A Suitable Boy, Page 63

  ‘Is it sweet enough?’ asked Mrs Rupa Mehra with concern.

  ‘I think so,’ said Dipankar with an air of appraisal.

  Having found a listener, Dipankar now expanded into several channels that interested him. His interests in mysticism were wide-ranging, and included Tantra and the worship of the Mother-Goddess besides the more conceptual ‘synthetic’ philosophy he had just been expounding. Soon he and Mrs Rupa Mehra were chatting happily about the great seers Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. Half an hour later it was Unity, Duality, and the Trinity, on which Dipankar had recently had a crash course. Mrs Rupa Mehra was trying her best to keep up with Dipankar’s free flow of ideas.

  ‘It all comes to a climax in the Pul Mela at Brahmpur,’ said Dipankar. ‘That is when the astral conjunctions are most powerful. On the night of the full moon of the month of Jeth the gravitational pull of the moon will act with full force upon all our chakras. I don’t believe in all the legends, but one can’t deny science. I will be going this year, and we can immerse ourselves in the Ganga together. I have already booked my ticket.’

  Mrs Rupa Mehra looked doubtful. Then she said:

  ‘That is a good idea. Let us see how things turn out.’

  She had just recalled with relief that she would not be in Brahmpur at the time.

  7.28

  Amit, meanwhile, was talking to Lata about Kakoli. He was telling Lata about her latest beau, the German nutcracker. Kuku had even got him to paint a diplomatically unsuitable Reichsadler above her bathtub. The tub itself had been painted inside and out with turtles, fish, crabs and other watery creatures by Kuku’s more artistic friends. Kuku loved the sea, especially at the delta of the Ganga, the Sundarbans. And fish and crabs reminded her of delicious Bengali dishes, and enhanced the wallowing luxuriousness of her bath.

  ‘And your parents didn’t object?’ asked Lata, recalling the stateliness of the Chatterji mansion.

  ‘My parents may mind,’ said Amit, ‘but Kuku can twist my father around her little finger. She’s his favourite. I think even my mother is jealous of the way he indulges her. A few days ago there was talk of letting her have a telephone of her own rather than just an extension.’

  Two telephones in one home seemed utterly extravagant to Lata. She asked why they were necessary, and Amit told her about Kakoli’s umbilical linkage to the telephone. He even imitated her characteristic greetings for her A-level, B-level and C-level friends. ‘But the phone holds such magic for her that she will readily desert an A-level friend who’s taken the trouble to visit her in order to talk to a C-level friend for twenty minutes if he happens to be on the line.’

  ‘I suppose she’s very sociable. I’ve never seen her alone,’ said Lata.

  ‘She is,’ said Amit.

  ‘Does she mean to be?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Is it of her own volition?’

  ‘That’s a difficult question,’ said Amit.

  ‘Well,’ said Lata, picturing the good-humouredly giggling Kakoli surrounded by a large crowd at the party, ‘she’s very nice, and attractive, and lively. I’m not surprised people like her.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Amit. ‘She doesn’t call people on the phone herself and ignores messages that come when she’s out of the house, so she doesn’t show a lot of volition as such. And yet she’s always on the phone. They always call back.’

  ‘So she’s, well, passively volitional.’ Lata looked rather surprised at her own phrase.

  ‘Well, passively volitional—in a lively way,’ said Amit, thinking this was an odd way to describe Kuku.

  ‘My mother’s getting along well with your brother,’ said Lata, with a glance towards them.

  ‘Looks like it,’ said Amit with a smile.

  ‘And what sort of music does she like?’ asked Lata. ‘I mean Kuku.’

  Amit thought for a second. ‘Despairing music,’ he said.

  Lata waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. Instead he said, ‘And what kind of music do you like?’

  ‘I?’ said Lata.

  ‘You,’ said Amit.

  ‘Oh, all sorts. I told you I liked Indian classical music. And don’t tell your Ila Kaki, but the one time I went to a ghazal concert, I enjoyed it. And you?’

  ‘All sorts as well.’

  ‘Does Kuku have any reason for liking despairing music?’ asked Lata.

  ‘Well, I’m sure she’s suffered her share of heartbreak,’ said Amit rather callously. ‘But she wouldn’t have found Hans if someone else hadn’t broken her heart.’

