Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Professor Mishra asked a question about Amit’s influences: did he detect the shadow of Eliot in his writing? He referred to several lines in Amit’s poetry, and compared them to lines of his own favourite modern poet.

Amit tried to answer the question as well as he could, but he thought that Eliot was not one of his major influences.

‘Have you ever been in love with an English girl?’

Amit sat up sharply, then relaxed. It was a sweet, anxious old lady from the back of the room.

‘Well, I–I don’t feel I can answer that before an audience,’ he said. ‘When I asked for questions, I should have added that I would answer any questions so long as they were not too private — or, for that matter, too public. Government policy, for instance, would be out.’

An eager young student, blinking in adoration, and unable to restrain the nervousness in his voice, said: ‘Of the 863 lines of poetry in your two published books, thirty-one refer to trees, twenty-two have the word “love” or “loving” in them, and eighteen consist of words of only one syllable. How significant is this?’

Lata noticed Kabir smile; she was smiling herself. Amit attempted to extricate an intelligent question out of what had just been said and talked a little about his themes. ‘Does that answer the question?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ nodded the young man happily.

‘Do you believe in the virtue of compression?’ asked a determined academic lady.

‘Well, yes,’ said Amit warily. The lady was rather fat.

‘Why, then, is it rumoured that your forthcoming novel — to be set, I understand, in Bengal — is to be so long? More than a thousand pages!’ she exclaimed reproachfully, as if he were personally responsible for the nervous exhaustion of some future dissertationist.

‘Oh, I don’t know how it grew to be so long,’ said Amit. ‘I’m very undisciplined. But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they’re bad, they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they’re good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch .’

‘How about Proust?’ asked a distracted-looking lady, who had begun knitting the moment the poems stopped.

Amit was surprised that anyone read Proust in Brahmpur. He had begun to feel rather happy, as if he had breathed in too much oxygen.

‘I’m sure I’d love Proust,’ he replied, ‘if my mind was more like the Sundarbans: meandering, all-absorptive, endlessly, er, sub-reticulated. But as it is, Proust makes me weep, weep, weep with boredom. Weep,’ he added. He paused and sighed. ‘Weep, weep, weep,’ he continued emphatically. ‘I weep when I read Proust, and I read very little of him.’

There was a shocked silence: why should anyone feel so strongly about anything? It was broken by Professor Mishra.

‘Needless to say, many of the most lasting monuments of literature are rather, well, bulky.’ He smiled at Amit. ‘Shakespeare is not merely great but grand, as it were.’

‘But only as it were,’ said Amit. ‘He only looks big in bulk. And I have my own way of reducing that bulk,’ he confided. ‘You may have noticed that in a typical Collected Shakespeare all the plays start on the right-hand side. Sometimes, the editors bung a picture in on the left to force them to do so. Well, what I do is to take my pen-knife and slit the whole book up into forty or so fascicles. That way I can roll up Hamlet or Timon— and slip them into my pocket. And when I’m wandering around — in a cemetery, say — I can take them out and read them. It’s easy on the mind and on the wrists. I recommend it to everyone. I read Cymbeline in just that way on the train here; and I never would have otherwise.’

Kabir smiled, Lata burst out laughing, Pran was appalled, Mr Makhijani gaped and Mr Nowrojee looked as if he were about to faint dead away.

Amit appeared pleased with the effect.

In the silence that followed, a middle-aged man in a black suit stood up. Mr Nowrojee began to tremble slightly. The man coughed a couple of times.

‘I have formulated a conception as the result of your reading,’ he announced to Amit. ‘It has to do with the atomic age and the place of poetry, and the influence of Bengal. Many things have happened since the War, of course. I have been listening for an hour to the very scintillation of India, that is what I said to myself when I formulated my conception. . ’

Immensely pleased with himself, he continued in this vein for the oral equivalent of about six paragraphs, punctuated with ‘You understand?’ Amit nodded, less amiably each time. Some people got up, and Mr Nowrojee in his distress pounded an imaginary gavel on the table.

Finally the man said to Amit: ‘Would you care to comment?’

‘No thank you,’ said Amit. ‘But I appreciate your sharing your remarks with us. Any other questions?’ he asked, emphasizing the last word.

But there were no more questions. It was time for Mrs Nowrojee’s tea and her famous little cakes, the delight of dentists.

Amit had hoped to talk to Lata a little, but he was mobbed. He had to sign books, he had to eat cake for fear of offending, and the sweet old lady, foiled once, insisted on asking him again whether he had been in love with an English girl. ‘Now you can answer, there is no audience now,’ she said. Several other people agreed with her. But Amit was spared: Mr Nowrojee, murmuring that his defence of rhyme had been so very heartening and that he himself was an unashamed devotee of rhyme, pressed into Amit’s hand the suppressed triolet, and asked Amit to read it and tell him what he thought. ‘Now, please be quite honest. Honesty such as yours is so refreshing, and only honesty will do,’ said Mr Nowrojee. Amit looked down at the poem in Mr Nowrojee’s thin, small, careful, upright handwriting:

A TRIOLET TO THE SONGSTRESS OF BENGAL

Fate snatched away sweet Toru Dutt

At the soft age of twenty-two.

The casuarina tree was cut.

Fate snatched away sweet Toru Dutt.

No bulbuls haunt its branches but

Her poems still haunt me and you.

Fate snatched away sweet Toru Dutt

At the soft age of twenty-two.

Meanwhile, Professor Mishra was talking to Pran in another corner of the room. ‘My dear boy,’ he was saying, ‘my commiserations go deeper than words. The sight of your hair, so short still, reminds me of that cruelly abridged life. . ’

Pran froze.

‘You must take care of your health. You must not undertake new challenges at a time of bereavement — and, of course, family anxiety. Your poor brother, your poor brother,’ said Professor Mishra. ‘Have a cake.’

‘Thank you, Professor,’ said Pran.

‘So you agree?’ said Professor Mishra. ‘The meeting is too soon, and to subject you to an interview—’

‘Agree to what?’ said Pran.

‘To withdrawing your candidature, of course. Don’t worry, dear boy, I will handle all the formalities. As you know, the selection committee is meeting on Thursday. It took so long to arrange a date,’ he went on. ‘But finally, in the middle of January, I succeeded in fixing one. And now, alas — but you are a young man, and will have many more opportunities for advancement, here in Brahmpur or elsewhere.’

‘Thank you for your concern, Professor Mishra, but I believe I will feel well enough to attend,’ said Pran. ‘That was an interesting question you asked about Eliot,’ he added.

Professor Mishra, his pallid face still frozen in disapproval at Pran’s unfilial attitude and tempted almost to refer to funeral baked meats, was silent for a while. Then he pulled himself together and said: ‘Yes, I gave a paper here a few months ago entitled “Eliot: Whither?” It is a pity you were unable to attend.’