A Suitable Boy

  Haresh visited Kedarnath’s house in Misri Mandi. He told Veena how sorry he was to hear of Mrs Mahesh Kapoor’s death and all the anxieties that the family had had to undergo. Old Mrs Tandon and Bhaskar were happy that he had visited. And Haresh was delighted to be able to mention to Kedarnath that the order for brogues from Prahapore would be coming through within the week, together with a short-term loan for the purchase of materials.

  19.7

  Haresh also visited Ravidaspur one morning. He took with him some bananas for Jagat Ram’s children, the good news about the Praha order, and an invitation to his wedding.

  The fruit was a luxury; there were no fruit sellers in Ravidaspur. The barefooted sons of the shoemaker accepted the bananas with suspicious reluctance and ate them with relish, dropping the skins into the drain that ran alongside the house.

  The news about the Praha order was met with satisfaction, and the fact that a loan for the purchase of raw materials was to accompany it was greeted with intense relief. Jagat Ram was looking rather subdued, thought Haresh. He had expected elation.

  Jagat Ram reacted to Haresh’s wedding invitation with visible shock, not so much because Haresh was getting married, and in Brahmpur at that, but because he should have thought of inviting him.

  Moved as he was, he had to refuse. The two worlds did not mix. He knew it; it was a fact of life. That a jatav from Ravidaspur should be present as a guest at a wedding at the house of Dr Kishen Chand Seth would cause social distress that he did not wish to be the centre of. It would injure his dignity. Apart from the practical problems of what to wear and what to give, he knew that he would feel no joy and only intense awkwardness at being present on the occasion.

  Haresh, reading his mind only partially, said, with brusque tact: ‘You’re not to bring a gift. I’ve never been a believer in gifts at weddings. But you must come. We are colleagues. I won’t hear of your not coming. And the invitation is also for your wife if you want her to come.’

  It was only with the greatest of reluctance that Jagat Ram agreed. The red-and-gold invitation, meanwhile, was being passed by the boys from hand to hand.

  ‘Haven’t they left anything for your daughter?’ asked Haresh, as the last of the bananas disappeared.

  ‘Oh, her dust has been washed away,’ said Jagat Ram quietly.

  ‘What?’ said Haresh, shocked.

  Jagat Ram shook his head. ‘What I mean to say—’ he began, and his voice was choked.

  ‘What happened, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘She got an infection. My wife said it was serious, but I thought, children get high fever so quickly, and it comes down just as quickly. And so I delayed. It was the money too; and the doctors here are, well, high-handed with us.’

  ‘Your poor wife—’

  ‘My wife said nothing, she said nothing against me. What she thinks, I don’t know.’ After a pause he quoted two lines:

  ‘Don’t break the thread of love, Raheem has said.

  What breaks won’t join; if joined, it knots the thread.’

  When Haresh commiserated, Jagat Ram merely sucked in his breath through his teeth and shook his head again.

  19.8

  When Haresh returned to Sunil’s, he found his father waiting for him impatiently.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he asked Haresh, crinkling his nose. ‘It’s almost ten. The Registrar will be at Dr Seth’s house in a few minutes.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Haresh, looking surprised. ‘I’d better take a quick shower.’

  He had forgotten about the time of the civil ceremony, which Mrs Rupa Mehra had insisted on having on the day before the wedding proper. She felt that she had to protect her daughter from the injustices of the traditional Hindu Law; marriages solemnized before a Registrar were governed by laws that were much fairer to women.

  The civil ceremony, however, was such a brief and dry affair that almost no one attached any significance to it, although from the moment it was over, Haresh and Lata were legally man and wife. Only a dozen or so people attended, and Haresh was reproved by his mother for being late.

  Lata had alternated between serene optimism and terrifying attacks of uncertainty for the last week. After the civil ceremony was over, she felt calm and almost happy, and fonder of Haresh than before. From time to time he had smiled at her as if he knew exactly when she had most needed reassurance.

