Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Remembering what Rasheed had once said about how generation succeeds generation in working mischief Maan now murmured to himself with a bitter smile: ‘The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.’

Baba looked at him and frowned. ‘I don’t understand English,’ he said quietly. ‘We here are simple people. We do not have any great learning. But Rasheed treats us as if we are ignorant to the core. He writes us letters, threatening us and boasting of his own humanism. Everything has gone — logic, respect, decency; but his pride and his sense of self, lunatically, remain. When I read his letters I weep.’ He looked towards the school. ‘He had a classmate who became a dacoit. Even he treats his family with more respect.’

After a while he continued, looking past the school towards Sagal. ‘He says that we are deluded, that our god is money, that wealth and land is all we are interested in. That sick man whom he visited with you, Rasheed used to tell us we should help him, should support his legal rights, should make him start a court case against his brothers. Such madness, such unrealistic notions — to interfere in the family matters of others and bring about needless strife. Imagine what would have happened if we had taken his advice. The man is dead now but the feud between the villages would have gone on forever.’

Maan said nothing; it was as if his mind was blocked. He hardly even registered the news of this death. His thoughts were still with that work-worn man who with such calm and cheerfulness used to pump water for his bath. Strange to think that even his paltry earnings had been undone by — by what? Perhaps by Maan’s own father. The two knew nothing of each other as individuals, but Kachheru was the saddest case of the evil practised under the act, and Mahesh Kapoor was almost directly responsible for his utter devastation, his reduction to the forsaken status of a landless labourer. Linked though they were in this sense of the former’s guilt and the latter’s despair, if they were to pass each other in the street, thought Maan, neither would know the other.

No doubt the effect of the Zamindari Act would be substantially good, but that would be of no help to Kachheru. Nor, Maan realized, with a seriousness unusual in him, could he do anything about it. To intercede with Baba would be impossible, and to take it up with his father an unthinkable betrayal of trust. To have helped the old woman at the Fort — that was entirely another thing.

And Rasheed? Censorious, pitiable, worn out, torn between family shame and family pride, forced to choose between loyalty and justice, between trust and pity, what must he have been through? Was he too not a victim of the tragedy of the countryside, of the country itself? Maan tried to imagine the pressure and suffering he must have undergone.

But Baba was saying, as if he had read Maan’s thoughts: ‘You know, the boy is very disturbed. I don’t like to think of it. He has almost no friends in the city as far as we can tell, no one to talk to except those communists. Why don’t you talk to him and make him see sense? We don’t know how it has happened that he has become so strange, so incoherent. Someone said that he got hit on the head during a demonstration. Then we found out that that was not so. But perhaps, as his uncle says, the immediate cause is not important. Sooner or later, what does not bend will snap.’

Maan nodded in the darkness. Whether or not the old man noticed, he continued: ‘I am not against the boy. Even now if he mends his ways and repents we will take him back. God is not called the compassionate, the merciful, for nothing. He tells us to forgive those who turn away from evil. But Rasheed — you know — if he changes his mind, he will be as vehement facing south as he was facing north.’ He smiled. ‘He was my favourite. I had more energy then, when he was ten years old. I would take him to the roof of my pigeon-house, and he would point out all our lands, exactly which bits were ours, and when they came into the family. With pride. And yet this same boy. . ’ The old man was silent. Then, in an almost anguished voice, he said: ‘One never knows anyone in this world, one cannot read anyone’s heart, one never knows whom to believe and whom to trust.’

A faint call was heard in the distance from Debaria, followed by a closer one from Sagal.

‘That is the call to night prayer,’ said Baba. ‘Let’s go back. I shouldn’t miss it and I don’t want to pray in this Sagal mosque. Come on, get up, get up.’

Maan remembered his first morning in Debaria when he had woken up to find Baba telling him to go to prayer. Then, his excuse had been his religion. Now he said, ‘Baba, if it’s all right, I’ll just sit here for a while. I’ll find my own way back.’

‘You want to be alone?’ asked Baba, his voice betraying his surprise at what was an unusual request, particularly from Maan. ‘Here, take the torch. No, no, take it, take it. I only brought it along to guide you. I can cut across these fields blindfolded at midnight at the new moon of Id. Well, I will mention him again in my prayers. May it do him some good.’

Alone Maan sat and looked out over the expanse of water. Into its blackness fell the reflection of the stars. He thought of the Bear, and of how he had done something definite to help Rasheed, and he felt ashamed at his own inaction. Rasheed never rested from his endeavours, thought Maan, shaking his head, whereas he himself did nothing but; or at least would have liked to. He promised himself that when he returned to Brahmpur for a few days’ break he would visit him, difficult though the encounter was bound to be. He had been deeply disturbed by his previous meeting, and he did not know if his perplexity had been enhanced or diminished by what Baba had told him.

So much lay beneath the placid surface of things, so much torment and danger. Rasheed was by no means his closest friend, but he had thought he knew him and understood him. Maan was given to trusting and being trusted, but, as Baba said, perhaps one could never read the human heart.

As for Rasheed, Maan felt that for his own sake he had to be made to see the world with all its evil in a more tolerant light. It was not true that one could change everything through effort and vehemence and will. The stars maintained their courses despite his madness, and the village world moved on as before, swerving only very slightly to avoid him.

Two days later they drove back to Brahmpur for a brief rest. Mrs Mahesh Kapoor greeted them with unaccustomed tears in her eyes. She had helped a little in canvassing among women for local Congress candidates in Brahmpur. Mahesh Kapoor was annoyed when he heard that she had even canvassed in L.N. Agarwal’s constituency. Now that Pran, Savita and Uma were in Calcutta, and Veena and Kedarnath were both busy and able only rarely to visit, she had been feeling quite lonely. Nor was she at all well. But she sensed immediately the new warmth of the relationship between her husband and her younger son, and this gave her great joy. She went into the kitchen in a little while to supervise Maan’s favourite tahiri herself; and later, after a bath, to do puja and give thanks for their safe return.

Though Mrs Mahesh Kapoor did not have, or have cause to have, a particularly well-developed sense of humour, one object that she had recently added to her puja paraphernalia never failed to make her smile. It was a brass bowl filled with harsingar blossoms and a few harsingar leaves. The bowl rested on a Congress flag made of flimsy paper, and Mrs Mahesh Kapoor looked from one to another with pleasure, admiring the saffron, white and green first of this and then of that as she rang her small brass bell around them — and all the gods — in joint benediction.