A Suitable Boy, Page 49

  Maan tried to follow suit—to do a bit of purchasing and to seek a few orders for the cloth business in Banaras—but found it too irksome to pursue. He paid a visit or two to his brother Pran and his sister Veena, but the very domesticity and purposefulness of their lives was a rebuke to his own. Veena told him off roundly, asking him what kind of an example he thought he was setting for young Bhaskar, and old Mrs Tandon looked at him even more suspiciously and disapprovingly than before. Kedarnath, however, patted Maan on the shoulder, as if to compensate for his mother’s coldness.

  Having exhausted all his other possibilities, Maan began to hang around the Rajkumar of Marh’s set and (though he did not visit Tarbuz ka Bazaar again) drank and gambled away much of the money that had been reserved for the business. The gambling—usually flush, but sometimes even poker, for which there was a recent craze among the more self-consciously dissolute students in Brahmpur—took place mainly in the students’ rooms, but sometimes in informal gambling dens in private houses here and there in the city. Their drink was invariably Scotch. Maan thought of Saeeda Bai all the time, and declined a visit even to the beautiful Rupvati. For this he was chaffed by all his new companions, who told him that he might lose his abilities permanently for lack of exercise.

  One day Maan, separated from his companions, was walking up and down Nabiganj in a lovesick haze when he bumped into an old flame of his. She was now married, but retained a great affection for Maan. Maan too continued to like her a great deal. Her husband—who had the unlikely nickname of Pigeon—asked Maan if he would join them for coffee at the Red Fox. But Maan, who would normally have accepted the invitation with alacrity, looked away unhappily and said that he had to be going.

  ‘Why is your old admirer behaving so strangely?’ said her husband to her with a smile.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, mystified.

  ‘Surely he’s not fallen out of love with you.’

  ‘That’s possible—but unlikely. Maan Kapoor doesn’t fall out of love with anyone as a rule.’

  They let it go at that, and went into the Red Fox.

  6.21

  Maan was not the only target of old Mrs Tandon’s suspicions. Of late, the old lady, who kept tabs on everything, began to notice that Veena had not been wearing certain items of her jewellery: that though she continued to wear her in-laws’ pieces, she had ceased to wear those that came from her parents. One day she reported this matter to her son.

  Kedarnath paid no attention.

  His mother kept at him, until eventually he agreed to ask Veena to put on her navratan.

  Veena flushed. ‘I’ve lent it to Priya, who wants to copy the design,’ she said. ‘She saw me wear it at Pran’s wedding and liked it.’

  But Veena looked so unhappy with her lie that the truth soon came out. Kedarnath discovered that running the household cost far more than she had told him it did; he, domestically impractical and often absent, had simply not noticed. She had hoped that by asking him for less household money she would reduce the financial pressure on his business. But now he realized that she had taken steps to pawn or sell her jewellery.

  Kedarnath also learned that Bhaskar’s school fees and books were already being supplied out of Mrs Mahesh Kapoor’s monthly household money, some of which she diverted to her daughter.

  ‘We can’t have that,’ said Kedarnath. ‘Your father helped us enough three years ago.’

  ‘Why not?’ demanded Veena. ‘Bhaskar’s Nani is surely allowed to give him those, why not? It’s not as if she’s supplying us our rations.’

  ‘There’s something out of tune with my Veena today,’ said Kedarnath, smiling a bit sadly.

  Veena was not mollified.

  ‘You never tell me anything,’ she burst out, ‘and then I find you with your head in your hands, and your eyes closed for minutes on end. What am I to think? And you are always away. Sometimes when you’re away I cry to myself all night long; it would have been better to have a drunkard as a husband, as long as he slept here every night.’

  ‘Now calm down. Where are these jewels?’

  ‘Priya has them. She said she’d get me an estimate.’

  ‘They haven’t yet been sold then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go and get them back.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go and get them back, Veena. How can you gamble with your mother’s navratan?’

  ‘How can you play chaupar with Bhaskar’s future?’

  Kedarnath closed his eyes for a few seconds.

  ‘You understand nothing about business,’ he said.

  ‘I understand enough to know that you can’t keep “over-extending” yourself.’

