A Suitable Boy

  ‘—and of course, I understand nothing about these handicaps and so on, but I do like the names, eagles and birdies and so on. They sound so—so—it’s all right, he’s gone. Now, Billy, when should we meet?’

  ‘We can’t meet. Not after this!’ Billy sounded horrified. He was, moreover, transfixed by Meenakshi’s little pear-like earrings, which he found curiously disconcerting.

  ‘I can’t get pregnant twice,’ said Meenakshi. ‘It’s perfectly safe now.’

  Billy was looking ill. He glanced quickly across the room at Shireen.

  ‘Really, Meenakshi!’

  ‘Don’t “really Meenakshi” me,’ said Meenakshi with a sharp edge to her voice. ‘We are going to continue as before, Billy, or I won’t answer for the consequences.’

  ‘You wouldn’t tell him—’ gasped Billy.

  Meenakshi drew her elegant neck upward and smiled at Billy. She looked tired, perhaps even a little worried. She did not answer his question.

  ‘And the—well—the baby?’ said Billy.

  ‘I’ll have to think of what to do about that,’ said Meenakshi. ‘I’d go mad wondering about it otherwise. Not knowing. That’s something I might need a little help with too. So, let’s say Friday afternoon?’

  Billy nodded his head helplessly.

  ‘Friday afternoon, then, that’s fixed,’ said Meenakshi. ‘It really is lovely to see you again. But you’re looking a little under the weather, Billy. Eat a raw egg before you come.’ And she moved away, blowing him a kiss when she was halfway across the room.

  13.33

  After dinner and a little dancing (‘Don’t know how long you’ll be able to do this, darling,’ said Arun to her), they returned home. Meenakshi turned on the lights, and opened the fridge for a drink of cold water. Arun looked at the thick stack of gramophone records lying on the dining table and growled:

  ‘This is the third time Varun’s done this. If he wants to live in this house, he must learn that a house is not a sty. Where is he anyway?’

  ‘He said he’d be out late, darling.’

  Arun headed for the bedroom, undoing his tie as he went. He put on the light, and stopped dead.

  The place had been ransacked. The long black iron trunk, usually covered with a mattress and a piece of brocade and used as a window seat, was lying open, its lock broken. The sturdy leather attaché case that lay inside the trunk was empty. Its nine-lever lock had been too hard to force, so the top of the thick hide had been slashed and hacked with a knife in a gaping, S-shaped curve. The jewellery boxes inside had been emptied of their contents and were lying scattered here and there on the floor. He looked quickly around the room. Nothing else had been touched, but everything in the attaché case had gone: everything from the jewellery given by both sides of the family to his father’s one remaining gold medal. Only the necklace that Meenakshi had worn the previous night and that she hadn’t locked away but left on the dressing table had been overlooked; and, of course, whatever she was wearing tonight. Much had been taken that was of great sentimental value. Worst of all—considering that he belonged to the insurance department at Bentsen Pryce and should perhaps have taken the coverage despite the expense of the premium—none of it was insured.

  When Arun went back to the drawing room, he looked ashen.

  ‘What’s the matter, darling?’ asked Meenakshi, moving towards the bedroom.

  ‘Nothing, darling,’ said Arun, barring her way. ‘Nothing. Sit down. No, in the drawing room.’ He could imagine what the scene might do to her, especially in her present state. He shook his head at the image of the hacked attaché case.

  ‘But something is terribly wrong, Arun,’ said Meenakshi.

  Slowly, and with his arm around her, he told her what had happened.

  ‘Thank God Aparna’s with your parents tonight. But where are the servants?’

  ‘I let them off early.’

  ‘We must see if Hanif is asleep in the quarters at the back.’

  The bearer-cum-cook was horrified. He had been asleep. He had seen and heard nothing. And he was very afraid that suspicion would fall on him. Clearly there appeared to have been inside knowledge of where the jewellery was kept. Perhaps it was the sweeper, he suggested. He was terrified of what the police would do to him under interrogation.

