Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

After shaving and bathing he donned a crisp white kurta-pyjama and made his way a little shamefacedly towards Saeeda Bai’s house. If he had been as drunk as his mother seemed to think he had been, he supposed that he must have been equally so outside Saeeda Bai’s gate, where he had a vague sense of having gone.

He arrived at Saeeda Bai’s house. He was admitted. Apparently, he was expected.

On the way up the stairs, he glanced at himself in the mirror. Unlike before, he now looked at himself quite critically. A white, embroidered cap covered his head; he took it off and surveyed his prematurely balding temples before putting it on again, thinking ruefully that perhaps it was his baldness that Saeeda Bai did not like. But what can I do about it? he thought.

When she heard his step on the corridor, Saeeda Bai called out in a welcoming voice, ‘Come in, come in, Dagh Sahib. Your footsteps sound regular today. Let us hope that your heart is beating as regularly.’

Saeeda Bai had slept over the question of Maan and had concluded that something had to be done. Though she had to admit to herself that he was good for her, he was getting to be too demanding of her time and energy, too obsessively attached, for her to handle easily.

When Maan told her about his scene with his father, and that he had been thrown out of the house, she was very upset. Prem Nivas, where she sang regularly at Holi and had once sung at Dussehra, had become a regular fixture of her annual calendar. She had to consider the question of her income. Equally importantly, she did not want her young friend to remain in trouble with his father. ‘Where do you plan to go?’ she asked him.

‘Why, nowhere!’ exclaimed Maan. ‘My father has delusions of grandeur. He thinks that because he can strip a million landlords of their inheritance, he can equally easily order his son about. I am going to stay in Brahmpur — with friends.’ A sudden thought struck him. ‘Why not here?’ he asked.

‘Toba, toba!’ cried Saeeda Bai, putting her hands to her shocked ears.

‘Why should I be separated from you? From the town where you live?’ He leaned towards her and began to embrace her. ‘And your cook makes such delicious shami kababs,’ he added.

Saeeda Bai might have been pleased by Maan’s ardour, but she was thinking hard. ‘I know,’ she said, disengaging herself. ‘I know what you must do.’

‘Mmh,’ said Maan, attempting to engage himself again.

‘Do sit still and listen, Dagh Sahib,’ said Saeeda Bai in a coquettish voice. ‘You want to be close to me, to understand me, don’t you?’

‘Yes, yes, of course.’

‘Why, Dagh Sahib?’

‘Why?’ asked Maan incredulously.

‘Why?’ persisted Saeeda Bai.

‘Because I love you.’

‘What is love — this ill-natured thing that makes enemies even of friends?’

This was too much for Maan, who was in no mood to get involved in abstract speculations. A sudden, horrible thought struck him: ‘Do you want me to go as well?’

Saeeda Bai was silent, then she tugged her sari, which had slipped down slightly, back over her head. Her kohl-blackened eyes seemed to look into Maan’s very soul.

‘Dagh Sahib, Dagh Sahib!’ she rebuked him.

Maan was instantly repentant, and hung his head. ‘I just feared that you might want to test our love by distance,’ he said.

‘That would cause me as much pain as you,’ she told him sadly. ‘But what I was thinking was quite different.’

She was silent, then played a few notes on the harmonium and said:

‘Your Urdu teacher, Rasheed, is leaving for his village in a few days. He will be gone for a month. I don’t know how to arrange for an Arabic teacher for Tasneem or an Urdu teacher for you in his absence. And I feel that in order to understand me truly, to appreciate my art, to resonate to my passion, you must learn my language, the language of the poetry I recite, the ghazals I sing, the very thoughts I think.’

‘Yes, yes,’ whispered Maan, enraptured.

‘So you must go to the village with your Urdu teacher for a while — for a month.’

‘What?’ cried Maan, who felt that another glass of water had been flung in his face.

Saeeda Bai was apparently so upset by her own solution to the problem — it was the obvious solution, she murmured, biting her lower lip sadly, but she did not know how she could bear being separated from him, etc. — that in a few minutes it was Maan who was consoling her rather than she him. It was the only way out of the problem, he assured her: even if he had nowhere to live in the village, he would sleep in the open, he would speak — think — write — the language of her soul, he would send her letters written in the Urdu of an angel. Even his father would be proud of him.

‘You have made me see that there is no other way,’ said Saeeda Bai at length, letting herself be convinced gradually.

Maan noticed that the parakeet, who was in the room with them, was giving him a cynical look. He frowned.

‘When is Rasheed leaving?’

‘Tomorrow.’

Maan went pale. ‘But that only leaves tonight!’ he cried, his heart sinking. His courage failed him. ‘No — I can’t go — I can’t leave you.’

‘Dagh Sahib, if you are faithless to your own logic, how can I believe you will be faithful to me?’

‘Then I must spend this evening here. It will be our last night together in a — in a month.’

A month? Even as he said the word, his mind rebelled at the thought. He refused to accept it.

‘It will not work this evening,’ said Saeeda Bai in a practical tone, thinking of her commitments.

‘Then I won’t go,’ cried Maan. ‘I can’t. How can I? Anyway, we haven’t consulted Rasheed.’

‘Rasheed will be honoured to give you hospitality. He respects your father very much — no doubt because of his skill as a woodcutter — and, of course, he respects you very much — no doubt because of your skill as a calligrapher.’

‘I must see you tonight,’ insisted Maan. ‘I must. What woodcutter?’ he added, frowning.

Saeeda Bai sighed. ‘It is very difficult to cut down a banyan tree, Dagh Sahib, especially one that has been rooted so long in the soil of this province. But I can hear your father’s impatient axe on the last of its trunks. Soon it will be torn from the earth. The snakes will be driven from its roots and the termites burned with its rotten wood. But what will happen to the birds and monkeys who sang or chattered in its branches? Tell me that, Dagh Sahib. This is how things stand with us today.’ Then, seeing Maan look crestfallen, she added, with another sigh: ‘Come at one o’clock in the morning. I will tell your friend the watchman to make the Shahenshah’s entry a triumphal one.’

Maan felt that she might be laughing at him. But the thought of seeing her tonight cheered him up instantly, even if he knew she was merely sweetening a bitter pill.

‘Of course, I can’t promise anything,’ Saeeda Bai went on. ‘If he tells you I am asleep, you must not make a scene or wake up the neighbourhood.’

It was Maan’s turn to sigh:

‘If Mir so loudly goes on weeping,

How can his neighbour go on sleeping?’

But, as it happened, everything worked out well. Abdur Rasheed agreed to house Maan in his village and to continue to teach him Urdu. Mahesh Kapoor, who had been afraid that Maan might attempt to defy him by staying in Brahmpur, was not altogether displeased that he would not be going to Banaras, for he knew what Maan did not — that the cloth business was doing pretty well without him. Mrs Mahesh Kapoor (though she would miss him) was glad that he would be in the charge of a strict and sober teacher and away from ‘that’. Maan did at least receive the ecstatic sop of a last passionate night with Saeeda Bai. And Saeeda Bai heaved a sigh of relief tinged only slightly with regret when morning came.