A Suitable Boy

  He allowed the policeman to search Maan’s room. The bed had not been slept in. There was no sign of anything remotely resembling a weapon.

  ‘Have you found anything to interest you?’ asked Mr Mahesh Kapoor. He kept thinking back to the searches and arrests that he and Prem Nivas had undergone in the time of the British.

  The Sub-Inspector looked around as quickly as possible, apologized profusely, and left. ‘If Mr Maan Kapoor does return, would Minister Sahib ask him to come to the Pasand Bagh Police Station? It would be better than the police coming here again,’ he said. Mahesh Kapoor nodded. He was stunned, but did not appear to be anything but calm and sarcastic.

  When they had left, he tried to console his wife with the thought that there had been some mistake. But Mrs Mahesh Kapoor was convinced that something disastrous had indeed happened—and that Maan, somehow, in his impetuousness, had caused it. She wanted to go at once to the Civil Hospital to see how Firoz was, but Mahesh Kapoor said that it would be best to wait till morning. Anyway, in her state of health, it was perhaps best if she did not see Firoz.

  ‘If he comes home, we can’t give him up,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Mahesh Kapoor impatiently. Then he shook his head. ‘You must go to bed now.’

  ‘I won’t be able to sleep.’

  ‘Well, then, pray,’ said Mahesh Kapoor impatiently. ‘But keep yourself covered up. Your chest sounds bad. I will call a doctor in the morning.’

  ‘Call a lawyer for him, not a doctor for me,’ said Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, who was in tears. ‘Can’t we get him bail?’

  ‘He hasn’t been arrested yet,’ said Mahesh Kapoor. Then a thought occurred to him. Though it was the middle of the night, he phoned up the middle Bespectacled Bannerji, and asked him about anticipatory bail. The lawyer was irked to be woken up at this amazing hour, but when he recognized Mahesh Kapoor’s voice and heard an account of what the police said had happened, he did his best to explain matters.

  ‘The problem, Kapoor Sahib, is that neither attempted murder nor grievous hurt with a dangerous weapon is a bailable offence. Is it, well, feasible, I mean, possible, that the charge might be considered to be ordinary grievous hurt? Or attempted culpable homicide? Those are bailable charges.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mahesh Kapoor.

  ‘Or simple hurt?’

  ‘No, I don’t think that is possible.’

  ‘You said a Sub-Inspector came to the house. Not even an Inspector. I am astonished.’

  ‘Well, that’s who it was.’

  ‘Perhaps you should have a word with the Deputy Superintendent of Police or the SP—to clarify things.’

  ‘Thank you for your explanations and, well, suggestion,’ said Mahesh Kapoor disapprovingly. ‘I am sorry to have woken you up at this hour.’

  There was a pause at the other end. ‘Not at all, not at all. Please feel free to call me up at any time.’

  When he returned to his room Mahesh Kapoor found his wife praying, and he wished he could have prayed as well. He had always been very fond of his reckless son, but had only realized in these last few weeks how dearly he loved him.

  Where are you? he thought, irritated and upset. Don’t for God’s sake do anything even more stupid than you’ve already done. At this thought his irritation disappeared, and was replaced with a profound anxiety both for his son and for the son of his friend.

  17.18

  Maan had disappeared into the mist and reappeared at Brahmpur Railway Station. He knew he had to get out of Brahmpur. He was drunk, and he was not certain why he had to escape. But Firoz had told him to, and Bibbo had told him to. He pictured the scene in his mind. It was terrible. He could not believe what he had done. There had been a knife in his hand. And then his friend had been lying on the ground, wounded and bleeding. Wounded? But Firoz—Firoz—that he and Saeeda Bai—Maan relived the wretchedness of his feelings. What tormented him more than anything was the deception. ‘It is not my sister he is in love with’—he thought of the near-hysterical words and realized how much Saeeda Bai must have been obsessed with Firoz. And again he chided himself for having been duped by his own love for her, and his love for his friend. Oh, what a fool I am, he thought. Oh, what a fool. He looked at his own clothes. There was no blood anywhere—not even on his bundi. He looked at his hands.

