A Suitable Boy

Having invoked her late husband, Mrs Rupa Mehra had reached an emotional climax, and it was possible now to pacify her and even to reason with her. Pran pointed out that the rehearsals would take place during the day except in an emergency. Savita said that she’d read Twelfth Night at school, and it was a harmless play; there was nothing scandalous in it.

  Savita had read the bowdlerized version that was approved as a school text, but it was very likely that Mr Barua would have to cut out certain passages anyway to avoid causing shock and distress to the parents who attended Annual Day. Mrs Rupa Mehra had not read the play; if she had, she would certainly have thought it unsuitable.

  ‘It is Malati’s influence, I know it,’ she said.

  ‘Well, Ma, it was Lata’s decision to attend the auditions,’ said Pran. ‘Don’t blame Malati for everything.’

  ‘She is too bold, that girl,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra, who was continually struggling between her fondness for Malati and her disapproval of what she saw as her overly forward attitude to life.

  ‘Malati said I needed something to distract me from other things,’ said Lata.

  It did not take long for her mother to see the justice and weight of this argument. But even while conceding the point, she said, ‘If Malati says so, it must be so. Who am I to say anything? I’m just your mother. You’ll only value my advice when I’m burning on my pyre. Then you’ll know how much I cared for your welfare.’ This thought cheered her up.

  ‘Anyway, Ma, there’s a good chance that I won’t get the part,’ said Lata. ‘Let’s ask the baby,’ she added, placing her hand on Savita’s stomach.

  The litany, ‘Olivia, Maria, Viola, nothing,’ was recited slowly several times over, and the fourth time around the baby obliged with a sharp kick on the word ‘nothing’.

  12.6

  Two or three days later, however, Lata received a note assigning her the part of Olivia and asking her to attend the first rehearsal on Thursday afternoon at three thirty. She rushed off in high excitement towards the women’s hostel, only to meet Malati on the way. Malati had been given the part of Maria. Both of them were equally pleased and astonished.

  The first rehearsal was to be merely a reading-through of the play. Again it was not necessary to book the auditorium; a classroom was sufficient. Lata and Malati decided to celebrate by having a preparatory ice-cream at the Blue Danube, and arrived at the classroom in high spirits, just five minutes before the reading was due to begin.

  There were about a dozen boys, and only one girl, presumably Viola. She was sitting apart from them, contemplating the empty blackboard.

  Also sitting apart from the main knot of actors, and not participating at all in the general air of masculine excitement when the two girls walked in, was Kabir.

  At first Lata’s heart leapt up when she saw him; then she told Malati to stay where she was. She was going over to talk to him.

  His behaviour was too casual to be anything but deliberate. Clearly, he had been expecting her. This was intolerable.

  ‘Who are you?’ she said, anger below the low level of her voice.

  He was taken aback, both by the tone and by the question. He looked rather guilty.

  ‘Malvolio,’ he said, then added: ‘Madam.’ But he remained seated.

  ‘You never told me you had the least interest in amateur dramatics,’ said Lata.

  ‘Nor did you tell me,’ was his reply.

  ‘I was not interested until a few days ago, when Malati dragged me to the audition,’ said Lata, shortly.

  ‘And my interest dates to about the same time,’ said Kabir with an attempt at a smile. ‘I heard that you did very well at the auditions.’

  Lata could see it all now. Somehow or other he had discovered that she had a good chance of getting a part, and he had decided to attend the auditions for male parts. It was precisely to get away from him that she had undertaken to act in the first place.

  ‘I suppose you instituted the usual inquiries,’ said Lata.

  ‘No, I heard about it by chance. I haven’t been following you around.’

  ‘And so—’

  ‘Why does there have to be a “so” to it?’ said Kabir, innocently. ‘I just happen to like the lines of the play.’ And he quoted with an easy and unselfconscious air:

  ‘There is no woman’s sides

  Can bide the beating of so strong a passion

  As love doth give my heart: no woman’s heart

  So big to hold so much; they lack retention.

