Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘You’re right!’ said Maan in a determined manner. He polished off the last two jamuns. ‘You’re absolutely right. You’re a pillar of strength, you know that, Pran? Even when you’re lying down. Now I feel I can face everyone and everything. I feel as if I’m a lion.’ He roared experimentally.

The door opened, and Mr and Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, Veena, Kedarnath and Bhaskar came in.

The lion subsided, and looked a little shamefaced. He hadn’t visited home for two days, and though there was no reproach in his mother’s eyes, he felt bad. While she said a few words to Pran, she arranged a fragrant bunch of bela from the garden in a vase that she had brought with her. And she asked Maan about the Nawab Sahib’s family.

Maan hung his head. ‘They are all very well, Ammaji,’ he said. ‘And how is the frog? Recovered enough to be hopping around like this?’ He gave Bhaskar a hug, then exchanged a few words with Kedarnath. Veena went over to Pran, put her hand on his forehead, and asked not how he was but how Savita was taking his illness.

Pran shook his head. ‘I couldn’t have timed it worse,’ he said.

‘You must take care of yourself,’ said Veena.

‘Yes,’ said Pran. ‘Yes, of course.’ After a pause he added, ‘She wants to study law — in case she becomes a widow and the child an orphan — I mean, fatherless.’

‘Don’t say such things, Pran,’ said his sister sharply.

‘Law?’ said Mr Mahesh Kapoor equally sharply.

‘Oh, I only say them because I don’t believe them,’ said Pran. ‘I’m protected by a mantra.’

Mrs Mahesh Kapoor turned to him and said, ‘Pran — Ramjap Baba also said one other thing; he said your chances for a job would be affected by a death. Do not make fun of fate. It is never good. If any of my grown-up children were to die before me, I would want to die myself.’

‘What’s all this talk of dying?’ said her husband, impatient with all this needless emotion. ‘This room is full of mosquitoes. One just bit me. Tell Savita she should concentrate on her duties as a mother. All this law will do her no good.’

Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, surprisingly, demurred.

‘Unh! What do you understand about anything?’ said her husband. Women should have rights. I’m all for giving them property rights. But if they insist on working, they won’t be able to spend time on their children, and they’ll be brought up neglected. If you had been working, would you have had time to nurse Pran? Would he have been alive today?’

Mrs Mahesh Kapoor said nothing further on the subject. She looked back on Pran’s childhood, and thought that what her husband had said was probably true.

‘How’s the garden, Ammaji?’ asked Pran. The scent of the bela blossoms had filled the room.

‘The zinnias under Maan’s window are out,’ said his mother. ‘And the malis are laying down the new lawn. Since your father resigned, I’ve had a little time to spend on it, though we have to pay the malis ourselves now. And I’ve planted a few new rose bushes. The ground’s soft. And the pond herons have been visiting.’

Maan, who had so far been rather subdued and un-leonine, could not resist quoting from Ghalib:

‘The breeze of the garden of faithfulness has dispersed from my heart,

And nothing remains to me except unfulfilled desire.’

He lapsed into atypical moroseness.

Veena smiled; Pran laughed; Bhaskar’s expression did not change, for his mind was on other things.

But Kedarnath looked more perturbed than usual; Mrs Mahesh Kapoor scanned her younger son’s face with fresh anxiety; and the ex-Minister of Revenue told him irritably to shut up.

Mrs Mahesh Kapoor walked around her garden slowly. It was early morning, cloudy, and comparatively cool. A tall jamun tree, though rooted in the pavement outside, spread its branches over a corner of the garden walk. The purple fruit had indelibly stained the stone path; the pits lay scattered around a corner of her lawn.

Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, like Maan, was very fond of jamuns, and felt that their arrival was more than adequate compensation for the departure of the mango season. The jamun-pickers, who had been given a contract by the horticultural section of the Public Works Department, walked along the street in the early morning, climbing each tree and shaking down with their long lathis the dark, olive-sized, sweetly acerbic fruit. Their women, standing below, collected them on large sheets to sell them in the busy market near Chowk. Every year there would be a tussle about the rights to the fruit that fell on Mrs Mahesh Kapoor’s side, and every year it would be peacefully settled. The jamun-pickers would be allowed to enter her garden as long as they gave her a share of the fruit and an undertaking not to trample all over her lawn and flower beds.

The jamun-pickers tried to be careful, but the lawn and flower beds did suffer. Well, thought Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, at least it is the monsoon, and the beauty of the garden at this time of year doesn’t really lie in its flowers but in its greenery. She had learned by now not to plant the few bright monsoon flowers — zinnias, balsam, orange cosmos — in the beds that lay close to the jamun trees. And she liked the jamun-pickers, who were cheerful, and without whom she would probably not have benefited even from those branches that did stretch out over her lawn.

Now she walked slowly around the garden of Prem Nivas, thinking of many things, but mainly of Pran. She was dressed in an old sari: a short, nondescript woman who to a stranger might almost have looked like one of the servants. Her husband dressed very well — if, as a Congress MLA, he was compelled to wear homespun cotton it had nevertheless to be of the best quality — and he had often rebuked her for her dowdiness. But since this was only one of many rebukes, just or unjust, she felt that she had neither the energy nor the taste to act on it. It was like her lack of knowledge of English. What could she do about it? Nothing, she had long since decided. If she was stupid, she was stupid; it was God’s doing.

The fact that year after year she carried away some of the best prizes in the Rose and Chrysanthemum Show in December as well as in the Annual Flower Show in February never ceased to amaze the more sophisticated inhabitants of Brahmpur. The committee of the Race Club marvelled that her roses displayed a compactness and freshness that theirs could never attain; and the wives of the executives of Burmah Shell or the Praha Shoe Company even deigned, in their anglicized Hindi, to ask her once or twice what it was she put into her lawn that made it so even and springy and green. Mrs Mahesh Kapoor would have been hard-pressed to answer even if she had fully understood their brand of Hindi. She simply stood with gratefully folded hands, accepting their compliments and looking rather foolish, until they gave up. Shaking their heads they decided that she was indeed foolish, but that she — or more probably her head gardener—‘had a gift’. Once or twice they had tried to bribe him to leave her by offering him twice his present salary; but the head mali, who was originally from Rudhia, was content to remain at Prem Nivas and see the trees he had planted grow tall and the roses he had pruned bloom brightly. His disagreement with her about the side lawn had been amicably resolved. It had been left slightly uneven, and had become something of a sanctuary for her favourite bird.

The two under-gardeners were in government service, and had been allotted to Mahesh Kapoor in his capacity as Minister of Revenue. They loved the garden at Prem Nivas, and were unhappy that they were to be torn away from it. ‘Why did Minister Sahib resign?’ they asked sadly.

‘You will have to ask Minister Sahib,’ said Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, who herself was not happy about his decision, and thought it was an unwise one. Nehru, after all, despite his carping and complaining about his party, was still in Congress. Surely any precipitate action by his followers — such as resignation — was premature. The question was, would it help to force the Prime Minister’s hand, and make him leave as well, thus giving birth to a new and possibly more vigorous party? Or would it merely weaken his position in his own party and make things worse than before?