Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘What radiologist?’ asked Lata. ‘It’s still the 1st of April. Is that it?’

‘Yes, the radiologist. Call me tomorrow,’ said Dr Kishen Chand Seth to his daughter. ‘Remind me, Parvati. Now we must go. I must see this film again next week. So sad,’ he added approvingly.

On the way to his grey Buick Dr Kishen Chand Seth noticed a wrongly parked car. He yelled at the policeman on duty at the busy intersection. The policeman, who recognized the terrifying Dr Seth, as did most of the forces of order and disorder in Brahmpur, left the traffic to fend for itself, came over promptly, and took down the number of the car. A beggar limped alongside and asked for a couple of pice. Dr Kishen Chand Seth looked at him in fury and gave him a brutal whack on the leg with his stick. He and Parvati got into the car and the policeman cleared the traffic for them.

‘No talking, please,’ said the invigilator.

‘I was just borrowing a ruler, Sir.’

‘If you have to do that, do it through me.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

The boy sat down and applied himself once more to the question paper in front of him.

A fly buzzed against the windowpane of the examination hall. Outside the window the red crown of a gulmohur tree could be seen below the stone steps. The fans whirled slowly around. Row after row of heads, row after row of hands, drop after drop of ink, words and yet more words. Someone got up to have a drink of water from the earthenware pitcher near the exit. Someone leaned back against his chair and sighed.

Lata had stopped writing about half an hour ago, and had been staring at her paper sightlessly since. She was trembling. She could not think of the questions at all. She was breathing deeply and the sweat stood out on her forehead. Neither of the girls on either side of her noticed. Who were they? She didn’t recognize them from the English lectures.

What do these questions mean? she asked herself. And how was I managing to answer them just a little while ago? Do Shakespeare’s tragic heroes deserve their fates? Does anyone deserve her fate? She looked around again. What is the matter with me, I who am so good at taking exams? I don’t have a headache, I don’t have a period, what is my excuse? What will Ma say—

An image of her bedroom in Pran’s house came to her mind. In it she saw her mother’s three suitcases, filled with most of what she owned in the world. Standard appendages of her Annual Rail-Pilgrimage, they lay in a corner, with her large handbag resting like a self-confident black swan upon them. Nearby lay a small square dark-green copy of the Bhagavad Gita and a glass that contained her false teeth. She had worn them ever since a car accident ten years ago.

What would my father have thought? wondered Lata — with his brilliant record — his gold medals — how can I fail him like this? It was in April that he died. Gulmohurs were in bloom then too. . I must concentrate. I must concentrate. Something has happened to me and I must not panic. I must relax and things will be all right again.

She fell into a reverie once more. The fly buzzed in a steady drone.

‘No humming. Please be silent.’

Lata realized with a start that it was she who had been humming softly to herself and that both her neighbours were now looking at her: one appeared puzzled, the other annoyed. She bent her head towards her answer book. The pale blue lines stretched out without any potential meaning across the blank page.

‘If at first you don’t succeed—’ she heard her mother’s voice say.

She quickly turned back to a previous question she had already answered, but what she had written made no sense to her.

‘The disappearance of Julius Caesar from his own play as early as Act III would seem to imply. .’

Lata rested her head on her hands.

‘Are you feeling all right?’

She raised her head and looked at the troubled face of a young lecturer from the Philosophy Department who happened to be on invigilation duty that day.

‘Yes.’

‘You’re quite sure?’ he murmured.

Lata nodded.

She picked up her pen and began to write something in her answer book. A few minutes passed, and the invigilator announced: ‘Half an hour left.’

Lata realized that at least an hour of her three-hour paper had vanished into nothingness. She had answered only two questions so far. Activated by sudden alarm, she began to write answers to the two remaining questions — she chose them virtually at random — in a rapid, panic-stricken scrawl, smearing her fingers with ink, smudging the answer book, hardly conscious of what she was writing. The buzzing of the fly seemed to her to have entered her brain. Her normally attractive handwriting now looked worse than Arun’s, and this thought almost made her seize up again.

‘Five minutes left.’

Lata continued to write, hardly aware of what it was she was writing.

‘Pens down, please.’

Lata’s hand continued to move across the page.

‘No more writing, please. Time’s up.’

Lata put her pen down and buried her head in her hands.

‘Bring your papers to the front of the hall. Please make sure that your roll numbers are correctly inscribed on the front and that your supplementary booklets, if you have any, are arranged in the right order. No talking, please, until you have left the hall.’

Lata handed in her booklet. On the way out she rested her right wrist for a few seconds against the cool earthenware pitcher.

She did not know what had come over her.

Lata stood outside the hall for a minute. Sunlight poured on to the stone steps. The edge of her middle finger was smeared with dark-blue ink, and she looked at it, frowning. She was close to tears.

Other English students stood on the steps and chatted. A post-mortem of the paper was being held, and it was dominated by an optimistic and chubby girl who was ticking off on her fingers the various points she had answered correctly.

‘This is one paper I know I have done really well,’ she said. ‘Especially the King Lear question. I think that the answer was “Yes”.’ Others were looking excited or depressed. Everyone agreed that several of the questions were far harder than they had needed to be. A knot of history students stood not far away, discussing their paper, which had been held simultaneously in the same building. One of them was the young man who had brought himself to Lata’s attention in the Imperial Book Depot, and he was looking a little worried. He had spent a great deal of time these last few months in extracurricular activities — particularly cricket — and this had taken its toll upon his performance.

Lata walked to a bench beneath the gulmohur tree, and sat down to collect herself. When she got home for lunch she would be pestered with a hundred questions about how well she had done. She looked down at the red flowers that lay scattered at her feet. In her head she could still hear the buzzing of the fly.

The young man, though he had been talking to his classmates, had noticed her walking down the steps. When she sat down on the far bench under the tree, he decided to have a word with her. He told his friends that he had to go home for lunch — that his father would be waiting for him — and hurried along the path past the gulmohur. As he came to the bench, he uttered an exclamation of surprise and stopped.

‘Hello,’ he said.

Lata raised her head and recognized him. She flushed with embarrassment that he should see her in her present visible distress.

‘I suppose you don’t remember me?’ he said.

‘I do,’ said Lata, surprised that he should continue to talk to her despite her obvious wish that he should walk on. She said nothing further, nor did he for a few seconds.