A Suitable Boy, Page 65

  For Kuku was behaving as freely as she always did, encouraged by Tapan and Amit. Soon Dr Ila Chattopadhyay turned up (‘I am such a stupid woman, I always forget lunch timings. Am I late? Stupid question. Hello. Hello. Hello. Oh, you again? Lalita? Lata? I never remember names’) and things became even more boisterous.

  Bahadur announced that there was a phone call for Kakoli.

  ‘Tell whoever it is that Kuku will take it after lunch,’ said her father.

  ‘Oh, Baba!’ Kuku turned a liquid gaze on her father.

  ‘Who is it?’ Mr Justice Chatterji asked Bahadur.

  ‘That German Sahib.’

  Mrs Ganguly’s intelligent, pig-like eyes darted from face to face.

  ‘Oh, Baba, it’s Hans. I must go.’ The ‘Hans’ was pleadingly elongated.

  Mr Justice Chatterji nodded slightly, and Kuku leapt up and ran to the phone.

  When Kakoli returned to the table, everyone except the children turned towards her. The children were consuming large quantities of tomato chutney, and their mother was not even reproving them, so keen was she to hear what Kuku was going to say.

  But Kuku had turned from love to food. ‘Oh, gulab-jamun,’ she said, imitating Biswas Babu, ‘and the chumchum! And mishti doi. Oh—the bhery mhemory makesh my shallybhery juishes to phlow.’

  ‘Kuku.’ Mr Justice Chatterji was seriously displeased.

  ‘Sorry, Baba. Sorry. Sorry. Let me join in the gossip. What were you talking about in my absence?’

  ‘Have a sandesh, Kuku,’ said her mother.

  ‘So, Dipankar,’ said Dr Ila Chattopadhyay. ‘Have you changed your subject yet?’

  ‘I can’t, Ila Kaki,’ said Dipankar.

  ‘Why not? The sooner you make the move the better. There isn’t a single decent human being I know who is an economist. Why can’t you change?’

  ‘Because I’ve already graduated.’

  ‘Oh!’ Dr Ila Chattopadhyay appeared temporarily floored. ‘And what are you going to do with yourself?’

  ‘I’ll decide in a week or two. I’ll think things out when I’m at the Pul Mela. It’ll be a time for appraising myself in the spiritual and intellectual context.’

  Dr Ila Chattopadhyay, breaking a sandesh in half, said: ‘Really, Lata, have you ever heard such unconvincing prevarication? I’ve never understood what “the spiritual context” means. Spiritual matters are an utter waste of time. I’d rather spend my time listening to the kind of gossip your aunt purveys and that your mother pretends to suffer through than go to something like the Pul Mela. Isn’t it very dirty?’ She turned to Dipankar. ‘All those millions of pilgrims crowded along a strip of sand just under the Brahmpur Fort? And doing—doing everything there.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Dipankar. ‘I’ve never been. But it’s supposed to be well organized. They even have a District Magistrate allocated especially for the great Pul Mela every sixth year. This year’s a sixth year, so bathing is especially auspicious.’

  ‘The Ganges is an absolutely filthy river,’ said Dr Ila Chattopadhyay. ‘I hope you don’t propose to bathe in it. . . . Oh, do stop blinking, Dipankar, it ruins my concentration.’

  ‘If I bathe,’ said Dipankar, ‘I’ll wash away not only my own sins but those of six generations above me. That might even include you, Ila Kaki.’

  ‘God forbid,’ said Dr Ila Chattopadhyay.

  Turning to Lata, Dipankar said: ‘You should come too, Lata. After all, you’re from Brahmpur.’

  ‘I’m not really from Brahmpur,’ said Lata, with a glance at Dr Ila Chattopadhyay.

  ‘Where are you from, then?’ asked Dipankar.

  ‘Nowhere now,’ said Lata.

  ‘Anyway,’ continued Dipankar earnestly, ‘I think I’ve convinced your mother to come.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Lata, smiling at the thought of Mrs Rupa Mehra and Dipankar guiding each other through the Pul Mela crowds and the labyrinths of time and causality. ‘She won’t be in Brahmpur at the time. But where will you live in Brahmpur?’