  19.9

  Amit, Kakoli, Dipankar, Meenakshi, Tapan, Aparna, Varun and even Hans had arrived together from Calcutta early that morning and had been present at the civil ceremony. Pran’s house was bursting at the seams. Dr Kishen Chand Seth’s house too was entirely overrun. Only Prem Nivas, lacking its mistress, remained almost empty.

  All manner of known and unknown people wandered in and out of Dr Kishen Chand’s house. Since he had decided to operate on the unusually pacific assumption that anyone whom he didn’t recognize must have been asked by someone else, or else must be involved with the lighting or the catering arrangements, he threatened very few people with his stick. Parvati kept an eye on him and made sure that no one came to grief.

  It was a hot day. A few birds—mynas, babblers, sparrows, bulbuls, and barbets—were disturbed in their nesting by this constant throng of noisy, busy humans. The beds in the garden had gone to seed; except for a few tobacco flowers, nothing on the ground was in bloom. But the trees—champa, jacaranda, and Sita ashok—were full of white or mauve or red blossom, and bougainvillaea—orange, red, pink, and magenta—fell in great masses over the walls of the house and down the trunks of trees. From time to time, amid the continuous racket of the barbets, the call of a distant brainfever bird sounded high and insistent and clear.

  Lata sat in an inner room with the other women for the singing and henna ceremonies. Kuku and Meenakshi, Malati and Savita, Mrs Rupa Mehra, Veena, Hema and her Taiji, all kept themselves entertained and Lata distracted by singing wedding songs, some innocent, some risqué, and dancing to the beat of a dholak while an old woman fitted them all with glass bangles of their choice—from Firozabad, she claimed—and another squeezed bold but delicate patterns of henna on their hands and feet. Lata looked at her hands, covered now with the moist, beautiful tracery, and began to weep.

  She wondered how long it would take to set. Savita took out a handkerchief and wiped her tears for her.

  Veena quickly began a song about her delicate hands and how she couldn’t draw water at the public well. She was her father-in-law’s favourite; he had felt sorry for her and had had a well made for her in the garden of the house. She was the favourite of her husband’s elder brother; he had given her a gold vessel for the water. She was the favourite of her husband’s younger brother; he had given her a silken rope for the bucket. She was the beloved of her husband, and he had hired two water-carriers for her. But her husband’s sister and mother were jealous of her, and had secretly gone and covered up the well.

  In another song the jealous mother-in-law slept next to the newly married bride so that her husband couldn’t visit her at night. Mrs Rupa Mehra enjoyed these songs as much as she always did, probably because it was impossible for her to imagine herself in any such role.

  Malati—together with her mother, who had suddenly appeared in Brahmpur—sang, ‘You grind the spices, fat one, and we will eat!’

  Kakoli clapped loudly while her henna was still green and moist—and smudged it completely. Her musical contribution was a variant of ‘Roly Poly Mr Kohli’, which, in the absence of her mother, she sang to the tune of a Tagore song:

  ‘Roly poly Mr Kohli

  Walking slowly up the stairs.

  Holy souly Mrs Kohli

  Comes and takes him unawares.

  Mr Kohli, base and lowly,

  Stares at choli, dreams of lust,

  As the holy Mrs Kohli

  With her pallu hides her bust.’

  19.10

  Before dusk the next day the guests began to gather on the lawn to the sound of the shehnai.

  The men
of the family stood by the gate and received them. Arun and Varun were dressed in fine, starched, white kurta-pyjamas embroidered with chikan work. Pran was dressed in the white sharkskin sherwani he had worn at his own wedding—though it had been winter then.

  Mrs Rupa Mehra’s brother had come from Madras as usual, but had arrived too late for the bangle ceremony, which he had been expected to help perform. He knew almost none of the people he was greeting, and only a few of them looked familiar to him, perhaps from the time of Savita’s wedding. He greeted everyone decorously as they passed into the garden. Dr Kishen Chand Seth, on the other hand, overheated in the straitjacket of an extremely tight black achkan, got impatient after a while with this endless meeting and greeting, shouted at his son, whom he had not seen for more than a year, loosened a few buttons, and wandered off to supervise something. He had refused to stand in for his late son-in-law in the ceremonies on the grounds that sitting still and listening to priests would destroy both his circulation and his serenity.

