Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘You didn’t give me reasons for keeping me away in your letter, and now that I’m here—’

‘Bibbo!’ commanded the parakeet. ‘Bibbo! Bibbo!’

Maan began to pound on the door. ‘Let me in! Talk to me, please — and for God’s sake shut that half-witted parakeet up. I know you’re feeling bad. How do you think I feel? You’ve wound me up like a clock, and now—’

‘If you ever want to see me again,’ said Saeeda Bai from inside, her voice tearful, ‘you’ll go away now. Or I’ll tell Bibbo to call the watchman. You caused me pain involuntarily. I accept it was involuntary. Now you should accept it was pain. Please go away. Come back some other time. Stop it, Dagh Sahib — for God’s sake — if you wish to see me again.’

Maan, in the face of this threat, stopped pounding the door and walked into the gallery, pent up and utterly perplexed. He was so lost that he didn’t even say he was going or wish her well. He couldn’t understand it at all. This was like a hailstorm falling out of a clear sky. Still, it was clearly no mere coquettishness.

‘But what did you do?’ persisted Bibbo, a little frightened by her mistress’s mood, but enjoying the drama. Poor Dagh Sahib! She had never heard anyone pound on Saeeda Bai’s door before. What passion!

‘Nothing at all,’ said Maan, feeling frustrated and ill-used, and glad of someone’s sympathy. ‘Nothing at all.’ Surely it was not for this that he had exiled himself in the countryside for weeks. She had just a few minutes earlier virtually promised him a night of tenderness and ecstasy, and now — for no reason at all — had decided not merely to default, but to impale him with emotional threats.

‘Poor Dagh Sahib,’ said Bibbo, looking at his bewildered but attractive face. ‘You’ve forgotten your cane. Here it is.’

‘Oh — you’re right,’ said Maan.

As they walked down the stairs, she contrived to brush, then press against him. She stood on tiptoe and turned her lips to his face. Maan could not refrain from kissing her. He was feeling so frustrated that he would have made immediate and frantically passionate love to anyone, even to Tahmina Bai.

What an understanding girl Bibbo is, thought Maan, as they stood there kissing and embracing for a minute. Intelligent, too. Yes, it isn’t fair at all, it isn’t fair, and she can see it.

But Bibbo was perhaps not intelligent enough. They were kissing on the landing, and the tall mirror carried their reflection to the gallery. Saeeda Bai’s mercurial anger had been followed by mercurial regret at her treatment of Maan. She decided to reassure Maan of her affection for him by bidding him goodbye from the gallery as he walked across the hall. Now she glanced down the stairs to see what was keeping him. What she saw in the mirror made her bite her lower lip to the point where it almost bled.

She stood transfixed. After a bit, Maan came to his senses and disengaged himself. The pretty Bibbo, giggling a little, escorted him across the hall to the door.

When she returned, she crossed the hall and walked up the stairs to clear away the sherbet glasses from Saeeda Bai’s outer room. The Begum Sahiba will probably lie on her bed for an hour, and come out only when she feels hungry, she thought. She giggled a little more at the memory of the kiss. She was still giggling to herself when she got to the gallery. There she saw Saeeda Bai. One look at Saeeda Bai’s face, and the giggling stopped.

The next day Maan visited Bhaskar.

Bhaskar had been bored for a few days. Then he had decided to train himself in the metric system, although it was not yet in use anywhere in India. The advantages of this system over the British one became immediately apparent to him when he started using volume measurements. All sorts of comparisons became obvious when he used the metric system. For instance, if he wanted to compare the volume of Brahmpur Fort with that of Savita’s baby-to-be, he could do it instantly, without converting from cubic yards to cubic inches. It wasn’t as if that conversion presented great difficulty to Bhaskar; it was just that it was inconvenient and inelegant.

Another delight of the metric system was that Bhaskar could roam with unfettered delight through his beloved powers of ten. But after a few days he had tired of the metric system and its joys. His friend Dr Durrani had not visited him for some time, though Kabir had. Bhaskar liked Kabir well enough, but it was Dr Durrani who always brought new mathematical insights in tow, and without him Bhaskar had had to fend for himself.

Again he was bored, and complained to Mrs Mahesh Kapoor. After a bit of grumbling — he wanted to go back to Misri Mandi, and his grandmother was very reluctant to let him go — he applied to his grandfather instead.

Mahesh Kapoor told Bhaskar with stern affection that he couldn’t help him. All such decisions were in his wife’s domain.

‘But I’m terribly bored,’ said Bhaskar. ‘And I haven’t had a headache in a week. Why must I spend half the day in bed? I want to go to school. I don’t like it here in Prem Nivas.’

‘What?’ said his grandfather. ‘Not even with your Nana and Nani here?’

‘No,’ stated Bhaskar. ‘It’s all right for a day or two. Besides, you’re never actually here.’

‘That’s true. I have so much work to do — and so many decisions to make. Well, you’ll be interested to know that I’ve decided to leave the Congress Party.’

‘Oh,’ said Bhaskar, doing his best to sound interested. ‘And what does that mean? Will they lose?’

Mahesh Kapoor frowned. The effort and stress that the decision had cost him was not something a child could be expected to understand. Bhaskar, besides, apparently doubted even that two plus two always equalled four, and could not be expected to sympathize greatly when the certainties of his grandfather’s life were shifting underfoot. And yet Bhaskar at other times was so certain of his facts and figures, though he may well have arrived at them by erratic frog-leaps of abstract thought. Mahesh Kapoor, who was not awed by anyone else in the family, was perhaps even a little afraid of Bhaskar. A strange boy! He must certainly, thought Mahesh Kapoor, be given every opportunity to develop his rather eerie powers.

‘Well, for a start,’ said Mahesh Kapoor, ‘it means that I will have to decide what constituency I must fight from. The Congress Party is very strong in the city, but that’s where my strength lies too. On the other hand, my old constituency in the city has been redrawn, and that will present me with certain problems.’

‘What problems?’

‘Nothing you would understand,’ Mahesh Kapoor told Bhaskar. Then, seeing Bhaskar’s intense, even hostile, frown, he continued: ‘The caste composition is quite different now. I’ve been looking over many of the new constituencies that have been delineated by the Election Commissioner, and the population figures—’

‘Figures,’ breathed Bhaskar.

‘Yes, arranged by religion and caste in the 1931 Census. Caste! Caste! You may think it’s madness, but you can never ignore it.’

‘Can I have a look at these statistics, Nanaji?’ said Bhaskar. ‘I’ll tell you what to do. Just tell me what variables are in your favour—’

‘Speak in clear Hindi, idiot, it’s impossible to understand what you are saying,’ said Mahesh Kapoor to his grandson, still affectionately, but rather irritated by Bhaskar’s presumption.

Soon, however, Bhaskar had all the facts and figures he needed to keep him more than happy for at least three days, and he started poring over the constituencies.

When Maan came to visit, he asked the servant to take him straight to Bhaskar’s room. He discovered Bhaskar sitting up in bed. The bed was covered with paper.