  He bought a ticket to Banaras. He was almost weeping at the counter, and the clerk looked at him strangely.

  On the train he offered the remnants of his bottle of whisky to a young man who happened to be awake in the compartment. The man shook his head. Maan looked at the sign near the alarm handle—To Stop Train Pull Chain—and began to tremble violently. By the time he got to Banaras, he had gone off to sleep. The young man woke him up and made sure he got off.

  ‘I’ll never forget your kindness—never—’ said Maan, as the train steamed off.

  Dawn was breaking. He walked along the ghats, singing a bhajan which his mother had taught him when he was ten years old. Then he went to the house where his fiancée lived, and started battering on the door. Those good people got alarmed. When they saw Maan there, they became very angry: they told him to go away and not to make an exhibition of himself. He next went to some people to whom he had lent money. They were not keen to see him at all. ‘I’ve killed my friend,’ Maan told them. ‘Nonsense,’ they replied.

  ‘You’ll see—it’ll be in all the papers,’ Maan said, distraught. ‘Please hide me for a few days.’

  They thought it a wonderful joke. ‘What are you doing in Banaras?’ they said. ‘Are you here on business?’

  ‘No,’ said Maan.

  Suddenly he could bear it no longer. He went to the local police station to give himself up.

  ‘I was the man—I—’ he said, hardly able to speak coherently.

  The policemen humoured him for a while, then grew annoyed, and finally wondered whether there might not be some truth to what he was saying. They tried to telephone Brahmpur but could not get through. Then they sent an urgent telegram. ‘Please wait,’ they told Maan. ‘We’ll arrest you if we can.’

  ‘Yes—yes—’ said Maan. He was feeling very hungry. All he had had that day was a few cups of tea.

  Finally the police got a message back that stated that the younger son of the Nawab Sahib of Baitar had been found seriously wounded on Cornwallis Road in Brahmpur, and that the principal suspect was Maan Kapoor. They looked at Maan as if he was mad, and arrested him. Then, in a few hours, they handcuffed him, and put him on the train back to Brahmpur under the escort of two constables.

  ‘Why must you handcuff me? What have I done?’ said Maan.

  The station house officer was so tired of Maan, so annoyed with the needless work he had caused him, and so exasperated by his latest and most ludicrous protest that he wanted to beat him up. ‘These are the regulations,’ he said.

  Maan got along better with the constables.

  ‘I suppose you have to be very alert in case I escape,’ he said. ‘In case I break free and jump from the train.’

  The constables laughed good-humouredly. ‘You won’t escape,’ they said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Oh, you can’t,’ one of them said. ‘We keep the keyholes on top, so that you can’t open the handcuffs by striking them on—well, on those window bars, for instance. But if you want to go to the bathroom, you should tell us.’

  ‘We’re very careful about our handcuffs,’ said the other.

  ‘Yes, we unlock them when they aren’t in use. Otherwise the springs can get weak.’

  ‘Can’t have that,’ said the other constable. ‘Why did you give yourself up?’ he asked curiously. ‘Are you really the son of a Minister?’

  Maan shook his head miserably. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, and went off to sleep.

  He dreamed of a vast and varicose Victoria, like the one in the portrait in the dining room of Baitar Fort. She was removing layer after layer of her regalia and calling to him enticingly. ‘I have left
something behind,’ she was saying. ‘I must go back.’ The dream was unbearably disturbing. He woke up. Both the constables were asleep, although it was only early evening. When the train approached Brahmpur, they woke up by instinct, and delivered him into the hands of a party from the Pasand Bagh Police Station that was waiting on the platform.

  ‘What will you do?’ Maan asked his escorts.

  ‘We’ll take the next train back,’ they replied.

  ‘Look us up when you are next in Banaras,’ one of them said.

