Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

It would have been too much to hope that Mrs Rupa Mehra would not have been at home when the post arrived two days later at Pran’s house. She hardly ever went out these days, what with Savita and the baby. Even Dr Kishen Chand Seth, if he wanted to see her, had to come to the university.

When Amit’s parcel arrived, Lata was at a rehearsal. Mrs Rupa Mehra signed for it. Since the mail from Calcutta carried nothing but disaster these days, and her curiosity about the contents was unassuageable (especially when she saw the sender’s name), she almost opened the parcel herself. Only the fear of being condemned jointly by Lata, Savita and Pran restrained her.

When Lata returned, it was almost dark.

‘Where have you been all this time? Why didn’t you get back earlier? I’ve been going mad with anxiety,’ said her mother.

‘I’ve been at rehearsal, Ma, you know that. I’m not much later than usual. How’s everyone? Baby’s sleeping, by the sound of it.’

‘This package arrived two hours ago — from Calcutta. Open it at once.’ Mrs Rupa Mehra was about to burst.

Lata was going to protest, but then, noticing the anxiety on her mother’s face and thinking of her volatility and tearfulness ever since she had received the news about the second medal, she decided that it was not worth asserting her right to privacy if it meant causing her mother further pain. She opened the package.

‘It’s Amit’s book,’ she said with pleasure: ‘ The Fever Bird by Amit Chatterji. Very handsome — what a beautiful cover.’ Mrs Rupa Mehra, forgetting for a second the threat that Amit had once posed, picked up the book and was enchanted. The plain blue-and-gold cover, the paper, which appeared to be far superior to the stock they had seen during the war, the wide margins, the clear, spacious print, the luxury of it all delighted her. She had seen the smaller and shabbier Indian edition of the book in a bookstore once; the poems, which she had glanced through, had not seemed to her to be very edifying, and she had put it down. Mrs Rupa Mehra could not help wishing that the handsome book that she was now holding had been blank: it would have made a wonderful vehicle for the poems and thoughts that she often copied down.

‘How lovely. In England they really make such beautiful things,’ she said.

She opened the book and began to read the inscription. Her frown grew deeper as she reached the bottom.

‘Lata, what does this poem mean?’ she asked.

‘How can I tell, Ma? You haven’t given me a chance to read it myself. Let me have a look at it.’

‘But what are all these pineapples doing here?’

‘Oh, that’s probably Rose Aylmer,’ said Lata. ‘She ate too many and died.’

‘You mean, “A night of memories and sighs”? That Rose Aylmer?’

‘Yes, Ma.’

‘How painful it must have been!’ Mrs Rupa Mehra’s nose began to redden in sympathy. Then a sudden alarming thought struck her: ‘Lata, this is not a love poem, is it? I can’t even understand it, it could be anything. What does he mean by Rose Aylmer? Those Chatterjis are very clever.’

Mrs Rupa Mehra had just had a renewed attack of resentment against the Chatterjis. She attributed the theft of the jewellery to Meenakshi’s carelessness. She was always opening the trunk in the presence of the servants, and putting temptation in people’s way. Not that Mrs Rupa Mehra wasn’t worried about Meenakshi too (who must have been very upset after this shock) — and about her third grandchild, assuredly a grandson this time. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Savita’s baby, she might well have rushed off to Calcutta, to busy herself with help and commiseration. Besides, there were several things she wanted to check in Calcutta in the wake of Arun’s letter, particularly how Haresh was faring — and what exactly it was he was doing. Haresh had said that he was working ‘in a supervisory capacity, and living in the European colony at Prahapore’. He had not mentioned that he was a mere foreman.

‘I doubt it’s a love poem, Ma,’ said Lata.

‘And he hasn’t written “Love” or anything at the bottom, just his name,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra, reassuring herself.

‘I like it, but I’ll have to reread it,’ Lata mused aloud.

‘It’s too clever for my liking,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra. ‘Tattoo and sot and whatnot. These modern poets are like this. And he hasn’t even had the politeness to write your name,’ she added, further reassured.

‘Well, it’s on the envelope, and I can’t imagine he talks about pineapples to everyone,’ said Lata. But she too thought it a little strange.

Later, lying on her bed, she read the poem again at her leisure. She was secretly very pleased to have a poem written for her, but much in it was not immediately clear. When he said that he winged his even and passionless way, did he mean that the temperature of his poems was cool? That he was speaking in the voice of the bird of the title but was not fevered? Or did it mean something private to his imagination? Or anything at all?

After a while, Lata began to read the book, partly for itself, partly as a clue to the inscription. The poems were, by and large, no more unclear than their complexity required; they made grammatical sense, and Lata was grateful for that. And some of them were poems of deep feeling, by no means passionless, though their diction was at times formal. There was an eight-line love poem that she liked, and a longer one, a bit like an ode, about walking alone through the Park Street Cemetery. There was even a humorous one about buying books on College Street. Lata liked most of the poems that she read, and was moved by the fact that when she had been lonely and unoccupied in Calcutta Amit had taken her to places that had meant so much to him and that he was used to visiting alone.

For all their feeling, the tenor of the poems was muted — and sometimes self-deprecating. But the title poem was anything but muted, and the self that it presented appeared to be gripped almost by mania. Lata herself had often been kept awake on summer nights by the papiha, the brainfever bird, and the poem, partly for this reason, disturbed her profoundly.

THE FEVER BIRD

The fever bird sang out last night.

I could not sleep, try as I might.

My brain was split, my spirit raw.

I looked into the garden, saw

The shadow of the amaltas

Shake slightly on the moonlit grass.

Unseen, the bird cried out its grief,

Its lunacy, without relief:

Three notes repeated closer, higher,

Soaring, then sinking down like fire

Only to breathe the night and soar,

As crazed, as desperate, as before.

I shivered in the midnight heat

And smelt the sweat that soaked my sheet.

And now tonight I hear again

The call that skewers through my brain,

The call, the brainsick triple note—

A bone of pain stuck in its throat.

I am so tired I could weep.

Mad bird, for God’s sake let me sleep.

Why do you cry like one possessed?

When will you rest? When will you rest?

Why wait each night till all but I

Lie sleeping in the house, then cry?

Why do you scream into my ear

What no one else but I can hear?

Her thoughts a whirl of images and questions, Lata read this poem through five or six times. It was far clearer than most of the poems in the book, clearer certainly than the inscription he had written for her, and yet it was far more mysterious and disturbing. She knew the yellow laburnum, the amaltas tree that stood above Dipankar’s meditation hut in the garden at Ballygunge, and she could imagine Amit looking out at its branches at night. (Why, she wondered, had he used the Hindi word for the tree rather than the Bengali — was it just for the sake of the rhyme?) But the Amit she knew — kindly, cynical, cheerful — was even less the Amit of this poem than of the short love poem that she had read and liked.