A Suitable Boy(281)

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 thick-set, 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 criticized 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.