Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

This hint of practicality made him smile instead of alarming him. He said, ‘Lata, we don’t have a chance if we go away. Let’s wait and see how things work out. We’ll make them work out.’

‘I thought you lived from our one meeting to the next.’

Kabir put an arm around her.

‘I do. But we can’t decide everything. I don’t want to disillusion you, but—’

‘You are, you are disillusioning me. How long will we have to wait?’

‘Two years, I think. First I have to finish my degree. After that I’m going to apply to get into Cambridge — or maybe take the exam for the Indian Foreign Service—’

‘Ah—’ It was a low cry of almost physical pain.

He stopped, realizing how selfish he must have sounded.

‘I’ll be married off in two years,’ said Lata, covering her face in her hands. ‘You’re not a girl. You don’t understand. My mother might not even let me come back to Brahmpur—’

Two lines from one of their meetings came to her mind:

Desert not friendship. Renegade with me

From raptured realm of Mr Nowrojee.

She got up. She made no attempt to hide her tears. ‘I’m going,’ she said.

‘Please don’t, Lata. Please listen,’ said Kabir. ‘When will we be able to speak to each other again? If we don’t talk now—’

Lata was walking quickly up the path, trying to escape from his company now.

‘Lata, be reasonable.’

She had reached the flat top of the path. Kabir walked behind her. She seemed so walled off from him that he didn’t touch her. He sensed that she would have brushed him off, maybe with another painful remark.

Halfway to the house was a shrubbery of the most fragrant kamini, some bushes of which had grown as tall as trees. The air was thick with their scent, the branches full of small white blossoms against dark-green leaves, the ground covered with petals. As they passed below, he tousled the leaves gently, and a shower of fragrant petals fell on her hair. If she even noticed this, she gave no indication of it.

They walked on, unspeaking. Then Lata turned around.

‘That’s my sister’s husband there in a dressing gown. They’ve been looking for me. Go back. No one’s seen us yet.’

‘Yes; Dr Kapoor. I know. I’ll — I’ll talk to him. I’ll convince them—’

‘You can’t run four runs every day,’ said Lata.

Kabir stopped dead in his tracks, a look of puzzlement rather than pain on his face. Lata walked on without looking back.

She never wanted to see him again.

At the house, Mrs Rupa Mehra was having hysterics. Pran was grim. Savita had been crying. Lata refused to answer any questions.

Mrs Rupa Mehra and Lata left for Calcutta that evening. Mrs Rupa Mehra kept up a litany of how shameful and inconsiderate Lata was; how she was forcing her mother to leave Brahmpur before Ramnavami; how she had been the cause of unnecessary disruption and expense.

Receiving no response, she finally gave up. For once, she hardly talked to the other passengers.

Lata kept quiet. She looked out of the train window till it became completely dark. She felt heartbroken and humiliated. She was sick of her mother, and of Kabir, and of the mess that was life.

While Lata was falling in love with Kabir, a quite different set of events was taking place in Old Brahmpur, which, however, were to prove not irrelevant to her story. These events involved Pran’s sister, Veena, and her family.

Veena Tandon entered her house in Misri Mandi, to be greeted by her son Bhaskar with a kiss, which she happily accepted despite the fact that he had a cold. He then rushed back to the small sofa where he had been sitting — his father on one side and his father’s guest on the other — and continued his explanation of the powers of ten.

Kedarnath Tandon looked at his son indulgently but, happy in the consciousness of Bhaskar’s genius, did not pay much attention to what he was saying. His father’s guest, Haresh Khanna, who had been introduced to Kedarnath by a mutual acquaintance in the shoe business, would have been happier talking about the leather and footwear trade of Brahmpur, but felt it best to indulge his host’s son — especially as Bhaskar, carried away by his enthusiasm, would have been very disappointed to lose his indoor audience on a day when he had not been allowed to go out kite-flying. He tried to concentrate on what Bhaskar was saying.

‘Well, you see, Haresh Chacha, it’s like this. First you have ten, that’s just ten, that is, ten to the first power. Then you have a hundred, which is ten times ten, which makes it ten to the second power. Then you have a thousand, which is ten to the third power. Then you have ten thousand, which is ten to the fourth power — but this is where the problem begins, don’t you see? We don’t have a special word for that — and we really should. Ten times that is ten to the fifth power, which is a lakh. Then we have ten to the sixth power, which is a million, ten to the seventh power which is a crore, and then we come to another power for which we don’t have a word — which is ten to the eighth. We should have a word for that as well. Then ten to the ninth power is a billion, and then comes ten to the tenth. Now it’s amazing that we don’t have a word in either English or Hindi for a number that is as important as ten to the tenth. Don’t you agree with me, Haresh Chacha?’ he continued, his bright eyes fixed on Haresh’s face.

‘But you know,’ said Haresh, pulling something out of his recent memory for the enthusiastic Bhaskar, ‘I think there is a special word for ten thousand. The Chinese tanners of Calcutta, with whom we have some dealings, once told me that they used the number ten-thousand as a standard unit of counting. What they call it I can’t remember, but just as we use a lakh as a natural measuring point, they use ten-thousand.’

Bhaskar was electrified. ‘But Haresh Chacha, you must find that number for me,’ he said. ‘You must find out what they call it. I have to know,’ he said, his eyes burning with mystical fire, and his small frog-like features taking on an astonishing radiance.

‘All right,’ said Haresh. ‘I’ll tell you what. When I go back to Kanpur, I’ll make inquiries, and as soon as I find out what that number is, I’ll send you a letter. Who knows, perhaps they even have a number for ten to the eighth.’

‘Do you really think so?’ breathed Bhaskar wonderingly. His pleasure was akin to that of a stamp collector who finds the two missing values in an incomplete series suddenly supplied to him by a total stranger. ‘When are you going back to Kanpur?’

Veena, who had just come in bearing cups of tea, rebuked Bhaskar for his inhospitable comment, and asked Haresh how many spoonfuls of sugar he took.

Haresh could not help noticing that when he had seen her a few minutes earlier her head had been uncovered, but now, after returning from the kitchen, she had covered it with her sari. He guessed correctly that it was at her mother-in-law’s behest that she had done so. Although Veena was a little older than him, and quite plump, he could not help thinking how animated her features were. The slight touches of anxiety about her eyes only added to her liveliness of character.

Veena, for her part, could not help noticing that her husband’s guest was a good-looking young man. Haresh was short, well built without being stocky, fair in complexion, with a squarish rather than an oval face. His eyes were not large, but they had a directness of gaze which she believed was a key to straightforwardness of character. Silk shirt and agate cufflinks, she observed to herself.

‘Now, Bhaskar, go and talk to your grandmother,’ said Veena. ‘Papa’s friend wants to talk to him about important matters.’