Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘Abandoned dancing!’ Mrs Rupa Mehra could hardly believe her ears.

But before she could think of anything to say the little sky-blue Austin had started off on the first leg of the night’s revels.

Cocktails at the Finlays’ was a hubbub of chatter. Everyone stood around talking about the ‘monsoonish’ weather, which had struck earlier than usual this year. Opinion was divided as to whether today’s tremendous rains were monsoonal or pre-monsoonal. Golf had been quite impossible this afternoon, and though the races at Tollygunge were very rarely cancelled owing to the weather (after all, it was known as the Monsoon Racing Season to distinguish it from the winter one), if the rains were as heavy tomorrow as they had been today, the ground might be complete slush and the going too difficult for the horses. English county cricket too played a large part in the conversation, and Lata heard more than she might have wished to about Denis Compton’s brilliant batting and his left-arm spinners, and how superbly he was doing as captain of Middlesex. She nodded in agreement wherever necessary, her mind on a different cricketer.

About a third of the crowd was Indian: executives of managing agencies like Arun, with a smattering of civil servants, lawyers, doctors and army officers. Unlike in Brahmpur, which she had just been visiting in her thoughts, in this stratum of Calcutta society — even more obviously than at the Chatterjis’—men and women mixed freely and unselfconsciously. The hawk-nosed hostess, Mrs Finlay, was very kind to her and introduced her to a couple of people when she noticed her standing by herself. But Lata felt ill at ease. Meenakshi, on the other hand, was in her element, and her laughter could be heard from time to time tinkling above the general mash of sociable noise.

Arun and Meenakshi were both floating a few inches above the ground by the time they and Lata drove over from Alipore to Firpo’s. The rain had stopped a couple of hours earlier. They drove by the Victoria Memorial, where the ice-cream and jhaal-muri sellers provisioned the couples and families who had come out for a stroll in the comparative cool of the evening. Chowringhee was uncrowded. Even at night the broad and spacious frontage of the street presented an impressive appearance. To the left a few late trams plied along the edge of the Maidan.

At the entrance to Firpo’s, they met Bishwanath Bhaduri: a dark, tall young man of about Arun’s age with a square-set jaw and hair combed neatly back. He bent at the waist when introduced to Lata, and told her that he was Bish, and that he was charmed.

They waited for Billy Irani and Shireen Framjee for a few minutes. ‘I told them we were leaving the party,’ said Arun. ‘Why the hell haven’t they appeared?’

Perhaps responding to his importunity, they appeared within seconds, and after they had been introduced to Lata — there had been no time for Arun and Meenakshi to make the necessary introductions at the Finlays’ once they had got caught up in small talk — they all went up together to the restaurant, and were shown to the table they had reserved.

Lata found the food at Firpo’s delicious and the talk of Bishwanath Bhaduri glitteringly insipid. He mentioned that he had happened to be in Brahmpur at the time of her sister Savita’s wedding, to which he had gone with Arun. ‘A lovely bride — one felt like snatching her away from the altar oneself. But of course not as lovely as her younger sister,’ he added suavely.

Lata stared at him incredulously for a second or two, then looked at the rolls, imagining them into pellets.

‘I suppose the shehnai should have been playing “Here Comes the Bride”,’ she could not resist saying as she looked up again.

‘What? Er, hum, yes?’ said Bish, nonplussed. Then he added, glancing at a neighbouring table, that what he liked about Firpo’s was that you could see ‘the world and their wife’ here.

Lata reflected that her remark had clearly run off his back like duck’s water. And at the thought of that phrase, she began to smile.

Bishwanath Bhaduri, for his part, found Lata puzzling but attractive. At least she looked at him while she talked. Most Calcutta girls in his set spent half their time looking around to see who else was at Firpo’s.

Arun had decided that Bish would be a good possibility for Lata, and had told her that he was an ‘up-and-coming young fellow’.

Now Bish was telling Lata about his passage to England:

‘One feels discontented and searches about for one’s soul. . One feels homesick at Aden and buys one’s postcards at Port Said. . One does a certain sort of job and gets used to it. . Back in Calcutta one sometimes imagines that Chowringhee is Piccadilly. . Of course, sometimes when one is on tour, one misses one’s connections. . One stops at a railway station and finds nothing behind it — and spends the night with the coolies snoring on the platform. . ’ He picked up the menu again. ‘I wonder whether I should have something sweet. . one’s Bengali tooth, you know. . ’

Lata began to wish that he were up-and-going.

Bish had begun to discuss some matter in his department in which he had acquitted himself particularly well.

‘. . and of course, not that one wants to take personal credit for it, but the upshot of it all was that one secured the contract, and one has been handling the business ever since. Naturally’—and here he smiled smoothly at Lata—‘there was considerable disquiet among one’s competitors. They couldn’t imagine how one had swung it.’

‘Oh?’ said Lata, frowning as she tackled her peach melba. ‘Was there? Was the disquiet considerable?’

Bishwanath Bhaduri shot her a quick glance of — not dislike exactly but, well, disquiet.

Shireen wanted to dance at the 30 °Club, but was overruled, and they all went to the Golden Slipper in Free School Street instead, where it was livelier if less exclusive. The bright young things sometimes believed in slumming it.

Bish, perhaps sensing that Lata had not taken to him, made an excuse and disappeared after dinner.

‘See you anon,’ were his parting words.

Billy Irani had been remarkably quiet throughout the evening, and he did not appear to want to dance at all — not even foxtrots and waltzes. Arun made Lata dance a waltz with him despite her protests that she did not know how to dance at all. ‘Nonsense,’ said Arun affectionately. ‘You do, you just don’t know it.’ He was right; she quickly got the hang of it, and enjoyed it too.

Shireen forced Billy on to his feet. Later, when the orchestra struck up an intimate number, Meenakshi requisitioned him. When they returned to the table Billy was blushing furiously.

‘Look at him blush,’ said Meenakshi delightedly. ‘I think he likes holding me close. He was pressing me so close to his broad chest with his strong, golf-playing arms that I could feel his heart thump.’

‘I was not,’ said Billy indignantly.

‘I wish you would,’ said Meenakshi with a sigh. ‘I nurture a secret lust for you, you know, Billy.’

Shireen laughed. Billy glared fiercely at Meenakshi and blushed even more furiously.

‘That’s enough nonsense,’ said Arun. ‘Don’t embarrass my friend — or my younger sister.’

‘Oh, I’m not embarrassed, Arun Bhai,’ said Lata, though she was amazed all right by the tenor of the conversation.

But what amazed Lata most of all was the tango. At about one thirty in the morning, by which time the two couples were fairly high, Meenakshi sent a note to the band leader, and five minutes later he struck up a tango. Since very few people knew how to tango, the couples on the floor stood around looking a little perplexed. But Meenakshi went straight up to a man dressed in a dinner jacket who was sitting with some friends at a table across the room — and enchanted him on to the floor. She did not know him but she recognized him as a wonderful dancer whom she had once seen in action before. His friends prodded him on as well. Everyone cleared the floor for them, and without even any initial discomfiture, they paced and twirled and froze together in swift, jerky, stylized movements with such erotic control and abandon that very soon the entire nightclub was cheering them on. Lata felt her own heart beating faster. She was fascinated by Meenakshi’s brazenness and dazzled by the play of light on the gold choker round her neck. Clearly Meenakshi was right; one couldn’t tango in a dowdy choli.