Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Then, thinking of the ghazals of Mast, he jumped into a tonga, and told the tonga-wallah to take him to the Barsaat Mahal. It had been years since Maan had been there, and the thought of seeing it appealed to him today.

The tonga passed through the green residential ‘colonies’ of the eastern part of Brahmpur, and came to Nabiganj, the commercial street that marked the end of spaciousness and the start of clutter and confusion. Old Brahmpur lay beyond it, and, almost at the western end of the old town, on the Ganga itself, stood the beautiful grounds and the still more beautiful marble structure of the Barsaat Mahal.

Nabiganj was the fashionable shopping street where the quality of Brahmpur were to be seen strolling up and down of an evening. At the moment, in the heat of the afternoon, there were not many shoppers about, and only a few cars and tongas and bicycles. The signs of Nabiganj were painted in English, and the prices matched the signs. Bookshops like the Imperial Book Depot, well-stocked general stores such as Dowling & Snapp (now under Indian management), fine tailors such as Magourian’s where Firoz had all his clothes (from suits to achkans) made, the Praha shoe shop, an elegant jeweller’s, restaurants and coffee houses such as the Red Fox, Chez Yasmeen, and the Blue Danube, and two cinema halls — Manorma Talkies (which showed Hindi films) and the Rialto (which leaned towards Hollywood and Ealing): each of these places had played some minor or major role in one or another of Maan’s romances. But today, as the tonga trotted through the broad street, Maan paid them no attention. The tonga turned off on to a smaller road, and almost immediately on to a yet smaller one, and they were now in a different world.

There was just enough room for the tonga to get through among the bullock-carts, rickshaws, cycles and pedestrians who thronged both the road and the pavement — which they shared with barbers plying their trade out of doors, fortune tellers, flimsy tea-stalls, vegetable-stands, monkey-trainers, ear-cleaners, pickpockets, stray cattle, the odd sleepy policeman sauntering along in faded khaki, sweat-soaked men carrying impossible loads of copper, steel rods, glass or scrap paper on their backs as they yelled ‘Look out! Look out!’ in voices that somehow pierced through the din, shops of brassware and cloth (the owners attempting with shouts and gestures to entice uncertain shoppers in), the small carved stone entrance of the Tinny Tots (English Medium) School which opened out on to the courtyard of the reconverted haveli of a bankrupt aristocrat, and beggars — young and old, aggressive and meek, leprous, maimed or blinded — who would quietly invade Nabiganj as evening fell, attempting to avoid the police as they worked the queues in front of the cinema halls. Crows cawed, small boys in rags rushed around on errands (one balancing six small dirty glasses of tea on a cheap tin tray as he weaved through the crowd), monkeys chattered in and bounded about a great shivering-leafed pipal tree and tried to raid unwary customers as they left the well-guarded fruit-stand, women shuffled along in anonymous burqas or bright saris, with or without their menfolk, a few students from the university lounging around a chaat-stand shouted at each other from a foot away either out of habit or in order to be heard, mangy dogs snapped and were kicked, skeletal cats mewed and were stoned, and flies settled everywhere: on heaps of foetid, rotting rubbish, on the uncovered sweets at the sweetseller’s in whose huge curved pans of ghee sizzled delicious jalebis, on the faces of the sari-clad but not the burqa-clad women, and on the horse’s nostrils as he shook his blinkered head and tried to forge his way through Old Brahmpur in the direction of the Barsaat Mahal.

Maan’s thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the sight of Firoz standing by a pavement stall. He halted the tonga at once and got down.

‘Firoz, you’ll have a long life — I was just thinking about you. Well, half an hour ago!’

Firoz said that he was just wandering about, and had decided to buy a walking stick.

‘For yourself or for your father?’

‘For myself.’

‘A man who has to buy himself a walking stick in his twenties might not have such a long life after all,’ said Maan.

Firoz, after leaning at various angles on various sticks, decided upon one and, without haggling about the price, bought it.

‘And you, what are you doing here? Paying a visit to Tarbuz ka Bazaar?’ he asked.

‘Don’t be disgusting,’ said Maan cheerfully. Tarbuz ka Bazaar was the street of singing girls and prostitutes.

‘Oh, but I forgot,’ said Firoz slyly: ‘Why should you consort with mere melons when you can taste the peaches of Samarkand?’

Maan frowned.

‘What further news of Saeeda Bai?’ continued Firoz, who, from the back of the audience, had enjoyed the previous night. Though he had left by midnight, he had sensed that, Maan’s engagement notwithstanding, romance was once again entering his friend’s life. More, perhaps, than anyone else, he knew and understood Maan.

‘What do you expect?’ asked Maan, a little glumly. ‘Things will happen the way they will. She didn’t even allow me to escort her back.’

This was quite unlike Maan, thought Firoz, who had very rarely seen his friend depressed. ‘So where are you going?’ he asked him.

‘To the Barsaat Mahal.’

‘To end it all?’ inquired Firoz tenderly. The parapet of the Barsaat Mahal faced the Ganga and was the venue of a number of romantic suicides every year.

‘Yes, yes, to end it all,’ said Maan impatiently. ‘Now tell me, Firoz, what do you advise?’

Firoz laughed. ‘Say that again. I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Maan Kapoor, beau of Brahmpur, at whose feet young women of good families, heedless of reputation, hasten to fling themselves like bees on a lotus, seeks the advice of the steely and stainless Firoz on how to proceed in a matter of the heart. You’re not asking for my legal advice, are you?’

‘If you’re going to act like that—’ began Maan, disgruntled. Suddenly a thought struck him. ‘Firoz, why is Saeeda Bai called Firozabadi? I thought she came from these parts.’

Firoz replied: ‘Well, her people did in fact originally come from Firozabad. But that’s all history. In fact her mother Mohsina Bai settled in Tarbuz ka Bazaar, and Saeeda Bai was brought up in this part of the city.’ He pointed his stick towards the disreputable quarter. ‘But naturally Saeeda Bai herself, now that she’s made good and lives in Pasand Bagh — and breathes the same air as you and I — doesn’t like people to talk about her local origins.’

Maan mused over this for a few moments. ‘How do you know so much about her?’ he asked, puzzled.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Firoz, waving away a fly. ‘This sort of information just floats around in the air.’ Not reacting to Maan’s look of astonishment, he went on, ‘But I must be off. My father wants me to meet someone boring who’s coming to tea.’ Firoz leapt into Maan’s tonga. ‘It’s too crowded to ride a tonga through Old Brahmpur; you’re better off on foot,’ he told Maan, and drove off.

Maan wandered along, mulling — but not for long — over what Firoz had said. He hummed a bit of the ghazal that had embedded itself in his mind, stopped to buy a paan (he preferred the spicier, darker green leaves of the desi paan to the paler Banarasi), manoeuvred his way across the road through a crowd of cycles, rickshaws, pushcarts, men and cattle, and found himself in Misri Mandi, near a small vegetable-stall, close to where his sister Veena lived.

Feeling guilty for having been asleep when she came to Prem Nivas the previous afternoon, Maan decided impulsively to visit her — and his brother-in-law Kedarnath and nephew Bhaskar. Maan was very fond of Bhaskar and liked throwing arithmetical problems at him like a ball to a performing seal.