  Alas, their love may be called appetite,—

  No motion of the liver, but the palate,—

  That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt;

  But mine is all as hungry as the sea,

  And can digest as much: make no compare

  Between that love a woman can bear me

  And that I owe Olivia.’

  Lata felt her face burning. After a while she said: ‘You’re reciting someone else’s lines, I’m afraid. Those weren’t written for you.’ She paused, then added: ‘But you know them rather too well.’

  ‘I learned them—and a good deal more besides—the night before the auditions,’ said Kabir. ‘I hardly slept! I was determined to get the part of the Duke. But I had to settle for Malvolio. I hope that doesn’t mean anything by way of my fate. I got your note. I keep hoping we’ll meet at Prem Nivas or somewhere—’

  To her own surprise Lata found herself laughing. ‘You’re mad, absolutely mad,’ she said.

  She had turned away, but as she turned back towards him she noticed the last flicker of what was a look of real pain on his face.

  ‘I was only joking,’ said Lata.

  ‘Well,’ said Kabir, making light of it, ‘some are born mad, some achieve madness, and some have madness thrust upon them.’

  Lata was tempted to ask him which of the three categories he thought he belonged to. But instead she said: ‘So you do know Malvolio’s role as well.’

  ‘Oh, those lines,’ said Kabir. ‘Everyone knows those lines. Just poor Malvolio playing the fool.’

  ‘Why aren’t you playing cricket or something else instead?’ said Lata.

  ‘What? In the Monsoon Term?’

  But Mr Barua, who had arrived a few minutes ago, waved an imaginary baton towards the student who was to play the Duke, and said: ‘All right, well, then, now, “If music be . . .”, all right? Good.’ And the reading began.

  As Lata listened, she got drawn into the other world. It was a while before her first entrance. And when she began reading, she lost herself in the language. Soon she became Olivia. She survived her first exchange with Malvolio. Later she laughed with the rest at Malati’s rendering of Maria. The girl who played Viola too was excellent, and Lata enjoyed falling in love with her. There was even a slight resemblance between Viola and the boy who was to play her brother. Mr Barua had done his casting well.

  From time to time, however, Lata, emerging from the play, remembered where she was. She avoided looking at Kabir as much as she could, and only once did she feel that his eyes were on her. She felt certain that he would wish to talk to her afterwards, and she was glad that Malati and she had both got parts. One passage caused her particular difficulty, and Mr Barua had to coax her through it.

  Olivia: Why, how dost thou, man? What is the matter with thee?

  Malvolio: Not black in my mind, though yellow in my legs. It did come to his hands, and commands shall be executed. I think we do know the sweet Roman hand.

  Mr Barua [puzzled at the pause, and looking at Lata in expectation]: Yes, yes, good?

  Olivia: Wilt—

  Mr Barua: Wilt? Yes, wilt thou . . . good, excellent, keep on going, Miss Mehra, you’re doing very well.

  Olivia: Wilt thou—

  Mr Barua: Wilt thou? Yes, yes!

  Olivia: Wilt thou go to bed, Malvolio?

  Mr Barua [holding up one hand to still the guffaws, and waving at the dumbstruck Kabir with his imaginary baton]: How now, Malvolio?

  Malvolio: To bed? A
y, sweetheart; and I’ll come to thee.

  Everyone, other than the two actors and Mr Barua, joined in the laughter that followed. Even Malati. Et tu, thought Lata.

  The clown recited, rather than sang, the song at the end of the play, and Lata, catching Malati’s eye and avoiding Kabir’s, left quickly afterwards. It was not yet dark. But she need not have feared that he would ask her out that evening. It was Thursday, and he had another obligation.

  12.7

  When Kabir got to his uncle’s house, it was dark. He parked his bicycle and knocked. His aunt opened the door. The house, single-storeyed and sprawling, was not well lit. Kabir often remembered playing with his cousins in the large back-garden in his childhood, but for the last several years the house had appeared to him almost to be haunted. It was on Thursday evenings that he usually visited it now.

  ‘How is she today?’ he asked his aunt.

  His aunt, a thin, rather severe-looking but not unkind woman, frowned. ‘For two or three days it was all right. Then again this thing began. Do you want me to be with you?’

  ‘No—no, Mumani, I’d rather be with her alone.’

  Kabir entered the room at the back of the house, which for the last five years had been his mother’s bedroom. Like the rest of the house, the room was poorly lit, with just a couple of weak bulbs in heavy shades. She was sitting up in a hard-backed armchair, looking out of the window. She had always been a plump woman, but now she had grown fat. Her face was formed of a collection of pouches.

  She continued to stare out of the window at the dark shapes of the guava trees at the end of the garden. Kabir came and stood by her. She did not appear to register his presence until she said:

  ‘Close the door, it’s cold.’

  ‘I’ve closed it, Ammi-jaan.’

  Kabir did not say that it was not cold at all, that it was July, and that he was sweating after his bicycle ride.

  There was a pause. His mother had forgotten about him. He put his hand on her shoulder. She started for a second, then said:

  ‘So it’s Thursday night.’

  She used the Urdu word for Thursday, ‘jumeraat’, literally Friday-night. Kabir remembered how, as a boy, he had considered it amusing that Friday-night could itself have a night. His mother used to explain such matters to him in an affectionate, light-hearted way, because his father was far too occupied, voyaging through strange seas of thought alone, to bother much with his children. It was only when they were of an age to talk to him properly that he began to take a fitful interest in them.

  ‘Yes, Thursday night.’

  ‘How is Hashim?’ she asked. This was how she usually began.

  ‘Very well, he’s doing well in school. He had some very difficult homework, so he couldn’t come.’

  In fact, Hashim found it hard to bear such meetings, and when Kabir told him it was Thursday evening, he would usually find some reason not to go. Kabir, understanding his feelings only too well, would sometimes not remind him. That was the case this evening.

  ‘And Samia?’

  ‘Still in school in England.’

  ‘She never writes.’

  ‘Sometimes she does, Ammi—but rarely. We too miss her letters.’

  It was impossible to tell his mother that her daughter was dead, dead of meningitis, buried a year ago. Surely, he thought, this year-long conspiracy of silence could not have worked. However disturbed people’s minds may be, inklings, clues, suggestions, overheard fragments of conversation must work themselves into the mind and lodge themselves into a pattern indicating the truth. Once, indeed, a few months ago, his mother had said: ‘Ah, Samia. I won’t see her here, but in the other place.’ But whatever this meant, it did not prevent her from asking about her daughter subsequently. Sometimes, within minutes of a conversation or a thought, it would be wiped clean from her mind.

  ‘How is your father? Still asking if two plus two makes four?’ For an instant Kabir noticed something of the old amused and amusing light in her eyes, then it was dead.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When I was married to him—’

  ‘You still are, Ammi.’

  ‘You’re not listening to me. When I—you’ve made me forget—’

  Kabir held her hand. There was no responsive pressure.

  ‘Listen,’ his mother said. ‘Listen carefully to every word I say. We don’t have much time. They want to get me married off to someone else. And they have guards around my room at night. There are several of them. My brother has posted them there.’ Her hand became tense in his grasp.

  Kabir did not dissuade her. He was thankful they were alone.

  ‘Where?’ he asked.

  She jerked her head slightly in the direction of the trees.

  ‘Behind the trees?’ asked Kabir.

  ‘Yes. Even the children know,’ she said. ‘They look at me, and they say, toba! toba! One day she will have another baby. The world—’

  ‘Yes, Ammi.’

  ‘The world is a terrible place and people like to be cruel. If this is humanity, I want no part in it. Why are you not paying attention? They play music to tempt me. But, Mashallah, I have my wits about me. It is not for nothing that I am the daughter of an army officer. What do you have there?’

  ‘I brought a few sweets, Ammi. For you.’

  ‘I asked for a brass ring, and you have brought me sweets?’ Her voice rose in protest. She was, Kabir thought, much worse than usual. Usually the sweets pacified her and she stuffed them greedily into her mouth. This time, however, she would have none of them. She lost her breath, then continued:

  ‘There is medicine in those sweets. The doctors have put them there. If God had wanted me to have medicine, He would have sent word. Hashim, you do not care—’

  ‘Kabir, Ammi.’

  ‘Kabir came last week, on Thursday.’ The voice grew alarmed, wary, as if sensing that this too was part of a trap.

  ‘I—’ But now tears came to his eyes, and he could not speak.

  His mother appeared to be irritated by this new development, and her hand slipped out of his own, like a dead creature.

  ‘I am Kabir.’

  She accepted it. It was irrelevant.

  ‘They want to send me to a doctor, near the Barsaat Mahal. I know what they want.’ She looked downwards. Then her head dropped on to her chest, and she was asleep.

  Kabir stayed with her for another half hour, but she did not wake up. Finally, he got up and went to the door.

  His aunt, seeing his look of distress, said:

  ‘Kabir, son, why don’t you eat with us? It will do you good. And it will be good for us to get the chance to talk to you.’

  But Kabir wanted to get away on his bicycle, as fast and as far as he could. This was not the mother he had loved and known, but someone stranger than a stranger.

  There had been no history of such a condition in the family, nor any specific accident—a fall, a blow—that had caused it. She had been under some emotional strain for about a year after the death of her own mother, but then, that was a grief not unusual in the world. At first she was merely depressed, then she became anxious over trifles and incapable of handling the daily business of life. She had grown suspicious of people: the milkman, the gardener, her relatives, her husband. Dr Durrani, when he could not ignore the problem, sometimes hired people to help her, but her suspicions soon extended to them. Finally, she took it into her head that her husband was working out a detailed plot to harm her, and in order to foil it she tore up sheaves of his valuable and unfinished mathematical papers. It was at this stage that he asked her brother to take her away. The only other alternative was incarceration in an asylum. There was an asylum in Brahmpur, and it was located just beyond the Barsaat Mahal; perhaps it was this that she had been referring to earlier.

  When they were children, Kabir, Hashim and Samia had always, and rather proudly, declared their father to be slightly mad. It was clearly his eccentricity—or something aligned with it—that made people respe
ct him so much. But it was their affectionate, amusing and practical mother who had been afflicted with this strange visitation, so causelessly and so incurably. Samia at least, Kabir thought, has been spared the continuing torment of it all.

  12.8

  The Rajkumar of Marh was in trouble, and was up before Pran. Owing to problems with their landlord, the Rajkumar and his associates had been forced to seek housing in a students’ hostel, but they had refused to adapt their style of life to its norms. Now he and two of his friends had been seen by one of the Proctor’s assistants in Tarbuz ka Bazaar, just emerging from a brothel. When they were questioned, they had pushed him aside, and one of the boys had said:

  ‘You sister-fucker, what’s your business in all this? Are you a commission agent? What are you doing here anyway? Or are you out pimping for your sister as well?’ One of them had struck him across the face.

  They had refused to give their names, and denied that they were students. ‘We’re not students, we’re the grandfathers of students,’ they had asserted.

  In mitigation, or perhaps not in mitigation, it could be said that they were drunk at the time.

  On the way back, they had sung a popular film song, ‘I didn’t sigh, I didn’t complain—’ at the top of their lungs and had disturbed the peace of several neighbourhoods. The Proctor’s assistant had followed them at a safe distance. Being overconfident, they had returned to the hostel, where a compliant watchman had let them enter, though it was past midnight. They continued to sing for a while until their fellow-students begged them to shut up.

  The Rajkumar woke up the next morning with a bad headache and a premonition of disaster, and disaster came. The watchman, fearful now for his job, had been forced to identify them, and they were hauled up before the warden of the hostel. The warden asked them to leave the hostel immediately and recommended their expulsion. The Proctor, for his part, was generally in favour of severe action. Student rowdyism was getting to be a headache, and if aspirin didn’t cure it, decapitation would. He told Pran, who was now on the student welfare committee, which took care of discipline, to handle matters provisionally, as he himself was going to be tied up with arrangements for the students’ union elections. Ensuring fair and calm elections was a recurrent problem: students from various political parties (communists, socialists, and—under a different name—the Hindu revivalist RSS) had already started beating each other up with shoes and lathis as a prelude to fighting for votes.