A Suitable Boy, Page 6

  Just after Raghubir Mehra had died, Mrs Rupa Mehra and her family had gone to live with her father, who at that stage had not yet remarried. Given her straitened finances, this seemed to be the only thing to do; she also thought that he might be lonely, and hoped to help him with his household affairs. The experiment had lasted a few months, and had been a disaster. Dr Kishen Chand Seth was an impossible man to live with. Tiny though he was, he was a force to reckon with not only at the medical college, from which he had retired as Principal, but in Brahmpur at large: everyone was scared of him and obeyed him tremblingly. He expected his home life to run on similar lines. He overrode Rupa Mehra’s writ with respect to her own children. He left home suddenly for weeks on end without leaving money or instructions for the staff. Finally, he accused his daughter, whose good looks had survived her widowhood, of making eyes at his colleagues when he invited them home—a shocking accusation for the heartbroken though sociable Rupa. The teenaged Arun had threatened to beat up his grandfather. There had been tears and yells and Dr Kishen Chand Seth had pounded the floor with his stick. Then Mrs Rupa Mehra had left, weeping and determined, with her brood of four, and had sought refuge with sympathetic friends in Darjeeling.

  Reconciliation had been effected a year later in a renewed bout of weeping. Since then things had jolted along. The marriage with Parvati (which had shocked not just his family but Brahmpur at large because of the disparity of age), Lata’s enrolment at Brahmpur University, Savita’s engagement (which Dr Kishen Chand Seth had helped arrange), Savita’s wedding (which he had almost wrecked and from which he had wilfully absented himself): all these were landmarks along an extremely bumpy road. But family was family, and, as Mrs Rupa Mehra continually told herself, one had to take the rough with the smooth.

  Several months had now passed since Savita’s wedding. Winter had gone and the pythons in the zoo had emerged from hibernation. Roses had replaced narcissi, and had been replaced in their turn by the purple-wreath creeper, whose five-bladed flowers helicoptered gently to the ground in the hot breeze. The broad, silty-brown Ganga, flowing due east past the ugly chimneys of the tannery and the marble edifice of the Barsaat Mahal, past Old Brahmpur with its crowded bazaars and alleys, temples and mosques, past the bathing ghats and the cremation ghat and the Brahmpur Fort, past the whitewashed pillars of the Subzipore Club and the spacious estate of the university, had shrunken with the summer, but boats and steamers still plied busily up and down its length, as did trains along the parallel railway line that bounded Brahmpur to the south.

  Lata had left the hostel and had gone to live with Savita and Pran, who had descended from Simla to the plains very much in love. Malati visited Lata often, and had grown to like the lanky Pran, of whom she had formed such an unfavourable first impression. Lata too liked his decent, affectionate ways, and was not too upset to learn that Savita was pregnant. Mrs Rupa Mehra wrote long letters to her daughters from Arun’s flat in Calcutta, and complained repeatedly that no one replied to her letters either soon enough or often enough.

  Though she did not mention this in any of her letters for fear of enraging her daughter, Mrs Rupa Mehra had tried—without success—to find a match for Lata in Calcutta. Perhaps she had not made enough effort, she told herself: she was, after all, still recovering from the excitement and exertion of Savita’s wedding. But now at last she was going back to Brahmpur for a three-month stint at what she had begun to call her second home: her daughter’s home, not her father’s. As the train puffed along towards Brahmpur, the propitious city which had yielded her one son-in-law already, Mrs Rupa Mehra promised herself that she would make another attempt. Within a day or two of her arrival she would go to her father for advice.

  1.13

  In the event, it was not necessary to go to Dr Kishen Chand Seth for advice. He drove to the university the next day in a fury and arrived at Pran Kapoor’s house.

  It was three in the afternoon, and hot. Pran was at the department. Lata was attending a lecture on the Metaphysical Poets. Savita had gone shopping. Mansoor, the young servant, tried to soothe Dr Kishen Chand Seth by offering him tea, coffee or fresh lime juice. All this was brushed brusquely aside.

  ‘Is anyone at home? Where is everyone?’ asked Dr Kishen Chand Seth in a rage. His short, compressed and very jowly appearance made him look a little like a fierce and wrinkled Tibetan watchdog. (Mrs Rupa Mehra’s good looks had been the gift of her mother.) He carried a carved Kashmiri cane which he used more for emphasis than for support. Mansoor hurried inside.

  ‘Burri Memsahib?’ he called, knocking at the door of Mrs Rupa Mehra’s room.

  ‘What? . . . Who?’

