Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Uma burst into a happy and meaningless chant. Meenakshi volunteered to hold her while they packed, and to call Arun at the office.

When Firoz came round from the effect of the anaesthesia, his father was asleep. He was at first uncertain where he was — then he moved, and a stab of terrible pain pierced his side. He noticed the tube in his arm. He turned his head to the right. There was a khaki clad policeman with a notebook beside him, asleep in a chair. The light of a dim lamp fell on his dreaming face.

Firoz bit his lip, and tried to understand this pain, this room, and why he was here. There had been a fight — Maan had had a knife — he had been stabbed. Tasneem came into it somewhere. Someone had covered him with a shawl. His walking stick had been slippery with blood. Then a tonga had reared out of the mist. Everything else was dark.

But the sight of his father’s face disturbed him greatly. He could not understand why. There had been something said by someone — what it was he could not for the moment remember — something about his father. His memory of what had happened was like the map of an unexplored continent — the edges were clearer than the core. Yet there was something at that core that he shrank away from even as he approached it. Thinking was an effort, and he kept lapsing into a quiet darkness and emerging once again into the present.

Lying flat on his back he noticed a lizard on the upper reaches of the wall in front of him — one of the permanent denizens of this ward. Firoz found himself wondering what it must be like to be a lizard — what strange surfaces it lived on, where it needed more effort to move in one direction than in another. He was still staring at the lizard, when he heard the policeman say, ‘Ah, Sahib, you’ve woken up.’

‘Yes,’ Firoz heard himself say. ‘I’ve woken up.’

‘Do you feel well enough to make a statement?’

‘Statement?’ said Firoz.

‘Yes,’ said the policeman. ‘Your assailant has been arrested.’

Firoz looked at the wall. ‘I am tired,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll sleep a little longer.’

The Nawab Sahib had woken at the sound of his son’s voice. He looked silently at Firoz now, and Firoz at him. The father appeared to be pleading with the son, the son frowning in unhappy concentration. Then he closed his eyes for a while, leaving the Nawab Sahib baffled and disturbed.

‘I think he will be able to speak clearly in an hour or so,’ said the policeman. ‘It is important to get a statement as soon as possible.’

‘Please do not disturb him,’ said the Nawab Sahib. ‘He looks very tired and he needs to rest.’

The Nawab Sahib could not go back to sleep. He got up after a while and paced about the room. Firoz was sound asleep, and did not take anyone’s name. After about an hour he woke up again.

‘Abba—’ he said.

‘Yes, son.’

‘Abba — there is something—’

His father was silent.

‘What is all this?’ Firoz said suddenly. ‘Did Maan attack me?’

‘So it seems. They found you on Cornwallis Road. Do you remember what happened?’

‘I am trying to—’

The policeman interrupted: ‘Do you remember what happened at Saeeda Bai’s?’

Firoz saw his father start at the name, and suddenly he saw the blinding core of what he had been trying to touch, to approach, to remember. He turned towards his father and looked at him with an expression of pain and reproach that pierced him to the heart. The old man could not hold his gaze, and turned away.

Saeeda Bai had not been idle in the face of calamity. Despite the terror and shock of Maan’s attack on her and on Firoz, she — and Bibbo too — had managed, after the initial shock and reaction, to keep their heads. The house had to be protected, and Maan had to be saved from the effect of his own actions. The law might define things as it chose, but Saeeda Bai knew that Maan was not a criminal. And she blamed herself and her own excitability too for his tragic outburst of violence.

For herself, once Dr Bilgrami had examined her, she almost forgot her concern. She knew she would live; what happened to her voice was in God’s hands. For Tasneem, however, she felt the clutch of a cold fear. The child she had conceived in terror, had carried in shame, and had borne in pain had been given the name of that paradisal spring which could, if anything could, wash antecedence into non-existence and torment into calm. Yet now again that antecedence and that torment were knocking at the door of the present. Saeeda Bai longed once more for her mother’s advice and strong comfort. Mohsina Bai had been a harder, more independent woman than Saeeda; without her courage and persistence Saeeda Bai herself would by now be merely another ageing and impoverished whore from Tarbuz ka Bazaar — and Tasneem a younger version of the same.

That first night, half-expecting a visit from the police or a message from the Nawab Sahib, and sick with fear and pain, she had remained at home, making sure that everything in her room, along the bloodstained stairs, indeed everywhere in the house was as it should be. Sleep, she told herself; sleep; and if you can’t sleep, lie in bed and pretend that this is just a night like any other. But she had been seized with restlessness. If it had been possible, she would have got down on her knees and scrubbed clean each drop of blood on the street that led to her door.

As for the man from whose side this blood had flowed, and whose face reminded her not of his mother, whom she had never seen, but most disturbingly of his father, Saeeda Bai felt nothing, a mere coldness, half brother to her daughter though he was. She hardly cared if he lived or died except in so far as it would affect Maan. And yet, when the police had come, she had been terrified into giving testimony that might — she saw it all too clearly now — that might lead her beloved Dagh Sahib to the scaffold.

For Maan, who had almost killed her, her anxiety, her terrified tenderness, knew no limits — but what could she do? And she began now to think as her mother would have thought. Whom did she know? And how well? And whom did they know? And how well? Soon Bilgrami Sahib became the emissary of elliptical communications from Saeeda Bai to a rising Minister of State, to a Joint Secretary in the Home Department, to the kotwal of Brahmpur. And Bilgrami Sahib himself used his own contacts judiciously and persistently in a generous attempt to save his rival — persistently, because he feared for Saeeda Bai’s health and spirit if something terrible were to happen to Maan, and judiciously, because he feared that Saeeda Bai, in her attempt to spread the web of her influence too wide, might tempt some contrary spirit to rip it from end to end.

‘Priya, promise me you’ll talk to your father.’

This time it had been Veena who had suggested going up on to the roof. She could not bear the looks of satisfaction, distaste, and pity that she had had to face in the Goyal household below. It was a cold afternoon, and they were both wearing shawls. The sky was slate-coloured, except for an area across the Ganga where the sands had been whipped up by the wind into a dirty yellow-brown haze. Veena was crying blindly and pleading with Priya.

‘But what good will it do?’ said Priya, wiping the tears from her friend’s face and her own.

‘All the good in the world if it saves Maan.’

‘What is your father doing?’ asked Priya. ‘Hasn’t he spoken to anyone?’

‘My father,’ said Veena bitterly, ‘cares more for his image as a man of principle than for his family. I spoke to him; do you think it had any effect? He told me that I should be thinking of my mother, not of Maan. Only now do I realize what a cold man he really is. Maan will be hanged at eight o’clock, and he’ll be signing his files at nine. My mother is beside herself. Promise me you’ll speak to your father, Priya, promise me. You’re his only child, he’ll do anything for you.’