A Suitable Boy

  ‘No yellow ones this year?’ she asked.

  ‘No, Memsahib,’ said Gajraj, rather crestfallen.

  ‘They are very beautiful,’ said Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, continuing to look at the lilies.

  Gajraj’s heart leapt up. ‘They are better than ever this year,’ he ventured. ‘Except that the yellow ones have not come out, I don’t know why.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Mrs Mahesh Kapoor. ‘My children like the bright ones—red and blue. I think it is only you and I who care for the pale yellow lilies. But if they’ve died, can we get them from somewhere else next year?’

  ‘Memsahib, I don’t think you can get them in Brahmpur. It was your Calcutta friend who brought them two years ago.’

  Gajraj was referring to a friend of Veena’s in fact, a young woman from Shantiniketan who had stayed at Prem Nivas as a guest a couple of times. She had very much enjoyed the garden, and Mrs Mahesh Kapoor found her good company even if her ways were a little surprising. On her second visit, she had brought the yellow lilies with her on the train in a bucket of water.

  ‘A pity,’ said Mrs Mahesh Kapoor. ‘Anyway, the blue ones are very striking.’

  13.6

  Out on the muddy surface of the lawn, a few birds—babblers, red-wattled lapwings, and mynas—were walking around, pecking at whatever presented itself. This was the season for earthworms, and the lawn was full of their curled castings.

  The sky had grown dark and the sound of distant thunder could be heard.

  ‘Have you seen any snakes this year?’ asked Mrs Mahesh Kapoor.

  ‘No,’ said Gajraj. ‘But Bhaskar said he saw one. A cobra. He shouted for me, but by the time I came, it had disappeared.’

  ‘What?’ Mrs Mahesh Kapoor’s heart beat more rapidly for a minute. ‘When?’

  ‘Just yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Where did he see this?’

  ‘He was playing on that pile of bricks and rubble over there—standing on it and flying his kite—I told him to be careful, because it was a likely place for snakes, but—’

  ‘Tell him to come out at once. And call Veena Baby as well.’

  Veena, though now a mother, was still called Baby by the older servants at Prem Nivas.

  ‘No,’ continued Mrs Mahesh Kapoor. ‘On second thoughts, I’ll go back to the verandah for tea. It looks as if it’s about to rain.’

  ‘Veena,’ she told her daughter when they came out, ‘this boy is like you used to be—very wilful. He was playing on that pile of rubble yesterday, and it is full of snakes.’

  ‘Yes!’ said Bhaskar, enthusiastically. ‘I saw one yesterday. A cobra.’

  ‘Bhaskar!’ said Veena, her blood running cold.

  ‘It didn’t threaten me or anything. It was too far away. And by the time I called for Gajraj it wasn’t there any more.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ asked his mother.

  ‘I forgot.’

  ‘That’s not the sort of thing one forgets,’ said Veena. ‘Were you intending to play there again today?’

  ‘Well, when Kabir comes we were thinking of flying kites—’

  ‘You are not to play there, do you understand? Neither there nor in any part of the back garden. Do you understand me? Or I won’t let you out in the garden at all.’

  ‘But, Mummy—’

  ‘No “but Mummy” or “please Mummy”—you are not to play there. Now go back inside and have your milk.’

  ‘I’m sick of milk,’ said Bhaskar. ‘I’m nine years old—almost ten. Why should I drink milk forever?’ He was not pleased to have been disciplined in front of his grandmother. He also felt that Gajraj, whom he had looked upon as a friend, had betrayed him.

  ‘Milk is good for you. Many boys don’t get any milk at all,’ said Veena.

  ‘They are lucky,’ said Bhaskar. ‘I hate the skin that forms on it as it cools. And the glasses here are one-sixth larger than those at home,’ he added ungratefully.

  ‘If you drink your milk quickly, nothing will form on it at all,’ said his mother unsympathetically. It was very unlike Bhaskar to be so sullen, and she was determined not to encourage it. ‘Now, if you disobey me again and behave as if you’re six, I’m going to slap you—and Nani won’t stop me either.’

  There was a roll of thunder, and a few drops of rain pattered down.

