Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

With unembarrassed aplomb Netaji went straight up to the young SDO and said:

‘SDO Sahib, I am so pleased to meet you. And so honoured. I say this from the bottom of my heart.’

The weak-chinned face under the sola topi looked at him in displeased puzzlement.

‘Yes?’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’ The SDO’s Hindi, though tolerable, had a Bengali intonation.

Netaji continued: ‘But, SDO Sahib, how can you say that? The question is how I can be of service to you. You are our guest in Salimpur tehsil. I am the son of a zamindar of Debaria village. My name is Tahir Ahmed Khan. The name is known here: Tahir Ahmed Khan. I am a youth organizer for the Congress Party.’

‘Good. Glad to meet you,’ said the SDO in a voice that was utterly unglad.

Netaji’s heart did not sink at this lack of enthusiasm. He now produced his trump card.

‘And this is my good friend, Maan Kapoor,’ he said with a flourish, nudging Maan forward. Maan looked rather sullen.

‘Good,’ said the SDO, as unenthusiastically as before. Then a slow frown crossed his face and he said, ‘I think I have met you somewhere before.’

‘Oh, but this is the son of Mahesh Kapoor, our Revenue Minister!’ said Netaji with aggressive obsequiousness.

The SDO looked surprised. Then he frowned again in concentration. ‘Ah yes! We met very briefly, I believe, at your father’s place about a year ago,’ he said in a fairly amiable voice, speaking now in English and, as a result, unintentionally cutting Netaji out of the conversation. ‘You have a place near Rudhia too, don’t you? Near the town, that is.’

‘Yes, my father has a farm there. In fact, coming to think of it, I should be visiting it one of these days,’ said Maan, suddenly remembering his father’s instructions.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked the SDO.

‘Oh, nothing much, just visiting a friend,’ said Maan. Then, after a pause, he added: ‘A friend who is standing at the other end of the platform.’

The SDO smiled weakly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m off to Rudhia later today, and if you want to go to your father’s farm and don’t mind a very bumpy ride in my jeep, you’re most welcome to come with me. I have to do a bit of wolf-hunting myself: an activity, I should add, for which I am utterly untrained and unfit. But because I’m the SDO I have to be seen to be handling the menace myself.’

Maan’s eyes lit up. ‘Wolf-hunting?’ he said. ‘Do you really mean that?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said the SDO. ‘Tomorrow morning is when we go. Are you fond of hunting? Would you care to come along?’

‘That would be wonderful,’ said Maan with great enthusiasm. ‘But I don’t have anything except kurta-pyjamas to wear.’

‘Oh, I should think we could get you togged up if necessary,’ said the SDO. ‘Anyway, it’s nothing formal — just a beat to try to flush out a few man-eating wolves that have been bothering some villages in my subdivision.’

‘Well, I’ll speak to my friend,’ said Maan. He realized that fortune had delivered him three gifts simultaneously: the chance to do something he loved, the release from a journey he did not wish to make, and a responsible excuse for effecting that release.

He looked at his unexpected benefactor in the friendliest way and said: ‘I’ll just be back. But I don’t think you mentioned your name.’

‘I’m very sorry, you’re quite right. I am Sandeep Lahiri,’ said the SDO, shaking Maan’s hand warmly and entirely ignoring the injured and fuming Netaji.

Rasheed was not unhappy that Maan could not come with him to his wife’s village, and was glad to see how enthusiastic Maan was to go to his father’s farm.

The SDO was pleased to have company. He and Maan agreed to meet in a couple of hours. After he had finished some work at Salimpur Station — involving a consignment of vaccines for an inoculation programme in the area — Sandeep Lahiri sat down in the stationmaster’s office and pulled Howards End out of his bag. He was still reading it when Maan found him there. They set out almost immediately.

The jeep ride southwards was as bumpy as Sandeep Lahiri had promised, and very dusty as well. The driver and a policeman sat in front, and Maan and the SDO at the back. They did not talk much.

‘It really does work,’ said Sandeep at one point, taking off his sola topi and looking at it with appreciation. ‘I never believed it until I started work here. I always thought that it was part of the mindless uniform of the pukka sahib.’

At another point he told Maan a few demographic details about his subdivision: what percentage of Muslims, Hindus and so on there were. The details immediately slipped out of Maan’s mind.

Sandeep Lahiri had a pleasant, rather tentative way of producing his occasional, well-rounded sentences, and Maan took a liking to him.

This liking increased when, at his bungalow that evening, he became more expansive. Although Maan was a Minister’s son, Sandeep made no bones about his dislike of the politicians in his own subdivision and the way they interfered with his work. Since he was the judicial as well as the executive head of his subdivision — separation of powers had not yet been fully realized in Purva Pradesh — he had more work than a human being could be expected to handle. In addition, there were all kinds of emergencies that cropped up: like the wolves or an epidemic or the visit of a political bigwig who insisted on being shepherded around by the SDO himself. Strangely enough, it was not his local MLA who gave Sandeep Lahiri the most trouble but a member of the Legislative Council whose home was in this area and who treated it as his private domain.

This man, Maan learned over a nimbu pani laced with gin, saw the SDO as a competitor to his influence. If the SDO was compliant and consulted him on everything, he was content. If the SDO showed any independence, he tried quickly to bring him to heel.

‘The problem is,’ said Sandeep Lahiri with a rueful glance at his guest, ‘that Jha is an important Congressman — the Chairman of the Legislative Council and a friend of the Chief Minister. Nor does he miss an opportunity to remind me of this. He also reminds me periodically that he is more than twice my age and embodies what he calls “the wisdom of the people”. Oh well. In some respects he’s quite right, of course. Within eighteen months of appointment we’re put in charge of an area of half a million people — handling revenue work and criminal work, quite apart from keeping law and order and managing the general welfare of the subdivision and acting as father and mother of the population. No wonder he feels annoyed whenever he sees me, fresh from my training at Metcalfe House and my six months’ field experience in some other district. Another?’

‘Please.’

‘This bill of your father’s is going to make a vast amount of additional work for us, you know,’ said Sandeep Lahiri a little later. ‘But it’s a good thing, I suppose.’ He sounded unconvinced. ‘Oh, it’s almost time for the news.’ He went over to his sideboard, on which rested a large radio in a handsome polished wooden cabinet. It had a great many white dials.

He turned it on. A big green valve-light slowly began to glow and the sound of a male voice singing an evening raag gradually filled the room. It was Ustad Majeed Khan. With a grimace of instinctive distaste Sandeep Lahiri turned the volume down.

‘Well,’ he said to Maan, ‘I’m afraid there’s no getting around this stuff. It’s the price of the news, and I pay it for a minute or two every day. Why can’t they put on something listenable, like Mozart or Beethoven?’

Maan, who had heard western classical music perhaps three times in his life, and had not enjoyed the experience, said: