Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

As the morning progressed he stopped singing. A couple of times he lost patience with the bullocks, and gave them a stroke or two with the stick — especially the outer one, who had decided to halt when his fellow did, instead of continuing to wheel around as he had been ordered to.

Kachheru was now working at a steady pace, using with care his finite energy and that of his cattle. It had grown unbearably hot, and the sweat poured down from his forehead into his eyebrows and trickled down from there into his eyes. He wiped it from time to time with the back of his right hand, keeping steady his hold on the plough with the left. By midday he was exhausted. He led the cattle to a ditch, but the water there, though they drank it, was warm. He himself drank from the leather bag that he had filled at the water-pump before setting out.

His wife came out into the fields when the sun was at its height, bringing him rotis, salt, a few chillies, and some lassi to drink. She watched him eat in silence, asked him if he wanted her to do anything else, and returned.

A little later Rasheed’s father turned up with an umbrella that he used as a parasol. He squatted on a low ridge of mud that divided one field from another, and said a word or two of encouragement to Kachheru. ‘It’s true what they say,’ he said. ‘There’s no work as hard as farming.’ Kachheru did not answer, but nodded respectfully. He was beginning to feel ill. When Rasheed’s father left, the fact of his presence was marked by the red-stained earth where he had spat out his paan-juice.

By now the water in the fields was uncomfortably hot underfoot, and a hot breeze had begun to blow. ‘I will have to rest for a while,’ he told himself. But he realized the importance of ploughing while the fugitive water was still on the ground, and he did not wish it to be said that he had not done what he knew needed doing.

By the time it was late afternoon his dark face was flushed red. His feet, callused and cracked though they were, felt as if they had been boiled. After a short day’s work he usually shouldered the plough himself as he drove the cattle back from the fields. But he had no energy to do so today and gave it to the spent cattle to haul. Hardly a coherent thought formed itself in his mind. The metal of his spade, when it touched his shoulder accidentally, made him wince.

He passed by his own unploughed field with its two mulberry trees and hardly noticed it. Even that small field was not really his own, but it did not strike him to say so — or even think so. His only intention was to place one foot after the other on the path that led back to Debaria. The village lay three-quarters of a mile ahead of him, and it seemed to him that he was walking there through fire.

Rasheed’s father’s whitewashed house, while fairly imposing from the outside by the standards of Debaria, contained very few rooms. It basically consisted of a square colonnaded quadrangle open to the sky in the middle. On one side of this quadrangle three quite airless rooms had been constructed by the simple expedient of bricking in the space between the columns. These rooms were occupied by members of the family. There were no other rooms in the house. Cooking was done in a corner of the open colonnade. This saved the women of the household from the smoke of a chimney-less hearth in a closed kitchen — exposure to which in the course of time would have ruined their eyes and lungs.

Other sections of the colonnade contained storage bins and shelves. In the central square was an open space with a lemon tree and a pomegranate tree. Behind the back wall of the quadrangle was a privy for the women and a small vegetable garden. A set of stairs led up to the roof where Rasheed’s father held court and ate paan — as he was doing at this moment.

No man could enter the house who was not a close member of the family. Rasheed’s maternal or paternal uncles had free access. This was true of the bear-like uncle even after his sister, Rasheed’s mother, had died and Rasheed’s father had taken a second — and much younger — wife. Since the patriarch, Baba, despite his age and diabetes, didn’t mind climbing the stairs, roof conferences were a regular phenomenon. A roof conference was always convened, for instance, when anyone returned from a long absence, in order to sort out family matters.

This evening’s was in honour of Rasheed, but before the other men had assembled it had turned quite quickly into an argument — or a series of arguments — between Rasheed and his father. His father had raised his voice on a number of occasions. Rasheed had defended himself, but it would have been almost unthinkable for him to raise his voice in uncontrolled anger. Sometimes he remained silent.

When Rasheed had left Maan outside and entered the courtyard, he had been in an unquiet frame of mind. Maan had not mentioned the letter today, which was good. Rasheed had not liked the thought of disappointing his friend in the matter, but it would have been impossible for him to write the kinds of things that Maan would almost certainly want to dictate. Rasheed did not care for what he saw as the baser human instincts. They made him uncomfortable, at times, even angry. In matters such as these, he preferred to keep his eyes closed. If he suspected that there was anything between Maan and Saeeda Bai — and considering the circumstances of their meetings it was hard to imagine how he could not have known it — he did not wish to dwell on it.

As he walked upstairs to meet his father, he thought about his mother, who had lived in that house until her death two years before. It had seemed unimaginable to him then, as it seemed unimaginable to him now, that after her death his father could have married anyone else. At the age of fifty-five, surely one’s appetites became still; and surely the memory of a woman who had devoted her entire life to his service and to the service of his two sons would have stood like a wall between his father and the thought of taking a second wife. But here she was, his stepmother: a pretty woman, not ten years older than himself. And it was she who slept with his father on the roof whenever he decided she should, and who bustled around the house, apparently undaunted by the ghost of the woman who had planted the trees whose fruit she unthinkingly plucked.

What did his father do, Rasheed wondered, other than give in to his appetites? He sat at home and ordered people about, and he ate paan continuously from morning till night, like a chain-smoker. He had ruined his teeth and tongue and throat. His mouth was a mere red slash interrupted by the occasional black tooth. Yet this man with his black, curly, balding hair and thickset, belligerent face was forever provoking and lecturing him — and had done so from Rasheed’s infancy to his adulthood.

Rasheed could not remember a time when he had not been lectured to by his father. In school, when he was a small or even adolescent ruffian, he had no doubt deserved it. But later, as he had settled down, and done well in college, he had continued to be a target for his father’s dissatisfaction. And everything had got worse since he had lost his elder and favourite son, Rasheed’s beloved brother, in a train accident, just a year before the loss of his wife.

‘Your place is here, on the land,’ his father had told him afterwards. ‘I need your help. I am no longer so young. If you want to remain at Brahmpur University, you yourself will have to find the means to do so.’ His father was hardly poor, Rasheed thought bitterly. He was apparently young enough to take a young wife. And — Rasheed’s mind rebelled at the thought — he was even young enough to want her to give him another child. Late fatherhood was something of a tradition in the family. Baba, after all, had been in his fifties when Netaji was born.