  Lata looked curiously at Amit, perhaps almost sternly. ‘I can hardly believe you’re a poet,’ she said.

  ‘No. Nor can I,’ said Amit. ‘Have you read anything by me?’

  ‘No,’ said Lata. ‘I was sure there’d be a copy of your book in this house, but—’

  ‘And are you fond of poetry?’

  ‘Very fond.’

  There was a pause. Then Amit said:

  ‘What have you seen of Calcutta so far?’

  ‘Victoria Memorial and Howrah Bridge.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  It was Amit’s turn to look stern.

  ‘And what are you doing this afternoon?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Lata, surprised.

  ‘Good. I’ll show you a few places of poetic interest. We’ve got the car, which is good. And there are a couple of umbrellas in the car—so we won’t get wet when we walk around the cemetery.’

  But even though it was ‘just Amit’, as Lata pointed out, whom she would be going out with, Mrs Rupa Mehra unreasonably insisted on someone accompanying them. Amit for Mrs Rupa Mehra was merely Meenakshi’s brother—and not a risk in any sense of the word. But, well, he was a young man, and for form’s sake it was important that someone be with them, so that they would not be seen alone together. On the other hand, Mrs Rupa Mehra was prepared to be fairly flexible as to who the chaperon could be. She herself was certainly not going to walk around with them in the rain. But Dipankar would do.

  ‘I can’t go with you, Dada,’ said Dipankar. ‘I have to go to the library.’

  ‘Well, I’ll phone Tapan at his friend’s place and see what he has to say,’ said Amit.

  Tapan agreed on the condition that Cuddles could accompany them—on a leash of course.

  Since Cuddles was nominally Dipankar’s dog, his sanction was required as well. This he readily gave.

  And so, on a warm, rainy Saturday afternoon, Amit, Lata, Dipankar (who would go with them as far as the Asiatic Society), Tapan and Cuddles went for a drive and a walk with the acquiescence of Mrs Rupa Mehra, who was relieved that Lata was at last behaving more like her normal self again.

  7.29

  When the mass of the British left India at Independence, they left behind them a great number of pianos, and one of them, a large, black, tropicalized Steinway, stood in the drawing room of Hans Sieber’s apartment in Queens Mansions. Kakoli was seated at it and Hans was standing behind her, singing from the same score that she was playing from, and feeling extremely happy although the songs that he was singing were extremely gloomy.

  Hans adored Schubert. They were singing through Winterreise, a snowbound song cycle of rejection and dejection that ends in madness. Outside, the warm Calcutta rain came down in sheets. It flooded the streets, gurgled down the inadequate drainage system, poured into the Hooghly, and finally flowed down into the Indian Ocean. In an earlier incarnation it could well have been the soft German snow that had whirled around the memory-haunted traveller, and in a later one it might well become part of the icy brook into whose surface he had carved his initials and those of his faithless beloved. Or possibly even his hot tears that threatened to melt all the snow of winter.

  Kakoli had not at first been ecstatic about Schubert, her tastes running more to Chopin, whom she played with heavy rubato and gloom. But now that she was accompanying Hans’s singing she had grown to like Schubert more and m
ore.

  The same was true about her feeling for Hans, whose excessive courtliness had at first amused her, then irked her, and now reassured her. Hans, for his part, was as smitten by Kuku as any of her mushrooms had ever been. But he felt that she took him lightly, only returning one in three of his calls. If he had known of her even poorer rate of return with other friends, he would have realized how highly she valued him.

  Of the twenty-four lieder in the song cycle they had now arrived at the last song but one, ‘The Mock Suns’. Hans was singing this cheerfully and briskly. Kuku was dragging the pace on the piano. It was a tussle of interpretation.

  ‘No, no, Hans,’ said Kakoli when he leaned over and turned the page to the final song. ‘You sang that too fast.’

  ‘Too fast?’ said Hans. ‘I felt the accompaniment was not very brisk. You wanted to go slower, yes? “Ach, meine Sonnen seid ihr nicht!”’ He dragged it out. ‘So?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, he is mad, Kakoli, you know.’ The real reason why Hans had sung the song so energetically was Kuku’s perfect presence.

  ‘Almost mad,’ said Kuku. ‘In the next song he goes quite mad. You can sing that as fast as you like.’

