and announced that no cold drinks were available. Suleiman frowned and dismissed him, asking him to bring some water and to hurry up with the lunch.
‘What was I saying?’ he asked, distracted by the domestic chaos.
‘About the sealing of the palace.’
‘Ah, yes. The Indian Armed Constabulary lived here for two years. It wasn’t just neglect: the place was looted. There were two major thefts of silver – they said ten tons in all …’
‘Ten tons? Of silver?’
‘That’s what they say,’ replied Suleiman dreamily. He looked at his watch. It was nearly three o’clock and his absent lunch was clearly on his mind. ‘Ten tons … though it’s probably exaggerated. Certainly everything valuable was taken: even the chairs were stripped of their silver backing.’
‘Were the guards in league with the robbers?’
‘The case is still going on. It’s directed against some poor character who got caught: no doubt one of the minnows who had no one to protect him.’
Suleiman walked over to the window and shouted some instructions in Urdu down to the servants in the courtyard below.
‘I’ve asked them to bring some bottled water. I can’t drink the water here. My stomach – you’ve no idea the hell I’ve been through with it, the pain. I have to keep taking these terrible antibiotics. I’ve been to specialists, but they can’t do anything.’
Shortly afterwards the bearer reappeared. There was no bottled water, he said. And no, Rajah Sahib, the khana was not yet ready. He shuffled out backwards, mumbling apologies.
‘What are these servants doing?’ said Suleiman. ‘They can’t treat us like this.’
He began to pace backwards and forwards through the ruination of his palace, stepping over the chunks of plaster on the floor.
‘I get terrible bouts of gloom whenever I come here,’ he said. ‘It makes me feel so tired – exhausted internally.’
He paused, trying to find the right words: ‘There is … so much that is about to collapse: it’s like trying to keep a dike from bursting. Partly it’s because I don’t live here enough … But it preys on my mind wherever I am. I feel overwhelmed at even the thought of this place.’
He paused again, raising his hands in a gesture of helplessness: ‘I simply can’t see any light at the end of any of the various tunnels. Each year I feel that it is less and less worth struggling for. Sometimes the urge just to escape becomes insupportable – just to leave it all behind, to take a donkey and some books and disappear.
‘Come,’ he said, suddenly taking my arm. ‘I can’t breathe. There’s no air in this room …’
The Rajah led me up flight after flight of dark, narrow staircases until we reached the flat roof at the top of the fort. From beyond the moat, out over the plains, smoke was rising from the early-evening cooking fires, forming a flat layer at the level of the treetops. To me it was a beautiful, peaceful Indian winter evening of the sort I had grown to love, but Suleiman seemed to see in it a vision of impending disaster. He was still tense and agitated, and the view did nothing to calm him down.
‘You see,’ he explained, ‘it’s not just the qila that depresses me. It’s what is happening to the people. There was so much that could have been done after Independence, when they abolished the holdings of the zamindars who were strangling the countryside. But all that happened was the rise of these criminal politicians: they filled the vacuum and they are the role models today. Worse still, theirs are the values – if you can call them values – to which people look up: corruption, deception, duplicity, and crude, crass materialism. These are seen to be the avenues to success.
‘The world that I knew has been completely corrupted and destroyed. I go in to fits of depression when I see the filth and dirt of modern Lucknow and remember the flowers and trees of my youth. Even out here the rot has set in. Look at that monstrosity!’
Suleiman pointed to a thick spire of smoke rising from a sugar factory some distance away across the fields.
‘Soft powder falls on the village all day from the pollution from that factory. It was erected illegally and in no other country would such a pollutant be tolerated. I spoke to the manager and he assured me action was imminent, but of course nothing ever happens.’
‘Perhaps if you went back in to politics you could have it closed down?’ I suggested.
‘Never again,’ said Suleiman. ‘After two terms in the Legislative Assembly I came on record saying I would leave the Congress Party if it continued to patronise criminals. The new breed of Indian politician has no ideas and no principles. In most cases they are just common criminals, in it for what they can plunder. Before he died I went and saw Rajiv and told him what was happening. He was interested but he didn’t do anything. He was a good man, but weak, unsure of himself. He did nothing to stop the rot.’
‘Do you really think things are that bad?’ I asked
‘There has been a decline in education, in health, in sanitation. There is a general air of misery and suffering in the air. It’s got much, much worse in the last fifteen years. Last week, a few miles outside Lucknow, robbers stopped the traffic and began robbing passers-by in broad daylight. Later, it turned out that the bandits were policemen.
‘When I first joined the Legislative Assembly I was elected with an unprecedented majority. Perhaps you are right: perhaps I should have stayed in politics. But what I saw just horrified me. These people … In their desire to get a majority, the rules are bent, the laws broken, institutions are destroyed. The effects are there for anyone to see. You saw the roads: they’re intolerable. Twenty years ago the journey here used to take an hour; now it takes twice that. Electricity is now virtually non-existent, or at best very erratic. There is no health care, no education, nothing. Fifty years after Independence there are still villages around here which have no drinking water. And now there are these hold-ups on the road. Because they are up to their neck in it, the police and the politicians turn a blind eye.’
‘But isn’t that all the more reason for you to stay in politics?’ I said. ‘If all the people with integrity were to resign, then of course the criminals will take over.’
‘Today it is impossible to have integrity or honesty and to stay in politics in India,’ replied Suleiman. ‘The process you have to go through is so ugly, so awful, it cannot leave you untouched. Its nature is such that it corrodes, that it eats up all that is most precious and vital in the spirit. It acts like acid on one’s integrity and sincerity. You quickly find yourself doing something totally immoral, and you ask yourself: “What next?”’
We fell silent for a few minutes, watching the sun setting over the sugar mill. Behind us, the bearer reappeared to announce that the Rajah’s dal and rice was finally ready. It was now nearly five o’clock.
‘In some places in India perhaps you can still achieve some good through politics,’ said Suleiman. ‘But in Lucknow it’s like a black hole. One has an awful feeling that the forces of darkness are going to win here. It gets worse by the year, the month, the week. The criminals feel they can act with impunity: if they’re not actually Members of the Legislative Assembly themselves, they’ll certainly have political connections. As long as they split 10 per cent of their takings between the local MLA and the police, they can get on
