A Suitable Boy

  ‘All right.’

  As they walked upstairs Dipankar said:

  ‘And even Bahadur’s favourite dishes don’t seem to please you. He was saying yesterday that you snapped at him. He’s an old servant.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Tapan really did look unhappy, and now that he was in Dipankar’s room, almost trapped.

  The room itself contained no chairs, just a bed, a variety of mats (including Buddhist prayer-mats), and a large painting that Kuku had made of the swamps of the Sundarbans. The single bookshelf contained religious books, a few economics textbooks, and a red bamboo flute—which Dipankar, when the mood took him, played very untunefully and fervently.

  ‘Sit down on that mat,’ said Dipankar, indicating a square blue cloth mat with a purple and yellow circular design in the middle. ‘Now what is it? It’s something to do with school, I know, and it isn’t the report.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Tapan, desperately. ‘Dada, why can’t I leave? I just don’t like it there. Why can’t I join St Xavier’s here in Calcutta, like Amit Da? He didn’t have to go to Jheel.’

  ‘Well, if you want—’ shrugged Dipankar.

  He reflected that it was only after Amit was well ensconced at St Xavier’s that some of Mr Justice Chatterji’s colleagues had recommended Jheel School to him—so strongly, in fact, that he had decided to send his second son there. Dipankar had enjoyed it, and had done better than his parents had expected; and Tapan had therefore followed.

  ‘When I told Ma I wanted to leave, she got annoyed and said that I should speak to Baba—and I just can’t speak to Baba. He’ll ask me for reasons. And there are no reasons. I just hate it, that’s all. That’s why I get those headaches. Apart from that, I’m not unfit, or anything.’

  ‘Is it that you miss home?’ asked Dipankar.

  ‘No—I mean, I don’t really—’ Tapan shook his head.

  ‘Has someone been trying to bully you?’

  ‘Please let me go, now, Dada. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Well, if I let you go now you’ll never tell me. So what is it? Tapan, I want to help you, but you’ve got to tell me what happened. I promise I won’t tell anyone.’

  He was distressed to notice that Tapan had started crying; and that now, enraged with himself, he was wiping away his tears and looking resentfully at his elder brother. To cry at thirteen was, he knew, a disgrace. Dipankar put his arm around his shoulder; it was angrily shrugged off. But slowly the story emerged, amid explosive outbursts, long silences, and furious sobs, and it was not a pleasant one, even to Dipankar, who had been to Jheel School years before, and was prepared for quite a lot.

  A gang of three senior boys had been bullying Tapan. Their leader was the hockey captain, the seniormost prefect in the house other than the house captain. He was sexually obsessed with Tapan, and made him spend hours every night somersaulting up and down the long verandah as an alternative, he said, to somersaulting naked in his study four times. Tapan knew what he was after and had refused. Sometimes he was made to somersault in assembly because there was an imaginary spot of dust on his shoes, sometimes he had to run around the lake (after which the school was named) for an hour or more till he was near collapse—for no reason other than the prefect’s whim. Protest was useless, since insubordination would carry its own penalties. To speak to the house captain was pointless; the solidarity of the barons would have ensured his further torture. To speak to the housemaster, a genial and ineffectual fool with his dogs and his beautiful wife and his pleasant don’t-disturb-me life, would have branded Tapan as a sneak—to be shunned and hounded even by those who now sympathized with him. And often enough his peers too could not resist teasing him about his powerful admirer’s obsession, and implying that Tapan secretly enjoyed it.

  Tapan was physically tough, and was always ready to use his fists or his sharp Chatterji tongue in his own defence; but the combination of major and minor cruelties had worn him down. He felt crushed by their cumulative weight and his own isolation. He had nothing and no one to tell him that he was right except a single Tagore song at assembly, and this made his loneliness even deeper.

  Dipankar looked grim as he listened; he knew the system from experience, and realized what pitiful resources a boy of thirteen could summon up against three seventeen-year-olds, invested with the absolute power of a brutal state. But he had no idea of what was to come; and Tapan became almost incoherent as he recounted the worst of it.

