Battle for Bittora Page 2

  I looked at her in exasperation. 'I see you've enjoyed a very happy Holi.'

  She shrugged, touched her pink forelock and said resignedly without opening her eyes,'Arrey bhai, it ij fast colour. We have tried to shampoo it away but it ij not coming off. Sahnaz herself could not make it go. Why did you not come home for Holi?'

  It was my turn to shrug now. 'Too much work, Amma.'

  She sniffed. 'Well, we had something very important to tell you. So we came here.'

  'Really, Amma, you look exhausted,' I told her, feeling a little guilty. 'You should've just phoned me.'

  She looked at me like I was really, really dumb.

  'Buggers,' she said.

  Huh?

  'All aawar phones are bugged.'

  I sighed.

  'Well, this place isn't. So spill. What is this very important something?'

  She sniffed again. 'If you were reading the papers, you would not ask such a stupid questsun,' she said loftily.

  I looked at her, a Very Bad Feeling twisting my insides.

  'What's in the papers now?' I asked suspiciously.

  She said smugly, 'Pragati Party comj begging to Pushpa Pande...'

  'And what do the Praggus have to say?' I asked, even more apprehensively. (I'm really wary of Amma's party machinery -because even though it purports to be a clean, meritocratic, nonpartisan setup, it's actually about as democratic as the Mughal court of Aurangzeb.)

  Amma lifted my chin with a bony finger, looked at me with suddenly starry eyes, and whispered, 'TB wants to give us the ticket from Bittora.'

  TB is not tuberculosis. It is reverential Praggu shorthand for Top Brass, which is what they call their party president. He's this fair, cute, sixty-seven-year-old widower with very large nostrils, who belongs to the 'first family' of Indian politics. Basically, his mother and his grandfather have both been prime ministers of India before him. And now even his daughter - an attractive forty-plus woman whom everyone insists on calling a girl - has been launched into active politics. That should reveal to you how 'democratic' the whole setup is. The only reason why the Praggus manage to win again and again in India's free, fair, universal adult franchise elections is because the main opposition party, the Indian Janata Party or the IJP, is a weirdo hardliner Hindu outfit with some very scary screwball notions that equate rule-of-democracy with rule-of-religious-majority. I tell you, if the Praggus had even a halfway decent opposition against them, their ass would've been grass decades ago.

  'But you've retired,' I pointed out.

  Her eyes lit up and she began to speak but precisely at that point, Rumi returned with a huge Slice of Italy box and set it down before us. 'Pepperoni,' he announced. 'And chocolate mud pie. You're not veg or anything unhealthy like that na, Ammaji?'

  She grinned and told him that of course she wasn't, while I glowered at the two of them, annoyed that they were getting along so cozily. Rumi was such a fraud - he claimed to hate pollies, and here he was being so sycophantic, ripping open little packets of oregano and emptying them lavishly all over the pizza, then placing the largest slice on a Lion King DVD cover and handing it to Amma with a flourish.

  She bit into the pizza with relish and watched me intently as she chewed, head cocked bird-like to one side, waiting for my reaction to the bombshell she'd just dropped.

  Well, I was going to make her wait for it. Let her make PC with Rumi for a while.

  Unfortunately, Rumi, instead of being difficult and saying Amma's appreciation of pepperoni was phallic or whatever, just took great draughts of Pepsi and said gushingly, 'Oh my god, this is such a privilege! I'm such a fan of your husband!'

  'Thenks,' said Amma serenely, reaching for her Pepsi can and swilling the liquid around. Wow, her diet had changed big time since I saw her last, when all she would eat was a little tadka-less dal and brown rice. 'So are we.'

  Hah, that was a load of bull! Amma had never been too impressed with Bauji.

  His name was Pandit Madan Mohan Pande and he'd been a big freedom fighter in the old days when the Pragati Party was both democratic and idealistic and engaged in the fight for India's independence. He printed an underground newspaper, whose brilliant (and, according to the British, seditious) editorials influenced a whole generation of young Indians and earned him three years as a Grade C prisoner in the Yerawada jail. The wardens kept putting him in solitary confinement and assigned him arduous labour but I don't think it bothered him too much. At least, that's what he always told me. He said that he'd been young and strong and that he loved being alone - he could spend hours in meditation.

  Anyway, post independence and after his arranged marriage to Amma (she had been fifteen to his thirty-three), Bauji contested the first Lok Sabha election on a Pragati Party ticket from his sleepy little hometown of Bittora in Pavit Pradesh, and won. Twice. He lost the third time he stood, and the party moved him to the Upper House, the Rajya Sabha, where he thrived in a low-key sort of way, sending long idealistic letters to the prime minister, writing editorials for the Hindu newspaper and generally acting like some sort of self-appointed, fiercely honest and therefore gently ignored national conscience. Amma, completely in awe of her terrifyingly well-educated, tall, fair and handsome superstar husband, stayed in the background, cooking his food and making sure he took his blood pressure pills.

  But once he and all his 'batch', so to speak, swarg sidhaaroed for their heavenly abode, Amma moved in to take over his mantle with gusto. She'd been watching him carefully (and critically) from the sidelines for years and had quietly decided that he was too rigid in his ways. She reckoned she could learn from his mistakes and be a lot more 'adjusting' in her dealings with people.

  So in giving the Thenks, so are we ones to Rumi, she was basically being a bit of a fraud.

  'I loved Shaadi, Khaadi aur Azaadi' gushed Rumi, revealing hitherto unsuspected depths of general knowledge and falling a few notches even lower in my estimation. God, what was wrong with the guy? Was he a closet Pragati Party groupie? Any minute now, he would whip off his shirt and reveal the Top Brass tattoo across his tits.

  'Arrey!' burbled Amma happily, as she dug into a chocolate mud pie.'You have read aawar autobiography? You read political books? What are you doing in this computer office, making cartons?'

  Rumi looked a little confounded at this.

  'Cartoons, Rumi,' I clarified, taking pity on him. 'What are you doing in this computer office, making cartoons?

  'Oh!' His intellectual brow cleared. He said, earnestly, and I could tell he meant it, 'But Ammaji, your book is not a political book! It's unputdownable! It reads like fiction!'

  It is fiction, I thought sourly. None of the stuff in the 1993 book, published the year Bauji died, actually happened. Amma and Bauji did not meet and fall passionately in love in the Yerawada jail. My mum wasn't born there either. And Amma contributed pretty much zilch to the freedom struggle. Bauji had married her two years after independence - in a bid to appease his parents, who were fully embarrassed to have an ex-jailbird on their hands. They'd hoped that her mix of beauty and pedigree would redeem him in Brahmin society somewhat. Anyway, in the book, she blithely claimed to be a good ten years older than she actually was, and basically used it as a tool to claw her way into the hearts of the frail, fast-fading freedom fighters club (who were all so senile they said they remembered her).

  It worked like a charm. Amma was given the ticket to contest from Bauji's old seat in Bittora and won it by a landslide margin on the crest of a sympathy wave. To be fair, she did do some decent work for the people there - and got re-elected twice after that, dropping only one election in the middle.

  But then things got messy.

  Rumi asked, a little hesitantly, 'Um... wasn't somebody going to make a movie based on the book?'

  'Yes,' I said shortly. 'Somebody was.'

  The thing is that Amma had been under a pretty dark cloud, career-wise, for the last four years or so. And it all started when the film rights to her book, Shaadi, K
haadi aur Azaadi, were sold to an international film studio. News of the movie deal naturally reawakened interest in the book, and some shady photo studio in Noida gave an interview to a nosy news magazine about how Pushpa Pande had been their client for years and had got dozens of photographs of luminaries of the freedom struggle morphed to include her own image. A lot of these images had been included in the book. Amma had been sitting around smugly, speculating on who would play her in the film - Deepika (nah, too dark), Katrina (nah, too sturdy), Aishwarya (umm, maybe, only she played old Kokilaben Ambani, how can she play me?) - when the story broke and kicked her in the butt.

  The party, totally red-faced and embarrassed, promptly slimed her out of the ticket from Bittora and Amma found herself, in the space of just a few weeks, reduced to being that most ignominious thing in India's political capital - an ex-MP. At once, a host of newly appointed cabinet ministers and Supreme Court judges started circling hungrily around her house on Tughlaq Road, it being a prime piece of real estate bang in the heart of Lutyens' Delhi.

