This Time Of Morning

By Nayantara Sahgal

This unusually prescient novel is set in the early post-Independence years, when a new republic eagerly looks forward to a future full of hope. Rakesh, a Foreign Service officer who had grown up at a time when young men were ardent nationalists, returns to Delhi after a six-year absence to find many changes. He meets the new Advisor on Foreign Affairs, the controversial Kalyan Sinha, and is once again drawn to the magnetic personality of the politician whose ruthless manipulations are, in a way, a precursor to the moral corruption of the years to come. Vintage Sahgal, This Time of Morning is a riveting work of fiction that captures the realities of a country in transition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Aug 4, 2008
• ISBN: 9789350299807

Nayantara Sahgal

Nayantara Sahgal is the author of nine novels, ten works of non-fiction and wide-ranging literary and political commentary. She has received the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Sinclair Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. A resident of Dehra Dun, she has been awarded the Doon Ratna. In 2009, she received Zee TV's Awadh Samman.

Book preview

1

Rakesh stood at one end of the dusty veranda of Palam airport in the crowd that had just got off the plane, while luggage clattered noisily past him along the moving belt. In India luggage like everything else had to be sturdy to survive. He watched for the new, lightweight, fibre suitcase that would adapt less readily to rugged handling than the shabby leather boxes and canvas bedding rolls he saw rattle past, lifted off, bumped and banged to the floor. But whatever the condition of their luggage, a lot of people could apparently afford to travel by air. The plane had been full, and the man at the booking counter had told him all planes travelled with a full load. Sensitive to changes during his absence in foreign capitals, every Indian detail held an interest for him.

Memories of other, more streamlined airports, well-modulated voices announcing arrivals and departures, the smooth efficiency of passport and customs officials, held no lure at the moment. Delhi after six years! Rakesh took a quick look around the drive for the car he had been promised, then back to the luggage belt again. That was it, he told the man behind the belt, who rescued the smart suitcase and lifted it off. His Air India bag in one hand, his suitcase in the other, Rakesh walked over to the line of cars, excited and expectant. There was Saleem’s car, a Hindustan like everybody else’s, but painted a defiant royal blue, and some distance from it a uniformed chauffeur, borrowed or stolen for the occasion, scanning the crowd on the veranda to fit someone of Rakesh’s description. ‘Shorter and slimmer than I am,’ Saleem Sahib had said, but everyone was inches shorter and slimmer than Saleem Sahib. ‘He will be wearing a white closed-collar suit.’ So were a number of other Government of India officials, but this one would be young. And then the chauffeur saw the young man. his suit rumpled by the flight, the top button of his coat undone, eagerly scanning the cars. He hurried over, touching his cap. ‘To Saleem Sahib’s flat?’ the chauffeur enquired. ‘No, for a drive around Delhi first,’ said Rakesh, ‘if you can spare the time.’

‘I am not needed till tomorrow,’ said the chauffeur.

The barren countryside flanking the road from Palam to the city gave way to new houses and legations. There were big embassy buildings coming up in Chanakyapuri, said the chauffeur, and a new hotel, the Ashoka. Vijay Chowk, as they drove through it, would soon be a tangle of cyclists on their way home from work, Rakesh remembered. It was nearly closing time now and the Secretariat buildings were burnt pink and orange by the late sun. It was the turning point of the day, when the sky, drenched in colour, glowed lavishly above the sweep and expanse of the avenue to India Gate. The evening’s bustle converged on Connaught Place, a dusty haze mingling with approaching twilight. People poured along the roads. A group of young men and women, the girls in tight salvar-kameez and sleek high pompadours, the men with tapered trousers and Elvis Presley haircuts, stood outside Gaylords. How alike everyone was beginning to look, from London to Delhi, thought Rakesh. The film poster above the Regal showed a fat heroine smiling coyly with forefinger on chin while a fat hero gazed gluttonously at her. Film posters, at least, had not changed. He went into Macropolo’s for a tin of cigarettes and then instructed the chauffeur to take him to the External Affairs Ministry. There was still time to look in on Saleem and drive home with him.

