Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

When Kabir got to his uncle’s house, it was dark. He parked his bicycle and knocked. His aunt opened the door. The house, single-storeyed and sprawling, was not well lit. Kabir often remembered playing with his cousins in the large back-garden in his childhood, but for the last several years the house had appeared to him almost to be haunted. It was on Thursday evenings that he usually visited it now.

‘How is she today?’ he asked his aunt.

His aunt, a thin, rather severe-looking but not unkind woman, frowned. ‘For two or three days it was all right. Then again this thing began. Do you want me to be with you?’

‘No — no, Mumani, I’d rather be with her alone.’

Kabir entered the room at the back of the house, which for the last five years had been his mother’s bedroom. Like the rest of the house, the room was poorly lit, with just a couple of weak bulbs in heavy shades. She was sitting up in a hard-backed armchair, looking out of the window. She had always been a plump woman, but now she had grown fat. Her face was formed of a collection of pouches.

She continued to stare out of the window at the dark shapes of the guava trees at the end of the garden. Kabir came and stood by her. She did not appear to register his presence until she said:

‘Close the door, it’s cold.’

‘I’ve closed it, Ammi-jaan.’

Kabir did not say that it was not cold at all, that it was July, and that he was sweating after his bicycle ride.

There was a pause. His mother had forgotten about him. He put his hand on her shoulder. She started for a second, then said:

‘So it’s Thursday night.’

She used the Urdu word for Thursday, ‘jumeraat’, literally Friday-night. Kabir remembered how, as a boy, he had considered it amusing that Friday-night could itself have a night. His mother used to explain such matters to him in an affectionate, light-hearted way, because his father was far too occupied, voyaging through strange seas of thought alone, to bother much with his children. It was only when they were of an age to talk to him properly that he began to take a fitful interest in them.

‘Yes, Thursday night.’

‘How is Hashim?’ she asked. This was how she usually began.

‘Very well, he’s doing well in school. He had some very difficult homework, so he couldn’t come.’

In fact, Hashim found it hard to bear such meetings, and when Kabir told him it was Thursday evening, he would usually find some reason not to go. Kabir, understanding his feelings only too well, would sometimes not remind him. That was the case this evening.

‘And Samia?’

‘Still in school in England.’

‘She never writes.’

‘Sometimes she does, Ammi — but rarely. We too miss her letters.’

It was impossible to tell his mother that her daughter was dead, dead of meningitis, buried a year ago. Surely, he thought, this year-long conspiracy of silence could not have worked. However disturbed people’s minds may be, inklings, clues, suggestions, overheard fragments of conversation must work themselves into the mind and lodge themselves into a pattern indicating the truth. Once, indeed, a few months ago, his mother had said: ‘Ah, Samia. I won’t see her here, but in the other place.’ But whatever this meant, it did not prevent her from asking about her daughter subsequently. Sometimes, within minutes of a conversation or a thought, it would be wiped clean from her mind.

‘How is your father? Still asking if two plus two makes four?’ For an instant Kabir noticed something of the old amused and amusing light in her eyes, then it was dead.

‘Yes.’

‘When I was married to him—’

‘You still are, Ammi.’

‘You’re not listening to me. When I — you’ve made me forget—’

Kabir held her hand. There was no responsive pressure.

‘Listen,’ his mother said. ‘Listen carefully to every word I say. We don’t have much time. They want to get me married off to someone else. And they have guards around my room at night. There are several of them. My brother has posted them there.’ Her hand became tense in his grasp.

Kabir did not dissuade her. He was thankful they were alone.

‘Where?’ he asked.

She jerked her head slightly in the direction of the trees.

‘Behind the trees?’ asked Kabir.

‘Yes. Even the children know,’ she said. ‘They look at me, and they say, toba! toba! One day she will have another baby. The world—’

‘Yes, Ammi.’

‘The world is a terrible place and people like to be cruel. If this is humanity, I want no part in it. Why are you not paying attention? They play music to tempt me. But, Mashallah, I have my wits about me. It is not for nothing that I am the daughter of an army officer. What do you have there?’

‘I brought a few sweets, Ammi. For you.’

‘I asked for a brass ring, and you have brought me sweets?’ Her voice rose in protest. She was, Kabir thought, much worse than usual. Usually the sweets pacified her and she stuffed them greedily into her mouth. This time, however, she would have none of them. She lost her breath, then continued:

‘There is medicine in those sweets. The doctors have put them there. If God had wanted me to have medicine, He would have sent word. Hashim, you do not care—’

‘Kabir, Ammi.’

‘Kabir came last week, on Thursday.’ The voice grew alarmed, wary, as if sensing that this too was part of a trap.

‘I—’ But now tears came to his eyes, and he could not speak.

His mother appeared to be irritated by this new development, and her hand slipped out of his own, like a dead creature.

‘I am Kabir.’

She accepted it. It was irrelevant.

‘They want to send me to a doctor, near the Barsaat Mahal. I know what they want.’ She looked downwards. Then her head dropped on to her chest, and she was asleep.

Kabir stayed with her for another half hour, but she did not wake up. Finally, he got up and went to the door.

His aunt, seeing his look of distress, said:

‘Kabir, son, why don’t you eat with us? It will do you good. And it will be good for us to get the chance to talk to you.’

But Kabir wanted to get away on his bicycle, as fast and as far as he could. This was not the mother he had loved and known, but someone stranger than a stranger.

There had been no history of such a condition in the family, nor any specific accident — a fall, a blow — that had caused it. She had been under some emotional strain for about a year after the death of her own mother, but then, that was a grief not unusual in the world. At first she was merely depressed, then she became anxious over trifles and incapable of handling the daily business of life. She had grown suspicious of people: the milkman, the gardener, her relatives, her husband. Dr Durrani, when he could not ignore the problem, sometimes hired people to help her, but her suspicions soon extended to them. Finally, she took it into her head that her husband was working out a detailed plot to harm her, and in order to foil it she tore up sheaves of his valuable and unfinished mathematical papers. It was at this stage that he asked her brother to take her away. The only other alternative was incarceration in an asylum. There was an asylum in Brahmpur, and it was located just beyond the Barsaat Mahal; perhaps it was this that she had been referring to earlier.

When they were children, Kabir, Hashim and Samia had always, and rather proudly, declared their father to be slightly mad. It was clearly his eccentricity — or something aligned with it — that made people respect him so much. But it was their affectionate, amusing and practical mother who had been afflicted with this strange visitation, so causelessly and so incurably. Samia at least, Kabir thought, has been spared the continuing torment of it all.