A Suitable Boy

  ‘I see,’ said Rasheed.

  ‘Maybe after dinner?’ said Maan. ‘I’m not in the mood now with all these kids running around.’ He was afraid that they might start chanting ‘Saeeda Bai! Saeeda Bai!’ at the top of their lungs.

  Rasheed didn’t say anything for a few moments, then waved away a fly and said: ‘The only reason why I’m getting you to write these two letters again and again is that the way you draw the curve is too shallow. It should be more rounded. Like this—’ And he drew the letter ‘sheen’ very slowly.

  Maan could sense that Rasheed was not happy, that he in fact disapproved, but he did not know what to do about it. He could not bear to think that he would not hear from Saeeda Bai, and he feared that she might not write to him unless he wrote to her. In fact he wasn’t even sure that she had his postal address. Of course ‘c/o Abdur Rasheed, village Debaria, tehsil Salimpur, Distt Rudhia, P.P.’ would get to him, but Maan was not certain that Saeeda Bai was certain that it would.

  Since she could read nothing but Urdu, he would have to get an Urdu scribe to write his letter for him until he himself learned the script sufficiently well to be able to do so. And who other than Rasheed could or would help him by writing it, and—unless Saeeda Bai’s hand was exceptionally clear and careful—by reading out her reply to him when it came?

  Maan was staring down at the ground in his perplexity when he noticed that a huge crowd of flies had gathered around the spot where Baba had spat. They were ignoring the sherbet that Maan and Rasheed were drinking.

  How strange, he thought, and frowned.

  ‘What are you thinking of?’ said Rasheed, quite brusquely. ‘Once you can read and write the language you’ll be free. So do pay attention, Kapoor Sahib.’

  ‘Look at that,’ said Maan.

  ‘That’s odd. You’re not diabetic, are you?’ said Rasheed, no longer with sharpness but concern in his voice.

  ‘No,’ said Maan, surprised. ‘Why? That’s where Baba spat just now.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I see,’ said Rasheed. ‘He is. And the flies gather around his spittle because it’s sweet.’

  Maan looked over towards the old man, who was shaking his finger at one of the brats.

  ‘But he insists he’s in very good general health,’ said Rasheed, ‘and against all our advice, he still fasts every day during Ramazan. Last year it was in June, and he didn’t have a morsel of food or a drop of water from sunrise to sunset. And this year it’ll be at almost the same time of year. Long hot days. No one expects it of a man his age. But he won’t listen.’

  The heat had suddenly begun to get to Maan, but he didn’t know what to do about it. He was sitting under the neem tree, which was the coolest place out of doors. If he had been at home, he would have turned on the fan, collapsed on to his bed and stared at the ceiling as the blades went round and round. Here there was nothing to do but suffer. The sweat trickled down his face, and he tried to be grateful that flies didn’t settle upon it immediately.

  ‘It’s too hot!’ said Maan. ‘I don’t want to live.’

  ‘You should have a bath,’ said Rasheed.

  ‘Ah!’ said Maan.

  Rasheed went on: ‘I’ll go in and get some soap and tell the fellow to pump the water while you’re under the tap. It would have been too cold after dark last night, but now’s a good time. . . . Use that tap.’ He pointed to the pump directly in front of the house. ‘But you should put on your lungi while bathing.’

  There was a small, windowless room that jutted forward out of the house and Maan used this to change in. It was not part of the house proper but acted as a sort of shed. It contained spare parts for agricultural machinery and a few ploughs. Some spears and sticks stood in a corner. When Maan entered it there was as much expectation among the children as if an actor had gone backstage to emerge in a brilliant new costume. When he came out they discussed him critically.

  ‘Look at him, he looks so pale.’

  ‘He looks even more bald now.’

  ‘Lion, lion, without a tail!’

  All of them became very excited. One odious child of about seven called ‘Mr Biscuit’ made use of the clamour to aim a stone at a girl. The stone went hurtling through the air and hit her on the back of the head. She started screaming in pain and shock. Baba, jolted out of his recitation, got up from his charpoy and appraised the situation in an instant. Everyone was staring at Mr Biscuit, who was trying to appear nonchalant. Baba caught hold of Mr Biscuit’s ear and twisted it.

  ‘Haramzada—bastard—you dare to behave like the animal you are?’ cried the old man.

  Mr Biscuit began to blubber, and snot ran down from his nostrils. Baba dragged him by the ear to where he had been sitting, and slapped him so hard the boy almost went flying. Then, ignoring him, he sat down to his recitation again. But his concentration had been spoilt.

  Mr Biscuit sat stunned on the ground for a few minutes, then got up to perpetrate what further mischief he could. Meanwhile his victim had been taken back home by Rasheed; she was bleeding copiously from the back of her head, and crying her eyes out.

  Ignorant and brutal at the age of seven! This, thought Rasheed, is what the village does to you. Anger against his surroundings welled up within him.

  Maan had his bath under the scrutiny of the village children. The cool water poured generously out of the spout, pumped by a very vigorous middle-aged man with a friendly, square, deeply furrowed and wrinkled face. He showed no signs of tiring and appeared to enjoy being of service, continuing to pump water even after Maan had finished.

  Maan at last was cool and, therefore, at a truce with the world.

  8.6

  Maan did not eat much at lunch but praised the food a great deal, hoping that some of his praise would get through to the unseen woman or women of the house who had prepared it.

  A little after lunch, after they had washed their hands and were resting on the charpoys outside, a couple of visitors arrived at the house. One was Rasheed’s maternal uncle.

  This man was the elder brother of Rasheed’s late mother. He was a huge, kind bear of a man, with a pepper-and-salt stubble. He lived about ten miles away, and Rasheed had once run off and lived with him for a month after he had been beaten at home for half-throttling a fellow-schoolmate to death.

  Rasheed got up from the charpoy the instant he saw him. Then he said to Maan—the others were still out of earshot—‘The big man is my Mamu. The round one is known as the “guppi” in my mother’s village—he blathers on and on and tells ridiculous stories. We’re stuck.’

  By now the visitors had reached the cattle-shed.

  ‘Ah, Mamu, I didn’t know you were coming. How are you?’ said Rasheed in warm welcome. And he nodded at the guppi civilly.

  ‘Ah,’ said the Bear, and sat down heavily on the charpoy. He was a man of few words.

  The man of many words, his friend and travelling companion, also sat down and asked for a glass of water. Rasheed promptly went inside and got some sherbet.

  The guppi asked Maan a number of questions and ascertained quickly who, why, what and how he was. He then described to Maan a number of incidents that had occurred on their ten-mile journey. They had seen a snake, ‘as thick as my arm’ (Rasheed’s Mamu frowned in concentration, but did not contradict him); they had almost been blown off their feet by a sudden whirlwind; and the police had shot at them three times at the check-post just outside Salimpur.

  Rasheed’s Mamu merely mopped his brow and gasped gamely in the heat. Maan leaned forward, amazed by these unlikely adventures.

  Rasheed returned, bearing glasses of sherbet. He told them that his father was sleeping. The Bear nodded benevolently.

  The talkative one was asking Maan about his love life, and Maan was attempting weakly to fend off the questions.

  ‘People’s love lives are not very interesting,’ said Maan, sounding unconvincing even to himself.

  ‘How can you say that?’ said the guppi. ‘Every man’s love life is interesting. I
f he doesn’t have one, that’s interesting. If he has one, that’s interesting. And if he has two, that’s twice as interesting.’ He laughed delightedly at his sally. Rasheed looked abashed. Baba had gone inside his house already.

  Encouraged by the fact that he had not been immediately stifled, as he often was in his own village, the guppi went on:

  ‘But what would you know of love—of true love? You young men have not seen much. You may think that because you live in Brahmpur you have seen the world—or more of the world than we poor yokels see. But some of us yokels have also seen the world—and not just the world of Brahmpur, but of Bombay.’

  He paused, impressed by his own words, especially the entrancing word ‘Bombay’, and looked at his audience with pleasure. Several children had appeared in the last couple of minutes, drawn by the guppi’s magic. Whenever the guppi appeared they could be sure of a good story, and probably one that their parents would not want them to hear—involving ghosts or deadly violence or passionate love.

  A goat too had appeared, and was standing at the upper end of a cart, trying to graze on the leaves of a branch just overhead. With its crafty yellow eyes it stared at the leaves and strained its neck upwards.

  ‘When I was in Bombay,’ the round and reverberant guppi went on, ‘long before my fate changed and I had to return to this blessed countryside, I worked in a big shop, a very famous shop run by a mullah, and we would sell carpets to big people, all the very big people of Bombay. They would have so much money, they would take it in wads out of their bags and throw it down on the counter.’

  His eyes lit up as if at the memory. The children sat enthralled—or most of them anyway. Mr Biscuit, the seven-year-old horror, was occupied with the goat. Whenever it got near its goal, the leafy branch, Mr Biscuit would tilt the cart downwards, and the poor goat would now try to clamber up to the other end. So far it had not succeeded in eating a single leaf.

  ‘It’s a love story, I’m warning you in advance, so if you don’t want to listen to it, you can tell me to stop now,’ said the guppi in a formulary way. ‘Because once I’ve begun, I can’t stop it any more than one can stop the act of love itself.’

  Rasheed would have got up and left if he hadn’t been so conscious of his duty as a host. But Maan wanted to stay and hear the story.

  ‘Go on, go on,’ he said.

  Rasheed looked at Maan, as if to say: This man needs no encouragement. If you show any interest at all he’ll go on twice as long.

  Aloud he said to the guppi: ‘Of course, this is an eyewitness account as usual.’

  The guppi shot him a glance, at first suspicious, then placatory. He had just been about to say that he had seen the events he was about to recount with his very own eyes.

  ‘I saw these events with my very own eyes,’ he said.

  The goat started bleating piteously. The guppi shouted at the distracting Mr Biscuit: ‘Sit down, or I’ll feed you to that goat, your eyes first.’

  Mr Biscuit, horrified by such a graphic description of his fate, thought that the guppi must mean business, and sat down on the ground like any ordinary child.

  The guppi went on: ‘So we’d sell carpets to all the big people, and there were such beautiful women who would come to our shop that our eyes would water with emotion. The mullah in particular had a weakness for beauty, and whenever he saw a beautiful woman walking past our shop or about to enter it he would say: “Oh God! Why have you made such angels? Farishtas have come to earth to haunt us mortals.” We would all start laughing. He would get very cross and scold us: “When you’re tired of saying Bismillah on your knees you should praise the angels of God.”’

  The guppi paused for effect.

  ‘Well, one day—this happened before my very eyes—a beautiful woman called Vimla tried to start her car, which was parked near our shop. It wouldn’t start, so she got out. She started walking towards our shop. She was beautiful, so beautiful—that we were all entranced. One of us said: “The ground is shaking.” The mullah said: “She is so beautiful that if she looks at you, boils will break out all over your body.” But then—suddenly—’

  The guppi’s voice started trembling with the recollection.

  ‘Suddenly—from the other direction—and on the other side of the street—came a young Pathan, so tall and handsome that the mullah started praising God as excitedly as before: “As the Moon leaves the skies, the Sun approaches,” and so on.

  ‘They approached each other. Then the young Pathan boy crossed the road towards her—saying, “Please, please—” in an importunate voice and holding out a card that he had whipped out of his pocket. He showed it to her three times. She was reluctant to read it, but finally she took it and bent her head to read it. No sooner had she done this than the young Pathan embraced her like a bear and bit her cheek so hard that the blood streamed down. She screamed!’

  The guppi covered his face with his hands to ward off the awful image. Then he rallied and continued:

  ‘The mullah cried, “Quick, quick, lie down, no one has seen anything—no one must get mixed up in this.” But a man who was in his underwear on the roof of a nearby hotel saw it and cried, “Toba, toba!” He didn’t come down to help but he called the police. Within minutes the streets were sealed off, and there was no way out, no escape at all. Five jeeps rushed towards the Pathan from all directions. The Superintendent of Police was merciless and the policemen used all the force they could, but the Pathan was clinging to the girl so tightly that they could not separate his arms, which were locked around her waist. He had shouldered aside three men before they finally succeeded in knocking him out with the butt of a pistol and separating his hands with a crowbar.’

