Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘Yes. Kuku,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra, suddenly flustered. Though she was in the habit of telling people that she was invariably called Ma and that she liked it, she was not happy at present to hear herself thus addressed by Amit. She looked at her daughter with alarm. She thought of Lata when she had been as old as Aparna. Who could have thought she would have grown up so quickly?

‘Give my best love to your family,’ she said to Amit in a voice that carried very little conviction.

Amit was puzzled by what seemed to be — but perhaps he had only imagined it? — an undercurrent of hostility. What, he wondered, had happened at the homoeopath’s to upset Lata’s mother? Or was she upset with him?

On the way back home, all of them agreed that Mrs Rupa Mehra had been in a most peculiar mood.

Amit said: ‘I feel I’ve done something to upset your mother. I should have brought you back on time that evening.’

Lata said: ‘It isn’t you. It’s me. She wanted me to go with her to Delhi, and I didn’t want to go.’

Varun said: ‘It’s because of me. I know it. She looked so unhappy with me. She can’t bear to see me waste my life. I’ve got to turn over a new leaf. I can’t disappoint her again. And when you see me going back to my old ways, Luts, you have to get angry with me. Really angry. Shout at me. Tell me I’m a damn fool and have no leadership qualities. None!’

Lata promised to do so.

No one saw off Maan and his Urdu teacher Abdur Rasheed at the Brahmpur Railway Station. It was noon. Maan was in such unhappy spirits in fact that even the presence of Pran or Firoz or his more disreputable student companions would not have soothed him much. He felt that he was being exiled, and he was quite right: that was exactly how both his father and Saeeda Bai saw matters. His father’s ultimatum to get out of town had been direct, Saeeda Bai’s solution had been more artful. One had coerced him and one had cajoled him. Both liked Maan, and both wanted him out of the way.

Maan did not blame Saeeda Bai, or not much; he felt that his absence would be very hard on her, and that by suggesting that he go to Rudhia instead of back to Banaras, she was keeping him as close to herself as, under the circumstances, she could hope to. He was furious with his father, though, who had thrown him out of Brahmpur for hardly any reason at all, had refused to listen to his side of things, and had grunted in a satisfied way when told that he would be going off to his Urdu teacher’s village.

‘Visit our farm while you’re there — I’d like to hear how things are getting on,’ was what his father had said. Then, after a pause, he had added, needlessly: ‘That is, if you can make the time to travel a few miles. I know what an industrious student you will turn out to be.’

Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had merely hugged her son and told him to come back soon. Sometimes, thought Maan, bridling and frustrated, even his mother’s affection was unbearable. It was she who was unshakably set against Saeeda Bai.

‘Not before a month is over,’ countered Mahesh Kapoor. He was relieved that Maan, despite his chafing, was not going to defy him by remaining in Brahmpur, but annoyed that he himself would have to ‘deal with Banaras’ in both senses: with the parents of Maan’s fiancée, and with Maan’s assistant in the cloth business who — and he thanked heaven for medium-sized mercies — was tolerably competent. He had enough on his plate, and Maan was a drain on his time and patience.

The platform was as crowded as ever with passengers and their friends and families and servants, hawkers, railway staff, coolies, vagrants and beggars. Babies wailed and whistles blew. Stray dogs slunk about with punished eyes, monkeys bared aggressive teeth. There was a pervasive railway platform stench. It was a hot day, and the fans were not working in the bogeys. The train sat at the narrow-gauge platform for half an hour after it was due to depart. Maan was stifled by the heat in the second-class compartment, but did not complain. He kept looking up glumly towards his luggage: a deep-blue leather suitcase and several smaller bags.

Rasheed, who, Maan decided, looked rather wolf-like in feature, had loped off to talk to some boys in another carriage. They were students at the Brahmpur madrasa who were going back to their districts for a few days.

Maan began to feel very sleepy. The fans were still not working, and the train showed no sign of starting. He touched the upper part of his ear, where he had placed a small piece of cotton wool containing a drop of Saeeda Bai’s rose perfume, and passed his hand slowly across his face. It was wet with perspiration.

To minimize the uncomfortable sensation of sweat trickling down his face, Maan tried to remain as still as he could. The man opposite him was fanning himself with a Hindi newspaper.

The train at last began to move. It passed through the city for a while, then moved into the open countryside. Villages and fields went by, some parched and dusty and fallow, others yellow with wheat or green with other crops. The fans began to whirr and everyone looked relieved.

In some of the fields along the railway track, the wheat harvest was going on. In others it had just taken place, and the dry stubble was glinting in the sun.

Every fifteen minutes or so the train stopped at a small railway station, sometimes in the middle of nowhere, sometimes in a village. Very occasionally it would halt in a small town, the headquarters of a subdivision of the district they were travelling through. A mosque or a temple, a few neem or pipal or banyan trees, a boy driving goats along a dusty dirt track, the sudden turquoise flash of a kingfisher — Maan vaguely registered these. After a while he closed his eyes again, and was overwhelmed by his feeling of separation from the one person whose company he desired. He wanted to see nothing and hear nothing, just to recall the sights and sounds of the house in Pasand Bagh: the delicious perfumes of Saeeda Bai’s room, the evening cool, the sound of her voice, the pressure of her hand on his. He began to think even of her parakeet and her watchman with affection.

But even when he closed his eyes to cut out the dry brightness of the afternoon light and the monotonous fields stretching out to the huge visible quadrant of the dusty sky, the sounds of the train bore in on him with amplified volume. The jolting and clicking of the train as it rocked sideways and slightly upwards, the sound of it going over a small bridge or the whooshing of a train rushing past in the opposite direction, the sound of a woman coughing or the crying of a child, even the dropping of a coin or the rustle of a newspaper, all took on an unbearable intensity. He rested his head on his hands, and stayed still.

‘Are you all right? Are you feeling all right?’ It was Rasheed who was speaking to him.

Maan nodded, and opened his eyes.

He looked at his fellow-passengers, then again at Rasheed. He decided that Rasheed looked too gaunt for someone who was only his own age. He also had a few white hairs.

Well, thought Maan, if I can begin to go bald at twenty-five, why shouldn’t he begin to go white?

After a while he asked: ‘How’s the water at your place?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s fine, isn’t it?’ said Maan anxiously. He was beginning to wonder what life would be like in the village.

‘Oh yes, we pump it up by hand.’

‘Don’t you have any electricity?’

Rasheed smiled a little sardonically and shook his head.

Maan was silent. The serious practical implications of his exile were beginning to seep in.

They had stopped just beyond a small station. The train tanks were being filled with water from above, and, as the engine steamed out, the sound of water dropping on the roof of the compartment reminded Maan of rain. There would be weeks of unbearable heat until the monsoons.