A Suitable Boy

  L.N. Agarwal, disgusted with the proceedings, reflected that the young man thought nothing of the fact that he was parleying on equal terms with the chief executive of the state. And even S.S. Sharma, who normally loved the outward forms of respect and obeisance, had, it appeared, so far forgotten what was due to him as not to mind their absence.

  ‘I understand and agree,’ the Chief Minister was saying. L.N. Agarwal looked at S.S. Sharma and thought: You are getting old and weak. You have acceded to unreason in order to buy a temporary peace. But the precedent of this peace will remain to haunt us, your successors. And you may not have bought peace anyway. Still, we will know soon enough about that.

  That night the injured student died. The grieving father spoke to those who were holding vigil outside. The next day the body was cremated at the cremation ghat on the Ganga. The students sat on the great steps leading down to the ghat. There was no procession. The dense crowd of mourners was quiet as the flames crackled around the body. The police had been instructed to keep away. There was no violence.

  12.25

  Dr Kishen Chand Seth had booked two tables in the small bridge room of the Subzipore Club. Noticing his name on the roster for the day, none of the other members had booked either of the two remaining tables. The librarian, who usually made it a point to look at the roster himself (the bridge room was located next door to the library), sighed when he saw the name of the eminent radiologist. There would be little peace for him that afternoon; and, if they continued to play through the film, that evening either.

  Dr Kishen Chand Seth was seated facing a tiger skin that was hanging head downwards on the wall. The tiger had been there for as long as anyone could remember, though its connection with bridge was unclear. Prints of Oxford colleges—including one with a pelican perched on a pillar in the quad—hung on the remaining walls. The four green baize-covered bridge tables were arranged squarely in the small square room. Apart from the sixteen hardbacked chairs there were no others. It was a fairly austere room, if one excepted the tiger. Its one large window looked out upon a gravel drive, and beyond that the lawn where members and their guests sat on white cane chairs in the shade of large trees and sipped long drinks; and far beyond that the Ganga.

  The seven others constituting Dr Kishen Chand Seth’s bridge party were: his wife Parvati, who was wearing an exceptionally tasteless sari with roses printed on it; his relation by marriage, the ex-Minister of Revenue, Mahesh Kapoor, whom Dr Seth seemed to recall he was currently on good terms with; Mr Shastri, the Advocate-General; the Nawab Sahib of Baitar; Professor and Mrs O.P. Mishra; and Dr Durrani. There were six men and two women, and the draw of cards had placed them in such a way that the two women were seated at the same table, though they were not partners. Mrs O.P. Mishra, a frightened but babbling sort of woman, was a good bridge player. Parvati Seth was not a good player, and irritated her husband a great deal by her hesitant and obtuse bidding whenever she happened to be his partner. He very rarely dared to rebuke her, however, and vented his spleen on anyone else who happened to be nearby.

  Dr Kishen Chand Seth’s idea of an ideal afternoon of bridge was furious, ruthless play combined with continuous conversation; and his idea of entertaining conversation was a series of small shocks and explosions.

  When he was most delighted, he actually cackled. And it was a cackle that preceded the following remark:

  ‘Two spades. Hm, hm, hmm, now, Minister—ex-Minister, I should say—you are taking as long to bid as it must have taken you to decide to resign.’

  Mahesh Kapoor frowned in concentration. ‘What? Pass.’

  ‘Or as long as it took him to frame the Zamindari Act, wouldn’t you say, Nawab Sahib? He was always a slow bidder; let’s hope he takes his time gobbling up your estates. But there’s no reason for you to bid so slowly.’

  The Nawab Sahib, somewhat distracted, said, ‘Three hearts.’

  ‘But I forget,’ said Dr Kishen Chand Seth, turning to the left. ‘You won’t be doing that any longer. Who will, I wonder. Agarwal? Could he handle both Revenue and Home?’

  Mr Mahesh Kapoor sat up a little more stiffly, but said nothing. He held his cards in a slightly tighter grip. He thought for a moment of reminding his host that it had been L.N. Agarwal himself who had issued the order for requisitioning cars. But he held his tongue.

  ‘No, er, no bid,’ said Dr Durrani.

  Dr Kishen Chand Seth, having seen three of his squibs fizzle out, sent up a fourth. ‘It’s a portfolio that requires someone responsible, and who else is there in the Cabinet as competent as Agarwal? Now, what shall I bid? What shall I bid? Three spades. Good. But I must say he did a good job teaching those students a lesson. In my day, medical students stuck to their Anatomy and did not make cadavers of themselves. Three spades. Yes, what’s your bid, now, Kapoor Sahib?’

  Mahesh Kapoor looked across at his partner, and thought of the student who had restored his grandson to him. Dr Durrani seemed to be going through a struggle with himself. ‘Well, er, do you, well, consider that the lathi charge was, um, justified?’ he asked, scrunching his eyes up. There was as much disapproval in his voice as it was ever capable of holding, which wasn’t much. He had expressed only the mildest verbal disapproval when his wife had tried to destroy a large part of his life’s work by tearing up his mathematical papers.

  ‘Oh, but I do, I do—’ cried Dr Kishen Chand Seth with relish. ‘One must be cruel only to be kind. The surgeon’s knife; we doctors learn that at an early age. But you are a doctor too, of course. A doctor of a kind. Not yet a professor, but no doubt that will come. You should ask Professor Mishra there what it takes to rise to such a height.’

  By such means did Dr Kishen Chand Seth knit the two tables together into a web of distracting conversation. His own game thrived upon the stimulus that this turmoil provided. Most of the others were used to him through acquaintance, and tried not to get provoked. But anyone else who was present and attempting to play in the bridge room at that time would have been tempted to complain to the committee, had Dr Kishen Chand Seth himself not been a member of it. Since he was one of the oldest members of the Subzipore Club and since he believed in terrorizing everyone else before they could complain even mildly about him, his odd behaviour escaped its normal consequences.

  When he saw the dummy’s hand, Dr Kishen Chand Seth almost had a fit. After he had played the hand, he and the Nawab Sahib were one trick down, and Dr Seth turned roundly on his partner. ‘Good heavens, Nawab Sahib, with such a poor hand, how did you go on to bid three hearts? We had no chance of making nine tricks.’

  ‘You could have had hearts.’

  Dr Kishen Chand Seth bristled with rage. ‘If I had hearts, partner, I would have bid the suit earlier,’ he almost shouted. ‘If you didn’t have spades, you should have shut up—the bidding. This is what happens when you turn your back on your religion and play cards with infidels.’

  The Nawab Sahib told himself, as he often had before, that he would never respond to one of Dr Kishen Chand Seth’s invitations in the future.

  ‘Now, now, Kishy,’ said Parvati mildly, glancing across from the other table.

  ‘Sorry—sorry—’ said Dr Kishen Chand Seth. ‘I—well—well, whose turn is it to deal? Ah, yes, drinks. What will everyone have to drink?’ And he clicked out the small wood and brass extension located immediately to his right in the table; it contained an ashtray and a coaster. ‘First the ladies. Gin for the ladies?’

  Mrs O.P. Mishra cast a terrified look at her husband. Parvati Seth, catching the look, said, ‘Kishy!’ rather sharply.

  Kishy was brought to heel for the next few minutes. He alternated his concentration between his cards, the tiger, and (once the waiter had brought it in) his whisky. Normally he was restricted to tea and nimbu pani, but he threw such a tantrum if he was not allowed his whisky when playing bridge that Parvati thought it best to husband her strength for more winnable battles. The only problem was that the whisky had unpredictable effects. On
some days it made him slightly mellow, on other days more belligerent. It never made him amorous. And rarely did it make him, as it makes some men, sentimental; only movies had that power.

  Dr Kishen Chand Seth was looking forward to the movie which was to be screened in the club today: a Charlie Chaplin movie, he recalled. His granddaughter Savita had very much wanted to see it, and despite her husband’s and mother’s advice, had availed herself of his membership to do so. Pran and Mrs Rupa Mehra, reasonably enough, had insisted on coming along. But Dr Seth could not see them sitting anywhere on the lawn even after an hour had gone by and they were well into the second rubber and thirteenth argument.

  ‘Er, well,’ Dr Durrani was remonstrating, ‘I can’t entirely, you know, agree with you. A fine calculation of probabilities is an essential part—’

  ‘Essential, nothing!’ Dr Kishen Chand Seth cut him off. ‘Most good bridge play is simply deduction, not a judgement of probabilities. Now I’ll give you an example,’ he went on. Dr Kishen Chand Seth liked arguing from examples. ‘It happened to me just a week ago. A week ago, wasn’t it, dear?’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Parvati. She remembered the game well, because her husband’s triumph had spiced their evening conversations throughout the week.

  ‘I was the declarer and I played clubs early in the game. I had five, my dummy had two, and the man on the right ruffed.’

  ‘Woman, Kishy.’

  ‘Yes, yes, woman!’ said Dr Kishen Chand Seth, expostulating as much as he dared.

  ‘That meant that the man on my left had to have had six clubs, or, rather, five after this round. Now later in the game it was clear that he could only have space in his hand for two hearts; since he had bid spades, I assumed he must have had at least four spades, and the residue of those had to take up the rest of the place in his hand.’

  ‘Isn’t that Rupa, dear?’ asked Parvati suddenly, pointing towards the lawn. She had heard the story so often that she had entirely forgotten to treat it with reverence.

  This cruel interruption threw her husband completely off his stride. ‘Yes, yes, it is Rupa. Let it be Rupa—or anyone else,’ he cried, dismissing his daughter from his mind. ‘Now, you see, I had the ace, the king, and the jack of hearts. So I played the ace first and then the king. As I had deduced, the queen fell.’ He paused to retaste the memory. ‘Everyone said that I was a lucky player or that the probabilities were in my favour. But that was not the case at all. Luck—nothing! Probabilities—nothing! I had my eyes open, and, most of all, my brain open. To deduction,’ he ended triumphantly. Then, since it sounded like a toast, he took a good gulp of whisky.

  Dr Durrani looked unconvinced.

  The next table, though often dragged by Dr Seth into the vortex of his own, was much calmer. Mr Shastri, the Advocate-General, was at his genial best, and did his best (in his syllabic manner) to draw out Mrs O.P. Mishra, who played a good game but seemed to be worried that she was doing so; she kept darting glances at her husband opposite. Bridge, where the bidding consisted almost entirely of monosyllabic words, was the ideal game for Mr Shastri. He was happy that he was not sitting at the other table, where he would have been forced by his host into an embarrassing conversation about the taking over of the estates and his estimation of the government’s chances when the zamindari case went to the Supreme Court. He sympathized equally with the Nawab Sahib and Mahesh Kapoor. Mahesh Kapoor had exploded twice in the face of Dr Kishen Chand Seth’s opinions, and appeared about to do so for the third time. The Nawab Sahib had subsided into icy etiquette; he now refused to contradict even the most outrageous of his host’s comments, or to take visible offence at his repeated offers of whisky—indeed, even to repeat what Dr Kishen Chand Seth well knew, that he was a teetotaller. Only Dr Durrani was able to maintain an absent-minded and undisagreeable disagreement, and this exasperated Dr Kishen Chand Seth.

  Meanwhile, Professor O.P. Mishra was holding forth for the benefit of Parvati and the Advocate-General:

  ‘Politicians, you know, prefer to appoint mediocrities to important posts not merely because they themselves will look better in comparison or because they are afraid of competition, but also because, you see, a person appointed on merit feels that it is owed to him, while a mediocrity is only too conscious that it is not.’

  ‘I see,’ smiled Mr Shastri. ‘And it is not so with your pro-fes-sion?’

  ‘Well,’ said Professor Mishra, ‘there’s always the odd case here or there, you know, but in general, in our department at least, one makes every attempt to ensure the pre-eminence of excellence. . . . Simply because someone may, for instance, be the son of an illustrious person ought not, in our eyes—’

  ‘What’s that you’re saying, Mishra?’ cried Dr Seth from the next table. ‘Do repeat that—I didn’t quite hear you; nor did my friend Kapoor Sahib. . . .’

  Dr Seth was never happier than when walking through an emotional minefield—unless it was when he was dragging seven other troops along with him.

  Professor Mishra pursed his lips sweetly and said: ‘My dear Dr Seth, I have quite forgotten what I was rambling on about—perhaps because I feel so relaxed in these delightful surroundings. Or perhaps it is your excellent whisky that has made my memory as limp as my limbs. But what an amazing mechanism the human body is: who could imagine that one could feed in, say, four arrowroot biscuits and one boiled egg and get an output, say, of three spades—and one trick down?’

