Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘Hunt?’ said Maan, staring at him.

‘And your clothes are still in the wash—’

Maan turned away in disgust. He told Waris to follow him. He went to his room, dumped his belongings in his bag and walked out of the Fort. A rickshaw was summoned to take him to the station. Waris wanted to accompany him, but Maan did not let him come.

Waris’s last words to him were: ‘I sent a junglefowl to the Nawab Sahib. Could you see if he got it? And give my best to that old fellow, Ghulam Rusool, who used to work here.’

‘So tell me,’ said Rasheed to his four-year-old daughter Meher as they sat on a charpoy outside his father-in-law’s house, ‘what have you learned?’

Meher, who was sitting on her father’s lap, rattled off her version of the Urdu alphabet as follows:

‘Alif-be-te-se-he-che-dal-bari-ye!’

Rasheed was not pleased. ‘That is a very abridged version of the alphabet,’ he said. He reflected that during his absence in Brahmpur, Meher’s education had very considerably regressed. ‘Now, Meher, you must try harder than that. You are a bright girl.’

Though Meher was indeed a bright girl, she did not evince any further interest in the alphabet beyond adding two or three letters to her list.

She was pleased to see her father, but had been very shy with him when he had walked into the house the previous evening after an absence of several months. It had taken all her mother’s persuasion and even the bribe of a cream biscuit to make her greet Rasheed. Finally, and very hesitantly, she had said, ‘Adaab arz, Chacha-jaan.’

Very softly, her mother had said, ‘Not Chacha-jaan. Abba-jaan.’ This correction had brought on another attack of shyness. Now, however, Rasheed had re-established himself in her good graces, and she was chatting away with him as if the intervening months had not existed.

‘What do they sell in the village shop?’ asked Rasheed, hoping that Meher might give a better account of herself in practical affairs than she had with the alphabet.

‘Sweets, savouries, soap, oil,’ said Meher.

Rasheed was pleased. He bounced her up and down on his knee, and asked for a kiss, which he promptly got.

A short while later, Rasheed’s father-in-law emerged from the house where he had been talking to his daughter. He was a tall, gentle man with a well-trimmed white beard, and was known in the village as Haji Sahib in recognition of the fact that he had performed the pilgrimage to Mecca some thirty years earlier.

Seeing his son-in-law and granddaughter still talking away outside the house and making no attempt at activity, he said:

‘Abdur Rasheed, the sun is getting higher, and if you must go today, you had better make a move soon.’ He paused. ‘And be sure that you eat a large spoonful of ghee from that canister at every meal. I make certain that Meher does, and that’s why her skin looks so healthy and her eyes shine as bright as diamonds.’ Haji Sahib bent down to pick up his granddaughter and hugged her. Meher, who had figured out that she, her baby sister, and her mother would be going to Debaria with their father, clung to her Nana with great affection, and extracted a four-anna coin from his pocket.

‘You come too, Nana-jaan,’ she insisted.

‘What have you found?’ said Rasheed. ‘Put it back. Bad habit, bad habit,’ he said, shaking his head.

But Meher appealed to her Nana, who let her keep her doubtfully gotten gains. He was very sad to see them go, but he went inside to fetch his daughter and the baby.

Rasheed’s wife emerged from the house. She was wearing a black burqa with a thin veil across her face, and was holding the baby in her arms. Meher went over to her mother, pulled at her burqa, and asked to hold the baby.

‘Not now, Munia is asleep. In a little while,’ her mother said in a soft voice.

‘Have something to eat. Or at least a glass of sherbet before you go,’ said Haji Sahib, who a few minutes earlier had been pressing them to make haste.

‘Haji Sahib, we must go,’ said Rasheed. ‘We should spend a little time near the town.’

‘Then I’ll come with you to the railway station,’ said Haji Sahib, nodding slowly.

‘Please don’t trouble yourself,’ said Rasheed.

A sudden look of more than ordinary concern, even anxiety, crossed the sober features of the old man.

‘Rasheed, I am worried that—’ he began, then stopped.

Rasheed, who respected his father-in-law, had unburdened himself to him about his visit to the patwari, but he knew that that was not the source of the old man’s concern.

‘Please don’t worry, Haji Sahib,’ said Rasheed, his face also reflecting momentary pain. Then he busied himself with their bags and tins and canisters and they all set off for the road that led past the outskirts of the village. Here there was a small tea-stall where the bus to the town and the railway station stopped. A little crowd of passengers had gathered, together with a larger crowd of those who had come to see them off.

The bus clattered to a halt.

Haji Sahib was in tears as he embraced first his daughter, then his son-in-law. When he took Meher up in his arms, she followed one of his tears with her finger, frowning. The baby slept through all this, even though she was passed from arm to arm.

With a great deal of bustle everyone got on to the bus except for two passengers; a young woman in an orange sari and a little girl of about eight, obviously her daughter.

The woman was embracing a middle-aged woman — presumably her mother, whom she had come to visit, or perhaps her sister — and weeping in a loud voice. They hugged and clutched each other with theatrical abandon, wailing and keening. The younger woman gasped with grief and cried:

‘Do you remember the time when I fell down and hurt my knee. . ’

The other woman wailed: ‘You are my only one, my only one. . ’

The little girl, who was dressed in mauve with one pink ribbon around her single plait, was looking profoundly bored.

‘You fed me food — you gave me everything. . ’ continued her mother.

‘What will I do without you. . Oh God! Oh God!’

This went on for a few minutes despite the desperate honks of the driver’s horn. But to drive off without them would have been unthinkable. The other passengers, though the spectacle had palled and they were now getting impatient, would never have allowed it.

‘What is happening?’ said Rasheed’s wife in a low, troubled voice to Rasheed.

‘Nothing, nothing. They are just Hindus.’

Finally, the young woman and her daughter came aboard. She leaned out of the window and continued to wail. With a sneeze and a growl the bus jolted forward. Within seconds, the woman stopped wailing and turned her attention to eating a laddu, which she took out of a packet, broke into two equal hemispheres and shared with her daughter.

The bus was so ill that it kept collapsing every few minutes. It belonged to a potter who had made a spectacular change of profession — so spectacular in fact that he had got himself ostracized by his local caste-brethren until they found his bus indispensable for getting to the station. The potter drove it and tended it, fed and watered it, diagnosed its sneezes and false death rattles, and coaxed its carcass along the road. Clouds of grey-blue smoke rose from the engine, raw oil leaked from its sump, the smell of burning rubber seared the air whenever it braked, and it punctured or blew a tyre every hour or two. The road, made of vertically laid bricks and little else, was cratered with holes, and the wheels had lost all memory of their shock absorbers. Rasheed felt he was in danger of castration every few minutes. His knees kept knocking the man in front of him because the back boards of the seat were missing.