Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Malati said, ‘It didn’t occur to me — it just didn’t occur to me — but didn’t it occur to you either? With a name like that — though all the Kabirs I know are Hindu — Kabir Bhandare, Kabir Sondhi—’

‘It didn’t occur to me,’ said Lata. ‘Thanks, Malu,’ she added, using the form of Malati’s name she sometimes used out of affection. ‘Thank you for — well—’

‘I’m so sorry. Poor Lata.’

‘No. See you when you return.’

‘Read a P.G. Wodehouse or two,’ said Malati by way of parting advice. ‘Bye.’

‘Bye,’ said Lata and put down the receiver carefully.

She returned to the table but she could not eat. Mrs Rupa Mehra immediately tried to find out what the matter was. Savita decided not to say anything at all for the moment. Pran looked on, puzzled.

‘It’s nothing,’ Lata said, looking at her mother’s anxious face.

After dinner, she went to the bedroom. She couldn’t bear to talk with the family or listen to the late news on the radio. She lay face down on her bed and burst into tears — as quietly as she could — repeating his name with love and with angry reproach.

It did not need Malati to tell her that it was impossible. Lata knew it well enough herself. She knew her mother and the deep pain and horror she would suffer if she heard that her daughter had been seeing a Muslim boy.

Any boy was worrisome enough, but this was too shameful, too painful, to believe. Lata could hear Mrs Rupa Mehra’s voice: ‘What did I do in my past life that I have deserved this?’ And she could see her mother’s tears as she faced the horror of her beloved daughter being given over to the nameless ‘them’. Her old age would be embittered and she would be past consoling.

Lata lay on the bed. It was getting light. Her mother had gone through two chapters of the Gita that she recited every day at dawn. The Gita asked for detachment, tranquil wisdom, indifference to the fruits of action. This was a lesson that Mrs Rupa Mehra would never learn, could never learn. The lesson did not suit her temperament, even if its recitation did. The day she learned to be detached and indifferent and tranquil she would cease to be herself.

Lata knew that her mother was worried about her. But perhaps she attributed Lata’s undisguisable misery over the next few days to anxiety about the results of the exams.

If only Malati were here, Lata said to herself.

If only she had not met him in the first place. If only their hands had not touched. If only.

If only I could stop acting like a fool! Lata said to herself. Malati always insisted that it was boys who behaved like morons when they were in love, sighing in their hostel rooms and wallowing in the Shelley-like treacle of ghazals. It was going to be a week before she met Kabir again. If she had known how to get in touch with him before then, she would have been even more torn with indecision.

She thought of yesterday’s laughter outside Mr Nowrojee’s house and angry tears came to her eyes again. She went to Pran’s bookshelf and picked up the first P.G. Wodehouse she saw: Pigs Have Wings . Malati, though flippant, both meant and prescribed well.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Savita.

‘Yes,’ said Lata. ‘Did it kick last night?’

‘I don’t think so. At least I didn’t wake up.’

‘Men should have to bear them,’ said Lata, apropos of nothing. ‘I’m going for a walk by the river.’ She assumed, correctly, that Savita was in no state to join her down the steep path that led from the campus to the sands.

She changed her slippers for sandals, which made walking easier. As she descended the clayey slope, almost a mud cliff, to the shore of the Ganga, she noticed a troupe of monkeys cavorting in a couple of banyan trees — two trees that had fused into one through the intertwining of their branches. A small orange-smeared statue of a god was jammed between the central trunks. The monkeys were usually pleased to see her — she brought them fruits and nuts whenever she remembered to. Today she had forgotten, and they made clear their displeasure. A couple of the smaller ones pulled at her elbow in request, while one of the larger ones, a fierce male, bared his teeth in annoyance — but from a distance.

She needed to be distracted. She suddenly felt very gentle towards the animal world — which seemed to her, probably incorrectly, to be a simpler place than the world of humans. Though she was halfway down the cliff, she walked back up again, went to the kitchen, and got a paper bag full of peanuts and another filled with three large musammis for the monkeys. She knew they did not like them as much as oranges, but in the summer only the thicker-skinned green sweet-limes were available.

They were, however, entirely delighted. Even before she said ‘Aa! Aa!’—something she had once heard an old sadhu say to entice them — the monkeys noticed the paper bags. They gathered around, grabbing, grasping, pleading, clambering up the trees and down the trees in excitement, even hanging down from the branches and suspended roots and stretching their arms. The little ones squeaked, the big ones growled. One brute, possibly the one who had bared his teeth at her earlier, stored some of the peanuts in his cheek pouches while he tried to grab more. Lata scattered a few, but fed them mainly by hand. She even ate a couple of peanuts herself. The two smallest monkeys, as before, grabbed — and even stroked — her elbow for attention. When she kept her hands closed to tease them, they opened them quite gently, not with their teeth but with their fingers.

When she tried to peel the musammis, the biggest monkeys would have none of it. She usually succeeded in a democratic distribution, but this time all three musammis were grabbed by fairly large monkeys. One went a little farther down the slope, and sat on a large root to eat it: he half peeled it, then ate it from the inside. Another, less particular, ate his skin and all.

Lata, laughing, finally swung what was left of the bag of peanuts around her head, and it flew off into the tree; it was caught in a high branch, but then came free, fell a little more, and got caught on a branch again. A great red-bottomed monkey climbed towards it, turning around at intervals to threaten one or two others who were climbing up the other root-branches that hung down from the main body of the banyan tree. He grabbed the whole packet and climbed higher to enjoy his monopoly. But the mouth of the bag suddenly came open and the nuts scattered all around. Seeing this, a thin baby monkey leapt in its excitement from one branch to another, lost its hold, banged its head against the trunk, and dropped down to the ground. It ran off squeaking.

Instead of going down to the river as she had planned, Lata now sat down on the exposed root where the monkey had just been eating his musammi, and tried to address herself to the book in her hands. It did not succeed in diverting her thoughts. She got up, climbed the path up the slope again, then walked to the library.

She looked through the last season’s issues of the university magazine, reading through with intense interest what she had never so much as glanced at before: the cricket reports and the names beneath the team photographs. The writer of the reports, who signed himself ‘S.K.’, had a style of lively formality. He wrote, for example, not about Akhilesh and Kabir but about Mr Mittal and Mr Durrani and their excellent seventh-wicket stand.

It appeared that Kabir was a good bowler and a fair batsman. Though he was usually placed low in the batting order, he had saved a number of matches by remaining unflappable in the face of considerable odds. And he must have been an incredibly swift runner, because he had sometimes run three runs, and on one occasion, had actually run four. In the words of S.K.: