Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘So, Dipankar,’ said Dr Ila Chattopadhyay. ‘Have you changed your subject yet?’

‘I can’t, Ila Kaki,’ said Dipankar.

‘Why not? The sooner you make the move the better. There isn’t a single decent human being I know who is an economist. Why can’t you change?’

‘Because I’ve already graduated.’

‘Oh!’ Dr Ila Chattopadhyay appeared temporarily floored. ‘And what are you going to do with yourself?’

‘I’ll decide in a week or two. I’ll think things out when I’m at the Pul Mela. It’ll be a time for appraising myself in the spiritual and intellectual context.’

Dr Ila Chattopadhyay, breaking a sandesh in half, said: ‘Really, Lata, have you ever heard such unconvincing prevarication? I’ve never understood what “the spiritual context” means. Spiritual matters are an utter waste of time. I’d rather spend my time listening to the kind of gossip your aunt purveys and that your mother pretends to suffer through than go to something like the Pul Mela. Isn’t it very dirty?’ She turned to Dipankar. ‘All those millions of pilgrims crowded along a strip of sand just under the Brahmpur Fort? And doing — doing everything there.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Dipankar. ‘I’ve never been. But it’s supposed to be well organized. They even have a District Magistrate allocated especially for the great Pul Mela every sixth year. This year’s a sixth year, so bathing is especially auspicious.’

‘The Ganges is an absolutely filthy river,’ said Dr Ila Chattopadhyay. ‘I hope you don’t propose to bathe in it. . Oh, do stop blinking, Dipankar, it ruins my concentration.’

‘If I bathe,’ said Dipankar, ‘I’ll wash away not only my own sins but those of six generations above me. That might even include you, Ila Kaki.’

‘God forbid,’ said Dr Ila Chattopadhyay.

Turning to Lata, Dipankar said: ‘You should come too, Lata. After all, you’re from Brahmpur.’

‘I’m not really from Brahmpur,’ said Lata, with a glance at Dr Ila Chattopadhyay.

‘Where are you from, then?’ asked Dipankar.

‘Nowhere now,’ said Lata.

‘Anyway,’ continued Dipankar earnestly, ‘I think I’ve convinced your mother to come.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Lata, smiling at the thought of Mrs Rupa Mehra and Dipankar guiding each other through the Pul Mela crowds and the labyrinths of time and causality. ‘She won’t be in Brahmpur at the time. But where will you live in Brahmpur?’

‘On the sands — I’ll find a place in someone’s tent,’ said Dipankar optimistically.

‘Don’t you know anyone in Brahmpur?’

‘No. Well, Savita, of course. And there’s an old Mr Maitra who’s related to us somehow, whom I met once as a child.’

‘You must look up Savita and her husband when you get there,’ said Lata. ‘I’ll write and tell Pran you’ll be coming. You can always stay with them if the sand runs out. And it’s useful anyway to have an address and phone number in a strange town.’

‘Thank you,’ said Dipankar. ‘Oh, there’s a lecture at the Ramakrishna Mission tonight on Popular Religion and its Philosophical Dimensions. Why don’t you come? It’s bound to cover the Pul Mela.’

‘Really, Dipankar, you are more of an idiot than I thought,’ said Dr Ila Chattopadhyay to her nephew. ‘Why am I wasting my time on you? Don’t you waste your time on him either,’ she advised Lata. ‘I’m going to talk to Amit. Where is he?’

Amit was in the garden. He had been forced by the children to show them the frog spawn in the lily pond.

The hall was almost full. There must have been about two hundred people, though Lata noticed that there were only about five women. The lecture, which was in English, started on time, at seven o’clock. Professor Dutta-Ray (who had a bad cough) introduced the speaker, informing the audience of the young luminary’s biography and credentials, and continuing for a few minutes to speculate about what he would say.

The young speaker stood up. He did not look at all like someone who had been, as the professor had stated, a sadhu for five years. He had a round, anxious face. He was wearing a well-starched kurta and dhoti, and there were two pens in the pocket of his kurta. He did not speak about Popular Religion and its Philosophical Dimensions, though he did mention the Pul Mela once, elliptically, as ‘this great concourse that will be assembling on the banks of the Ganga to lave itself in the light of the full moon’. For the most part he treated the patient audience to a speech of exceptional banality. He soared and veered over a vast terrain, and assumed that his droppings would make an intelligible pattern.

Every few sentences, he stretched his arms out in a gentle, all-inclusive gesture as if he were a bird spreading its wings.

Dipankar looked rapt, Amit bored, Lata perplexed.

The speaker was now in full flight: ‘Humanity must be made incarnate in the present. . shatter the horizons of the mind. . the challenge is interior. . birth is a remarkable thing. . the bird feels the vast quivering of the leaf. . a certain relation of sacrality can be maintained between the popular and the philosophical. . an open-ended mind through which life can flow, through which one can hear the birdsong, the impulse of space-time.’

Finally, an hour down the line, he came to the Great Question:

‘Can humanity even tell where a newer inspiration will emerge? Can we penetrate those great darknesses within ourselves where symbols are born? I say that our rites, call them popular if you will, do penetrate this darkness. The alternative is the death of the mind, and not “re-death” or punarmrityu, which is the first reference to “rebirth” in our scriptures, but ultimate death, the death of ignorance. Let me then emphasize to you all’—he stretched his arms out towards the audience—‘that, let objectors say what they will, it is only by preserving the ancient forms of sacrality, however perverse, however superstitious they may seem to the philosophical eye, that we can maintain our elementality, our ethos, our evolution, our very essence.’ He sat down.

‘Our eggshells,’ said Amit to Lata.

The audience applauded guardedly.

But now the venerable Professor Dutta-Ray, who had introduced the speaker so paternally at first, got up and, shooting glances of undisguised hostility at him, proceeded to demolish what he saw as the theories he had just propounded. (It was clear that the Professor saw himself as one of the ‘objectors’ referred to in the speech.) But were there any theories in the speech at all? There was certainly a tenor, but it was difficult to demolish a tenor. At any rate, the Professor tried to, his voice, mild at first, rising to this hoarse-throated battle cry:

‘Let us not deceive ourselves! For whilst it may often be the case that the theses are intrinsically plausible, they are by the same token impossible to substantiate or refute with more than illustrative evidence; indeed, it is in practice difficult to know whether they come into the orbit of reference of the key question, which, although it may well shed light on the tendency, can scarcely tell us whether an answer can be couched convincingly in terms of what might broadly be called its evolving patterns; in this perspective, then, though admittedly the theory may appear — to the ignorant eye — well founded, it is not compelling as an analysis of the basic difficulty, which traces to considerations we must descry elsewhere; to be quite specific, its failure to explain must make it seem irrelevant even if it does not, as it were, actually refute it; but to stipulate this is to remove the underpinnings of the entire analytical framework, and the most pertinent and cogent argument must be abandoned.’