A Suitable Boy(195)

My father, though he is fairly absent-minded, can see that there is something the matter with me. Yesterday he said, ‘It’s not your results, so what is it, Kabir? I believe it must be a girl or something.’ I too believe it must be a girl or something.

Well, now that you have my address why don’t you write to me? I have been unhappy since you left and unable to concentrate on anything. I knew you couldn’t write to me even if you wanted to because you didn’t have my address. Well, now you do. So please do write. Otherwise I’ll know what to think. And the next time I go to Mr Nowrojee’s place I will have to read out some stricken verses of my own.

With all my love, my darling Lata,

Yours,

Kabir





7.4


FOR a long while Lata sat in a kind of reverie. She did not at first re-read the letter. She felt a great many emotions, but they pulled her in conflicting directions. Under ordinary circumstances the pressure of her feelings might have caused her to shed a few unselfconscious tears, but there were a couple of remarks in the letter which made that impossible. Her first sense was that she had been cheated, cheated out of something that she had expected. There was no apology in the letter for the pain that he must have known he had caused her. There were declarations of love, but they were not as fervent or untinged with irony as she had thought they would be. Perhaps she had given Kabir no opportunity to explain himself at their last meeting, but now that he was writing to her, he could have explained himself better. He had not addressed anything seriously, and Lata had above all wanted him to be serious. For her it had been a matter of life and death.

Nor had he given her much – or any – news of himself, and Lata longed for it. She wanted to know everything about him – including how well he had done in his exams. From his father’s remark it was probable that he had not done badly, but that was not the only interpretation of his remark. It might simply have meant that with the results out, even if he had merely passed, one area of uncertainty had been closed as a possible explanation for his downcast – or perhaps merely unsettled – mood. And how had he obtained her address? Surely not from Pran and Savita? From Malati perhaps? But as far as she knew Kabir did not even know Malati.

He did not want to take any responsiblity for her feelings, that was clear. If anything it was she who – according to him – should be the one to apologize. In one sentence he praised her intelligence, in another he treated her like a dunce. Lata got the sense that he was trying to jolly her along without making any commitment to her beyond ‘love’. And what was love?

Even more than their kisses, she remembered the morning when she had followed him to the cricket field and watched him practising in the nets. She had been in a trance, she had been entranced. He had leaned his head back and burst out laughing at something. His shirt had been open at the collar; there had been a faint breeze in the bamboos; a couple of mynas were quarrelling; it had been warm.

She read through the letter once again. Despite his injunction to her that she should not sit crying on benches, tears gathered in her eyes. Having finished the letter, she began, hardly conscious of what she was doing, to read a paragraph of the book on Egyptian mythology. But the words formed no pattern in her mind.

She was startled by Varun’s voice, a couple of yards away.

‘You‘d better go in, Lata, Ma is getting anxious.’

Lata controlled herself and nodded.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, noticing that she was – or had been – in tears. ‘Have you been quarrelling with her?’

Lata shook her head.

Varun, glancing down at the book, saw the letter, and immediately understood who it was from.

‘I’ll kill him,’ said Varun with timorous ferocity.

‘There’s nothing to kill,’ said Lata, more angrily than sadly. ‘Just don’t tell Ma, please, Varun Bhai. It would drive both of us crazy.’





7.5


WHEN Arun came back from work that day, he was in excellent spirits. He had had a productive day, and he sensed that the evening was going to go off well. Meenakshi, her domestic crisis resolved, was no longer running around nervously; indeed, so elegantly collected was she that Arun could never have guessed she had been in the least distraught. After kissing him on the cheek and giving him the benefit of her tinkly laugh, she went in to change. Aparna was delighted to see her father and bestowed a few kisses on him too but was unable to convince him to do a jigsaw puzzle with her.

Arun thought that Lata looked a bit sulky, but then that was par for the course with Lata these days. Ma, well, Ma, there was no accounting for her moods. She looked impatient, probably because her tea had not come on time. Varun was his usual scruffy, shifty self. Why, Arun asked himself, did his brother have so little spine and initiative and why did he always dress in tattered kurta-pyjamas that looked as if they had been slept in? ‘Turn off that bloody noise,’ he shouted as he entered the drawing room and received the full power of ‘Two intoxicating eyes’.