  ‘On the sands—I’ll find a place in someone’s tent,’ said Dipankar optimistically.

  ‘Don’t you know anyone in Brahmpur?’

  ‘No. Well, Savita, of course. And there’s an old Mr Maitra who’s related to us somehow, whom I met once as a child.’

  ‘You must look up Savita and her husband when you get there,’ said Lata. ‘I’ll write and tell Pran you’ll be coming. You can always stay with them if the sand runs out. And it’s useful anyway to have an address and phone number in a strange town.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Dipankar. ‘Oh, there’s a lecture at the Ramakrishna Mission tonight on Popular Religion and its Philosophical Dimensions. Why don’t you come? It’s bound to cover the Pul Mela.’

  ‘Really, Dipankar, you are more of an idiot than I thought,’ said Dr Ila Chattopadhyay to her nephew. ‘Why am I wasting my time on you? Don’t you waste your time on him either,’ she advised Lata. ‘I’m going to talk to Amit. Where is he?’

  Amit was in the garden. He had been forced by the children to show them the frog spawn in the lily pond.

  7.35

  The hall was almost full. There must have been about two hundred people, though Lata noticed that there were only about five women. The lecture, which was in English, started on time, at seven o’clock. Professor Dutta-Ray (who had a bad cough) introduced the speaker, informing the audience of the young luminary’s biography and credentials, and continuing for a few minutes to speculate about what he would say.

  The young speaker stood up. He did not look at all like someone who had been, as the professor had stated, a sadhu for five years. He had a round, anxious face. He was wearing a well-starched kurta and dhoti, and there were two pens in the pocket of his kurta. He did not speak about Popular Religion and its Philosophical Dimensions, though he did mention the Pul Mela once, elliptically, as ‘this great concourse that will be assembling on the banks of the Ganga to lave itself in the light of the full moon’. For the most part he treated the patient audience to a speech of exceptional banality. He soared and veered over a vast terrain, and assumed that his droppings would make an intelligible pattern.

  Every few sentences, he stretched his arms out in a gentle, all-inclusive gesture as if he were a bird spreading its wings.

  Dipankar looked rapt, Amit bored, Lata perplexed.

  The speaker was now in full flight: ‘Humanity must be made incarnate in the present . . . shatter the horizons of the mind . . . the challenge is interior . . . birth is a remarkable thing . . . the bird feels the vast quivering of the leaf . . . a certain relation of sacrality can be maintained between the popular and the philosophical . . . an open-ended mind through which life can flow, through which one can hear the birdsong, the impulse of space-time.’

  Finally, an hour down the line, he came to the Great Question:

  ‘Can humanity even tell where a newer inspiration will emerge? Can we penetrate those great darknesses within ourselves where symbols are born? I say that our rites, call them popular if you will, do penetrate this darkness. The alternative is the death of the mind, and not “re-death” or punarmrityu, which is the first reference to “rebirth” in our scriptures, but ultimate death, the death of ignorance. Let me then emphasize to you all’—he stretched his arms out towards the audience—‘that, let objectors say what they will, it is only by preserving the ancient forms of sacrality, however perverse, however superstitious they may seem to the philosophical eye, that we can maintain our elementality, our ethos, our evolution, our very essence.’ He sat down.

  ‘Our eggshells,’ said Amit to Lata.

  The audience applauded guardedly.

  But now the venerable Professor Dutta-Ray, who had introduced the speaker so paternally at first, got up and, shooting glances of undisguised hostility at him, proceeded to demolish what he saw as the theories he had just propounded. (It was clear that the Professor saw himself as one of the ‘objectors’ referred to in the speech.) But were the
re any theories in the speech at all? There was certainly a tenor, but it was difficult to demolish a tenor. At any rate, the Professor tried to, his voice, mild at first, rising to this hoarse-throated battle cry:

