Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘Then the women were all over the Pathan: bandaging his hand, et cetera, et cetera. They treated him as if there was only one man in the whole train. Beautiful women, all filled with admiration.’

The guppi, seeking approval, looked over towards Maan, who was feeling mildly sick.

‘Are you feeling all right?’ asked the guppi, after a long silence.

‘Mmmmh,’ said Maan. There was a pause, and he continued: ‘Tell me, why do you tell such outrageous stories?’

‘But they are all true,’ said the guppi. ‘Basically true.’

Maan was silent.

‘Look at it this way,’ continued the guppi. ‘If I merely said, “Hello” and you said, “Hello. Where have you come from?” and I said, “From the direction of Baitar. By train”—well, how would the day pass? How would we get through these boiling afternoons and hot nights? So I tell stories — some to keep you cool, some to make you hotter!’ The guppi laughed.

But Maan was not listening any longer. He had sat up at the word ‘Baitar’, as galvanized by it as the guppi had been by ‘Bombay’. A wonderful idea had struck him.

He would write to Firoz, that was it. He would write to Firoz and enclose a letter to Saeeda Bai. Firoz wrote excellent Urdu and had none of Rasheed’s puritanism. Firoz would translate Maan’s letter and send it on to Saeeda Bai. She would be astonished to get his letter: astonished and delighted! And she would write back to him by the next post.

Maan got up from the charpoy and began pacing up and down, composing the letter in his head, adding here and there a couplet or two from Ghalib or Mir — or Dagh — for ornamentation or emphasis. Rasheed could have no objection to mailing a letter to the son of the Nawab of Baitar; Maan would simply hand him the closed envelope.

The guppi, puzzled by Maan’s erratic behaviour and disappointed that he had lost his audience, wandered off into the darkness.

Maan sat down once again, leaned against the edge of the verandah, and listened to the hiss of the lantern and the other sounds of the night. Somewhere a baby cried. Somewhere a dog barked, and other dogs joined in. Then all was quiet for a while, except for the drift of a voice or two from the roof, where Rasheed’s father spent his summer nights. Sometimes the voices seemed to be raised in argument, sometimes subdued; but Maan could make out nothing of what was being said.

It was a cloudy night, and the papiha or brainfever bird called from time to time from a distant tree, its series of triple notes growing tauter and higher and more intense until it reached a climax and dropped into sudden silence. Maan did not think of the romantic associations of the sound (‘pee-kahan? pee-kahan?’ Where is my love? Where is my love?). He wanted the bird to be quiet so that he could concentrate on the voice of his own heart.

That night there was a violent storm. It was a sudden summer thunderstorm of the kind that builds up when the heat is most unbearable. It lashed through the trees and fields, whipped away thatch and even a few tiles from the houses in the village, and drenched the dusty ground. Those who had looked up at the clouds — so often bringers of nothing but the occasional gust of wind — and had decided to sleep outside anyway to avoid the heat, had picked up their charpoys and rushed inside when, without more warning than a heavy drop or two, the clouds had burst over their heads. Then they had gone out again to bring in the cattle tethered outside. Now they all steamed together in the darkness of the huts where most of the villagers lived, the cattle lowing plaintively in the front rooms, the humans talking together in the back.

Kachheru, the chamar who had worked for Rasheed’s family since childhood, and whose hut consisted of only a single room, had judged the arrival of the storm to the hour. His buffalo was inside, and safe from the lashing rain. She snorted and urinated from time to time, but these were reassuring sounds.

A little rain came through the roof and fell on Kachheru and his wife, who were lying on the ground. There were many roofs that were flimsier than his, and some that would be blown away in this kind of storm, but Kachheru said sharply:

‘Old woman — what use are you if you cannot even save us from the rain?’

His wife said nothing for a while. Then she said: ‘We should see how the beggar and his wife are doing. Their hut is on low ground.’

‘That is none of our business,’ retorted Kachheru.

‘On nights like these I think of the night when Tirru was born. I wonder how he’s doing in Calcutta. He never writes.’

‘Go to sleep, go to sleep,’ said Kachheru wearily. He knew the work that lay ahead of him the next morning, and he did not want to waste his hours of sleep in idle and disturbing chatter.

But for a while he lay awake with his own thoughts. The wind howled and ceased and howled again, and water continued to leak in. In the end he got up to improvise some temporary repair to his wife’s inefficient thatching.

Outside, the solid world of huts and trees, walls and wells, was now a shapeless, threatening roar of wind, water, moonlight, lightning, clouds and thunder. The land on which the untouchable castes lived was on the northern outskirts of the village. Kachheru was lucky; his own hut, though small, was not on the lowest land; it was in fact on the edge of a low escarpment of earth. But further below him he could see the rain-blurred outlines of huts that would be awash with water and filth by morning.

When he woke up, it was not yet light. He put on his dirty dhoti, and made his way through the slush of the village lanes to Rasheed’s father’s house. The rain had stopped, but the neem trees were still sprinkling droplets of water on him — and on the sweeper-women who were moving silently from house to house removing the garbage left outside at night by the women of the house. A few pigs grunted their way through the lanes, gobbling up whatever scraps or excrement they could find. All the dogs were silent, though a cock crowed occasionally in the waning darkness.

Gradually it became lighter. By now Kachheru, who had been walking slowly but in a deliberate manner along the slightly drier edges of the slushy lanes, was no longer near the scene of the worst damage, damage that sometimes distressed him as much as it did his wife, but which he had learned to ignore.

Kachheru looked around when he got to Rasheed’s father’s house. He could not see anyone, but he assumed that Baba at least was awake; he was a stickler for the pre-dawn prayer. A couple of people were sleeping on charpoys on the covered verandah; they must have been sleeping in the courtyard and had probably been caught in the sudden rain. Kachheru passed his hand over his wrinkled face and allowed himself to smile.

Suddenly there was a desperate mixture of quacks and clucks. A duck, king of the courtyard, with its head craned forward aggressively, but with an incongruously pacific expression on its face, was chasing (by turns) a cock, a couple of hens, and a few large chicks across the brick and mud — towards and then away from the cattle-shed, around the neem tree, and across the lane to the house where Baba and his younger son lived.

Kachheru rested on his haunches for a while. Then he went to the water-pump and splashed some water over his bare and muddy feet. A small black goat was butting its head against the shaft of the water-pump. Kachheru scratched its head. Its cynical yellow eyes looked back at him, and it bleated in complaint when he stopped.

Kachheru climbed the four steps to the door of the room where the ploughs were stored. Rasheed’s father had three ploughs, two local or desi ones with pointed wooden shares and one mishtan plough with a curved metallic share which Kachheru ignored. He left open the door to the room, and pulled the desi ploughs into the light of the entrance. Then he sat down on his haunches once again and examined the two ploughs. Eventually he placed one on his shoulder and walked across the courtyard to the cattle-shed. The cattle turned their heads at his approach, and he, pleased to see them, said, ‘Aaaah! aaaaah!’ in a low and comforting tone.