  ‘Burri Memsahib, your father is here.’

  ‘Oh. Oh.’ Mrs Rupa Mehra, who had been enjoying an afternoon nap, woke into a nightmare. ‘Tell him I will be with him immediately, and offer him some tea.’

  ‘Yes, Memsahib.’

  Mansoor entered the drawing room. Dr Seth was staring at an ashtray.

  ‘Well? Are you dumb as well as half-witted?’ asked Dr Kishen Chand Seth.

  ‘She’s just coming, Sahib.’

  ‘Who’s just coming? Fool!’

  ‘Burri Memsahib, Sahib. She was resting.’

  That Rupa, his mere chit of a daughter, could ever somehow have been elevated into not just a Memsahib but a Burri Memsahib puzzled and annoyed Dr Seth.

  Mansoor said, ‘Will you have some tea, Sahib? Or coffee?’

  ‘Just now you offered me nimbu pani.’

  ‘Yes, Sahib.’

  ‘A glass of nimbu pani.’

  ‘Yes, Sahib. At once.’ Mansoor made to go.

  ‘And oh—’

  ‘Yes, Sahib?’

  ‘Are there any arrowroot biscuits in this house?’

  ‘I think so, Sahib.’

  Mansoor went into the back garden to pluck a couple of limes, then returned to the kitchen to squeeze them into juice.

  Dr Kishen Chand Seth picked up a day-old Statesman in preference to that day’s Brahmpur Chronicle, and sat down to read in an armchair. Everyone was half-witted in this house.

  Mrs Rupa Mehra dressed hurriedly in a black-and-white cotton sari and emerged from her room. She entered the drawing room, and began to apologize.

  ‘Oh, stop it, stop it, stop all this nonsense,’ said Dr Kishen Chand Seth impatiently in Hindi.

  ‘Yes, Baoji.’

  ‘After waiting for a week I decided to visit you. What kind of daughter are you?’

  ‘A week?’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra palely.

  ‘Yes, yes, a week. You heard me, Burri Memsahib.’

  Mrs Rupa Mehra didn’t know which was worse, her father’s anger or his sarcasm.

  ‘But I only arrived from Calcutta yesterday.’

  Her father seemed ready to explode at this patent fiction when Mansoor came in with the nimbu pani and a plate of arrowroot biscuits. He noticed the expression on Dr Seth’s face and stood hesitantly by the door.

  ‘Yes, yes, put it down here, what are you waiting for?’

  Mansoor set the tray down on a small glass-topped table and turned to leave. Dr Seth took a sip and bellowed in fury—

  ‘Scoundrel!’

  Mansoor turned, trembling. He was only sixteen, and was standing in for his father, who had taken a short leave. None of his teachers during his five years at a village school had inspired in him such erratic terror as Burri Memsahib’s crazy father.

  ‘You rogue—do you want to poison me?’

  ‘No, Sahib.’

  ‘What have you given me?’

  ‘Nimbu pani, Sahib.’

  Dr Seth, jowls shaking, looked closely at Mansoor. Was he trying to cheek him?

  ‘Of course it’s nimbu pani. Did you think I thought it was whisky?’

  ‘Sahib.’ Mansoor was nonplussed.

  ‘What have you put in it?’

  ‘Sugar, Sahib.’

  ‘You buffoon! I have my nimbu pani made with salt, not sugar,’ roared Dr Kishen Chand Seth.
‘Sugar is poison for me. I have diabetes, like your Burri Memsahib. How many times have I told you that?’

  Mansoor was tempted to reply, ‘Never,’ but thought better of it. Usually Dr Seth had tea, and he brought the milk and sugar separately.

  Dr Kishen Chand Seth rapped his stick on the floor. ‘Go. Why are you staring at me like an owl?’

  ‘Yes, Sahib. I’ll make another glass.’

  ‘Leave it. No. Yes—make another glass.’

  ‘With salt, Sahib.’ Mansoor ventured to smile. He had quite a nice smile.

  ‘What are you laughing at like a donkey?’ asked Dr Seth. ‘With salt, of course.’

  ‘Yes, Sahib.’

  ‘And, idiot—’

  ‘Yes, Sahib?’

  ‘With pepper too.’

  ‘Yes, Sahib.’

  Dr Kishen Chand Seth veered around towards his daughter. She wilted before him.

  ‘What kind of daughter do I have?’ he asked rhetorically. Rupa Mehra waited for the answer, and it was not long in coming. ‘Ungrateful!’ Her father bit into an arrowroot biscuit for emphasis. ‘Soggy!’ he added in disgust.

