Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘Goodnight, Ma,’ said Kalpana. ‘I’ve put a jug of water by your bed. If there’s anything you want, please tell me — Ovaltine or Horlicks or anything. And I’ll get in touch with Haresh tomorrow.’

‘No, darling, you must rest now. It’s very late, and you are not very well.’

‘Actually, Ma, I’m feeling a lot better than I felt earlier today. Haresh and Lata — Lata and Haresh. Well, no harm trying.’

But the next morning, Kalpana Gaur was not feeling at all well, and spent the day listless and yawning. And the day after, when she sent a message to Neel Darvaza, she found that Haresh Khanna had already returned to Kanpur.

In the train from Calcutta to Kanpur Lata had plenty of time to wonder about her sudden summons. The telegram from Mrs Rupa Mehra had been cryptic, as the best telegrams are, and had required her to come to Kanpur in two days’ time.

It was a day journey, though a long one. Arun had got up early to drop her at Howrah Station. Howrah Bridge was uncrowded. When they got to the station with its familiar smell of smoke, urine and fish, Arun made sure she was well settled in her ladies’ compartment.

‘What’ll you read on the way?’

‘ Emma .’

‘Not like our saloons, is it?’

‘No,’ said Lata with a smile.

‘I’ve telegrammed Brahmpur, so Pran ought to be at the station. Maybe Savita too. Look out for them.’

‘All right, Arun Bhai.’

‘Now, be good. It won’t be the same without you at home. Aparna will be much more difficult.’

‘I’ll write. . and, Arun Bhai, when you reply, please type.’

Arun laughed, then yawned.

The train departed on time.

Lata was happy once again to see the green and moist countryside of Bengal, which she loved — with its palms and banana trees, emerald fields of rice and village ponds. After a while, however, the landscape changed into a dry and hilly tract with small ravines over which the train clanked in a different voice.

The land became drier still as they moved westwards into the plains. Dusty fields and poor villages passed by between the telegraph poles and furlong markers. The heat was intense, and Lata’s mind began to wander. She would have been happy to stay in Calcutta for the rest of her holidays, but her mother sometimes took it into her head to insist on companionship for her Rail-Pilgrimages — usually when she felt ill or lonely somewhere along the route. She wondered which it was this time.

The other women in her compartment were shy with each other at first, and only talked to those they were travelling with, but as time passed, through the catalysis of a rather charming baby, they established a web of conversation. Young men from their families stopped by to inquire whether everything was all right when the train halted at a station, brought cups of tea in earthenware cups, and replenished the earthenware pitchers with water, for the day was getting even hotter, and the fans functioned only about half the time.

A woman in a burqa, having established which direction was west, rolled out a small prayer-rug and began to pray.

Lata thought of Kabir, and she felt both miserable and — in a curious way that she could not understand — happy. She loved him still — it was pointless to pretend otherwise. Had Calcutta had any effect at all in diminishing what she felt for him? Certainly, his letter had not given her any great hope of the strength of his feelings for her. Was there anything at all to be said for loving and not being loved equally in return? She didn’t think so. Why, then, did she smile when she thought of him?

Lata read her Emma , and was grateful to be able to. If she had been travelling with her mother, they would have formed the central node in the conversational web, and everyone in the compartment would by now have heard about Bentsen Pryce, Lata’s brilliance in her studies, the details of Mrs Rupa Mehra’s rheumatism, her false teeth and former beauty, the saloon-sheltered glory of her late husband’s inspection tours, the harshness of fate, and the wisdom of acceptance and resignation.

Sootily, fitfully, the train made its way along the great, burning plain of the Ganga.

At Patna a swarm of locusts, a mile long, darkened the sky.

Dust and flies and soot somehow succeeded in entering the compartment even when the glass panes were pulled down.

The Brahmpur telegram could not have arrived, because neither Savita nor Pran was at the platform to meet her. Lata had been looking forward to seeing them, if only for the fifteen minutes that the train stopped at Brahmpur. As the train pulled out of Brahmpur Junction she felt a disproportionate sadness.

As the whistle of the train suddenly wailed out, she caught in the distance a glimpse of the roofs of the university.

Always I am weeping, weeping

In your heart my image keeping

If, for example, he had appeared at the station — say, in the casual clothes he had worn when he had been with her on the boat, smiling with his old friendliness, arguing with a porter about the rate he was charging — suppose he too had been going to Kanpur — or at least as far as Banaras or Allahabad — Lata felt that her heart would have leapt with happiness at the sound of his voice and the sight of his face — and any misunderstanding between them would have vanished in a single puff of steam, a single turn of the wheels.

Lata looked down at her book.

‘My poor dear Isabella,’ said he, fondly taking her hand, and interrupting, for a few moments, her busy labours for some one of her five children—‘How long it is, how terribly long since you were here! And how tired you must be after your journey! You must go to bed early, my dear — and I recommend a little gruel to you before you go. — You and I will have a nice basin of gruel together. My dear Emma, suppose we all have a little gruel.’

An egret flew over a field towards a ditch.

A sickly smell of molasses rose from a sugarcane factory.

The train stopped for an hour at a tiny station for no particular reason.

Beggars begged at the barred windows of the compartment.

When the train crossed the Ganga at Banaras, she threw a two-anna coin for luck out of the barred window. It hit a girder, then spun downwards into the river.

At Allahabad the train crossed over to the right bank again, and Lata threw another coin out.

Ganga darshan is so nice.

I have now completed twice.

She told herself that she was in danger of becoming an honorary Chatterji.

She began to hum Raag Sarang, then later drifted into Multani.

She rejected her sandwiches and bought some samosas and tea at the next station.

She hoped her mother was well. She yawned. She put Emma aside. She thought once again of Kabir.

She drowsed off for an hour. When she woke she found she had been leaning against the shoulder of an old woman in a white sari, who smiled at her. She had been keeping the flies off Lata’s face.

A troop of monkeys were raiding a dusty mango tree in an orchard at dusk, while three men stood below, trying to shoo them off with stones and lathis.

Soon it was night. It was still warm.

In a while the train slowed down once more, and the word ‘Cawnpore’ greeted her in black on a large yellow sign on the platform. Her mother was there, and her uncle Mr Kakkar, both smiling; but there was a look of strain on her mother’s face.

They went home by car. Kakkar Phupha (as Lata called her father’s sister’s husband) was a successful accountant with a cheery manner.

When they were alone, Mrs Rupa Mehra told Lata about Haresh: ‘a very suitable prospect’.

Lata was speechless for a moment. Then in a tone of disbelief she said: ‘You treat me like a child.’