A Suitable Boy

  S.S. Sharma had been called to Delhi. The Congress MLAs of Purva Pradesh had elected L.N. Agarwal as Chief Minister. Astoundingly enough, one of his first acts in office had been to send a firm note to the Raja of Marh refusing government or police protection for any further attempts to salvage the linga.

  The Banaras people had decided that Maan was no longer a suitable boy; they had informed Mahesh Kapoor of their decision.

  All these subjects, and many others, were on everyone’s mind—and no one’s tongue.

  Meenakshi and Kakoli, noticing the notorious Maan, swept up in a shimmer of chiffon, and even Mahesh Kapoor was not unhappy at the diversion they provided. Before they got there, however, Maan—who had just noticed Professor Mishra prowling vastly in the vicinity—had made good his disappearance.

  When they heard that Firoz and Imtiaz were twins, Meenakshi and Kakoli were delighted.

  ‘If I have twins,’ said Kuku, ‘I shall call them Prabodhini and Shayani. Then one can sleep while the other is awake.’

  ‘How very silly, Kuku,’ said Meenakshi. ‘You’ll never get any sleep yourself that way. And they won’t ever get to know each other. Tell me, which of you is the elder?’

  ‘I am,’ said Imtiaz.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ said Meenakshi.

  ‘I assure you, Mrs Mehra, I am. Ask my father here.’

  ‘He wouldn’t know,’ said Meenakshi. ‘A very nice man, who gave me a lovely little lacquer box, once told me that, according to the Japanese, the baby who comes out second is the elder, because he proves his courtesy and maturity by allowing his younger brother to emerge first.’

  ‘Mrs Mehra,’ said Firoz, laughing, ‘I can never thank you enough.’

  ‘Oh, do call me Meenakshi. Charming idea, isn’t it? Now if I have twins I shall call them Etah and Etawah! Or Kumbh and Karan. Or Bentsen and Pryce. Or something quite unforgettable. Etawah Mehra—how exquisitely exotic. Where has Aparna got to? And tell me, who are those two foreigners there, talking to Arun and Hans?’ She stretched her long neck lazily and pointed with the red-nail-polished finger of a delicately hennaed hand.

  ‘They are from the local Praha factory,’ said Mahesh Kapoor.

  ‘Oh, how dreadful!’ exclaimed Kuku. ‘They’re probably discussing the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. Or is it the communists? I must separate them at once. Or at least listen to what they’re saying. I’m so desperately bored. Nothing ever happens in Brahmpur. Come, Meenakshi. And we haven’t yet given Ma and Luts our heart-deep congratulations. Not that they deserve them. How stupid of her not to marry Amit. Now he’ll never marry anyone, I’m sure, and he’ll become as grouchy as Cuddles. But of course, they could always have a torrid affair,’ she added hopefully.

  And in a flash of flesh the Chatterjis of the backless cholis were gone.

  19.13

  ‘She’s married the wrong man,’ said Malati to her mother. ‘And it’s breaking my heart.’

  ‘Malati,’ said her mother, ‘everyone must make their own mistakes. Why are you sure it is a mistake?’

  ‘It is, it is, I know it!’ said Malati passionately. ‘And she’ll find out soon enough.’ She was determined to get Lata to at least write a letter to Kabir. Surely Haresh, with the simpering Simran in his shady background, would have to accept that as reasonable.

  ‘Malati,’ said her mother calmly, ‘don’t make mischief in someone else’s marriage. Get married yourself. What happened to the five boys whose father you met in Nainital?’

  But Malati was looking across the crowd at Varun, who was smiling rather weakly and adoringly at Kalpana Gaur.

  ‘Would you like me to marry an IAS officer?’ she asked her mother. ‘The most sweet and weak-willed and idiotic one I’ve ever met?’

  ‘I want you to marry someone with character,’ said her mother. ‘Someone like your father. Someone whom you cannot push around. And that’s what you want as well.’

  Mrs Rupa Mehra too was staring at Kalpana Gaur and Varun in amazement. Surely not!—surely not!—she thought. Kalpana, who was like a daughter to her: how could she have battened on to her poor son? Could I be imagining things? she wondered. But Varun was so guileless—or, rather, so ineffectual even when he tried to be guileful that the symptoms of his infatuation were unmistakable.

  How and when could this have happened?

