Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

They stumbled out of the nightclub at two thirty, and Arun shouted: ‘Let’s go — let’s go to Falta! The waterworks — a picnic — I’m hungry — kababs at Nizam’s.’

‘It’s getting rather late, Arun,’ said Billy. ‘Perhaps we should call it a night. I’ll drop Shireen and—’

‘No nonsense — I’m master of ceremonies,’ insisted Arun. ‘You get into my car. We’ll all go — no, into the back — I’ll sit with this pretty girl in the front — no, no, no, Saturday tomorrow — and we’ll all go now — at once — we’ll all go and have breakfast at the airport — airport picnic — all to the airport for breakfast — bloody car won’t start — oh, wrong key.’

Off zoomed the little car through the streets, with Arun at the shaky helm, Shireen sitting with him in front, and Billy squashed between the two other women at the back. Lata must have appeared very nervous, because Billy patted her hand kindly once. A little later, she noticed that Billy’s other hand was interlocked with Meenakshi’s. She was surprised, but — after the torrid tango — not suspicious; she assumed that that was how things were done when one went for a drive in this kind of society. But she hoped for the sake of their common safety that the same sort of thing was not going on in the front seat.

Although there was no broad and direct road to the airport, even the narrower streets of North Calcutta were deserted at this hour, and driving was not intrinsically difficult. Arun roared along, blowing his horn loudly from time to time. But suddenly a child rushed out from behind a cart straight into their path. Arun swerved wildly, narrowly missed hitting it, and came to a halt before a lamp post.

Luckily neither child nor car was damaged. The child disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.

Arun got out of the car in a black fury and started shouting into the night. There was a piece of smouldering rope hanging from the lamp post for people to light their biris with, and Arun started pulling it as if it were a bell-rope. ‘Get up — get up — all of you — all of you bastards—’ he shouted at the entire neighbourhood.

‘Arun — Arun — please don’t,’ said Meenakshi.

‘Bloody idiots — can’t control their children — at three in the bloody morning—’

A few destitute people, sleeping in their rags on the narrow pavement next to a pile of rubbish, stirred themselves.

‘Do shut up, Arun,’ said Billy Irani. ‘You’ll cause trouble.’

‘You trying to take charge, Billy? — No good — good fellow, but not much there—’ He turned his attention to the unseen enemy, the breeding, stupid masses. ‘Get up — you bastards — can’t you hear me?’ He followed this up with a few other Hindi swear words, since he could not speak Bengali.

Meenakshi knew that if she said anything, Arun would snap at her.

‘Arun Bhai,’ said Lata as calmly as she could. ‘I’m very sleepy, and Ma will be worried about us. Let’s go home now.’

‘Home? Yes, let’s go home.’ Arun, startled by this excellent suggestion, smiled at his brilliant sister.

Billy was about to suggest that he drive, then thought better of it.

When he and Shireen were dropped off near his car, he was in a thoughtful mood, though he said nothing except to wish everyone goodnight.

Mrs Rupa Mehra was sitting up late for them. She was so relieved to hear the car drive up that when they came in she could not at first speak.

‘Why are you up at this hour, Ma?’ said Meenakshi, yawning.

‘I will get no sleep tonight at all thanks to your selfishness,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra. ‘Soon it will be time to get up.’

‘Ma, you know we always come back late when we go dancing,’ said Meenakshi. Arun had meanwhile gone into the bedroom, and Varun too, who had been woken up at two by his alarmed mother and forced to sit up with her, had seized the opportunity and slunk away to bed.

‘Yes, you can behave as irresponsibly as you like when you are gallivanting around by yourselves,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra. ‘But not when you have my daughter with you. Are you all right, darling?’ she asked Lata.

‘Yes, Ma, I had a good time,’ said Lata, yawning as well. She remembered the tango and began to smile.

Mrs Rupa Mehra looked doubtful. ‘You must tell me everything you did. What you ate, what you saw, whom you met, what you did.’

‘Yes, Ma. Tomorrow,’ said Lata with another yawn.

‘All right,’ conceded Mrs Rupa Mehra.

Lata woke up almost at noon the next day with a headache that did not improve when she had to give a recitation of the previous night’s events. Both Aparna and Mrs Rupa Mehra wanted to know about the tango. After she had absorbed the details of the dance, the scarily precocious Aparna wanted reassurance, for some reason, on one particular point:

‘So Mummy tangoed and everyone clapped?’

‘Yes, sweetheart.’

‘Daddy also?’

‘Oh yes. Daddy clapped too.’

‘Will you teach me to tango?’

‘I don’t know how to tango,’ said Lata. ‘But if I did, I would.’

‘Does Uncle Varun know how to tango?’

Lata tried to visualize Varun’s terror if Meenakshi had tried to prise him away from a table on to the dance floor. ‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘Where is Varun anyway?’ she asked her mother.

‘He went out,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra shortly. ‘Sajid and Jason turned up, and they disappeared.’

Lata had only met these two Shamshu friends once. Sajid had a cigarette that hung down, literally hung down, with no apparent means of support, from the left side of his lower lip. What he did for a living she did not know. Jason frowned toughly when speaking to her. He was an Anglo-Indian, and had been in the Calcutta police before he had been thrown out a few months earlier for sleeping with another Sub-Inspector’s wife. Varun knew both of them from St George’s. Arun shuddered to think that his own alma mater could have produced such seedy characters.

‘Isn’t Varun studying at all for the IAS?’ asked Lata. The other day Varun had been talking about sitting for the civil service exams later in the year.

‘No,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra with a sigh. ‘And there’s nothing I can do. He does not listen to his mother any more. When I say anything to him, he just agrees with me and then goes off with his friends an hour later.’

‘Perhaps he’s not cut out for the administrative service,’ suggested Lata.

But her mother would have none of that.

‘Studying is a good discipline,’ she said. ‘It needs application. Your father used to say that it does not matter what you study. As long as you study hard, it improves the mind.’

By that criterion, the late Raghubir Mehra should have been proud of his younger son. Varun, Sajid and Jason were at that moment standing in the two-rupee enclosure at the Tollygunge racetrack, cheek by jowl with what Arun would have considered the riff-raff of the solar system, studying with intense concentration the pukka or final version of the racing form for the afternoon’s six races. They were hoping that they would thereby improve, if not their mind, at least their economic situation.

Normally they would not have invested the six annas that it cost to buy a pukka racing form, and would — with the help of the handicap list and information about cancellations — have simply pencilled in changes on the provisional form that they had bought on Wednesday. But Sajid had lost it.

A thin, warm rain was falling all over Calcutta, and the Tollygunge racecourse was slushy. The discontented horses being walked around the paddock were being eyed keenly from all sides through the drizzle. The Tolly had gymkhana racing, not turf racing, unlike the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, whose monsoon season began more than a month later. This meant that professional jockeys were not compulsory, and there were plenty of gentleman-jockeys and even one or two ladies who rode in the races. Since the riders were sometimes quite heavy, the handicap on the horses too started at a heavier level.