  Mrs Rupa Mehra knew better than to protest.

  Dr Kishen Chand Seth went on:

  ‘You have been back from Calcutta for a week and you haven’t visited me once. Is it me you hate so much or your stepmother?’

  Since her stepmother, Parvati, was considerably younger than herself, Mrs Rupa Mehra found it very difficult to think of her other than as her father’s nurse and, later, mistress. Though fastidious, Mrs Rupa Mehra did not entirely resent Parvati. Her father had been lonely for three decades after her mother had died. Parvati was good to him and (she supposed) good for him. Anyway, thought Mrs Rupa Mehra, this is the way things happen in the world. It is best to be on good terms with everyone.

  ‘But I only arrived here yesterday,’ she said. She had told him so a minute ago, but he evidently did not believe her.

  ‘Hunh!’ said Dr Seth dismissively.

  ‘By the Brahmpur Mail.’

  ‘You wrote in your letter that you would be coming last week.’

  ‘But I couldn’t get reservations, Baoji, so I decided to stay in Calcutta another week.’ This was true, but the pleasure of spending time with her three-year-old granddaughter Aparna had also been a factor in her delay.

  ‘Have you heard of telegrams?’

  ‘I thought of sending you one, Baoji, but I didn’t think it was so important. Then, the expense. . . .’

  ‘Ever since you became a Mehra you have become completely evasive.’

  This was an unkind cut, and could not fail to wound. Mrs Rupa Mehra bowed her head.

  ‘Here. Have a biscuit,’ said her father in a conciliatory manner.

  Mrs Rupa Mehra shook her head.

  ‘Eat, fool!’ said her father with rough affection. ‘Or are you still keeping those brainless fasts that are so bad for your health?’

  ‘It is Ekadashi today.’ Mrs Rupa Mehra fasted on the eleventh day of each lunar fortnight in memory of her husband.

  ‘I don’t care if it’s ten Ekadashis,’ said her father with some heat. ‘Ever since you came under the influence of the Mehras you have become as religious as your ill-fated mother. There have been too many mismatched marriages in this family.’

  The combination of these two sentences, loosely coupled in several possible wounding interpretations, was too much for Mrs Rupa Mehra. Her nose began to redden. Her husband’s family was no more religious than it was evasive. Raghubir’s brothers and sisters had taken her to their heart in a manner both affecting and comforting to a sixteen-year-old bride, and still, eight years after her husband’s death, she visited as many of them as possible in the course of what her children called her Annual Trans-India Rail-Pilgrimage. If she was growing to be ‘as religious as her mother’ (which she was not—at least not yet), the operative influence was probably the obvious one: that of her mother, who had died in the post-First-World-War influenza epidemic, when Rupa was very young. A faded image now came before her eyes: the soft spirit of Dr Kishen Chand Seth’s first wife could not have been more distant from his own freethinking, allopathic soul. His comment about mismatched marriages injured the memory of two loved ghosts, and was possibly even intended as an insult to the asthmatic Pran.

  ‘Oh don’t be so sensitive!’ said Dr Kishen Chand Seth brutally. Most women, he had decided, spent two-thirds of their time weeping and whimpering. What good did they think it did? As an afterthought he added, ‘You should get Lata married off soon.’

  Mrs Rupa Mehra’s head jerked up. ‘Oh? Do you think so?’ she said. Her father seemed even more full of surprises than usual.

  ‘Yes. She must be nearly twenty. Far too late. Parvati got married when she was in her thirties, and see what she got. A suitable boy must be found for Lata.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I was just thinking the same,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra. ‘But I don’t know what Lata will say.’

  Dr Kishen Chand Seth frowned at this irrelevance.

  ‘And where will I find a suitable boy?’ she continued. ‘We were lucky with Savita.’

  ‘Lucky—nothing! I made the introduction. Is she pregnant? No one tells me anything,’ said Dr Kishen Chand Seth.

  ‘Yes, Baoji.’

  Dr Seth paused to interpret the yes. Then he said: ‘It’s about time. I hope I get a great-grandson this time.’ He paused again. ‘How is she?’

  ‘Well, a bit of morning sickness,’ began Mrs Rupa Mehra.

  ‘No, idiot, I mean my great-granddaughter, Arun’s child,’ said Dr Kishen Chand Seth impatiently.

  ‘Oh, Aparna? She’s very sweet. She’s grown very attached to me,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra happily. ‘Arun and Meenakshi send their love.’

