A Suitable Boy, Page 75

  By now the water in the fields was uncomfortably hot underfoot, and a hot breeze had begun to blow. ‘I will have to rest for a while,’ he told himself. But he realized the importance of ploughing while the fugitive water was still on the ground, and he did not wish it to be said that he had not done what he knew needed doing.

  By the time it was late afternoon his dark face was flushed red. His feet, callused and cracked though they were, felt as if they had been boiled. After a short day’s work he usually shouldered the plough himself as he drove the cattle back from the fields. But he had no energy to do so today and gave it to the spent cattle to haul. Hardly a coherent thought formed itself in his mind. The metal of his spade, when it touched his shoulder accidentally, made him wince.

  He passed by his own unploughed field with its two mulberry trees and hardly noticed it. Even that small field was not really his own, but it did not strike him to say so—or even think so. His only intention was to place one foot after the other on the path that led back to Debaria. The village lay three-quarters of a mile ahead of him, and it seemed to him that he was walking there through fire.

  8.12

  Rasheed’s father’s whitewashed house, while fairly imposing from the outside by the standards of Debaria, contained very few rooms. It basically consisted of a square colonnaded quadrangle open to the sky in the middle. On one side of this quadrangle three quite airless rooms had been constructed by the simple expedient of bricking in the space between the columns. These rooms were occupied by members of the family. There were no other rooms in the house. Cooking was done in a corner of the open colonnade. This saved the women of the household from the smoke of a chimney-less hearth in a closed kitchen—exposure to which in the course of time would have ruined their eyes and lungs.

  Other sections of the colonnade contained storage bins and shelves. In the central square was an open space with a lemon tree and a pomegranate tree. Behind the back wall of the quadrangle was a privy for the women and a small vegetable garden. A set of stairs led up to the roof where Rasheed’s father held court and ate paan—as he was doing at this moment.

  No man could enter the house who was not a close member of the family. Rasheed’s maternal or paternal uncles had free access. This was true of the bear-like uncle even after his sister, Rasheed’s mother, had died and Rasheed’s father had taken a second—and much younger—wife. Since the patriarch, Baba, despite his age and diabetes, didn’t mind climbing the stairs, roof conferences were a regular phenomenon. A roof conference was always convened, for instance, when anyone returned from a long absence, in order to sort out family matters.

  This evening’s was in honour of Rasheed, but before the other men had assembled it had turned quite quickly into an argument—or a series of arguments—between Rasheed and his father. His father had raised his voice on a number of occasions. Rasheed had defended himself, but it would have been almost unthinkable for him to raise his voice in uncontrolled anger. Sometimes he remained silent.

  When Rasheed had left Maan outside and entered the courtyard, he had been in an unquiet frame of mind. Maan had not mentioned the letter today, which was good. Rasheed had not liked the thought of disappointing his friend in the matter, but it would have been impossible for him to write the kinds of things that Maan would almost certainly want to dictate. Rasheed did not care for what he saw as the baser human instincts. They made him uncomfortable, at times, even angry. In matters such as these, he preferred to keep his eyes closed. If he suspected that there was anything between Maan and Saeeda Bai—and considering the circumstances of their meetings it was hard to imagine how he could not have known it—he did not wish to dwell on it.

  As he walked upstairs to meet his father, he thought about his mother, who had lived in that house until her death two years before. It had seemed unimaginable to him then, as it seemed unimaginable to him now, that after her death his father could have married anyone else. At the age of fifty-five, surely one’s appetites became still; and surely the memory of a woman who had devoted her entire life to his service and to the service of his two sons would have stood like a wall between his father and the thought of taking a second wife. But here she was, his stepmother: a pretty woman, not ten years older than himself. And it was she who slept with his father on the roof whenever he decided she should, and who bustled around the house, apparently undaunted by the ghost of the woman who had planted the trees whose fruit she unthinkingly plucked.