  ‘But that last song must be very slow,’ said Hans. ‘Like this—’ And he played out what he meant with his right hand in the treble reaches of the piano. His hand touched Kuku’s for a second at the end of the first line. ‘There, you see, Kakoli, he is resigned to his fate.’

  ‘So he’s suddenly stopped being mad?’ said Kakoli. What nonsense, she thought.

  ‘Maybe he is mad and resigned to his fate. Mixed.’

  Kuku tried it, and shook her head. ‘I’d go to sleep,’ she said.

  ‘So now, Kakoli, you think “The Mock Suns” must be slow and “The Organ-grinder” must be fast.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Kakoli liked it when Hans spoke her name; he pronounced the three syllables with equal weight. Very rarely did he call her Kuku.

  ‘And I think “The Mock Suns” must be fast and “The Organ-grinder” must be slow,’ continued Hans.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kuku. How dreadfully incompatible we are, she thought. And everything should be perfect—just perfect. If it wasn’t perfect it was awful.

  ‘So each of us thinks that one song must be fast and one slow,’ said Hans with triumphant logic. This seemed to prove to him that, given an adjustment or two, he and Kakoli were unusually compatible.

  Kuku looked at Hans’s square and handsome face, which was glowing with pleasure. ‘You see,’ said Hans, ‘most times I hear it, people sing both slow.’

  ‘Both slow?’ said Kuku. ‘That would never do.’

  ‘No, never do,’ said Hans. ‘Shall we take it again from there with slower tempo, like you suggest?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kakoli. ‘But what on earth does it mean? Or in the sky? The song, I mean.’

  ‘There are three suns,’ explained Hans, ‘and two go and then one is left.’

  ‘Hans,’ said Kakoli. ‘I think you are very lovable. And your subtraction is accurate. But you haven’t added to my understanding.’

  Hans blushed. ‘I think the two suns are the girl and her mother, and he himself is the third.’

  Kakoli stared at him. ‘Her mother?’ she said incredulously. Perhaps Hans had too stodgy a soul after all.

  Hans looked doubtful. ‘Maybe not,’ he admitted. ‘But who else?’ He reflected that the mother had appeared somewhere in the song cycle, though much earlier.

  ‘I don’t understand it at all. It’s a mystery,’ said Kakoli. ‘But it’s certainly not the mother.’ She sensed that a major crisis was brewing. This was almost as bad as Hans’s dislike of Bengali food.

  ‘Yes?’ said Hans. ‘A mystery?’

  ‘Anyway, Hans, you sing very well,’ said Kuku. ‘I like it when you sing about heartbreak. It sounds very professional. We must do this again next week.’

  Hans blushed once more, and offered Kakoli a drink. Although he was expert at kissing the hands of married women, he had not kissed Kakoli yet. He did not think she would approve of it; but he was wrong.

  7.30

  When they got to the Park Street Cemetery, Amit and Lata got out of the car. Dipankar decided he’d wait in the car with Tapan, since they were only going to be a few minutes and, besides, there were only two umbrellas.

  They walked through a wrought-iron gate. The cemetery was laid out in a grid with narrow avenues between clusters of tombs. A few soggy palm trees stood here and there in clumps, and the cawing of crows interspersed with thunder and the noise of rain. It was a melancholy place. Founded in 1767, it had filled up quickly with the European dead. Young and old alike—mostly victims of the feverish climate—lay buried here, compacted under great slabs and pyramids, mausolea and cenotaphs, urns and columns, all decayed and greyed now by ten generations of Calcutta heat and rain. So densely packed were the tombs that it was in places difficult to walk between them. Rich, rain-fed grass grew between the graves, and the rain poured down ceaselessly over it all. Compared to Brahmpur or Banaras, Allahabad or Agra, Lucknow or Delhi, Calcutta could hardly be considered to have a history, but the climate had bestowed on its comparative recency a desolate and unromantic sense of slow ruin.

  ‘Why have you brought me here?’ asked Lata.

  ‘Do you know Landor?’

  ‘Landor? No.’

  ‘You’ve never heard of Walter Savage Landor?’ asked Amit, disappointed.

  ‘Oh yes. Walter Savage Landor. Of course. “Rose Aylmer, whom these watchful eyes”.’

  ‘Wakeful. Well, she lies buried here. As does Thackeray’s father and one of Dickens’s sons, and the original for Byron’s Don Juan,’ said Amit, with a proper Calcuttan pride.