  This seemed to satisfy Dr Seth for the moment, and he bit his arrowroot biscuit carefully. ‘Soft,’ he complained. ‘Soft.’

  Things had to be just so for her father, Mrs Rupa Mehra knew. When she was a child she had not been allowed to drink water with her meals. Each morsel had to be chewed twenty-four times to aid digestion. For a man so particular about, indeed so fond of, his food, it was sad to see him reduced to biscuits and boiled eggs.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do for Lata,’ her father went on. ‘There’s a young radiologist at the Prince of Wales. I can’t remember his name. If we had thought about it earlier and used our imaginations we could have captured Pran’s younger brother and had a double wedding. But now they say he’s got engaged to that Banaras girl. Perhaps that is just as well,’ he added, remembering that he was supposed to be feuding with the Minister.

  ‘But you can’t go now, Baoji. Everyone will be back soon,’ protested Mrs Rupa Mehra.

  ‘Can’t? Can’t? Where is everyone when I want them?’ retorted Dr Kishen Chand Seth. He clicked his tongue impatiently. ‘Don’t forget your stepmother’s birthday next week,’ he added as he walked to the door.

  Mrs Rupa Mehra looked wistfully and worriedly from the doorway at her father’s back. On the way to his car he paused by a bed of red and yellow cannas in Pran’s front garden, and she noticed him get more and more agitated. Bureaucratic flowers (among which he also classified marigolds, bougainvillaea and petunias) infuriated him. He had banned them at the Prince of Wales Medical College as long as he had wielded supreme power there; now they were making a comeback. With one swipe of his Kashmiri walking stick he lopped off the head of a yellow canna. As his daughter tremblingly watched, he got into his ancient grey Buick. This noble machine, a Raja among the rabble of Austins and Morrises that plied the Indian roads, was still slightly dented from the time when, ten years ago, Arun (on a visit during his vacation from St George’s) had taken it for a catastrophic joyride. Arun was the only one in the family who could defy his grandfather and get away with it, indeed was loved the more for it. As Dr Kishen Chand Seth drove off, he told himself that this had been a satisfying visit. It had given him something to think about, something to plan.

  Mrs Rupa Me
hra took a few moments to recover from her father’s bracing company. Suddenly realizing how hungry she was, she began to think of her sunset meal. She could not break her fast with grain, so young Mansoor was dispatched to the market to buy some raw bananas to make into cutlets. As he went through the kitchen to get the bicycle key and the shopping bag, he passed by the counter, and noticed the rejected glass of nimbu pani: cool, sour, inviting.

  He swiftly gulped it down.

  1.14

  Everyone who knew Mrs Rupa Mehra knew how much she loved roses and, particularly, pictures of roses, and therefore most of the birthday cards she received featured roses of various colours and sizes, and various degrees of copiousness and blatancy. This afternoon, sitting with her reading glasses on at the desk in the room she shared with Lata, she was going through old cards for a practical purpose, although the project threatened to overwhelm her with its resonances of ancient sentiment. Red roses, yellow roses, even a blue rose here and there combined themselves with ribbons, pictures of kittens and one of a guilty-looking puppy. Apples and grapes and roses in a basket; sheep in a field with a foreground of roses; roses in a misty pewter mug with a bowl of strawberries resting nearby; violet-flushed roses graced with unrose-like, unserrated leaves and mild, even inviting, green thorns: birthday cards from family, friends and assorted well-wishers all over India, and even some from abroad—everything reminded her of everything, as her elder son was apt to remark.

  Mrs Rupa Mehra glanced in a cursory manner over her piles of old New Year cards before returning to the birthday roses. She took out a small pair of scissors from the recesses of her great black handbag, and tried to decide which card she would have to sacrifice. It was very rarely that Mrs Rupa Mehra bought a card for anyone, no matter how close or dear the person was. The habit of necessary thrift had sunk deep into her mind, but eight years of the deprivation of small luxuries could not reduce for her the sanctity of the birthday greeting. She could not afford cards, so she made them. In fact she enjoyed the creative challenge of making them. Scraps of cardboard, shreds of ribbon, lengths of coloured paper, little silver stars and adhesive golden numerals lay in a variegated trove at the bottom of the largest of her three suitcases, and these were now pressed into service. The scissors poised, descended. Three silver stars were parted from their fellows, and pasted (with the help of borrowed glue—this was the only constituent Mrs Rupa Mehra did not, for fear of leakage, carry with her) on to three corners of the front of the folded blank white piece of cardboard. The fourth corner, the northwest corner, could contain two golden numerals indicating the age of the recipient.