  Maan smiled at his new escorts, but they were much less inclined to humour him. The mustachioed Sub-Inspector, in particular, appeared very serious. When they got to the police station, he was given a thin grey blanket and put in the lock-up. It was a small, cold, filthy cell—a barred room with nothing but a few pieces of jute on the floor—no straw or mattress or pillow. It stank. In place of a toilet there was a large clay vessel in the corner. The other man in the cell looked tubercular and was drunk. His eyes were red. He stared in a hunted way at the police and, when the door clanged shut, at Maan.

  The Sub-Inspector apologized to Maan curtly. ‘You will have to stay here tonight,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow we will decide whether to remand you into judicial custody or not. If we get a proper statement from you we won’t need to hold you here much longer.’

  Maan sat down on the floor on a piece of jute matting and covered his head with his hands. For a second he imagined the scent of attar of roses, and he began to cry bitterly. More than anything he regretted that the last day had existed. If only he had remained ignorant, he thought. If only he had not known.

  17.19

  Apart from Firoz, who was still not conscious, there were two people sitting in the room in the ward. One was an Assistant Sub-Inspector, who nodded off because there was nothing for him to take down; the police had insisted on, and the hospital had acquiesced in, his presence. The other was the Nawab Sahib. Imtiaz, because he was a doctor, was not prevented from coming in, and did so from time to time. But it was the Nawab Sahib who kept vigil by the bedside of his son. His servant, Ghulam Rusool, was given a pass so that he could bring the Nawab Sahib his food and a daily change of clothes. At night the Nawab Sahib slept on a couch in the same room; he insisted that it was not a problem for him. Even in winter he was used to sleeping with a single blanket. At the appointed hours, he spread a small rug on the floor and prayed.

  On the first day Firoz was not allowed visitors even during visiting hours. Imtiaz did manage to get Zainab into the hospital; she was in purdah. When she saw Firoz—his face pale, his thick curly hair matted to his forehead, the tube of a saline drip stuck in the crook of his right arm (they had moved it from his ankle)—she was so upset that she decided that she would not bring her children to see him until he was better. Nor would it do them any good to see their grandfather so desperate and tearful. But agitated though she was, she was convinced that Firoz would get better. It was the usually optimistic Imtiaz who thought of all the possible complications and was worried.

  Whoever came to relieve the policeman on duty usually brought some news for the Nawab Sahib from the police station. By now he knew that Firoz had not been stabbed by a stranger on the street, but that there had been a fight at Saeeda Bai’s between Maan and Firoz, and that it was Maan who had nearly killed him. He had not believed this at first. But Maan had been arrested, and had confessed, and there was no question of not believing it now.

  Sometimes he would get up and wipe Firoz’s forehead with a towel. He would take his name, not so much to wake him as to reassure himself that the name still meant someone living. He remembered Firoz’s childhood and thought of his wife, whose features were so like his. Even more than Zainab, Firoz was his link to her. Then he would begin to upbraid himself because he had not prevented Firoz from visiting Saeeda Bai’s. He should have known from the experience of his own youth the attraction of places of that kind. But since his wife’s death it had grown difficult to speak to his children; his library had more and more taken over his world. Only once had he ordered his secretary not to give Firoz an easy excuse to go to that place. If only, he thought, he had explicitly forbidden Firoz from going there. But what good would it have done? he reflected. In Maan’s company he could well have gone regardless—that unthinking young man would have cared as little for the behests of his friend’s father as for those of his own.

  Now and then, listening to the doctors, and looking at Imtiaz’s worried expression as he consulted with them, the Nawab Sahib felt that he was going to lose his son. Then he was overwhelmed with despair, and in bitterness of spirit wished every ill and pain on Maan—even on his family. He wished Maan to suffer as he had made his son suffer. He could not conceive what Firoz could possibly have done to have been stabbed with a knife by the friend who he thought had loved him.

  When he prayed, he felt ashamed of these feelings, but he could not control them. That Maan had saved his son’s life once seemed to be a fact so hazy, so distant from this present jeopardy, as to be almost irrelevant.