  Luckily, Anthony Suleiman, an old friend of hers on the Housing Committee, made sure she didn't lose her house by declaring that the nation owed the widow of the famous freedom fighter, Pandit Madan Mohan Pande, a home during her lifetime. So Amma stayed.

  But I wasn't sure that was a good thing. At least, if she'd given up the house and moved to Bittora, she would've eventually gotten over the trauma of being politically irrelevant. Now she lived on a road chockfull of VIPs, a stone's throw from Parliament House, and kept picking savagely at her political sores. I tell you, during those first few months, it had been scary just watching her, sitting in the verandah and staring at the jamun trees, her hair all wild and scraggy.

  Rumi, his sensitive side finally coming to the fore, changed the subject. 'Is your family very large, Ammaji?'

  Amma shook her head, busily spooning chocolate mud pie into her face. 'There ij us, aawar daughter Jyoti and aawar granddaughter Sarojini. That ij all.'

  My mother lives in Toronto. She migrated there when I was sixteen, partly because my late father's family is settled there, but mostly because Amma and she just didn't see eye-to-eye on the whole lying-about-your-age and pretending-you-had-been-to-prison and accepting-expensive-presents-from-shady-industrialists thing. That, and the fact that Amma had always thought Ma married beneath her. My father had been a college professor and Bauji had heartily approved of him but Amma had been keenly disappointed. She'd hoped Ma would make a brilliant political alliance and strengthen our 'dynasty'. In fact, practically the moment my dad died, when I was just three, Amma had been all, Oh good, Jyoti, now you are free to entice Top Brass! We think he likes you... Of course, Ma never forgave her.

  She's really pretty, Ma, and smart too. She's dean at the Cohen University, and lives alone on campus, in a lovely house surrounded by apple trees, reading girlie magazines and books about monks who've sold their Ferraris.

  I said, rather pointedly, 'Rumi, you want to go finish those kitaanus? I'd like to approve them before I leave.'

  He pulled a bit of a sad face but got up to go. 'It's been a real honour meeting you, Ammaji!' he told Amma earnestly. Then he turned to me and drawled meaningfully, 'And Sarojini, you and I will have a long talk tomorrow.'

  I gave him a shove in the general direction of his desk. Amma, more polite, dismissed him with her practiced, gracious smile and, swallowing the last of her chocolate mud pie, wiped her hands fastidiously with about sixteen paper tissues.

  'That mud pie was loaded with triglycerides and unhealthy preservatives, by the way,' I informed her.

  She shrugged magnificently. 'So what?' she said. 'Life is sort.'

  Okayy.

  Then she collected all the leftover chilli and oregano flakes sachets and calmly dropped them into her capacious handbag. Next, she produced a toothpick and proceeded to pick at her (all real, no fakes) teeth. Finally, she gazed piercingly at me and said firmly, 'You have to come and help us with the campaigning.'

  I sighed.

  Are you sure you've got the ticket, Amma?' I asked. 'I mean, how d'you know they won't backstab you again? Has it been announced yet?'

  She nodded. 'Hundred per cent,' she said. 'TB haj assured us personally. Dwivedi's patta has been cut. Pukka.'

  So it hadn't been announced yet. Which meant that nothing was pukka. The last time too, they'd assured her she was getting it - that they had faith in her, despite the morphed photo scandal - and then they'd gone and announced her bete noir Pandit Dinanath Dwivedi's name, instead. And at the last minute too, when it was too late for her to get her act together and stand as a rebel independent candidate. Even then, all kinds of shady little regional parties had swarmed around her, offering her a ticket, but the Praggus cunningly promised her a Rajya Sabha berth if she sat out the election quietly, which got her really excited, as she thought the Upper House was the epitome of snooty, intellectual, political cool. Needless to say, it didn't materialize.

  I sighed again.

  'Amma, whyn't you go back to Delhi, and if,' I looked at her expression and hastily corrected myself, 'when you get the ticket, you call me and I'll take the next flight down.'

  She was sure she'd cut Dwivedi's patta last time as well. She'd told the press that she considered him a hypocrite, a bribe-eater and a skinflint. As proof of his hypocrisy, bribe-eating and skinflintishness, she had offered the fact that he and his family ate their vegetables unpeeled. A Brahmin so stingy that he grudged the cows in his courtyard his vegetable peels could not be good for Bittoragarh, she had declared.

