Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

The man set out in hope, and reached the moneylender’s village by noon. On the outskirts of the village he noticed an old man who was ploughing a field, and a woman, her face covered, who was bringing food out for him, her utensils balanced on her head. He could tell from her gait that she was a young woman and he overheard her say in a young woman’s voice: ‘Baba, here is some food for you. Eat it, and then please come home. Your son is no more.’ The man looked up at the sky and said: ‘As God wills.’ He then sat down to eat the food.

The villager, puzzled and disturbed by this conversation, tried to make sense of it. He thought to himself: If she were the old man’s daughter, why would she cover her face before him? She must be his daughter-in-law. But then he was worried by the identity of the dead man. Surely, if it had been one of her husband’s brothers who had died, she would have referred to him as ‘jethji’ or ‘devarji’, rather than ‘your son’. So it must have been her husband who had died. The calm manner in which both father and wife had accepted his death was unusual, not to say shocking.

At any rate, the villager, considering his own purposes and his own problems, went on to the moneylender’s shop. The moneylender asked him what he wanted. The villager told him that he needed some money for his daughter’s wedding and had nothing to pledge in exchange.

‘That is all right,’ said the moneylender, looking at his face. ‘How much do you want?’

‘A lot,’ said the man. ‘Two thousand rupees.’

‘Fine,’ said the moneylender, and asked his accountant to count it out immediately.

While the accountant was counting out the money, the poor villager felt obliged to make some conversation. ‘You are a very good man,’ he said gratefully, ‘but the other people in your village seem peculiar to me.’ And he recounted what he had seen and heard.

‘Well,’ said the moneylender. ‘How would the people in your village have reacted to such news?’

‘Well, obviously,’ said the poor man, ‘the whole village would have gone to the family’s house to mourn with them. There would have been no question of ploughing your fields, let alone eating anything till the body was disposed of. People would have been wailing and beating their breasts.’

The moneylender turned to the accountant and told him to stop counting out the money. ‘It is not safe to lend anything to this man,’ he said.

The man, appalled, turned to the moneylender. ‘But what have I done?’ he asked.

The moneylender replied: ‘If you weep and wail so much about returning what has been given to you in trust by God, you will not be happy about returning what is given to you in trust by a mere man.’

While the pandit told this story there was silence. No one knew what to expect, and at the end of it they felt that they had been reproached for their grief. Pran found himself feeling upset rather than consoled: what the pandit had said was perhaps true, he thought, but he wished the Sikh ragis had come earlier.

Still, here they were now, all three of them, dark and full-bearded, their white turbans set off by a blue headband. One of them played the tabla, the other two the harmonium, and all three closed their eyes while they sang songs from Nanak and Kabir.

Pran had heard them before; his mother asked the ragis about once a year to sing at Prem Nivas. But now he thought not of the beauty of their singing or of the words of the saints, but of the last time he had heard tabla and harmonium in Prem Nivas: when Saeeda Bai had sung on the evening of Holi last year. He glanced across to where the women were sitting. Savita and Lata were sitting together, as they had been that other evening as well. Savita’s eyes were closed. Lata was looking at Mahesh Kapoor, who seemed once again to have distanced himself from what was going on. She had not seen Kabir, who was sitting far behind her, at the back of the covered area.

Her thoughts had wandered to the life of this woman, Pran’s mother, whom she had greatly liked but not much known. Had hers been a full life? Could her marriage be said to have been happy or successful or fulfilled: and if so, what did those words mean? What was at the centre of her marriage: her husband, her children, or the small puja room where every morning she prayed, allowing routine and devotion to create a purpose and imply an order in her daily and annual round? Here sat so many people who were affected by her death, and there sat her husband, the Minister Sahib, transparently fretful about the long proceedings. He was trying to indicate to the pandit that he had had enough, but was unable to catch his eye.

The pandit said: ‘I understand that the women would now like to sing some songs.’ No one came forward. He was about to speak again, when old Mrs Tandon said: ‘Veena, come forward, sit here.’ The pandit asked her to sit on the platform where the ragis had been singing, but Veena said, ‘No; down here.’ She was very simply dressed, as was her friend Priya and another young woman. Veena had on a white cotton sari with a black border. A very thin gold chain, which she kept touching, hung around her neck. Her dark-red tika was smudged. There appeared to be tears on her cheeks, and especially in the dark, puffy rings around her eyes. Her plump face looked sad and strangely placid. She took out a small book, and they began singing. She sang clearly, and from time to time moved her hand slightly in response to the words of the song. Her voice was natural and very affecting. After the first song was over she began, without even a pause, her mother’s favourite hymn, ‘Uth, jaag, musafir’:

‘Rise, traveller, the sky is light.

Why do you sleep? It is not night.

The sleeping lose, and sleep in vain.

The waking rise, and rise to gain.

Open your eyelids, you who nod.

O heedless one, pay heed to God.

Is this your way to show your love?

You sleep below, he wakes above.

What you have done, that you must bear.

Where is the joy in sin then, where?

When on your head your sins lie deep,

Why do you clutch your head and weep?

Tomorrow’s task, enact today.

Today’s at once; do not delay.

When birds have robbed the standing grain

What use to wring your hands in vain?’

Somewhere in the middle of the second stanza she stopped singing — the others continued — and began crying quietly. She tried to stop but couldn’t. She started to wipe her tears with the pallu of her sari and then simply wiped them away with her hands. Kedarnath, who was sitting in front, took out his handkerchief and threw it into her lap, but she didn’t notice. She slowly looked up, her eyes a little above the crowd, and continued singing. Once or twice she coughed. By the time she was singing the first verse again, her voice was clear; but now it was her irritable father who was in tears.

The song, taken from the hymn-book of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram, brought home to him like nothing else had his unrealized loss. Gandhi was dead, and with him his ideals. That preacher of non-violence whom he had followed and revered had died violently, and now Mahesh Kapoor’s own son — more beloved for the danger he was in — was lying in prison for violence of his own. Firoz, whom he had known from childhood, might die. His friendship with the Nawab Sahib, which had stood so much and so long, had shattered under the sudden power of grief and rumour. The Nawab Sahib was not here today, and he had prevented the two of them from visiting Firoz. That visit would have meant much to the dead woman. The lack of it had enhanced her grief and — who knew the workings of sorrow on the brain? — may have hastened her death.

Too late, and perhaps because of the love that everyone else around him so clearly bore her, he began to realize fully what he had lost, indeed, whom he had lost — and how suddenly. There was so much to do, and no one to help him, to advise him quietly, to check his impatience. His son’s life and his own future both seemed to him to be in hopeless straits. He wanted to give up and let the world take care of itself. But he could not let Maan go; and politics had been his life.