A Suitable Boy

  But Maan must have looked completely perplexed. He could not imagine that Rasheed could possibly be paying court to Tasneem. Saeeda Bai continued: ‘Yes, yes, it’s true. This pious young student, who wouldn’t come when summoned into my presence because he was involved with teaching her a passage from the Holy Book, has now taken it into his head that she is in love with him, that she is going mad for his love, and that he owes it to her to marry her. He is a sly and dangerous young wolf.’

  ‘Honestly, Saeeda Begum, this is news to me. I have not seen him for two weeks,’ said Maan. He noticed that her pale neck was flushed.

  ‘That is hardly surprising. He returned here two weeks ago. If, as appeared from your protests, you have arrived recently—’

  ‘Recently?’ exclaimed Maan. ‘I have barely had time to wash my face and hands—’

  ‘Do you mean he never breathed a word of this? That is very unlikely.’

  ‘Indeed not, Saeeda Bai. He is a very earnest soul; he didn’t even want to teach me ghazals. Yes, he talked once or twice about socialism and methods for improving the economic status of the village—but love! Why, he is a married man.’

  Saeeda Bai smiled. ‘Has Dagh Sahib forgotten that men have not forgotten to count to four in our community?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ said Maan. ‘Of course. But—well, you are not pleased—’

  ‘No,’ said Saeeda Bai, with a flash of anger. ‘I am not pleased.’

  ‘Is Tasneem—’

  ‘No, she is not, she is not, and I will not have her be in love with some village lout—’ said Saeeda Begum. ‘He wants to marry her for my possessions. Then he will spend them on digging a village ditch. Or planting trees. Trees!’

  This did not at all accord with Maan’s sense of Rasheed, but he thought better than to contradict Saeeda Bai, who had worked herself into a state of indignation.

  ‘Well, how about a true-hearted admirer for Tasneem?’ he suggested by way of diversion.

  ‘It is not for admirers to choose her but to be chosen by me,’ said Saeeda Bai Firozabadi.

  ‘May not even a Nawabzada admire her, even if from afar?’

  ‘Whom precisely are you referring to?’ asked Saeeda Bai, her eyes flashing dangerously.

  ‘Let me say, a friend,’ said Maan, enjoying her unfeigned interest, and admiring the brilliance of her expression—like swordplay at sunset, he thought. How beautiful she looked—and what a wonderful night lay ahead.

  But Saeeda Begum got up and went to the gallery. She was biting the inside of her cheek. She clapped her hands again. ‘Bibbo!’ she shouted. ‘Bibbo! Bibbo! That stupid girl must have gone to the kitchen. Ah’—for Bibbo had come running up the stairs at the note of danger in her mistress’s voice—‘Bibbo, you’ve decided to grace us with your presence at last? I have been shouting myself hoarse for the last half hour.’

  Maan smiled to himself at the charming exaggeration.

  ‘Dagh Sahib is tired, Bibbo. Kindly show him out.’ Something caught in her voice.

  Maan started. What on earth had got into Saeeda Begum?

  He looked at her, but she had averted her face. She had sounded not merely angry but painfully upset.

  It must be my fault, he thought. I have said or done something terribly wrong. But what on earth have I done or said? he asked himself. Why should the thought of a Nawabzada paying court to Tasneem worry Saeeda Begum so greatly? After all, Firoz is the very opposite of a village lout.

  Saeeda Bai walked past him, picked up the birdcage, and went back to her bedroom, closing the door behind her. Maan was stunned. He looked at Bibbo. She was astonished too. It was her turn to look at him with sympathy.

  ‘Sometimes this happens,’ said Bibbo. But in fact it happened very rarely. ‘What did you do?’ she continued with immense curiosity. Her mistress was normally unshockable. Nothing even the Raja of Marh had done recently—and he had been in a foul mood because of the result of the Zamindari Abolition case—had had this effect.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Maan, staring at the closed door. After a minute he said softly, as if speaking to himself: ‘But she can’t really be serious.’ And, he thought to himself, I, for my part, am not going to be brushed off like this. He went to the bedroom door.

  ‘Oh, Dagh Sahib, please, please—’ cried Bibbo, horrified. The bedroom, when Saeeda Bai entered it, was sacrosanct.

