Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

This reporter has never seen anything like it. It is true that the outfield was not merely sluggish but torpid with the morning’s rain. It is undeniable that the mid-wicket boundary at our opponents’ field is more than ordinarily distant. It is irrefutable that there was confusion in the ranks of their fielders, and that one of them actually slipped and fell in pursuit of the ball. But what will be remembered are not these detracting circumstances. What will be remembered by Brahmpurians in time to come is the quicksilver crossing of two human bullets ricocheting from crease to crease and back again with a velocity appropriate more to the track than the pitch, and unusual even there. Mr Durrani and Mr Mittal ran four runs where no four was, on a ball that did not even cross the boundary; and that they were home and dry with more than a yard to spare attests to the fact that theirs was no flamboyant or unseasoned risk.

Lata read and relived matches that had been layered over by the pressure of recency even for the participants themselves, and the more she read the more she felt herself in love with Kabir — both as she knew him and as he was revealed to her by the judicious eye of S.K.

Mr Durrani, she thought, this should have been a different world.

If, as Kabir said, he lived in the town, it was more than likely that it was at Brahmpur University that his father taught. Lata, with a flair for research that she did not know she possessed, now looked up the fat volume of the Brahmpur University Calendar, and found what she was seeking under ‘Faculty of Arts: Department of Mathematics’. Dr Durrani was not the head of his department, but the three magic letters after his name that indicated that he was a Fellow of the Royal Society outgloried twenty ‘Professors’.

And Mrs Durrani? Lata said the two words aloud, appraising them. What of her? And of Kabir’s brother and the sister he had had ‘until last year’? Over the last few days her mind had time and again recurred to these elusive beings and those few elusive comments. But even if she had thought about them in the course of the happy conversation outside Mr Nowrojee’s — and she hadn’t — she could not have brought herself to ask him about them at the time. Now, of course, it was too late. If she did not want to lose her own family, she would have to shade herself from the bright beam of sudden sunlight that had strayed into her life.

Outside the library she tried to take stock of things. She realized that she could not now attend next Friday’s meeting of the Brahmpur Literary Society.

‘Lata: Whither?’ she said to herself, laughed for a second or two, and found herself in tears.

Don’t! she thought. You might attract another Galahad. This made her laugh once again. But it was a laughter that swept nothing away and unsettled her still further.

Kabir confronted her next Saturday morning not far from her house. She had gone out for a walk. He was on his bicycle, leaning against a tree. He looked rather like a horseman. His face was grim. When she saw him her heart went into her mouth.

It was not possible to avoid him. He had clearly been waiting for her. She put on a brave front.

‘Hello, Kabir.’

‘Hello. I thought you’d never come out of your house.’

‘How did you find out where I live?’

‘I instituted inquiries,’ he said unsmilingly.

‘Whom did you ask?’ said Lata, feeling a little guilty for the inquiries she herself had ‘instituted’.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Kabir with a shake of his head.

Lata looked at him in distress. ‘Are your exams over?’ she asked, her tone betraying a touch of tenderness.

‘Yes. Yesterday.’ He didn’t elaborate.

Lata stared at his bicycle unhappily. She wanted to say to him: ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me about yourself as soon as we exchanged words in the bookshop, so that I could have made sure I didn’t feel anything for you?’ But how often had they in fact met, and were they in any sense of the word intimate enough for such a direct, almost despairing, question? Did he feel what she felt for him? He liked her, she knew. But how much more could be added to that?

He pre-empted any possible question of hers by saying:

‘Why didn’t you come yesterday?’

‘I couldn’t,’ she said helplessly.

‘Don’t twist the end of your dupatta, you’ll crumple it.’

‘Oh, sorry.’ Lata looked at her hands in surprise.

‘I waited for you. I went early. I sat through the whole lecture. I even chomped through Mrs Nowrojee’s rock-hard little cakes. I had built up a good appetite by then.’

‘Oh — I didn’t know there was a Mrs Nowrojee,’ said Lata, seizing upon the remark. ‘I wondered about the inspiration for his poem, what was it called—“Haunted Passion”? Can you imagine her reaction to that? What does she look like?’

‘Lata—’ said Kabir with some pain, ‘you’re going to ask me next if Professor Mishra’s lecture was any good. It was, but I didn’t care. Mrs Nowrojee is fat and fair, but I couldn’t care less. Why didn’t you come?’

‘I couldn’t,’ said Lata quietly. It would be better all around, she reflected, if she could summon up some anger to deal with his questions. All she could summon up was dismay.

‘Then come and have some coffee with me now at the university coffee house.’

‘I can’t,’ she said. He shook his head wonderingly. ‘I really can’t,’ she repeated. ‘Please let me go.’

‘I’m not stopping you,’ he said.

Lata looked at him and sighed: ‘We can’t stand here.’

Kabir refused to be affected by all these can’ts and couldn’ts.

‘Well, let’s stand somewhere else, then. Let’s go for a walk in Curzon Park.’

‘Oh no,’ said Lata. Half the world walked in Curzon Park.

‘Where then?’

They walked to the banyan trees on the slope leading down to the sands by the river. Kabir chained his bike to a tree at the top of the path. The monkeys were nowhere to be seen. Through the scarcely moving leaves of the gnarled trees they looked out at the Ganga. The wide brown river glinted in the sunlight. Neither said anything. Lata sat down on the upraised root, and Kabir followed.

‘How beautiful it is here,’ she said.

Kabir nodded. There was a bitterness about his mouth. If he had spoken, it would have been reflected in his voice.

Though Malati had warned her sternly off him, Lata just wanted to be with him for some time. She felt that if he were now to get up and go, she would try to dissuade him. Even if they were not talking, even in his present mood, she wanted to sit here with him.

Kabir was looking out over the river. With sudden eagerness, as if he had forgotten his grimness of a moment ago, he said: ‘Let’s go boating.’

Lata thought of Windermere, the lake near the High Court where they sometimes had department parties. Friends hired boats there and went out boating together. On Saturdays it was full of married couples and their children.

‘Everyone goes to Windermere,’ Lata said. ‘Someone will recognize us.’

‘I didn’t mean Windermere. I meant up the Ganges. It always amazes me that people go sailing or boating on that foolish lake when they have the greatest river in the world at their doorstep. We’ll go up the Ganges to the Barsaat Mahal. It’s a wonderful sight by night. We’ll get a boatman to keep the boat still in midstream, and you’ll see it reflected by moonlight.’ He turned to her.

Lata could not bear to look at him.

Kabir could not understand why she was so aloof and depressed. Nor could he understand why he had so suddenly fallen out of favour.

‘Why are you so distant? Is it something to do with me?’ he asked. ‘Have I said something?’