  ‘Yes, yes, thank you, thank you,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra impatiently to someone who was congratulating her.

  What could be done to prevent such a disaster? Kalpana was years older than Varun, and—even if she was like a daughter to her—Mrs Rupa Mehra had no intention of having her as a daughter-in-law.

  But now Malati (‘that girl who makes nothing but mischief’) had gone up to Varun, and was looking deeply, deeply with her peerless green eyes into his. Varun’s jaw had dropped slightly and he appeared to be stammering.

  Leaving Lata and Haresh to fend for themselves, Mrs Rupa Mehra marched up to Varun.

  ‘Hello, Ma,’ said Kalpana Gaur. ‘Many congratulations. What a lovely wedding. And I can’t help feeling responsible for it, in a way.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra shortly.

  ‘Hello, Ma,’ said Malati. ‘Yes, congratulations are in order from me as well.’ Receiving no immediate response, she added, without thinking: ‘These gulab-jamuns are delicious. You must try one.’

  This reference to forbidden sweets annoyed Mrs Rupa Mehra further. She glared at the offending objects for a second or two.

  ‘What is the matter, Malati?’ she asked with some asperity. ‘You still look a little under the weather—you’ve been running around so much, I’m not surprised—and, Kalpana, standing in the centre of the crowd is not good for your hot spots; go and sit on that bench there at once, it is much cooler. Now I must have a word with Varun, who is not doing his duties as a host.’

  And she took him aside.

  ‘You too will marry a girl I choose,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger son.

  ‘But—but, Ma—’ Varun shifted from foot to foot.

  ‘A suitable girl, that is what I want for you,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra in an admonitory voice. ‘That is what your Daddy would have wanted. A suitable girl, and no exceptions.’

  While Varun was trying to figure out the implications of that last phrase, Arun joined them, together with Aparna, who held her father’s hand in one hand and an ice-cream cone in another.

  ‘Not pistachio, Daadi,’ she announced, disappointedly.

  ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra, ‘we’ll get you lots of pistachio ice-cream tomorrow.’

  ‘At the zoo.’

  ‘Yes, at the zoo,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra absently. She frowned. ‘Sweetheart, it’s too hot to go to the zoo.’

  ‘But you promised,’ Aparna pointed out.

  ‘Did I, sweetheart? When?’

  ‘Just now! Just now!’

  ‘Your Daddy will take you,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra.

  ‘Your Varun Chacha will take you,’ said Arun.

  ‘And Kalpana Aunty will come with us,’ said Varun.

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra, ‘I will be talking with her tomorrow about old times and other matters.’

  ‘Why can’t Lata Bua come with us?’ asked Aparna.

  ‘Because she’ll be going to Calcutta tomorrow, with Haresh Phupha,’ said Varun.

  ‘Because they’re married?’

  ‘Because they’re married.’

  ‘Oh. And Bhaskar can come with us, and Tapan Maama.’

  ‘They certainly can. But Tapan says that all he wants to do is to read comics and sleep.’

  ‘And the Lady Baby.’

  ‘Uma’s too small to enjoy the zoo,’ Varun pointed out. ‘And the snakes will frighten her. They might even gobble her up.’ He laughed sinisterly and rubbed his stomach, to Aparna’s delight.

  Uma was at the moment herself the object of enjoyment and admiration. Savita’s aunts were cooing over her; they were extremely pleased that, despi
te their predictions, she had not turned out to be ‘as black as her father’. This they said in full hearing of Pran, who laughed. For the colour of Haresh’s skin they had nothing but praise; it would cancel out the flaw of Lata’s complexion.

  With matters of such Mendelian moment did the aunts from Lucknow and Kanpur and Banaras and Madras occupy themselves.

  ‘Lata’s baby is bound to be born black,’ suggested Pran. ‘Things balance out within a family.’

  ‘Chhi, chhi, how can you say such things?’ said Mrs Kakkar.

  ‘Pran has babies on the brain,’ said Savita.

  Pran grinned—rather boyishly, Savita thought.

  On the 1st of April this year, he had received a phone call that had sent him beaming back to the breakfast table. Parvati, it appeared, was pregnant. Mrs Rupa Mehra had reacted with horror.

