A Suitable Boy Read online

  Noticing the rowdy kids from Rudhia, he said in his slightly nasal voice to Mahesh Kapoor:

  ‘So you’re cultivating a rural constituency for the coming elections?’

  Mahesh Kapoor smiled. Ever since 1937 he had stood from the same urban constituency in the heart of Old Brahmpur—a constituency that included much of Misri Mandi, the home of the shoe trade of the city. Despite his farm and his knowledge of rural affairs—he was the prime mover of a bill to abolish large and unproductive landholdings in the state—it was unimaginable that he would desert his electoral home and choose to contest from a rural constituency. By way of answer, he indicated his garments; the handsome black achkan he was wearing, the tight off-white pyjamas, and the brilliantly embroidered white jutis with their up-turned toes would present an incongruous picture in a rice field.

  ‘Why, nothing is impossible in politics,’ said Sharmaji slowly. ‘After your Zamindari Abolition Bill goes through, you will become a hero throughout the countryside. If you chose, you could become Chief Minister. Why not?’ said Sharmaji generously and warily. He looked around, and his eye fell on the Nawab Sahib of Baitar, who was stroking his beard and looking around perplexedly. ‘Of course, you might lose a friend or two in the process,’ he added.

  Mahesh Kapoor, who had followed his glance without turning his head, said quietly: ‘There are zamindars and zamindars. Not all of them tie their friendship to their land. The Nawab Sahib knows that I am acting out of principle.’ He paused, and continued: ‘Some of my own relatives in Rudhia stand to lose their land.’

  The Chief Minister nodded at the sermon, then rubbed his hands, which were cold. ‘Well, he is a good man,’ he said indulgently. ‘And so was his father,’ he added.

  Mahesh Kapoor was silent. The one thing Sharmaji could not be called was rash; and yet here was a rash statement if ever there was one. It was well known that the Nawab Sahib’s father, the late Nawab Sahib of Baitar, had been an active member of the Muslim League; and though he had not lived to see the birth of Pakistan, that above all was what he had dedicated his life to.

  The tall, grey-bearded Nawab Sahib, noticing four eyes on him, gravely raised his cupped hand to his forehead in polite salutation, then tilted his head sideways with a quiet smile, as if to congratulate his old friend.

  ‘You haven’t seen Firoz and Imtiaz anywhere, have you?’ he asked Mahesh Kapoor, after walking slowly over.

  ‘No, no—but I haven’t seen my son either, so I assume. . . .’

  The Nawab Sahib raised his hands slightly, palms forward, in a gesture of helplessness.

  After a while he said: ‘So Pran is married, and Maan is next. I would imagine you will find him a little less tractable.’

  ‘Well, tractable or not, there are some people in Banaras I have been talking to,’ said Mahesh Kapoor in a determined tone. ‘Maan has met the father. He’s also in the cloth business. We’re making inquiries. Let’s see. And what about your twins? A joint wedding to two sisters?’

  ‘Let’s see, let’s see,’ said the Nawab Sahib, thinking rather sadly about his wife, buried these many years; ‘Inshallah, all of them will settle down soon enough.’

  1.7

  ‘To the law,’ said Maan, raising his third glass of Scotch to Firoz, who was sitting on his bed with a glass of his own. Imtiaz was lounging in a stuffed chair and examining the bottle.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Firoz. ‘But not to new laws, I hope.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, don’t worry, my father’s bill will never pass,’ said Maan. ‘And even if it does, you’ll be much richer than me. Look at me,’ he added, gloomily. ‘I have to work for a living.’

  Since Firoz was a lawyer and his brother a doctor, it was not as if they fitted the popular mould of the idle sons of aristocracy.

  ‘And soon,’ went on Maan, ‘if my father has his way, I’ll have to work on behalf of two people. And later for more. Oh God!’

  ‘What—your father isn’t getting you married off, is he?’ asked Firoz, halfway between a smile and a frown.

  ‘Well, the buffer zone disappeared tonight,’ said Maan disconsolately. ‘Have another.’

  ‘No, no thanks, I still have plenty,’ said Firoz. Firoz enjoyed his drink, but with a slightly guilty feeling; his father would approve even less than Maan’s. ‘So when’s the happy hour?’ he added uncertainly.

  ‘God knows. It’s at the inquiry stage,’ said Maan.