  ‘Saeeda Begum,’ said Maan in a tender and puzzled voice, ‘what have I done? Please tell me. Why are you so angry with me? Was it Rasheed—or Firoz—or what?’

  There was no answer from inside.

  ‘Please, Kapoor Sahib—’ said Bibbo, raising her voice and trying to sound firm.

  ‘Bibbo!’ came the parakeet’s metallic and commanding voice from the bedroom. Bibbo started giggling.

  Maan was now trying to open the door, but the handle wouldn’t work. She must have locked it from the inside, he thought angrily. Aloud he said, ‘This is an unjust way to treat me, Saeeda Begum—you promise me heaven one minute and you throw me the next minute into hell. I hardly had time to bathe and shave after arriving in Brahmpur, and I came to see you. At least tell me why you are so upset.’

  From inside the room came Saeeda Bai’s voice: ‘Just go away, please, Dagh Sahib, have pity on me. I can’t see you today. I can’t give you reasons for everything.’

  ‘You didn’t give me reasons for keeping me away in your letter, and now that I’m here—’

  ‘Bibbo!’ commanded the parakeet. ‘Bibbo! Bibbo!’

  Maan began to pound on the door. ‘Let me in! Talk to me, please—and for God’s sake shut that half-witted parakeet up. I know you’re feeling bad. How do you think I feel? You’ve wound me up like a clock, and now—’

  ‘If you ever want to see me again,’ said Saeeda Bai from inside, her voice tearful, ‘you’ll go away now. Or I’ll tell Bibbo to call the watchman. You caused me pain involuntarily. I accept it was involuntary. Now you should accept it was pain. Please go away. Come back some other time. Stop it, Dagh Sahib—for God’s sake—if you wish to see me again.’

  Maan, in the face of this threat, stopped pounding the door and walked into the gallery, pent up and utterly perplexed. He was so lost that he didn’t even say he was going or wish her well. He couldn’t understand it at all. This was like a hailstorm falling out of a clear sky. Still, it was clearly no mere coquettishness.

  ‘But what did you do?’ persisted Bibbo, a little frightened by her mistress’s mood, but enjoying the drama. Poor Dagh Sahib! She had never heard anyone pound on Saeeda Bai’s door before. What passion!

  ‘Nothing at all,’ said Maan, feeling frustrated and ill-used, and glad of someone’s sympathy. ‘Nothing at all.’ Surely it was not for this that he had exiled himself in the countryside for weeks. She had just a few minutes earlier virtually promised him a night of tenderness and ecstasy, and now—for no reason at all—had decided not merely to default, but to impale him with emotional threats.

  ‘Poor Dagh Sahib,’ said Bibbo, looking at his bewildered but attractive face. ‘You’ve forgotten your cane. Here it is.’

  ‘Oh—you’re right,’ said Maan.

  As they walked down the stairs, she contrived to brush, then press against him. She stood on tiptoe and turned her lips to his face. Maan could not refrain from kissing her. He was feeling so frustrated that he would have made immediate and frantically passionate love to anyone, even to Tahmina Bai.

  What an understanding girl Bibbo is, thought Maan, as they stood there kissing and embracing for a minute. Intelligent, too. Yes, it isn’t fair at all, it isn’t fair, and she can see it.

  But Bibbo was perhaps not intelligent enough. They were kissing on the landing, and the tall mirror carried their reflection to the gallery. Saeeda Bai’s mercurial anger had been followed by mercurial regret at her treatment of Maan. She decided to reassure Maan of her affection for him by bidding him goodbye from the gallery as he walked across the hall. Now she glanced down the stairs to
see what was keeping him. What she saw in the mirror made her bite her lower lip to the point where it almost bled.

  She stood transfixed. After a bit, Maan came to his senses and disengaged himself. The pretty Bibbo, giggling a little, escorted him across the hall to the door.

  When she returned, she crossed the hall and walked up the stairs to clear away the sherbet glasses from Saeeda Bai’s outer room. The Begum Sahiba will probably lie on her bed for an hour, and come out only when she feels hungry, she thought. She giggled a little more at the memory of the kiss. She was still giggling to herself when she got to the gallery. There she saw Saeeda Bai. One look at Saeeda Bai’s face, and the giggling stopped.

  12.17

  The next day Maan visited Bhaskar.

  Bhaskar had been bored for a few days. Then he had decided to train himself in the metric system, although it was not yet in use anywhere in India. The advantages of this system over the British one became immediately apparent to him when he started using volume measurements. All sorts of comparisons became obvious when he used the metric system. For instance, if he wanted to compare the volume of Brahmpur Fort with that of Savita’s baby-to-be, he could do it instantly, without converting from cubic yards to cubic inches. It wasn’t as if that conversion presented great difficulty to Bhaskar; it was just that it was inconvenient and inelegant.

  Another delight of the metric system was that Bhaskar could roam with unfettered delight through his beloved powers of ten. But after a few days he had tired of the metric system and its joys. His friend Dr Durrani had not visited him for some time, though Kabir had. Bhaskar liked Kabir well enough, but it was Dr Durrani who always brought new mathematical insights in tow, and without him Bhaskar had had to fend for himself.

  Again he was bored, and complained to Mrs Mahesh Kapoor. After a bit of grumbling—he wanted to go back to Misri Mandi, and his grandmother was very reluctant to let him go—he applied to his grandfather instead.

  Mahesh Kapoor told Bhaskar with stern affection that he couldn’t help him. All such decisions were in his wife’s domain.

  ‘But I’m terribly bored,’ said Bhaskar. ‘And I haven’t had a headache in a week. Why must I spend half the day in bed? I want to go to school. I don’t like it here in Prem Nivas.’

  ‘What?’ said his grandfather. ‘Not even with your Nana and Nani here?’

  ‘No,’ stated Bhaskar. ‘It’s all right for a day or two. Besides, you’re never actually here.’

  ‘That’s true. I have so much work to do—and so many decisions to make. Well, you’ll be interested to know that I’ve decided to leave the Congress Party.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bhaskar, doing his best to sound interested. ‘And what does that mean? Will they lose?’

  Mahesh Kapoor frowned. The effort and stress that the decision had cost him was not something a child could be expected to understand. Bhaskar, besides, apparently doubted even that two plus two always equalled four, and could not be expected to sympathize greatly when the certainties of his grandfather’s life were shifting underfoot. And yet Bhaskar at other times was so certain of his facts and figures, though he may well have arrived at them by erratic frog-leaps of abstract thought. Mahesh Kapoor, who was not awed by anyone else in the family, was perhaps even a little afraid of Bhaskar. A strange boy! He must certainly, thought Mahesh Kapoor, be given every opportunity to develop his rather eerie powers.

  ‘Well, for a start,’ said Mahesh Kapoor, ‘it means that I will have to decide what constituency I must fight from. The Congress Party is very strong in the city, but that’s where my strength lies too. On the other hand, my old constituency in the city has been redrawn, and that will present me with certain problems.’

  ‘What problems?’

  ‘Nothing you would understand,’ Mahesh Kapoor told Bhaskar. Then, seeing Bhaskar’s intense, even hostile, frown, he continued: ‘The caste composition is quite different now. I’ve been looking over many of the new constituencies that have been delineated by the Election Commissioner, and the population figures—’

  ‘Figures,’ breathed Bhaskar.

  ‘Yes, arranged by religion and caste in the 1931 Census. Caste! Caste! You may think it’s madness, but you can never ignore it.’

  ‘Can I have a look at these statistics, Nanaji?’ said Bhaskar. ‘I’ll tell you what to do. Just tell me what variables are in your favour—’

  ‘Speak in clear Hindi, idiot, it’s impossible to understand what you are saying,’ said Mahesh Kapoor to his grandson, still affectionately, but rather irritated by Bhaskar’s presumption.

  Soon, however, Bhaskar had all the facts and figures he needed to keep him more than happy for at least three days, and he started poring over the constituencies.

  12.18

  When Maan came to visit, he asked the servant to take him straight to Bhaskar’s room. He discovered Bhaskar sitting up in bed. The bed was covered with paper.

  ‘Hello, genius,’ said Maan genially.

  ‘Hello,’ said Bhaskar, rather abstracted. ‘Just a minute.’ He stared at a chart for a minute, scribbled down a few numbers with a pencil, and turned towards his uncle.

  Maan kissed him, and asked him how he had been.

  ‘Fine, Maan Maama, but everyone makes such a fuss here.’

  ‘How’s the head?’

  ‘Head?’ said Bhaskar, surprised. ‘My head is fine.’

  ‘Well, then, do you want some sums?’

  ‘Not just at the moment,’ said Bhaskar. ‘My head is full of them.’

  Maan could hardly believe this response. It was as if Kumbhkaran had decided to wake up at dawn and go on a diet.

  ‘What are you doing? It looks very serious,’ he ventured.

  ‘Very serious indeed,’ said Mahesh Kapoor’s voice. Maan turned around. His father, mother, and sister had come into the room. Veena hugged Maan tearfully, then sat down on the edge of Bhaskar’s bed after moving away a few sheets of paper. Bhaskar didn’t object.

  ‘Bhaskar’s been complaining that he’s bored here. He wants to leave,’ said Veena to Maan.

  ‘Oh, I can stay for two or three days more,’ said Bhaskar.

  ‘Really?’ said Veena, surprised. ‘Perhaps I really should have your head examined twice a day.’ Maan cheered up at his sister’s response. If she could joke in this way, Bhaskar must be all right.

  ‘What’s he been up to?’ he asked.

  Mahesh Kapoor replied laconically: ‘He’s telling me which constituency I should fight from.’

  ‘Why not from your old one?’ asked Maan.

  ‘They’ve redrawn it.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Besides, I’m going to leave the Congress Party.’

  ‘Oh!’ Maan looked at his mother, but she did not say anything. She appeared rather unhappy, though. She was not in favour of her husband’s decision, but did not feel she could stop him. He would have to resign as Minister of Revenue; he would have to move out of the party that was associated in the people’s minds with the freedom movement, the party of which he and she had been lifelong members; he would have to find funds from somewhere to compete with the sizeable funds of the state Congress Party, so effectively garnered and dispensed by the Home Minister. Above all, he would have to struggle once again against hard odds, and he was not young.

  ‘Maan, you’ve grown so thin,’ said his mother.

  ‘Thin? Me?’ said Maan.

  ‘Yes, and you’re so much darker,’ she said, sadly. ‘Almost like Pran. This village life is not good for you. Now we must take care of you properly. You must tell me what you want at every meal—’

  ‘Yes, well, it’s good to see you back, and I hope that things have changed,’ said Mahesh Kapoor, pleased but somewhat anxious to see his son.

  ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me about Bhaskar?’ said Maan.

  Both Veena and her mother glanced towards Mahesh Kapoor.

  ‘Well,’ said Mahesh Kapoor, ‘you must trust us to decide certain things.’

&n
bsp; ‘So if Savita’s baby had been born—’

  ‘You’re here now, Maan, and that’s the main thing,’ said his father shortly. ‘Where are your things? The servant can’t find them. I’ll have them sent up to your room. And before you leave for Banaras you must—’

  ‘My things are at Firoz’s house. I’m staying there.’

  This remark was greeted with an amazed silence.

  Mahesh Kapoor looked annoyed, and Maan was not too upset by this. But Mrs Mahesh Kapoor looked hurt, and he felt bad. He began to wonder if, after all, he had done the right thing.

  ‘So this is not your home any more?’ she said.

  ‘Of course it is, of course it is, Ammaji, but with so many people staying here—’

  ‘People—really, Maan,’ Veena said.

  ‘It’s only temporary. I’ll move back when I can. I have to talk things over with Firoz as well. My future and so on—’

  ‘Your future lies in Banaras, and no question about it,’ said his father impatiently.

  His mother, sensing possible trouble, said: ‘Well, we will talk about all this after lunch. You can stay for lunch, can’t you?’ She looked at him tenderly.

  ‘Of course I can, Ammaji,’ said Maan, hurt.

  ‘Good. We have alu paratha today.’ This was one of Maan’s favourite dishes. ‘When did you come?’

  ‘I just came. I thought I’d see Bhaskar before anyone else.’

  ‘No, to Brahmpur.’

  ‘Yesterday evening.’

  ‘So why didn’t you come and have dinner with us?’ asked his mother.

  ‘I was tired.’

  ‘So you had dinner at Baitar House?’ asked his father. ‘How is the Nawab Sahib?’

  Maan flushed but did not answer. This was intolerable. He was glad he was not going to live under the dominating eye of his father.

  ‘So where did you have dinner?’ repeated his father.