  What did his father do, Rasheed wondered, other than give in to his appetites? He sat at home and ordered people about, and he ate paan continuously from morning till night, like a chain-smoker. He had ruined his teeth and tongue and throat. His mouth was a mere red slash interrupted by the occasional black tooth. Yet this man with his black, curly, balding hair and thickset, belligerent face was forever provoking and lecturing him—and had done so from Rasheed’s infancy to his adulthood.

  Rasheed could not remember a time when he had not been lectured to by his father. In school, when he was a small or even adolescent ruffian, he had no doubt deserved it. But later, as he had settled down, and done well in college, he had continued to be a target for his father’s dissatisfaction. And everything had got worse since he had lost his elder and favourite son, Rasheed’s beloved brother, in a train accident, just a year before the loss of his wife.

  ‘Your place is here, on the land,’ his father had told him afterwards. ‘I need your help. I am no longer so young. If you want to remain at Brahmpur University, you yourself will have to find the means to do so.’ His father was hardly poor, Rasheed thought bitterly. He was apparently young enough to take a young wife. And—Rasheed’s mind rebelled at the thought—he was even young enough to want her to give him another child. Late fatherhood was something of a tradition in the family. Baba, after all, had been in his fifties when Netaji was born.

  Whenever he thought of his mother, tears came to Rasheed’s eyes. She had loved him and his brother almost to excess, and she had been adored in return. His brother had delighted in the pomegranate tree and he in the lemon. Now as he looked around the courtyard, freshened and washed by the rain, he seemed to see everywhere the tangible marks of her love.

  The death of her elder son had certainly hastened her own. And before dying she had made Rasheed, heartbroken as he was by his brother’s death and her own impending one, promise her something that he had wanted desperately to refuse but did not have the heart or will to: a promise that was no doubt good in itself; but that had tied his life down even before he had begun to taste freedom.

  8.13

  Rasheed sighed as he walked up the stairs. His father was sitting on a charpoy on the roof, and his stepmother was pressing his feet.

  ‘Adaab arz, Abba-jaan. Adaab arz, Khala,’ said Rasheed. He called his stepmother Aunt.

  ‘You have taken your time coming,’ said his father curtly.

  Rasheed said nothing. His young stepmother looked at him for a second, then turned away. Rasheed had never been impolite to her, but in his presence she always felt conscious of the woman whom she had supplanted, and she felt hurt that he made no attempt to reassure her or show her any affection.

  ‘How is your friend?’

  ‘Fine, Abba. I’ve left him downstairs—writing a letter, I think.’

  ‘I don’t mind him coming, but I would like to have been warned.’

  ‘Yes, Abba. I’ll try to do so next time. This came up quite suddenly.’

  Rasheed’s stepmother got up and said: ‘I’ll go and make some tea.’

  When she had gone, Rasheed said quietly: ‘Abba, if you can, please spare me this.’

  ‘Spare you what?’ said his father in a sudden fit of temper. He understood just what Rasheed meant, but was unwilling to admit it.

  Rasheed at first decided he would say nothing, then reconsidered it. If I don’t speak my mind, he thought, will I have to continue to bear the intolerable? ‘What I mean, Abba,’ he said in a low voice, ‘is being cri
ticized in front of her.’

  ‘I will say what I like to you when and where I like,’ said his father, chewing his paan and looking out over the edge of the roof. ‘Where are the others? Oh, yes—and you can be sure that it is not only I who criticize you and your way of life.’

  ‘My way of life?’ said Rasheed, some slight sharpness escaping into his tone of voice. He felt that it hardly suited his father to criticize his way of life.

  ‘On your first evening in the village, you missed both the evening and the night prayer. Today when I went into the fields I wanted you to accompany me—but you were nowhere to be seen. I had something important to show you and discuss with you. Some land. What kind of influence will people think you are under? And you spend your day going around from the house of the washerman to the house of the sweeper, asking about this one’s son and that one’s nephew, but spending no time with your own family. It is no secret that many people here think that you are a communist.’

