A Suitable Boy, Page 92

  ‘But I have just had tea, you know, with my breakfast—I’ve just had tea and also far too much to eat before I left my house. Look at me. I must be careful. Your hospitality knows no bounds. But—’

  ‘You aren’t saying, by any chance, Tiwariji, are you, that what we are offering falls below your expectations? Why don’t you like to eat with us? Do you think we will pollute you?’

  ‘Oh, no, no, no, it is just that an insect of the gutter like myself does not feel happy when offered the luxuries of a palace. Heh heh heh!’ The Football wobbled a little at his witticism, and even Rasheed’s father smiled. He decided not to press the point. All of the other brahmins were straightforward about their caste rules, which forbade eating with non-brahmins, but the Football was always evasive.

  Mr Biscuit approached their charpoy, attracted by tea and biscuits.

  ‘Clear off, or I’ll fry you in ghee,’ Moazzam said, his hedgehog-hair bristling. ‘He’s a glutton,’ he explained to Maan.

  Mr Biscuit stared at them with a blank gaze.

  Meher offered him one of her two biscuits, and he came forward like a zombie to ingest it.

  Rasheed was pleased at Meher’s generosity, but not at all pleased with Mr Biscuit.

  ‘He does nothing but eat and shit, eat and shit the whole day,’ he told Maan. ‘That’s his entire business in life. He’s seven years old, and can hardly read a word. What can one do?—it’s the atmosphere of the village. People think he’s funny and encourage him.’

  As if to prove his other skills, Mr Biscuit, having absorbed the offering, now put his hands to his ears and called out, in a mockery of the muezzin’s call to prayer:

  ‘Aaaaaaye Lalla e lalla alala! Halla o halla!’

  Moazzam shouted: ‘You low creature!’ and made as if to slap him, but Maan restrained him.

  Moazzam, once again fascinated by Maan’s watch, said: ‘Look: the two hands are coming together now.’

  ‘Don’t give Moazzam your watch,’ advised Rasheed. ‘I’ve warned you already. Or your torch. He likes to find out what makes them work, but he doesn’t operate very scientifically. I once found him bashing my watch with a brick. He had taken it out of my bag when I wasn’t looking. Luckily, the basic machinery still worked. But the glass, needle, spring—all were smashed. It cost me twenty rupees to have it repaired.’

  But Moazzam was now counting and tickling Meher’s toes—to her great delight. ‘Sometimes he says the most interesting and even sensitive things,’ said Rasheed. ‘He is very puzzling. The trouble is that his parents spoiled him, and did not discipline him at all. Now he just follows his own inclinations. Sometimes he steals money from them or others and goes off into Salimpur. What he does there no one knows. Then he resurfaces after a few days. He’s very intelligent, even affectionate. But he’ll come to a bad end.’

  Moazzam, who had overheard this, laughed and said, a little resentfully: ‘I won’t. It’s you who will come to a bad end. Eight, nine, ten; ten, nine, eight—keep still—seven, six. Give me that charm—you’ve played with it long enough.’

  Noticing a couple of other visitors approaching in the distance, he handed Meher to her great-grandfather, who had emerged from the house, and wandered off to investigate and—if necessary—challenge them.

  ‘Quite a mischievous kid,’ said Maan.

  ‘Mischievous?’ said Baba. ‘He’s a rogue—a thief—at the age of twelve!’

  Maan smiled.

  ‘He broke the fan of that bicycle-operated winnowing machine there. He’s not mischievous, he’s a hooligan,’ continued Baba, rocking Meher to and fro, very vigorously for an old man.

  ‘Now he’s so big,’ continued Baba, throwing a dirty look in Moazzam’s direction, ‘that he has to have fancy food. So he steals—from people’s pockets. Every day he steals rice, daal, whatever he can, from his own house and sells it at the bania’s shop. Then he’s off to Salimpur to eat grapes and pomegranates!’

  Maan laughed.

  Suddenly Baba thought of something. ‘Rasheed!’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Baba?’

  ‘Where’s that other daughter of yours?’

  ‘Inside, Baba, with her mother. I think she’s feeding.’

  ‘She’s a weakling. Hardly seems to be a child of my stock. She should be given buffalo’s milk to drink. When she smiles she looks like an old woman.’