  Bhaskar withdrew into the house with some dignity. His mother and grandmother smiled at each other.

  Neither of them needed to mention that Veena too used to make a great fuss about drinking her milk when she was a child, and that she often gave it to her younger brothers to dispose of.

  After a while Mrs Mahesh Kapoor said:

  ‘He looked in good spirits last night despite all that the doctors said. Didn’t you think so?’

  ‘Yes, Ammaji, I did.’ There was a silence. ‘It’s a difficult time for them,’ Veena continued. ‘Why don’t you ask Savita, Lata and Ma to stay here in Prem Nivas until the baby’s born? We’re going to be leaving in a day or two anyway.’

  Her mother nodded. ‘I asked once before, but Pran thought she wouldn’t like it, that she’d feel happier in familiar surroundings.’

  Mrs Mahesh Kapoor also reflected that Mrs Rupa Mehra, when she visited Prem Nivas, was liable to mention that she found the rooms exceedingly bare. And this was true. Mahesh Kapoor, though he was of no help in running the house, often exercised his veto on proposed furnishing. It was only on the puja-room and the kitchen that his wife had been able to exercise that loving care that she lavished on the garden.

  ‘And Maan?’ said Veena. ‘This house feels odd without him. When he’s in Brahmpur it is very bad that he isn’t staying with his family. We hardly get a chance to meet as it is.’

  ‘No,’ said her mother. ‘I felt hurt at first, but I think he’s right, it’s for the best that he stays with his friend. Minister Sahib is going through a hard time, and they would find each other’s company difficult, I think.’

  This was a mild prediction. Mahesh Kapoor was short with everyone these days. It was not merely the fact that the house was suddenly less full of hangers-on and aspirants of various kinds, company he claimed to despise but in fact now fretted for; it was also the unpredictability of the future that ate at him and made him snap with less than usual cause at whoever happened to be around.

  ‘But apart from his moods, I enjoy this relief,’ said Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, completing the arc of her own thoughts aloud. ‘In the evening there is time for some bhajans. And I can walk around the garden in the morning now, without feeling that I am ignoring some important political guest.’

  By now the clouds had blotted out the sun completely. Gusts of wind were blowing across the garden and turning the silver undersides of the leaves on a nearby poplar tree so violently that it appeared not dark green but silver. But the verandah where they were sitting was protected by a low wall decorated with shallow urns of portulaca and was covered with a corrugated roof, and neither of them felt like moving indoors.

  Veena hummed to herself the first few lines of a bhajan, one of her mother’s favourites: ‘Rise, traveller, the sky is bright’. It came from the anthology used at Gandhi’s ashram, and reminded Mrs Mahesh Kapoor of how they would give themselves courage in the most hopeless days of the freedom struggle.

  After a few seconds, she too began to hum along, and then to sing the words:

  ‘Uth, jaag, musafir, bhor bhaee

  Ab rayn kahan jo sowat hai. . . .’

  Rise, traveller, the sky is bright.

  Why do you sleep? It is not night. . . .

  Then she laughed. ‘Think of the Congress Party in those days. And look at it now.’

  Veena smiled. ‘But you still get up early,’ she said. ‘You don’t need this bhajan.’

  ‘Yes,’ said her mother. ‘Old habits die hard. And I need less sleep these days. But I still need the help of that bhajan several times a day.’

  She sipped her tea for a while. ‘How is your music?’ she asked
.

  ‘My serious music?’ asked Veena.

  ‘Yes,’ said her mother with a smile. ‘Your serious music. Not bhajans, but what you learn from your Ustad.’

  ‘My mind’s not really on it,’ said Veena. After a pause she continued: ‘Kedarnath’s mother has stopped objecting to it. And it’s closer from Prem Nivas than from Misri Mandi. But I can’t concentrate these days. I can’t shut the world out. First it was Kedarnath, then Bhaskar, now Pran; and I hope it isn’t Savita next. If only they would all have their troubles simultaneously, it would help: my hair might go white once, but I’d make some real progress the rest of the time.’ She paused again. ‘But Ustad Sahib is more patient with me than with his other disciples. Or perhaps it’s just that he is more content these days, less bitter about life.’

