At Ambejogai, Pramod’s party post didn’t count

Vijay and Jayant Hamine remember Mahajan since the days their sister Rekha was in college with him at Yogeshwari Mahavidyalaya, chattering about acting in a drama alongside him.

Now, the two barely make ends meet in this small town overrun by stray pigs and uncleared garbage. Still, the big contracts and avenues of growth that Mahajan’s rise must have promised remain a dream this family won’t even admit having nurtured.

‘‘I do party work,’’ says Jayant, Rekha’s youngest brother. He’s almost 50, unmarried and has never had a proper job. According to locals, Mahajan’s youngest brother-in-law accompanies BJP candidates at election time or at morchas, either manning the loudspeaker or running errands. He has no steady income.

Vijay is a local journalist, earning a few thousand rupees a month.

‘‘I once asked gently if something could be done for Anand,’’ says Sulabha Joshi (62), Rekha’s sister. Anand, her 30-year-old son, was working for a small firm in Beed. ‘‘He said, ‘Let him show some initiative’.’’

Anand completed his BA, did courses in computers—‘‘hardware and software,’’ he says—and set up a small unit supplying infotech solutions, unsupported. As Ambejogai makes its way from small town to a growing urban centre, Anand’s income nudged the family from one of the area’s worst quarters to Yogeshwari Vasahat, a colony of small row-houses and buildings.

It’s a suffocating crowd—Rekha’s 85-year-old mother Kamlabai, her two brothers and Sulabha all live with Anand, his wife and their two-year-old son—but it’s the only affordable way.

It’s little wonder then that Rekha herself mentioned to friends, not so long ago, that while her husband had in fact offered some assistance to all his family members, she’d failed on that count.

After all, Pravin’s 1,000-sq ft apartment in Thane had been bought with Mahajan’s assistance, apart from other business ventures he’d helped with. At that time, she could hardly have thought her brother-in-law would feel so insulted by her husband as to pull the trigger on him.

Do all successful people have Pramod Mahajans backing them, Sulabha asks. ‘‘His success is a matter of great pride,’’ she adds. ‘‘But we love Pramodji anyway, because he is family.’’

She’s known Pravin since he was nine. ‘‘Maybe that was too early to gauge his character,’’ she says. Anand admits that people asked questions, assuming some material gain was on the way. ‘‘But we didn’t expect anything, so there’s no question of being angry or hurt.’’

Sulabha, who used to work at a cooperative but now plays sheet anchor at home, remembers the last time her brother-in-law came home. It was the wedding of Aniruddh, the son of Pratima Bhatambrekar, Mahajan’s sister.

‘‘Even then, he remembered to ask for aatya’s (his mother-in-law) vaangi bhaaji (a brinjal preparation) and thalipeeth, which he adored,’’ she says.

And, as the wrinkled Kamalabai breaks into a fresh round of silent tears, she adds: ‘‘The next we saw him was in hospital, tubes everywhere, through the glass of the ICU.’’