Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Surely, Abraham was a nation

obedient unto God, a man of pure faith

and no idolater,

showing thankfulness for His blessings;

He chose him, and He guided him

to a straight path.

And We gave him in this world good,

and in the world to come he shall be

among the righteous.

Then We revealed to thee: “Follow thou

the creed of Abraham, a man of pure faith

and no idolater.”’

The Imam got quite carried away with his quotations in Arabic, but after a while he returned to his quieter discourse in Urdu. He talked about the greatness of God and his Prophet, and how everyone should be good and devout in the spirit of Abraham and the other prophets of God.

When it was over, everyone joined in asking for God’s blessings, and, after a few minutes, dispersed to their villages, making sure they returned by a different route from the one they had taken to arrive.

‘And tomorrow, being Friday, we’ll get another sermon,’ some of them grumbled. But others thought that the Imam had been at his best.

As he walked back into the village, Maan bumped into the Football, who drew him aside.

‘Where have you been?’ asked the Football.

‘To the Idgah.’

The Football looked unhappy. ‘That is not a place for us,’ he said.

‘I suppose not,’ said Maan indifferently. ‘Still, no one made me feel unwelcome.’

‘And now, you will watch all this cruel goat business?’

‘If I see it, I’ll see it,’ said Maan, who thought that hunting, after all, was as bloody a business as sacrificing a goat. Besides, he didn’t want to get into a false compact of solidarity with the Football, whom he did not greatly care for.

But when he saw the sacrifice, he did not enjoy it.

In some of the houses of Debaria, the master of the house himself performed the sacrifice of the goat or, occasionally, the sheep. (Cow sacrifice had been forbidden in P.P. since British times because of the danger of religious rioting.) But in other houses, a man specially trained as a butcher came around to sacrifice the animal that symbolized God’s merciful replacement for Abraham’s son. According to popular tradition this was Ishmael, not Isaac, though the Islamic authorities were divided on this matter. The goats of the village seemed to sense that their final hour was at hand, for they set up a fearful and pitiful bleating.

The children, who enjoyed the spectacle, followed the butcher as he made his rounds. Eventually he got to Rasheed’s father’s house. The plump black goat was made to face west. Baba said a prayer over it while Netaji and the butcher held it down. The butcher then put his foot on its chest, held its mouth, and slit its throat. The goat gurgled, and from the slash in its throat bright red blood and green, half-digested grass poured out.

Maan turned away, and noticed that Mr Biscuit, wearing a garland of marigolds that he must have somehow procured at the fair, was looking at the slaughter with a phlegmatic air.

But everything was proceeding briskly. The head was chopped off. The skin on the legs and underbelly was slit and the entire skin peeled off the fat. The hind legs were broken at the knee, then bound, and the goat was hung from a branch. The stomach was slit, and the entrails, with their blood and filth, were pulled out. The liver and lungs and kidneys were removed, the front legs cut off. Now the goat, which only a few minutes ago had been bleating in alarm and gazing at Maan with its yellow eyes, was just a carcass, to be divided in thirds among the owners, their families, and the poor.

The children looked on, thrilled and enthralled. They especially enjoyed the sacrifice itself and later the spilling out of the grey-pink guts. Now they stared as the front quarters were set aside for the family, and the rest of the body chopped into sections across the ribs and placed on the scales on the verandah to be balanced. Rasheed’s father was in charge of the distribution.

The poor children — who got to eat meat very rarely — crowded forward to get their share. Some clustered around the scales and grabbed at the chunks of meat, others tried to but were pushed back; most of the girls sat quietly in one place, and eventually got served. Some of the women, including the wives of the chamars, appeared to be very shy and could hardly bring themselves to come forward to accept the meat. Eventually they carried it off in their hands, or on bits of cloth or paper, praising and thanking the Khan Sahib for his generosity or complaining about their share as they walked to the next house to receive their portion of its sacrifice.

The previous evening’s meal had been hurried because of the preparations for Bakr-Id; but today’s late afternoon meal was relaxed. The tastiest dish was one made from the liver, kidneys and tripe of the goat that had just been slaughtered. Then the charpoys were shifted under the neem tree beneath which the goat had earlier been quietly browsing.

Maan, Baba and his two sons, Qamar — the sarcastic schoolteacher from Salimpur — as well as Rasheed’s uncle, the Bear, were all present for lunch. The talk turned naturally to Rasheed. The Bear asked Maan how he was doing.

‘Actually, I haven’t seen him since I returned to Brahmpur,’ confessed Maan. ‘He has been so busy with his tuitions, I suppose, and I myself with one thing and another—’

It was a feeble excuse, but Maan had not neglected his friend by intention. It was just the way things happened to be in his life.

‘I did hear that he was involved in the student Socialist Party,’ said Maan. ‘With Rasheed, though, there’s no fear that he’ll neglect his studies.’ Maan did not mention Saeeda Bai’s remark about Rasheed.

Maan noticed that only the Bear seemed truly concerned about Rasheed. After a while, and long after the conversation had passed on to other matters, he said: ‘Everything he does he does too seriously. His hair will be white before he’s thirty unless someone teaches him to laugh.’

Everyone was constrained when talking about Rasheed. Maan felt this acutely; but since no one — not even Rasheed himself — had told him how he had disgraced himself, he could not understand it. When Rasheed had read Saeeda Bai’s letter to him, Maan, being denied an early return to Brahmpur, had been seized with such restlessness that he had very shortly afterwards set out on a trek. Perhaps it was his own preoccupation that had blinded him to the tension in the family of his friend.

Netaji planned to hold a party the next night — a feast of meat for which he had another goat handy — in honour of various people of importance in the subdivision: police and petty administration officials and so on. He was trying to persuade Qamar to get the headmaster of his school in Salimpur to come. Qamar not only flatly refused, but made no secret of his contempt for Netaji’s transparent attempts to ingratiate himself with the worthy and the influential. Throughout the afternoon Qamar found some way or other of needling Netaji. At one point he turned to Maan with newfound friendliness and said, ‘I suppose that when your father was here, he was unable to shake off our Netaji.’

‘Well,’ said Maan, resisting a smile, ‘Baba and he very kindly showed my father around Debaria.’

‘I thought it might be something like that,’ said Qamar. ‘He was having tea with me in Salimpur when he heard from a friend of mine, who had dropped in, that the great Mahesh Kapoor was visiting his own native village. Well, that was the end of tea with me. Netaji knows which cups of tea contain more sugar. He’s as smart as the flies on Baba’s sputum.’