  ‘Many children do, Baba,’ said Rasheed.

  ‘Now this is a healthy child. See how her cheeks glow.’

  Two men—also brahmins from the village—now approached the open courtyard, preceded by Moazzam and followed by Kachheru. Baba went forward to greet them, and Rasheed and Maan moved their own charpoy closer to the end of the courtyard where Rasheed’s father was sitting with the Football. It was becoming a conference.

  To add to the numbers, Netaji also appeared shortly from the direction of Sagal. Qamar, the sardonic schoolteacher who had made a very brief appearance at the shop in Salimpur, was with him. They had just been visiting the madrasa to talk with the teachers.

  10.17

  Everyone greeted everyone else, though with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Qamar was not delighted to see such an accumulation of brahmins, and greeted them in the most perfunctory manner—although the recent arrivals, Bajpai (complete with his sandalwood-paste caste-mark) and his son Kishor Babu, were very good people. They for their part were not happy to see their fellow-brahmin, the Football, who was a mischief-maker and liked nothing better than to set people off against each other.

  Kishor Babu was a shy and gentle soul. He told Maan that he was very pleased to make his acquaintance at last, and took both his hands in his own. After that he tried to pick up Meher, who, however, would not let him and ran off to sit on her grandfather’s lap while he examined the betel nuts that Kachheru had brought. Netaji went across the way to fetch another charpoy.

  Bajpai had caught hold of Maan’s right hand and was examining it carefully. ‘One wife. Some wealth,’ he said. ‘As for the line of wisdom. . . .’

  ‘. . . it seems not to exist.’ Maan finished the sentence for him and smiled.

  ‘The line of life is not very favourable,’ said Bajpai encouragingly.

  Maan laughed.

  Qamar meanwhile was looking disgusted at this whole exercise. Here was another example of the pitiful superstition of the Hindus.

  Bajpai continued: ‘You were four children, only three remain.’

  Maan stopped laughing, and his hand tensed.

  ‘Am I right?’ said Bajpai.

  ‘Yes,’ said Maan.

  ‘Which one passed away?’ asked Bajpai, looking at Maan’s face intently and kindly.

  ‘No,’ said Maan, ‘that’s what you have to tell me.’

  ‘I believe it was the youngest.’

  Maan was relieved. ‘I am the youngest,’ he said. ‘It was the third who died when he was less than a year old.’

  ‘All bogus, all bogus,’ said Qamar, with a look of contempt. He was a man of principle and could not abide charlatanism.

  ‘You should not say so, Master Sahib,’ said Kishor Babu mildly. ‘It is quite scientific. Palmistry—and astrology too. Otherwise why would the stars be where they are?’

  ‘Everything is scientific for you,’ said Qamar. ‘Even the caste system. Even worshipping the linga and other disgusting things. And singing bhajans to that adulterer, that teaser of women, that thief Krishna.’

  If Qamar was spoiling for a quarrel, he did not get what he wanted. Maan looked at him in surprise but did not interfere. He too was interested in what Bajpai and Kishor Babu would say. As for the Football, his small eyes darted swiftly from one side to another.

  Kishor Babu now spoke in a slow and considered voice: ‘You see, Qamar Bhai, it is like this. It is not these images that we worship. They are only points of concentration. Now tell me, why do you turn towards Mecca when you pray? No one would say that you are worshipping the stone. And with Lord Krishna, we do not think of him in those term
s. For us he is the incarnation of Vishnu himself. Why, even I am named after Lord Krishna in a way.’

  Qamar snorted. ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said, ‘that the ordinary Hindus of Salimpur who do their puja every morning before their four-armed goddesses and their elephant-headed gods are using them as points of concentration. They are worshipping those idols, plain and simple.’

  Kishor Babu sighed. ‘Ah, the common people!’ he said, in a manner that implied that this explained everything. He was a firm believer in the caste system.

  Rasheed felt it necessary to intervene on the side of the Hindu minority. ‘Anyway, people are good or bad according to what they do, not according to what they worship.’

  ‘Really, Maulana Sahib?’ said Qamar sourly. ‘So it doesn’t matter who or what you worship? What do you think about all this, Kapoor Sahib?’ he continued provocatively.

  Maan thought for a few seconds but said nothing. He looked over to where Meher and two of her friends were trying to put their arms around the corrugated bark of the neem tree.

  ‘Or don’t you have any views on the subject, Kapoor Sahib?’ Qamar persisted. Being from outside the village, he could be as abrasive as he wished.

  Kishor Babu was now looking quite distressed. Neither Baba nor his sons had so far participated in the theological skirmish. Kishor Babu felt that as his hosts they ought to have intervened to prevent it from getting out of hand. He sensed that Maan did not care at all for Qamar’s method of questioning, and feared that he might react strongly.

  In the event, Maan did not. Still looking for the most part towards the neem tree and only occasionally glancing at Qamar, Maan said:

  ‘I don’t think about these matters. Life is complicated enough without them. But it is clear, Master Sahib, that if you think that I am evading your question, you are not going to give me or anyone else any peace. So I see that you are going to force me to be serious.’

  ‘That is no bad thing,’ said Qamar curtly. He had appraised Maan’s character quickly and had come to the conclusion that he was a man of very little account.

  ‘What I think is this,’ said Maan in the same unusually measured manner as before. ‘It is entirely a matter of chance that Kishor Babu was born in a Hindu family and you, Master Sahib, in a Muslim one. I have no doubt that if you had been exchanged after birth, or before birth, or even before conception, you would have been praising Krishanji and he, the Prophet. As for me, Master Sahib, being so little worthy of praise, I don’t feel very much like praising anyone—let alone worshipping them.’

  ‘What?’ said the Football, rolling belligerently into the conversation and gathering momentum as he spoke: ‘Not even holy men like Ramjap Baba? Not even the Holy Ganga at the full moon of the great Pul Mela? Not even the Vedas? Not even God himself?’

  ‘Ah, God,’ said Maan. ‘God is a big subject—too big for the likes of me. I am sure that He is too big to be concerned about what I think of Him.’

  ‘But don’t you ever have the sense of His presence?’ asked Kishor Babu, leaning forward in a concerned manner. ‘Don’t you ever feel that you are in communion with Him?’

  ‘Now that you mention it,’ said Maan, ‘I feel in direct communion with Him just now. And He is telling me to halt this futile argument and drink my tea before it gets cold.’

  Apart from the Football, Qamar and Rasheed, everyone smiled. Rasheed didn’t enjoy what he saw as Maan’s endemic flippancy. Qamar felt outmanoeuvred by a cheap and irrelevant trick, while the Football was foiled in his attempt to foment trouble. But social harmony had been re-established, and the gathering broke up into smaller groups.

  Rasheed’s father, the Football, and Bajpai began to discuss what would happen if the zamindari law came into force. It had now received the President’s assent but its constitutionality was under challenge in the High Court in Brahmpur. Rasheed, who at present was uncomfortable with that subject, began to talk to Qamar about changes in the curriculum of the madrasa. Kishor Babu, Maan, and Netaji formed a third group—but since Kishor Babu insisted on gently questioning Maan about his views on non-violence while Netaji was eager to ask him about the wolf-hunt, the conversation was a curiously spliced one. Baba went off to amuse himself with his favourite great-granddaughter, whom Moazzam was taking for a piggyback ride from the cattle-shed to the pigeon-house and back.

  Kachheru sat against the wall in the shade of the cattle-shed, thinking his own thoughts and looking indulgently at the children playing in the courtyard. He had not listened to any of the discussion. He was not interested. Though pleased to be of service, he was glad that he had not been asked to do anything by anyone for the time it had taken him to smoke two biris.

  10.18

  The days passed one by one. The heat increased. There was no more rain. The huge sky remained painfully blue for days on end. Once or twice a few clouds did appear over the unending patchwork of plains, but they were small and white, and soon drifted away.

  Maan slowly got used to his exile. At first he fretted. The heat tormented him, the vast, flat, low-lying world of the fields disoriented him, and he was bored limp. Godforsaken in this godforsaken place, he was not where he wanted to be at all. He could not imagine he would ever adjust to it. The need for comfort and stimulus, he felt, was an upward-clicking ratchet. And yet, as the days went by, and things moved or did not move according to the volition of the sky or the circulation of the calendar or the wills of other people, he fell in with life around him. The thought struck him that perhaps his father’s acceptance of imprisonment had been something like this—except that Maan’s days were defined not by morning roll call and lights out, but by the muezzin’s call to prayer and the cow-dust hour when the cattle returned lowing through the lanes.