  Rasheed reflected that this probably meant only that he loathed the poverty and injustice endemic to the village, and that he made no particular secret of it. Visiting poor families was hardly cause for reproach.

  ‘I hope you don’t think that what I am doing is wrong,’ said Rasheed in a mutedly sarcastic manner.

  His father said nothing for a second, then remarked with great asperity: ‘Your education in Brahmpur and so on has done a lot for your confidence. You should take advice where you can get it.’

  ‘And what advice would that be?’ said Rasheed. ‘The advice of the elders of this village that I should make as much money as I can as quickly as I can? Everyone here, as far as I can see, lives entirely for their appetites: for women or drink or food—’

  ‘Enough! You’ve said enough!’ said his father, shouting at him, but losing several of his consonants in the process.

  Rasheed did not add ‘—or paan’, as he had been about to do. Instead he kept quiet, resolved not to say anything to his father that he might later regret, no matter how much he was provoked. In the end what Rasheed said was couched in general terms: ‘Abba, I feel that one is responsible for others, not only for oneself and one’s family.’

  ‘But first of all for one’s family.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Abba,’ said Rasheed, wondering why he ever returned to Debaria. ‘Do you think my marriage, for instance, shows that I don’t care for my family? That I didn’t care for my mother or my elder brother? I feel I would have been happier—and you as well—if I had been the one who had died.’

  His father was silent for a minute. He was thinking of his happy-go-lucky elder son who had been content to live in Debaria and help manage the family land, who had been as strong as a lion, who had taken pride in his place as the son of a local zamindar, and who, rather than seeing everything as a problem, had spread a kind of unconcerned goodwill wherever he had gone. Then he thought of his wife—Rasheed’s mother—and he drew in a slow breath.

  To Rasheed he said in a gentler voice than before: ‘Why do you not leave these schemes of yours—all these educational schemes, historical schemes, socialist schemes, all these schemes of improvement and redistribution, all this, this’—he waved his hand around—‘and live here and help us. Do you know what will happen to this land in a year or so when zamindari is abolished? They want to take it away from us. And then all your imaginary poultry farms and high-yielding fish ponds and improved dairy farms with which you intend to benefit the mass of mankind will have to be built in the air, because if all that comes to pass, there certainly won’t be enough land to support them. Not in our family, anyway.’

  His father might have intended to speak gently, but what had come out of his utterance was inescapable scorn.

  ‘What can I do to prevent it, Abba?’ said Rasheed. ‘If the land is to be justly taken over it will be taken over.’

  ‘You could do a lot,’ his father began hotly. ‘For one thing, you could stop using the word “justly” for what is nothing but theft. And for another, you could talk to your friend—’

  Rasheed’s face became tense. He could not bear the thought of demeaning himself in this way. But he chose an argument that he thought would be more suited to his father’s view of the world.

  ‘It would not work,’ he said. ‘The Revenue Minister is completely unbending. He won’t make individual exceptions. In fact he has let it be known that those people who try to use their influence with him or anyone else in the Revenue Department will be the first to be notified under the act.’

  ‘Is that so?’ said Rasheed’s father thoughtfully. ‘Well, we have not been idle ourselves . . . the tehsildar knows us; and the Sub-Divisional Officer is an honest fellow, but lazy . . . let’s see.’

  ‘Well, what has been happening, Abba?’ asked Rasheed.

  ‘That is what I wanted to speak to you about. . . . I wanted to point out certain fields. . . . We have to make things clear to everyone. . . . As the Minister says, there cannot be exceptions. . . .’

  Rasheed frowned. He could not understand what his father was getting at.

  ‘The idea is to move the tenants around,’ said his father, cracking a betel nut with a small brass nutcracker. ‘Keep them running—this year this field, next year, that. . . .’

  ‘But Kachheru?’ said Rasheed, thinking of the small field with the two mulberry trees—Kachheru had not planted a mango tree for fear that such presumption might tempt providence.

