Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Kakoli had not at first been ecstatic about Schubert, her tastes running more to Chopin, whom she played with heavy rubato and gloom. But now that she was accompanying Hans’s singing she had grown to like Schubert more and more.

The same was true about her feeling for Hans, whose excessive courtliness had at first amused her, then irked her, and now reassured her. Hans, for his part, was as smitten by Kuku as any of her mushrooms had ever been. But he felt that she took him lightly, only returning one in three of his calls. If he had known of her even poorer rate of return with other friends, he would have realized how highly she valued him.

Of the twenty-four lieder in the song cycle they had now arrived at the last song but one, ‘The Mock Suns’. Hans was singing this cheerfully and briskly. Kuku was dragging the pace on the piano. It was a tussle of interpretation.

‘No, no, Hans,’ said Kakoli when he leaned over and turned the page to the final song. ‘You sang that too fast.’

‘Too fast?’ said Hans. ‘I felt the accompaniment was not very brisk. You wanted to go slower, yes? “Ach, meine Sonnen seid ihr nicht!”’ He dragged it out. ‘So?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, he is mad, Kakoli, you know.’ The real reason why Hans had sung the song so energetically was Kuku’s perfect presence.

‘ Almost mad,’ said Kuku. ‘In the next song he goes quite mad. You can sing that as fast as you like.’

‘But that last song must be very slow,’ said Hans. ‘Like this—’ And he played out what he meant with his right hand in the treble reaches of the piano. His hand touched Kuku’s for a second at the end of the first line. ‘There, you see, Kakoli, he is resigned to his fate.’

‘So he’s suddenly stopped being mad?’ said Kakoli. What nonsense, she thought.

‘Maybe he is mad and resigned to his fate. Mixed.’

Kuku tried it, and shook her head. ‘I’d go to sleep,’ she said.

‘So now, Kakoli, you think “The Mock Suns” must be slow and “The Organ-grinder” must be fast.’

‘Exactly.’ Kakoli liked it when Hans spoke her name; he pronounced the three syllables with equal weight. Very rarely did he call her Kuku.

‘And I think “The Mock Suns” must be fast and “The Organ-grinder” must be slow,’ continued Hans.

‘Yes,’ said Kuku. How dreadfully incompatible we are, she thought. And everything should be perfect — just perfect. If it wasn’t perfect it was awful.

‘So each of us thinks that one song must be fast and one slow,’ said Hans with triumphant logic. This seemed to prove to him that, given an adjustment or two, he and Kakoli were unusually compatible.

Kuku looked at Hans’s square and handsome face, which was glowing with pleasure. ‘You see,’ said Hans, ‘most times I hear it, people sing both slow.’

‘Both slow?’ said Kuku. ‘That would never do.’

‘No, never do,’ said Hans. ‘Shall we take it again from there with slower tempo, like you suggest?’

‘Yes,’ said Kakoli. ‘But what on earth does it mean? Or in the sky? The song, I mean.’

‘There are three suns,’ explained Hans, ‘and two go and then one is left.’

‘Hans,’ said Kakoli. ‘I think you are very lovable. And your subtraction is accurate. But you haven’t added to my understanding.’

Hans blushed. ‘I think the two suns are the girl and her mother, and he himself is the third.’

Kakoli stared at him. ‘Her mother?’ she said incredulously. Perhaps Hans had too stodgy a soul after all.

Hans looked doubtful. ‘Maybe not,’ he admitted. ‘But who else?’ He reflected that the mother had appeared somewhere in the song cycle, though much earlier.

‘I don’t understand it at all. It’s a mystery,’ said Kakoli. ‘But it’s certainly not the mother.’ She sensed that a major crisis was brewing. This was almost as bad as Hans’s dislike of Bengali food.

‘Yes?’ said Hans. ‘A mystery?’

‘Anyway, Hans, you sing very well,’ said Kuku. ‘I like it when you sing about heartbreak. It sounds very professional. We must do this again next week.’

Hans blushed once more, and offered Kakoli a drink. Although he was expert at kissing the hands of married women, he had not kissed Kakoli yet. He did not think she would approve of it; but he was wrong.

When they got to the Park Street Cemetery, Amit and Lata got out of the car. Dipankar decided he’d wait in the car with Tapan, since they were only going to be a few minutes and, besides, there were only two umbrellas.

They walked through a wrought-iron gate. The cemetery was laid out in a grid with narrow avenues between clusters of tombs. A few soggy palm trees stood here and there in clumps, and the cawing of crows interspersed with thunder and the noise of rain. It was a melancholy place. Founded in 1767, it had filled up quickly with the European dead. Young and old alike — mostly victims of the feverish climate — lay buried here, compacted under great slabs and pyramids, mausolea and cenotaphs, urns and columns, all decayed and greyed now by ten generations of Calcutta heat and rain. So densely packed were the tombs that it was in places difficult to walk between them. Rich, rain-fed grass grew between the graves, and the rain poured down ceaselessly over it all. Compared to Brahmpur or Banaras, Allahabad or Agra, Lucknow or Delhi, Calcutta could hardly be considered to have a history, but the climate had bestowed on its comparative recency a desolate and unromantic sense of slow ruin.

‘Why have you brought me here?’ asked Lata.

‘Do you know Landor?’

‘Landor? No.’

‘You’ve never heard of Walter Savage Landor?’ asked Amit, disappointed.

‘Oh yes. Walter Savage Landor. Of course. “Rose Aylmer, whom these watchful eyes”.’

‘Wakeful. Well, she lies buried here. As does Thackeray’s father and one of Dickens’s sons, and the original for Byron’s Don Juan ,’ said Amit, with a proper Calcuttan pride.

‘Really?’ said Lata. ‘Here? Here in Calcutta?’ It was as if she had suddenly heard that Hamlet was the Prince of Delhi. ‘Ah, what avails the sceptred race!’

‘Ah, what the form divine!’ continued Amit.

‘What every virtue, every grace!’ cried Lata with sudden enthusiasm.

‘Rose Aylmer, all were thine.’

A roll of thunder punctuated the two stanzas.

‘Rose Aylmer, whom these watchful eyes—’ continued Lata.

‘Wakeful.’

‘Sorry, wakeful. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes—’

‘May weep, but never see,’ said Amit, brandishing his umbrella.

‘A night of memories and sighs.’

‘I consecrate to thee.’

Amit paused. ‘Ah, lovely poem, lovely poem,’ he said, looking delightedly at Lata. He paused again, then said: ‘Actually, it’s “A night of memories and of sighs”.’

‘Isn’t that what I said?’ asked Lata, thinking of nights — or parts of nights — that she herself had recently spent in a similar fashion.

‘No. You left out the second “of”.’

‘A night of memories and sighs. Of memories and of sighs. I see what you mean. But does it make such a difference?’

‘Yes, it makes a difference. Not all the difference in the world but, well, a difference. A mere “of”; conventionally permitted to rhyme with “love”. But she is in her grave, and oh, the difference to him.’

They walked on. Walking two abreast was not possible, and their umbrellas complicated matters among the cluttered monuments. Not that her tomb was so far away — it was at the first intersection — but Amit had chosen a circuitous route. It was a small tomb capped by a conical pillar with swirling lines; Landor’s poem was inscribed on a plaque on one side beneath her name and age and a few lines of pedestrian pentameter: