Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Whenever he thought of his mother, tears came to Rasheed’s eyes. She had loved him and his brother almost to excess, and she had been adored in return. His brother had delighted in the pomegranate tree and he in the lemon. Now as he looked around the courtyard, freshened and washed by the rain, he seemed to see everywhere the tangible marks of her love.

The death of her elder son had certainly hastened her own. And before dying she had made Rasheed, heartbroken as he was by his brother’s death and her own impending one, promise her something that he had wanted desperately to refuse but did not have the heart or will to: a promise that was no doubt good in itself; but that had tied his life down even before he had begun to taste freedom.

Rasheed sighed as he walked up the stairs. His father was sitting on a charpoy on the roof, and his stepmother was pressing his feet.

‘Adaab arz, Abba-jaan. Adaab arz, Khala,’ said Rasheed. He called his stepmother Aunt.

‘You have taken your time coming,’ said his father curtly.

Rasheed said nothing. His young stepmother looked at him for a second, then turned away. Rasheed had never been impolite to her, but in his presence she always felt conscious of the woman whom she had supplanted, and she felt hurt that he made no attempt to reassure her or show her any affection.

‘How is your friend?’

‘Fine, Abba. I’ve left him downstairs — writing a letter, I think.’

‘I don’t mind him coming, but I would like to have been warned.’

‘Yes, Abba. I’ll try to do so next time. This came up quite suddenly.’

Rasheed’s stepmother got up and said: ‘I’ll go and make some tea.’

When she had gone, Rasheed said quietly: ‘Abba, if you can, please spare me this.’

‘Spare you what?’ said his father in a sudden fit of temper. He understood just what Rasheed meant, but was unwilling to admit it.

Rasheed at first decided he would say nothing, then reconsidered it. If I don’t speak my mind, he thought, will I have to continue to bear the intolerable? ‘What I mean, Abba,’ he said in a low voice, ‘is being criticized in front of her.’

‘I will say what I like to you when and where I like,’ said his father, chewing his paan and looking out over the edge of the roof. ‘Where are the others? Oh, yes — and you can be sure that it is not only I who criticize you and your way of life.’

‘My way of life?’ said Rasheed, some slight sharpness escaping into his tone of voice. He felt that it hardly suited his father to criticize his way of life.

‘On your first evening in the village, you missed both the evening and the night prayer. Today when I went into the fields I wanted you to accompany me — but you were nowhere to be seen. I had something important to show you and discuss with you. Some land. What kind of influence will people think you are under? And you spend your day going around from the house of the washerman to the house of the sweeper, asking about this one’s son and that one’s nephew, but spending no time with your own family. It is no secret that many people here think that you are a communist.’

Rasheed reflected that this probably meant only that he loathed the poverty and injustice endemic to the village, and that he made no particular secret of it. Visiting poor families was hardly cause for reproach.

‘I hope you don’t think that what I am doing is wrong,’ said Rasheed in a mutedly sarcastic manner.

His father said nothing for a second, then remarked with great asperity: ‘Your education in Brahmpur and so on has done a lot for your confidence. You should take advice where you can get it.’

‘And what advice would that be?’ said Rasheed. ‘The advice of the elders of this village that I should make as much money as I can as quickly as I can? Everyone here, as far as I can see, lives entirely for their appetites: for women or drink or food—’

‘Enough! You’ve said enough!’ said his father, shouting at him, but losing several of his consonants in the process.

Rasheed did not add ‘—or paan’, as he had been about to do. Instead he kept quiet, resolved not to say anything to his father that he might later regret, no matter how much he was provoked. In the end what Rasheed said was couched in general terms: ‘Abba, I feel that one is responsible for others, not only for oneself and one’s family.’

‘But first of all for one’s family.’

‘Whatever you say, Abba,’ said Rasheed, wondering why he ever returned to Debaria. ‘Do you think my marriage, for instance, shows that I don’t care for my family? That I didn’t care for my mother or my elder brother? I feel I would have been happier — and you as well — if I had been the one who had died.’

His father was silent for a minute. He was thinking of his happy-go-lucky elder son who had been content to live in Debaria and help manage the family land, who had been as strong as a lion, who had taken pride in his place as the son of a local zamindar, and who, rather than seeing everything as a problem, had spread a kind of unconcerned goodwill wherever he had gone. Then he thought of his wife — Rasheed’s mother — and he drew in a slow breath.

To Rasheed he said in a gentler voice than before: ‘Why do you not leave these schemes of yours — all these educational schemes, historical schemes, socialist schemes, all these schemes of improvement and redistribution, all this, this’—he waved his hand around—‘and live here and help us. Do you know what will happen to this land in a year or so when zamindari is abolished? They want to take it away from us. And then all your imaginary poultry farms and high-yielding fish ponds and improved dairy farms with which you intend to benefit the mass of mankind will have to be built in the air, because if all that comes to pass, there certainly won’t be enough land to support them. Not in our family, anyway.’

His father might have intended to speak gently, but what had come out of his utterance was inescapable scorn.

‘What can I do to prevent it, Abba?’ said Rasheed. ‘If the land is to be justly taken over it will be taken over.’

‘You could do a lot,’ his father began hotly. ‘For one thing, you could stop using the word “justly” for what is nothing but theft. And for another, you could talk to your friend—’

Rasheed’s face became tense. He could not bear the thought of demeaning himself in this way. But he chose an argument that he thought would be more suited to his father’s view of the world.

‘It would not work,’ he said. ‘The Revenue Minister is completely unbending. He won’t make individual exceptions. In fact he has let it be known that those people who try to use their influence with him or anyone else in the Revenue Department will be the first to be notified under the act.’

‘Is that so?’ said Rasheed’s father thoughtfully. ‘Well, we have not been idle ourselves. . the tehsildar knows us; and the Sub-Divisional Officer is an honest fellow, but lazy. . let’s see.’

‘Well, what has been happening, Abba?’ asked Rasheed.

‘That is what I wanted to speak to you about. . I wanted to point out certain fields. . We have to make things clear to everyone. . As the Minister says, there cannot be exceptions. . ’

Rasheed frowned. He could not understand what his father was getting at.

‘The idea is to move the tenants around,’ said his father, cracking a betel nut with a small brass nutcracker. ‘Keep them running — this year this field, next year, that. . ’

‘But Kachheru?’ said Rasheed, thinking of the small field with the two mulberry trees — Kachheru had not planted a mango tree for fear that such presumption might tempt providence.