  ‘Over-extension is just over-extension. All great fortunes are based on debt.’

  ‘Well we, I know, will never be greatly fortunate again,’ burst out Veena passionately. ‘This isn’t Lahore. Why can’t we guard what little we have?’

  Kedarnath was silent for a while. Then he said:

  ‘Get the jewellery back. It’s all right, it really is. Haresh’s arrangement with the brogues is about to come through any day, and our long-term problems will be solved.’

  Veena looked at her husband very dubiously.

  ‘Everything good is always about to happen, and everything bad always happens.’

  ‘Now that’s not true. At least in the short term something good has happened to me. The shops in Bombay have paid up at last. I promise you that that is true. I know I’m a bad liar, so I don’t even attempt it. Now get the navratan back.’

  ‘Show me the money first!’

  Kedarnath burst out laughing. Veena burst into tears.

  ‘Where’s Bhaskar?’ he asked, after she had sobbed for a bit and subsided into silence.

  ‘At Dr Durrani’s.’

  ‘Good. I hope he stays there a couple of hours more. Let’s play a game of chaupar, you and I.’

  Veena dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief.

  ‘It’s too hot on the roof. Your mother won’t want her beloved son to turn black as ink.’

  ‘Well, we’ll play in this room, then,’ said Kedarnath with decision.

  Veena got the jewellery back late that afternoon. Priya was not able to give her an estimate; with the witch hanging around the gossipy jeweller every minute of his previous visit, she had decided to subjugate urgency to discretion.

  Veena looked at the navratan, gazing reminiscently at each stone in turn.

  Early the same evening, Kedarnath went over with it to his father-in-law, and asked him to keep it in his custody at Prem Nivas.

  ‘What on earth for?’ asked Mahesh Kapoor. ‘Why are you bothering me with these trinkets?’

  ‘Baoji, it belongs to Veena, and I want to make sure she keeps it. If it’s in my house, she might suddenly be struck with noble fancies and pawn it.’

  ‘Pawn it?’

  ‘Pawn it or sell it.’

  ‘What madness. What’s been going on? Have all my children taken leave of their senses?’

  After a brief account of the navratan incident, Mahesh Kapoor said:

  ‘And how is your business now that the strike is finally over?’

  ‘I can’t say it’s going well—but it hasn’t collapsed yet.’

  ‘Kedarnath, run my farm instead.’

  ‘No, but thank you, Baoji. I should be getting back now. The market must have opened already.’ A further thought struck him. ‘And besides, Baoji, who would mind your constituency if I decided to leave Misri Mandi?’

  ‘True. All right. Fine. It’s good that you have to go back because I have to deal with these files before tomorrow morning,’ said Mahesh Kapoor inhospitably. ‘I’ll be working all night. Put it down here somewhere.’

  ‘What—on the files, Baoji?’ There was nowhere else on the table to place the navratan.

  ‘Where else then—around my neck? Yes, yes, on that pink one: “Orders of the State Government on the Assessment Proposals”. Don’t look so anxious, Kedar
nath, it won’t disappear again. I’ll see that Veena’s mother puts the stupid thing away somewhere.’

  6.22

  Later that night in the house where the Rajkumar and his friends lived, Maan lost more than two hundred rupees gambling on flush. He usually held on to his cards far too long before packing them in or asking for a show. The predictability of his optimism was fatal to his chances. Besides, he was entirely un-poker-faced, and his fellow-players had a shrewd idea of how good his cards were from the instant he picked them up. He lost ten rupees or more on hand after hand—and when he held three kings, all he won was four rupees.

  The more he drank, the more he lost, and vice versa.

  Every time he got a queen—or begum—in his hand, he thought with a pang of the Begum Sahiba whom he was allowed to see so rarely these days. He could sense that even when he was with her, despite their mutual excitement and affection, she was finding him less amusing as he became more intense.

  After he had got completely cleaned out, he muttered in a slurred voice that he had to be off.

  ‘Spend the night here if you wish—go home in the morning,’ suggested the Rajkumar.

  ‘No, no—’ said Maan, and left.

  He wandered over to Saeeda Bai’s, reciting some poetry on the way and singing from time to time.

