Race Course Road: A Novel

by Goswami, Seema

  So, the moment it became clear that the country was headed for a hung Parliament, Sukanya had announced that she would take a charter flight to Delhi that very night. Rather than stay at Banga Bhavan, however, she had chosen to commandeer the Lutyens bungalow of the hapless Ghosh, much to the annoyance of his wife. Mouha Ghosh, descended from generations of bhadralok, wasn’t a fan of Sukanya and her rough-and-ready methods. But, for the sake of her husband’s political prospects, she had pinned an ingratiating smile on her face as she served Sukanya with her favourite luchi and torkari.

  But all her sycophantic gestures were in vain. She may as well have been invisible for all the attention Sukanya paid her as she scoffed down her breakfast. The Poriborton Party leader was too focused on her first meeting of the day to spare a thought for such social niceties as thanking her hostess for remembering her favourite dish. Jayesh and Malti Sharma were going to call on her in half an hour and she needed to get her thoughts together for that encounter.

  To say that Sukanya Sarkar was conflicted would be to massively understate the case. By the time she had left the SPP, her relations with the late Girdhari Lal Sharma had deteriorated to the extent that the two of them hadn’t spoken for months. And after she formed her own party, that wall of silence had become impregnable.

  But for all her bitterness towards Sharma Senior, Sukanya still had a soft spot for his son. In her mind, Jayesh Sharma would always be the shy, ever-smiling eleven-year old she had first met, who lived in the shadow of his overbearing Dad, staying under the radar so as to not bring his father’s wrath down on him for some trifling infraction. Only in her early twenties herself at the time, her heart had gone out to the boy who was so palpably anxious to earn the approval of a father who barely deigned to notice him.

  As she had flitted in and out of the Sharma residence, Sukanya had formed a bond with the young Jayesh. It began the morning she had arrived at the house to see Jayesh sitting at a chessboard, puzzling over his next move. The chair opposite him was empty so Sukanya had asked whom he was playing with. ‘With myself,’ Jayesh had said matter-of-factly.

  The loneliness that was encapsulated in those two words had cut straight to Sukanya’s heart. On an impulse, she had offered to play the next game with him. And soon, that had become a daily routine for them. Sukanya would arrive at the Sharma household early in the morning. And while she waited for Sharma Senior to see her and Jayesh waited for the driver to collect him for the school run, the two of them would squeeze in a game or two.

  They first played in silence, both concentrating hard so as not to lose. And then, as they got more comfortable with one another, the chatter started. Jayesh, who had lost his mother in childbirth and been brought up by a stentorian maiden aunt, slowly lost his reserve and began talking to Sukanya.

  He would tell her about the bigger boys in class who were bullying him. He would complain that his father never gave him enough pocket money. He would ask for help with some tricky homework set by his teacher. And Sukanya in turn would tell him about her own childhood, regale him with anecdotes about her student politics days and give him the kind of motherly advice he was so starved of.

  But their relationship had ended rather abruptly after a year or so. Once Sukanya resigned from the SPP, she never set foot in the Sharma household again. And she never saw either Girdhari Lal or Jayesh ever again.

  There had been a moment when she had thought of reaching out to Jayesh after his father died. She wasn’t hypocrite enough to attend the funeral of a man she had hated by the end. She did, however, have fond memories of Jayesh and would have liked to call on him. But caught up in a state election of her own, she had left it too late. Weeks and then months had passed—until it seemed downright silly to ask to pay a condolence call. So, Sukanya had left it at that.

  And now, Jayesh was coming to call on her with his wife. She had insisted that they come alone. She didn’t want a large entourage on either side complicating matters. She wanted to reconnect with the boy she had once known, without all the baggage that had weighed down her relationship with his father.

  ▪

  Didi Damyanti was enjoying herself thoroughly. After years of being dismissed as a ‘regional figure’, she was finally in a position to play a major role in national politics. And she was determined to make the most of this chance.

  Politics hadn’t been kind to Damyanti after she left the SPP in a fit of rage after Girdhari Lal Sharma refused to anoint her the chief ministerial candidate for Uttar Pradesh nearly two decades ago. Driven both by anger and a sense of her destiny, she had set up her own party in time to contest the UP elections as leader of the Dalit Morcha.

  It had not gone well. The Dalit Morcha’s fledgling infrastructure was no match for the well-oiled political machinery that was the SPP. And Damyanti’s gamble to appeal to the electorate as a fresh young face hadn’t paid off either. Except for her Dalit brethren who flocked to hear her speak, the rest of the electorate had treated her with cool indifference. Instead of taking her to their hearts, the people of Uttar Pradesh had handed her a humiliating defeat.

  Girdhari Lal Sharma had been certain that as soon as Damyanti finished licking her wounds, she would come crawling back to him and beg to be readmitted into the SPP. But Damyanti was made of sterner stuff. She may have lost the battle, but she saw no reason to give up the war.

  So, for the next five years as the Dalit Morcha sat in opposition, Damyanti devoted herself to building up her party organization, block by block, across the state. She already had the Dalit vote all sown up so she spent her time and energy on expanding her party’s caste base. She inducted prominent Brahmin leaders into the Dalit Morcha, reached out to marginalized Muslim communities, set up a Mahila Morcha to bring the women of the area into the political mainstream, promised reservations to Other Backward Castes (OBCs) to win over their support.

  Five years later, as Uttar Pradesh went to the polls yet again, all this groundwork paid off spectacularly. Didi Damyanti was elected chief minister of the state in a virtual landslide. Her joy at this victory was tempered only by the regret that she couldn’t rub it in Sharma Senior’s face—he had passed away the previous year.

  All went well in Damyanti’s first term, as she focused on cleaning up the administration and improving the crumbling infrastructure of the state. But by the time she was voted back to office the second time, all that power and fame had gone to Damyanti’s head. Now, instead of spending money on things that would benefit the people, she began allocating the scarce resources of the state to vanity projects. Giant statues of Damyanti, cast as a mythological Hindu goddess, began appearing at city squares and public parks all across Uttar Pradesh. And soon, the Dalit Morcha was transformed into nothing more than a cult to propitiate ‘Devi Damyanti’, as she was now styled in party literature.

  The arrogance cost her dear. In a couple of years—with the law and order situation deteriorating rapidly and corruption more rampant than ever—the people had slowly become disillusioned with their Didi (no, the ‘Devi’ never caught on). Cocooned in a cloud of oblivion, surrounded by sycophants and lackeys who would never tell her the truth, Damyanti had failed to realize how badly things were going for her. So, she had been astonished when she lost the next election to Birendra Pratap Singh’s newly-resurgent LJP.

  But this defeat was probably the best thing that ever happened to Damyanti. Shocked at the sudden reversal of her fortune—she had been convinced to the end that she would be voted back to power—she had reverted back to her original incarnation of ‘woman of the people’. She had begun travelling across the state, going from village to village in a cavalcade of white Ambassador cars, with the windows rolled down to indicate that she didn’t need such perks of privilege as air-conditioning. She had listened to the grievances of those she met, held meetings in villages and small towns so that people could see her up close and not as a distant figure, and started welfare schemes at the panchayat level to make small incremental improvem
ents in the lives of the people.

  The people, for their part, took a good hard look at the new, improved Didi Damyanti—the Devi had been shed along with her hauteur—and decided that they liked what they saw. So, the next time they were asked to vote for a chief minister, they went with Damyanti yet again.

  This time, though, Damyanti had learnt her lesson. And despite the landslide victory she had achieved over the LJP, she did not take her success for granted. Instead, she pegged away at winning over more and more voters in Uttar Pradesh. And, for good measure, she began expanding her party’s footprint in states like Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, where there was a substantial Dalit population and significant agrarian distress.

  The strategy had paid off splendidly in this general election, with the Dalit Morcha winning seats in areas where it had never been a factor before. And now, here she was with fifty-five MPs in Parliament, a solid chunk of support that neither of the two national parties could afford to ignore in a hung Parliament.

  The first person to reach out to her had been Jacob Fernando, phoning on behalf of Karan Pratap. He had rung late last night to ask if the LJP party leadership could call on her to ask for her support. She had demurred. She had a checklist of demands, she had informed Jacob, which she would send over. They should have a look at it; discuss it among themselves. Only if they were okay with it, would she even entertain the thought of a meeting. Otherwise it would just be a waste of everyone’s time.

  The same checklist had been sent over to Jayesh Sharma’s office as well, when Rajiv Mehta had called to ask for a meeting. Now, it was just a question of waiting to see which side made the better—and quicker—offer.

  Of course, the issue that Damyanti cared about the most didn’t feature on the list at all: the dropping of the CBI cases registered against her for disproportionate assets. She was far too canny to put anything quite so incriminating in writing. And what would be the point? She knew full well that both Karan and Jayesh would be cognizant of this demand without her ever having to voice it.

  So, instead Damyanti had drawn up a wishlist of all the things she had ever hankered after. One, she wanted the rank of Deputy Prime Minister in the next government. Two, she insisted on getting one of two portfolios: finance or home. Three, the government had to set up a task force for Dalit development, headed by her brother. Four, the Speaker of the new Lok Sabha should be from the Dalit Morcha. And five, the LJP had to promise that Sukanya Sarkar and her Poriborton Party would not be part of the government.

  Damyanti was pretty sure that both Karan Pratap and Jayesh Sharma would agree to most of these terms. The only sticking point would be the title of Deputy Prime Minister. But she was not going to budge on that, no matter what.

  All things being equal, Damyanti knew she would choose Karan over Jayesh in a heartbeat. The LJP numbers were only marginally higher but she knew that Karan’s party machinery was best-equipped to win over many of the smaller parties and Independents and ensure that the government was far more stable than any coalition that Jayesh put together. The SPP leader simply didn’t have the same deft touch as his late father when it came to the world of realpolitik.

  Also, at the end of the day, she was reasonably sure that Karan would be more amenable to her terms. He may hedge; he may bargain; he may bluster. But in the end, he would have to give in. After all, she was his best hope of forming the government.

  The LJP could well send out feelers to Sukanya Sarkar, and the PP leader may even play along for a while. But the truth was that these two parties were not natural allies. Sukanya’s ‘secular’ credentials would be badly dented if she allied with a party that was determined to impose a Uniform Civil Code on the country. Not to mention the trifling point that it would also erode her Muslim support base.

  Damyanti, on the other hand, was quite willing to give up on her minority supporters if it meant getting a seat at the table in Delhi. Everyone knew that’s where the real power lay. And if grasping it meant letting go of a section of her base, well then, that was a price worth paying.

  Sukanya would never take such a pragmatic approach to politics. Damyanti, who had had first-hand experience of the Poriborton Party leader’s obduracy, her rigid moral positions and her aversion to compromise, was quite sure of that.

  Never mind all the posturing, never mind her troubled history with the party; when push came to shove, Sukanya would choose the SPP over the LJP. Sure, she would make Jayesh run around in circles before she did that, but she would align with him in the end. Damyanti would bet her Chattarpur farmhouse on that.

  The first person to call on Didi Damyanti that morning, though, was not a member of either party. He had arrived unannounced at the gates of her bungalow even before the camera crews turned up. He had waited while the security guards scrambled to get clearance to let him in. And then, holding a giant bouquet of red roses, Madan Mohan Prajapati had entered her drawing room.

  Damyanti had been sorely tempted to turn him away at the gate. He really had no business turning up at her house like this and putting her on the spot. Surely the man knew how important a day this was for her. What on earth made him think that she would want to waste it on him?

  But something made her hesitate. It was never a good idea to make needless enemies in politics. She had learnt that lesson with Sukanya Sarkar. If Madan Mohan wanted to call on her to congratulate her then it was best to give him five minutes and get it over with. No point antagonizing a man who had the potential of becoming something of a nuisance.

  So, Damyanti greeted the former Defence Minister warmly and offered him a cup of masala chai. Madan Mohan accepted gratefully, sinking into the sofa opposite her, with the air of a man who intended to make himself comfortable for a while.

