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Journalism of Courage
What’s the Minister without a Ministry, Mamata Banerjee, doing the night before she’s scheduled to meet the Prime Minister? She’s just arrived from Kolkata—and she’s drawing.
Not a new battleline between her party and the NDA but the sketch of a child peering above a clutch of dismembered pink and red hands.
Pretty intense stuff.
‘‘It’s the face of the future,’’ she says. ‘‘I am really sad, you can see it in my face. I have never understood artifice.’’ Before you can ask her if her sadness has to do with her art or the buzz that Vajpayee isn’t exactly rushing in to give her the Most Powerful Ministry, she says: ‘‘Tonight my mind is overburdened with concern for the families of the two Trinamool supporters butchered by CPM thugs in West Bengal.’’
Pretty intense stuff again.
And then her Man Friday, Ratan Mukherjee, enters the room. She asks him to fix her appointments with the Prime Minister, the Lok Sabha Speaker and the Vice President.
She knows Vajpayee is in town tomorrow and will be away on Saturday and then leave the country on September 16. ‘‘It is the Prime Minister’s prerogative,’’ she says. ‘‘I trust him completely.’’
What does she want? She deflects it. ‘‘Those bereaved families continued to haunt me. I stayed awake till four. That young man from Chakdah (one of the two who was killed) was one of our brightest talents. And imagine, he was only 35.’’ And as she talks, her sketch pen continues to deepen the shade of yellow on her page.You ask her again, what does she want.
‘‘Tomorrow it’s just a courtesy call,’’ she says. ‘‘I am happy with this odd situation of being part of the Cabinet without a ministry to look after.’’ Suddenly, Mukherjee re-enters with the news that the ‘‘moon thing was not discussed’’ at the Cabinet meeting this evening but ‘‘it was definitely on the agenda.’’
‘‘I am interested in this lunar project,’’ she says. ‘‘I could not attend this evening’s meeting. I got the information late at 12.30 pm. I took the evening flight from Kolkata. And reached here after eight.’’
From moon it’s back to Planet Earth. Or thereabouts. ‘‘Look what I painted on the flight,’’ she says pointing to flowers which again look like dismembered hands from a distance. She says she has done six such abstract drawings over the past 48 hours.
‘‘My mind is in a turmoil,’’ she says. The phone rings. The few persons in her room want to know if it is from the Prime Minister. Mamata seeks the caller’s blessings in Hindi that doesn’t sound like the original thing. No, it was not the Prime Minister.