  After a while Veena went on: ‘I wish I could do something about Priya.’

  ‘Priya Goyal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What made you think of her?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just suddenly thought of her. What was her mother like when she was young?’

  ‘Ah, she was a good woman,’ said Mrs Mahesh Kapoor.

  ‘I think,’ said Veena, ‘the state would be in better shape if you and she ran it rather than Baoji and L.N. Agarwal.’

  Instead of ticking Veena off for this subversive remark, Mrs Mahesh Kapoor merely said: ‘I don’t think so, you know. Two illiterate women—we wouldn’t even be able to read a file.’

  ‘At least you would have been generous to each other. Not like men.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said her mother sadly. ‘You know nothing of the pettiness of women. When brothers agree to split a joint family they sometimes divide lakhs of rupees’ worth of property in a few minutes. But the tussle of their wives over the pots and pans in the common kitchen—that nearly causes bloodshed.’

  ‘At any rate,’ said Veena, ‘Priya and I would run things well. And it would enable her to escape from that wretched house in Shahi Darvaza and from her husband’s sister and sisters-in-law. Yes, you’re right about women, perhaps. But do you think a woman would have ordered that lathi charge on the students?’

  ‘No, maybe not,’ said her mother. ‘At any rate, it’s pointless thinking about such things. Women will never be called upon to make such decisions.’

  ‘Some day,’ said Veena, ‘this country will have a woman Prime Minister or a woman President.’

  Veena’s mother laughed at this forecast. ‘Not in the next hundred years,’ she said gently, and looked out at the lawn again.

  A few plump brown partridges, some big, some small, ran awkwardly across the far end of the lawn and with an immense effort got themselves airborne for a few seconds. They landed on the broad swing that hung down from a branch of the tamarind tree. There the partridges sat while the rain suddenly pelted down.

  The gardeners quickly took shelter at the back of the house near the kitchen.

  The thunder made a growling noise, and squirrels ran up the tree in alarm. Lightning flashed in sheets all over the sky. The rain came down in torrents, and soon the mud of the lawn had become a thick paste. The partridges disappeared in the grey barrage; even the swing became indistinct. The sound of the storm on the corrugated roof made speech difficult, and an occasional violent gust of wind drove rain on to the verandah itself.

  After a while the door to the house opened, and Bhaskar came out. He sat next to his mother, and the three of them stared at the wall of water.

  For about five minutes they looked at the rain in silence, enchanted by the power and the noise of it, and the sight of great trees swaying and shuddering in the wind. Then the rain let up slightly, and speech became possible again.

  ‘It’ll be good for the farmers,’ said Mrs Mahesh Kapoor. ‘There hasn’t been enough rain so far this year.’

  ‘But not for the cobblers,’ said Veena. Kedarnath had once told her that the small shoemakers, who stretched moistened shoe-uppers on to wooden lasts in order to shape them, sometimes had to wait for a week in this weather till they were dry and could be taken off. Since they lived from hand to mouth, and their capital was tied up in their materials and tools, this was a great hardship.

  ‘Do you like the rain?’ Mrs Mahesh Kapoor asked Bhaskar when there was another respite.

  ‘I like flying kites after the rain,’ said Bhaskar. ‘The air currents are more interesting.’

  The rain increased once more, and once again each was lost in private thought.

  Bhaskar was thinking of his return in a couple of days to his own house, where there were many more kites in the sky than here, and where he could play once again with his friends. Life here in the ‘colonies’ was rather limited.

  Mrs Mahesh Kapoor thought about her mother, who used to be terrified of storms, and whose final illness had taken a severe turn for the worse in just such a violent storm as this.

  And Veena thought of her Bengali friend (she of the yellow water lilies) who, when the monsoon rains first struck after the terrible months of heat, would walk out of the house dressed as she was, humming a Tagore song in welcome, and let the rain streak down her face and her hair, run down her body to her bare feet, and soak her blouse and her sari to the skin.

