Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘A bit of a bounder, I’d say,’ said Arun, who had noticed Maan’s eyes casually following Lata before he had turned them elsewhere.

Lata smiled, and her meek brother Varun, who was a nervous shadow to Arun and Meenakshi, smiled too in a kind of stifled complicity. Varun was studying — or trying to study — mathematics at Calcutta University, and he lived with Arun and Meenakshi in their small ground-floor flat. He was thin, unsure of himself, sweet-natured and shifty-eyed; and he was Lata’s favourite. Though he was a year older than her, she felt protective of him. Varun was terrified, in different ways, of both Arun and Meenakshi, and in some ways even of the precocious Aparna. His enjoyment of mathematics was mainly limited to the calculation of odds and handicaps on the racing form. In winter, as Varun’s excitement rose with the racing season, so did his elder brother’s ire. Arun was fond of calling him a bounder as well.

And what would you know about bounding, Arun Bhai? thought Lata to herself. Aloud she said: ‘He seemed quite nice.’

‘An aunty we met called him a Cad,’ contributed Aparna.

‘Did she, precious?’ said Meenakshi, interested. ‘Do point him out to me, Arun.’ But Maan was now nowhere to be seen.

‘I blame myself to some extent,’ said Arun in a voice which implied nothing of the sort; Arun was not capable of blaming himself for anything. ‘I really should have done something,’ he continued. ‘If I hadn’t been so tied up with work, I might have prevented this whole fiasco. But once Ma got it into her head that this Kapoor chap was suitable, it was impossible to dissuade her. It’s impossible to talk reason with Ma; she just turns on the waterworks.’

What had also helped deflect Arun’s suspicions had been the fact that Dr Pran Kapoor taught English. And yet, to Arun’s chagrin, there was hardly an English face in this whole provincial crowd.

How fearfully dowdy! said Meenakshi wearily to herself, encapsulating her husband’s thoughts. ‘And how utterly unlike Calcutta. Precious, you have smut on your nose,’ she added to Aparna, half looking around to tell an imaginary ayah to wipe it off with a handkerchief.

‘I’m enjoying it here,’ Varun ventured, seeing Lata look hurt. He knew that she liked Brahmpur, though it was clearly no metropolis.

‘You be quiet,’ snapped Arun brutally. His judgement was being challenged by his subordinate, and he would have none of it.

Varun struggled with himself; he glared, then looked down.

‘Don’t talk about what you don’t understand,’ added Arun, putting the boot in.

Varun glowered silently.

‘Did you hear me?’

‘Yes,’ said Varun.

‘Yes, what?’

‘Yes, Arun Bhai,’ muttered Varun.

This pulverization was standard fare for Varun, and Lata was not surprised by the exchange. But she felt very bad for him, and indignant at Arun. She could not understand either the pleasure or the purpose of it. She decided she would speak to Varun as soon after the wedding as possible to try to help him withstand — at least internally — such assaults upon his spirit. Even if I’m not very good at withstanding them myself, Lata thought.

‘Well, Arun Bhai,’ she said innocently, ‘I suppose it’s too late. We’re all one big happy family now, and we’ll have to put up with each other as well as we can.’

The phrase, however, was not innocent. ‘One big happy family’ was an ironically used Chatterji phrase. Meenakshi Mehra had been a Chatterji before she and Arun had met at a cocktail party, fallen in torrid, rapturous and elegant love, and got married within a month, to the shock of both families. Whether or not Mr Justice Chatterji of the Calcutta High Court and his wife were happy to welcome the non-Bengali Arun as the first appendage to their ring of five children (plus Cuddles the dog), and whether or not Mrs Rupa Mehra had been delighted at the thought of her firstborn, the apple of her eye, marrying outside the khatri caste (and to a spoilt supersophisticate like Meenakshi at that), Arun certainly valued the Chatterji connection greatly. The Chatterjis had wealth and position and a grand Calcutta house where they threw enormous (but tasteful) parties. And even if the big happy family, especially Meenakshi’s brothers and sisters, sometimes bothered him with their endless, unchokable wit and improvised rhyming couplets, he accepted it precisely because it appeared to him to be undeniably urbane. It was a far cry from this provincial capital, this Kapoor crowd and these garish light-in-the-hedge celebrations — with pomegranate juice in lieu of alcohol!

‘What precisely do you mean by that?’ demanded Arun of Lata. ‘Do you think that if Daddy had been alive we would have married into this sort of a family?’

Arun hardly seemed to care that they might be overheard. Lata flushed. But the brutal point was well made. Had Raghubir Mehra not died in his forties but continued his meteoric rise in the Railway Service, he would — when the British left Indian government service in droves in 1947—certainly have become a member of the Railway Board. His excellence and experience might even have made him Chairman. The family would not have had to struggle, as it had had to for years and was still forced to, on Mrs Rupa Mehra’s depleted savings, the kindness of friends and, lately, her elder son’s salary. She would not have had to sell most of her jewellery and even their small house in Darjeeling to give her children the schooling which she felt that, above everything else, they must have. Beneath her pervasive sentimentality — and her attachment to the seemingly secure physical objects that reminded her of her beloved husband — lay a sense of sacrifice and a sense of values that determinedly melted them down into the insecure, intangible benefits of an excellent English-medium boarding school education. And so Arun and Varun had continued to go to St George’s School, and Savita and Lata had not been withdrawn from St Sophia’s Convent.

The Kapoors might be all very well for Brahmpur society, thought Arun, but if Daddy had been alive, a constellation of brilliant matches would have been strewn at the feet of the Mehras. At least he, for one, had overcome their circumstances and done well in the way of in-laws. What possible comparison could there be between Pran’s brother, that ogling fellow whom Lata had just been talking to — who ran, of all things, a cloth shop in Banaras, from what Arun had heard — and, say, Meenakshi’s elder brother, who had been to Oxford, was supposed to be studying law at Lincoln’s Inn, and was, in addition, a published poet?

Arun’s speculations were brought down to earth by his daughter, who threatened to scream if she didn’t get her ice-cream. She knew from experience that screaming (or even the threat of it) worked wonders with her parents. And, after all, they sometimes screamed at each other, and often at the servants.

Lata looked guilty. ‘It’s my fault, darling,’ she said to Aparna. ‘Let’s go at once before we get caught up in something else. But you mustn’t cry or yell, promise me that. It won’t work with me.’

Aparna, who knew it wouldn’t, was silent.

But just at that moment the bridegroom emerged from one side of the house, dressed all in white, his dark, rather nervous face veiled with hanging strings of white flowers; everyone crowded forward towards the door from which the bride would emerge; and Aparna, lifted into her Lata Bua’s arms, was forced to defer once again both treat and threat.

It was a little untraditional, Lata couldn’t help thinking, that Pran hadn’t ridden up to the gate on a white horse with a little nephew sitting in front of him and with the groom’s party in tow to claim his bride; but then Prem Nivas was the groom’s house after all. And no doubt if he had followed the convention, Arun would have found further cause for mockery. As it was, Lata found it difficult to imagine the lecturer on Elizabethan Drama under that veil of tuberoses. He was now placing a garland of dark red, heavily fragrant roses around her sister Savita’s neck — and Savita was doing the same to him. She looked lovely in her red-and-gold wedding sari, and quite subdued; Lata thought she might even have been crying. Her head was covered, and she looked down at the ground as her mother had doubtless instructed her to do. It was not proper, even when she was putting the garland round his neck, that she should look full in the face of the man with whom she was to live her life.