Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘I’ll speak to him,’ said Priya. ‘I promise.’

What Veena did not know — what Priya did not have the heart to tell her — was that she had spoken to her father already, and that the Home Minister had told her that there was nothing he would do to interfere. This was, in his words, an unimportant matter: one ruffian trying to kill another in an infamous establishment. That their fathers were who they were had nothing to do with the business. It touched upon no affairs of state; it provided no excuse for intervention; the local police and magistracy could handle it adequately. He had even gently upbraided his daughter for attempting to use his influence in this manner, and Priya, who was not used to being upbraided by her father, had felt both unhappy and ashamed.

Mahesh Kapoor was unable to bring himself to do what had been suggested to him over the phone: to try to bring pressure to bear directly or from above on the investigating officer, in this case the Sub-Inspector in charge of the Pasand Bagh Police Station. It went against his grain to do so. Indeed, the just implementation of his own Zamindari Abolition and Land Reforms Act would depend on how far he could prevent landlords from bringing their influence to bear on village record-keepers and local officers. He did not relish the way the politician Jha was undermining the administration near Rudhia town, and he did not see himself as ever being tempted to do the same. So when his wife asked him whether he could not ‘talk to someone, even to Agarwal’, Mahesh Kapoor told her abruptly to be quiet.

For her the shock and grief of the last two days had been almost unbearable. When she thought of Firoz lying in hospital and Maan in the police lock-up, she could not sleep. Once Firoz had become conscious he had been allowed very few visitors — including his aunt Abida and his sister Zainab. Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had begged her husband to speak to the Nawab Sahib — to express his grief and regret, and to ask if they could visit Firoz. This he had tried to do. But the Nawab Sahib, being in the hospital, was not available on the phone. And his apologetic, embarrassed, excessively polite secretary Murtaza Ali had made it clear that the Nawab Sahib had indicated from his remarks that a visit by Maan’s family at this time would be unwelcome.

The rumour mills, meanwhile, were busy. What was a mere paragraph in the Calcutta papers was the staple of the Brahmpur press and Brahmpur conversation, and would continue to be so for days, despite the alternative attractions of elections and electioneering. The police were still unaware of the connection between Saeeda Bai’s establishment and the Nawab Sahib’s. They had still not learned of the monthly stipend. But Bibbo had begun to put two and two together, and was unable to resist casting dark and proud hints about Tasneem’s ancestry in the strictest (and thus leakiest) confidence to a couple of her closest friends. And a reporter from the Hindi press who was well known for muck-raking had interrogated an old and retired courtesan who had known Saeeda Bai’s mother in the days when they had been part of a joint establishment in Tarbuz ka Bazaar. This old woman was induced by money and the promise of more money to describe all she knew about Saeeda Bai’s early life. Some of her facts were true, some embroidered, some false, almost all interesting to the journalist. She stated calmly and authoritatively that Saeeda Bai had lost her virginity when she had been raped at the age of fourteen or fifteen by a prominent citizen who had been drunk; it was Saeeda Bai’s mother who had told her so. What lent some likelihood to this particular assertion was that the old woman admitted that she did not know who this man was. She had her ideas, that was all.

For every fact or imagined fact that appeared in print, there were ten rumours that hovered about like wasps over a rotting mango. Neither family escaped the whispered voices, the pointed fingers that followed them wherever they went.

Veena, partly to be with her mother at this hard time, and partly to flee from her kindly but insatiable neighbours, moved into Prem Nivas for a few days. That same evening Pran and the Calcutta party returned to Brahmpur.

Within twenty-four hours of his arrest, Maan had been produced before a local magistrate. His father had hired a District Court lawyer to ask for bail or at least a transfer from the lock-up into a proper jail, but the charges that were being investigated did not admit of the former, and the police opposed the latter. The investigating officer, who had been frustrated by his inability to find a weapon and by Maan’s lapses of memory about this and other details, had asked that Maan be kept in police custody for a few more days on the grounds that they needed to interrogate him further. The magistrate had allowed the police to keep him for two more days in the lock-up, after which he would be transferred to the comparative decency of the district jail.

Mahesh Kapoor had visited Maan in the police station twice. Maan complained about nothing in his cell — the filth, the discomfort, the cold. He appeared to be so shocked and so remorseful that his father could not find it in his heart to reproach him further for what he had done to himself and to Firoz and to the Nawab Sahib; and indeed to Mahesh Kapoor’s own future.

Maan kept asking for information about Firoz — he was in terror that he might die. He asked his father if he had visited him in hospital, and Mahesh Kapoor was forced to admit that he had not been permitted to.

Mahesh Kapoor had told his wife not to visit Maan until he was in jail — the conditions in the police lock-up would, he thought, upset her too much. But finally Mrs Mahesh Kapoor could bear it no longer. She said that if necessary she would go alone. In exasperation her husband finally gave in and asked Pran to take her there.

She saw Maan and wept. Nothing in her life had approached in degradation her experience of these last few days. The police at the door of Prem Nivas, the searches for incriminating evidence, the arrest of someone she loved — these she had known from the time of the British. But she had not been ashamed of the man whom they had hauled off to jail as a political prisoner. Nor had he had to undergo such filth and squalor as this.

As painful as anything to her had been the fact that she had not been granted permission to visit Firoz and expiate with her affection some of the terrible guilt and sadness she felt towards him and his family.

Maan no longer looked like her handsome son but a dirty and unkempt man, one whose looks spoke of shame and desperation.

She hugged him and wept as if her heart would break. Maan wept too.

In the midst of his regret and repentance, Maan still felt he had to see Saeeda Bai. He could not mention this to his father, and he did not know whom to ask to convey a message to her. Only Firoz, he thought, would have understood. When his mother returned to Prem Nivas by car, Pran remained for a few minutes. Maan asked him to get Saeeda Bai to see him somehow. Pran tried to explain that it was impossible: she would be a material witness in the case, and she would not be allowed to visit him.

Maan seemed hardly to understand his own jeopardy — or the fact that attempted murder or even grievous hurt with a dangerous weapon carried a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. He seemed to believe that it was inexplicably unjust to keep him away from Saeeda Bai. He asked Pran to convey to her his bitter regret and continuing love. He scrawled out a couple of lines in Urdu to that effect. Pran was very unhappy with his mission, but agreed to perform it, and gave the note to the watchman within the hour.

When he returned to Prem Nivas in the late afternoon, he saw his mother lying on a sofa on the verandah. She was facing the garden, which was full of early flowers: pansies, calendulas, gerberas, salvias, cosmos, phlox and a few California poppies. The beds, where they met the lawn, were fringed with sweet alyssum. Bees were buzzing around the first few lemon-scented blossoms on the pomelo tree, and a small, glossy, blue-black sunbird flitted in and out of its branches.