Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘Oh, but I do, I do—’ cried Dr Kishen Chand Seth with relish. ‘One must be cruel only to be kind. The surgeon’s knife; we doctors learn that at an early age. But you are a doctor too, of course. A doctor of a kind. Not yet a professor, but no doubt that will come. You should ask Professor Mishra there what it takes to rise to such a height.’

By such means did Dr Kishen Chand Seth knit the two tables together into a web of distracting conversation. His own game thrived upon the stimulus that this turmoil provided. Most of the others were used to him through acquaintance, and tried not to get provoked. But anyone else who was present and attempting to play in the bridge room at that time would have been tempted to complain to the committee, had Dr Kishen Chand Seth himself not been a member of it. Since he was one of the oldest members of the Subzipore Club and since he believed in terrorizing everyone else before they could complain even mildly about him, his odd behaviour escaped its normal consequences.

When he saw the dummy’s hand, Dr Kishen Chand Seth almost had a fit. After he had played the hand, he and the Nawab Sahib were one trick down, and Dr Seth turned roundly on his partner. ‘Good heavens, Nawab Sahib, with such a poor hand, how did you go on to bid three hearts? We had no chance of making nine tricks.’

‘You could have had hearts.’

Dr Kishen Chand Seth bristled with rage. ‘If I had hearts, partner, I would have bid the suit earlier,’ he almost shouted. ‘If you didn’t have spades, you should have shut up — the bidding. This is what happens when you turn your back on your religion and play cards with infidels.’

The Nawab Sahib told himself, as he often had before, that he would never respond to one of Dr Kishen Chand Seth’s invitations in the future.

‘Now, now, Kishy,’ said Parvati mildly, glancing across from the other table.

‘Sorry — sorry—’ said Dr Kishen Chand Seth. ‘I — well — well, whose turn is it to deal? Ah, yes, drinks. What will everyone have to drink?’ And he clicked out the small wood and brass extension located immediately to his right in the table; it contained an ashtray and a coaster. ‘First the ladies. Gin for the ladies?’

Mrs O.P. Mishra cast a terrified look at her husband. Parvati Seth, catching the look, said, ‘Kishy!’ rather sharply.

Kishy was brought to heel for the next few minutes. He alternated his concentration between his cards, the tiger, and (once the waiter had brought it in) his whisky. Normally he was restricted to tea and nimbu pani, but he threw such a tantrum if he was not allowed his whisky when playing bridge that Parvati thought it best to husband her strength for more winnable battles. The only problem was that the whisky had unpredictable effects. On some days it made him slightly mellow, on other days more belligerent. It never made him amorous. And rarely did it make him, as it makes some men, sentimental; only movies had that power.

Dr Kishen Chand Seth was looking forward to the movie which was to be screened in the club today: a Charlie Chaplin movie, he recalled. His granddaughter Savita had very much wanted to see it, and despite her husband’s and mother’s advice, had availed herself of his membership to do so. Pran and Mrs Rupa Mehra, reasonably enough, had insisted on coming along. But Dr Seth could not see them sitting anywhere on the lawn even after an hour had gone by and they were well into the second rubber and thirteenth argument.

‘Er, well,’ Dr Durrani was remonstrating, ‘I can’t entirely, you know, agree with you. A fine calculation of probabilities is an essential part—’

‘Essential, nothing!’ Dr Kishen Chand Seth cut him off. ‘Most good bridge play is simply deduction, not a judgement of probabilities. Now I’ll give you an example,’ he went on. Dr Kishen Chand Seth liked arguing from examples. ‘It happened to me just a week ago. A week ago, wasn’t it, dear?’

‘Yes, dear,’ said Parvati. She remembered the game well, because her husband’s triumph had spiced their evening conversations throughout the week.

‘I was the declarer and I played clubs early in the game. I had five, my dummy had two, and the man on the right ruffed.’

‘Woman, Kishy.’

‘Yes, yes, woman!’ said Dr Kishen Chand Seth, expostulating as much as he dared.

‘That meant that the man on my left had to have had six clubs, or, rather, five after this round. Now later in the game it was clear that he could only have space in his hand for two hearts; since he had bid spades, I assumed he must have had at least four spades, and the residue of those had to take up the rest of the place in his hand.’

‘Isn’t that Rupa, dear?’ asked Parvati suddenly, pointing towards the lawn. She had heard the story so often that she had entirely forgotten to treat it with reverence.

This cruel interruption threw her husband completely off his stride. ‘Yes, yes, it is Rupa. Let it be Rupa — or anyone else,’ he cried, dismissing his daughter from his mind. ‘Now, you see, I had the ace, the king, and the jack of hearts. So I played the ace first and then the king. As I had deduced, the queen fell.’ He paused to retaste the memory. ‘Everyone said that I was a lucky player or that the probabilities were in my favour. But that was not the case at all. Luck — nothing! Probabilities — nothing! I had my eyes open, and, most of all, my brain open. To deduction,’ he ended triumphantly. Then, since it sounded like a toast, he took a good gulp of whisky.

Dr Durrani looked unconvinced.

The next table, though often dragged by Dr Seth into the vortex of his own, was much calmer. Mr Shastri, the Advocate-General, was at his genial best, and did his best (in his syllabic manner) to draw out Mrs O.P. Mishra, who played a good game but seemed to be worried that she was doing so; she kept darting glances at her husband opposite. Bridge, where the bidding consisted almost entirely of monosyllabic words, was the ideal game for Mr Shastri. He was happy that he was not sitting at the other table, where he would have been forced by his host into an embarrassing conversation about the taking over of the estates and his estimation of the government’s chances when the zamindari case went to the Supreme Court. He sympathized equally with the Nawab Sahib and Mahesh Kapoor. Mahesh Kapoor had exploded twice in the face of Dr Kishen Chand Seth’s opinions, and appeared about to do so for the third time. The Nawab Sahib had subsided into icy etiquette; he now refused to contradict even the most outrageous of his host’s comments, or to take visible offence at his repeated offers of whisky — indeed, even to repeat what Dr Kishen Chand Seth well knew, that he was a teetotaller. Only Dr Durrani was able to maintain an absent-minded and undisagreeable disagreement, and this exasperated Dr Kishen Chand Seth.

Meanwhile, Professor O.P. Mishra was holding forth for the benefit of Parvati and the Advocate-General:

‘Politicians, you know, prefer to appoint mediocrities to important posts not merely because they themselves will look better in comparison or because they are afraid of competition, but also because, you see, a person appointed on merit feels that it is owed to him, while a mediocrity is only too conscious that it is not.’

‘I see,’ smiled Mr Shastri. ‘And it is not so with your pro-fes-sion?’

‘Well,’ said Professor Mishra, ‘there’s always the odd case here or there, you know, but in general, in our department at least, one makes every attempt to ensure the pre-eminence of excellence. . Simply because someone may, for instance, be the son of an illustrious person ought not, in our eyes—’

‘What’s that you’re saying, Mishra?’ cried Dr Seth from the next table. ‘Do repeat that — I didn’t quite hear you; nor did my friend Kapoor Sahib. . ’