  Mrs Rupa Mehra was wearing a beige chiffon sari with a beautiful gold border—a gift from her daughter-in-law that had made her entirely forget the incident of the lacquer box. She knew that He wouldn’t have wanted her to dress too much like a widow on their younger daughter’s wedding day.

  The groom’s party was fifteen minutes late already. Mrs Rupa Mehra was starving: she was not meant to eat until she had given her daughter away, and she was glad that the astrologers had set the actual time of the wedding for eight o’clock, and not, say, eleven.

  ‘Where are they?’ she demanded of Maan, who happened to be standing nearby and was gazing in the direction of the gate.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ma,’ said Maan. ‘Who do you mean?’ He had been looking out for Firoz.

  ‘The baraat, of course.’

  ‘Oh, yes, the baraat—well, they should be coming at any minute. Shouldn’t they be here already?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra, as impatient and anxious as the Boy standing on the Burning Deck. ‘Yes, of course they should.’

  The baraat was at last sighted, and everyone crowded towards the gate. A large, maroon, flower-adorned Chevrolet drove up. It narrowly avoided scratching Dr Kishen Chand Seth’s grey Buick, which was parked somewhat obstructively near the entrance. Haresh stepped out. He was accompanied by his parents and his brothers and was followed by, among others, a motley crowd of his college friends. Arun and Varun escorted him to the verandah. Lata emerged from inside the house, dressed in a red-and-gold sari, and with her eyes lowered, as befitted a bride. They exchanged garlands. Sunil Patwardhan broke into loud cheers, and the photographer clicked away.

  They walked across the lawn to the wedding platform, decorated with roses and tuberoses, and sat down facing the young priest from the local Arya Samaj temple. He lit the fire and began the ceremony. Haresh’s foster-parents sat near Haresh, Mrs Rupa Mehra sat near Lata, and Arun and Varun sat behind her.

  ‘Sit up straight,’ said Arun to Varun.

  ‘I am sitting straight!’ retorted Varun Mehra, IAS, angrily. He noticed that Lata’s garland had slipped off her left shoulder. He helped rearrange it and glared at his brother.

  The guests, unusually for a wedding, were quiet and attentive as the priest went through the rites. Mrs Rupa Mehra was sobbing through her Sanskrit, and Savita was sobbing too, and soon Lata was crying as well. When her mother took her hand, filled it with rose petals and pronounced the words, ‘O bridegroom, accept this well-adorned bride called Lata,’ Haresh, prompted by the priest, took her hand firmly in his own and repeated the words: ‘I thank you, and accept her willingly.’

  ‘Cheer up,’ he added in English. ‘I hope you won’t have to go through this again.’ And Lata, whether at that thought or at his tone of voice, did indeed cheer up.

  Everything went well. Her brothers poured puffed rice on to her hands and into the fire each time she and Haresh circled it. The knot between their scarves was tied, and bright red sindoor was applied to the parting of Lata’s hair with the gold ring that Haresh was to give her. This ring ceremony puzzled the priest (it didn’t fit in with his idea of Arya Samaji rituals), but because Mrs Rupa Mehra insisted on it, he went along with it.

  One or two children squabbled tearfully over the possession of some rose petals; and an insistent old woman tried without success to get the priest to mention Babé Lalu, the clan deity of the Khannas, in the course of his liturgy; other than that, everything went harmoniously.

  But when the people who were gathered together recited the Gayatri Mantra three times before the witnessing fire, Pran, glancing at Maan, noticed that his head was bowed and his lips trembling as he mumbled the words. Like his elder brother, he could not forget the last time that the ancient words had been recited in his presence, and before a different fire.

  19.11

  It was a warm evening, and there was less silk and more fine cotton than at Savita’s wedding. But the jewellery glittered just as gloriously. Meenakshi’s little pear-earrings, Veena’s navratan and Malati’s emeralds glinted across the garden, whispering to each other the stories of their owners.

  The younger Chatterjis were out in full force, but there were very few politicians, and no children from Rudhia running wildly around. A couple of executives from the small Praha factory in Brahmpur were present, however, as were some of the middlemen from the Brahmpur Shoe Mart.

