Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Here she went on to write on the non-adhesive flap:

After I have written to Kalpana I will play a game of patience with Varun’s cards. Lots and lots of love to you and to Varun and a big hug and lots of kisses to my little sweetheart Aparna, and of course to Meenakshi also.

Yours everloving,

Ma

Fearing that her pen might run out during the course of her next letter, Mrs Rupa Mehra opened her handbag and took out an already opened bottle of ink — Parker’s Quink Royal Washable Blue — effectively separated from the other contents of the handbag by several layers of rags and cellophane. A bottle of glue she habitually carried had once leaked from its slit rubber cap with disastrous consequences, and glue had thenceforth been banished from her handbag, but ink had so far caused her only minor problems.

Mrs Rupa Mehra took out another inland letter form, then decided that this would be a false economy in the present case, and began writing on a well-husbanded pad of cream-coloured cambric bond:

Dearest Kalpana,

You have always been like a daughter to me so I will speak from the heart. You know how worried I have been about Lata this last year or so. As you know, since your Uncle Raghubir died I have had a hard time in many ways, and your father — who was so close to Uncle during his lifetime — has been as good to me after his sad demise. Whenever I come to Delhi which is sadly not often of late I feel happy when I am with you, despite the jackals that bark all night behind your house, and since your dear mother passed away I have felt like a mother to you.

Now the time has come to get Lata well settled, and I must look all out for a suitable boy. Arun should shoulder some responsibility in the matter but you know how it is, he is so occupied with work and family. Varun is too young to help and is quite unsteady also. You my dear Kalpana are a few years older to Lata and I hope you can suggest some suitable names among your old college friends or others in Delhi. Maybe in October in the Divali holidays — or in December in the Christmas-New Year holidays — Lata and I can come to Delhi to look into things? I only mention this to mention it. Do please say what you think?

How is your dear father? I am writing from Brahmpur where I am staying with Savita and Pran. All is well but the heat is already very delapidating and I am dreading April-May-June. I wish you could have come to their wedding but what with Pimmy’s appendix operation I can understand. I was worried to know she had not been well. I hope it is all resolved now. I am in good health and my blood sugar is fine. I have taken your advice and had new glasses made and can read and write without strain.

Please write soonest to this address. I will be here throughout March and April, maybe even in May till Lata’s results for this year are out.

With fondest love,

Yours ever,

Ma (Mrs. Rupa Mehra)

P.S. Lata sometimes comes up with the idea that she will not get married. I hope you will cure her of such theories. I know how you feel about early marriage after what happened with your engagement, but in a different way I also feel that ’tis better to have loved and lost etc. Not that love is always an unmixed blessing. P.S. Divali would be better than New Year for us to come to Delhi, because it fits in better with my annual travel plans, but whichever time you say is fine.

Lovingly, Ma

Mrs Rupa Mehra looked over her letter (and her signature — she insisted on all young people calling her Ma), folded it neatly in four, and sealed it in a matching envelope. She fished out a stamp from her bag, licked it thoughtfully, stuck it on the envelope, and wrote Kalpana’s address (from memory) as well as Pran’s address on the back. Then she closed her eyes and sat perfectly still for a few minutes. It was a warm afternoon. After a while she took out the pack of playing cards from her bag. When Mansoor came in to take away the tea and to do the accounts, he found she had dozed off over a game of patience.

The Imperial Book Depot was one of the two best bookshops in town, and was located on Nabiganj, the fashionable street that was the last bulwark of modernity before the labyrinthine alleys and ancient, cluttered neighbourhoods of Old Brahmpur. Though it was a couple of miles away from the university proper it had a greater following among students and teachers than the University and Allied Bookshop, which was just a few minutes away from campus. The Imperial Book Depot was run by two brothers, Yashwant and Balwant, both almost illiterate in English, but both (despite their prosperous roundness) so energetic and entrepreneurial that it apparently made no difference. They had the best stock in town, and were extremely helpful to their customers. If a book was not available in the shop, they asked the customer himself to write down its name on the appropriate order form.

Twice a week an impoverished university student was paid to sort new arrivals on to the designated shelves. And since the bookshop prided itself on its academic as well as general stock, the proprietors unashamedly collared university teachers who wandered in to browse, sat them down with a cup of tea and a couple of publishers’ lists, and made them tick off titles that they thought the bookshop should consider ordering. These teachers were happy to ensure that books they needed for their courses would be readily available to their students. Many of them resented the University and Allied Bookshop for its entrenched, lethargic, unresponsive and high-handed ways.

After classes, Lata and Malati, both dressed casually in their usual salwaar-kameez, went to Nabiganj to wander around and have a cup of coffee at the Blue Danube coffee house. This activity, known to university students as ‘ganjing’, they could afford to indulge in about once a week. As they passed the Imperial Book Depot, they were drawn magnetically in. Each wandered off to her favourite shelves and subjects. Malati headed straight for the novels, Lata went for poetry. On the way, however, she paused by the science shelves, not because she understood much science, but, rather, because she did not. Whenever she opened a scientific book and saw whole paragraphs of incomprehensible words and symbols, she felt a sense of wonder at the great territories of learning that lay beyond her — the sum of so many noble and purposive attempts to make objective sense of the world. She enjoyed the feeling; it suited her serious moods; and this afternoon she was feeling serious. She picked up a random book and read a random paragraph:

It follows from De Moivre’s formula that z n= r n(cos n + i sin n). Thus, if we allow complex number z to describe a circle of radius r about the origin, z nwill describe n complete times a circle of radius r nas z describes its circle once. We also recall that r, the modulus of z, written |z|, gives the distance of z from O, and that if z ′ =x ′ +iy ′ , then |z — z ′ | is the distance between z and z ′ . With these preliminaries we may proceed to the proof of the theorem.

What exactly it was that pleased her in these sentences she did not know, but they conveyed weight, comfort, inevitability. Her mind strayed to Varun and his mathematical studies. She hoped that her brief words to him the day after the wedding had done him some good. She should have written to him more often to bolster his courage, but with exams coming up she had very little time for anything. It was at the insistence of Malati — who was even busier than she was — that she had gone ganjing at all.

She read the paragraph again, looking serious. ‘We also recall’ and ‘with these preliminaries’ drew her into a compact with the author of these verities and mysteries. The words were assured, and therefore reassuring: things were what they were even in this uncertain world, and she could proceed from there.