A Suitable Boy

  The young historian, in the affected tones of an official announcer, informed the audience: ‘The famous courtesan Sunil Patwardhan will now perform for us her exquisite rendering of the kathak dance. Lord Krishna is dancing with the milkmaids. “Come,” he says to the gopis, “come to me. What is there to fear?”’

  ‘Tha-tha-thai-thai!’ said a drunken physicist, imitating the sound of the dance steps.

  ‘Not courtesan, you lout, artiste!’

  ‘Artiste!’ said the historian, prolonging the last vowel.

  ‘Come on, Sunil—we’re waiting.’

  And Sunil, obliging fellow that he was, danced a few clumpish steps of quasi-kathak while his friends rolled around with laughter. He simpered coyly as he twirled his chubby bulk about the room, knocking a book down here and spilling someone’s drink there. He then became completely engrossed in what he was doing, and followed his rendition of Krishna and the gopis—in which he played both parts—with an impromptu scene representing the Vice-Chancellor of Brahmpur University (a notorious and indiscriminate womanizer) oilily greeting the poet Sarojini Naidu when she came as the chief guest at the Annual Day ceremonies. Some of his friends, helpless with laughter, begged him to stop, and others, equally helpless, begged him to dance forever.

  4.7

  Into this scene walked a tall, white-haired gentleman, Dr Durrani. He was mildly surprised to see what was going on inside. Sunil froze in mid-dance, indeed in mid-stance—but then went forward to greet his unexpected guest.

  Dr Durrani was not as surprised as he should have been; a mathematical problem was occupying the larger part of his cerebrum. He had decided to walk over and discuss it with his young colleague. In fact it had been Sunil who had given him the impetus for his idea in the first place.

  ‘Er, I, have I, er, chosen a bad time—er—?’ he asked in his maddeningly slow voice.

  ‘Well, no—not, er, exactly—’ said Sunil. He liked Dr Durrani and was somewhat in awe of him. Dr Durrani was one of the two Fellows of the Royal Society that Brahmpur University could boast of, the other being Professor Ramaswami, the well-known physicist.

  Dr Durrani did not even notice that Sunil was imitating his manner of speech; Sunil himself was still in an imitative mode after his kathak performance, and only noticed it himself after he had done it.

  ‘Er, well, Patwardhan, er, I do feel that, perhaps, I am, er, impinging?’ continued Dr Durrani. He had a strong square face, with a handsome white moustache, but scrunched up his eyes for punctuation every time he said ‘er’. This syllable also caused his eyebrows and the lower part of the skin on his forehead to move up and down.

  ‘No, no, Dr Durrani, of course not. Please do join us.’ Sunil led Dr Durrani to the centre of the room, planning to introduce him to the other guests. Dr Durrani and Sunil Patwardhan were a study in physical contrast despite the fact that they were both rather tall.

  ‘Well, if you are, er, certain, you know, that I’m not going to, er, er, be in the way. You see,’ went on Dr Durrani more fluently but just as slowly, ‘what has been troubling me for the last day or so is this question of what you might call, er, super-operations. I—well, I—you see, I, um, thought that on the basis of all that, we could come up with several quite surprising series: you see, er—’

  Such was the force of Dr Durrani’s innocent involvement in his magical world, and so uncensorious was he about the indecorous high jinks of his juniors, that they did not seem greatly put out by the fact that he had intruded on their evening.

  ‘Now you see, Patwardhan,’—Dr Durrani treated the whole world on terms of gentle distance—‘it isn’t just a question of 1, 3, 6, 10, 15—which would be a, er, trivial series based on the, er, primary combinative operation—or even 1, 2, 6, 24, 120—which would be based on the secondary combinative operation. It could go much, er, much further. The tertiary combinative operation would result in 1, 2, 9, 262144, and then 5 to the power of 262144. And of course that only, er, takes us to the fifth term in the, er, third such operation. Where will the, er, where will the steepness end?’ He looked both excited and distressed.

  ‘Ah,’ said Sunil, his whisky-rich mind not quite on the problem.

  ‘But of course what I am saying is, er, quite obvious. I didn’t mean to, er, er, trouble you with that. But I did think that I, er,’—he looked around the room, his eye alighting on a cuckoo clock on the wall—‘that I would, well, pick your brains on something that might be quite, er, quite unintuitive. Now take 1, 4, 216, 72576 and so on. Does that surprise you?’