  Jagat Ram too had come, but not his wife. He stood by himself for a while until Kedarnath noticed him and beckoned him to join them.

  When he was introduced to old Mrs Tandon, she was unable to stifle her discomfiture. She looked at him as if he smelt, and gave him a weak namaste.

  Jagat Ram said to Kedarnath: ‘I have to go now. Would you give this to Haresh Sahib and his bride?’ He handed him what looked like a small shoebox covered in brown paper.

  ‘But aren’t you going to congratulate him?’

  ‘Well, there’s a long line,’ said Jagat Ram, tugging a little at his moustache. ‘Please congratulate him for me.’

  Old Mrs Tandon had turned to Haresh’s parents, and was talking to them about Neel Darvaza, which she had visited as a child. She congratulated them and, in the course of the conversation, contrived to mention that Lata was rather too fond of music.

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Haresh’s foster-father. ‘We too are very fond of music.’

  Old Mrs Tandon was displeased, and decided to say nothing more.

  Malati, meanwhile, was talking to the musicians themselves, a shehnai player who had been known to her own musician-friend, and the tabla player Motu Chand.

  Motu, who remembered Malati from the day he had stood in at the Haridas College of Music, asked her about Ustad Majeed Khan and his famous disciple Ishaq, whom, sadly, he very rarely met these days. Malati told him about the concert she had very recently attended, praised Ishaq’s musicianship, and mentioned that she had been struck by the indulgence which the arrogant maestro granted to him: he rarely, for instance, broke in with a dominating improvisation of his own when Ishaq was singing. In a world of professional jealousy and rivalry even between teacher and student, they performed with a sense of complementarity that was wonderful to see.

  It had begun to be said of Ishaq—and that too within a year of his first strumming the tanpura before his Ustad—that he had the makings of one of the great singers of his time.

  ‘Well,’ said Motu Chand, ‘things are not the same without him where I work.’ He sighed, then, noticing Malati look a bit blank, said: ‘Were you not at Prem Nivas at Holi last year?’

  ‘No,’ said Malati, realizing from his question that Motu must be Saeeda Bai’s tabla player. ‘And this year, of course. . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ said Motu sadly. ‘Terrible, terrible . . . and now with that fellow Rasheed’s suicide. . . . He taught Saeeda Bai’s, well, sister, you know . . . but he caused so much trouble that they had to get the watchman to beat him up . . . and then we heard later. . . . Well, there’s nothing but trouble
in the world, nothing but trouble—’ He began to hammer at the little wooden cylinders around his tabla to tighten the straps and adjust the pitch. The shehnai player nodded at him.

  ‘This Rasheed you’re talking about—’ asked Malati, suddenly quite troubled herself. ‘He’s not the socialist, is he?—the history student—’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ said Motu, flexing his well-padded fingers; and the tabla and shehnai began to play again.

  19.12

  Maan, dressed in a kurta-pyjama, as suited the weather, was standing a little distance away and heard nothing of this conversation. He looked sad, almost unsociable.

  For a moment he wondered where the harsingar tree was, before he realized that he was in a different garden altogether. Firoz came up to him, and they stood there, silent, for a while. A rose petal or two floated down from somewhere. Neither bothered to brush it off. Imtiaz joined them after a while, then the Nawab Sahib and Mahesh Kapoor.

  ‘It’s all for the best, on the whole,’ said Mahesh Kapoor. ‘If I had been an MLA, Agarwal would have had to ask me to join his Cabinet, and I would not have been able to stand it.’

  ‘Well,’ said the Nawab Sahib, ‘whether things are for the best or not, that’s how they are.’

  There was a pause. Everyone was friendly enough, but no one knew what to talk about. Every topic seemed closed for one reason or another. There was no mention of law or laws, of doctors or hospitals, of gardens or music, of future plans or past recollections, of politics or religion, of bees or lotuses.

  The judges of the Supreme Court had agreed that the Zamindari Acts were constitutional; they were in the process of writing their judgement, which would be announced to the world at large in a few days.