Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

He looked with triumph and malice at the speaker before continuing: ‘As a broad generalization, one might tentatively hazard a guess therefore, that, all other things being equal, one should not make particular generalizations when general particularizations are equally available — and available to far less idle effect.’

Dipankar was looking shocked, Amit bored, Lata puzzled.

Several people in the audience wanted to ask questions, but Amit had had enough. Lata was willingly, and Dipankar unwillingly, drawn out of the hall. She was feeling slightly dizzy, and not only because of the rarefied abstractions she had just breathed. It had been hot and stuffy inside.

For a minute or two none of them spoke. Lata, who had noticed Amit’s boredom, expected him to show his annoyance, and Dipankar to expostulate. Instead, Amit merely said:

‘When faced with something like that, if I am caught short without paper and pencil, I amuse myself by taking any word that the speaker has used — like “bird” or “cloth” or “central” or “blue”—and try to imagine different varieties of them.’

‘Even words like “central”?’ asked Lata, amused by the idea.

‘Even those,’ said Amit. ‘Most words are fertile.’

He felt in his pocket for an anna, and bought a small, fragrant garland of fresh white bela flowers from a vendor. ‘Here,’ he said, giving it to Lata.

Lata, very pleased, said ‘Thank you,’ and after inhaling its fragrance with a delighted smile, put it unselfconsciously in her hair.

There was something so pleasing, natural and unpretentious about her gesture that Amit found himself thinking: She may be more intelligent than my sisters, but I’m glad she’s not as sophisticated. She’s the nicest girl I’ve met for a long time.

Lata for her part was thinking how much she liked Meenakshi’s family. They brought her out of herself and her stupid, self-created misery. In their company it was possible to enjoy, after a fashion, even such a lecture as she had just sat through.

Mr Justice Chatterji was sitting in his study. In front of him lay a half-completed judgement. On his desk stood a black-and-white photograph of his parents, and another of himself, his wife, and their five children that had been taken many years ago by a fashionable Calcutta studio. Kakoli, wilful child, had insisted on including her teddy bear; Tapan had been too small at the time to have had an articulate will at all.

The case involved the confirmation of the death sentence on six members of a gang of dacoits. Such cases caused Mr Justice Chatterji a great deal of pain. He did not like criminal work at all, and looked forward to being reallocated civil work, which was both more intellectually stimulating and less distressing. There was no question that these six men had been found guilty according to law and that the sentence of the Sessions Judge was not unreasonable or perverse. And so Mr Justice Chatterji knew that he would not set it aside. Not all of them may have intended specifically to cause the death of the men they were robbing but, under the Indian Penal Code, in a case of dacoity-cum-murder each criminal was severally liable for the act.

This was not a case for the Supreme Court. The High Court at Calcutta was the last effective court of appeal. He would sign the judgement, and so would his brother judge, and that, for these men, would be the end. One morning a few weeks down the line, they would be hanged in Alipore Jail.

Mr Justice Chatterji looked at the photograph of his family for a minute or two, and then around his room. Three of the walls were lined with the buff-coloured half-calf or deep-blue bindings of law-books: the Indian Law Reports , the All India Reporter , the Income Tax Reports , the All England Law Reports, Halsbury’s Laws , a few textbooks and books on general jurisprudence, the Constitution of India (just over a year old) and the various codes and statutes with their commentaries. Though the Judges’ Library at the High Court now provided him with any books he might need, he still continued to subscribe to the journals he had always subscribed to. He did not wish to cut off the series, partly because he liked on occasion to write his judgements at home, partly because he continued to hope that Amit would follow in his footsteps — just as he had followed in his own father’s footsteps, down to choosing for himself and later for his son the same Inn to qualify from.

It was not absence of mind that had made Mr Justice Chatterji evade his duties as a host this afternoon, nor the fat gossip, nor the noise made by her children, of whom he was in fact quite fond. It was the gossip’s husband, Mr Ganguly, who had suddenly — after a prolonged silence throughout lunch — begun on the verandah to talk about his favourite great man — Hitler: six years dead but still revered by him like a god. In his monotonous voice, chewing his thoughts like cud, he had begun the kind of monologue that Mr Justice Chatterji had heard from him twice before: how even Napoleon (another great Bengali hero) did not come up to Hitlerian standards, how Hitler had helped Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose when he wanted to fight the dreadful British, how atavistic and admirable a force the Indo-Germanic bond was, and how terrible it was that the Germans and the British would within a month be officially terminating the state of war that had existed between them since 1939. (Mr Justice Chatterji thought that it was high time, but did not say so; he refused to get drawn into what was essentially a soliloquy.)

Now that Kakoli’s ‘German Sahib’ had been mentioned over lunch, this man had expressed his gratification at the possibility that the ‘Indo-Germanic bond’ might become manifest even in his own family. Mr Justice Chatterji had listened for a while with amiable disgust; he had then made a polite excuse, got up, and not returned.

Mr Justice Chatterji had nothing against Hans. He liked what little he had seen of him. Hans was handsome and well dressed and in every sense presentable, and he behaved with amusing if aggressive politeness. Kakoli liked him a great deal. In time he would probably even learn not to mangle people’s hands. What Justice Chatterji could not abide, however, was the syndrome just exemplified by his wife’s relative — a combination that was by no means uncommon in Bengal: the mad deification of the patriot Subhas Bose who had fled to Germany and Japan and later established the Indian National Army to fight the British; the eulogization of Hitler and Fascism and violence; the denigration of all things British or tainted with ‘pseudo-British liberalism’; and resentment bordering on contempt for the sly milksop Gandhi who had dispossessed Bose of the presidentship of the Congress Party which he had won by election many years before. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was a Bengali, and Mr Justice Chatterji was certainly as proud of being a Bengali as of being an Indian, but he — like his father, ‘old Mr Chatterji’—was profoundly grateful that the likes of Subhas Bose had never succeeded in ruling the country. His father had much preferred Subhas Bose’s quieter and equally patriotic brother Sarat, also a lawyer, whom he had known and, after a fashion, admired.

If this fellow wasn’t related to my wife, he would be the last person I’d ruin my Sunday afternoon with, thought Mr Justice Chatterji. Families contain far too great a range of temperament — and, unlike acquaintances, they can’t be dropped. And we’ll continue to be related till one of us drops dead.

Such thoughts on death, such overviews of life were more appropriate to his father, who was nearly eighty, than to himself, thought Mr Justice Chatterji. But the older man seemed so content with his cat and his leisured reading of Sanskrit classics (literary, not religious ones) that he hardly seemed to think of mortality or the passage of time. His wife had died after they had been married ten years, and he had very rarely mentioned her after that. Did he think about her any more often these days? ‘I like reading those old plays,’ he had said to his son a few days ago. ‘King, princess, maidservant — whatever they thought then is still true now. Birth, awareness, love, ambition, hate, death, all the same. All the same.’