Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘Let’s see, let’s see,’ said the Nawab Sahib, thinking rather sadly about his wife, buried these many years; ‘Inshallah, all of them will settle down soon enough.’

‘To the law,’ said Maan, raising his third glass of Scotch to Firoz, who was sitting on his bed with a glass of his own. Imtiaz was lounging in a stuffed chair and examining the bottle.

‘Thank you,’ said Firoz. ‘But not to new laws, I hope.’

‘Oh, don’t worry, don’t worry, my father’s bill will never pass,’ said Maan. ‘And even if it does, you’ll be much richer than me. Look at me,’ he added, gloomily. ‘I have to work for a living.’

Since Firoz was a lawyer and his brother a doctor, it was not as if they fitted the popular mould of the idle sons of aristocracy.

‘And soon,’ went on Maan, ‘if my father has his way, I’ll have to work on behalf of two people. And later for more. Oh God!’

‘What — your father isn’t getting you married off, is he?’ asked Firoz, halfway between a smile and a frown.

‘Well, the buffer zone disappeared tonight,’ said Maan disconsolately. ‘Have another.’

‘No, no thanks, I still have plenty,’ said Firoz. Firoz enjoyed his drink, but with a slightly guilty feeling; his father would approve even less than Maan’s. ‘So when’s the happy hour?’ he added uncertainly.

‘God knows. It’s at the inquiry stage,’ said Maan.

‘At the first reading,’ Imtiaz added.

For some reason, this delighted Maan. ‘At the first reading!’ he repeated. ‘Well, let’s hope it never gets to the third reading! And, even if it does, that the President withholds his assent!’

He laughed and took a couple of long swigs. ‘And what about your marriage?’ he demanded of Firoz.

Firoz looked a little evasively around the room. It was as bare and functional as most of the rooms in Prem Nivas — which looked as if they expected the imminent arrival of a herd of constituents. ‘My marriage!’ he said with a laugh.

Maan nodded vigorously.

‘Change the subject,’ said Firoz.

‘Why, if you were to go into the garden instead of drinking here in seclusion—’

‘It’s hardly seclusion.’

‘Don’t interrupt,’ said Maan, throwing an arm around him. ‘If you were to go down into the garden, a good-looking, elegant fellow like you, you would be surrounded within seconds by eligible young beauties. And ineligible ones too. They’d cling to you like bees to a lotus. Curly locks, curly locks, will you be mine?’

Firoz flushed. ‘You’ve got the metaphor slightly wrong,’ he said. ‘Men are bees, women lotuses.’

Maan quoted a couplet from an Urdu ghazal to the effect that the hunter could turn into the hunted, and Imtiaz laughed.

‘Shut up, both of you,’ said Firoz, attempting to appear more annoyed than he was; he had had enough of this sort of nonsense. ‘I’m going down. Abba will be wondering where on earth we’ve got to. And so will your father. And besides, we ought to find out if your brother is formally married yet — and whether you really do now have a beautiful sister-in-law to scold you and curb your excesses.’

‘All right, all right, we’ll all go down,’ said Maan genially. ‘Maybe some of the bees will cling to us too. And if we get stung to the heart, Doctor Sahib here can cure us. Can’t you, Imtiaz? All you would have to do would be to apply a rose petal to the wound, isn’t that so?’

‘As long as there are no contraindications,’ said Imtiaz seriously.

‘No contraindications,’ said Maan, laughing as he led the way down the stairs.

‘You may laugh,’ said Imtiaz. ‘But some people are allergic even to rose petals. Talking of which, you have one sticking to your cap.’

‘Do I?’ asked Maan. ‘These things float down from nowhere.’

‘So they do,’ said Firoz, who was walking down just behind him. He gently brushed it away.

Because the Nawab Sahib had been looking somewhat lost without his sons, Mahesh Kapoor’s daughter Veena had drawn him into her family circle. She asked him about his eldest child, his daughter Zainab, who was a childhood friend of hers but who, after her marriage, had disappeared into the world of purdah. The old man talked about her rather guardedly, but about her two children with transparent delight. His grandchildren were the only two beings in the world who had the right to interrupt him when he was studying in his library. But now the great yellow ancestral mansion of Baitar House, just a few minutes’ walk from Prem Nivas, was somewhat run down, and the library too had suffered. ‘Silverfish, you know,’ said the Nawab Sahib. ‘And I need help with cataloguing. It’s a gigantic task, and in some ways not very heartening. Some of the early editions of Ghalib can’t be traced now; and some valuable manuscripts by our own poet Mast. My brother never made a list of what he took with him to Pakistan. . ’

At the word Pakistan, Veena’s mother-in-law, withered old Mrs Tandon, flinched. Three years ago, her whole family had had to flee the blood and flames and unforgettable terror of Lahore. They had been wealthy, ‘propertied’ people, but almost everything they had owned was lost, and they had been lucky to escape with their lives. Her son Kedarnath, Veena’s husband, still had scars on his hands from an attack by rioters on his refugee convoy. Several of their friends had been butchered.

The young, old Mrs Tandon thought bitterly, are very resilient: her grandchild Bhaskar had of course only been six at the time; but even Veena and Kedarnath had not let those events embitter their lives. They had returned here to Veena’s hometown, and Kedarnath had set himself up in a small way in — of all polluting, carcass-tainted things — the shoe trade. For old Mrs Tandon, the descent from a decent prosperity could not have been more painful. She had been willing to tolerate talking to the Nawab Sahib though he was a Muslim, but when he mentioned comings and goings from Pakistan, it was too much for her imagination. She felt ill. The pleasant chatter of the garden in Brahmpur was amplified into the cries of the blood-mad mobs on the streets of Lahore, the lights into fire. Daily, sometimes hourly, in her imagination she returned to what she still thought of as her city and her home. It had been beautiful before it had become so suddenly hideous; it had appeared completely secure so shortly before it was lost forever.

The Nawab Sahib did not notice that anything was the matter, but Veena did, and quickly changed the subject even at the cost of appearing rude. ‘Where’s Bhaskar?’ she asked her husband.

‘I don’t know. I think I saw him near the food, the little frog,’ said Kedarnath.

‘I wish you wouldn’t call him that,’ said Veena. ‘He is your son. It’s not auspicious. . ’

‘It’s not my name for him, it’s Maan’s,’ said Kedarnath with a smile. He enjoyed being mildly henpecked. ‘But I’ll call him whatever you want me to.’

Veena led her mother-in-law away. And to distract the old lady she did in fact get involved in looking for her son. Finally they found Bhaskar. He was not eating anything but simply standing under the great multicoloured cloth canopy that covered the food tables, gazing upwards with pleased and abstract wonderment at the elaborate geometrical patterns — red rhombuses, green trapeziums, yellow squares and blue triangles — from which it had been stitched together.

The crowds had thinned; the guests, some chewing paan, were departing at the gate; a heap of gifts had grown by the side of the bench where Pran and Savita had been sitting. Finally only they and a few members of the family were left — and the yawning servants who would put away the more valuable furniture for the night, or pack the gifts in a trunk under the watchful eye of Mrs Rupa Mehra.