  One of the nocturnal sports of the prefect’s gang was to hunt the civet cats that roamed around under the roof of their house. They would smash their heads in and skin them, then break bounds with the connivance of the night-watchman and sell them for their skin and scent-glands. Because they discovered that Tapan was terrified of the things, they got a particular kick out of forcing him to open trunks in which they were lying dead. He would go berserk, run screaming at the senior boys and hit them with his fists. This they thought was hilarious, especially since they were also able to feel him up at the same time.

  In one case they garotted a live civet cat, forced Tapan to watch, heated up an iron bar, and cut its throat from side to side with it. Then they played with its voice-box.

  Dipankar stared at his brother, almost paralysed. Tapan was shuddering and gagging in dry heaves.

  ‘Just get me out of there, Dada—I can’t spend another term there—I’ll jump off the train, I’m telling you—every time the morning bell rings I wish I was dead.’

  Dipankar nodded and put his arm around his shoulder. This time it was not shrugged off.

  ‘One day I’ll kill him,’ said Tapan with such hatred that Dipankar was chilled. ‘I’ll never forget his name, I’ll never forget his face. I’ll never forget what he did. Never.’

  Dipankar’s mind turned back to his own schooldays. There had been plenty of unpleasant incidents, but this psychopathic and persistent sadism left him speechless.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me—why?—that school was like this?’ said Tapan, still gasping. His eyes were full of misery and accusation.

  Dipankar said: ‘But—but school wasn’t like that for me—my schooldays weren’t unhappy for me on the whole. The food was bad, the omelettes were like lizards’ corpses, but—’ He stopped, then continued, ‘I’m sorry, Tapan. . . . I was in a different house, and, well, times do change. . . . But that housemaster of yours should be sacked immediately. And as for those boys—they should be—’

  He controlled himself with an effort, then went on:

  ‘Gangs did terrorize the juniors, even in my time, but this—’ He shook his head. ‘Do other boys have it just as bad?’

  ‘No—’ said Tapan, then corrected himself. ‘He picked on another boy earlier, but the boy gave in after a week’s treatment, and went to his study.’

  Dipankar nodded.

  ‘How long has this been going on?’

  ‘More than a year, but it’s been worse since he was made a prefect. These last two terms—’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  Tapan was silent. Then he burst out passionately:

  ‘Dada, promise me, please promise me you won’t tell anyone else.’

  ‘I promise,’ said Dipankar. His fists were clenched. ‘No, wait; I’ll have to tell Amit Da.’

  ‘No!’

  Tapan revered Amit, and could not bear that he should hear about his indignities and horrors.

  ‘You’ve got to leave it to me, Tapan,’ said Dipankar. ‘We have to be able to convince Ma and Baba to take you out of school without letting them know the details. I can’t do that by myself. Amit Da and I together may be able to. I’ll tell him, but no one else.’ He looked at Tapan with pity, affection, and dismay. ‘Is that OK? Just Amit Da? No one else. I promise.’

  Tapan nodded and got up, then started crying, and sat down again.

  ‘Do you want to wash your face?’

  Tapan nodded, and went off to use the bathroom.

  16.4

&n
bsp; ‘I’m writing,’ said Amit crossly. ‘Go away.’ He looked up from his roll-top desk at Dipankar, and looked down again.

  ‘Tell your Muse to go away instead, Dada, and to come back after we’ve finished.’

  Amit frowned. Dipankar was rarely so abrupt. Something must be the matter. But he could feel his inspiration slipping away, and he wasn’t pleased.

  ‘Oh, what is it, Dipankar? As if Kuku isn’t interruption enough. She came in to tell me something Hans had done that was singularly sweet. I can’t even remember what it was now. But she had to tell someone, and you were in your hut. Well, what is it?’

  ‘First, the good news,’ said Dipankar tactically. ‘I’ve decided to join a bank. So your Muse can keep visiting you.’

  Amit jumped up from his desk and grabbed hold of his hands.

  ‘You’re not serious!’

  ‘Yes. When I meditated today it all became clear to me. Crystal clear. It’s irrevocable.’

  Amit was so relieved that he didn’t even ask Dipankar his reasons. In any case, he was sure they would be couched in the form of incomprehensible and capitalized abstractions.

  ‘And how long will it remain irrevocable?’

  Dipankar looked hurt.

