no wrong in Karan’s eyes. He could never lose his temper with her. And if she told him some bitter truths, he was sure to take them on board without throwing a fit.

  But perhaps, Vidya added, he might want to leave that particular task to her. It was best if she approached Radhika, as one wife to another, and asked her to intervene.

  It did not go well. Radhika, always prickly and defensive when it came to her husband, reacted with barely concealed rage when Vidya showed her the polling figures. ‘I really don’t understand this, Vidya,’ she said tightly. ‘Who is asking you to conduct these surveys in areas where Karan has been campaigning? Your brief is to find out how the LJP is doing, not to rate my husband’s popularity with the public.’

  ‘Please don’t misunderstand, Radhika,’ pleaded Vidya. ‘We are not targeting areas where Karan has been speaking. We routinely poll people after campaign rallies—no matter who has addressed them—to find out what the public reaction is. It is really standard practice.’

  ‘Well, I hope you haven’t shared these figures with Karan. I don’t want anyone to demoralize him at this stage. He is already stressed enough, between running the country and trying to win the next election. The last thing he needs is to be told that he is bringing the party down.’

  Or that Asha is beating him hollow in the approval ratings, thought Vidya to herself. She knew first-hand just how bitter the rivalry between the step-siblings was. And that it would kill Karan
to know that he was doing so much worse than his sister.

  But, of course, it wouldn’t do to draw attention to that fact. So Vidya merely said mildly: ‘You know, Radhika, this is a general election held over five phases. And public memory is short. So while the sympathy wave may well last for the first two-three rounds, by the last two rounds, we will be struggling to keep our vote share at the same high level. And even more so now that we have a bloody arms scandal to deal with as well. So, we have to strategize carefully and deploy our resources in the best manner possible.’

  Radhika nodded her agreement.

  A slightly more emboldened Vidya went on, ‘I feel that Karan’s time would be best utilized in government, from where he can project a suitably prime ministerial image to the country. And Asha can be sent out to do the bulk of the political campaigning. She is the one that the people really want to see. She’s the one who gets us the numbers. We need her back in play right now. We really can’t afford to let the momentum slip away from us at this point.’

  ‘Is that what you think is happening?’ asked Radhika.

  ‘Yes, I am afraid so. We need a concerted effort here to claw back our advantage. And we cannot afford to let an asset like Asha lie idle at this moment.’

  ‘Well, you know, it’s not as if she has been asked to pull back,’ said Radhika weakly. ‘She just wanted to spend more time with Amma.’

  Vidya allowed herself to believe the lie. ‘I can completely understand that. But perhaps you can explain to her that the party needs her?’

  Radhika sighed extravagantly and promised to do all that she could.

  THIRTEEN

  And thus it was that Asha Devi was propelled back into the electoral scrum after the third round of polling. She had just over a week to campaign in those areas that were going to the polls in the fourth phase. And another fortnight to make an impact in the states that would vote in the fifth and final phase.