Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Maan got along better with the constables.

‘I suppose you have to be very alert in case I escape,’ he said. ‘In case I break free and jump from the train.’

The constables laughed good-humouredly. ‘You won’t escape,’ they said.

‘How do you know?’

‘Oh, you can’t,’ one of them said. ‘We keep the keyholes on top, so that you can’t open the handcuffs by striking them on — well, on those window bars, for instance. But if you want to go to the bathroom, you should tell us.’

‘We’re very careful about our handcuffs,’ said the other.

‘Yes, we unlock them when they aren’t in use. Otherwise the springs can get weak.’

‘Can’t have that,’ said the other constable. ‘Why did you give yourself up?’ he asked curiously. ‘Are you really the son of a Minister?’

Maan shook his head miserably. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, and went off to sleep.

He dreamed of a vast and varicose Victoria, like the one in the portrait in the dining room of Baitar Fort. She was removing layer after layer of her regalia and calling to him enticingly. ‘I have left something behind,’ she was saying. ‘I must go back.’ The dream was unbearably disturbing. He woke up. Both the constables were asleep, although it was only early evening. When the train approached Brahmpur, they woke up by instinct, and delivered him into the hands of a party from the Pasand Bagh Police Station that was waiting on the platform.

‘What will you do?’ Maan asked his escorts.

‘We’ll take the next train back,’ they replied.

‘Look us up when you are next in Banaras,’ one of them said.

Maan smiled at his new escorts, but they were much less inclined to humour him. The mustachioed Sub-Inspector, in particular, appeared very serious. When they got to the police station, he was given a thin grey blanket and put in the lock-up. It was a small, cold, filthy cell — a barred room with nothing but a few pieces of jute on the floor — no straw or mattress or pillow. It stank. In place of a toilet there was a large clay vessel in the corner. The other man in the cell looked tubercular and was drunk. His eyes were red. He stared in a hunted way at the police and, when the door clanged shut, at Maan.

The Sub-Inspector apologized to Maan curtly. ‘You will have to stay here tonight,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow we will decide whether to remand you into judicial custody or not. If we get a proper statement from you we won’t need to hold you here much longer.’

Maan sat down on the floor on a piece of jute matting and covered his head with his hands. For a second he imagined the scent of attar of roses, and he began to cry bitterly. More than anything he regretted that the last day had existed. If only he had remained ignorant, he thought. If only he had not known.

Apart from Firoz, who was still not conscious, there were two people sitting in the room in the ward. One was an Assistant Sub-Inspector, who nodded off because there was nothing for him to take down; the police had insisted on, and the hospital had acquiesced in, his presence. The other was the Nawab Sahib. Imtiaz, because he was a doctor, was not prevented from coming in, and did so from time to time. But it was the Nawab Sahib who kept vigil by the bedside of his son. His servant, Ghulam Rusool, was given a pass so that he could bring the Nawab Sahib his food and a daily change of clothes. At night the Nawab Sahib slept on a couch in the same room; he insisted that it was not a problem for him. Even in winter he was used to sleeping with a single blanket. At the appointed hours, he spread a small rug on the floor and prayed.

On the first day Firoz was not allowed visitors even during visiting hours. Imtiaz did manage to get Zainab into the hospital; she was in purdah. When she saw Firoz — his face pale, his thick curly hair matted to his forehead, the tube of a saline drip stuck in the crook of his right arm (they had moved it from his ankle) — she was so upset that she decided that she would not bring her children to see him until he was better. Nor would it do them any good to see their grandfather so desperate and tearful. But agitated though she was, she was convinced that Firoz would get better. It was the usually optimistic Imtiaz who thought of all the possible complications and was worried.

Whoever came to relieve the policeman on duty usually brought some news for the Nawab Sahib from the police station. By now he knew that Firoz had not been stabbed by a stranger on the street, but that there had been a fight at Saeeda Bai’s between Maan and Firoz, and that it was Maan who had nearly killed him. He had not believed this at first. But Maan had been arrested, and had confessed, and there was no question of not believing it now.

Sometimes he would get up and wipe Firoz’s forehead with a towel. He would take his name, not so much to wake him as to reassure himself that the name still meant someone living. He remembered Firoz’s childhood and thought of his wife, whose features were so like his. Even more than Zainab, Firoz was his link to her. Then he would begin to upbraid himself because he had not prevented Firoz from visiting Saeeda Bai’s. He should have known from the experience of his own youth the attraction of places of that kind. But since his wife’s death it had grown difficult to speak to his children; his library had more and more taken over his world. Only once had he ordered his secretary not to give Firoz an easy excuse to go to that place. If only, he thought, he had explicitly forbidden Firoz from going there. But what good would it have done? he reflected. In Maan’s company he could well have gone regardless — that unthinking young man would have cared as little for the behests of his friend’s father as for those of his own.

Now and then, listening to the doctors, and looking at Imtiaz’s worried expression as he consulted with them, the Nawab Sahib felt that he was going to lose his son. Then he was overwhelmed with despair, and in bitterness of spirit wished every ill and pain on Maan — even on his family. He wished Maan to suffer as he had made his son suffer. He could not conceive what Firoz could possibly have done to have been stabbed with a knife by the friend who he thought had loved him.

When he prayed, he felt ashamed of these feelings, but he could not control them. That Maan had saved his son’s life once seemed to be a fact so hazy, so distant from this present jeopardy, as to be almost irrelevant.

His own connection with Saeeda Bai too had sunk so far back in his consciousness that he did not think of her any more with reference to himself. He did not know where and how she fitted into these events. He felt only the dimmest anxiety in her regard, not the possibility of any revelation of the past. The present provision he made for her and for the daughter who she claimed was his own, this was a duty he accepted as a necessary act of decency, the partial expiation of an old and half-forgotten sin. And it was understood that for her part nothing would ever be said to anyone about what had happened two decades ago between a married man of almost forty and a girl of fifteen. The child who had later been born was never told that she was anything but Saeeda Bai’s younger sister; or so the Nawab Sahib had been given to understand. Apart from Saeeda Bai herself only her mother had truly known what had happened, and she was long since dead.

Firoz was now speaking a few words, and, incoherent as they were, for his father they were as miraculous as the words of someone who had returned from the dead. He pulled his chair closer to the bed and held Firoz’s left hand. It was reassuringly warm. The policeman too became more alert. ‘What is your son saying, Nawab Sahib?’ he asked.