Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

Sometimes he even missed the lightning-like presence of Abida, a woman of whose immodesty and forwardness the Nawab Sahib instinctively disapproved. Begum Abida Khan, MLA, had refused to abide by the strictures of the zenana quarters and the constraints of a mansion, and was now living in a small house closer to the Legislative Assembly. She believed in being aggressive and if necessary immodest in fighting for causes she considered just or useful, and she looked upon the Nawab Sahib as utterly ineffectual. Indeed, she did not have a very high opinion of her own husband who had, as she thought, ‘fled’ Brahmpur at Partition in a state of panic and was now crawling around the Middle East in a state of religious dotage. Because her niece Zainab — of whom she was fond — was visiting, she did pay a visit to Baitar House, but the purdah she was expected to maintain irked her, and so did the inevitable criticism of her style of life that she faced from the old women of the zenana.

But who were these old women after all? — the repository of tradition and old affection and family history. Only two old aunts of the Nawab Sahib, and the widow of his other brother — no one else remained of that whole busy zenana. The only children in Baitar House were the two who were visiting, the six- and three-year-old grandchildren of the Nawab Sahib. They loved visiting Baitar House and Brahmpur because they found the huge old house exciting, because they could see mongooses sliding under the doors of locked and deserted rooms, because much was made of them by everyone from Firoz Mamu and Imtiaz Mamu to the ‘old servitors’ and the cooks. And because their mother seemed much happier here than at home.

The Nawab Sahib did not at all like to be disturbed when he was reading, but he made more than an exception for his grandsons. Hassan and Abbas were given a free run of the house. No matter what mood he was in, they lifted it; and even when he was sunk in the impersonal comfort of history, he was happy to be brought back to the present world, as long as it was personally through them. Like the rest of the house, the library too was running to seed. The magnificent collection, built up by his father and incorporating additions by the three brothers — each with his different tastes — was housed in an equally magnificent alcoved and high-windowed room. The Nawab Sahib, wearing a freshly starched kurta-pyjama — with a few small squarish holes in the kurta which looked a bit like moth-holes (but what moth would bite quite so squarely?) — was seated this morning at a round table in one of the alcoves, reading The Marginal Notes of Lord Macaulay selected by his nephew G.O. Trevelyan.

Macaulay’s comments on Shakespeare, Plato and Cicero were as trenchant as they were discriminating, and the editor clearly believed that the marginalia of his distinguished uncle were well worth publishing. His own remarks were openly admiring: ‘Even for Cicero’s poetry Macaulay had enough respect to distinguish carefully between the bad and the less bad,’ was one sentence that drew a mild smile from the Nawab Sahib.

But what, after all, thought the Nawab Sahib, is worth doing, and what is not? For people like me at least things are in decline, and I do not feel it worth my while consuming the rest of my life fighting politicians or tenants or silverfish or my son-in-law or Abida to preserve and maintain worlds that I find exhausting to preserve or maintain. Each of us lives in a small domain and returns to nothing. I suppose if I had a distinguished uncle I might spend a year or two collating and printing his marginal notes.

And he fell to musing about how Baitar House would eventually fall into ruin with the abolition of zamindari and the exhaustion of funds from the estate. Already it was becoming difficult, according to his munshi, to extract the standard rent from the tenants. They pleaded hard times, but underneath the pleas was the sense that the political equations of ownership and dependence were inexorably shifting. Among those who were most vocal against the Nawab Sahib were some whom he had treated with exceptional leniency, even generosity, in the past, and who found this difficult to forgive.

What would survive him? It occurred to him that although he had dabbled in Urdu poetry much of his life, he had never written a single poem, a single couplet, that would be remembered. Those who do not live in Brahmpur decry the poetry of Mast, he thought, but they can complete in their sleep many of the ghazals he has written. It struck him, with a start, that there had never been a truly scholarly edition of the poems of Mast, and he began to stare at the motes in the beam of sunlight that fell on his table.

Perhaps, he said to himself, this is the labour that I am best fitted for at this stage of things. At any rate, it is probably what I would most enjoy.

He read on, savouring the insight with which Macaulay unsparingly analysed the character of Cicero, a man taken over by the aristocracy into which he had been adopted, two-faced, eaten up by vanity and hatred, yet undoubtedly ‘great’. The Nawab Sahib, who thought much of death these days, was startled by Macaulay’s remark: ‘I really think that he met with little more than his deserts from the Triumvirs.’

Despite the fact that the book had been dusted with a white preservative powder, a silverfish crawled out of the spine and scuttled across the band of sunlight on the round table. The Nawab Sahib looked at it for an instant, and wondered what had happened to the young man who had sounded so enthusiastic about taking charge of his library. He had said he would come over to Baitar House but that had been the last that the Nawab Sahib had heard of him — and it must have been at least a month ago. He shut the book and shook it, opened it again on a random page, and continued reading as if the new paragraph had led directly on from the previous one:

The document which he most admired in the whole collection of the correspondence was Caesar’s answer to Cicero’s message of gratitude for the humanity which the conqueror had displayed towards those political adversaries who had fallen into his power at the surrender of Corfinium. It contained (so Macaulay used to say) the finest sentence ever written:

‘I triumph and rejoice that my action should have obtained your approval; nor am I disturbed when I hear it said that those whom I have sent off alive and free will again bear arms against me; for there is nothing which I so much covet as that I should be like myself, and they like themselves.’

The Nawab Sahib read the sentence several times. He had once hired a Latin tutor but had not got very far. Now he attempted to fit the resonant phrases of the English to what must have been the still more resonant phrases of the original. He sat in a reverie for a good ten minutes meditating on the content and manner of the sentence, and would have continued to do so had he not felt a tug at the leg of his pyjamas.

It was his younger grandson, Abbas, who was tugging at him with both hands. The Nawab Sahib had not seen him come in, and looked at him with pleased surprise. A little behind Abbas stood his six-year-old brother Hassan. And behind Hassan stood the old servant, Ghulam Rusool.

The servant announced that lunch was waiting for the Nawab Sahib and his daughter in the small room adjoining the zenana quarters. He also apologized for allowing Hassan and Abbas into the library when the Nawab Sahib was reading. ‘But Sahib, they insisted, and would not listen to reason.’

The Nawab Sahib nodded his approval and turned happily from Macaulay and Cicero to Hassan and Abbas.

‘Are we eating on the floor or at the table today, Nana-jaan?’ asked Hassan.

‘It’s just us — so we’ll eat inside — on the rug,’ replied his grandfather.