The blue haze of near-winter smudged the high, black, wrought-iron beauty of the gates leading to Rashtrapati Bhavan as the chauffeur parked the car under the trees. The Ministry of External Affairs, housed in one of New Delhi’s pink sandstone administrative buildings, had come into existence in 1947. Its senior officers belonged to the Indian Civil Service, the body of experienced administrators which along with the Army, the parliamentary system and the English language, the British had bequeathed to India. Its younger officers belonged to the Indian Foreign Service and were independent India’s own contribution. Most of them had been sixteen or seventeen when the Indian flag was hoisted in place of the Union Jack on Delhi’s seventeenth-century Red Fort. The old Civil Service jealously guarded its rights and privileges against the encroaching new services, both foreign and internal, and the polite tension between the old and the new affected this and every other Ministry as India struggled to squeeze a revolution into the bureaucratic mould and adapt dramatic plans and programmes to everyday consumption.

Rakesh took the shallow brick stairs in long strides and walking down a corridor carpeted in fading tan, pushed open a door marked Saleem Ahmed: West Asia & North Africa. The big, untidy man behind the desk looked up from his work, then with an exclamation of surprise, came round the desk to pummel Rakesh in an embrace.

‘I didn’t expect you. I thought you would go straight to the flat. Saira is waiting with tea. How was Cairo?’ Saleem propelled Rakesh towards a chair, pushed him into it, and stood grinning down at him.

‘Beirut,’ corrected Rakesh, ‘for the past six weeks. Doesn’t the Ministry keep track of its orders?’

‘What were you doing in Beirut for six weeks?’

Rakesh shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I thought you might. There seems to have been a muddle about postings. Anyway, I enjoyed Beirut.’

‘Beirut, Cairo, the pygmy forests of Africa. What does it matter, my dear fellow? You are back in the Ministry of Eternal Affairs.’

Rakesh looked at the green baize-topped desk piled high with files, and a side table laden with more files. The Out tray over-flowed. There was a teacup, the saucer splashed with tea and filled with squashed cigarette butts in the In tray. The tea tray had been moved to comparative safety on a pile of the day’s newspapers. Even the walls, with their uneven yellow distemper looked about to burst their confines. Untidiness spilled on a monumental scale, beginning with Saleem’s own person.

‘Don’t you ever have a spring cleaning?’ said Rakesh. ‘Half of those cabinets could be emptied.’

‘And what do we do when Question No. 61 in Parliament asks about the condition of Indians in Aden. We go to Filing Cabinet No. 2 for the information we need. You’ve been away too long. Tidy up! The last thing I warn Shankar about when I leave every night is not to tidy up.’

Rakesh stretched luxuriously. ‘It’s wonderful to be back,’ he said.

Saleem smiled. They all came back, himself included, from three, four, or five years abroad, sometimes much longer, and heaved a sigh of relief. But before a year was out they or their wives were agitating for foreign posts again. Allowances in Delhi were cut, accommodation was difficult, and once families had been seen, family affairs straightened out, and school-age children left in boarding schools, they were restless and ready to leave. Most of ‘their group’, those who had joined the Foreign Service five years after independence, were young men of provincial backgrounds, orthodox families and arranged marriages who had reacted in varying degree to their collision with other cultures. But they had all acquired polish and poise. They had become conditioned to the tempestuousness of Arab politics, the museums and art galleries of Europe, the impact of America. Their wives spoke a smattering of several languages and had had babies and learned to keep house, servantless, all over the world. Even the most sheltered among them had obtained driving licences, taken tennis lessons, learned to make a cocktail and to entertain with ease. They did not really belong in Delhi or in any one place any more. The diplomatic corps was a nationality of its own. But they never stopped planning and plotting a Delhi posting. The world had to wait a little while they got their bearings again.

‘Any tea left in that?’ enquired Rakesh.

Saleem sent for a cup and poured out the strong, dark brew.

‘What’s happening?’ asked Rakesh, ‘Kalyan Sinha’s appointment came out of the blue.’

‘Not really. Just making it legal, you might say,’ said Saleem, leaning back comfortably in his own chair. ‘He’s been meddling with foreign appointments for the past year.’

The controversial Sinha had spent two years in Delhi as Minister without Portfolio. He had recently been appointed Adviser on Foreign Affairs and his gaunt arresting face appeared regularly in the papers. The Prime Minister was not obliged to consult his colleagues before making an appointment to the Cabinet and changes had been expected for some time, but this appointment had come as a surprise for no one knew Sinha. Delhi was electric with the brittle false calm that preceded a storm, a storm that would continue to threaten but never rage, as was the way of government storms in Delhi.

‘Isn’t there any cheerful news?’ Rakesh demanded.

