Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

I hope you will return soon, as I miss seeing you and hearing your criticisms and corrections, and I hope that you are well and in good spirits. I am sending this letter through Bibbo. She will post it; she says this address should be sufficient. I pray that it reaches you.

With many good wishes and renewed respects,

Your student,

Tasneem

Rasheed read this letter slowly, twice, sitting by the side of the lake near the school. He had returned to Debaria to find that Maan had come back a little earlier than expected, and, after inquiries, he had followed him to the lake to make sure he was all right. He appeared to be fine, from the vigorous way he was swimming back from the far end.

Rasheed had been surprised to receive the letter. It had been waiting for him at his father’s house. He was interested to see the excerpts, which he recognized instantly from the chapter of the Quran called ‘The Kingdom’. How like Tasneem, he thought, to select the most gentle excerpts from a surah that contained terrible descriptions of hellfire and perdition.

Her calligraphy had not deteriorated. If anything it had slightly improved. Her own appraisal of it was both modest and just. There was something in the letter — quite apart from the fact that it had been sent to him behind Saeeda Bai’s back — that troubled him, and despite himself he found his thoughts turning to Meher’s mother, who was sitting inside his father’s house, probably fanning the baby. Poor woman, good-hearted and beautiful though she was, she could barely write her own name. And he once again thought: If I had had any choice, would it ever have been a woman like her whom I would have chosen as my partner and companion through this life?

Maan laughed a little, then coughed. Rasheed looked at him. He sneezed.

‘You should dry your hair,’ said Rasheed. ‘Don’t blame me if you catch a cold. Swimming and then not drying your hair is an absolutely certain way of catching a cold. Summer colds are the worst. Your voice sounds bad too. And you look much darker, more burned by the sun than when I saw you just a few days ago.’

Maan reflected that his voice must have been affected by the dust of the journey. He hadn’t actually shouted at anyone, not even at the marksman or the munshi. On his return from Baitar, perhaps to relieve his feelings, he had made straight for the lake near the school, and had swum across and back a few times. When he got out, he saw Rasheed sitting on the bank, reading a letter. Next to him was a small box — of sweets, it appeared.

‘It must be all this Urdu you’ve been teaching me,’ Maan said. ‘All those guttural letters, ghaaf and khay and so on — my throat can’t survive them.’

‘You are making excuses,’ said Rasheed. ‘This is an excuse not to study. In fact you haven’t studied more than four hours since you’ve been here.’

‘What are you saying?’ said Maan. ‘All I do from morning to night is repeat the alphabet forwards and backwards and practise writing Urdu letters in the air. Why, even when I was swimming just now I kept imagining letters: when I swam breaststroke, I was writing qaaf, when I swam backstroke, I was writing noon—’

‘Do you want to go up there?’ asked Rasheed, with some impatience.

‘What do you mean?’ said Maan.

‘I mean, is there even the slightest truth in what you have been saying?’

‘Not the slightest!’ laughed Maan.

‘So when you go up there, what will you say to God?’

‘Oh, well,’ said Maan. ‘I have topsy-turvy views about all that. Up is down to me, and down is up. In fact, I believe that if there is paradise anywhere, it is here, here on earth. What do you think?’

Rasheed did not much care for flippancy on serious subjects. He did not think paradise was on earth: certainly not in Brahmpur, certainly not here in Debaria, nor in his wife’s virtually illiterate village.

‘You look worried,’ said Maan. ‘I hope it isn’t anything I said.’

Rasheed thought for a few seconds before answering. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t your answer exactly. I was wondering about Meher’s education.’

‘Your daughter?’ asked Maan.

‘Yes. My elder daughter. She’s a bright girl — you’ll meet her in the evening. But there are no schools like this’—he waved an arm towards the nearby madrasa—‘in her mother’s village — and she will grow up ignorant unless I do something about it. I try to teach her whenever I’m here, but then I go to Brahmpur for a few months, and the illiterate environment takes over.’

It never struck Rasheed as odd that he loved Meher every bit as much as his own daughter. Perhaps one element of this bond was precisely that Meher had at first been for him purely an object of love, not of responsibility. Even when, a year or so ago, she stopped calling him Chacha and started calling him Abba, some of that sense of the uncle — who would come home and spoil her with presents and affection — remained. With a start, Rasheed recalled that the baby was about as old as Meher had been when her father had died. Perhaps this too had been in her mother’s mind when she had lost control of her emotions and broken down at the station.

Rasheed thought of his wife with tenderness, but not with passion, and he felt that she too felt no passion for him, merely a sense of comfort when he was with her. She lived for her children and the memory of her first husband.

This is my life, the only life I will live, thought Rasheed. If only things had been different, we might each have been happy.

At first the very thought of sharing a room with her for an hour had troubled him. Then he grew used to the brief visits he paid to her in the middle of the night when the other men were asleep in the courtyard. But even when fulfilling his obligations as a husband he wondered what she was thinking. Sometimes he imagined that she was close to tears. Had she begun to love him more after the baby had been born? Perhaps. But the women of the zenana in her father’s village — her elder brothers’ wives — were often quite cruel even when they teased each other, and she would not have been able to express her affection for him openly, even if there had been much to express.

Once more Rasheed began to unfold the letter he had received, then stopped and said to Maan:

‘So — how is your father’s farm?’

‘My father’s farm?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well,’ said Maan. ‘It should be all right. Not much going on at this time of the year.’

‘But haven’t you just visited the farm?’

‘No. Not exactly.’

‘Not exactly?’

‘I mean, no. No, I meant to, but — I got caught up in things.’

‘So what have you been doing?’

‘Losing my temper mainly,’ said Maan. ‘And trying to kill wolves.’

Rasheed frowned, but did not follow up these interesting possibilities. ‘You are being flippant as usual,’ he said.

‘What are those flowers?’ asked Maan, to change the subject.

Rasheed looked across the tank to the far shore.

‘The purple ones?’

‘Yes. What are they called?’

‘Sadabahar — or evergreen,’ said Rasheed, ‘because it’s always spring for them. They never seem to die, and no one can get rid of them. I think they’re beautiful — though they often grow in foul places. . ’ He paused. ‘Some people call them “behayaa”—or “shameless”.’ He was lost in meditation for a long while, one thought leading to another.

‘Well,’ said Maan, ‘what were you thinking of?’

‘My mother,’ said Rasheed. After a pause he continued in a quiet voice: ‘I loved her, God protect her spirit. She was an upright woman, and well educated as women go. She loved my brother and me, and only regretted that she never had a daughter. Perhaps that’s why — well, anyway, she was the only one who appreciated my wish to educate myself, to make something of myself and do something for this place.’ Rasheed said ‘this place’ with such bitterness that it sounded almost as if he detested it. ‘But my love for her has tied my life up in knots. And as for my father — what does he understand of anything outside property and money? I have to be discreet even in what I say at home. I’m always looking up towards the roof and lowering my voice. Baba, for all his piety, understands things — things one might not expect him to. But my father has contempt for everything I revere. And it has become worse lately with the changes in the house.’ Maan guessed that Rasheed meant his father’s second wife.