  ‘Well—’ said Sunil.

  ‘Ah!’ said Dr Durrani, ‘I thought not.’ He looked approvingly at his younger colleague, whose brains he often picked in this manner. ‘Well, well, well! Now shall I tell you what the impetus, the, er, catalyst, for all this, was?’

  ‘Oh, please do,’ said Sunil.

  ‘It was a, er, a remark—a very, er, perceptive remark of yours.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘You said, apropos the Pergolesi Lemma, “The concept will form a tree.” It was a, er, a brilliant comment—I never thought of it in those terms before.’

  ‘Oh—’ said Sunil.

  Haresh winked at him, but Sunil frowned. Making deliberate fun of Dr Durrani was lese-majesty in his eyes.

  ‘And indeed,’ went on Dr Durrani generously, ‘though I was, er, blind to it at the time’—he scrunched up his deep-set eyes almost into nothingness by way of unconscious illustration—‘it, well, it does form a tree. An unprunable one.’

  He saw in his mind’s eye a huge, proliferating, and—worst of all—uncontrollable banyan tree spreading over a flat landscape, and continued, with increasing distress and excitement: ‘Because whatever, er, method of super-operating is chosen—that is, type 1 or type 2—it cannot, er, it cannot definitely be applied at each, er, at each stage. To choose a particular, well, clumping of types may, may . . . er, yes, it may indeed prune the branches but it will be too, er, arbitrary. The alternative will not yield a, er, consistent algorithm. So this, er, question arose in my, er, mind: how can one generalize it as one moves to higher operations?’ Dr Durrani, who tended to stoop slightly, now straightened up. Clearly, action was required in the face of these terrible uncertainties.

  ‘What conclusion did you come to?’ said Sunil, tottering a bit.

  ‘Oh, but that is just it. I didn’t. Of course, er, super-operation n+1 has to act vis-à-vis super-operation n as n acts to n–1. That goes without saying. What troubles me is, er, the question of iteration. Does the same sub-operation, the same, er, sub-super-operation, if I might call it that’—he smiled at the thought of his terminology—‘does it, er—would it—’

  The sentence was left unfinished as Professor Durrani looked around the room, pleasingly mystified.

  ‘Do join us for dinner, Dr Durrani,’ said Sunil. ‘It’s open house. And may I offer you something to drink?’

  ‘Oh, no, no, er, no,’ said Dr Durrani kindly. ‘You young people go ahead. Don’t mind me.’

  Haresh, suddenly thinking of Bhaskar, approached Dr Durrani and said, ‘Excuse me, Sir, but I wonder if I might force a very bright young man on to your attention. I think he would very much enjoy meeting you—and I hope you would enjoy meeting him.’

  Dr Durrani looked inquiringly at Haresh but did not say anything. What did young people have to do with anything? he wondered. (Or people, for that matter.)

  ‘He was talking of the powers of ten the other day,’ said Haresh, ‘and he regretted that neither in English nor in Hindi is there a word for ten to the power of four or ten to the power of eight.’

  ‘Yes, er, well, it is a great pity,’ said Dr Durrani with some feeling. ‘Of course, in the accounts of Al-Biruni one finds. . . .’

  ‘He seemed to feel that something should be done about it.’

  ‘How old is this young man?’ said Dr Durrani, quite interested.

  ‘Nine.’

  Dr Durrani stooped once more in order to put himself on talk
ing terms with Haresh. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well, er, er, send him along. You know where I, er, live,’ he added, and turned to go.

  Since neither Haresh nor Dr Durrani had ever seen each other before, this was unlikely. But Haresh thanked him, very pleased to be able to put two like minds into contact with each other. He did not feel uncomfortable that he might be encroaching on the time and energies of the great man. In fact the thought did not even occur to him.

  4.8

  Pran, who dropped in a bit later, was not an old Stephanian. He had been invited by Sunil as a friend and colleague. He missed seeing Dr Durrani, with whom he had a nodding acquaintance, and missed hearing about Bhaskar. In common with almost everyone in the family, he was a little in awe of his nephew, who seemed in certain respects just like any other child—fond of flying kites, fond of playing truant from school, and affectionate most of all towards his grandmothers.