  ‘Well,’ said Amit. ‘I’m sorry. And it is very good of you to tell me.’ He frowned and capped his pen. ‘You’re not doing this for me, are you? A sacrifice on the altar of literature?’ Amit looked rather sheepishly grateful.

  ‘No,’ said Dipankar. ‘Not at all.’ But this was not entirely true; the effect of his decision on Amit’s life had very much entered his thinking. ‘But what I want to talk to you about is Tapan. Do you mind?’

  ‘No, now that you’ve porlocked me already. He doesn’t look very happy these days.’

  ‘Oh, so you’ve noticed?’

  Amit, in the throes of his novel, was insensitive to the feelings of his family in proportion to his sensitivity to the feelings of his characters.

  ‘Yes, I have noticed. And Ma says he wants to leave school.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, that’s what I want to discuss with you. Do you mind if I shut the door? Kuku—’

  ‘Kuku can gurgle herself through any door; they’re no obstacle to Kuku. But do, if you wish.’

  Dipankar closed the door and sat down on a chair near the window.

  He told Amit what Tapan had told him. Amit listened, nodding his head from time to time, and was sickened. At first he too could hardly speak.

  ‘How long has Tapan had to go through all this?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘At least a year.’

  ‘It makes my stomach turn—are you sure he’s not—you know—imagining it—some of it? It seems so—’

  ‘He’s not imagining anything, Dada.’

  ‘Why didn’t he go to the school authorities?’

  ‘It’s not a day school, Dada, the boys would have made life worse hell for him—if you can imagine that.’

  ‘This is terrible. This is really terrible. Where is he now? Is he all right?’

  ‘In my room. Or he may have gone for a walk with Cuddles.’

  ‘Is he all right?’ repeated Amit.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dipankar. ‘But he won’t be if he has to go back to Jheel in a month.’

  ‘Strange,’ said Amit. ‘I had no inkling of all this. None at all. Poor Tapan. He’s never mentioned anything.’

  ‘Well, Dada—’ said Dipankar. ‘Is that really his fault? He’d probably think we’d make a couplet out of it. No one ever talks to anyone in our family, we just exchange brilliances.’

  Amit nodded.

  ‘Does he want to go to another boarding school?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Jheel is as good or as bad as any of them; they all breed conformists or bullies.’

  ‘Well,’ said Amit, ‘Jheel bred you.’

  ‘I’m talking about a general tendency, Dada, not about invariable effects. But it’s up to us to do something. I mean the two of us. Ma will have hysterics if she hears about all this. And Tapan won’t be able to face Baba if he thinks he’s heard. As for Kuku, she sometimes has good ideas, but it would be idiocy to trust her to be discreet. And Meenakshi’s out, obviously: the Mehras would know in a minute, and what Arun’s mother knows today the world knows tomorrow. It was difficult enough to get Tapan to speak to me. And I promised him I’d tell only you.’

  ‘And he didn’t mind?’

  Dipankar hesitated for a fraction of a second. ‘No,’ he said.

  Amit uncapped his pen again, and drew a small circle on the poem he had been writing. ‘Won’t it be difficult for him to get admission somewhere else at this stage?’ he asked, investing the circle with eyes and two large ears.

  ‘Not if you talk to someone at St Xavier’s,’ replied Dipankar. ‘It’s your old school, and they’re always telling you how proud they are of you.’

  ‘True,’ said Amit thoughtfully. ‘And I did give a talk and a reading there earlier this year, which I very rarely do. So I suppose I could—but what reason could I give? Not his general health; you said he could swim across that lake and back. His headaches? Well, if they’re brought on by travel, perhaps. Anyway, whatever I think of, getting him provisionally into another school would certainly counter one possible objection by Ma. A sort of fait accompli.’

  ‘Well,’ said Dipankar quietly, ‘as Baba says, no fait is ever accompli until it’s accompli.’

  Amit thought of Tapan’s misery and his own poem went out of his mind.

  ‘I’ll go over after lunch,’ he said. ‘Has the car been kuku’d?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And how will we convince Ma?’ continued Amit, looking worried, almost grim.