  His own connection with Saeeda Bai too had sunk so far back in his consciousness that he did not think of her any more with reference to himself. He did not know where and how she fitted into these events. He felt only the dimmest anxiety in her regard, not the possibility of any revelation of the past. The present provision he made for her and for the daughter who she claimed was his own, this was a duty he accepted as a necessary act of decency, the partial expiation of an old and half-forgotten sin. And it was understood that for her part nothing would ever be said to anyone about what had happened two decades ago between a married man of almost forty and a girl of fifteen. The child who had later been born was never told that she was anything but Saeeda Bai’s younger sister; or so the Nawab Sahib had been given to understand. Apart from Saeeda Bai herself only her mother had truly known what had happened, and she was long since dead.

  Firoz was now speaking a few words, and, incoherent as they were, for his father they were as miraculous as the words of someone who had returned from the dead. He pulled his chair closer to the bed and held Firoz’s left hand. It was reassuringly warm. The policeman too became more alert. ‘What is your son saying, Nawab Sahib?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the Nawab Sahib, smiling. ‘But it appears to me to be a good sign.’

  ‘Something about his sister, I think,’ said the policeman, his pencil poised over a new page.

  ‘She was here before you took over,’ said the Nawab Sahib. ‘But, poor girl, she was distressed to see him in this state and did not stay long.’

  ‘Tasneem—’ It was Firoz’s voice.

  The Nawab Sahib heard and flinched. That was her name, the name of Saeeda Bai’s daughter. He had spoken it with a terrifying tenderness.

  The policeman continued to jot down whatever Firoz said.

  The Nawab Sahib looked upwards in sudden fear. A lizard was climbing up the wall in an irregular wriggle, stopping and starting. He stared at it, transfixed.

  ‘Tasneem—’

  The Nawab Sahib sighed very slowly, as if the effort of drawing and releasing breath had suddenly become painful. He released Firoz’s hand, and unconsciously joined both his own together. Then he let them fall to his side.

  He tried, in his fear, to piece the words together. His first feeling was that Firoz had somehow come to learn the truth, or some part of the truth. The thought caused him such pain that he had to lean back in his chair and close his eyes. He had longed for his son to open his eyes and to see him sitting by his side. But now the thought was terrifying. When his eyes open and he finds me sitting here, what will he say to me or I to him?

  Then he thought of the policeman’s dutiful note-taking. What would happen if ever anyone else pieced together the fragments of the truth? Or if they heard about the past from whoever had told Firoz about it? Things that had long been dead would rear themselves out of the grave; and matters so little known that they had almost lost their sense
of existence would become the business of the world at large.

  But perhaps no one had said anything at all. Perhaps Firoz did not know anything. The Nawab Sahib reflected that possibly in his own guilt he had merely conjoined a few innocent fragments into a frightening whole. Perhaps Firoz had merely met the girl at Saeeda Bai’s.

  ‘In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,’ he began hurriedly.

  ‘Praise belongs to God, the Lord of all Being,

  the All-Merciful, the All-Compassionate, the Master of the Day of Doom.

  Thee only we serve; to Thee alone we pray for succour.

  Guide us in the straight path—’

  The Nawab Sahib stopped. If it was in fact the case that Firoz did not know, that was no cause for relief at all. He would have to know. He would have to be told. The alternative was too terrible to imagine. And it was he who would have to tell him.

  17.20

  Varun was reading the racing results in the Statesman with great interest. Uma, who was in Savita’s arms, had grabbed a handful of his hair and was tugging at it, but this did not distract him. Her tongue was poking out between her lips.

  ‘She will be a tell-tale when she grows up,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra. ‘A little chugal-khor. Whom will we tell tales on? Whom will we tell tales on? Look at her little tongue.’

  ‘Ow!’ said Varun.

  ‘Now, now, Uma,’ said Savita in mild reproof. ‘I find her very exhausting, Ma. She’s so good-natured as a rule, but last night she kept on crying. Then this morning I discovered she was wet. How does one sort out the tantrums from the genuine tears?’