Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘Brahmpur — a pale blue sari,’ he said, almost to himself.

Lata turned to him through the window with a questioning look.

The train began to move.

Haresh shook his head, still smiling. Even if the train had been stationary, he would probably not have explained himself.

He waved as the train pulled out, but neither mother nor daughter waved back. However, being an optimist, Haresh put this down to their anglicized reticence.

A blue sari. That’s what it was, he kept thinking to himself.

Haresh had spent his day in Lucknow at Simran’s sister’s house. He told her that he had met a woman just yesterday who — since he had no chance of succeeding with Simran — was someone he was thinking seriously about as wife material.

He did not put it exactly like that; but even if he had it would not have been intrinsically offensive. Most marriages he knew had been decided on that basis, and the deciders were usually not even the couple themselves but their elders: fathers or male heads of the concerned families — with the wished-for or unwished-for counsel of dozens of others thrown in. In the case of one of Haresh’s distant rural cousins, the go-between had been the village barber; by virtue of his access to most of the houses in the village, this had been the fourth marriage he had been instrumental in arranging that year.

Simran’s sister sympathized with Haresh. She knew how long and faithfully Haresh had loved her sister, and she felt that his heart still belonged to her.

Haresh himself would not have thought of this as casually metaphorical. He and his heart did belong to her. She could do with it and with him what she pleased, and he would still love her. The pleasure in Simran’s eyes whenever they met — the sadness underlying that pleasure — the increasing certainty that her parents would not yield, that they would cut her off from themselves — that her mother, emotional woman that she was, might very well even carry out the threat against herself that she now spoke of in every letter to her and every day when she was home — all these had worn Simran down. Her correspondence, erratic even in England (partly because she herself would receive Haresh’s letters erratically, whenever the friend to whose address they were sent visited her) became even more so. Sometimes weeks would pass, and Haresh would not hear from her; then he would get three letters in as many days.

Simran’s sister knew how hard it would be for her to hear the news that Haresh had decided he might live his life with someone else — or even consider doing so. Simran loved Haresh. Her sister loved him too — even if he was the son of a Lala, which among the Sikhs was something of a term of contempt for Hindus. Her brother too had been part of the conspiracy. When he and Haresh were both seventeen he had been paid to sing ghazals on his friend’s behalf under his sister’s window: Simran had been annoyed with Haresh for some reason, and Haresh had been trying to appease her. He had had to hire her brother because he himself had, together with a love of music and a belief in its power to move unyielding hearts, a singing voice that even his beloved Simran (who liked his speaking voice well enough) had declared to be tuneless.

‘Haresh, have you made up your mind?’ said Simran’s sister in Punjabi. She was three years older than Simran, and her own marriage had been an arranged one — to a Sikh officer in the army.

‘What choice do I have?’ replied Haresh. ‘I have to think of someone else sooner or later. Time is passing. I am twenty-eight. I’m thinking of her good too — she will refuse everyone whom your parents suggest until she knows that I’m married.’

Haresh’s eyes grew moist. Simran’s sister patted him on the shoulder.

‘When did you make up your mind that this girl might suit you?’

‘At Kanpur Station. She was drinking that chocolate drink — you know, Pheasant’s.’ Haresh, noticing the look on Simran’s sister’s face, realized she wished to be spared the exact details.

‘Have you made any proposal?’

‘No. We have agreed to write to each other. Her mother arranged the meeting. They are in Lucknow at the moment, but they didn’t seem keen to see me here.’

‘Have you written to your father?’

‘I’ll write to him tonight, when I get back to Kanpur.’ Haresh had chosen a train that would enable him to meet Mrs Rupa Mehra and her daughter as if by chance at Lucknow Station.

‘Don’t write to Simran just yet.’

Haresh said in a hurt voice: ‘But why? I’ll have to say something sooner or later.’

‘If nothing comes out of this you will have hurt her for nothing.’

‘She’ll wonder if she doesn’t hear from me.’

‘Write as you always write.’

‘How can I do that?’ Haresh baulked at the deception.

‘Don’t say anything that isn’t true. Just don’t touch on this.’

Haresh thought for a while. ‘All right,’ he said at last. But he felt that Simran knew him too well not to sense from his letters that something had begun to happen in his life, not just in hers, that could draw the two of them apart.

The conversation turned after a while to Simran’s sister herself. Her young son Monty (only three years old) wanted to join the navy and her husband (who was crazy about the boy) was taking this decision extraordinarily badly. He treated it as a vote of no confidence in himself, and was, it seemed to her, sulking as a result. She herself attributed Monty’s preference to the fact that he enjoyed playing with boats in his tub, and had not yet arrived at the model-soldier stage.

Monty, incidentally, had difficulty pronouncing certain words, and just the other day had said (talking in English instead of Punjabi) while splashing around in his favourite element after one brief pre-monsoon shower, that he wanted to go to ‘the miggle of the puggle’. This Simran’s sister took as being symptomatic of his intrinsic sweetness. She hoped that in years to come he would order his men ‘into the heart of backle’. Monty sat through all this with a look of offended dignity. From time to time he tugged at his mother’s fingers to get her to stop prattling.

Since he wasn’t feeling hungry, Haresh decided to forgo lunch and went to see the twelve o’clock show of a film instead. Hamlet was playing at the local cinema hall. He enjoyed it, but Hamlet’s indecisiveness irritated him.

He then had a good haircut for a rupee. Finally, he had a paan and went off to the station in order to catch the train back to Kanpur — and, he hoped, to meet Lata and her mother, both of whom he had become quite fond of. That he was successful in this pleased him greatly; that they did not wave to him as the train moved out did not distress him unduly. The coincidence connecting Brahmpur Station and Lucknow Station he took as a propitious sign.

On the two-hour train journey back to Kanpur, Haresh took out a blue writing pad from his portfolio (‘H.C. Khanna’ was embossed on the top of each page) and a cheap white scribbling pad as well. He looked from one to the other, then to a woman sitting opposite him, then out of the window. It was getting dark. Soon the train lights came on. Finally he decided that it would not do to write a serious letter in a jolting train. He put away the writing pad.

At the top of his scribbling pad, he wrote: ‘To Do’. Then he crossed it out and wrote: ‘Points to remember’. Then he crossed that out and wrote: ‘Action Points’. It occurred to him that he was behaving as stupidly as Hamlet.

After he had listed his correspondence and various work-related items, his thoughts moved to more general matters, and he made a third list, under the heading, ‘My Life’: