Vikram Seth - A Suitable Boy

‘How unimaginable it is,’ said Maan out loud rather dreamily, ‘that our parents also must have — just like us—’

This remark struck Saeeda Bai as being in somewhat poor taste. She did not at all wish her imagination to be transported to the domestic love-making of Mahesh Kapoor — or anyone else for that matter. She did not know who her own father was: her mother, Mohsina Bai, had claimed not to know. Besides, domesticity and its standard concerns were not objects of fond contemplation for her. She had been accused by Brahmpur gossip of destroying several settled marriages by casting her lurid nets around hapless men. She said a little sharply to Maan:

‘It is good to live in a household like I do where one does not have to imagine such things.’

Maan looked a little chastened. Saeeda Bai, who was quite fond of him by now and knew that he usually blurted out the first thing that came into his head, tried to cheer him up by saying:

‘But Dagh Sahib looks distressed. Would he have been happier to have been immaculately conceived?’

‘I think so,’ said Maan. ‘I sometimes think I would be happier without a father.’

‘Oh?’ said Saeeda Bai, who had clearly not been expecting this.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Maan. ‘I often feel that whatever I do my father looks upon with contempt. When I opened the cloth business in Banaras, Baoji told me it would be a complete failure. Now that I have made a go of it, he is taking the line that I should sit there every day of every month of every year of my life. Why should I?’

Saeeda Bai did not say anything.

‘And why should I marry?’ continued Maan, spreading his arms wide on the bed and touching Saeeda Bai’s cheek with his left hand. ‘Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?’

‘Because your father can get me to sing at your wedding,’ said Saeeda Bai with a smile. ‘And at the birth of your children. And at their mundan ceremony. And at their marriages, of course.’ She was silent for a few seconds. ‘But I won’t be alive to do that,’ she went on. ‘In fact I sometimes wonder what you see in an old woman like me.’

Maan became very indignant. He raised his voice and said, ‘Why do you say things like that? Do you do it just to get me annoyed? No one ever meant much to me until I met you. That girl in Banaras whom I met twice under heavy escort is less than nothing to me — and everyone thinks I must marry her just because my father and mother say so.’

Saeeda Bai turned towards him and buried her face in his arm. ‘But you must get married,’ she said. ‘You cannot cause your parents so much pain.’

‘I don’t find her at all attractive,’ said Maan angrily.

‘That will merely take time,’ advised Saeeda Bai.

‘And I won’t be able to visit you after I’m married,’ said Maan.

‘Oh?’ said Saeeda Bai in such a way that the question, rather than leading to a reply, implied the closure of the conversation.

After a while they got up and moved to the other room. Saeeda Bai called for the parakeet, of whom she had become fond. Ishaq Khan brought in the cage, and a discussion ensued about when he would learn to speak. Saeeda Bai seemed to think that a couple of months would be sufficient, but Ishaq was doubtful. ‘My grandfather had a parakeet who didn’t speak for a whole year — and then wouldn’t stop talking for the rest of his life,’ he said.

‘I’ve never heard anything like that,’ said Saeeda Bai dismissively. ‘Anyway, why are you holding that cage in such a funny way?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing really,’ said Ishaq, setting the cage down on a table and rubbing his right wrist. ‘Just a pain in my wrist.’

In fact it was very painful and had become worse during the previous few weeks.

‘You seem to play well enough,’ said Saeeda Bai, not very sympathetically.

‘Saeeda Begum, what would I do if I didn’t play?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Saeeda Bai, tickling the little parakeet’s beak. ‘There’s probably nothing the matter with your hand. You don’t have plans to go off for a wedding in the family, do you? Or to leave town until your famous explosion at the radio station is forgotten?’

If Ishaq was injured by this painful reference or these unjust suspicions, he did not show it. Saeeda Bai told him to fetch Motu Chand, and the three of them soon began to make music for Maan’s pleasure. Ishaq bit his lower lip from time to time as his bow moved across the strings, but he said nothing.

Saeeda Bai sat on a Persian rug with her harmonium in front of her. Her head was covered with her sari, and she stroked the double string of pearls hanging around her neck with a finger of her left hand. Then, humming to herself, and moving her left hand on to the bellows of the harmonium, she began to play a few notes of Raag Pilu. After a little while, and as if undecided about her mood and the kind of song she wished to sing, she modulated to a few other raags.

‘What would you like to hear?’ she asked Maan gently.

She had used a more intimate ‘you’ than she had ever used so far—‘tum’ instead of ‘aap’. Maan looked at her, smiling.

‘Well?’ said Saeeda Bai, after a minute had gone by.

‘Well, Saeeda Begum?’ said Maan.

‘What do you want to hear?’ Again she used tum instead of aap and sent Maan’s world into a happy spin. A couplet he’d heard somewhere came to his mind:

Among the lovers the Saki thus drew distinction’s line,

Handing the wine-cups one by one: ‘For you, Sir’; ‘Yours’; and ‘Thine’.

‘Oh, anything,’ said Maan. ‘Anything at all. Whatever you feel is in your heart.’

Maan had still not plucked up the courage to use ‘tum’ or plain ‘Saeeda’ with Saeeda Bai, except when he was making love, when he hardly knew what he said. Perhaps, he thought, she just used it absent-mindedly with me and will be offended if I reciprocate.

But Saeeda Bai was inclined to take offence at something else.

‘I’m giving you the choice of music and you are returning the problem to me,’ she said. ‘There are twenty different things in my heart. Can’t you hear me changing from raag to raag?’ Then, turning away from Maan, she said:

‘So, Motu, what is to be sung?’

‘Whatever you wish, Saeeda Begum,’ said Motu Chand happily.

‘You blockhead, I’m giving you an opportunity that most of my audiences would kill themselves to receive and all you do is smile back at me like a weak-brained baby, and say, “Whatever you wish, Saeeda Begum.” What ghazal? Quickly. Or do you want to hear a thumri instead of a ghazal?’

‘A ghazal will be best, Saeeda Bai,’ said Motu Chand, and suggested ‘It’s just a heart, not brick and stone’ by Ghalib.

At the end of the ghazal Saeeda Bai turned to Maan and said: ‘You must write a dedication in your book.’

‘What, in English?’ asked Maan.

‘It amazes me,’ said Saeeda Bai, ‘to see the great poet Dagh illiterate in his own language. We must do something about it.’

‘I’ll learn Urdu!’ said Maan enthusiastically.

Motu Chand and Ishaq Khan exchanged glances. Clearly they thought that Maan was quite far gone in his fascination with Saeeda Bai.

Saeeda Bai laughed. She asked Maan teasingly, ‘Will you really?’ Then she asked Ishaq to call the maidservant.

For some reason Saeeda Bai was annoyed with Bibbo today. Bibbo seemed to know this, but to be unaffected by it. She came in grinning, and this reignited Saeeda Bai’s annoyance.

‘You’re smiling just to annoy me,’ she said impatiently. ‘And you forgot to tell the cook that the parakeet’s daal was not soft enough yesterday — do you think he has the jaws of a tiger? Stop grinning, you silly girl, and tell me — what time is Abdur Rasheed coming to give Tasneem her Arabic lesson?’