  ‘What about Kachheru?’ said his father, displaying an anger that he hoped would seal the lid on this uncomfortable subject. ‘He will get whatever field I desire to give him. Make an exception for one chamar, and I’ll have twenty rebellions. The family is agreed on this.’

  ‘But his trees—?’

  ‘His trees?’ said Rasheed’s father dangerously. ‘The trouble is these communist ideas you drink like mother’s milk at the university. Let him take one under each arm and clear off if he wants to.’

  A sort of sickness gripped Rasheed’s heart as he looked at his father. He said softly that he was not feeling well, and asked to be excused. At first his father looked at him intently, then suddenly said, ‘Go. And find out what’s happening about the tea. Ah, here comes your Mamu.’ His brother-in-law’s large stubble-bearded face had appeared at the top of the stairs.

  ‘I was telling Rasheed what I thought about his grand idiocies,’ said Rasheed’s father with a laugh just before Rasheed walked downstairs and out of sight.

  ‘Oh, yes?’ said the Bear mildly. He thought highly of his nephew and did not care for his brother-in-law’s attitude towards him.

  The Bear knew that Rasheed liked him too, and sometimes wondered at it. After all, he was not an educated man. But what Rasheed admired about him was that he was a man who had attained tolerance and calm without losing his zest. Nor could he ever forget that at his uncle’s home he had found a refuge when he had fled from his own.

  The Bear’s main concern about Rasheed was that he was not looking well. He was too thin, too dark, and too gaunt; and more white had appeared in his hair than should by rights appear in the hair of any young man.

  ‘Rasheed is good,’ he said.

  He received a grunt in response to this absolute statement.

  ‘The only problem with Rasheed,’ added the Bear, ‘is that he worries too much about everyone, including you.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Rasheed’s father, parting his lips and opening his red mouth.

  ‘Not only you, of course,’ continued his brother-in-law calmly and with great and expansive definitiveness. ‘About his wife. About his children. About the village. About the country. About true religion and false religion. Also about other matters: some important, some less so. Like how one should behave towards one’s fellow-man. Like how the world can be fed. Like where the mud goes when you hammer a peg into the ground. And of course the greatest question of all. . . .’ The Bear paused and belched.

  ‘What is that?’ his brother-in-law could not resist asking. />
  ‘Why a goat eats green and shits black,’ said the Bear.

  8.14

  His father’s words burning in his ears, Rasheed walked downstairs. He forgot to inquire about the tea. He did not at first know what he should think, let alone do. He felt, above all, ashamed. Kachheru, whom he had known since he was a child, who had carried him on his back, who had stood patiently by the hand-pump while he bathed, who had served the family trustingly and unflaggingly for so many years, ploughing and weeding and fetching and carrying: it was unimaginable that his father should so indifferently have suggested shifting him about from field to field in his old age. He was no longer young; he had aged in their service. A man of settled habits, he had become deeply attached to the small plot that he had tilled for fifteen years. He had made improvements to the field, connecting it by a series of small channels to a larger ditch; he had maintained the raised paths that bordered it; he had planted the mulberry trees for shade and occasional fruit. Strictly speaking, these too may have been the landlord’s under the old dispensation, but to speak strictly here was to speak inhumanly. And under the new dispensation that was doubtless soon to come, Kachheru had rights which could not be denied. Everyone knew that he was the tiller of that field. Under the impending zamindari legislation five years of continuous tenancy was enough to establish his right to the land.

  That night Rasheed could hardly sleep. He did not want to talk to anyone, not even to Maan. During the night prayer—which he did not avoid—he mouthed the words through habit but his heart remained grounded. When he lay down he felt a painful pressure in his head. After a few hours of restlessness he got up at last and walked through the lanes towards the wastelands at the far northern end of the village. Everything was still. The bullocks had ceased their work on the threshing-ground. The dogs were unperturbed by his presence. The night was starlit and warm. In their cramped thatched huts the poorest of the village slept. They cannot do it, said Rasheed to himself. They cannot do it.