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The Betrayal 2
When Dr Kamal took his seat in the hall he saw that it was
packed with people. He felt his chest contract and he hurriedly
lit a cigarette.
'Hullo, Doc,' said Rhada, the secretary of the Orient Front,
sitting down beside him. 'Is our Youth League present?'
'This should be an interesting meeting,' he commented,
pretending not to have heard the question.
'This should be their first and last meeting.'
Dr Kamal was jolted. So the secretary knew of the intentions
of the Youth League? Salim Rashid had assured him that the
plans were all secret and that he would not be implicated. Now
someone had told the secretary-and perhaps many others -- and though he seemed to approve of the planned disruption
and violence there was no way of telling how he would react if
things went wrong.
'There is Salim Rashid,' Rhada said, pointing towards the
front.
'Yes,' Dr Kamal answered feebly.
'These upstarts can give us a lot of trouble is they are not
stopped.'
'The youth must settle matters among themselves,' Dr Kamal said, with suppressed anger.
Several young men began adjusting the public address
system on the stage and then one of them began to speak. He
gave the audience a preliminary brief account of how he and
several friends had been drawn to the politics of the People's
Movement in Cape Town and had decided to form a branch in
the city.
'Mr Chairman, I object!'
Salim Hoosein stood up.
'May I remind you that there is a political organisation here,
the Orient Front. You may have heard of it.'
'I have heard of it. But I feel that there is a need for a different
kind of political organisation. Let me explain ...'
Several voices interjected:
'What do you mean?'
'Is the Front dead?'
'Are you issuing a challenge?'
The speaker pleaded for order and said that members of the
audience would have ample time to ask questions later.
'Mr Chairman, are you trying to smear the Orient Front?'
Salim Rashid shouted.
Before he could answer several voices accused the new
group of trying to divide the Indian people in their liberatory
struggle. Then someone boomed:
'Uncivilised Indians, don't you know anything about meeting procedure.'
Dr Kamal jumped up from his seat and turning in the
direction of the voice said:
'I strongly object to the defamatory slur cast upon us by
someone in the hall. For his information, I must state that we
Indians are among the most civilised races of mankind, a
people with a glorious culture ...'
'Well, that is quite plain to all,' a cynical voice near him said.
'Why don't you keep quiet and let the meeting get on?'
He sat down, his body quivering. The rebuke stung him
with such ferocity that for a moment, while standing, he had
felt his body reeling as if he was about to plunge down a
vertiginous height. His dignity and status had suffered a
humiliating reduction. What compelling force had made him
jump up from his seat and expose himself to the audience and
identify himself, so it seemed to him, with the opponents of
the new political group? He had come as an observer -- a
delusion he had managed to sustain until a few moments
ago -- but now he had become involved in their dispute. He
should have stayed at home. The new group seemed to have
many more sympathisers than he had calculated; people were
taking them seriously. If the Youth League was defeated . .
he did not have time to complete the thought as, with the
volume of the public address system amplified, the Chairman
continued:
'Some of us felt that what we lacked here was a political
body that would unify the oppressed. We are convinced that
any organisation opposed to racialism should not have a.
racial structure, such as that of the Orient Front, or the African
Front ...'
Salim Rashid leapt from his seat.
Don't insult the Orient Front! Don't insult the organisation
founded by the great Mahatma Gandhi!'
He rushed forward and immediately members of the Youth
League rose to follow their leader. Friends and sympathisers
of the new group in the audience, shocked at first by the
sudden threat of violence, jumped up from their seats and
pressed towards the front to join the fray.
There was uproar and panic. Women screamed. The stage
became a mass of seething, pushing, wrestling, punching,
shouting combatants. From the rear of the hall one had the
impression that players in a drama were involved in a mock
battle.
Someone ran out of the hall to telephone the police.
When Salim Rashid leapt from his seat shouting his battle
cry and rushing forward, Dr Kamal had experienced a sharp
conflict within. There was the urge to flee from the violence he
had contrived, and there was a petrifying inertia compelling
him to remain and witness the battle. He stayed, trapped by
indecision and the ambiguity of his political commitment, but
when he saw the opposition's determination to fight the Youth
League members, he rose from his seat. He took a few hurried
steps, reached the foyer and stopped at the door. Policemen
with truncheons and guns rushed past him into the hall.
Driven by a turbid amalgam of curiosity, fear and
bewilderment, Dr Kamal re-entered the hall and watched horrified at
the new dimension added to the battle. Then he fled. The
centre of his being that had been in turmoil during the past few
weeks seemed to be undergoing a kind of physical rot and
together with this feeling he sensed the approaching storm of
reproach and stigma that would engulf him. He reached his
car. As he drove homewards Salim Rashid's words-aroused
flaming furies-pursued him:
'Don't insult our organisation.'.
.'
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