‘Aside from your arrival, let me see. You should have heard the P.M. in Parliament today. His speech was pure literature and about a hundred years ahead of its time. Our legislators looked quite dazed. He put the whole language issue in its historic perspective with a plea for tolerance and understanding. I hope it was enough to ward off the demonstration that’s threatened. The Down With English group is going to make a noise sometime soon, and the Down With Hindi group promises to make an even bigger noise if this happens. I’m not sure how cheerful it all is, but there’s never a dull moment.’

Winters were, in any case, never dull. The visiting season had arrived, with Delhi playing host to international celebrities. Elsenhower had been one of those who had driven through Vijay Chowk, his hands clasped above his head in greeting to the enthusiastic crowds. A few years earlier Bulganin and Khrushchev had waved their hats as they drove past the pink sandstone buildings. Delegations from all over the world came and went and Delhi preserved its delicate balance.

Rakesh looked with affection at his large, rumpled friend.

‘I hope you’re not off somewhere now that I’m back.’

‘Not a hope,’ said Saleem. ‘All the C class posts are full and the I.C.S. is lined up for the good ones. Anyway, for the time being West Asia needs me here. Let’s go. Saira will be wondering if your plane landed after all. By the way, she’s got tickets for the Blue Cross Ball at the Club on Saturday. Find a female and come with us.’

‘Can you wait five minutes?’ asked Rakesh. ‘I’ll look in on the S.G. if he hasn’t left and make sure I’m not off somewhere the day after tomorrow.’

‘He’ll be there. He never goes home.’

‘Do I have a chance of being posted in Delhi?’

‘I’ve been wondering,’ said Saleem. ‘There’ll be Sinha’s Ministry now. Anyway, go and announce your return.’

The decision about Rakesh’s next post would be taken by the Foreign Service Board, but Rakesh wanted to put in his bid for Delhi beforehand, and the S.G. had always been well-disposed towards him. He climbed another flight of stairs, knocked at the door marked The Secretary General and entered to a low ‘Come in’.

Sir Arjun Mitra looked up from a broad, polished, impeccably neat desk, separated by several yards of grey carpet from a semicircle of deep leather chairs grouped around a low coffee table. A carved Kashmiri cigar box of walnut wood stood on the table beside a bowl of white roses. The S.G. looked over the top of his glasses, then took them off and laid them on his desk with a careful precise gesture.

‘Come in, come in, Rakesh. No, you’re not disturbing me. When did you arrive? I thought you were still on leave.’

He spoke warmly but with the hesitation of a man who is never sure how he will be received. Sir Arjun was at the top of the administrative tree, a patient, conscientious civil servant whose entire life was now bounded by these four walls. This was more than devotion to duty and the flood of overwork that every Ministry had to handle. It was a refuge from home and his wife. The blessed relief each morning of entering this orderly room, the balm of at least outward respect from his subordinates, were his mainstay. He would have been surprised to learn that the respect was not merely outward. The younger officers liked the Old Boy. He did not fire the imagination or spark their sense of adventure. He did not symbolize the spirit of the age. But nobody expected him to. He had a quiet dignity and a genuine sympathy for the young and their problems. He remembered them and kept them docketed in the various neat cubbyholes of his mind. Rakesh in his first post had been attached to him during a Heads of Mission conference in Europe. He had taken him shopping, acting as his interpreter, and cooked an omelette for him when his plane was eight hours late and they had to return to Rakesh’s flat from the airport in a cold drizzle. Sir Arjun had kindly feelings towards him.

He was due to retire in February but he had asked for and been given a year’s extension. No one grudged the Old Boy his extension but frequent extensions at the top level held up promotions at the lower levels and External Affairs like other Ministries offered the spectacle of senior officials who never retired and juniors who never rose higher in rank. Sir Arjun tried not to think of his impending retirement. He had lived a life whose routine clung to him like plaster too painful to remove.

‘My leave ended today, sir. I got in from Allahabad an hour ago.’

‘Ah. Now where is it you’ve been posted?’

‘Well, that’s the problem, sir. I wanted to put in my bid for Delhi, if that’s at all possible.’

‘You’re coming from Cairo?’

‘Beirut, sir, for six weeks, and Tokyo and Paris before that. I’d very much like to remain in Delhi.’

Sir Arjun sighed. It was either that or an independent charge. None of the young men wanted to serve in a big mission. There were not enough independent charges to go round, they were not senior enough for the important ones, and Delhi was always a bottleneck.

‘I rather think you were being considered for First Secretary at Bonn.’

‘Ordinarily I would have welcomed it, sir. But I have been away for six and a half years.’

Rakesh looked down at the Evening Bulletin on the S.G.’s desk, with the face of the newly appointed Advisor on Foreign Affairs on the front page.

