Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

The great monsoon sky over the twin villages — indeed, over much of the Gangetic plain — was overcast, and people were worried that it might rain the next day, on Bakr-Id itself, and spoil the festivities. Mahesh Kapoor for the most part managed to avoid any political talk. All that sort of thing could be left to electioneering time. Now he simply made sure that he was recognized. He did namaste or adaab as was appropriate, drank tea, and made small talk.

‘Should I go around Sagal as well?’ he asked Baba.

Baba thought for a second. ‘No, don’t do that. Let the web of gossip do its work.’

Finally, having made his rounds, Mahesh Kapoor drove off, but not before thanking Baba and saying to Maan:

‘Perhaps you and Bhaskar are right. At any rate, even if you didn’t learn much Urdu, you weren’t wasting your time.’

Maan could not remember the last time his father had praised him. He was extremely pleased, and more than a little surprised. A couple of tears came to his eyes!

Mahesh Kapoor pretended not to notice, nodded, looked at the sky, and waved in a general way to the gathered populace as the jeep squelched off.

Maan slept in the verandah because of the possibility of rain. He woke up late, but did not find Baba louring angrily over him asking him why he hadn’t been to morning prayer.

Instead, Baba said: ‘So you’ve got up, I see. Will you be coming to the Idgah?’

‘Yes,’ said Maan. ‘Why not?’

‘Then you should get ready quickly,’ he said, and patted a fat black goat that was browsing meditatively near the neem tree.

The others in the family had preceded them, and now Baba and Maan walked across the fields from Debaria to Sagal. The Idgah was located in Sagal; it was part of the school near the lake. The sky was still overcast, but there was also an undercast of light that added brilliance to the emerald colour of the transplanted rice. Ducks were swimming in a paddy field, scrabbling for worms and insects. Everything was fresh and refreshing.

All around them, approaching the Idgah from different directions, were men, women and children, all dressed in festive attire — new clothes, or — for those who could not afford them — clothes that were spotlessly clean and freshly pressed. They converged on the school from all the surrounding villages, not merely from Debaria and Sagal. The men were for the most part dressed in white kurta-pyjamas; but some wore lungis, and some allowed themselves coloured kurtas, though of a sober colour. Maan noticed that their headgear varied from white, close-fitting filigreed caps to black, glossy ones. The women and children wore brightly coloured clothes — red, green, yellow, pink, maroon, blue, indigo, purple. Even under the black or dark-blue burqas worn by most of the women Maan could see the hems of their coloured saris or salwaars, and the attractive anklets and chappals on feet patterned with bright red henna and splashed with the inescapable mud of the monsoon.

It was while they were walking along the narrow paths that a man, old, thin and hungry-looking, and dressed in nothing but a dirty dhoti, intercepted Baba and, with his hands folded, said in a desperate voice:

‘Khan Sahib, what have I done that you should do this to me and to my family? How can we manage now?’

Baba looked at him, thought for a second, and said: ‘Do you want your legs broken? I don’t care what you say now. Did you think about this when you went to the kanungo to complain?’

He then kept walking towards Sagal. Maan, however, was so troubled by the man’s look — half of hatred born of betrayal, half of supplication — that he stared at his deeply wrinkled face and tried to recall — as he had with the sarangi player — where he had seen him before.

‘What’s the story behind this, Baba?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ said Baba. ‘He wanted to get his grasping fingers on my land, that’s all.’ It was clear from his voice that he wished to dismiss the subject from his mind.

As they approached the school, the sounds of a loudspeaker could be heard repeating the praises of God or else telling the people to get ready for the Id prayers, and not to delay too long at the fair. ‘And, ladies, please make yourselves proper; we are about to start; please hurry up, everyone.’

But it was difficult to get the holiday-making crowd to hurry up. Some people, certainly, were performing their ritual ablutions by the edge of the tank; but most of them were milling around the stalls and the improvised market that had formed just outside the school gates along the length of the earthen embankment. Trinkets, bangles, mirrors, balloons — and, best of all, food of all kinds from alu tikkis to chholé to jalebis extruded spluttering into hot tawas, barfis, laddus, flossy pink candy, paan, fruit — everything that Mr Biscuit could have dreamed of in his least constrained imaginings. Indeed, Mr Biscuit was loitering near a stand with half a barfi in his hand. Meher, who had been given some sweets by her grandfather, was sharing them with other children. Moazzam, on the other hand, was busy befriending various vulnerable children—‘for their money’, as the shaven but mustachioed Netaji pointed out to Maan.

The women and girls disappeared into the school building, from where they would watch and participate in the proceedings, while the men and boys arranged themselves in rows on long rolls of cloth in the compound outside. There were more than a thousand men present. Maan saw among them several of the elders of Sagal who had given Rasheed so much trouble outside the mosque, but he did not see the sick old man whom Rasheed and he had gone to visit — not that in such a large gathering it was possible to be certain about who was not there. He was asked to sit on the edge of the verandah next to two bored policemen of the P.P. Police Constabulary, who lounged about in greenish khaki and surveyed the scene. They were there to see that order was maintained and to act as witnesses in case the Imam’s sermon contained anything inflammatory, but their presence was resented, and their manner betrayed that they knew it.

The Imam began the prayers, and the people stood up and knelt down as required with the awesome unanimity of the Islamic service. In the middle of the two snatches of prayers, however, there was a sound of distant thunder. By the time the Imam had begun his sermon, the congregation appeared to be paying more attention to the sky than to his words.

It began to drizzle, and the people started getting restless. Eventually they settled down, but only after the Imam had interrupted his sermon to upbraid them:

‘You! Don’t you have any patience in the sight of God — on the day we have met to remember the sacrifice of Ibrahim and Ismail? You put up with rain in the fields, and yet on this day you act as if a few drops of water will dissolve you away. Don’t you know how those who are doing the pilgrimage this year are suffering on the scorching sands in Arabia? Some of them have even died of heatstroke — and you are in terror of a few drops from the sky. Here I am talking about Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son, and all you are thinking of is keeping dry — you will not even sacrifice a few minutes of your time. You are like the impatient ones who would not come to prayer because the merchants had arrived. In the Surah al-Baqarah, the very surah after which this festival is named, it says:

Who therefore shrinks from the religion

of Abraham, except he be foolish-minded?

And later it says:

We will serve thy God and the God of thy fathers

Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac, One God;

to him we surrender.

Is this the quality of your surrender? Stop it, stop it, good people; be still, and do not fidget!