  Arun tried to phone the police, but there was no response on the line.

  After a stream of six obscenities, he came to his senses. The last thing he wanted to do was to upset his wife.

  ‘Darling, you wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ll drive over to the police station and inform them.’

  But Meenakshi did not want to remain alone in the house, and said that she would go along with Arun. She had begun to tremble slightly. In the car she put her hand on his shoulder while he drove.

  ‘It’s all right, darling,’ said Arun. ‘At least all of us are all right. Don’t worry. Try not to think of it. It isn’t good for you or the baby.’

  13.34

  Meenakshi was so upset by the robbery and the loss of her jewellery, which did not include the gold earrings that she had got made but did include her father-in-law’s second gold medal, that she needed to recover at her parents’ house for a week. Arun was as sympathetic as he could be, and though he knew he would miss her and Aparna, he felt that it would be good for her to be away from the house for a while. Varun returned the next morning after a night with his friends. He grew pale when he heard the news. When Arun told him that if he hadn’t been ‘drinking around town all night there would have been someone at home to prevent the robbery’, his face grew red. Arun too, after all, had been out having a good time. But instead of provoking Arun, who appeared to be at the end of his tether, Varun kept quiet and slunk into his room.

  Arun wrote to Mrs Rupa Mehra, telling her about the robbery. He assured her that Meenakshi was well, but was forced to mention that the other medal too had been lost. He could imagine how badly she would take this. He too had loved his father and was upset most particularly about the loss of this medal. But there was nothing to be done except hope that the police would trace the culprit or culprits. They were already interrogating the sweeper-boy: beating him up, to be precise. Arun, when he heard of this, tried to stop them.

  ‘But how else can we find out what happened—how the thieves came to know where you kept the jewellery?’ asked the station house officer.

  ‘I don’t care. I won’t have this,’ said Arun, and made sure that they didn’t beat him up further. The worst of it was that Arun himself suspected that it was the sweeper-boy who had been in league with the criminals. It was unlikely that it was the Toothless Crone or Hanif. As for the part-time mali or the driver, they never entered the house.

  Another matter about which Arun wrote to his mother was his meeting with Haresh. The loss of face he had suffered at the Khandelwals’ still made him flush whenever he thought about it. He told Mrs Rupa Mehra precisely what he thought of his prospective brother-in-law: that he was a short, pushy, crass young man with too good an opinion of himself. He had a smattering of the grimy Midlands over a background of the malodorous alleys of Neel Darvaza. Neither St Stephen’s nor the culture of London had had much effect on him. He dressed dressily; he lacked the social graces; and his English was oddly unidiomatic for one who had studied it at college and had lived two years in the country. As for mixing in Arun’s kind of company (the Calcutta Club and the Tollygunge Racecourse: the elite of Calcutta society, both Indian and European), Arun could not see how it would be possible. Khanna was a foreman—a foreman!—in that Czech shoemaking establishment. Mrs Rupa Mehra could not seriously believe that he was fit material to marry a Mehra of their class and background, or to drag her daughter down with him. Arun added that Meenakshi, by and large, agreed with him.

  What he did not add, because he did not know it, was that Meenakshi had other plans for Lata. Now that she was staying with the Chatterjis, she began to work on Amit. Kakoli was a willing accomplice. Both of them liked Lata, a
nd both of them thought that she would be just the right match for their elder brother. She would put up with his quirks, and appreciate his work. She was intelligent and literary; and though Amit could subsist on very little conversation in life (unlike his sisters, or even Dipankar), what conversation he did have could not be fatuous or vacuous—unless, of course, it was with his brothers or sisters, where he was comparatively unbuttoned.

  At any rate, Kakoli—who had once told him that she reeeeeally pitied the woman who had to marry him—had decided that she needn’t pity Lata, who would be capable both of understanding and of handling her eccentric brother.

  Perhaps Meenakshi’s plotting was a good thing. Amit, who had liked Lata a great deal, would not have been prodded into action had it not been for his energetic and conniving sisters.

  Instead of employing the usual Kakoli-couplets, which had proven to be ineffectual, the two sisters were much more gentle with Amit this time. Meenakshi told him that there was a vague Other on the scene. At first she had thought it was a fellow called Akbar or something who was acting with Lata in As You Like It, but the main contender had turned out to be a bumptious cobbler, who was utterly unsuited to Lata; she thus implied that Amit would be rescuing Lata from an unhappy marriage by intervening. Kakoli simply told him that Lata liked him, and that she knew he liked Lata, and that she couldn’t see what he was making such a fuss about. Why didn’t he send her a love letter and one of his books?

  Neither Meenakshi nor Kakoli felt they had much chance of success unless they had appraised Amit’s feelings for Lata correctly; but if they had, then they would act as the necessary spurs to action. They did not know much about his time at Oxford and what affairs, if any, he had had there, but they did know that in Calcutta he had rebuffed all the efforts of his female admirers or their mothers to get to know him better. He had remained faithful to Jane Austen. He appeared to be content to lead a life of contemplation. He had a strong, if not very patent, will, and never did anything he didn’t want to. As for the law, in which he had earned his degree, in spite of Biswas Babu’s exhortations and his father’s annoyance, Amit had showed no signs of exerting himself in it at all.

  His justification to himself for his idleness went something like this: I need not worry about money; I shall never be in real want. Why earn more than I need? If I take up practising law, apart from boring myself and being irritable to everyone around me, I will achieve nothing of permanent worth. I will be just one among thousands of lawyers. It is better to write one lasting sonnet than to win a hundred spectacular cases. I think I can write at least one lasting sonnet in my life—if I allow myself the scope and time to do so. The less I clog up my life with needless busy-ness, the better I find I write. Therefore I will do as little as possible. I will work on my novel whenever I can, and write a poem whenever inspiration seizes me, and leave it at that.

  It was this scheme of his that had been threatened by his father’s ultimatum and Dipankar’s abscondence. What would happen to his novel if he was saddled with financial drudgery?

  Unfortunately, doing as little as possible by way of breadwinning was accompanied in Amit’s case by doing as little as possible in his social life as well. He had a few good friends, but they were all abroad—friends from his university days, to whom he wrote and from whom he received short letters, corresponding in style to the desultory conversations he used to have with them. They had been quite different from him in temperament and usually it was they who had befriended him. He was reserved, and found it difficult to make the first move, but was not slow to respond. In Calcutta, however, he had not responded much to anyone. The family had sufficed for society whenever he had needed it. It was because Lata was a member of the clan by marriage that he had felt obliged to make sure she was taken care of at the Chatterji party. Because she was quasi-family he had talked to her almost from the first in an easy and casual manner that normally came to him after months of acquaintance. Later he had grown to like her for herself. That he should have bothered to take her around Calcutta to show her the sights of the city had struck both his sisters and Dipankar as an unusual expenditure of energy. Perhaps Amit too had found his Ideal.

  It had stopped there, however. After Lata left Calcutta, they did not correspond. Lata had found Amit kind and comforting; he had taken her out of her sadness into the world of poetry, into the history of the city, and—equally important—into the open air, whether of the cemetery or of College Street. Amit for his part had liked Lata a great deal, but had stopped short of declaring his fondness for her. Though he was a poet and had some insight into human emotion in general, he was far too reticent in his own life for his own happiness. When he was at Oxford, he had been wordlessly attracted to a woman, the sister of one of his friends, and as lively and explosive as a firecracker; only later did he learn that she had liked him too—and had finally in impatience given up on him and attached herself to someone else. ‘Wordlessly’ meant that he had not said what he had felt for her. He had, however, written a great many words, rhymed and somewhat reasoned, about his feelings, though he had crossed out most of them, published very few of those that were left, and sent or shown her none.

