Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

The Rajkumar of Marh was in trouble, and was up before Pran. Owing to problems with their landlord, the Rajkumar and his associates had been forced to seek housing in a students’ hostel, but they had refused to adapt their style of life to its norms. Now he and two of his friends had been seen by one of the Proctor’s assistants in Tarbuz ka Bazaar, just emerging from a brothel. When they were questioned, they had pushed him aside, and one of the boys had said:

‘You sister-fucker, what’s your business in all this? Are you a commission agent? What are you doing here anyway? Or are you out pimping for your sister as well?’ One of them had struck him across the face.

They had refused to give their names, and denied that they were students. ‘We’re not students, we’re the grandfathers of students,’ they had asserted.

In mitigation, or perhaps not in mitigation, it could be said that they were drunk at the time.

On the way back, they had sung a popular film song, ‘I didn’t sigh, I didn’t complain—’ at the top of their lungs and had disturbed the peace of several neighbourhoods. The Proctor’s assistant had followed them at a safe distance. Being overconfident, they had returned to the hostel, where a compliant watchman had let them enter, though it was past midnight. They continued to sing for a while until their fellow-students begged them to shut up.

The Rajkumar woke up the next morning with a bad headache and a premonition of disaster, and disaster came. The watchman, fearful now for his job, had been forced to identify them, and they were hauled up before the warden of the hostel. The warden asked them to leave the hostel immediately and recommended their expulsion. The Proctor, for his part, was generally in favour of severe action. Student rowdyism was getting to be a headache, and if aspirin didn’t cure it, decapitation would. He told Pran, who was now on the student welfare committee, which took care of discipline, to handle matters provisionally, as he himself was going to be tied up with arrangements for the students’ union elections. Ensuring fair and calm elections was a recurrent problem: students from various political parties (communists, socialists, and — under a different name — the Hindu revivalist RSS) had already started beating each other up with shoes and lathis as a prelude to fighting for votes.

The onus of deciding the fate of others was exactly the sort of thing that Pran fretted a great deal over, and Savita could see how anxious this made him. He couldn’t concentrate on his breakfast newspapers. He hadn’t been feeling at all well lately — and Savita could sense that the pressure of having to dispense rough justice to these idiotic young men was going to do him no good. He couldn’t even work on his lectures on Shakespearian comedy, although he had set some time aside the previous evening.

‘I don’t see why you have to see them here,’ Savita said. ‘Ask them to go to the Proctor’s office.’

‘No, no, darling, that would only alarm them further. I just want to get their side of the story, and they’ll be more forthcoming if they’re less terrified — if they’re sitting with me in a drawing room rather than standing and shuffling in front of a desk. I hope you and Ma don’t mind. It’ll take half an hour at the most.’

The culprits arrived at eleven o’clock, and Pran offered them tea.

The Rajkumar of Marh was thoroughly ashamed of himself and kept staring at his palms, but his friends, mistaking Pran’s kindness for weakness, and knowing that he was popular with students, decided that they were in no danger, and smirked when Pran asked him what they had to say about the charges. They knew that Pran was Maan’s brother, and took his sympathy for granted.

‘We were minding our own business,’ one of them said. ‘He should have minded his.’

‘He asked you for your names, and you said—’ Pran looked down at the papers in his hand. ‘Well, you know what you said. I don’t need to repeat it. I don’t need to quote the regulations of the university to you, either. You seem to know them well enough. According to this, as you approached the hostel you began to sing: “Any student who is seen in an undesirable place shall be liable to immediate expulsion.”’

The two main culprits looked at each other with a smile of unbothered complicity.

The Rajkumar, fearing that if he was expelled, his infuriated father would castrate him or worse, mumbled: ‘But I didn’t even do anything.’ It was just his luck that he had decided to go along to be sociable.

One of the other two said, rather contemptuously: ‘Yes, that’s true, we can vouch for that. He isn’t interested in that kind of thing — unlike your brother, who—’

Pran cut the young man off sharply. ‘That is not the point. Let us keep non-students out of this. You do not realize, it seems to me, that you will very likely be expelled. A fine is pointless, it will have no effect on you.’ He looked from one face to the other, then went on: ‘The facts are clear, and your attitude isn’t helpful either. Your fathers are having a hard enough time already without being forced to add you to their worries.’

Pran noticed the first look of vulnerability — not of repentance so much as of fear — on their faces. With the impending abolition of zamindari, their fathers had indeed been increasingly impatient with their wastrel sons. Sooner or later their allowances might even be reduced. They had no idea of what to do with themselves other than to have a good time as students, and if this was taken away from them, there was nothing but darkness ahead. They looked at Pran, but he said nothing further for a while. He appeared to be reading the sheaf of papers in front of him.

It’s difficult for them, thought Pran. It’s sad, all this riotous high living; it’s all they know, and it won’t last long. They might even have to find work. It’s not easy for students these days, whatever their class. Employment’s hard to find, the country doesn’t seem to be going in any direction, and the example of their elders is pathetic. Images of the Raja of Marh, of Professor Mishra, and of bickering politicians came to his mind. He looked up and said:

‘I have to decide what to recommend to the Proctor. I tend to agree with the warden—’

‘No, please, Sir—’ said one of the students.

The other kept quiet, but gave Pran a beseeching look.

The Rajkumar was now wondering how he would face his grandmother, the Dowager Rani of Marh. Even his father’s rage would be easier to bear than the look of disappointment in her eyes.

He began to sniffle.

‘We didn’t mean to do what we did,’ he said. ‘We were—’

‘Stop,’ said Pran. ‘And think about what you are saying before you say it.’

‘But we were drunk,’ said the luckless Rajkumar. ‘That’s why we behaved like that.’

‘So shamefully,’ said one of the others in a low voice.

Pran closed his eyes.

All of them reassured him that they would never do anything like this again. They swore it on their fathers’ honour, they pledged it in the names of several gods. They began to look repentant, and, indeed, they even began to feel repentant as a result of looking it.

After a while, Pran had had enough, and stood up.

‘You’ll hear in due course from the authorities,’ he told them at the door. The bureaucratic, formulary words sounded strange to him even as he said them. They hesitated, wondering what else they could say in their own defence, then walked off forlornly.

After telling Savita he would be back for lunch, Pran went to Prem Nivas. It was a warm day, though overcast. By the time he got there he was somewhat out of breath. His mother was in the garden, giving instructions to the mali.