The title dispute for Flat 4-C, Shivam Residency was settled by mutual agreement fourteen days after the election. The flat was formally registered as constituency accommodation for the Samajwadi Alliance MP for Lucknow North. The BJP received a market-value settlement from party funds.
Zara Siddiqui was sworn into Parliament on the designated date, the youngest woman from Lucknow North to hold the seat. Her first act in the House was to table a question on municipal infrastructure budget allocation discrepancies in UP's northern districts, a question she had first formulated at a kitchen table in Civil Lines in the second week of a constituency campaign.
Aditya Malhotra filed nomination papers for a by-election in a Kanpur constituency six months later. He won it. His first act in the House was to second a motion on voter ID correction procedures at constituency level, citing, in his speech, data from a voter registration drive in Lucknow North during the previous general election. He did not name the candidate who had showed him the Election Commission notification that made the corrections possible. He didn't need to.
The municipal infrastructure question Zara had tabled remained under consideration for three months. When it came to the floor, Aditya Malhotra was one of two BJP members who crossed the aisle to support the motion.
Both of them had, before that session, had the kind of conversation that honest people have when they are figuring out the complicated thing — at a kitchen table, over chai and coffee, in the early morning before the day's demands began. The details of that conversation were their own business.
Judge Raghunath Tiwari, who heard about the settlement from his clerk, allowed himself a single satisfied observation: thirty-two days and a court order was, as pedagogical tools went, rather effective.
He made himself tea and went back to work.♥ ♥ ♥