  Meenakshi and Kakoli did not know of this affair (or non-affair), though everyone in the family believed that there had to be some explanation for all the unhappy love poems in his first, very successful, volume. Amit was, however, more than capable of fending off in his acid way any sisterly inquiries that approached too closely his sensitive, fertile, lazy core.

  His second volume showed a kind of philosophical resignation unusual in a man who was not yet thirty—and who was fairly famous. What on earth, wondered one of his English friends in a letter, was he resigned about? He did not realize that Amit was probably, and perhaps even undiagnosed by himself, lonely. He had no friends—either men or women—in Calcutta; and the fact that this was the fault of his own lack of effort and sociability didn’t mitigate his resultant mood: a sort of jocular weariness, and even at times plain if private despondency.

  His novel, set in the period of the Bengal famine, took him outside himself into the lives of others. But even here Amit wondered from time to time if he hadn’t chosen too black a canvas. The subject was complex and deep—man against man, man against nature, the city against the countryside, the desperate expediencies of war, a foreign government against an unorganized peasantry—perhaps he would have been better off writing social comedy. There was enough material for it in the family around him. And he had a taste for it; he often found himself escaping into light reading—detective stories, the ubiquitous Wodehouse, even comics—from his task of weighty prose.

  When Biswas Babu had broached the question of marriage with Amit, he had stated, with his usual vibratory emphasis: ‘An arranged marriage with a sober girl, that is the solution.’ Amit had said that he would reserve judgement on the matter, though he had felt immediately that nothing would be more repugnant to him; he would rather live a bachelor all his days than under a canopy of feminine sobriety. But after his walk in the cemetery with Lata, when she had not been put off by his whimsical manner and the wild and whirling nature of his words, and had responded to them with surprising liveliness, he had begun to wonder if the fact that she was ‘a sober girl’ should count so greatly against her. She had shown no awe of him, though he was well known, nor any defensive need to emphasize her own opinions. He remembered her unselfconscious gratitude and pleasure when he had given her a garland of flowers for her hair after the dreadful lecture at the Ramakrishna Mission. Perhaps, he thought, my sisters are right for once. But, well, Lata will be coming to Calcutta at Christmas, and I can show her the great banyan tree at the Botanical Gardens, and we’ll see how things work out from there. He felt no sense of urgency about events, only a very mild foreboding about the cobbler, and no concern at all about this Akbar fellow.

  13.35

  Mournfully, languishingly, Kuku was warbling to her own accompaniment on the piano:

&n
bsp; ‘In this house I am so lonely.

  I am loved by Cuddles only.’

  ‘Oh, do shut up, Kuku,’ said Amit, putting down his book. ‘Must we have this non-stop nonsense? I’m reading this unreadable Proust, and you’re making it worse.’

  But Kuku felt that it would be a dereliction of inspiration to stop. And a betrayal of Cuddles, who was leashed to the far leg of the piano.

  ‘Chatterjis can go to hell,

  I will live in Grand Hotel.

  What room number is or where,

  With my Cuddles—I don’t care!’

  Her left-hand accompaniment livened up, and the rather Schubertian melody gave way to jazz:

  ‘I would like room 21:

  With my Cuddles: that is fun!

  I would like room 22:

  With my Cuddles: that will do.

  I would like room 23:

  With my Cuddles: just for me.

  I would like room 24:

  With my Cuddles: . . .’

  She played a little, in an extemporaneous manner—trills, broken chords and fragments of uncertain melody—until Amit could bear the suspense no longer, and added: ‘To be sure.’

  They improvised the rest of the song together:

  ‘I would like room 25:

  With my Cuddles: we will thrive.

  I would like room 26:

  With my Cuddles: please to fix.

  I would like room 27:

  With my Cuddles: that is heaven.

  I would like room 28:

  With my Cuddles: that is great.

  I would like room 29:

  With my Cuddles: that is fine.

  I would like room number 30.

  “Sorry, no, that room is dirty.”’

  Both of them laughed with pleasure, and told each other how stupid they were. Cuddles barked hoarsely, but then suddenly grew very excited. His ears pricked up and he strained at the leash.