Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

As he entered the residential areas of Misri Mandi, the alleys became narrower and cooler and somewhat quieter, though there were still plenty of people getting about from place to place and others just lounging around or playing chess on the ledge near the Radhakrishna Temple, whose walls were still bright with the stains of Holi colours. The strip of bright sunlight above his head was now thin and unoppressive, and there were fewer flies. After turning into a still narrower alley, just three feet across, and avoiding a urinating cow, he arrived at his sister’s house.

It was a very narrow house: three storeys and a flat rooftop, with about a room and a half on each storey and a central grating in the middle of the stairwell that allowed light from the sky all the way through to the bottom. Maan entered through the unlocked door and saw old Mrs Tandon, Veena’s mother-in-law, cooking something in a pan. Old Mrs Tandon disapproved of Veena’s taste for music, and it was because of her that the family had had to come back the previous evening without listening to Saeeda Bai. She always gave Maan the shivers; and so, after a perfunctory greeting, he went up the stairs, and soon found Veena and Kedarnath on the roof — playing chaupar in the shade of a trellis and evidently deep in an argument.

Veena was a few years older than Maan, and she took after her mother in shape — she was short and a bit dumpy. When Maan appeared on the roof, her voice had been raised, and her plump, cheerful face was frowning, but when she saw Maan she beamed at him. Then she remembered something and frowned again.

‘So you’ve come to apologize. Good! And not a moment too soon. We were all very annoyed with you yesterday. What kind of brother are you, sleeping for hours on end when you know that we’re bound to visit Prem Nivas?’

‘But I thought you’d stay for the singing—’ said Maan.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Veena nodding her head. ‘I’m quite sure you thought of all that when you dozed off. It had nothing to do with bhang, for instance. And it simply slipped your mind that we had to get Kedarnath’s mother home before the music began. At least Pran came early and met us at Prem Nivas, with Savita and his mother-in-law and Lata—’

‘Oh, Pran, Pran, Pran—’ said Maan in exasperation. ‘He’s always the hero and I’m always the villain.’

‘That’s not true, don’t dramatize things,’ said Veena, thinking of Maan as a small boy trying to shoot pigeons with a catapult in the garden and claiming to be an archer in the Mahabharata. ‘It’s just that you have no sense of responsibility.’

‘Anyway, what were you quarrelling about when I came up the stairs? And where’s Bhaskar?’ asked Maan, thinking of his father’s recent remarks and trying to change the subject.

‘He’s out with his friends flying kites. Yes, he was annoyed as well. He wanted to wake you up. You’ll have to have dinner with us today to make up.’

‘Oh — uh—’ said Maan undecidedly, wondering whether he might not risk visiting Saeeda Bai’s house in the evening. He coughed. ‘But what were you quarrelling about?’

‘We weren’t quarrelling,’ said the mild Kedarnath, smiling at Maan. He was in his thirties, but already greying. A worried optimist, he, unlike Maan, had — if anything — too strong a sense of his responsibilities, and the difficulties of starting from scratch in Brahmpur after Partition had aged him prematurely. When he was not on the road somewhere in south India drumming up orders, he was working till late at night in his shop in Misri Mandi. It was in the evenings that business was conducted there, when middlemen like him bought baskets of shoes from the shoemakers. His afternoons, though, were fairly free.

‘No, not quarrelling, not quarrelling at all. Just arguing about chaupar, that’s all,’ said Veena hastily, throwing the cowrie-shells down once more, counting her tally, and moving her pieces forward on the cross-shaped cloth board.

‘Yes, yes, I’m quite sure,’ said Maan.

He sat down on the rug and looked around at the flowerpots filled with leafy plants, which Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had contributed to her daughter’s roof garden. Veena’s saris were hanging up to dry on one side of the roof, and there were bright splashes of Holi colour all over the terrace. Beyond the roof a jumble of rooftops, minarets, towers and temple-tops stretched out as far as the railway station in ‘New’ Brahmpur. A few paper kites, pink, green and yellow, like the colours of Holi, fought each other in the cloudless sky.

‘Don’t you want something to drink?’ asked Veena quickly. ‘I’ll get you some sherbet — or will you have tea? I’m afraid we don’t have any thandai,’ she added gratuitously.

‘No, thank you. . But you can answer my question. What was the debate about?’ demanded Maan. ‘Let me guess. Kedarnath wants to keep a second wife, and he naturally wants your consent.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Veena, a little sharply. ‘I want a second child and I naturally want his consent. Oh!’ she exclaimed, realizing her indiscretion and looking at her husband. ‘I didn’t mean to — anyway, he’s my brother — we can ask his advice, surely.’

‘But you don’t want my mother’s advice in the matter, do you?’ countered Kedarnath.

‘Well, it’s too late now,’ said Maan genially. ‘What do you want a second child for? Isn’t Bhaskar enough?’

‘We can’t afford a second child,’ said Kedarnath, with his eyes closed — a habit that Veena still found bothersome. ‘Not at the moment, at any rate. My business is — well, you know how it is. And now there’s the possibility of a shoemakers’ strike.’ He opened his eyes. ‘And Bhaskar is so bright that we want to send him to the very best schools. And they don’t come cheap.’

‘Yes, we wish he was stupid, but unfortunately—’

‘Veena is being witty as usual,’ said Kedarnath. ‘Just two days before Holi she reminded me that it was difficult to make ends meet, what with the rent and the rise in food prices and everything. And the cost of her music lessons and my mother’s medicines and Bhaskar’s special maths books and my cigarettes. Then she said that we had to count the rupees, and now she’s saying that we should have another child because every grain of rice it will eat has already been marked with its name. The logic of women! She was born into a family of three children, so she thinks that having three children is a law of nature. Can you imagine how we’ll survive if they’re all as bright as Bhaskar?’

Kedarnath, who was usually quite henpecked, was putting up a good fight.

‘Only the first child is bright as a rule,’ said Veena. ‘I guarantee that my next two will be as stupid as Pran and Maan.’ She resumed her sewing.

Kedarnath smiled, picked up the speckled cowries in his scarred palm, and threw them on to the board. Normally he was a very polite man and would have given Maan his full attention, but chaupar was chaupar, and it was almost impossible to stop playing once the game had begun. It was even more addictive than chess. Dinners grew cold in Misri Mandi, guests left, creditors threw tantrums, but the chaupar players pleaded for just one more game. Old Mrs Tandon had once thrown the cloth board and the sinful shells into a disused well in a neighbouring lane, but, despite the family finances, another set had been procured, and the truant couple now played on the roof, even though it was hotter there. In this way they avoided Kedarnath’s mother, whose gastric and arthritic problems made climbing stairs difficult. In Lahore, both because of the horizontal geography of the house and because of her role as the confident matriarch of a wealthy and unscattered family, she had exercised tight, even tyrannical, control. Her world had collapsed with the trauma of Partition.