  Even when she had recalled the date, she had remained annoyed with Pran. ‘How can you joke this year when things are so sad?’ she demanded. But in Pran’s view one might as well try to be cheerful, however sad the core of things might be. And besides, he felt, it would not be such a terrible thing if Parvati and Kishy had a baby. At present they each dominated the other. A baby would redirect the equation.

  ‘What’s wrong with having babies on the brain?’ said Pran to the assembly of aunts. ‘Veena’s expecting, and Bhaskar and Kedarnath seem to be quite happy about it. That’s some good news in a sad year. And Uma too will need a brother and a sister sooner or later. Things won’t be quite so tight on my new salary.’

  ‘Quite right,’ the aunts agreed. ‘You can’t call it a family unless there are at least three children.’

  ‘Contract and tort permitting, of course,’ said Savita. Unhardened by the law she was looking as lovely and soft as ever in a blue-and-silver sari.

  ‘Yes, darling,’ said Pran. ‘Contract and tort permitting.’

  ‘Our congratulations, Dr Kapoor,’ said a strikingly inaudible voice behind him.

  Pran found himself pulled into the middle of a little pride of literary lions: Mr Barua, Mr Nowrojee, and Sunil Patwardhan.

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ said Pran, ‘but I’ve been married a year and a half now.’

  Mr Nowrojee’s face registered a fleeting and wintry smile.

  ‘I meant, of course, congratulations on your recent elevation, so’—he smiled sadly—‘so very richly deserved. And I have been meaning to tell you for many months now how very much I enjoyed your Twelfth Night. But you disappeared so early from Chatterji’s reading. I notice he is here this evening—I sent him a sheaf of villanelles a month ago, but have had no response so far; do you think I should trouble him with a reminder?’

  ‘It was Mr Barua who was the producer this year, Mr Nowrojee,’ replied Pran. ‘Mine was Julius Caesar, the year before.’

  ‘Oh, of course, of course, though one often wonders with Shakespeare—as I said to E.M. Forster in—was it—1913?—’

  ‘So, you bastard, you’ve managed to get Joyce on the syllabus after all,’ broke in Sunil Patwardhan. ‘An awful decision, an awful decision. I was just talking to Professor Mishra. He sounded stricken.’

  ‘Stick to mathematics, Sunil.’

  ‘I plan to,’ said Sunil. ‘Have you read Joyce on the sound of cricket bats?’ he asked, turning to Mr Barua and Mr Nowrojee: “Pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.” And that was early Joyce! Shall I do an imitation of Finnegan waking?’

  ‘No,’ said Pran. ‘Spare us the joy.’

  19.14

  Food was served at the far end of the garden and the guests roamed around, meeting each other, replenishing their plates, and congratulating the bride and groom and their families. Gifts and envelopes of money piled up near the decorated swing where the two of them were now sitting. One by one Lata met those whom she had not met before.

  Kalpana Gaur said: ‘I don’t know who I am—I don’t know if I’m part of the groom’s party or the bride’s.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Haresh, ‘it’s a problem. A serious problem. The first problem of our married life.’

  While Haresh laughed and joked with all his friends, and accepted their boisterous humour and congratulations, Lata said very little.

  When Mr Sahgal, her uncle from Lucknow, approached them with a repellent smile, she held Haresh’s hand tightly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Haresh.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Lata.

  ‘But there must be—’

  Mr Sahgal was holding out his hand to congratulate Haresh. ‘I must congratulate you,’ he said. ‘I saw from the very beginning that you two would get married—it was meant to be so—it is a match that Lata’s father would have approved of. She is a very, very good girl.’ Lata had closed her eyes. He looked at her face, at the lipstick on her lips, with a slight sneer, before moving away.

  Elsewhere, Dr Durrani, eating kulfi with an absorbed air, was talking to Pran, Kedarnath, Veena and Bhaskar. ‘So, er, interesting, as I was saying to your son, this insistence on the number seven . . . seven, um, steps, and seven, er, seven, circles round the fire. Seven er, notes to the scale, speaking in terms of a modulus, of course, and seven days to the, er, week.’ He suddenly remembered something and frowned, inching his bushy eyebrows upwards. ‘I must apologize, it’s Thursday, you see, so my son, my, er, elder son, could not be present. He has to be, er, er, elsewhere—’

  The Durrani invitation had been a dreadful mistake in Mrs Rupa Mehra’s eyes—and, once extended, was unretractable. ‘Do come along—and, of course, bring your family,’ Dr Kishen Chand Seth had told him over bridge, but Dr Seth was disappointed that the mad wife and villainous son had not turned up. Dr Durrani himself was so inoffensively vague that he was incapable of locating the groom at his own wedding.