  ‘Why have you come so late?’ asked Sunil a little belligerently. ‘And why is Savita not here? We were trusting her to leaven our cloddish company. Or is she walking ten paces behind you? No—I don’t see her anywhere. Did she think she’d cramp our style?’

  ‘I’ll answer the two questions worth answering,’ said Pran. ‘One—Savita decided she was feeling too tired; she begs you to excuse her. Two—I’m late because I’ve had dinner before coming. I know how things run in your house. Dinner isn’t served until midnight—if you remember to serve it at all—and even then it’s inedible. We usually have to get kababs at some wayside stall to fill ourselves up on the way home. You should get married yourself, you know, Sunil—then your household wouldn’t run so haphazardly. Besides, there would be someone to darn those atrocious socks. Anyway, why don’t you have your shoes on?’

  Sunil sighed. ‘That’s because Haresh decided he needed two pairs of shoes for himself. “My need is greater than thine.” There they are in the corner, and I know I’ll never see them again. Oh, but you two haven’t met,’ said Sunil, talking now in Hindi. ‘Haresh Khanna—Pran Kapoor. Both of you have studied English literature, and I’ve never met anyone who knows more about it than the one, or less about it than the other.’

  The two men shook hands.

  ‘Well,’ said Pran with a smile. ‘Why do you need two pairs of shoes?’

  ‘This fellow delights in creating mysteries,’ said Haresh, ‘but there’s a simple explanation. I’m using it as a sample to have another pair made.’

  ‘For yourself?’

  ‘Oh, no. I work with CLFC and I’m in Brahmpur for a few days on work.’

  Haresh assumed that the abbreviations he often used were entirely familiar to everyone else.

  ‘CLFC?’ asked Pran.

  ‘Cawnpore Leather & Footwear Company.’

  ‘Oh. So you work in the shoe trade,’ said Pran. ‘That’s a far cry from English literature.’

  ‘All I am living by is with the awl,’ said Haresh lightly, and offered no more by way of explanation and misquotation.

  ‘My brother-in-law works in the shoe trade as well,’ said Pran. ‘Perhaps you’ve met him. He’s a trader in the Brahmpur Shoe Mart.’

  ‘I may have,’ said Haresh, ‘though because of the strike not all the traders have their stalls open. What’s his name?’

  ‘Kedarnath Tandon.’

  ‘Kedarnath Tandon! But of course I know him. He’s been showing me around all sorts of places—’ Haresh was very pleased. ‘In fact, it’s because of him in a way that Sunil has lost his shoes. So you’re his sala—sorry, I mean Veena’s brother. Are you the older one or the younger one?’

  Sunil Patwardhan had loomed back into the conversation. ‘The elder,’ he said. ‘The younger one—Maan—was invited too, but his evenings nowadays are otherwise occupied.’

  ‘Well, tell me,’ said Pran, turning determinedly towards Sunil, ‘is there some special occasion for this party? It’s not your birthday, is it?’

  ‘No it’s not. And you’re not very good at changing the subject. But I’ll let you wriggle out of this one because I have a question for you, Dr Kapoor. One of my best students has been suffering because of you. Why were you so harsh—you and your disciplinary committee—what do they call it? student welfare committee?—with the boys who indulged in a little high spirits over Holi?’

  ‘A little high spirits?’ exclaimed Pran. ‘Those girls looked like they had been dyed in red and blue ink. It’s lucky they didn’t catch pneumonia. And really, there was a lot of, you know, unnecessary rubbing of colour here and there.’

  ‘But throwing the boys out of their hostels and threatening them with expulsion?’

  ‘Do you call that harsh?’ said Pran.

  ‘Of course. At the time that they’re preparing for their final exams?’

  ‘They certainly weren’t preparing for their exams on Holi when they decided—it seems that a few of them had even taken bhang—to storm the Women’s Hostel and lock up the warden in the common room.’

  ‘Oh, that steel-hearted bitch!’ said Sunil dismissively, then burst out laughing at the image of the women’s warden locked up, banging perhaps on the carom board in frustration. The warden was a draconian if rather good-looking woman who kept her charges on a strict leash, wore lots of make-up, and glared at any of the girls who did the same.

