Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Instead of taking offence at the roughness of this last remark, S.S. Sharma said to him in a calmer voice: ‘Here is the letter. Read it through and tell me what steps you think are appropriate. Of course, we are located nowhere near the borders of Pakistan. Still, some measures may be necessary to control the more excitable newspapers — in the case of panic, I mean. Or incitement.’

‘Certain processions may need to be controlled as well,’ said the Home Minister.

‘Let us see, let us see,’ said the Chief Minister.

The uncertainties of the great world were complemented in Brahmpur by the smaller certainties of the calendar. Two days after the flag-hoistings and orations of Independence Day — the most unsettling of the five that India had so far celebrated — came the full moon of the month of Shravan, and the tenderest of all family festivals — when brothers and sisters affirm their bonds to each other.

Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, however, who was normally keen on festivals, did not approve of Rakhi or believe in it. For her it was a typically Punjabi festival. She traced her ancestry back to a part of U.P. where, according to her, at least among khatris, the festival on which brothers and sisters more truly affirmed their bonds was Bhai Duj — located two and a half months from now among the little glut of smaller festivals clustering around the almost moonless skies of Divali. But she was alone in this; neither of her samdhins agreed with her, certainly not old Mrs Tandon, who, having lived in Lahore in the heart of the undivided Punjab, had celebrated Rakhi all her life like all her neighbours, nor Mrs Rupa Mehra, who believed in sentiment at all costs and on every possible occasion. Mrs Rupa Mehra believed in Bhai Duj as well, and sent greetings on that day too to all her brothers — the term included her male cousins — as a sort of confirmatory affirmation.

Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had clear but undogmatic views on various subjects relating to fasts and festivals: she had her own views of the legends underlying the Pul Mela as well. For her daughter, however, living in Lahore with the Tandons had made no difference. Veena had celebrated Rakhi ever since Pran was born. Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, whatever she thought of this festival, did not try to dampen her daughter’s enthusiasm for coloured thread and shiny florets when she was a little girl. And when Pran and Maan used to come to their mother as children to show her what their sister had given them, her pleasure was never entirely feigned.

Veena went in the morning to Prem Nivas to tie a rakhi around Pran’s wrist. She chose a simple rakhi, a small silver flower of tinsel on a red thread. She fed him a laddu and blessed him, and received in exchange his promise of protection, five rupees and a hug. Although, as Imtiaz had told him, his heart condition was a chronic one, she noticed that he was looking quite a bit better than before; the birth of his daughter, rather than adding to the strain of his life, appeared to have relieved it. Uma was a happy child; and Savita had not got overly or prolongedly depressed in the month following her birth, as her mother had warned her she might. The crisis of Pran’s health had given her too much concern, and reading the law too much stimulation, for a lapse into the luxury of depression. Sometimes she felt passionately maternal and tearfully happy.

Veena had brought Bhaskar along.

‘Where’s my rakhi?’ demanded Bhaskar of Savita.

‘Your rakhi?’

‘Yes. From the baby.’

‘You’re quite right,’ said Savita, smiling and shaking her head at her own thoughtlessness. ‘You’re quite right. I’ll go out and get one at once. Or better still, I’ll make one. Ma must have enough material in her bag for a hundred rakhis. And you — I hope you’ve brought a present for her.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Bhaskar, who had cut Uma a bright and multicoloured dodecahedron out of a single sheet of paper. It was to hang above her cot and she could follow it with her eyes as it twirled around. ‘I coloured it myself. But I didn’t try to use the minimum number of colours,’ he added apologetically.

‘Oh, that’s fine,’ said Savita. ‘The more colours the better.’ And she gave Bhaskar a kiss. When the rakhi was made, she tied it over his right wrist while holding Uma’s hand inside her own.

Veena also went to Baitar House, as she went every year, to tie a rakhi around Firoz’s wrist, and Imtiaz’s. Both were in, since they were expecting her.

‘Where is your friend Maan?’ she demanded of Firoz.

As he opened his mouth to speak, she popped a sweet in.

‘You should know!’ said Firoz, his eyes lighting up in a smile. ‘He’s your brother.’

‘You needn’t remind me,’ said Veena, vexed. ‘It’s Rakhi, but he’s not at home. He has no family feeling. If I’d known he would still be at the farm, I would have sent him the rakhi. He really is very inconsiderate. And now it’s too late.’

Meanwhile the Mehra family had duly dispatched their rakhis to Calcutta, and they had arrived well in time. Arun had warned his sisters that anything more elaborate than a single silver thread would be impossible for him to conceal under the sleeve of his suit, and therefore entirely out of the question for him to wear to work at Bentsen Pryce. Varun, almost as if to flaunt a garish taste that could be guaranteed to exasperate his elder brother, always insisted on elaborate rakhis that reached halfway up his bare arm. Savita had not had the chance to meet her brothers this year, and wrote them long and loving letters, rebuking them for being absentee uncles. Lata, busy as she was with Twelfth Night , wrote them brief but tender notes. She had a rehearsal on the actual day of Rakhi. Several of the actors were wearing rakhis, and Lata could not help smiling in the course of a conversation between Olivia and Viola when it struck her that if the festival of Rakhi had existed in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare would certainly have made much of it, with Viola perhaps bewailing her shipwrecked brother, imagining his lifeless, threadless, untinselled arm lying outstretched beside his body on some Illyrian beach lit by the full August moon.

She also thought of Kabir, and of his remark at the concert — so long ago, it seemed — about having had a sister till last year. Lata still did not know for certain what he had meant by the remark, but every interpretation that came to her mind made her feel deeply sorry for him.

As it happened, Kabir was thinking of her that night as well, and talking about her with his younger brother. He had come back home exhausted after the rehearsal, and had hardly eaten any dinner, and Hashim was unhappy to see him look so spent.

Kabir was trying to describe the strangeness of the situation with Lata. They acted together, they spent hours in the same room during rehearsals, but they did not talk to each other. Lata seemed to have turned, thought Kabir, from passionate to ice-cold — he could not believe that this was the same girl who had been with him that morning in the boat — in the grey mist in a grey sweater, and with the light of love in her eyes.

No doubt the boat had been rowing against the current of society, upstream towards the Barsaat Mahal; but surely there was a solution. Should they row harder, or agree to drift downstream? Should they row in a different river or try to change the direction of the river they were in? Should they jump out of the boat and try to swim? Or get a motor or a sail? Or hire a boatman?

‘Why don’t you simply throw her overboard?’ suggested Hashim.

‘To the crocodiles?’ said Kabir, laughing.

‘Yes,’ said Hashim. ‘She must be a very stupid or unfeeling girl — why does she delight in making you miserable, Bhai-jaan? I don’t think you should waste any time on her. It doesn’t stand to reason.’