‘I thought there might be a vacancy in the new department, sir,’ he said, and volunteered, ‘It came as something of a surprise.’

Sir Arjun coughed in the manner of someone interrupting an unnecessary surmise. His business was administration, not politics. Ministers would come and go. Programmes would be made, remade, and unmade, but the department would go on. ‘Not altogether, not altogether, you know.’

It had been said of the S.G. that if he strode along an avenue covered with eggshells in hobnailed boots he would still manage not to crush any underfoot. His talent for never committing himself was legendary. ‘Can you imagine the Old Boy playing bridge?’ Saleem had once remarked. ‘He’d never bid.’ The Old Boy in fact did not play bridge and he attended few of Delhi’s cocktail parties. In a Secretariat where the Prime Minister’s office hours continued till late into the evening, he thankfully spent as many evenings as he could in the office himself, even receiving ambassadors there after hours rather than at home. But now he looked at the clock on the opposite wall and rose. ‘Well, we shall be meeting.’

Rakesh stood up, too, and said, ‘If you’d keep it in mind, sir….’

One never knew with the Old Boy. Nice as he was, would he remember? And he had aged a good deal in these last six years.

‘We shall see what can be done about Delhi,’ he promised, and Rakesh said a grateful goodbye.

It was a short drive to Saleem’s flat. Meena Bagh consisted of three double-storeyed buildings around a common lawn. The flats were of concrete, hot in summer, cold in winter, with two bedrooms, a living-dining room, and a veranda that Saira had had enclosed in wire netting to make into a playroom for her two little girls, but the children were with their grandmother in Lucknow and she and Saleem luxuriated in the small extra rectangle of space. The flat was not uncomfortably small until Saleem stepped into it, and then everything looked ridiculously miniature. The P.W.D. sofa suite was adequate, but the dining table looked unsteady and the plywood chairs she had had made cheaply by a local carpenter were actually threatened by Saleem’s weight. She had solved the problem of space for clothing by hanging Saleem’s suits in the single wall cupboard, and keeping her saris between layers of tissue paper in a trunk under the double bed.

She stood looking at herself in the mirror she had bought at an auction. It was framed in carved silver gilt and was the only frivolous touch in this makeshift home. Her reflection gave her as much pleasure as her surroundings made her discontented. She was a young woman of porcelain prettiness, with grey eyes, a fair skin and brown hair curling to her shoulders. She would have liked a hairstyle but Saleem thought that hair should look like hair, so it remained in its natural state, making her look much younger than she was. She would have liked a home of her own, like her friend, the Rani of Mirpur, who had just built a house in Chanakyapuri. Saleem’s plot in the Government Servants’ housing colony had not even been released. ‘And it never will be,’ Saira complained from time to time. ‘We shall have to live in these dreadful flats every time we come home from abroad. I’ll be old before anything happens.’ But old age, she knew perfectly well, was something that happened to other people. She dimpled approvingly at her reflection and went downstairs to meet Saleem, hearing his car on the gravel. ‘You’re here, Rakesh!’ she said, delighted, as he got out and embraced her warmly, telling her she was prettier than ever.

end

On her way to Melaram’s with her mother’s shopping list, Rashmi changed her mind. On an impulse she turned her car into the bend in the road, where, not a quarter of a mile from Buddha Jayanti Park, a board announced Ram Mohan Construction Company, Peace Institute. She had watched the building’s progress with some interest, as though measuring it against her own gradual restoration to calm. Bare-legged workmen moved unhurriedly over the hard ground carrying baskets of gravel on their heads. One of them turned to look at her and ask her the time. He was the friendly one who always acknowledged her presence with a word or a smile. He was, she realized, the only human being with whom spontaneity had been possible in many months. A quiet site, a workman and a slowly growing building had been ingredients in her recovery.