  13.7

  Time hung very heavily on Maan’s hands. But he realized that he had to make up with Saeeda Bai quickly or he would go crazy with boredom and desire. He therefore wrote his first note in Urdu to her, in which he entreated her to be kind to him, her faithful vassal, her enchanted moth, etc., etc. There were a number of spelling errors, and his script was somewhat unformed, but there was no mistaking the strength of his sentiment. He thought of getting Rasheed’s help with some aspects of phrasing, then decided that since Rasheed was out of favour with Saeeda Bai this might merely cause complications. He gave it to the watchman to give her, but did not wait for her response immediately.

  He went for a walk to the Barsaat Mahal and stared across the river in the moonlight. Apart from Firoz, no one appeared to be on his side in the world at all. Everyone wanted him to mould himself in one direction or another according to their opinion or will. And even Firoz these days was fairly busy in court, and had only once suggested that they go for polo practice. That too had had to be cancelled at the last moment because of a conference called by his senior in a case.

  Something needed to happen soon, thought Maan. He was feeling uncontrollably restless. If Savita had her baby quickly, that would be a good thing. There would be some cheerful activity somewhere. Everyone was going around looking oppressed and careworn these days.

  Or if he could persuade his father to explore the option of a rural constituency, they could go on a whirlwind tour of Rudhia District for a few days and perhaps he could forget Saeeda Bai for a bit. His father, being at a loose end himself, had lost a little of his moral authority vis-à-vis Maan, and his company might not be so intolerable; in any case, he had not for the last few days told Maan to settle down. But precisely because he had not come to terms with his own situation, Mahesh Kapoor was exceptionally irritable these days. Perhaps Rudhia was not such a good idea after all.

  To add to Maan’s woes, he needed money; he had almost none left. Firoz, whom he had approached for a small loan upon his return to Brahmpur, had simply handed over his wallet to Maan and told him to take what he wanted out of it. A few days later, after lunch, without being asked but perhaps in response to a certain hangdog look on Maan’s face, he made the same generous gesture. This had helped Maan get by. But he couldn’t keep borrowing from his friend. A number of people in Banaras owed him money, some for goods supplied, some because of hard-luck stories which Maan had found difficult to withstand, and Maan felt that now that he was down on his own luck, they would be eager to help him out. He decided to visit Banaras for a couple of days to recoup his funds. It would be easy enough to keep out of the way of one or two of his rather irksome creditors. The problem was that his fiancée’s people might well find out that he was in Banaras. Besides
, he wasn’t sure if this was the best time to visit Banaras at all. He wanted to be on hand to help Savita when the baby was born, since Pran was not able to do so himself in his present condition, and Maan feared that it would be just his luck if the baby was born when he was out of town.

  He waited for two whole days for a reply from Saeeda Bai to his note. He had given his address as Baitar House. None came.

  Tiring of his own iffing and butting, and being eager for action of some kind, Maan borrowed some more money from Firoz, sent a servant to get his ticket for the next morning’s train to Banaras, and prepared to spend a despondent and eventless last evening.

  First, he visited the hospital, and instructed Savita to hold off having her baby for at least two days. Savita laughed, and promised to do her best.

  Then he had dinner with Firoz. Zainab’s husband was present at dinner—he had come alone to Brahmpur for the meeting of some waqf committee or other—and Maan could sense that Firoz was no more than polite to him. Maan could not understand this. Zainab’s husband appeared to be a fairly cultivated if rather tremulous man. He kept insisting that he was a peasant at heart, and backing up this assertion with Persian couplets. The Nawab Sahib dined on his own.

  Finally, Maan penned another note in Urdu, and gave it to Saeeda Bai’s watchman to deliver. Surely Saeeda Bai should tell him what his crime was—and if she couldn’t bring herself to forgive him at least she could respond to his letters.

  ‘Please give her this at once—and say that I am going away.’ Maan, sensing the drama of this last phrase, sighed deeply.

  The watchman knocked at the door, and Bibbo came out.

  ‘Bibbo—’ said Maan, gesturing with the ivory-topped cane.

  But Bibbo appeared rather scared, and refused to look him in the face. What’s the matter with her? thought Maan. She was happy enough to kiss me the last time I was here.

  A few minutes later Bibbo came out and said: ‘The Begum Sahiba instructs me to admit you.’