  ‘At the first reading,’ Imtiaz added.

  For some reason, this delighted Maan. ‘At the first reading!’ he repeated. ‘Well, let’s hope it never gets to the third reading! And, even if it does, that the President withholds his assent!’

  He laughed and took a couple of long swigs. ‘And what about your marriage?’ he demanded of Firoz.

  Firoz looked a little evasively around the room. It was as bare and functional as most of the rooms in Prem Nivas—which looked as if they expected the imminent arrival of a herd of constituents. ‘My marriage!’ he said with a laugh.

  Maan nodded vigorously.

  ‘Change the subject,’ said Firoz.

  ‘Why, if you were to go into the garden instead of drinking here in seclusion—’

  ‘It’s hardly seclusion.’

  ‘Don’t interrupt,’ said Maan, throwing an arm around him. ‘If you were to go down into the garden, a good-looking, elegant fellow like you, you would be surrounded within seconds by eligible young beauties. And ineligible ones too. They’d cling to you like bees to a lotus. Curly locks, curly locks, will you be mine?’

  Firoz flushed. ‘You’ve got the metaphor slightly wrong,’ he said. ‘Men are bees, women lotuses.’

  Maan quoted a couplet from an Urdu ghazal to the effect that the hunter could turn into the hunted, and Imtiaz laughed.

  ‘Shut up, both of you,’ said Firoz, attempting to appear more annoyed than he was; he had had enough of this sort of nonsense. ‘I’m going down. Abba will be wondering where on earth we’ve got to. And so will your father. And besides, we ought to find out if your brother is formally married yet—and whether you really do now have a beautiful sister-in-law to scold you and curb your excesses.’

  ‘All right, all right, we’ll all go down,’ said Maan genially. ‘Maybe some of the bees will cling to us too. And if we get stung to the heart, Doctor Sahib here can cure us. Can’t you, Imtiaz? All you would have to do would be to apply a rose petal to the wound, isn’t that so?’

  ‘As long as there are no contraindications,’ said Imtiaz seriously.

  ‘No contraindications,’ said Maan, laughing as he led the way down the stairs.

  ‘You may laugh,’ said Imtiaz. ‘But some people are allergic even to rose petals. Talking of which, you have one sticking to your cap.’

  ‘Do I?’ asked Maan. ‘These things float down from nowhere.’

  ‘So they do,’ said Firoz, who was walking down just behind him. He gently brushed it away.

  1.8

  Because the Nawab Sahib had been looking somewhat lost without his sons, Mahesh Kapoor’s daughter Veena had drawn him into her family circle. She asked him about his eldest child, his daughter Zainab, who was a childhood friend of hers but who, after her marriage, had disappeared into the world of purdah. The old man talked about her rather guardedly, but about her two children with transparent delight. His grandchildren were the only two beings in the world who had the right to interrupt him when he was studying in his library. But now the great yellow ancestral mansion of Baitar House, just a few minutes’ walk from Prem Nivas, was somewhat run down, and the library too had suffered. ‘Silverfish, you know,’ said the Nawab Sahib. ‘And I need help with cataloguing. It’s a gigantic task, and in some ways not very heartening. Some of the early editions of Ghalib can’t be traced now; and some valuable manuscripts by our own poet Mast. My brother never made a list of what he took with him to Pakistan. . . .’

  At the word Pakistan, Veena’s mother-in-law, withered old Mrs Tandon, flinched. Three years ago
, her whole family had had to flee the blood and flames and unforgettable terror of Lahore. They had been wealthy, ‘propertied’ people, but almost everything they had owned was lost, and they had been lucky to escape with their lives. Her son Kedarnath, Veena’s husband, still had scars on his hands from an attack by rioters on his refugee convoy. Several of their friends had been butchered.

  The young, old Mrs Tandon thought bitterly, are very resilient: her grandchild Bhaskar had of course only been six at the time; but even Veena and Kedarnath had not let those events embitter their lives. They had returned here to Veena’s hometown, and Kedarnath had set himself up in a small way in—of all polluting, carcass-tainted things—the shoe trade. For old Mrs Tandon, the descent from a decent prosperity could not have been more painful. She had been willing to tolerate talking to the Nawab Sahib though he was a Muslim, but when he mentioned comings and goings from Pakistan, it was too much for her imagination. She felt ill. The pleasant chatter of the garden in Brahmpur was amplified into the cries of the blood-mad mobs on the streets of Lahore, the lights into fire. Daily, sometimes hourly, in her imagination she returned to what she still thought of as her city and her home. It had been beautiful before it had become so suddenly hideous; it had appeared completely secure so shortly before it was lost forever.