  ‘Let us not deceive ourselves! For whilst it may often be the case that the theses are intrinsically plausible, they are by the same token impossible to substantiate or refute with more than illustrative evidence; indeed, it is in practice difficult to know whether they come into the orbit of reference of the key question, which, although it may well shed light on the tendency, can scarcely tell us whether an answer can be couched convincingly in terms of what might broadly be called its evolving patterns; in this perspective, then, though admittedly the theory may appear—to the ignorant eye—well founded, it is not compelling as an analysis of the basic difficulty, which traces to considerations we must descry elsewhere; to be quite specific, its failure to explain must make it seem irrelevant even if it does not, as it were, actually refute it; but to stipulate this is to remove the underpinnings of the entire analytical framework, and the most pertinent and cogent argument must be abandoned.’

  He looked with triumph and malice at the speaker before continuing: ‘As a broad generalization, one might tentatively hazard a guess therefore, that, all other things being equal, one should not make particular generalizations when general particularizations are equally available—and available to far less idle effect.’

  Dipankar was looking shocked, Amit bored, Lata puzzled.

  Several people in the audience wanted to ask questions, but Amit had had enough. Lata was willingly, and Dipankar unwillingly, drawn out of the hall. She was feeling slightly dizzy, and not only because of the rarefied abstractions she had just breathed. It had been hot and stuffy inside.

  For a minute or two none of them spoke. Lata, who had noticed Amit’s boredom, expected him to show his annoyance, and Dipankar to expostulate. Instead, Amit merely said:

  ‘When faced with something like that, if I am caught short without paper and pencil, I amuse myself by taking any word that the speaker has used—like “bird” or “cloth” or “central” or “blue”—and try to imagine different varieties of them.’

  ‘Even words like “central”?’ asked Lata, amused by the idea.

  ‘Even those,’ said Amit. ‘Most words are fertile.’

  He felt in his pocket for an anna, and bought a small, fragrant garland of fresh white bela flowers from a vendor. ‘Here,’ he said, giving it to Lata.

  Lata, very pleased, said ‘Thank you,’ and after inhaling its fragrance with a delighted smile, put it unselfconsciously in her hair.

  There was something so pleasing, natural and unpretentious about her gesture that Amit found himself thinking: She may be more intelligent than my sisters, but I’m glad she’s not as sophisticated. She’s the nicest girl I’ve met for a long time.

  Lata for her part was thinking how much she liked Meenakshi’s family. They brought her out of herself and her stupid, self-created misery. In their company it was possible to enjoy, after a fashion, even such a lecture as she had just sat through.

  7.36

  Mr Justice Chatterji was sitting in his study. In front of him lay a half-completed judgement. On his desk stood a black-and-white photograph of his parents, and another of himself, his wife, and their five children that had been taken many years ago by a fashionable Calcutta studio. Kakoli, wilful child, had insisted on including her teddy bear; Tapan had been too small at the time to have had an articulate will at all.

  The case involved the confirmation of the death sentence on six members of a gang of dacoits. Such cases caused Mr Justice Chatterji a great deal of pain. He did not like criminal work at all, and looked forward to being reallocated civil work, which was both more intellectually stimulating and less distressing. There was no question that these six men had been found guilty according to law and that the sentence of the Sessions Judge was not unreasonable or perverse. And so Mr Justice Chatterji knew that he would not set it aside. Not all of them may have intended specifically to cause the death of the men they were robbing but, under the Indian Penal Code, in a case of dacoity-cum-murder each criminal was severally liable for the act.

  This was not a case for the Supreme Court. The High Court at Calcutta was the last effective court of appeal. He would sign the judgement, and so would his brother judge, and that, for these men, would be the end. One morning a few weeks down the line, they would be hanged in Alipore Jail.

  Mr Justice Chatterji looked at the photograph of his family for a minute or two, and then around his room. Three of the walls were lined with the buff-coloured half-calf or deep-blue bindings of law-books: the Indian Law Reports, the All India Reporter, the Income Tax Reports, the All England Law Reports, Halsbury’s Laws, a few textbooks and books on general jurisprudence, the Constitution of India (just over a year old) and the various codes and statutes with their commentaries. Though the Judges’ Library at the High Court now provided him with any books he might need, he still continued to subscribe to the journals he had always subscribed to. He did not wish to cut off the series, partly because he liked on occasion to write his judgements at home, partly because he continued to hope that Amit would follow in his footsteps—just as he had followed in his own father’s footsteps, down to choosing for himself and later for his son the same Inn to qualify from.