Rashmi sat in the car, the pleasantly warm, dry breath of late October lulling her like a sedative. Since she had come to Delhi the queer shaken feeling had eased a little and she felt less like one who has narrowly survived an ugly accident. Delhi provided a respite from the clashes that had become her relationship with Dalip, from the deadening trauma out of which it seemed no feeling could ever again emerge. I don’t hate him, she had told herself wearily during the blank intervals between quarrels, I don’t wish him harm, but he and I – she could not even think ‘we’ any longer – cannot go on together. The windscreen mirror tilted towards her reflected a face that depended for beauty on its expression and animation. For months it had done without both. How like prolonged starvation wrong marriage could be, robbing lustre, defeating courage and will. Away from it she was beginning to understand that a part of life, though destroyed, could be rebuilt and then go on, incredibly, as before, at least in bare outline. Toothpaste and detergent and marmalade had to be stocked on pantry shelves despite the hammers in one’s head, despite the fact that love and gaiety ended. The small domestic duties her mother gave her were mechanically performed and oddly soothing while she came to a decision about her future. For some ironic reason it was anguish to kill even what was better dead, and she had not been able to make up her mind, or even to discuss her problem with her parents. There was no such thing as a clean break. A break had jagged edges and did violence to some part of one’s being. Or was it because she was conditioned to endure, reconcile and preserve, no matter at what cost? The thought of a break burdened her with the guilt that her best had not been enough, and that there was so frighteningly little truth or permanence in even what one most wanted. Only one thing seemed clear at this moment, that love, if love is the terrible desire for one person, had left her, never to return.

The workmen were leaving the site and a glance at her watch told her that Melaram’s would soon close. She drove back to the main road, slowing down at Vijay Chowk as she threaded her way through the bicycle traffic. She decided to get only what was required for tonight’s party. The rest of the supplies could be sent the next day.

Darkness dropped sudden as a curtain over the long light afternoon. From the window of his study Kailas Vrind watched the garden blotted out. A crisp freshness was in the air, heralding the first cool night of the season. Subdued sounds came from the pantry and dining room where Mira was supervising arrangements for her dinner party. Kailas had always been grateful for Mira’s quiet housekeeping. He remembered his mother’s, whose efficiency, authority and much vaunted economy had been achieved at the cost of the family’s nerves. Clatter in the kitchen, a strident voice, commotion on laundry days had been his mother’s refuge and chief distraction as well as her major preoccupation. Peace was a condition that had come with marriage, a curious circumstance, since his childhood had been a routine one while his marriage had endured all the ups and downs and insecurity and frequent partings of a political career in a country struggling to be free. He had first been attracted by Mira’s voice and it was still her best feature, clear and vibrant as a young woman’s. They had been what few married people continue to be, a team, and the balance they had worked to create now stood him in good stead. He felt he needed that standby now that for the first time in his working life the way ahead was not absolutely clear. Strange how unambiguous it had been till now.

Kailas belonged to the generation that had succumbed to the magic of Gandhi. The fire, the dedication and singlemindedness of the man in the loincloth had attracted him, made him a member of the Congress, sent him to jail along with thousands of his countrymen, and trained and tempered something within him that might otherwise have developed haphazard and purposeless. What he had lost of his law practice he had gained in manhood. A singularly fortunate generation, Kailas felt, for whom ideals and actions had been happily wedded, and the goal achieved.

Kailas was not among those who believed that the Congress should have been disbanded after independence. The Party that had inspired, organized and led the struggle for freedom was after all, a political party, the most widely represented in the country, with a well-defined platform and a responsibility for the future. He himself had served as Chief Minister of his state, Uttar Pradesh, in the Interim Government that had been sworn in a year before independence and afterwards had been elected in the country’s first election to the Lok Sabha. Since then Delhi had become the pulse of his external world, and the house left to Mira by her father, their home.

Kailas had come to Delhi on the crest of the wave, elected from his constituency in Allahabad by a comfortable majority. He had led successive delegations to the U.N. And then, abruptly, his career at the U.N. had ended. It seemed he had spent his time since then adding up the factors that had contributed to this, turning them over and over again in his mind. It had started with Kalyan Sinha’s appointment to the delegation under him. Kailas tried to separate his dislike of Kalyan from his distrust of him. Had he made his dislike too obvious? Would he have succeeded with Kalyan if he had made a greater effort to win him? He did not think so. His very personality, confident and serene, constituted a threat to men like Kalyan. Kalyan’s rejection of him was much more than personal. They had been, from the start, two mutually antagonistic people, both blunt, both authoritative, and the delegation could have only one leader. It soon became apparent, in one of the unexpected twists that political affairs give to men and nations, which one would have to go. The crisis had come two years earlier when Kailas discovered that Kalyan had communicated personally with the P.M. on a matter that had already been fully discussed in a delegation meeting. He remembered his own disbelief when the copy of the telegram, was shown to him.

‘When did this cable go?’ he had asked his P.A., Joseph, who had been attached to him since his appointment as chairman of the first Indian delegation to the U.N.

Joseph had looked worried. ‘This morning. I’m sorry, but Mr Sinha said you would not be back until