  It was past midnight. The watchman, seeing the state he was in, asked him to go home. Maan started singing, appealing over his head to Saeeda Bai:

  ‘It’s just a heart, not brick and stone, why should it then not fill with pain?

  Yes, I will weep a thousand times, why should you torture me in vain?’

  ‘Kapoor Sahib, you will wake up everyone on the street,’ said the watchman matter-of-factly. He bore Maan no grudge for the scuffle they had had the other night.

  Bibbo came out and chided Maan gently. ‘Kindly go home, Dagh Sahib. This is a respectable house. Begum Sahiba asked who was singing, and when I told her, she was most annoyed. I believe she is fond of you, Dagh Sahib, but she will not see you tonight, and she has asked me to tell you that she will never see you in this state. Please forgive my impertinence, I am only repeating her words.’

  ‘It’s just a heart, not brick and stone,’ sang Maan.

  ‘Come, Sahib,’ said the watchman calmly and led Maan gently but firmly down the street in the direction of Prem Nivas.

  ‘Here, this is for you—you’re a good man—’ said Maan, reaching into his kurta pockets. He turned them inside out, but there was no money in them.

  ‘Take my tip on account,’ he suggested.

  ‘Yes, Sahib,’ said the watchman, and turned back to the rose-coloured house.

  6.23

  Drunk, broke, and far from happy, Maan tottered back to Prem Nivas. To his surprise and rather unfocused distress, his mother was waiting up for him again. When she saw him, tears rolled down her cheeks. She was already overwrought because of the business with the navratan.

  ‘Maan, my dear son, what has come over you? What has she done to my boy? Do you know what people are saying about you? Even the Banaras people know by now.’

  ‘What Banaras people?’ Maan inquired, his curiosity aroused.

  ‘What Banaras people, he asks,’ said Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, and began to cry even more intensely. There was a strong smell of whisky on her son’s breath.

  Maan put his arm protectively around her shoulder, and told her to go to sleep. She told him to go up to his room by the garden stairs to avoid disturbing his father, who was working late in his office.

  But Maan, who had not taken in this last instruction, went humming off to bed by the main stairs.

  ‘Who’s that? Who’s that? Is it Maan?’ came his father’s angry voice.

  ‘Yes, Baoji,’ said Maan, and continued to walk up the stairs.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ called his father in a voice that reverberated across half of Prem Nivas.

  ‘Yes, Baoji,’ Maan stopped.

  ‘Then come down here at once.’

  ‘Yes, Baoji.’ Maan stumbled down the stairs and into his father’s office. He sat down on the chair across the small table at which his father was sitting. There was no one in the office besides the two of them and a couple of lizards that kept scurrying across the ceiling throughout their conversation.

  ‘Stand up. Did I tell you to sit down?’

  Maan tried to stand up, but failed. Then he tried again, and leaned across the table towards his father. His eyes were glazed. The papers on the table and the glass of water near his father’s hand seemed to frighten him.

  Mahesh Kapoor stood up, his mouth set in a tight line, his eyes stern. He had a file in his right hand, which he slowly transferred to his left. He was about to slap Maan hard across the face when Mrs Mahesh Kapoor rushed in and said:

  ‘Don’t—don’t—don’t do that—’

  Her voice and eyes pleaded with her husband, and he relented. Maan, meanwhile, closed his eyes and collapsed back into the chair. He began to drift off to sleep.

  His father, enraged, came around the table, and started shaking him as if he wanted to jolt every bone in his body.

  ‘Baoji!’ said Maan, awoken by the sensation, and began to laugh.

  His father raised his right arm again, and with the back of his hand slapped his twenty-five-year-old son across the face. Maan gasped, stared at his father, and raised his hand to touch his cheek.

  Mrs Mahesh Kapoor sat down on one of the benches that ran along the wall. She was crying.

  ‘Now you listen, Maan, unless you want another of those—listen to me,’ said his father, even more furious now that his wife was crying because of something he had done. ‘I don’t care how much of this you remember tomorrow morning but I am not going to wait until you are sober. Do you understand?’ He raised his voice and repeated, ‘Do you understand?’

