Sootily, fitfully, the train made its way along the great, burning plain of the Ganga.
At Patna a swarm of locusts, a mile long, darkened the sky.
Dust and flies and soot somehow succeeded in entering the compartment even when the glass panes were pulled down.
The Brahmpur telegram could not have arrived, because neither Savita nor Pran was at the platform to meet her. Lata had been looking forward to seeing them, if only for the fifteen minutes that the train stopped at Brahmpur. As the train pulled out of Brahmpur junction she felt a disproportionate sadness.
As the whistle of the train suddenly wailed out, she caught in the distance a glimpse of the roofs of the university.
Always I am weeping, weeping.
In your heart my image keeping.
If, for example, he had appeared at the station – say, in the casual clothes he had worn when he had been with her on the boat, smiling with his old friendliness, arguing with a porter about the rate he was charging – suppose he too had been going to Kanpur – or at least as far as Banaras or Allahabad – Lata felt that her heart would have leapt with happiness at the sound of his voice and the sight of his face – and any misunderstanding between them would have vanished in a single puff of steam, a single turn of the wheels.
Lata looked down at her book.
‘My poor dear Isabella,’ said he, fondly taking her hand, and interrupting, for a few moments, her busy labours for some one of her five children – ‘How long it is, how terribly long since you were here! And how tired you must be after your journey! You must go to bed early, my dear – and I recommend a little gruel to you before you go. – You and I will have a nice basin of gruel together. My dear Emma, suppose we all have a little gruel.’
An egret flew over a field towards a ditch.
A sickly smell of molasses rose from a sugar-cane factory.
The train stopped for an hour at a tiny station for no particular reason.
Beggars begged at the barred windows of the compartment.
When the train crossed the Ganga at Banaras, she threw a two-anna coin for luck out of the barred window. It hit a girder, then spun downwards into the river.
At Allahabad the train crossed over to the right bank again, and Lata threw another coin out.
Ganga darshan is so nice.
I have now completed twice.
She told herself that she was in danger of becoming an honorary Chatterji.
She began to hum Raag Sarang, then later drifted into Multani.
She rejected her sandwiches and bought some samosas and tea at the next station.
She hoped her mother was well. She yawned. She put Emma aside. She thought once again of Kabir.
She drowsed off for an hour. When she woke she found she had been leaning against the shoulder of an old woman in a white sari, who smiled at her. She had been keeping the flies off Lata’s face.
A troop of monkeys were raiding a dusty mango tree in an orchard at dusk, while three men stood below, trying to shoo them off with stones and lathis.
Soon it was night. It was still warm.
In a while the train slowed down once more, and the word Cawnpore greeted her in black on a large yellow sign on the platform. Her mother was there, and her uncle Mr Kakkar, both smiling; but there was a look of strain on her mother’s face.
9.6
THEY went home by car. Kakkar Phupha (as Lata called her father’s sister’s husband) was a successful accountant with a cheery manner.
When they were alone, Mrs Rupa Mehra told Lata about Haresh: ‘a very suitable prospect’.
Lata was speechless for a moment. Then in a tone of disbelief she said: ‘You treat me like a child.’
Mrs Rupa Mehra wavered for a few seconds between suppression and placation, then murmured: ‘What is the harm, darling? I am not forcing anything on you. And day-after we will be leaving for Lucknow anyway and then back to Brahmpur the day after that.’
Lata looked at her mother, amazed that she should defend herself.
‘And it was for this – not because you were unwell or needed my help – that I was summoned from Calcutta.’ The tone of Lata’s voice was so unloving that Mrs Rupa Mehra’s nose reddened. But she pulled herself together and said: ‘Darling, I do need your help. Getting you married is not easy. And the boy is of our community.’
‘I don’t care what community he belongs to. I am not going to see him. I should never have left Calcutta.’
‘But he is a khatri – from U.P. originally,’ protested her mother.
This cast-iron argument had no effect on Lata. She said: ‘Ma, please. I know all your prejudices and I share none of them. You bring me up one way and you act in another.’
To this righteous attack her mother merely murmured: ‘You know, Lata, I have nothing against – against Mohammedans as such. It is only your future I am concerned about.’ Mrs Rupa Mehra had been expecting an outburst of sorts, and, with an effort, remained emollient.