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say, ‘Shiva Prasad Sharma’ became a household name.
    Yet each time he returned home to Amarkantak – basking in the glow of recognition and success – it was to encounter an increasingly sterile reception from the one man in the world whom he felt should have been most excited by his eldest son’s progress. Why was it that his father had transferred his affections so facilely to that much younger and more insignificant son, tiny Hari, born in the embarrassing tumescence of old age? Their father was the headmaster of an obscure village school – in New Delhi such a position would have been thought inconsequential. And yet, it was undeniable: whenever Shiva Prasad stood back to survey the progress of his own famous life, his dazzling career, it was with a marked lack of satisfaction, a sense of non-completion. He had not yet experienced his father’s quiet pride.
    In the years that followed, Shiva Prasad strove for this elusive achievement. After he became a fixture on the Party’s intellectual scene, he expected political accolades to follow – and on his visits home to Amarkantak, he hinted as much to his incredulous parent. He explained how the Party was coming more and more to rely on his public pronouncements and private convictions. But he sensed that his father didn’t believe him, and when the old man proved this, by dying of old age before the son could effect his crucial transition into politics, it was a moment of brutal reckoning. Shiva Prasad was forced to appreciate, as he took the train back to Amarkantak for the funeral, that he had not been able to prove himself to his parent in the way he had once hoped, after all.
    In the ensuing decade, this realisation deepened. Shiva Prasad now came to see that although from its very inception his life had promised wonderful things – indeed, it had delivered marvels – it had not continued to dispense them with the speed to which he had once become accustomed. A climactic event was missing, and due to a lamentable lapse on the part of fate he had not been asked to contest a seat in the Lower House. He was not, after the Party got into power, offered a place in the Rajya Sabha either. And by the time his Non-Resident brother Hari went into English-language media, Shiva Prasad was forced to confess to himself that although fundamentally fascinating and deeply important, his life lacked a rounded shape.
    The marriages of his daughters were significant landmarks. After Unmentionable Urvashi ran away with a Muslim, he was at least able to blame his failure to rise on his daughter: that his pet, his favourite, his darling, had defied him to take to the bed of a Muslim – the shame of it for himself as a father, as a man, as a Hindu! He had spoilt her from the beginning, he thought; he had even misnamed her: that lascivious name he had insisted on for his firstborn … why had he done it? Against his wife’s better judgement, he had invited disgrace to come and lodge in his family. Things only changed for the better when Sunita announced her surprise engagement.
    Shiva Prasad debated – only briefly – the positive and negative ramifications of the match. On the negative side was the association with a man who had humiliated him some nine years before in a moment of ignominy. It had occurred when Shiva Prasad agreed to appear as a guest on a political debate show run by one of the new television channels. The other guest was Professor Ved Vyasa Chaturvedi; their scheduled conversation topic, the building of the new Ram temple at Ayodhya; and the conversation was supposed to take place in Hindi. However, so deracinated was Professor Chaturvedi that every now and then he would throw in a word or phrase in English: historical perspective, apotheosis, divide and rule . This kind of slip provided Shiva Prasad with the excuse he needed to unveil his fellow guest (with his hollow, treacherous politics) as a fraud, and as soon as he could, he took him up on it with some