  ‘Really?’ said Lata. ‘Here? Here in Calcutta?’ It was as if she had suddenly heard that Hamlet was the Prince of Delhi. ‘Ah, what avails the sceptred race!’

  ‘Ah, what the form divine!’ continued Amit.

  ‘What every virtue, every grace!’ cried Lata with sudden enthusiasm.

  ‘Rose Aylmer, all were thine.’

  A roll of thunder punctuated the two stanzas.

  ‘Rose Aylmer, whom these watchful eyes—’ continued Lata.

  ‘Wakeful.’

  ‘Sorry, wakeful. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes—’

  ‘May weep, but never see,’ said Amit, brandishing his umbrella.

  ‘A night of memories and sighs.’

  ‘I consecrate to thee.’

  Amit paused. ‘Ah, lovely poem, lovely poem,’ he said, looking delightedly at Lata. He paused again, then said: ‘Actually, it’s “A night of memories and of sighs”.’

  ‘Isn’t that what I said?’ asked Lata, thinking of nights—or parts of nights—that she herself had recently spent in a similar fashion.

  ‘No. You left out the second “of”.’

  ‘A night of memories and sighs. Of memories and of sighs. I see what you mean. But does it make such a difference?’

  ‘Yes, it makes a difference. Not all the difference in the world but, well, a difference. A mere “of”; conventionally permitted to rhyme with “love”. But she is in her grave, and oh, the difference to him.’

  They walked on. Walking two abreast was not possible, and their umbrellas complicated matters among the cluttered monuments. Not that her tomb was so far away—it was at the first intersection—but Amit had chosen a circuitous route. It was a small tomb capped by a conical pillar with swirling lines; Landor’s poem was inscribed on a plaque on one side beneath her name and age and a few lines of pedestrian pentameter:

  What was her fate? Long, long before her hour,

  Death called her tender soul by break of bliss

  From the first blossoms, from the buds of joy;

  Those few our noxious fate unblasted leaves

  In this inclement clime of human life.

  Lata looked at the tomb and then at Amit, who appeared to be deep in thought. She thought to herself: he has a com
fortable sort of face.

  ‘So she was twenty when she died?’ said Lata.

  ‘Yes. Just about your age. They met in the Swansea Circulating Library. And then her parents took her out to India. Poor Landor. Noble Savage. Go, lovely Rose.’

  ‘What did she die of? The sorrow of parting?’

  ‘A surfeit of pineapples.’

  Lata looked shocked.

  ‘I can see you don’t believe me, but oh, ’tis true, ’tis true,’ said Amit. ‘We’d better go back,’ he continued. ‘They will not wait for us—and who can wonder? You’re drenched.’

  ‘And so are you.’

  ‘Her tomb,’ continued Amit, ‘looks like an upside-down ice-cream cone.’

  Lata said nothing. She was rather annoyed with Amit.

  After Dipankar had been dropped off at the Asiatic Society, Amit asked the driver to take them down Chowringhee to the Presidency Hospital. As they passed the Victoria Memorial he said:

  ‘So the Victoria Memorial and Howrah Bridge is all you know and all you need to know of Calcutta?’

  ‘Not all I need to know,’ said Lata. ‘All I happen to know. And Firpo’s and The Golden Slipper. And the New Market.’

  Tapan greeted this news with a Kakoli-couplet:

  ‘Cuddles, Cuddles, gentle dog,

  Go and bite Sir Stuart Hogg.’

  Lata looked mystified. Since neither Tapan nor Amit explained the reference, she went on: ‘But Arun has said we’ll go for a picnic to the Botanical Gardens.’

  ‘Under the spreading banyan tree,’ said Amit.

  ‘It’s the biggest in the world,’ said Tapan, with a Calcutta chauvinism equal to his brother’s.

  ‘And will you go there in the rains?’ said Amit.

  ‘Well, if not now, then at Christmas.’

  ‘So you’ll be back at Christmas?’ asked Amit, pleased.

  ‘I think so,’ said Lata.

  ‘Good, good,’ said Amit. ‘There are lots of concerts of Indian classical music in winter. And Calcutta is very pleasant. I’ll show you around. I’ll dispel your ignorance. I’ll expand your mind. I’ll teach you Bangla!’

  Lata laughed. ‘I’ll look forward to it,’ she said.