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Thrust upon Me”:
1912–1921
    T he return home of the not-quite-prodigal, not-yet-prodigious Jawaharlal Nehru, B.A. (Cantab.), LL.B., was a major occasion for the Nehru family. When he stepped off the boat in Bombay, he was greeted by a relative; the family, with a retinue of some four dozen servants, awaited him at the hill station of Mussoorie, where his ailing mother had gone to escape the heat of the plains. Jawaharlal took a train to Dehra Dun, where he alighted into the warm embrace of a visibly moved Motilal. Both father and son then rode up to the huge mansion Motilal had rented for the occasion, and there was, if accounts of the moment are to be believed, something improbably heroic about the dashing young man cantering up the drive to reclaim his destiny. The excited women and girls rushed outside to greet him. Leaping out of the saddle and flinging the reins to a groom, Jawaharlal scarcely paused for breath as he ran to hug his mother, literally sweeping her off her feet in his joy. He was home.
    He was soon put to work in his father’s chambers, where his first fee as a young lawyer was the then princely sum of five hundred rupees, offered by one of Motilal’s regular clients, the wealthy Rao Maharajsingh. “The first fee your father got,” Motilal noted wryly, “was Rs. 5 (five only). You are evidently a hundred times better than your father.” The older man must have understood perfectly well that his client’s gesture was aimed at Motilal himself; his pride in his son was well enough known that people assumed that kindness to the as yet untested son was a sure way to the father’s heart. As he had done at Harrow, Jawaharlal worked hard at his briefs, but his confidence faltered when he had to argue his cases in court, and he was not considered much of a success. It did not help that his interest in the law was at best tepid and that he found much of the work assigned to him “pointless and futile,” his cases “petty and rather dull.”
    Jawaharlal sought to escape the tedium of his days by partying extravagantly at night, a habit encouraged by his father’s own penchant for lavish entertainment. He called on assorted members of Allahabad’s high society, leaving his card at various English homes. But he made no great mark upon what even his authorized biographer called “the vacuous, parasitic life of upper-middle-class society in Allahabad.” At his own home, Jawaharlal played the role of the dominant elder brother. He tormented his little sister Betty, startling her horse to teach her to hold her nerve, or throwing her into the deep end of the pool to force her to learn to swim. These lessons served more to instill fear than courage in the little girl. He took holidays in Kashmir, on one occasion going on a hunt and shooting an antelope that died at his feet, its “great big eyes full of tears” — a sight that would haunt Jawaharlal for years.
    All told, however, there was little of note about Jawaharlal Nehru’s first few years back in India, until his marriage — arranged, of course, by his father — in February 1916. Father and son had dealt with the subject of marriage in their transcontinental correspondence, but Motilal had given short shrift to Jawaharlal’s mild demurrals whenever the matter was broached. In a letter to his mother Jawaharlal had even suggested he might prefer to remain unmarried rather than plight his troth to someone he did not like: “I accept that any girl selected by you and father would be good in all respects, but still, I may not be able to get along well with her.” But for all the romantic idealism in his epistolary descriptions of the ideal marriage, he gave in to his parents’ wishes. For his parents, there was no question of allowing the young man to choose his own bride; quite apart from the traditional practice of arranging marriages, Motilal took a particular