  ‘Mubarak ho, Didi, Mubarak ho,’ he began, in his usual unctuous style. ‘Now you have gone from being the Queen to becoming the Kingmaker.’

  Damyanti could feel an eye-roll coming on. Controlling it with an effort, she responded, ‘Thank you, Madan Mohanji. It’s all thanks to the blessings of God and of well-wishers like you.’

  Madan Mohan smiled ingratiatingly. ‘Well, that’s why I’m here to see you, Didi. It’s because I am a well-wisher of yours. I just wanted to warn you against aligning with Karan Pratap Singh. Woh ladka toh aasteen ka saap hai (that boy is like a snake up your sleeve; a friend who is really a foe). If you get too close to him, you will end up getting stung.’

  Damyanti frowned. This was a bit much. Give the man an inch and he wanted to take an entire acre. What made him think she was interested in his opinion on the matter? She needed political advice from him about as much as she needed a hole in her head.

  ‘Please don’t worry about me, Madan Mohanji,’ she replied coldly. ‘I can look after myself. Aap apni chinta kijiye, meri nahin (Please worry about yourself not me). Thank you for the flowers, but I must say goodbye now. I have many people waiting to see me.’

  But Madan Mohan was impervious to insults. ‘Didiji, believe me, I am not saying this because of my problems with Karan. You can ask anyone in the LJP. They will tell you what he is like. Which is why half the LJP MPs will defect the moment I give them a signal to form a new party under the leadership of Asha Devi. She is the person you should ally with. Once the two of you are together, I can get you the numbers to form the next government. You know you can depend upon me.’

  Damyanti couldn’t help herself. She began to laugh. And once she started she couldn’t stop. So hysterical did her laughter get that her PA popped his head around the door discreetly to see what the matter was. She waved him away impatiently and finally calmed down.

  ‘Is this a joke?’ she asked Madan Mohan, her blunt tones dipping contempt. ‘Do you seriously expect me to give up on Karan Pratap, who is the undisputed leader of his party and go with Asha Devi? Asha Devi? The woman whose naked pictures are plastered wherever you look. You believe that such a woman has any kind of future in politics? You were supposed to be an intelligent man. Has the lo
ss of power meant that you have lost your mind as well?’

  Madan Mohan started to remonstrate. Asha had, he conceded, had something of a setback. But she had bounced back from it and clawed back public sympathy. From now on, things could only get better for Asha Devi. And just think, he prodded Damyanti, how much support there would be for a government headed by two women. Hell, even three women, if he could get Sukanya Sarkar to come on board as well.

  That was the straw that broke Damyanti’s back. Nostrils flaring at the very mention of Sukanya, she got on her feet in a huff and indicated the door to Madan Mohan. ‘I really don’t have time for this today. My secretary will see you out…’

  Madan Mohan debated persisting with his spiel. But he knew in his heart that he had already pushed his luck a bit too far. So, accepting defeat, he staggered to his feet, sketched out a cursory namaste to Didi Damyanti, and left.

  This was a lost cause. He would try his luck with Sukanya Sarkar instead.

  ▪

  Jayesh Sharma was uncharacteristically nervous about his meeting with Sukanya Sarkar. He still had fond memories of her as the young woman who had shown him such kindness when he was but a child. But caught up in those memories was the hurt and dismay he had felt when she had abandoned him without a backward glance the moment she fell out with his father. How could someone be so kind and loving one minute, he had wondered, and so cold and ruthless the next?

  Over the years, Jayesh had followed Sukanya’s political career as it went from strength to strength. But he could see nothing of that smiling young woman who had played chess with him in the hatchet-faced firebrand who now led the Poriborton Party. She seemed like an entirely different person. A complete stranger, in fact.

  Sensing his nerves, Malti held on to his hand as they entered the room where Sukanya awaited them. Seated on a desk, working on some papers, she rose to her feet as soon as they entered and came forward to meet them. Jayesh held out his hand in greeting and was surprised to be swept up in a hug.