Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

The long-necked Meenakshi turned numerous heads when their party of four entered Firpo’s for dinner. Arun told Shireen she was looking gorgeous and Billy looked with soulful languor at Meenakshi and said that she looked divine, and things went wonderfully well and were followed by some pleasantly titillating dancing at the 30 °Club. Meenakshi and Arun were not really able to afford all this — Billy Irani had independent means — but it seemed intolerable that they, for whom this kind of life was so obviously intended, should be deprived of it by a mere lack of funds. Meenakshi could not help noticing, through dinner and beyond, the lovely little gold danglers that Shireen was wearing, and that hung so becomingly from her little velvety ears.

It was a warm evening. In the car on the way back home Arun said to Meenakshi, ‘Give me your hand, darling,’ and Meenakshi, placing one red nail-polished fingertip on the back of his hand, said, ‘Here!’ Arun thought that this was delightfully elegant and flirtatious. But Meenakshi had her mind on something else.

Later, when Arun had gone to bed, Meenakshi unlocked her jewellery case (the Chatterjis did not believe in giving their daughter great quantities of jewellery but she had been given quite enough for her likely requirements) and took out the two gold medals so precious to Mrs Rupa Mehra’s heart. She had given these to Meenakshi at the time of her wedding as a gift to the bride of her elder son. This she felt was the appropriate thing to do; she had nothing else to give, and she felt that her husband would have approved. On the back of the medals was engraved: ‘Thomasson Engineering College Roorkee. Raghubir Mehra. Civil Engg. First. 1916’ and ‘Physics. First. 1916’ respectively. Two lions crouched sternly on pedestals on each medal. Meenakshi looked at the medals, then balanced them in her hands, then held the cool and precious discs to her cheeks. She wondered how much they weighed. She thought of the gold chain she had promised Aparna and the gold drops she had virtually promised herself. She had examined them quite carefully as they hung from Shireen’s little ears. The danglers were shaped like tiny pears.

When Arun rather impatiently called her to bed, she murmured, ‘Just coming.’ But it was a minute or two before she joined him. ‘What are you thinking of, darling?’ he asked her. ‘You look dangerously preoccupied.’ But Meenakshi instinctively realized that to mention what had passed through her head — what she planned to do with those dowdy medals — would not be a good idea, and she avoided the subject by nibbling at the lobe of his left ear.

The next morning at ten o’clock Meenakshi phoned her younger sister Kakoli.

‘Kuku, a friend of mine from the Shady Ladies — my club, you know — wants to find out where she can get some gold melted down discreetly. Do you know of a good jeweller?’

‘Well, Satram Das or Lilaram, I suppose,’ yawned Kuku, barely awake.

‘No, I am not talking of Park Street jewellers — or any jewellers of that kind,’ said Meenakshi with a sigh. ‘I want to go somewhere where they don’t know me.’

‘ You want to go somewhere?’

There was a short silence at the other end. ‘Well, you may as well know,’ said Meenakshi: ‘I’ve set my heart on a pair of earrings — they look adorable — just like tiny little pears — and I want to melt down those fat ugly medals that Arun’s mother gave me for my wedding.’

‘Oh, don’t do that,’ said Kakoli in a kind of alarmed warble.

‘Kuku, I want your advice about the place, not about the decision.’

‘Well, you could go to Sarkar’s. No — try Jauhri’s on Rashbehari Avenue. Does Arun know?’

‘The medals were given to me,’ said Meenakshi. ‘If Arun wants to melt his golf clubs down to make a back brace I won’t object.’

When she got to the jeweller’s, she was astonished to meet opposition there as well.

‘Madam,’ said Mr Jauhri in Bengali, looking at the medals won by her father-in-law, ‘these are beautiful medals.’ His fingers, blunt and dark, slightly incongruous for someone who held and supervised work of such fineness and beauty, touched the embossed lions lovingly, and circled around the smooth, unmilled edges.

Meenakshi stroked the side of her neck with the long, red-polished nail of the middle finger of her right hand.

‘Yes,’ she said indifferently.

‘Madam, if I might advise you, why not order these earrings and this chain and pay for them separately? There is really no need to melt down these medals.’ A well-dressed and evidently wealthy lady would presumably not find any difficulty in this suggestion.

Meenakshi looked at the jeweller with cool surprise. ‘Now that I know the approximate weight of the medals, I propose to melt down one, not both,’ she said. Somewhat annoyed by his impertinence — these shopkeepers sometimes got above themselves — she went on: ‘I came here to get a job done; I would normally have gone to my regular jewellers. How long do you think it will take?’

Mr Jauhri did not dispute the issue further. ‘It will take two weeks,’ he said.

‘That’s rather a long time.’

‘Well, you know how it is, Madam. Artisans of the requisite skill are scarce, and we have many orders.’

‘But it is March. The wedding season is virtually over.’

‘Nevertheless, Madam.’

‘Well, I suppose that will have to do,’ Meenakshi said. She picked up one medal — it happened to be the Physics one — and popped it back in her purse. The jeweller looked somewhat regretfully at the Engineering Medal lying on a small velvet square on his table. He had not dared to ask whose it was, but when Meenakshi took a receipt for the medal after it had been weighed exactly on his scales, he had deduced from her name that it must have been awarded to her father-in-law. He was not to know that Meenakshi had never known her father-in-law and felt no particular closeness to him.

As Meenakshi turned to leave, he said, ‘Madam, if you happen to change your mind. .’

Meenakshi turned to him, and snapped: ‘Mr Jauhri, if I wish for your advice I will ask for it. I came to you specifically because you were recommended to me.’

‘Quite right, Madam, quite right. Of course it is entirely up to you. In two weeks then.’ Mr Jauhri frowned sadly at the medal before summoning his master artisan.

Two weeks later, Arun discovered through a casual conversational slip what Meenakshi had done. He was livid.

Meenakshi sighed. ‘It’s pointless talking to you when you are as cross as this,’ she said. ‘You behave quite heartlessly. Come, Aparna darling, Daddy’s angry with us, let’s go into the other room.’

A few days later Arun wrote — or, rather, scrawled — a letter to his mother:

Dear Ma,

Sorry not written to you earlier in response to your letter re Lata. Yes, by all means, will look for someone. But don’t be sanguine, the covenanted are almost twice-born and get dowry offers in the tens of thousands, even lakhs. Still, situation not entirely hopeless. Will try, but I suggest Lata come to Calcutta in the summer. Will effect introductions &c. But she must cooperate. Varun lackadaisical, studies hard only when I take a hand. Shows no interest in girls, only the fourfooted as usual, and dreadful songs. Aparna in fine fettle, asks after her Daadi continually so rest assured she misses you. Daddy’s Engg. Medal melted down for ear-drops and chain by M, but I’ve placed injunction on Physics, not to worry. All else well, back OK, Chatterjis much the same, will write at length when time.

Love and xxx from all,

Arun

This brief note, written in Arun’s illegible telegraphese (the upright lines of the letters tilting at angles of thirty degrees randomly to left or right), landed like a grenade in Brahmpur by the second post one afternoon. When Mrs Rupa Mehra read it, she burst into tears without even (as Arun might have been tempted to remark had he been there) the customary preliminary of a reddening nose. In fact, not to make cynical light of the matter, she was deeply upset, and for every obvious reason.