Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

The horror of the melted medal, the callousness of her daughter-in-law, her disregard of every tender feeling as evidenced by this shallow act of vanity upset Mrs Rupa Mehra more than anything had in years, more even than Arun’s marriage to Meenakshi in the first place. She saw before her very eyes her husband’s golden name being physically melted away in a crucible. Mrs Rupa Mehra had loved and admired her husband almost to excess, and the thought that one of the few things that tied his presence to the earth was now maliciously — for what was such wounding indifference but a kind of malice — and irretrievably lost made her weep tears of bitterness, anger and frustration. He had been a brilliant student at the Roorkee College and his memories of his student days had been happy ones. He had hardly studied, yet had done extremely well. He had been liked by both his fellow-students and his teachers. The only subject he had been weak in had been Drawing. In that he had barely scraped through. Mrs Rupa Mehra remembered his little sketches in the children’s autograph books and felt that the examiners had been ignorant and unjust.

Collecting herself after a while and dabbing her forehead with eau de cologne, she went out into the garden. It was a warm day, but a breeze was blowing from the river. Savita was sleeping, and all the others were out. She looked over at the unswept path past the bed of cannas. The young sweeper-woman was talking to the gardener in the shade of a mulberry tree. I must speak to her about this, thought Mrs Rupa Mehra absently.

Mansoor’s father, the far shrewder Mateen, came out on to the verandah with the account book. Mrs Rupa Mehra was in no mood for the accounts, but felt it was her duty to do them. Wearily she returned to the verandah, got her spectacles out of her black bag and looked at the book.

The sweeper-woman took up a broom and started sweeping up the dust, dried leaves, twigs, and fallen flowers from the path. Mrs Rupa Mehra glanced unseeingly at the open page of the account book.

‘Should I come back later?’ asked Mateen.

‘No, I’ll do them now. Wait a minute.’ She got out a blue pencil and looked at the lists of purchases. Doing the accounts had become much more of a strain since Mateen’s return from his village. Quite apart from his odd variant of the Hindi script, Mateen was more experienced than his son at cooking the books.

‘What is this?’ asked Mrs Rupa Mehra. ‘Another four-seer tin of ghee? Do you think we are millionaires? When did we order our last tin?’

‘Must be two months ago, Burri Memsahib.’

‘When you were away loafing in the village, didn’t Mansoor buy a tin?’

‘He may have, Burri Memsahib. I don’t know; I didn’t see it.’

Mrs Rupa Mehra started riffling back through the pages of the account book until she came upon the entry in Mansoor’s more legible hand. ‘He bought one a month ago. Almost twenty rupees. What happened to it? We’re not a family of twelve to go through a tin at such a rate.’

‘I’ve just returned, myself,’ Mateen ventured, with a glance at the sweeper-woman.

‘You’d buy us a sixteen-seer tin of ghee a week if given half the chance,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra. ‘Find out what happened to the rest of it.’

‘It goes in puris and parathas and on the daal — and Memsahib likes Sahib to put some ghee every day on his chapatis and rice—’ began Mateen. ‘Yes, yes,’ Mrs Rupa Mehra interrupted. ‘I can work out how much should go into all that. I want to find out what happened to the rest of it. We don’t keep open house — nor has this become the shop of a sweetseller.’

‘Yes, Burri Memsahib.’

‘Though young Mansoor seems to treat it like one.’

Mateen said nothing, but frowned, as if in disapproval.

‘He eats the sweets and drinks the nimbu pani that is kept aside for guests,’ continued Mrs Rupa Mehra.

‘I’ll speak to him, Burri Memsahib.’

‘I’m not sure about the sweets,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra scrupulously. ‘He is a self-willed boy. And you — you never bring my tea regularly. Why does no one take care of me in this house? When I am at Arun Sahib’s house in Calcutta his servant brings me tea all the time. No one even asks here. If I had my own house, it would have been different.’

Mateen, understanding that the accounts session was over, went to get Mrs Rupa Mehra her tea. About fifteen minutes later, Savita, who had emerged from her afternoon nap looking groggily beautiful, came on to the verandah to find her mother rereading Arun’s letter in tears, and saying, ‘Ear-drops! He even calls them ear-drops!’ When Savita found out what the matter was she felt a rush of sympathy towards her mother and indignation towards Meenakshi.

‘How could she have done that?’ she asked. Savita’s fierce defensiveness towards those whom she loved was masked by her gentle nature. She was independent-spirited but in such a low key that only those who knew her very well got any sense that her life and desires were not entirely determined by the easy drift of circumstance. She held her mother close and said, ‘I am amazed at Meenakshi. I will make sure that nothing happens to the other medal. Daddy’s memory is worth a great deal more than her small-minded whims. Don’t cry, Ma. I’ll send a letter off immediately. Or if you want we can write one together.’

‘No, no.’ Mrs Rupa Mehra looked down sadly at her empty cup.

When Lata returned and heard the news, she too was shocked. She had been her father’s darling and had loved looking at his academic medals; indeed she had been very unhappy when they had been given to Meenakshi. What could they mean to her, Lata had wondered, compared to what they would mean to his daughters? She was now most unpleasantly being proved right. She was angry too with Arun who, she felt, had permitted this sorry business by his consent or indulgence and who now made light of the event in his fatuously casual letter. His brutal little attempts to shock or tease his mother made Lata fume. As to his suggestion that she go to Calcutta and cooperate in his introductions — Lata decided that that would be the last thing in the world she would do.

Pran returned late from his first meeting of the student welfare committee to a household that was clearly not itself, but he was too exhausted to inquire immediately what the matter was. He sat in his favourite chair — a rocking chair requisitioned from Prem Nivas — and read for a few minutes. After a while he asked Savita if she wanted to go for a walk, and during the course of it he was briefed on the crisis. He asked Savita whether he could look over the letter she had written to Meenakshi. It was not that he lacked faith in his wife’s judgement — quite the contrary. But he hoped that he, not being a Mehra and therefore less taut with a sense of injury, might be of help in preventing irretrievable words from exacerbating irretrievable acts. Family quarrels, whether over property or sentiment, were bitter things; their prevention was almost a public duty.

Savita was happy to show him the letter. Pran looked it over, nodding from time to time. ‘This is fine,’ he said rather gravely, as if approving a student’s essay. ‘Diplomatic but deadly! Soft steel,’ he added in a different tone. He looked at his wife with an expression of amused curiosity. ‘Well, I’ll see it goes off tomorrow.’

Malati came over later. Lata filled her in about the medal. Malati described some experiments that they had been required to perform at the medical college, and Mrs Rupa Mehra was sufficiently disgusted to be distracted — at least for a while.

Savita noticed for the first time over dinner that Malati had a crush on her husband. It was evident in the way the girl looked at him over the soup and avoided looking at him over the main course. Savita was not at all annoyed. She assumed that but to know Pran was to love him; Malati’s affection was both natural and harmless. Pran, it was clear, was unaware of this; he was talking about the play that he had put on for Annual Day the previous year: Julius Caesar— a typical university choice (Pran was saying) since so few parents wanted their daughters to act on stage. . but, on the other hand, the themes of violence, patriotism and a change of regime had given it a freshness in the present historical context that it would not otherwise have had.