  The Nawab Sahib did not notice that anything was the matter, but Veena did, and quickly changed the subject even at the cost of appearing rude. ‘Where’s Bhaskar?’ she asked her husband.

  ‘I don’t know. I think I saw him near the food, the little frog,’ said Kedarnath.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t call him that,’ said Veena. ‘He is your son. It’s not auspicious. . . .’

  ‘It’s not my name for him, it’s Maan’s,’ said Kedarnath with a smile. He enjoyed being mildly henpecked. ‘But I’ll call him whatever you want me to.’

  Veena led her mother-in-law away. And to distract the old lady she did in fact get involved in looking for her son. Finally they found Bhaskar. He was not eating anything but simply standing under the great multicoloured cloth canopy that covered the food tables, gazing upwards with pleased and abstract wonderment at the elaborate geometrical patterns—red rhombuses, green trapeziums, yellow squares and blue triangles—from which it had been stitched together.

  1.9

  The crowds had thinned; the guests, some chewing paan, were departing at the gate; a heap of gifts had grown by the side of the bench where Pran and Savita had been sitting. Finally only they and a few members of the family were left—and the yawning servants who would put away the more valuable furniture for the night, or pack the gifts in a trunk under the watchful eye of Mrs Rupa Mehra.

  The bride and groom were lost in their thoughts. They avoided looking at each other now. They would spend the night in a carefully prepared room in Prem Nivas, and leave for a week’s honeymoon in Simla tomorrow.

  Lata tried to imagine the nuptial room. Presumably it would be fragrant with tuberoses; that, at least, was Malati’s confident opinion. I’ll always associate tuberoses with Pran, Lata thought. It was not at all pleasant to follow her imagination further. That Savita would be sleeping with Pran tonight did not bear thinking of. It did not strike her as being at all romantic. Perhaps they would be too exhausted, she thought optimistically.

  ‘What are you thinking of, Lata?’ asked her mother.

  ‘Oh, nothing, Ma,’ said Lata automatically.

  ‘You turned up your nose. I saw it.’

  Lata blushed.

  ‘I don’t think I ever want to get married,’ she said emphatically.

  Mrs Rupa Mehra was too wearied by the wedding, too exhausted by emotion, too softened by Sanskrit, too cumbered with congratulations, too overwrought, in short, to do anything but stare at Lata for ten seconds. What on earth had got into the girl? What was good enough for her mother and her mother’s mother and her mother’s mother’s mother should be good enough for her. Lata, though, had always been a difficult one, with a strange will of her own, quiet but unpredictable—like that time in St Sophia’s when she had wanted to become a nun! But Mrs Rupa Mehra too had a will, and she was determined to have her own way, even if she was under no illusions as to Lata’s pliability.

  And yet, Lata was named after that most pliable thing, a vine, which was trained to cling: first to her family, then to her husband. Indeed, when she was a baby, Lata’s fingers had had a strong and coiling grasp which even now came back with a sweet vividness to her mother. Suddenly Mrs Rupa Mehra burst out with the inspired remark:

  ‘Lata, you are a vine, you must cling to your husband!’

  It was not a success.

  ‘Cling?’ said Lata. ‘Cling?’ The word was pronounced with such quiet scorn that her mother could not help bursting into tears. How terrible it was to have an ungrateful daughter. And how unpredictable a baby could be.

  Now that the tears were running down her cheeks, Mrs Rupa Mehra transferred them fluidly from one daughter to the other. She clasped Savita to her bosom and wept loudly. ‘You must write to me, Savita darling,’ she said. ‘You must write to me every day from Simla. Pran, you are like my own son now, you must be responsible and see to it. Soon I will be all alone in Calcutta—all alone.’

  This was of course quite untrue. Arun and Varun and Meenakshi and Aparna would all be crowded together with her in Arun’s little flat in Sunny Park. But Mrs Rupa Mehra was one who believed with unformulated but absolute conviction in the paramountcy of subjective over objective truth.