  Maan nodded his head, suppressing his first instinct, which was to close his eyes again. He was so sleepy that he could only hear a few words drifting in and out of his consciousness. Somewhere, it seemed to him, there was a sort of tingling pain. But whose?

  ‘Have you seen yourself? Can you imagine how you look? Your hair wild, your eyes glazed, your pockets hanging out, a whisky stain all the way down your kurta—’

  Maan shook his head, then let it droop gently on his chest. All he wanted to do was to cut off what was going on outside his head: this angry face, this shouting, this tingling.

  He yawned.

  Mahesh Kapoor picked up the glass and threw the water on Maan’s face. Some of it fell on his own papers but he didn’t even look down at them. Maan coughed and choked and sat up with a start. His mother covered her eyes with her hands and sobbed.

  ‘What did you do with the money? What did you do with it?’ asked Mahesh Kapoor.

  ‘What money?’ asked Maan, watching the water drip down the front of his kurta, one channel taking the route of his whisky stain.

  ‘The business money.’

  Maan shrugged, and frowned in concentration.

  ‘And the spending money I gave you?’ continued his father threateningly.

  Maan frowned in deeper concentration, and shrugged again.

  ‘What did you do with it? I’ll tell you what you did with it—you spent it on that whore.’ Mahesh Kapoor would never have referred to Saeeda Bai in such terms if he had not been driven beyond the limit of restraint.

  Mrs Mahesh Kapoor put her hands to her ears. Her husband snorted. She was behaving, he thought impatiently, like all three of Gandhiji’s monkeys rolled into one. She would be clapping her hands over her mouth next.

  Maan looked at his father, thought for a second, then said, ‘No. I only brought her small presents. She never asked for anything more. . . .’ He was wondering to himself where the money could have gone.

  ‘Then you must have drunk and gambled it away,’ said his father in disgust.

  Ah yes, that was it, recalled Maan, relieved. Aloud he said, in a pleased tone, as if an intractable problem had, after long
endeavour, suddenly been solved:

  ‘Yes, that is it, Baoji. Drunk—gambled—gone.’ Then the implications of this last word struck him, and he looked shamefaced.

  ‘Shameless—shameless—you are behaving worse than a depraved zamindar, and I will not have it,’ cried Mahesh Kapoor. He thumped the pink file in front of him. ‘I will not have it, and I will not have you here any longer. Get out of town, get out of Brahmpur. Get out at once. I will not have you here. You are ruining your mother’s peace of mind, and your own life, and my political career, and our family reputation. I give you money, and what do you do with it?—you gamble with it or spend it on whores or on whisky. Is debauchery your only skill? I never thought I would be ashamed of a son of mine. If you want to see someone with real hardships look at your brother-in-law—he never asks for money for his business, let alone “for this and for that”. And what of your fiancée? We find a suitable girl from a good family, we arrange a good match for you—and then you chase after Saeeda Bai, whose life and history are an open book.’

  ‘But I love her,’ said Maan.

  ‘Love?’ cried his father, his incredulity mixed with rage. ‘Go to bed at once. This is your last night in this house. I want you out by tomorrow. Get out! Go to Banaras or wherever you choose, but get out of Brahmpur. Out!’

  Mrs Mahesh Kapoor begged her husband to rescind this drastic command, but to no avail. Maan looked at the two geckos on the ceiling as they scurried about to and fro. Then—suddenly—he got up with great resolution and without assistance, and said:

  ‘All right. Goodnight! Goodnight! Goodnight! I’ll go! I’ll leave this house tomorrow.’

  And he went off to bed without help, even remembering to take his shoes off before he fell off to sleep.

  6.24

  The next morning he woke up with a dreadful headache, which, however, cleared up miraculously in a couple of hours. He remembered that his father and he had exchanged words, and waited till the Minister of Revenue had gone to the Assembly before he went to ask his mother what it was they had said to each other. Mrs Mahesh Kapoor was at her wits’ end: her husband had been so incensed last night that he hadn’t slept for hours. Nor had he been able to work, and this had incensed him further. Any suggestion of reconciliation from her had been met with an almost incoherently angry rebuke from him. She realized that he was quite serious, that Maan would have to leave. Hugging her son to her she said: