A Suitable Boy(19)

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 sixteenyear-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 RailPilgrimage. 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 Fran’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 Fran’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.