Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

All at once it sensed their presence. It swung away from them and leapt down to the path in the ravine where Maan had imagined a wolf might emerge in the first place. Giving himself no chance to think of his own relief and paying not the least attention to the dazed Sandeep, he swung his rifle to follow the wolf to the point where he had earlier judged it would present the best target. It was now in his sights.

But just as he was about to fire, he suddenly saw two marksmen who had not been there before and who had no business to be there, sitting on the low ridge at the far side of the path, directly opposite him, their rifles trained on the wolf, and clearly about to fire as well.

This is mad! thought Maan.

‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’ he shouted.

One of the marksmen shot anyway but missed. The bullet pinged against a rock on the slope two feet away from Maan and ricocheted away.

‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! You crazy fools!’ yelled Maan.

The great wolf, having changed its route once, did not do so again. With the same irregular heavy swiftness it charged out of the ravine and made for the woods, its paws raising a trail of dust until it disappeared for a second behind the low boundary of a rough-surfaced field. The moment they saw it in open countryside some of the marksmen positioned at other exits fired at its diminishing shape. But they had no real chance. The wolf, like the fox and his own earlier fellow, was in the woods in a matter of seconds, safe from this concerted human terror.

The beaters had reached the exit of the ravine, and the beat was over. Not disappointment but a fit of violent anger seized Maan. He unloaded his rifle with trembling hands, then went over to where the errant marksmen were standing and grabbed one of them by his shirt.

The man was taller and possibly stronger than Maan, but he looked apologetic and frightened. Maan released him, then stood before him, saying nothing, merely breathing swiftly and heavily with tension and aggression. Then he spoke. Instead of asking them whether they were hunting humans or wolves, as he had been about to do, he controlled himself somehow and simply said in a semi-feral growl:

‘You were placed to guard that route. You were not intended to come over the ridge and hunt in some other place that you decided was more promising. One of us might have been killed. It might have been you.’

The man said nothing. He knew that what he and his companion had just done was inexcusable. He looked at his companion, who shrugged.

Suddenly, Maan felt a wave of disappointment wash over him. He turned away with a shake of the head, and walked back to where his rifle and water bottle were standing. Sandeep and the others had gathered beneath a tree and were discussing the beat. Sandeep was using his sola topi to fan his face. He still looked shaken.

‘The real problem,’ said someone, ‘is that wood there. It’s too close to the exit. Otherwise we could get about ten more marksmen and spread them in a very wide arc — there — and there, say—’

‘Well, at any rate,’ said someone else, ‘they’ve had a bad shock. We’ll flush this ravine out again next week. Only two wolves — I’d hoped that there’d be more of them here today.’ He pulled a biscuit out of his pocket and munched it.

‘Oh, so you think they’ll be here next week awaiting your pleasure?’

‘We set out too late,’ said yet another. ‘Early morning’s the best time.’

Maan stood apart from them, struggling with a rush of overwhelming feelings — unbearably tense and unbearably slack at the same time.

He took a drink from his water bottle and looked at the rifle from which he had not fired a single shot. He felt exhausted, frustrated, and betrayed by events. He would not join in their pointless post-mortem. And indeed a post-mortem was — in a literal sense — unjustified.

But later that afternoon Maan heard some good news. One of Sandeep’s visitors mentioned that a reliable colleague of his had told him that the Nawab Sahib and his two sons had passed through Rudhia and gone to Baitar with the intention of staying at the Fort for a few days.

Maan’s heart leapt up. The lustreless images of his father’s farm vanished from his mind. They were replaced by thoughts both of a proper hunt (with horses) on the Baitar Estate and — even more delightfully — of news from Firoz about Saeeda Bai. Ah, thought Maan, the pleasures of the chase! He got his few things together, borrowed a couple of novels from Sandeep — to make his exile in Debaria more bearable — went off to the station, and caught the first possible train along the slow and halting branch line to Baitar.

I wonder if Firoz delivered it personally, he said to himself. He must have! And I shall find out what she said to him when she read his letter — my letter, rather — and discovered that Dagh Sahib, driven desperate by his absence from her and his own inability to communicate, had used the Nawabzada himself as translator, scribe and emissary. And what did she make of my reference to Dagh’s lines:

It is you who wrong me, and then you who ask:

Dear Sir, please tell me, how do you fare today?

He got off at Baitar Station and hired a rickshaw to the Fort. Since he was dressed in crushed clothes (yet further crumpled from the hot and crowded train journey) and was unshaven, the rickshaw-wallah looked at him and his bag and asked:

‘Meeting someone there?’

‘Yes,’ said Maan, who did not consider his question an impertinence. ‘The Nawab Sahib.’

The rickshaw-wallah laughed at Maan’s sense of humour. ‘Very good, very good,’ he said.

After a while he asked:

‘What do you think of our town of Baitar?’

Maan said, hardly thinking of his words: ‘It’s a nice town. Looks like a nice town.’

The rickshaw-wallah said: ‘It was a nice town — before the cinema hall was built. Now what with the dancing girls and singing girls on the screen and all that loving and wiggling and so on’—he swerved to avoid a pothole in the road—‘it’s become an even nicer town.’

The rickshaw-wallah went on: ‘Nice from the point of view of decency, nice from the point of view of villainy. Baitar, Baitar, Baitar, Baitar.’ He puffed out the words in rhythm to his pedal strokes. ‘That — that building with the green signboard — is the hospital, as good as the district hospital in Rudhia. It was established by the present Nawab’s father or grandfather. And that is Lal Kothi, which was used as a hunting lodge by the Nawab Sahib’s great-grandfather — but is now surrounded by the town. And that’—for, as they rounded a built-up corner of the road they all at once came within sight of a massive, pale yellow building towering on its small hill above a muddle of whitewashed houses—‘that is Baitar Fort itself.’

It was a vast and impressive building, and Maan looked at it admiringly.

‘But Panditji wants to take it away and give it to the poor people,’ said the rickshaw-wallah, ‘once zamindari is abolished.’

Needless to say, Pandit Nehru — in distant Delhi, with a few other matters to think of — had no such plan. Nor did the Purva Pradesh Zamindari Abolition Bill — now only a presidential signature away from becoming an act — plan to take over forts or residences or even the self-managed land of the zamindars. But Maan let it go.

‘What do you stand to gain from all this?’ he asked the rickshaw-wallah.

‘I? Nothing! Nothing at all, nothing at all. Not here, anyway. Now if I could get a room, that would be fine. If I could get two, that would be even better; I would rent one out to some other poor fool and live off the sweat of his efforts. Otherwise I will continue to pedal my rickshaw during the day and sleep on it at night.’