  The guppi paused for further effect before continuing. His audience was spellbound.

  ‘The whole of Bombay was outraged at this gunda-gardi, this hooliganism, and a case was quickly registered against him. Everyone said: “Be strict—or all the girls in Bombay will have their cheeks bitten, and then what will happen?” There was a huge court case. He was put in a cage in court. He rattled the bars with such fury that the courtroom shook. But he was found guilty, and a death sentence was passed. Then the judge said: “Do you want to see anyone before you are hanging breathlessly from the gallows? Do you want one last glimpse of your mother?” The boy said: “No—I’ve seen enough of her. I’ve been fed by her breasts and have urinated in her arms when I was a baby—why should I want to see her again?” Everyone was shocked. “Anyone else?” said the judge.

  ‘“Yes,” said the doomed man. “Yes. One person, and one person alone: that person, a single sight of whom made me give up all hope of life on earth and made me willing to die—that person who has given me a taste of the world to come, for she has sent me to paradise. I have two things to say to her. She can stand outside the bars, I inside—I will not even touch her—”

  ‘All the big people of Bombay, all the businessmen and ballishtahs stood up in court, turned to stone with the shock of his request. The girl’s family started to scream. “Never!” they screamed—“Our daughter will never speak to him.” The judge said: “I have said she can—and she must.” So she went into the courtroom, and everyone was hissing: “Behayaa—besharam—how shameless can you get in the very face of your own death.” But he only held the bars and laughed. It said in the papers also: He laughed.’

  The guppi drained his glass of sherbet and held it out to be refilled. Resurrecting the past accurately was a thirsty job. The children stared impatiently as his Adam’s apple moved up and down gulp after gulp. With a sigh he continued:

  ‘The young man held the bars of his cage and looked deeply into Vimla’s eyes. By God, it was as if he wanted to drink her soul out of her body. But she looked at him with contempt, holding her head up proudly, her once-beautiful cheek scarred and defiled. Finally he found his voice, and said: “I only want to say two things to you. First, no one will marry you now except an old and poor man . . . you have been marked as the one bitten b
y the Pathan. Second”—and here the young man’s voice broke and the tears started streaming down his face—“second, by God I didn’t know what happened to me when I did that to you. I lost my senses when I saw you, I never knew what I was doing—forgive me, forgive me! I have had hundreds of offers of marriage. I have refused them all—the most beautiful women. Till I saw you I never knew I had a companion of the soul.

  ‘“I will treat your scar as a mark of beauty and bathe it with my tears and shower kisses on it. I am London-returned and I have thirty-five thousand people in factories working for me and crores of rupees in wealth and I want to give it all to you. God is a witness between us—I never knew what I was doing—but now I am willing to die.”

  ‘Hearing this, the girl, who a minute ago could have killed him with her own hands, began to gasp as if she was ill with love, and threw herself towards the judge, begging him to spare the man, saying: “Spare him, spare him—I knew him for a long time, I begged him to bite me—” But the judge had given his sentence and said: “Impossible. Do not lie, or I will put you away.” Then in despair she took a knife out of her bag and put it to her throat and said to the whole court—the High Court judge and all the high ballishtahs and sollishtahs and all—“If he is killed, I die. I will write here that I committed suicide because of the sentence you passed.”

  ‘So they had to undo the sentence—what could they do? Then she begged that the marriage should take place at the boy’s place. The girl was a Punjabi, and there was such enmity towards the Pathan and his family that her parents would have killed her as well as the boy for revenge.’

  The guppi paused.

  ‘This is true love,’ he said, deeply moved by his narration, and leaned back on the charpoy, spent.

  Maan, despite himself, was enthralled. Rasheed looked at him, then at the enraptured children, and closed his eyes in mild contempt for all that had gone on. His large, taciturn Mamu, who hardly appeared to have been listening, patted his friend on the back and said:

  ‘Now Radio Jhutistan takes leave of its listeners.’ Then he switched off an imaginary knob near the guppi’s ear and clapped his hand over his mouth.