Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘I felt like crying when I read the poem. They must be so proud of him. So proud.’

‘Hello, Arun, where’s Meenakshi?’

Lata turned around and saw Arun’s rather displeased expression. It was his friend Billy Irani. This was the third time someone had spoken to him with the sole intention of finding out where his wife was. He looked around the room for her orange sari, and spied her near the Kakoli crowd.

‘There she is, Billy, near Kuku’s nest. If you want to meet her, I’ll walk over with you and detach her,’ he said.

Lata wondered for a second what her friend Malati would have made of all this. She attached herself to Arun as if to a life raft, and floated across to where Kakoli was standing. Somehow or other Mrs Rupa Mehra, as well as an old Marwari gentleman clad in a dhoti, had infiltrated the crowd of bright young things.

The old gentleman, unconscious of the gilded youth surrounding him, was saying, rather fussily, to Hans:

‘Ever since the year 1933 I have been drinking the juice of bitter gourds. You know bitter gourd? It is our famous Indian vegetable, called karela. It looks like this’—he gesticulated elongatedly—‘and it is green, and ribbed.’

Hans looked mystified. His informant continued:

‘Every week my servant takes a seer of bitter gourd, and from the skin only, mark you, he will make juice. Each seer will yield one jam jar of juice.’ His eyes squinted in concentration. ‘What they do with the rest I do not care.’

He made a dismissive gesture.

‘Yes?’ said Hans politely. ‘That makes me so interested.’

Kakoli had begun to giggle. Mrs Rupa Mehra was looking deeply interested. Arun caught Meenakshi’s eye and frowned. Bloody Marwari, he was thinking. Trust them to make a fool of themselves in front of foreigners.

Sweetly oblivious of Arun’s disapproval, the gourd-proponent continued:

‘Then every morning for my breakfast he will give me one sherry glass or liqueur glass — so much — of this juice. Every day since 1933. And I have no sugar problems. I can eat sweetmeats without anxiety. My dermatology is also very good, and all bowel movements are very satisfactory.’

As if to prove the point he bit into a gulab-jamun which was dripping with syrup.

Mrs Rupa Mehra, fascinated, said: ‘Only the skin?’ If this was true, diabetes need no longer interpose itself between her palate and her desires.

‘Yes,’ said the man fastidiously. ‘Only the skin, like I have said. The rest is a superfluity. Beauty of bitter gourd is only skin-deep.’

‘Enjoying yourself?’ Jock Mackay asked Basil Cox as they wandered out on to the verandah.

‘Well, yes, rather,’ said Basil Cox, resting his whisky precariously on the white cast-iron railing. He felt light-headed, almost as if he wanted to balance on the railings himself. The fragrance of gardenias wafted across the lawn.

‘First time I’ve seen you at the Chatterjis. Patricia’s looking ravishing.’

‘Thanks. . she is, isn’t she? I can never predict when she’s going to have a good time. Do you know, when I had to come out to India, she was most unwilling. She even, well. . ’

Basil, moving his thumb gently across his lower lip, looked out into the garden, where a few mellow golden globes lit up the underside of a huge laburnum tree covered with grape-like clusters of yellow flowers. There appeared to be a hut of sorts under the tree.

‘But you’re enjoying it here, are you?’

‘I suppose so. . Puzzling sort of place, though. . Of course, I’ve been here less than a year.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, what’s that bird for instance that was singing a moment ago — pu-puuuuuu-pu! pu-puuuuu-pu! higher and higher. It certainly isn’t a cuckoo and I rather wish it was. Disconcerting. And I find all these lakhs and crores and annas and pice quite confusing still. I have to recalculate things in my head. I suppose I’ll get used to it all with time.’ From the expression on Basil Cox’s face it didn’t look likely. Twelve pence to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound was infinitely more logical than four pice to the anna and sixteen annas to the rupee.

‘Well, it is a cuckoo, as a matter of fact,’ said Jock Mackay, ‘it’s the hawk cuckoo — or brainfever bird. . didn’t you know that? It’s hard to believe, but I’ve got so used to it that I miss it when I’m back home on leave. The song of the birds I don’t mind at all, what I can’t abide is the dreadful music Indian singers make. . awful wailing stuff. . But do you know the question that disconcerted me most of all when I first came here twenty years ago and saw all these beautiful, elegantly dressed women?’ Jock Mackay cheerfully and confidingly jerked his head towards the drawing room. ‘How do you fuck in a sari?’

Basil Cox made a sudden movement, and his drink fell over into a flower bed. Jock Mackay looked faintly amused.

‘Well,’ said Basil Cox, rather annoyed, ‘did you find out?’

‘Everyone makes his own discoveries sooner or later,’ said Jock Mackay in an enigmatic manner. ‘But it’s a charming country on the whole,’ he continued expansively. ‘By the end of the Raj they were so busy slitting each other’s throats that they left ours unslit. Lucky.’ He sipped his drink.

‘Well, there doesn’t seem to be any resentment — quite the opposite, if anything,’ said Basil Cox after a while, looking over into the flower bed. ‘But I wonder what people like the Chatterjis really think of us. . After all, we’re still quite a presence in Calcutta. We still run things here — commercially speaking, of course.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry if I were you. What people think or don’t think is never very interesting,’ said Jock Mackay. ‘Horses, now, I often wonder what they’re thinking. . ’

‘Well, I had dinner with their son-in-law the other day — yesterday, as a matter of fact — Arun Mehra, he works with us — oh, of course, you know Arun — and suddenly his brother tumbles in, drunk as a lord and singing away — and reeking of some fearsome Shimsham fire-water — well, I’d never in a hundred years have guessed that Arun had a brother like that. And dressed in crumpled pyjamas!’

‘No, it is puzzling,’ agreed Jock Mackay. ‘I knew an old ICS chap, Indian, but pukka enough, who, when he retired, renounced everything, became a sadhu and was never heard of again. And he was a married man with a couple of grown-up children.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. But a charming people, I’d say: face-flattering, back-biting, name-dropping, all-knowing, self-praising, law-mongering, power-worshipping, road-hogging, spittle-hawking. . There were a few more items to my litany once, but I’ve forgotten them.’

‘You sound as if you hate the place,’ said Basil Cox.

‘Quite the contrary,’ said Jock Mackay. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if I decided to retire here. But should we go back in? I see you’ve lost your drink.’

‘Don’t think of anything serious before you are thirty,’ young Tapan was being advised by the round Mr Kohli, who had managed to free himself of his wife for a few minutes. He had his glass in his hand, and looked like a large, worried, almost disconsolate teddy bear in a slow hurry; his huge dome — a phrenological marvel — glistened as he leaned over the bar; he half closed his heavily lidded eyes and half opened his small mouth after he had delivered himself of one of his bon mots.

‘Now, Baby Sahib,’ said the old servant Bahadur firmly to Tapan, ‘Memsahib says you must go to bed at once.’

Tapan began laughing.

‘Tell Ma I’ll go to bed when I’m thirty,’ he said, dismissing Bahadur.