‘Yes, it’s been sorted out in my husband’s mind. Please tell him we look forward to seeing him.’ She looked at Dr Seth for confirmation; he gave a disgusted grunt, but thought it best to let things be. Suddenly his attention shifted.
‘When?’ he demanded, indicating Savita’s stomach with the handle of his cane.
‘August or September, that’s what we’ve been told,’ said Pran, rather vaguely, as if afraid that Dr Kishen Chand Seth might decide to take over things again.
Dr Kishen Chand Seth turned to Lata. ‘Why aren’t you married yet? Don’t you like my radiologist?’ he asked her.
Lata looked at him and tried to hide her amazement. Her cheeks burned.
‘You haven’t introduced her to the radiologist yet,’ Mrs Rupa Mehra interposed quickly. ‘And now it is almost time for her exams.’
‘What radiologist?’ asked Lata. ‘It’s still the 1st of April. Is that it?’
‘Yes, the radiologist. Call me tomorrow,’ said Dr Kishen Chand Seth to his daughter. ‘Remind me, Parvati. Now we must go. I must see this film again next week. So sad,’ he added approvingly.
On the way to his grey Buick Dr Kishen Chand Seth noticed a wrongly parked car. He yelled at the policeman on duty at the busy intersection. The policeman, who recognized the terrifying Dr Seth, as did most of the forces of order and disorder in Brahmpur, left the traffic to fend for itself, came over promptly, and took down the number of the car. A beggar limped alongside and asked for a couple of pice. Dr Kishen Chand Seth looked at him in fury and gave him a brutal whack on the leg with his stick. He and Parvati got into the car and the policeman cleared the traffic for them.
3.3
‘No talking, please,’ said the invigilator.
‘I was just borrowing a ruler, Sir.’
‘If you have to do that, do it through me.’
‘Yes, Sir.’
The boy sat down and applied himself once more to the question paper in front of him.
A fly buzzed against the windowpane of the examination hall. Outside the window the red crown of a gulmohur tree could be seen below the stone steps. The fans whirled slowly around. Row after row of heads, row after row of hands, drop after drop of ink, words and yet more words. Someone got up to have a drink of water from the earthenware pitcher near the exit. Someone leaned back against his chair and sighed.
Lata had stopped writing about half an hour ago, and had been staring at her paper sightlessly since. She was trembling. She could not think of the questions at all. She was breathing deeply and the sweat stood out on her forehead. Neither of the girls on either side of her noticed. Who were they? She didn’t recognize them from the English lectures.
What do these questions mean? she asked herself. And how was I managing to answer them just a little while ago? Do Shakespeare’s tragic heroes deserve their fates? Does anyone deserve her fate? She looked around again. What is the matter with me, I who am so good at taking exams? I don’t have a headache, I don’t have a period, what is my excuse? What will Ma say—
An image of her bedroom in Pran’s house came to her mind. In it she saw her mother’s three suitcases, filled with most of what she owned in the world. Standard appendages of her Annual Rail-Pilgrimage, they lay in a corner, with her large handbag resting like a self-confident black swan upon them. Nearby lay a small square dark-green copy of the Bhagavad Gita and a glass that contained her false teeth. She had worn them ever since a car accident ten years ago.
What would my father have thought? wondered Lata—with his brilliant record—his gold medals—how can I fail him like this? It was in April that he died. Gulmohurs were in bloom then too. . . . I must concentrate. I must concentrate. Something has happened to me and I must not panic. I must relax and things will be all right again.
She fell into a reverie once more. The fly buzzed in a steady drone.
‘No humming. Please be silent.’
Lata realized with a start that it was she who had been humming softly to herself and that both her neighbours were now looking at her: one appeared puzzled, the other annoyed. She bent her head towards her answer book. The pale blue lines stretched out without any potential meaning across the blank page.
‘If at first you don’t succeed—’ she heard her mother’s voice say.
She quickly turned back to a previous question she had already answered, but what she had written made no sense to her.
‘The disappearance of Julius Caesar from his own play as early as Act III would seem to imply . . .’
Lata rested her head on her hands.
‘Are you feeling all right?’
She raised her head and looked at the troubled face of a young lecturer from the Philosophy Department who happened to be on invigilation duty that day.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re quite sure?’ he murmured.
Lata nodded.
She picked up her pen and began to write something in her answer book. A few minutes passed, and the invigilator announced: ‘Half an hour left.’
Lata realized that at least an hour of her three-hour paper had vanished into nothingness. She had answered only two questions so far. Activated by sudden alarm, she began to write answers to the two remaining questions—she chose them virtually at random—in a rapid, panic-stricken scrawl, smearing her fingers with ink, smudging the answer book, hardly conscious of what she was writing. The buzzing of the fly seemed to her to have entered her brain. Her normally attractive handwriting now looked worse than Arun’s, and this thought almost made her seize up again.
‘Five minutes left.’
Lata continued to write, hardly aware of what it was she was writing.
‘Pens down, please.’
Lata’s hand continued to move across the page.
‘No more writing, please. Time’s up.’
Lata put her pen down and buried her head in her hands.
‘Bring your papers to the front of the hall. Please make sure that your roll numbers are correctly inscribed on the front and that your supplementary booklets, if you have any, are arranged in the right order. No talking, please, until you have left the hall.’
Lata handed in her booklet. On the way out she rested her right wrist for a few seconds against the cool earthenware pitcher.
She did not know what had come over her.
3.4
Lata stood outside the hall for a minute. Sunlight poured on to the stone steps. The edge of her middle finger was smeared with dark-blue ink, and she looked at it, frowning. She was close to tears.
Other English students stood on the steps and chatted. A post-mortem of the paper was being held, and it was dominated by an optimistic and chubby girl who was ticking off on her fingers the various points she had answered correctly.
‘This is one paper I know I have done really well,’ she said. ‘Especially the King Lear question. I think that the answer was “Yes”.’ Others were looking excited or depressed. Everyone agreed that several of the questions were far harder than they had needed to be. A knot of history students stood not far away, discussing their paper, which had been held simultaneously in the same building. One of them was the young man who had brought himself to Lata’s attention in the Imperial Book Depot, and he was looking a little worried. He had spent a great deal of time these last few months in extracurricular activities—particularly cricket—and this had taken its toll upon his performance.
Lata walked to a bench beneath the gulmohur tree, and sat down to collect herself. When she got home for lunch she would be pestered with a hundred questions about how well she had done. She looked down at the red flowers that lay scattered at her feet. In her head she could still hear the buzzing of the fly.
The young man, though he had been talking to his classmates, had noticed her walking down the steps. When she sat down on the far bench under the tree, he decided to have a word with her. He told his friends that he had to go home for lunch—that his father would be waiting for him—and hurried along
the path past the gulmohur. As he came to the bench, he uttered an exclamation of surprise and stopped.
‘Hello,’ he said.
Lata raised her head and recognized him. She flushed with embarrassment that he should see her in her present visible distress.
‘I suppose you don’t remember me?’ he said.
‘I do,’ said Lata, surprised that he should continue to talk to her despite her obvious wish that he should walk on. She said nothing further, nor did he for a few seconds.
‘We met at the bookshop,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Lata. Then, quickly, she added: ‘Please, just let me be. I don’t feel like talking to anyone.’
‘It’s the exam, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You’ll have forgotten all about it in five years.’
Lata became indignant. She did not care for his glib philosophy. Who on earth did he think he was? Why didn’t he just buzz off—like that wretched fly?
‘I say that,’ he continued, ‘because a student of my father’s once tried to kill himself after he had done badly in his final exams. It’s a good thing he didn’t succeed, because when the results came out he found he’d got a first.’
‘How can you think you’ve done badly in mathematics when you’ve done well?’ asked Lata, interested despite herself. ‘Your answers are either right or wrong. I can understand it in history or English, but . . .’
‘Well, that’s an encouraging thought,’ said the young man, pleased that she had remembered something about him. ‘Both of us have probably done less badly than we think.’
‘So you’ve done badly too?’ asked Lata.
‘Yes,’ he said, simply.
Lata found it hard to believe him, as he didn’t appear distressed in the least.
There was silence for a few moments. Some of the young man’s friends passed by the bench but very tactfully forbore from greeting him. He knew, however, that this would not prevent them from taxing him later about the beginnings of a grand passion.
‘But look, don’t worry . . .’ he went on. ‘One paper in six is bound to be difficult. Do you want a dry handkerchief?’
‘No, thank you.’ She glared at him, then looked away.
‘When I was standing there, feeling low,’ he said, pointing to the top of the steps, ‘I noticed you here looking even worse, and that cheered me up. May I sit down?’
‘Please don’t,’ said Lata. Then, realizing how rude her words had sounded, she said, ‘No, do. But I have to be off. I hope you’ve done better than you think.’
‘I hope you’ll feel better than you do,’ said the young man, sitting down. ‘Has it helped to talk to me?’
‘No,’ said Lata. ‘Not at all.’
‘Oh,’ said the young man, a bit disconcerted. ‘Anyway, remember,’ he went on, ‘there are more important things in the world than exams.’ He stretched backwards on the bench, and looked up at the reddish-orange flowers.
‘Like what?’ asked Lata.
‘Like friendship,’ he said, a little severely.
‘Really?’ said Lata, smiling a little now despite herself.
‘Really,’ he said. ‘Talking to you has certainly cheered me up.’ But he continued to look stern.
Lata stood up and started to walk away from the bench.
‘You don’t have any objection to my walking along with you for a bit?’ he said, getting up himself.
‘I can’t very well stop you,’ said Lata. ‘India is a free country now.’
‘All right. I’ll sit on this bench and think of you,’ he said melodramatically, sitting down again. ‘And of that attractive and mysterious ink stain near your nose. It’s been some days since Holi.’
Lata made a sound of impatience and walked away. The young man’s eyes were following her, and she was aware of it. She rubbed her stained middle finger with her thumb to control her awkwardness. She was annoyed with him and with herself, and unsettled by her unexpected enjoyment of his unexpected company. But these thoughts did have the effect of replacing her anxiety—indeed, panic—about how badly she’d done in the paper on Drama with the wish to look at a mirror at once.
3.5
Later that afternoon, Lata and Malati and a couple of their friends—all girls, of course—were taking a walk together to the jacaranda grove where they liked to sit and study. The jacaranda grove by tradition was open only to girls. Malati was carrying an incongruously fat medical textbook.
It was a hot day. The two wandered hand in hand among the jacaranda trees. A few soft mauve flowers drifted down to earth. When they were out of earshot of the others, Malati said, with quiet amusement:
‘What is on your mind?’
When Lata looked at her quizzically, Malati continued, undeterred: ‘No, no, it’s no use looking at me like that, I know that something is bothering you. In fact I know what it is that’s bothering you. I have my sources of information.’
Lata responded: ‘I know what you’re going to say, and it’s not true.’
Malati looked at her friend and said: ‘All that Christian training at St Sophia’s has had a bad influence on you, Lata. It’s made you into a terrible liar. No, I don’t mean that exactly. What I mean is that when you do lie, you do it terribly.’
‘All right, then, what were you going to say?’ said Lata.
‘I’ve forgotten now,’ said Malati.
‘Please,’ said Lata, ‘I didn’t get up from my books for this. Don’t be mean, don’t be elliptical, and don’t tease me. It’s bad enough as it is.’
‘Why?’ said Malati. ‘Are you in love already? It’s high time, spring is over.’
‘Of course not,’ said Lata indignantly. ‘Are you mad?’
‘No,’ said Malati.
‘Then why do you have to ask such astonishing questions?’
‘I heard about the way he walked familiarly up to you while you were sitting on the bench after the exam,’ said Malati, ‘so I assumed that you must have been meeting off and on since the Imperial Book Depot.’ From her informant’s description Malati had assumed that it had been the same fellow. And she was pleased she was right.
Lata looked at her friend with more exasperation than affection. News travels much too fast, she thought, and Malati listens in on every line.
‘We have not been meeting either off or on,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where you get your information from, Malati. I wish you would talk about music or the news or something sensible. Even your socialism. This is only the second time we’ve met, and I don’t even know his name. Here, give me your textbook, and let’s sit down. If I read a paragraph or two of something I don’t understand, I’ll be all right.’
‘You don’t even know his name?’ said Malati, now looking at Lata as if she was the one who was mad. ‘Poor fellow! Does he know yours?’
‘I think I told him at the bookshop. Yes, I did. And then he asked me if I was going to ask him his—and I said no.’
‘And you wish you hadn’t,’ said Malati, watching her face closely.
Lata was silent. She sat down and leaned against a jacaranda.
‘And I suppose he would like to have told you,’ said Malati, sitting down as well.
‘I suppose he would,’ said Lata laughing.
‘Poor boiled potatoes,’ said Malati.
‘Boiled—what?’
‘You know—“Don’t put chillies on boiled potatoes.”’ Malati imitated Lata.
Lata blushed.
‘You do like him, don’t you?’ said Malati. ‘If you lie, I’d know it.’
Lata did not respond immediately. She had been able to face her mother with reasonable calmness at lunch, despite the strange, trance-like event of the Drama paper. Then she said:
‘He could see that I was upset after the paper. I don’t think it was easy for him to come up and talk to me when I had, well, in a way rebuffed him at the bookshop.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Malati casuall
y. ‘Boys are such louts. He could very well have done it for the challenge. They’re always daring each other to do idiotic things—for instance, storming the Women’s Hostel at Holi. They think they are such heroes.’
‘He is not a lout,’ said Lata, bridling. ‘And as for heroism, I think it does take at least a little courage to do something when you know that your head can be bitten off as a result. You said something to the same effect in the Blue Danube.’
‘Not courage, boldness,’ said Malati, who was thoroughly enjoying her friend’s reactions. ‘Boys aren’t in love, they’re just bold. When the four of us were walking to the grove just now, I noticed a couple of boys on bicycles following us in a pathetic sort of way. Neither really wanted to brave an encounter with us, but neither could say so. So it was quite a relief to them when we entered the grove and the question became moot.’
Lata was silent. She lay down on the grass and stared up at the sky through the jacaranda branches. She was thinking of the smear on her nose, which she had washed off before lunch.
‘Sometimes they’ll come up to you together,’ continued Malati, ‘and grin more at each other than at you. At other times they’re so afraid that their friends will come up with a better “line” than they themselves can think of that they’ll actually take their life in their hands and come up to you alone. And what are their lines? Nine times out of ten it is “May I borrow your notes?”—perhaps tempered with a lukewarm, feeble-minded “Namaste”. What, incidentally, was the introductory line of the Potato Man?’
Lata kicked Malati.
‘Sorry—I meant the apple of your heart.’
‘What did he say?’ said Lata, almost to herself. When she tried to recall exactly how the conversation had begun, she realized that, although it had taken place just a few hours ago, it had already grown hazy in her mind. What remained, however, was the memory that her initial nervousness at the young man’s presence had ended in a sense of confused warmth: at least someone, if only a good-looking stranger, had understood that she had been bewildered and upset, and had cared enough to do something to lift her spirits.