Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘If he did I didn’t hear him,’ said Maan.

‘Hmm,’ said Veena, not very pleased. ‘If I know Baoji, he probably thought about it, and then pushed the thought aside as being unworthy of him. Even we had to wait in line for our turn to get that pitiful compensation for the loss of our business in Lahore. And that too when Ammaji was working day and night in the refugee camps. I sometimes think he cares for nothing but politics. Priya says her father’s equally bad. All right, eight o’clock. I’ll make your favourite alu paratha.’

‘You can bully Kedarnath, but not me,’ said Maan with a smile.

‘All right, go, go!’ said Veena, tossing her head. ‘You’d think we were still in Lahore from the amount we get to see you.’

Maan made a propitiatory sound, a tongue-click followed by a half-sigh.

‘With all his sales trips, I sometimes feel I have a quarter of a husband,’ continued Veena. ‘And an eighth of a brother each.’ She rolled up the chaupar board. ‘When are you returning to Banaras to do an honest day’s work?’

‘Ah, Banaras,’ said Maan with a smile, as if Veena had suggested Saturn. And Veena left it at that.

It was evening by the time Maan got to the Barsaat Mahal, and the grounds were not crowded. He walked through the arched entrance in the boundary wall, and passed through the outer grounds, a sort of park which was for the most part covered with dry grass and bushes. A few antelope browsed under a large neem tree, bounding lazily away as he approached.

The inner wall was lower, the arched entranceway less imposing, more delicate. Verses from the Quran in black stone and bold geometrical patterns in coloured stone were embedded in its marble facade. Like the outer wall, the inner wall ran along three sides of a rectangle. The fourth side was common to both: a sheer drop from a stone platform — protected only by a balustrade — to the waters of the Ganga below.

Between the inner entrance and the river was the celebrated garden and the small but exquisite palace. The garden itself was a triumph as much of geometry as of horticulture. It was unlikely in fact that the flowers with which it was now planted — other than jasmine and the dark-red, deep-scented Indian rose — were the same as those for which it had been planned more than two centuries ago. What few flowers remained now looked exhausted from the daily heat. But the well-tended, well-watered lawns, the great, shady neem trees dispersed symmetrically about the grounds, and the narrow sandstone strips that divided the flower beds and lawns into octagons and squares provided an island of calm in a troubled and crowded town. Most beautiful of all was the small, perfectly shaped pleasure-palace of the Nawabs of Brahmpur, set in the exact centre of the inner gardens, a filigreed jewel box of white marble, its spirit compounded equally of extravagant dissipation and architectural restraint.

In the days of the Nawabs, peacocks used to roam the grounds, and their raucous voices would on occasion compete with the musical entertainments laid on for those reclining and declining rulers: a performance by dancing girls, a more serious performance of khyaal by a court musician, a poetry competition, a new ghazal by the poet Mast.

The thought of Mast brought the wonder of the previous evening back into Maan’s mind. The clear lines of the ghazal, the soft lines of Saeeda Bai’s face, her banter, which now seemed to Maan to be both lively and tender, the way she would pull her sari over her head as it threatened to slip off, the special attentions she had granted Maan, all these came back to him as he wandered up and down along the parapet with thoughts very far from suicide. The river breeze was pleasant, and Maan began to feel encouraged by events. He had been wondering whether to stop by Saeeda Bai’s house in the evening, and he felt suddenly optimistic.

The great red sky covered the burnished Ganga like an inflamed bowl. On the far shore the sands stretched endlessly away.

As he looked at the river he was struck by a remark he had heard from the mother of his fiancée. She, pious woman, was convinced that on the festival of Ganga Dussehra the obedient river would begin to rise again and would cover on that particular day one of the steps along the ghats of her native Banaras. Maan began to think about his fiancée and her family and became depressed about his engagement, as he usually did when he gave it any thought. His father had arranged it, as he had threatened to do; Maan, taking the path of least resistance, had gone along with it; and now it was an ominous fact of life. He would sooner or later have to get married to her. Maan felt no affection for her — they had hardly met each other except in the company of their families — and he did not really want to think about her. He was much happier thinking about Samia, who was now in Pakistan with her family but who wanted to return to Brahmpur just to visit Maan, or Sarla, the daughter of the former Inspector-General of Police, or any of his other earlier passions. A later flame, however brightly it burned, did not douse an earlier one in Maan’s heart. He continued to feel sudden throbs of warmth and goodwill at the thought of almost any of them.

It was dark by the time Maan walked back into the crowded town, uncertain once again about whether he should try his luck at Saeeda Bai’s. He was in Misri Mandi in a few minutes. It was a Sunday, but not a holiday here. The shoe market was full of bustle, light and noise: Kedarnath Tandon’s shop was open, as were all the other shops in the arcade — known as the Brahmpur Shoe Mart — that was located just off the main street. The so-called basket-wallahs ran hastily from shop to shop with baskets on their heads, offering their wares to the wholesalers: shoes that they and their families had made during the day and that they would have to sell in order to buy food as well as leather and other materials for their next day’s work. These shoemakers, mainly members of the ‘untouchable’ jatav caste or a few lower-caste Muslims, a large number of whom had remained in Brahmpur after Partition, were gaunt and poorly clad, and many of them looked desperate. The shops were elevated three feet or so above street level to enable them to place their baskets at the edge of the cloth-covered floor for examination by a possible buyer. Kedarnath, for instance, might take a pair of shoes out of a basket submitted for his inspection. If he rejected the basket, the seller would have to run to the next wholesaler — or to one in another arcade. Or Kedarnath might offer a lower price, which the shoemaker might or might not accept. Or Kedarnath might husband his funds by offering the shoemaker the same price but less cash, making up the remainder with a credit note or ‘chit’ that would be accepted by a discount agent or a seller of raw materials. Even after the shoes were sold, the material for the next day remained to be bought, and the basket-wallahs were virtually forced to sell to someone not too late in the evening, even on unfavourable terms.

Maan did not understand the system, the large turnover of which depended on an effective network of credit in which chits were everything and banks played almost no role. Not that he wanted to understand it; the cloth business in Banaras was dependent on different financial structures. He had merely dropped in for a social chat, a cup of tea, and a chance to meet his nephew. Bhaskar, who was dressed in a white kurta-pyjama like his father, was sitting barefoot on the white cloth spread out on the floor of the shop. Kedarnath would occasionally turn to him and ask him to calculate something — sometimes to keep the boy entertained, sometimes because he was of real help. Bhaskar found the shop very exciting — what with the pleasure of working out discount rates or postal rates for distant orders, and the intriguing geometrical and arithmetical relationships of the stacked shoeboxes. He would delay going to bed as long as possible in order to remain with his father, and Veena sometimes had to send word more than once that he should come home.