Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

First, he fed all the cattle, mixing a little more grain than usual into the mush of hay and straw and water that was their fare in the hot weather. Even the black water buffaloes — usually sent out to forage for themselves under the supervision of a herdboy — were fed, since it was difficult for them to find enough to graze on in this season. Then he adjusted muzzles and ropes to the necks and noses of the pair of intelligent white bullocks he most liked to work with. He picked up a long stick that was leaning against the wall of the cattle-shed and drove them out gently. Aloud, but so that no one would hear him, he said:

‘If it weren’t for me, you’d be finished.’

As he was about to yoke the bullocks together he suddenly remembered something. Telling them sternly to remain exactly where they were he went back across the courtyard to the room opposite. He got out a spade and carried it across. The bullocks had not strayed. He praised them, then yoked them, and placed the plough upside down on the yoke, letting them drag it along while he shouldered his spade.

It was expected of Kachheru that whenever there was rain during the dry summer months he would go for the next day or two into his master’s fields and plough them while there was still water in the soil. He was to go from field to field, and plough from morning till evening in order to take full advantage of this temporary moisture. It was exhausting labour, and it was not paid for.

Kachheru was one of Rasheed’s father’s chamars, and was on call at any time he wanted, not just for farming tasks but for any odd jobs — whether it was pumping water for a bath or taking a message to the other end of the village or hauling arhar stalks on to the roof of the house to dry for cooking fuel. Unlike other strangers he was granted the special and very occasional dispensation of entrance into the sanctum of the house, especially if something needed to be lugged on to the roof. After the death of Rasheed’s elder brother, it had become necessary to have help in the house for the heavier tasks. But whenever Kachheru was called in, any women at home locked themselves in one of the rooms or slipped out into the vegetable garden at the back, staying as close to the wall of the house as possible.

In return for his services, he was taken care of by the family. This meant that he was given a certain amount of grain at harvest time: not enough, however, to provide for even a basic diet for himself and his wife. He had also been allowed a small plot of land to farm on his own, whenever his time was not required by his master. His master also lent him the use of his plough and bullocks if he felt he could spare them, as well as spades, hoes, and other tools, none of which Kachheru possessed or felt it worthwhile indebting himself to buy in order to till his small plot.

He was overworked, but it was not so much his mind as the exhaustion of his body that told him this. As the years had passed and he had never raised his head in rebellion or rudeness, he was now treated more politely by the family he had served for forty years, ever since he was a boy. They told him what he had to do, but did not shout at him in the voice of insulting command appropriate for the subservient caste to which he belonged. Rasheed’s father sometimes called him ‘my old one’, which pleased Kachheru. He was given a kind of pre-eminence among his chamars, and was asked to supervise them from time to time during the busiest farming seasons.

Yet when his only son Tirru had said that he wanted to get out of Debaria and its caste-ridden, poverty-stricken, unrelievedly back-breaking, hopeless life, Kachheru had not objected. Kachheru’s wife had pleaded with her son not to go, but her husband’s unspoken support had weighed heavily on the other side.

What future lay for their son in the village? He had no land, he had no money, and it was only at great sacrifice to the family — which had had to forgo the income that the boy would have brought in by herding cattle — that he had been educated to the sixth class at the government primary school a few miles away. Was this in order that he should kill himself working in the burning heat of the fields? Whatever Kachheru thought of his own life, he did not wish it upon his son. Let the boy go to Brahmpur or Calcutta or Bombay or wherever he chose and find work there: any kind of work, whether as a domestic servant or as a factory- or mill-hand.

At first Tirru had sent back money, and had written affectionate letters home in Hindi which Kachheru begged the postman or the bania at the shop — when they had the time — to read out for him. Sometimes he asked them to read them out several times, until they were irritated and puzzled. Then he would dictate replies which he would beg them to transcribe on a postcard. The boy had returned for the wedding of his two younger sisters, and had even helped with their dowries. But for the last year there had been no letters from Calcutta at all, and several of Kachheru’s letters were returned to sender. Not all, though; and so he continued to write a monthly letter to their son’s old address. But where he was, what had happened to him, and why he had stopped writing he could not imagine — and feared to. It was as if their son had half-ceased to exist. His wife was distraught. Sometimes she wept to herself in the dark, sometimes she prayed at a small orange-stained niche in a pipal tree where the village deity was said to live and where she had taken her son to be blessed before his departure. Every day she reminded Kachheru of how she had foreseen it all.

Finally one day he suggested to his wife that he would seek his master’s permission and financial support (though he knew this meant falling into a bottomless pit of debt) to go to Calcutta to search for their son. But she had fallen weeping on the ground, full of nameless terrors. Kachheru had rarely even been to Salimpur, and never to the district town of Rudhia. Brahmpur, let alone Calcutta, was entirely outside his imagination. She, for her part, had only known two villages, the village into which she had been born and the village into which she had married.

It was cool, and there was a morning breeze. From the pigeon-house came the sound of unfrantic, heavy cooing. Then a few pigeons began to fly around: some grey ones with black bands, some brownish ones, one or two white ones. Kachheru hummed a bhajan to himself as he walked the bullocks out of the village.

A few poor women and children, mostly of his own caste, had come out with baskets to glean the fields that had been harvested yesterday. Ordinarily by coming out as early as this they would have stolen a march on the birds and small animals that picked the fields bare. But now the gleaners were looking for grains of food in a morass of mud.

It was not unpleasant to be ploughing at this time of day. It was cool, and walking ankle-deep in cool water and mud behind a pair of well-trained and obedient bullocks (Kachheru had trained this pair himself) felt fine. He rarely needed to use his stick; unlike many peasants, he did not enjoy using it at all. The pair responded to his repertory of calls, moving anticlockwise in intersecting circuits around the field, as close to the edge as possible, drawing the plough slowly behind them. Kachheru continued to sing to himself, interrupting his bhajan with ‘wo! wo!’ or ‘taka taka’ or other commands, and then picked up the tune not from where he had left off but from where he would have been had he never stopped singing. After the whole of the first field was covered with furrows — a field twice as large as the one he farmed for himself — he was sweating with exertion. The sun had now risen about fifteen degrees in the sky, and it was becoming warm. He let the bullocks rest, and went around the untouched corners of the field, digging up the earth with his spade.