  It was not absence of mind that had made Mr Justice Chatterji evade his duties as a host this afternoon, nor the fat gossip, nor the noise made by her children, of whom he was in fact quite fond. It was the gossip’s husband, Mr Ganguly, who had suddenly—after a prolonged silence throughout lunch—begun on the verandah to talk about his favourite great man—Hitler: six years dead but still revered by him like a god. In his monotonous voice, chewing his thoughts like cud, he had begun the kind of monologue that Mr Justice Chatterji had heard from him twice before: how even Napoleon (another great Bengali hero) did not come up to Hitlerian standards, how Hitler had helped Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose when he wanted to fight the dreadful British, how atavistic and admirable a force the Indo-Germanic bond was, and how terrible it was that the Germans and the British would within a month be officially terminating the state of war that had existed between them since 1939. (Mr Justice Chatterji thought that it was high time, but did not say so; he refused to get drawn into what was essentially a soliloquy.)

  Now that Kakoli’s ‘German Sahib’ had been mentioned over lunch, this man had expressed his gratification at the possibility that the ‘Indo-Germanic bond’ might become manifest even in his own family. Mr Justice Chatterji had listened for a while with amiable disgust; he had then made a polite excuse, got up, and not returned.

  Mr Justice Chatterji had nothing against Hans. He liked what little he had seen of him. Hans was handsome and well dressed and in every sense presentable, and he behaved with amusing if aggressive politeness. Kakoli liked him a great deal. In time he would probably even learn not to mangle people’s hands. What Justice Chatterji could not abide, however, was the syndrome just exemplified by his wife’s relative—a combination that was by no means uncommon in Bengal: the mad deification of the patriot Subhas Bose who had fled to Germany and Japan and later established the Indian National Army to fight the British; the eulogization of Hitler and Fascism and violence; the denigration of all things British or tainted with ‘pseudo-British liberalism’; and resentment bordering on contempt for the sly milksop Gandhi who had dispossessed Bose of the presidentship of the Congress Party which he had won by election many years before. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was a Bengali, and Mr Justice Chatterji was certainly as proud of being a Bengali as of being an Indian, but he—like his father, ‘old Mr Chatterji’—was profoundly grateful that the likes of Subhas Bose had never succeeded in ruling the country. His father had much preferred Subhas Bose’s quieter and equally patriotic brother Sarat, also a lawyer, whom he had known and, after a fashion, admired.

  If this fellow wasn’t related to my wife, he w
ould be the last person I’d ruin my Sunday afternoon with, thought Mr Justice Chatterji. Families contain far too great a range of temperament—and, unlike acquaintances, they can’t be dropped. And we’ll continue to be related till one of us drops dead.

  Such thoughts on death, such overviews of life were more appropriate to his father, who was nearly eighty, than to himself, thought Mr Justice Chatterji. But the older man seemed so content with his cat and his leisured reading of Sanskrit classics (literary, not religious ones) that he hardly seemed to think of mortality or the passage of time. His wife had died after they had been married ten years, and he had very rarely mentioned her after that. Did he think about her any more often these days? ‘I like reading those old plays,’ he had said to his son a few days ago. ‘King, princess, maidservant—whatever they thought then is still true now. Birth, awareness, love, ambition, hate, death, all the same. All the same.’

  With a start Mr Justice Chatterji realized that he himself did not think very often of his wife. They had met at one of those—what were they called, those special festivals for young people held by the Brahmo Samaj, where teenagers and so on could get to meet?—Jubok Juboti Dibosh. His father had approved of her, and they had got married. They got on well; the house ran well; the children, eccentric though they were, were not bad as children went. He spent the earlier part of his evenings at the club. She very rarely complained about this; in fact, he suspected that she did not mind having the early evening to herself and the children.