  Amit, meanwhile, had been set upon by two elderly women, one of whom was wearing a glorious ruby pendant, like a radiating star, on her breast.

  She said: ‘That man told us that you’re the son of Mr Justice Chatterji.’

  ‘I am,’ said Amit with a smile.

  ‘We know your father very well from our Darjeeling days. He would come up every year for the Puja holidays.’

  ‘He still tries to.’

  ‘Yes, but we’re not there any longer. You must remember us to him. Now, tell me, are you the clever one?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Amit resignedly. ‘I’m the clever one.’

  This delighted the dazzling lady.

  ‘I knew you when you were that high,’ she exclaimed. ‘You were very clever, even then, so I’m not surprised you’ve written all those books.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Amit.

  Not to be outdone, the other lady asserted that she had known him since he was a bulge.

  ‘But a brainy bulge, no doubt,’ said Amit.

  ‘Now, now,’ said the lady.

  There was a commotion at the gate. A group of five hermaphrodites, hearing that there was a wedding in progress, had turned up, and were singing and dancing and demanding money. So shameless were their gestures that the nearby guests were turning away in shock, but Sunil Patwardhan rushed over with his friends to enjoy the fun. Dr Kishen Chand Seth, brandishing his stick, was trying to drive them away; but they were making lewd remarks about both it and him. They would have to be paid to go away. He offered them twenty rupees, and their leader told him that he wouldn’t even service him for that amount. Dr Kishen Chand Seth hopped around in fury, but he could do nothing. They demanded fifty, and they got it.

  ‘It’s blackmail,’ said Dr Kishen Chand Seth furiously. ‘Sheer blackmail.’ He had had enough of hosting this wedding. He went inside to lie down and cool his head, and soon fell asleep.

  Mrs Rupa Mehra, though she had broken her fast, had not done so with her usual gusto because she had to at the same time accept congratulations, introduce people to each other, watch over Haresh and Lata, keep a wary eye on Varun, and supervise the catering. But she was tearfully happy, and as she looked aroun
d her she felt even happier to see Pran talking to Professor Mishra, the Nawab Sahib talking to Mahesh Kapoor, and Maan and Firoz laughing together.

  Sunil Patwardhan came up to her.

  ‘Many, many congratulations, Mrs Mehra.’

  ‘Thank you so much, Sunil. I’m so glad you’re here. You haven’t seen my father anywhere, have you?’

  ‘I’m afraid not—not after that altercation at the gate. . . . Mrs Mehra, I have a small problem. . . . Haresh left his cufflinks at my house, and he told me to put them in the room where he’ll be staying tonight.’ Sunil fished a pair of cufflinks out of his trouser pockets. ‘If you would tell me where I should take them—’

  But Mrs Rupa Mehra would not be gulled so easily. She had been warned about Sunil Patwardhan’s pranks and practical jokes, and she was not going to allow him to disturb her daughter’s night of Ideal Marriage.

  ‘Give them to me,’ she said firmly, taking them from him. ‘I’ll make sure he gets them.’ And as a result, Haresh was the richer and Sunil the poorer by one pair of black onyx cufflinks.

  19.15

  Kabir had not been able to bring himself to come to the wedding. But though it was Thursday night, he had not gone to visit his mother either. Instead he took a walk by the Ganga: upriver past the banyan tree, along the dhobi-ghat, past the Pul Mela sands underneath the Fort, along the waterfront of the old town, following the black water for miles until he came to the Barsaat Mahal.

  In the shadow of a wall, he sat down on the sand for an hour, his head in his hands.

  Then he got up to walk again, up the tall stairs, across the parapet and to the other side.

  After a short while he came to a factory, the walls of which came down to the Ganga and prevented him from going further. But he was too tired anyway. He pressed his head against the wall.

  The ceremonies will be over by now, he thought.

  He hailed a boatman, and took a boat downriver back to the university and his father’s house.

  19.16

  The morning after the wedding, Haresh suddenly decided over breakfast that since he happened to be in Brahmpur, he should look in on the local Praha factory.