Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

In the event, Maan did not. Still looking for the most part towards the neem tree and only occasionally glancing at Qamar, Maan said:

‘I don’t think about these matters. Life is complicated enough without them. But it is clear, Master Sahib, that if you think that I am evading your question, you are not going to give me or anyone else any peace. So I see that you are going to force me to be serious.’

‘That is no bad thing,’ said Qamar curtly. He had appraised Maan’s character quickly and had come to the conclusion that he was a man of very little account.

‘What I think is this,’ said Maan in the same unusually measured manner as before. ‘It is entirely a matter of chance that Kishor Babu was born in a Hindu family and you, Master Sahib, in a Muslim one. I have no doubt that if you had been exchanged after birth, or before birth, or even before conception, you would have been praising Krishanji and he, the Prophet. As for me, Master Sahib, being so little worthy of praise, I don’t feel very much like praising anyone — let alone worshipping them.’

‘What?’ said the Football, rolling belligerently into the conversation and gathering momentum as he spoke: ‘Not even holy men like Ramjap Baba? Not even the Holy Ganga at the full moon of the great Pul Mela? Not even the Vedas? Not even God himself?’

‘Ah, God,’ said Maan. ‘God is a big subject — too big for the likes of me. I am sure that He is too big to be concerned about what I think of Him.’

‘But don’t you ever have the sense of His presence?’ asked Kishor Babu, leaning forward in a concerned manner. ‘Don’t you ever feel that you are in communion with Him?’

‘Now that you mention it,’ said Maan, ‘I feel in direct communion with Him just now. And He is telling me to halt this futile argument and drink my tea before it gets cold.’

Apart from the Football, Qamar and Rasheed, everyone smiled. Rasheed didn’t enjoy what he saw as Maan’s endemic flippancy. Qamar felt outmanoeuvred by a cheap and irrelevant trick, while the Football was foiled in his attempt to foment trouble. But social harmony had been re-established, and the gathering broke up into smaller groups.

Rasheed’s father, the Football, and Bajpai began to discuss what would happen if the zamindari law came into force. It had now received the President’s assent but its constitutionality was under challenge in the High Court in Brahmpur. Rasheed, who at present was uncomfortable with that subject, began to talk to Qamar about changes in the curriculum of the madrasa. Kishor Babu, Maan, and Netaji formed a third group — but since Kishor Babu insisted on gently questioning Maan about his views on non-violence while Netaji was eager to ask him about the wolf-hunt, the conversation was a curiously spliced one. Baba went off to amuse himself with his favourite great-granddaughter, whom Moazzam was taking for a piggyback ride from the cattle-shed to the pigeon-house and back.

Kachheru sat against the wall in the shade of the cattle-shed, thinking his own thoughts and looking indulgently at the children playing in the courtyard. He had not listened to any of the discussion. He was not interested. Though pleased to be of service, he was glad that he had not been asked to do anything by anyone for the time it had taken him to smoke two biris.

The days passed one by one. The heat increased. There was no more rain. The huge sky remained painfully blue for days on end. Once or twice a few clouds did appear over the unending patchwork of plains, but they were small and white, and soon drifted away.

Maan slowly got used to his exile. At first he fretted. The heat tormented him, the vast, flat, low-lying world of the fields disoriented him, and he was bored limp. Godforsaken in this godforsaken place, he was not where he wanted to be at all. He could not imagine he would ever adjust to it. The need for comfort and stimulus, he felt, was an upward-clicking ratchet. And yet, as the days went by, and things moved or did not move according to the volition of the sky or the circulation of the calendar or the wills of other people, he fell in with life around him. The thought struck him that perhaps his father’s acceptance of imprisonment had been something like this — except that Maan’s days were defined not by morning roll call and lights out, but by the muezzin’s call to prayer and the cow-dust hour when the cattle returned lowing through the lanes.

Even his initial outrage against his father had waned; it was too much of an effort being angry for long, and besides, during his stay in the countryside, he had begun to appreciate and even admire the scope of his father’s efforts — not that it aroused in him any spirit of emulation.

Being a bit of a layabout, he lay about a bit. Like the lion that the village children had dubbed him when he first arrived, he spent very few hours in active labour, yawned a great deal, and even appeared to luxuriate in his dissatisfied dormancy, which he interrupted off and on by a roar or two and a mild bout of activity — perhaps a swim in the lake by the school, or a walk to a mango grove — for it was the mango season, and Maan was fond of mangoes. Sometimes he lay on his charpoy and read one of the thrillers lent to him by Sandeep Lahiri. Sometimes he looked over his Urdu books. Despite his not very energetic efforts, he was now able to read clearly printed Urdu; and one day Netaji lent him a slim selection of the most famous ghazals of Mir, which, since he knew large parts of them by heart, did not prove too difficult for Maan.

What did people do in the village, anyway? he asked himself. They waited; they sat and talked and cooked and ate and drank and slept. They woke up and went into the fields with their brass pots of water. Perhaps, thought Maan, everyone is essentially a Mr Biscuit. Sometimes they looked upwards at the rainless sky. The sun rose higher, reached its height, sank, and set. After dark, when life used to begin for him in Brahmpur, there was nothing to do. Someone visited; someone left. Things grew. People sat around and argued about this and that and waited for the monsoon.

Maan too sat around and talked, since people enjoyed talking to him. He sat on his charpoy and discussed people, problems, mahua trees, the state of the world, everything and anything. He never doubted that he would be liked or trusted; since he was not suspicious by nature, he did not imagine that others would be suspicious of him. But as an outsider, as a city dweller, as a Hindu, as the son of a politician — and the Minister of Revenue at that — he was open to all kinds of suspicions and rumours — not all of them as fantastic as the one triggered off by his orange kurta. Some people thought that he was staking out the constituency that his father had chosen to fight from in the coming elections, others that he had decided to settle permanently here, having found that city life was not for him, yet others that he was lying low to avoid creditors. But after a while they got used to Maan, saw no harm in his lack of evident purpose, found his opinions pleasantly and humorously unaggressive, and liked the fact that he liked them. As ‘lion, lion, without a tail’ bathing under the hand-pump, as Maan Chacha dandling a wailing baby, as the source of intriguing objects like a watch and a torch, as the absorbed and incompetent calligrapher who used the wrong Urdu ‘Z’ in his spelling of simple words, he was fairly quickly accepted and trusted by the children; and the trust and acceptance of their parents followed soon enough. If Maan regretted that he only ever saw the men, he had enough sense not to mention it. Meanwhile he kept out of village feuds and discussions of zamindari or religion. His handling of Qamar and the Football on the subject of God was soon common knowledge throughout the village. Almost everyone approved. Rasheed’s family grew to enjoy his company. He even became something of an open-air confessional for them.