Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘Nothing,’ said Tapan, rubbing his fist on Cuddles’ furry white head. ‘Bye, Dada. See you at lunch.’

Dipankar yawned. Meditation often had this effect on him. ‘So what if you’ve just got a bad report? Your last term’s report wasn’t much good either, and you weren’t behaving like this. You haven’t even spent a day with your Calcutta friends.’

‘Baba was very stern when he saw my report.’

Mr Justice Chatterji’s gentle reproof carried a great deal of weight with the boys in the family. With Meenakshi and Kuku, it was duck’s water.

Dipankar frowned. ‘Perhaps you should meditate a bit.’

A look of distaste spread across Tapan’s face. ‘I’m taking Cuddles for a walk,’ he said. ‘He looks restless.’

‘You’re talking to me,’ said Dipankar. ‘I’m not your Amit Da; you can’t fob me off with excuses.’

‘Sorry, Dada. Yes.’ Tapan tensed.

‘Come up to my room.’ Dipankar had once been a prefect at Jheel School, and at one level knew how to exercise authority — though now he did it in a sort of dreamy way.

‘All right.’

As they walked upstairs Dipankar said:

‘And even Bahadur’s favourite dishes don’t seem to please you. He was saying yesterday that you snapped at him. He’s an old servant.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Tapan really did look unhappy, and now that he was in Dipankar’s room, almost trapped.

The room itself contained no chairs, just a bed, a variety of mats (including Buddhist prayer-mats), and a large painting that Kuku had made of the swamps of the Sundarbans. The single bookshelf contained religious books, a few economics textbooks, and a red bamboo flute — which Dipankar, when the mood took him, played very untunefully and fervently.

‘Sit down on that mat,’ said Dipankar, indicating a square blue cloth mat with a purple and yellow circular design in the middle. ‘Now what is it? It’s something to do with school, I know, and it isn’t the report.’

‘It’s nothing,’ said Tapan, desperately. ‘Dada, why can’t I leave? I just don’t like it there. Why can’t I join St Xavier’s here in Calcutta, like Amit Da? He didn’t have to go to Jheel.’

‘Well, if you want—’ shrugged Dipankar.

He reflected that it was only after Amit was well ensconced at St Xavier’s that some of Mr Justice Chatterji’s colleagues had recommended Jheel School to him — so strongly, in fact, that he had decided to send his second son there. Dipankar had enjoyed it, and had done better than his parents had expected; and Tapan had therefore followed.

‘When I told Ma I wanted to leave, she got annoyed and said that I should speak to Baba — and I just can’t speak to Baba. He’ll ask me for reasons. And there are no reasons. I just hate it, that’s all. That’s why I get those headaches. Apart from that, I’m not unfit, or anything.’

‘Is it that you miss home?’ asked Dipankar.

‘No — I mean, I don’t really—’ Tapan shook his head.

‘Has someone been trying to bully you?’

‘Please let me go, now, Dada. I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Well, if I let you go now you’ll never tell me. So what is it? Tapan, I want to help you, but you’ve got to tell me what happened. I promise I won’t tell anyone.’

He was distressed to notice that Tapan had started crying; and that now, enraged with himself, he was wiping away his tears and looking resentfully at his elder brother. To cry at thirteen was, he knew, a disgrace. Dipankar put his arm around his shoulder; it was angrily shrugged off. But slowly the story emerged, amid explosive outbursts, long silences, and furious sobs, and it was not a pleasant one, even to Dipankar, who had been to Jheel School years before, and was prepared for quite a lot.

A gang of three senior boys had been bullying Tapan. Their leader was the hockey captain, the seniormost prefect in the house other than the house captain. He was sexually obsessed with Tapan, and made him spend hours every night somersaulting up and down the long verandah as an alternative, he said, to somersaulting naked in his study four times. Tapan knew what he was after and had refused. Sometimes he was made to somersault in assembly because there was an imaginary spot of dust on his shoes, sometimes he had to run around the lake (after which the school was named) for an hour or more till he was near collapse — for no reason other than the prefect’s whim. Protest was useless, since insubordination would carry its own penalties. To speak to the house captain was pointless; the solidarity of the barons would have ensured his further torture. To speak to the housemaster, a genial and ineffectual fool with his dogs and his beautiful wife and his pleasant don’t-disturb-me life, would have branded Tapan as a sneak — to be shunned and hounded even by those who now sympathized with him. And often enough his peers too could not resist teasing him about his powerful admirer’s obsession, and implying that Tapan secretly enjoyed it.

Tapan was physically tough, and was always ready to use his fists or his sharp Chatterji tongue in his own defence; but the combination of major and minor cruelties had worn him down. He felt crushed by their cumulative weight and his own isolation. He had nothing and no one to tell him that he was right except a single Tagore song at assembly, and this made his loneliness even deeper.

Dipankar looked grim as he listened; he knew the system from experience, and realized what pitiful resources a boy of thirteen could summon up against three seventeen-year-olds, invested with the absolute power of a brutal state. But he had no idea of what was to come; and Tapan became almost incoherent as he recounted the worst of it.

One of the nocturnal sports of the prefect’s gang was to hunt the civet cats that roamed around under the roof of their house. They would smash their heads in and skin them, then break bounds with the connivance of the night-watchman and sell them for their skin and scent-glands. Because they discovered that Tapan was terrified of the things, they got a particular kick out of forcing him to open trunks in which they were lying dead. He would go berserk, run screaming at the senior boys and hit them with his fists. This they thought was hilarious, especially since they were also able to feel him up at the same time.

In one case they garotted a live civet cat, forced Tapan to watch, heated up an iron bar, and cut its throat from side to side with it. Then they played with its voice-box.

Dipankar stared at his brother, almost paralysed. Tapan was shuddering and gagging in dry heaves.

‘Just get me out of there, Dada — I can’t spend another term there — I’ll jump off the train, I’m telling you — every time the morning bell rings I wish I was dead.’

Dipankar nodded and put his arm around his shoulder. This time it was not shrugged off.

‘One day I’ll kill him,’ said Tapan with such hatred that Dipankar was chilled. ‘I’ll never forget his name, I’ll never forget his face. I’ll never forget what he did. Never.’

Dipankar’s mind turned back to his own schooldays. There had been plenty of unpleasant incidents, but this psychopathic and persistent sadism left him speechless.

‘Why didn’t you tell me — why? — that school was like this?’ said Tapan, still gasping. His eyes were full of misery and accusation.

Dipankar said: ‘But — but school wasn’t like that for me — my schooldays weren’t unhappy for me on the whole. The food was bad, the omelettes were like lizards’ corpses, but—’ He stopped, then continued, ‘I’m sorry, Tapan. . I was in a different house, and, well, times do change. . But that housemaster of yours should be sacked immediately. And as for those boys — they should be—’