Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘Yes, yes, all right, all right,’ said Maan shortly, sounding for a second remarkably like his father. He tried again. The Urdu alphabet, he felt, was difficult, multiform, fussy, elusive, unlike either the solid Hindi or the solid English script.

‘I can’t do this. It looks beautiful on the printed page, but to write it—’

‘Try again. Don’t be impatient.’ Rasheed took the bamboo pen from his hand, dipped it in the inkwell, and wrote a perfect, dark-blue ‘meem’. He then wrote another below it: the letters were identical, as two letters rarely are.

‘What does it matter, anyway?’ asked Maan, looking up from the sloping desk at which he was sitting, cross-legged, on the floor. ‘I want to read Urdu and to write it, not to practise calligraphy. Do I have to do this?’ He reflected that he was asking for permission as he used to when he was a child. Rasheed was no older than he was, but had taken complete control of him in his role as a teacher.

‘Well, you have put yourself in my hands, and I don’t want you to start on shaky foundations. So what would you like to read now?’ Rasheed inquired with a slight smile, hoping that Maan’s answer would not be the predictable one once more.

‘Ghazals,’ said Maan unhesitatingly. ‘Mir, Ghalib, Dagh. . ’

‘Yes, well—’ Rasheed said nothing for a while. There was tension in his eyes at the thought of having to teach ghazals to Maan shortly before going over passages of the Holy Book with Tasneem.

‘So what do you say?’ said Maan. ‘Why don’t we start today?’

‘That would be like teaching a baby to run the marathon,’ Rasheed responded after a few seconds, having found an analogy ridiculous enough to suit his dismay. ‘Eventually, of course, you will be able to. But for now, just try that meem again.’

Maan put the pen down and stood up. He knew that Saeeda Bai was paying Rasheed, and he sensed that Rasheed needed the money. He had nothing against his teacher; in a way he liked his conscientiousness. But he rebelled against his attempt to impose a new infancy on him. What Rasheed was pointing out to him was the first step on an endless and intolerably tedious road; at this rate it would be years before he would be able to read even those ghazals that he knew by heart. And decades before he could pen the love letters he yearned to write. Yet Saeeda Bai had made a compulsory half-hour lesson a day with Rasheed ‘the little bitter foretaste’ that would whet his appetite for her company.

The whole thing was so cruelly erratic, however, thought Maan. Sometimes she would see him, sometimes not, just as it suited her. He had no sense of what to expect, and it ruined his concentration. And so here he had to sit in a cool room on the ground floor of his beloved’s house with his back hunched over a pad with sixty aliphs and forty zaals and twenty misshapen meems, while occasionally a few magical notes from the harmonium, a phrase from the sarangi, a strain of a thumri floated down the inner balcony and filtered through the door to frustrate both his lesson and him.

Maan never enjoyed being entirely by himself at the best of times, but these evenings, when his lesson was over, if word came through Bibbo or Ishaq that Saeeda Bai preferred to be alone, he felt crazy with unhappiness and frustration. Then, if Firoz and Imtiaz were not at home, and if family life appeared, as it usually did, unbearably bland and tense and pointless, Maan would fall in with his latest acquaintances, the Rajkumar of Marh and his set, and lose his sorrows and his money in gambling and drink.

‘Look, if you aren’t in the mood for a lesson today. . ’ Rasheed’s voice was kinder than Maan had expected, though there was rather a sharp expression on his wolf-like face.

‘No, no, that’s fine. Let’s go on. It’s just a question of self-control.’ Maan sat down again.

‘Indeed it is,’ said Rasheed, reverting to his former tone of voice. Self-control, it struck him, was what Maan needed even more than perfect meems. ‘Why have you got yourself trapped in a place like this?’ he wanted to ask Maan. ‘Isn’t it pathetic that you should be sacrificing your dignity for a person of Saeeda Begum’s profession?’

Perhaps all this was present in his three crisp words. At any rate, Maan suddenly felt like confiding in him.

‘You see, it’s like this—’ began Maan. ‘I have a weak will, and when I fall into bad company—’ He stopped. What on earth was he saying? And how would Rasheed know what he was talking about? And why, even if he did, should he care?

But Rasheed appeared to understand. ‘When I was younger,’ he said, ‘I — who now consider myself truly sober — would spend my time beating people up. My grandfather used to do so in our village, and he was a well-respected man, so I thought that beating people up was what made people look up to him. There were about five or six of us, and we would egg each other on. We’d just go up to some schoolfellow, who might be wandering innocently along, and slap him hard across the face. What I would never have dared to do alone, I did without any hesitation in company. But, well, I don’t any more. I’ve learned to follow another voice, to be alone and to understand things — maybe to be alone and to be misunderstood.’

To Maan this sounded like the advice of a good angel; or perhaps a risen one. In his imagination’s eye he saw the Rajkumar and Rasheed struggling for his soul. One was coaxing him towards hell with five poker cards, one beating him towards paradise with a quill. He botched another meem before asking:

‘And is your grandfather still alive?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Rasheed, frowning. ‘He sits on a cot in the shade and reads the Quran Sharif all day, and chases the village children away when they disturb him. And soon he will try to chase the officers of the law away too, because he doesn’t like your father’s plans.’

‘So you’re zamindars?’ Maan was surprised.

Rasheed thought this over before saying: ‘My grandfather was, before he divided his wealth among his sons. And so is my father and so is my, well, my uncle. As for myself—’ He paused, appeared to look over Maan’s page, then continued, without finishing his previous sentence, ‘Well, who am I to set myself up in judgement in these matters? They are very happy, naturally, to keep things as they are. But I have lived in the village almost all my life, and I have seen the whole system. I know how it works. The zamindars — and my family is not so extraordinary as to be an exception to this — the zamindars do nothing but make their living from the misery of others; and they try to force their sons into the same ugly mould as themselves.’ Here Rasheed paused, and the area around the corners of his mouth tightened. ‘If their sons want to do anything else, they make life miserable for them too,’ he continued. ‘They talk a great deal about family honour, but they have no sense of honour except to gratify the promises of pleasure they have made to themselves.’

He was silent for a second, as if hesitating; then went on:

‘Some of the most respected of landlords do not even keep their word, they are so petty. You might find this hard to believe but I was virtually offered a job here in Brahmpur as the curator of the library of one such great man, but when I got to the grand house I was told — well, anyway, all this is irrelevant. The main fact is that the system of landlords isn’t good for the villagers, it isn’t good for the countryside as a whole, it isn’t good for the country, and until it goes. . ’ The sentence remained unfinished. Rasheed was pressing his fingertips to his forehead, as if he was in pain.

This was a far cry from meem, but Maan listened with sympathy to the young tutor, who appeared to speak out of some terrible pressure, not merely of circumstances. Only a few minutes earlier he had been counselling care, concentration, and moderation for Maan.