Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

In the event, when Pran went over to the lock-up to see Maan, he did not have to say a word. When Maan saw his brother’s shaven head he knew by some instinct that it was his mother who had died. He burst into horrible, tearless weeping and began to hit his head against the bars of his cell.

The policeman with the keys was bewildered in the face of this display; the Sub-Inspector snatched the keys from him and let Maan out. He fell into Pran’s embrace, and kept making these terrible, animal sounds of grief.

After a while, Pran calmed him down by talking continuously and gently to him. He turned to the police officer and said:

‘I understand you have got a barber here to shave my brother’s head. We should be leaving for the ghat soon.’

The Sub-Inspector was apologetic. A problem had arisen. One of the ticket clerks at the Brahmpur Railway Station was going to be asked to try to pick Maan out at an identification parade in the jail. Under these circumstances, he could not let Maan’s head be shaved.

‘This is ridiculous,’ said Pran, looking at the policeman’s moustache and thinking he had a great deal too much hair himself. ‘I heard the Home Minister himself say that—’

‘I spoke to the SP ten minutes ago,’ said the Sub-Inspector. Clearly, for him, the SP was more important than even the PM.

They got to the ghat by eleven. The policemen stood some distance away. The sun was high, the day unseasonably warm. Only the men were there. The cotton wool was removed from the face, the yellow cloth and the flowers were removed from the bier, the body was moved on to two long logs and covered with others.

Her husband performed all the necessary rites under the guidance of a pandit. What the rationalist in him thought of all the ghee and sandalwood and swahas and the demands of the doms who worked at the pyre was not betrayed by his face. The smoke of the pyre was oppressive, but he did not appear to sense it. No breeze blew from the Ganga to disperse it quickly.

Maan stood next to his brother, who almost had to support him. He saw the flames rise and lap over his mother’s face — and the smoke cover his father’s.

This is my doing, Ammaji, he thought, though no one had said any such thing to him. It is what I did that has led to this. What have I done to Veena and Pran and Baoji? I will never forgive myself and no one in the family will ever forgive me.

Ash and bones, that was all Mrs Mahesh Kapoor was now, ash and bones, warm still, but soon to cool, and be collected, and sunk in the Ganga at Brahmpur. Why not at Hardwar, as she had wished? Because her husband was a practical man. Because what are bones and ash, what even are flesh and blood and tissue when life has gone? Because it made no difference, the water of the Ganga is the same at Gangotri, at Hardwar, at Prayag, at Banaras, at Brahmpur, even at Sagar to which it was bound from the moment it dropped from the sky. Mrs Mahesh Kapoor was dead, and felt nothing, this ash of hers and sandalwood and common wood could be left to the doms at the cremation ghat to sift for the few pieces of jewellery which had melted with her body and were theirs by right. Fat, ligament, muscle, blood, hair, affection, pity, despair, anxiety, illness: all were no more. She had dispersed. She was the garden at Prem Nivas (soon to be entered into the annual Flower Show), she was Veena’s love of music, Pran’s asthma, Maan’s generosity, the survival of some refugees four years ago, the neem leaves that would preserve quilts stored in the great zinc trunks of Prem Nivas, the moulting feather of some pond heron, a small unrung brass bell, the memory of decency in an indecent time, the temperament of Bhaskar’s great-grandchildren. Indeed, for all the Minister of Revenue’s impatience with her, she was his regret. And it was right that she should continue to be so, for he should have treated her better while she lived, the poor, ignorant, grieving fool.

The chautha was held in the afternoon three days later under a small canopy on the lawn of Prem Nivas. The men sat on one side of the aisle, the women on the other. The area under the canopy quickly filled up, and then the aisle itself, and finally people spilled out on to the lawn, some of them as far as the flower beds. Mahesh Kapoor, Pran and Kedarnath received them at the entrance to the garden. Mahesh Kapoor was amazed by how many people had come to attend the chautha of his wife, whom he had always thought of as being a silly, superstitious and limited woman. Refugees she had helped during the days of Partition in the relief camps, their families, all those to whom she had given kindness or shelter from day to day, not merely the Rudhia relatives but a large group of ordinary farmers from Rudhia, many politicians who might well have paid only perfunctory or hypocritical homage if he himself had passed away, and scores of people whom neither he nor Pran recognized, all felt that they had to attend this service in her memory. Many of them folded their hands in respect before the photograph of her that stood, garlanded with marigolds, on a table on the long white-sheeted platform at one end of the shamiana. Some of them tried to utter a few words of condolence before being overcome themselves. When Mahesh Kapoor himself sat down, his heart was even more disturbed than it had been these last four days.

No one from the Nawab Sahib’s family came to the chautha. Firoz had taken a turn for the worse. He was suffering from a low infection, and he was being given stronger doses of penicillin to check and suppress it. Imtiaz — aware both of the possibilities and limitations of this comparatively recent form of treatment — was worried sick; and his father, seeing his son’s illness as punishment for his own sins, pleaded with God more than five times a day to spare Firoz and take away his own life instead.

Perhaps, too, he could not face the rumours that followed him now wherever he went. Perhaps he could not face the family, friendship with whom had caused him such grief. At any rate, he did not come.

Nor could Maan be present.

The pandit was a large man with a full, oblong face, bushy eyebrows, and a strong voice. He began to recite a few shlokas in Sanskrit, especially from the Isha Upanishad and from the Yajurveda, and to interpret them as a guide to life and to righteous action. God was everywhere, he said, in each piece of the universe; there was no permanent dissolution; this should be accepted. He talked about the deceased and how good and godfearing she had been and how her spirit would remain not only in the memories of those who knew her, but in the very world that surrounded them — in this garden, for instance; in this house.

After a while the pandit told his young assistant to take over.

The assistant sang two devotional songs. For the first one the audience sat silent, but when he began to sing the slow and stately ‘Twameva Mata cha Pita twameva’—‘You are both mother and father to us’—almost everyone joined in.

The pandit asked people to move forward in order to let people at the back squeeze in under the canopy. Then he asked whether the Sikh singers had arrived. Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had been very fond of their music, and Veena had convinced her father to ask them to sing at the chautha. When the pandit was told that they were on their way, he smoothed his kurta and began a story, which he had told many times before and which went as follows:

There was once a villager who was very poor, so poor that he did not have enough money to pay for his daughter’s wedding and had nothing to borrow against. He was in despair. At last someone said: ‘Two villages away there is a moneylender who believes in humanity. He will not need any security or property. Your word will be your bond. He lends to people according to their need, and he knows whom to trust.’