Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Meanwhile, upstairs, Priya was talking to Veena, who had come to pay her a visit. But it was more than a social visit, it was an emergency. Veena was very distressed. She had come home and found Kedarnath not merely with his eyes closed but with his head in his hands. This was far worse than his general state of optimistic anxiety. He had not wanted to talk about it, but she had eventually discovered that he was in very grave financial trouble. With the pickets and the stationing of the police in Chowk, the wholesale shoe market had finally ground from a slowdown to a complete halt. Every day now his chits were coming due, and he just did not have the cash to pay them. Those who owed him money, particularly two large stores in Bombay, had deferred paying him for past supplies because they thought he could not ensure future supplies. The supplies he got from people like Jagat Ram, who made shoes to order, were not enough. To fulfil the orders that buyers around the country had placed with him, he needed the shoes of the basket-wallahs, and they did not dare come to Misri Mandi these days.

But the immediate problem was how to pay for the chits that were coming due. He had no one to go to; all his associates were themselves short of cash. Going to his father-in-law was for him out of the question. He was at his wits’ end. He would try once more to talk to his creditors — the moneylenders who held his chits and their commission agents who came to him for payment when they were due. He would try to persuade them that it would do no one any good to drive him and others like him to the wall in a credit squeeze. This situation would surely not last long. He was not insolvent, just illiquid. But even as he spoke he knew what their answer would be. He knew that money, unlike labour, owed no allegiance to a particular trade, and could flow out of shoes and into, say, cold storage facilities without retraining or compunction or doubt. It only asked two questions: ‘What interest?’ and ‘What risk?’

Veena had not come to Priya for financial help, but to ask her how best to sell the jewellery she had got from her mother upon her marriage — and to weep on her shoulder. She had brought the jewellery with her. Only a little had remained from the traumatic days after the family’s flight from Lahore. Every piece meant so much to her that she started crying when she thought of losing it. She had only two requests — that her husband not find out until the jewellery had actually been sold; and that for a few weeks at least her father and mother should not know.

They talked quickly, because there was no privacy in the house, and at any moment anyone could walk into Priya’s room.

‘My father’s here,’ Priya said. ‘Downstairs, talking politics.’

‘We will always be friends, no matter what,’ said Veena suddenly, and started crying again.

Priya hugged her friend, told her to have courage, and suggested a brisk walk on the roof.

‘What, in this heat, are you mad?’ asked Veena.

‘Why not? It’s either heatstroke or interruption by my mother-in-law — and I know which I’d prefer.’

‘I’m scared of your monkeys,’ said Veena as a second line of defence. ‘First they fight on the roof of the daal factory, then they leap over on to your roof. Shahi Darvaza should be renamed Hanuman Dwar.’

‘You’re not scared of anything. I don’t believe you,’ said Priya. ‘In fact, I envy you. You can walk over by yourself any time. Look at me. And look at these bars on the balcony. The monkeys can’t come in, and I can’t go out.’

‘Ah,’ said Veena, ‘you shouldn’t envy me.’

They were silent for a while.

‘How is Bhaskar?’ asked Priya.

Veena’s plump face lit up in a smile, rather a sad one. ‘He’s very well — as well as your pair, anyway. He insisted on coming along. At the moment they are all playing cricket in the square downstairs. The pipal tree doesn’t seem to bother them. . I wish for your sake, Priya, that you had a brother or sister,’ Veena added suddenly, thinking of her own childhood.

The two friends went to the balcony and looked down through the wrought-iron grille. Their three children, together with two others, were playing cricket in the small square. Priya’s ten-year-old daughter was by far the best of them. She was a fair bowler and a fine batsman. She usually managed to avoid the pipal tree, which gave the others endless trouble.

‘Why don’t you stay for lunch?’ asked Priya.

‘I can’t,’ said Veena, thinking of Kedarnath and her mother-in-law, who would be expecting her. ‘Tomorrow perhaps.’

‘Tomorrow then.’

Veena left the bag of jewellery with Priya, who locked it up in a steel almirah. As she stood by the cupboard Veena said: ‘You’re putting on weight.’

‘I’ve always been fat,’ said Priya, ‘and because I do nothing but sit here all day like a caged bird, I’ve grown fatter’.

‘You’re not fat and you never have been,’ said her friend. ‘And since when have you stopped pacing on the roof?’

‘I haven’t,’ said Priya, ‘but one day I’m going to throw myself off it.’

‘Now if you talk like that I’m going to leave at once,’ said Veena and made to go.

‘No, don’t go. Seeing you has cheered me up,’ said Priya. ‘I hope you have lots of bad fortune. Then you’ll come running to me all the time. If it hadn’t been for Partition you’d never have come back to Brahmpur.’

Veena laughed.

‘Come on, let’s go to the roof,’ continued Priya. ‘I really can’t talk freely to you here. People are always coming in and listening from the balcony. I hate it here, I’m so unhappy, if I don’t tell you I’ll burst.’ She laughed, and pulled Veena to her feet. ‘I’ll tell Bablu to get us something cold to prevent heatstroke.’

Bablu was the weird fifty-year-old servant who had come to the family as a child and had grown more eccentric with each passing year. Lately he had taken to eating everyone’s medicines.

When they got to the roof, they sat in the shade of the water tank and started laughing like schoolgirls.

‘We should live next to each other,’ said Priya, shaking out her jet black hair, which she had washed and oiled that morning. ‘Then, even if I throw myself off my roof, I’ll fall on to yours.’

‘It would be awful if we lived next to each other,’ said Veena, laughing. ‘The witch and the scarecrow would get together every afternoon and complain about their daughters-in-law. “O, she’s bewitched my son, they play chaupar on the roof all the time, she’ll make him as dark as soot. And she sings on the roof so shamelessly to the whole neighbourhood. And she deliberately prepares rich food so that I fill up with gas. One day I’ll explode and she’ll dance over my bones.”’

Priya giggled. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’ll be fine. The two kitchens will face each other, and the vegetables can join us in complaining about our oppression. “O friend Potato, the khatri scarecrow is boiling me. Tell everyone I died miserably. Farewell, farewell, never forget me.” “O friend Pumpkin, the bania witch has spared me for only another two days. I’ll weep for you but I won’t be able to attend your chautha. Forgive me, forgive me.”’

Veena’s laughter bubbled out again. ‘Actually, I feel quite sorry for my scarecrow,’ she said. ‘She had a hard time during Partition. But she was quite horrible to me even in Lahore, even after Bhaskar was born. When she sees I’m not miserable she becomes even more miserable. When we become mothers-in-law, Priya, we’ll feed our daughters-in-law ghee and sugar every day.’

‘I certainly don’t feel sorry for my witch,’ said Priya disgustedly. ‘And I shall certainly bully my daughter-in-law from morning till night until I’ve completely crushed her spirit. Women look much more beautiful when they’re unhappy, don’t you think?’ She shook her thick black hair from side to side and glared at the stairs. ‘This is a vile house,’ she added. ‘I’d much rather be a monkey and fight on the roof of the daal factory than a daughter-in-law in the Rai Bahadur’s house. I’d run to the market and steal bananas. I’d fight the dogs, I’d snap at the bats. I’d go to Tarbuz ka Bazaar and pinch the bottoms of all the pretty prostitutes. I’d. . do you know what the monkeys did here the other day?’