  Parvati quickly interjected: ‘Professor Mishra, a young lecturer was telling us just a few days ago about the pleasures of teaching. What a noble profession it must be.’

  ‘My dear lady,’ said Professor Mishra, ‘teaching is a thankless task, but one undertakes it because one feels one has a calling, as it were. A couple of years ago I had rather an interesting discussion on the radio about the concept of teaching as a vocation—with a lawyer by the name of Dilip Pandey, in which I said—or was it Deepak Pandey—anyway, I said—’

  ‘Dilip,’ said the Advocate-General. ‘He is now dead, in fact.’

  ‘Oh, is he? What a pity. Well, I made the point that there are three kinds of teachers: those who are forgotten, those who are remembered and hated, and the third, the lucky ones, and I hope I am one of them, those who are remembered and’—he paused—‘forgiven.’

  He looked rather pleased with his formulation.

  ‘Oh, you are, you are—’ said his wife eagerly.

  ‘What’s that?’ cried Dr Kishen Chand Seth. ‘Speak louder, we can’t hear you.’ He banged his stick on the floor.

  Towards the end of the second rubber, the librarian (having been requested to do so twice already by the users of the library) sent a note to the bridge room. If Parvati had not restrained him, Dr Kishen Chand Seth would have screamed in wrath upon receiving it. As it was, he could neither believe nor stomach the insubordination of the librarian in requesting that the volume of conversation in the bridge room be reduced. He would haul the fellow up before the committee. A useless fellow, who spent most of his time dozing in the stacks, who treated the job as a sinecure, who—

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Parvati. ‘Yes, dear, I know. Now we at our table have finished our second rubber, but we’re talking quite quietly. Why don’t you concentrate on finishing yours, and then we can all go out on to the lawn; the film will begin in about twenty minutes. It’s a pity that in the monsoon they screen it indoors. Ah, yes, Pran and Savita are sitting there; eating chips, I suppose. She looks enormous. I think perhaps we’ll go and join them immediately, and you can follow.’

  ‘I am afraid we must now be going,’ said Professor Mishra, getting up hastily. His wife stood up too.

  ‘Must you go? Can’t you join us?’ asked Parvati.

  ‘No—no—far too busy these days—there are guests in the house—and I have been saddled with a good deal of unnecessary curriculum revision,’ explained Professor Mishra.

  Mahesh Kapoor looked at him for a second, then returned to his cards.

  ‘Thank y
ou, thank you,’ said the whale, and glided quickly out of sight, followed by his minnow.

  ‘How peculiar,’ said Parvati, turning back to the table. ‘What do you make of it?’ she asked Mr Shastri.

  ‘Force-ful per-son-al-it-y,’ was Mr Shastri’s opinion. Though it was unrevealing, it was delivered with a smile and conveyed the sense that Mr Shastri had some knowledge of the world, and did not opine where opinion was unnecessary.

  Parvati had begun to have second thoughts about letting her husband follow her. For one thing, he might still need to be managed. For another, she did not relish meeting Mrs Rupa Mehra without his support. The reaction of Kishy’s daughter to her rose-spangled sari was unpredictable. So Parvati waited for a few more minutes to see if the rubber would end. It did. Her husband was on the winning side. With some glee he was totting up his points for the hand—including an overtrick and a hundred honours. She breathed more freely.

  12.26

  Out on the lawn, everyone was introduced to everyone else. Savita found herself engaged in a slow and deliberate conversation with Mr Shastri. She found him very interesting. He was telling her about a woman lawyer at the Brahmpur High Court, who was very successful in criminal practice despite the fact that she had had to overcome the reservations of clients, colleagues and judges.

  Pran was feeling a bit exhausted, but Savita had insisted on seeing Charlie Chaplin ‘once more before I become a mother and see everything differently’; her grandfather’s Buick, a little the worse for having been requisitioned, had been sent to fetch them. Lata had gone off to one of those evening rehearsals so dreaded by Mrs Rupa Mehra; the director had said that it was necessary to make up for the rehearsals lost because of the student agitation.

  Savita was looking happy and energetic, and eating with great appetite the club speciality: small goli kababs, each with a raisin in the middle. The more she talked to Mr Shastri, the more she thought that it would be very interesting to study law.