  Even his initial outrage against his father had waned; it was too much of an effort being angry for long, and besides, during his stay in the countryside, he had begun to appreciate and even admire the scope of his father’s efforts—not that it aroused in him any spirit of emulation.

  Being a bit of a layabout, he lay about a bit. Like the lion that the village children had dubbed him when he first arrived, he spent very few hours in active labour, yawned a great deal, and even appeared to luxuriate in his dissatisfied dormancy, which he interrupted off and on by a roar or two and a mild bout of activity—perhaps a swim in the lake by the school, or a walk to a mango grove—for it was the mango season, and Maan was fond of mangoes. Sometimes he lay on his charpoy and read one of the thrillers lent to him by Sandeep Lahiri. Sometimes he looked over his Urdu books. Despite his not very energetic efforts, he was now able to read clearly printed Urdu; and one day Netaji lent him a slim selection of the most famous ghazals of Mir, which, since he knew large parts of them by heart, did not prove too difficult for Maan.

  What did people do in the village, anyway? he asked himself. They waited; they sat and talked and cooked and ate and drank and slept. They woke up and went into the fields with their brass pots of water. Perhaps, thought Maan, everyone is essentially a Mr Biscuit. Sometimes they looked upwards at the rainless sky. The sun rose higher, reached its height, sank, and set. After dark, when life used to begin for him in Brahmpur, there was nothing to do. Someone visited; someone left. Things grew. People sat around and argued about this and that and waited for the monsoon.

  Maan too sat around and talked, since people enjoyed talking to him. He sat on his charpoy and discussed people, problems, mahua trees, the state of the world, everything and anything. He never doubted that he would be liked or trusted; since he was not suspicious by nature, he did not imagine that others would be suspicious of him. But as an outsider, as a city dweller, as a Hindu, as the son of a politician—and the Minister of Revenue at that—he was open to all kinds of suspicions and rumours—not all of them as fantastic as the one triggered off by his orange kurta. Some people thought that he was staking out the constituency that his father had chosen to fight from in the coming elections, others that he had decided to settle perman
ently here, having found that city life was not for him, yet others that he was lying low to avoid creditors. But after a while they got used to Maan, saw no harm in his lack of evident purpose, found his opinions pleasantly and humorously unaggressive, and liked the fact that he liked them. As ‘lion, lion, without a tail’ bathing under the hand-pump, as Maan Chacha dandling a wailing baby, as the source of intriguing objects like a watch and a torch, as the absorbed and incompetent calligrapher who used the wrong Urdu ‘Z’ in his spelling of simple words, he was fairly quickly accepted and trusted by the children; and the trust and acceptance of their parents followed soon enough. If Maan regretted that he only ever saw the men, he had enough sense not to mention it. Meanwhile he kept out of village feuds and discussions of zamindari or religion. His handling of Qamar and the Football on the subject of God was soon common knowledge throughout the village. Almost everyone approved. Rasheed’s family grew to enjoy his company. He even became something of an open-air confessional for them.

  The days stretched by, hardly differentiated one from another. When the postman came to the house, he usually greeted Maan’s expectant expression with a rueful one. Over the weeks he received two letters: one from Pran, one from his mother. He learned from Pran’s letter that Savita was well, that his mother had not been too well, that Bhaskar sent his love and Veena her affectionate admonitions, that the Brahmpur Shoe Mart had woken up, that the English Department was still sound asleep, that Lata had gone to Calcutta, that Mrs Rupa Mehra had gone to Delhi. How distant those worlds appeared, he thought, like the occasional white clouds that fluffed themselves into existence and disappeared miles above him. His father, it seemed, was coming home as late as ever: he was now deep into consultations with the Advocate-General about the legal challenge to the Zamindari Act; he could not spare the time to write, or so his mother explained, but he had asked after Maan’s health and about the farm. She insisted that she herself was in good health; occasional minor complaints that Pran might have unnecessarily mentioned she attributed to old age—Maan was not to worry about her. The late onset of the rains had affected the garden, but they were expected soon, and when everything was green again, Maan would be interested to notice two small innovations: a slight unevenness in the side lawn, and a bed of zinnias planted below his window.