Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

She turned to Mr Makhijani, the patriotic poet.

‘I always feel, Mr Makhijani,’ she murmured in her resonant voice, ‘I always feel—’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Mr Makhijani fervently. ‘That is the ticket. One must feel. Without feeling, wherefrom would the Muse strike?’

Mrs Supriya Joshi continued: ‘I always feel that one should approach poetry in a spirit of purity. One must have a freshness of mind, a cleanliness of body. One must lave oneself in sparkling springs—’

‘Lave — ah, yes, lave,’ said Mr Makhijani.

‘Genius may be ninety-nine per cent perspiration, but ninety-nine per cent perspiration is the prerogative of genius.’ She looked pleased with her formulation.

Kabir turned to Mrs Supriya Joshi. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just playing a match.’

‘Oh,’ said Mrs Supriya Joshi.

‘May I say how very glad I was where I happened to be when you read your remarkable poetry a few months ago.’ Kabir beamed at her; she looked smitten. It was not for nothing that he planned to join the diplomatic service. The smell of his sweat had suddenly become aphrodisiac. Indeed, thought Mrs Supriya Joshi, this young man is very good-looking and very courteous.

‘Ah—’ she whispered. ‘Here comes the young master.’ Amit had just entered with Lata and Pran. Mr Nowrojee immediately began to talk to Amit earnestly and inaudibly.

Kabir noticed that Lata was looking around for a place to sit in the crowded room. In the gladness and surprise of seeing her, he did not even wonder why she had come in together with Amit.

He stood up. ‘There’s a place here,’ he said.

Lata’s mouth opened a little and she took in a quick breath. She glanced at Pran, but his back was turned. Without a word, she joined Kabir, squeezing in between him and Mrs Supriya Joshi, who did not look at all pleased. Far too courteous, she thought.

Mr Nowrojee, now smiling in wintry relief at the distinguished guest and the distinguished audience which included the Proctor, Mr Sorabjee, as well as the eminent Professor Mishra — removed Amit’s doily and his own, and took a sip of water before declaring the meeting open.

He introduced the speaker as ‘not the least of those who have merged the vigour of the West with a sensibility distinctly Indian’ and then proceeded to treat his audience to a disquisition on the word ‘sensibility’. Having touched on several senses of the word ‘sensible’, he continued to other adjectives: sensitive, sensile, sensate, sensuous and sensual. Mrs Supriya Joshi grew restless. She said to Mr Makhijani:

‘Such long long speeches he loves to give.’

Her voice carried, and Mr Nowrojee’s cheek, already flushed as a result of his discussion of the last two adjectives, took on a darker tinge of embarrassment.

‘But I do not mean to deprive you of the talents of Amit Chatterji with my own poor meanderings,’ he stated in a stricken manner, sacrificing the brief history of Indian Poetry in English that he had planned to deliver (it was to have climaxed in a triolet to ‘our supreme poetess Toru Dutt’). Mr Nowrojee continued: ‘Mr Chatterji will read a selection of his poems and then answer questions about his work.’

Amit began by saying how pleased he was to be in Brahmpur. The invitation had been extended at a cricket match; he noticed that Mr Durrani, who had invited him, was still dressed for cricket.

Lata looked astonished. Amit had told her when he arrived the previous day from Calcutta that he had been invited by the Literary Society, and Lata had simply assumed that it was Mr Nowrojee who had initiated the process. She turned to Kabir and he shrugged. There was a scent of sweat to him that reminded her of the day when she had watched him practising at the nets. He was behaving all too coolly. Was he like this with this other woman? Well, Lata told herself, two could be cool.

Amit for his part, noticing this unconscious and intimate look pass between them, realized that Lata must know Kabir quite well. He lost the thread of his thoughts for a moment, and improvised some guff about the resemblance between cricket and poetry. He then continued to say what he had meant to, which was that it was an honour to be reading in the city associated with the name of the Barsaat Mahal and the Urdu poet Mast. Perhaps it was not widely known that Mast, apart from being a famous writer of ghazals, was also a satirist. What exactly he would have made of the recent elections one could not tell, but he would certainly have made something of the unscrupulous energy with which they had been conducted, nowhere more so than in Purva Pradesh. Amit himself had been inspired to write a short poem after reading the morning’s edition of the Brahmpur Chronicle. In lieu of ‘Vande Mataram’ or any such patriotic opening hymn he would lay his poem before this audience as a Victory Hymn to their elected or soon-to-be-elected sovereigns.

He took a sheet of paper out of his pocket and began.

‘God of pebbles, help us, now the poll is past,

Not to spurn the small bribes but to snatch the vast,

To attack the right cause, to defend the wrong,

To exploit the helpless and protect the strong.

To our peculations and our victims add.

Mighty Lord, we pray thee, make us very bad. . ’

There were three more stanzas, referring among other things to a few local contests that Amit had read about in the newspaper — one of which made both Pran and Lata sit up: it referred in a flippant manner to a landowner and a land-snatcher who had first come together and then bounced apart like billiard balls in the cause of garnering the vote.

Most of the audience enjoyed the poem, especially the local references, and laughed. Mr Makhijani, however, was not amused.

‘He is making mockery of our Constitution. He is making mockery,’ said the patriotic bard.

Amit went on to read a dozen poems, including ‘The Fever Bird’, which had so haunted Lata when she first read it. Professor Mishra too thought it very good, listened intently, and nodded his head.

Several of the poems Amit read were not to be found in his books; for the most part they had been written more recently. One, however, about the death of an old aunt of his, which Lata found very moving, had been composed some time before. Amit had kept it aside and rarely read it. Lata noticed that Pran’s head was bowed as he listened to this poem, and indeed the whole audience was quite still.

After the reading and applause was over, Amit said that he would be happy to answer any questions.

‘Why is it that you do not write in Bengali, your mother tongue?’ asked a challenging voice. The young man who spoke appeared to be quite angry.

Amit had been asked this question — and had asked himself this question — many times before. His answer was that his Bengali was not good enough for him to be able to express himself in the manner he could in English. It wasn’t a question of choice. Someone who had been trained all his life to play the sitar could not become a sarangi player because his ideology or his conscience told him to. ‘Besides,’ Amit added, ‘we are all accidents of history and must do what we are best at without fretting too much about it. Even Sanskrit came to India from outside.’

Mrs Supriya Joshi, the songbird of free verse, now stood up and said:

‘Why do you use rhyming? Moon, June, Moon, June? A poet must be free — free as a bird — a fever bird.’ Smiling, she sat down.

Amit said he rhymed because he liked to. He liked the sound, and it helped give pith and memorability to what might otherwise become diffuse. He no more felt chained by it than a musician felt chained by the rules of a raag.

Mrs Supriya Joshi, unconvinced, remarked to Mr Makhijani: ‘All is rhyming, chiming, in his poems, like Nowrojee’s triolets.’