  1.10

  The tonga clip-clopped along the road, and the tonga-wallah sang out:

  ‘A heart was shattered into bits—and one fell here, and one fell there. . . .’

  Varun started to hum along, then sang louder, then suddenly stopped.

  ‘Oh, don’t stop,’ said Malati, nudging Lata gently. ‘You have a nice voice. Like a bulbul.’

  ‘In a china-china-shop,’ she whispered to Lata.

  ‘Heh, heh, heh.’ Varun’s laugh was nervous. Realizing that it sounded weak, he tried to make it slightly sinister. But it didn’t work. He felt miserable. And Malati, with her green eyes and sarcasm—for it had to be sarcasm—wasn’t helping.

  The tonga was quite crowded: Varun was sitting with young Bhaskar in the front, next to the tonga-wallah; and back to back with them sat Lata and Malati—both dressed in salwaar-kameez—and Aparna in her ice-cream-stained sweater and a frock. It was a sunny winter morning.

  The white-turbaned old tonga-wallah enjoyed driving furiously through this part of town with its broad, relatively uncrowded streets—unlike the cramped madness of Old Brahmpur. He started talking to his horse, urging him on.

  Malati now began to sing the words of the popular film song herself. She hadn’t meant to discourage Varun. It was pleasant to think of shattered hearts on a cloudless morning.

  Varun didn’t join in. But after a while he took his life in his hands and said, turning around:

  ‘You have a—a wonderful voice.’

  It was true. Malati loved music, and studied classical singing under Ustad Majeed Khan, one of the finest singers in north India. She had even got Lata interested in Indian classical music during the time they had lived together in the student hostel. As a result, Lata often found herself humming some tune or other in one of her favourite raags.

  Malati did not disclaim Varun’s compliment.

  ‘Do you think so?’ she said, turning around to look deeply into his eyes. ‘You are very sweet to say so.’

  Varun blushed to the depths of his soul and was speechless for a few minutes. But as they passed the Brahmpur Racecourse, he gripped the tonga-wallah’s arm and cried:

  ‘Stop!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Lata.

  ‘Oh—nothing—nothing—if we’re in a hurry, let’s go on. Yes, let’s go on.’

  ‘Of course we’re not, Varun Bhai,’ she said. ‘We’re only going to the zoo. Let’s stop if you want.’

  After they had got down, Var
un, almost uncontrollably excited, wandered to the white palings and stared through.

  ‘It’s the only anticlockwise racecourse in India other than Lucknow,’ he breathed, almost to himself, awestruck. ‘They say it’s based on the Derby,’ he added to young Bhaskar, who happened to be standing next to him.

  ‘But what’s the difference?’ asked Bhaskar. ‘The distance is the same, isn’t it, whether you run clockwise or anticlockwise?’

  Varun paid no attention to Bhaskar’s question. He had started walking slowly, dreamily, by himself, anticlockwise along the fence. He was almost pawing the earth.

  Lata caught up with him: ‘Varun Bhai?’ she said.

  ‘Er—yes? Yes?’

  ‘About yesterday evening.’

  ‘Yesterday evening?’ Varun dragged himself back to the two-legged world. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Our sister got married.’

  ‘Ah. Oh. Yes, yes, I know. Savita,’ he added, hoping to imply alertness by specificity.

  ‘Well,’ said Lata, ‘don’t let yourself be bullied by Arun Bhai. Just don’t.’ She stopped smiling, and looked at him as a shadow crossed his face. ‘I really hate it, Varun Bhai, I really hate seeing him bully you. I don’t mean that you should cheek him or answer back or anything, just that you shouldn’t let it hurt you the way that—well, that I can see it does.’

  ‘No, no—’ he said, uncertainly.

  ‘Just because he’s a few years older doesn’t make him your father and teacher and sergeant major all rolled into one.’

  Varun nodded unhappily. He was too well aware that while he lived in his elder brother’s house he was subject to his elder brother’s will.

  ‘Anyway, I think you should be more confident,’ continued Lata. ‘Arun Bhai tries to crush everyone around him like a steamroller, and it’s up to us to remove our egos from his path. I have a hard enough time, and I’m not even in Calcutta. I just thought I’d say so now, because at the house I’ll hardly get the chance to talk to you alone. And tomorrow you’ll be gone.’