  The dirty tricks department within the Pragati had promptly used this bizarre reasoning to spread rumours that ageing veteran Pushpa Pande was suffering from Alzheimer's, pressurized her to resign from all her posts within the party, and forced her into retirement.

  Amma shook her head vehemently.

  'Arrey bhai, why don't you understand - everything we said about that incompetent, lauki-ka-chhilka eating Dwivedi turned out to be true! He haj exposed himself in hij true colors, and now they want us to leap into the burning pyre, fight the elecsun and save their ijjat. We are the cleanest person they could find.'

  Which, if you thought about it, was a seriously scary thought.

  'What'd he do?' I asked, intrigued in spite of myself.

  Amma gave a low, girlish chuckle. 'You know how TB wants us to get clojer to the poor people?'

  I nodded. This was one of the TB's new pet policies. For top-level politicos to go spend a night in the homes of the poorest of the poor in India's rural districts. Eat what they ate. Sleep where they slept. Endure what they endured. It was supposed to make the politicians understand the needs of the poor and thus go about fulfilling them. Of course, both the IJP and the media had scoffed at the initiative, calling it naive, superficial, gimmicky and populist.

  'So Dwivedi went. Only, he took with him, in a big matador van, his own Sleepwell spring mattress, his own sheets, his own AC, his own bottled mineral water, his own food and his own English-style, ceramic commode.'

  Are you serious?' I asked.

  Amma nodded.

  'He didn't drink the water the poor couple he stayed with gave him, because they were low-caste Dalits. He didn't eat their food. He didn't share hij food either! He slept in their main room and made them sleep on the roof, becauj of mosquitoes. And then, when he instructed his servants to turn on his portable window AC, the load was too much for the small electricity station in the village. It blew up and the entire village waj dark for three whole days.'

  'Awesome,' I said, disgusted but not surprised.

  'The press got a photo of him sitting like a king on hij unconnected English-style commode, making mosun in the middle of a field, reading hij newjpaper. It came out in all the PP dailies. TB was furious. He threw him out. And now he wants us to stand.'

  I shook my head to clear it of the image of Dwivedi on his ceramic throne and tried to stick to the issue at hand.

  'But you made a public s
tatement that you've retired from politics!' I pointed out. 'You can't go back on your word like that!'

  She brushed aside this irrelevant remark.

  'Arrey bhai, but naysun needs us,' she purred, her palms joining smoothly into a leader-like namaste. 'Janta ko hamari jaroorat hai!'

  I groaned as she closed her eyes and the familiar, benevolent-politician smile slid across her face.

  'Amma, no, please! What about the thirty-seven interviews in which you claimed that all you want to do now is grow vegetables and pray?'

  Her eyes snapped open. 'That ij what you say when you are not having opsun! Now, we are having opsun! Why sud we become dark in the sun growing teenda-gobi, instead of fighting elections in Bittora if we have opsun? Hum mentally retarded hain kya?'

  'Amma, don't say mentally retarded!' I groaned.

  'Sorry...' she said grudgingly. 'Spesal.'

  'D'you think you'll win?' I asked her, switching tactics. 'What's the buzz in Bittora?'

  'Pragati ki hawa hai,' she replied breezily. 'The wind is changing and blowing for the Pragati. We will win, don't worry.'

  Yeah, right. She always says that. She also said it that one time she lost. Rather badly too. By over seventy thousand votes.

  'So the house must be overrun by a whole baraat from Bittora by now?' I asked. 'All of them dying to work for you and swearing that you will hundred per cent win?'

  She nodded. 'Yes,' she said, just a little defensively. 'Don't turn up your nose, Sarojini. These people have worked for us many, many times. We think so they know what they are talking.'

  They're a bunch of opportunists, I thought but didn't say. They'll work for anybody. They don't care if you win or lose, as long as they get to make some fast cash. Each time the elections roll around, they lift their noses, sniff the sour, currency-note scented air and close in like a horde of vultures.

  'So you want me and Ma to come and campaign for you, is that it?' I asked her.

  I knew how important this was. Constituents in the rural areas are never happy just to see you. They want to see you and your children and your children's children. They want to see the tiny black mole in the navel of your children's children. We are talking extremely nosy people here. Not that I mind. Meeting people is the good part actually. It's just the bit where they don't vote for you that sucks.