  ‘Come on, Sunil, she’s quite attractive—I think you have a soft spot for her yourself.’

  Sunil snorted at the ridiculous idea.

  ‘I bet she asked for them to be expelled immediately. Or rusticated. Or electrocuted. Like those Russian spies in America the other day. The trouble is that no one remembers their own student days once they are on the other side.’

  ‘What would you have done in her place?’ asked Pran. ‘Or in our place for that matter? The girls’ parents would have been up in arms if we had taken no action. And, quite apart from the question of such repercussions, I don’t think the punishment was unfair. A couple of members of the committee wanted them expelled.’

  ‘Who? The Proctor?’

  ‘Well—a couple of members,’ said Pran.

  ‘Come on, come on, don’t be secretive, you’re among friends—’ said Sunil, putting a broad arm around Pran’s gangly shoulders.

  ‘No, really, Sunil, I’ve said too much already.’

  ‘You, of course, voted for leniency.’

  Pran rebutted the friendly sarcasm seriously. ‘As it happens, yes, I did suggest leniency. Besides, I know how things can get out of hand. I thought of what happened when Maan decided to play Holi with Moby-Dick.’ The incident with Professor Mishra was by now notorious throughout the university.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the physicist who had wandered over, ‘what’s happened to your readership?’

  Pran sucked in his breath slowly. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘But it’s been months that the post has been lying open.’

  ‘I know,’ said Pran. ‘It’s even been advertised, but they don’t seem to want to set a date for the selection committee to meet.’

  ‘It’s not right. I’ll talk to someone at the Brahmpur Chronicle,’ said the young physicist.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Sunil enthusiastically. ‘It has come to our knowledge that despite the chronic understaffing in the English Department of our renowned university and the availability of a more than suitable local candidate for the post of reader which has been lying unfilled now for an unconscionable length of time—’

  ‘Please—’ said Pran, not at all calmly. ‘Just let things take their natural course. Don’t get the papers involved in all this.’

  Sunil looked meditative for a while, as if he was working something out. ‘All right, all right, have a drink!’ he said suddenly. ‘Why don’t you have a drink in your hand?’

  ‘First he grills me for half an hour without offering me a drink, then he asks me why I don’t have one. I’ll have whisky—with water,’ said Pran, in a less agitated tone.

  As the evening went on, the talk of the party turned to news in the t
own, to India’s consistently poor performance in international cricket (‘I doubt we will ever win a Test match,’ said Pran with confident pessimism), to politics in Purva Pradesh and the world at large, and to the peculiarities of various teachers, both at Brahmpur University and—for the Stephanians—at St Stephen’s in Delhi. To the mystification of the non-Stephanians, they participated in chorus with a querulous: ‘In my class I will say one thing: you may not understand, you may not want to understand, but you will understand!’

  Dinner was served, and it was just as rudimentary as Pran had predicted. Sunil, for all his good-natured bullying of his friends, was himself bullied by an old servant whose affection for his master (whom he had served since Sunil was a child) was only equalled by his unwillingness to do any work.

  Over dinner there was a discussion—somewhat incoherent because some of the participants were either belligerent or erratic with whisky—about the economy and the political situation. Making complete sense of it was difficult, but a part of it went like this:

  ‘Look, the only reason why Nehru became PM was because he was Gandhi’s favourite. Everyone knows that. All he knows how to do is to make those bloody long speeches that never go anywhere. He never seems to take a stand on anything. Just think. Even in the Congress Party, where Tandon and his cronies are pushing him to the wall, what does he do? He just goes along with it, and we have to—’

  ‘But what can he do? He’s not a dictator.’

  ‘Do you mind not interrupting? I mean to say, may I make my point? After that you can say whatever you want for as long as you want. So what does Nehru do? I mean to say, what does he do? He sends a message to some society that he’s been asked to address and he says, “We often feel a sense of darkness.” Darkness—who cares about his darkness or what’s going on inside his head? He may have a handsome head and that red rose may look pretty in his buttonhole, but what we need is someone with a stout heart, not a sensitive one. It’s his duty as Prime Minister to give a lead to the country, and he’s just not got the strength of character to do it.’