  ‘That’s the problem,’ said Dipankar. His decision to join a bank had made him quite decisive all around for an hour or so, but the effect was wearing off. ‘What can he do here in Calcutta that he can’t do at a boarding school like Jheel? I suppose he couldn’t develop a sudden interest in astronomy, could he, and be unable to live without a roof telescope. The thirst for knowledge, and so on. Then he’d have to live at home and attend a day school.’

  Amit smiled. ‘I can’t see it going down too well with Ma: one poet, one seer, and one astronomer. Sorry, banker-cum-seer.’

  ‘Headaches?’

  ‘Headaches?’ asked Amit. ‘Oh, I see, his migraines. Yes, well, that’ll help, but—let’s try thinking not of Tapan, but of Ma. . . .’

  After a few minutes, Dipankar suggested: ‘How about Bengali culture?’

  ‘Bengali culture?’

  ‘Yes, you know, the Jheel School song book has one paltry song by Tagore, and no provision for teaching Bengali, and—’

  ‘Dipankar, you’re a genius.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dipankar agreed.

  ‘That’s just right. “Tapan is losing his Bengali soul in the swamp of the Great Indian Sensibility.” She was complaining about his Bengali just the other day. Certainly it’s worth a try. But you know, I’m not sure about letting matters rest here. If this is the state of affairs at Jheel, we ought to complain to the headmaster, and if necessary kick up a wider fuss.’

  Dipankar shook his head. ‘I’m afraid that if Baba gets involved, that is exactly what is going to happen. And I’m more concerned with Tapan at the moment than with undoing the general brutalities of Jheel. But Dada, do talk to Tapan. And spend a bit of time with him. He admires you.’

  Amit accepted the implicit rebuke from his younger brother. ‘Well, I’m impressed with us,’ he said after a few moments of silence. ‘We’d make a very practical team. Movers and Fixers. Wide experience of Law and Economics. Solutions while you wait: Intrepid, Immediate and Irrevocable—’

  Dipankar cut him off. ‘I’ll talk to Ma at teatime, then, Dada. Tapan has had to put up with this for months, he shouldn’t have to put up with it for another day. If you and I—and, I hope, Ma—present a united front, and Tapan is so obviously unhappy at Jhe
el, Baba will give in. Besides, he won’t mind having Tapan in Calcutta; he misses him when he’s away. He’s the only one of his children who isn’t a Problem—except for his report card.’

  Amit nodded. ‘Well, wait for him to reach the age of responsibility before he displays his own variant of irresponsibility. If he’s a Chatterji, he will.’

  16.5

  ‘But I thought you used to call him Shambhu,’ said Mrs Chatterji to her gardener. She was referring to his young helper who had just gone off work at a little after five o’clock.

  ‘Yes,’ replied the old man, nodding his head vigorously. ‘Memsahib, about the chrysanthemums—’

  ‘But I just heard you call him Tirru when he left,’ persisted Mrs Chatterji. ‘Is he Shambhu or Tirru? I thought his name was Shambhu.’

  ‘Yes, Memsahib, it is.’

  ‘Well, what is Tirru then?’

  ‘He doesn’t use that name now, Memsahib,’ continued the gardener candidly. ‘He’s on the run from the police.’

  Mrs Chatterji was astonished.

  ‘The police?’

  ‘Yes, Memsahib. He hasn’t done anything. The police just decided to harass him. I think it’s to do with his ration card. He may have had to do something illegal to get one, because he’s from outside.’

  ‘Isn’t he from Bihar or somewhere?’ asked Mrs Chatterji.

  ‘Yes, Memsahib. Or Purva Pradesh. Or maybe even Eastern U.P. He seems reluctant to talk about it. But he’s a good boy, you can see there’s no harm in him.’ He pointed with his hoe in the direction of the bed that Tirru had been weeding.

  ‘But why here?’

  ‘He thought a judge’s house would be safest, Memsahib.’

  Mrs Chatterji was nonplussed by the logic of this. ‘But—’ she began, then thought better of it. ‘What were you saying about the chrysanthemums?’

  While the gardener explained the maraudings of the driver’s son, Mrs Chatterji continued to nod without listening. How perplexing, she said to herself. I wonder if I should tell my husband. Oh, there’s Dipankar. I’ll ask him. She waved to him.