‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Malati, uncontritely. ‘This is a sensitive point with you.’
‘It is not,’ said Lata. ‘It is not sensitive. It’s just irritating. I find it reassuring to think of Amit as a friend, and very unreassuring to think of him in any other way. It’s just because you saddled yourself with a musician that you want to saddle me with a poet.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Malati, please believe me, you’re barking up a nonexistent tree.’
‘All right,’ said Malati. ‘Here’s an experiment. Close your eyes, and think of Kabir.’
Lata wanted to refuse to go along. But curiosity is a curious thing, and after hesitating for a while she frowned and complied. ‘Surely it isn’t necessary to close my eyes,’ she said.
‘No, no, close your eyes,’ insisted Malati. ‘Now describe what he’s wearing – and one or two physical features. Don’t open your eyes while you’re speaking.’
Lata said: ‘He’s wearing cricket clothes; a cap; he’s smiling – and – this is ridiculous, Malati.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, his cap’s come off: he’s got wavy hair, and broad shoulders, and nice even teeth. Rather a – what do they call it in silly romantic novels? – an aquiline nose. What is the purpose of all this?’
‘All right, now think of Haresh.’
‘I’m trying,’ said Lata. ‘All right, I have him in focus now. He’s wearing a silk shirt – cream-coloured – and fawn trousers. Oh – and those horrible co-respondent shoes I told you about.’
‘Features?’
‘He’s got small eyes, but they’ve crinkled up very nicely into a smile – they’ve almost disappeared.’
‘Is he chewing paan?’
‘No, thank God. He’s drinking a cup of cold chocolate. Pheasant’s, he said it was called.’
‘And now Amit.’
‘All right,’ sighed Lata. She tried to picture him, but his features remained vague. After a while she said: ‘He refuses to come into focus.’
‘Oh,’ said Malati, with something like disappointment in her voice. ‘But what’s he wearing?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Lata. ‘How odd. Am I allowed to think instead of imagine?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Malati.
But try as she might, Lata could not imagine what kind of shirts and trousers and shoes Amit wore.
‘Where are you?’ asked Malati. ‘A house? A street? A park?’
‘A cemetery,’ said Lata.
‘And what are you doing?’ said Malati, laughing.
‘Talking in the rain. Oh yes, he has an umbrella. Would that count as an item of clothing?’
‘All right,’ admitted Malati. ‘I was wrong. But trees do grow, you know.’
Lata refused to follow up this unprofitable speculation. A little later, as they returned to the house for the promised tea, she said: ‘There’ll be no avoiding him, Malati. I’m bound to meet him. When he helped out after the disaster, that wasn’t the mark of “just a teenage boy”. He did that because he felt he had to, not because he meant me to hear about it.’
Malati said: ‘What you have got to do is to build up your life without him, intolerable though that may appear at first. Accept the fact that your mother will never accept him. That is an absolute given. You’re right, you’re bound to bump into him sooner or later, and the one thing that you must make sure of is that you have very little idle time. Yes, a play’s just the thing for you. You should act as Olivia.’
‘You must think me a fool,’ said Lata.
‘Well, foolish,’ said Malati.
‘It’s terrible, Malati,’ Lata continued. ‘I want to meet him more than anything. And I’ve told my Co-respondent to correspond. He asked at the station, and I couldn’t bear to be mean to him when he’d been so helpful to Ma and me.’
‘Oh, there’s no harm in that,’ said Malati. ‘So long as you don’t either dislike or love him, you can correspond with him. And didn’t he make it clear that he was still half in love with someone else?’
‘Yes,’ said Lata, rather thoughtfully. ‘Yes, he did.’
12.5
TWO days later Lata got a short note from Kabir asking her whether she was still annoyed with him. Couldn’t they meet at the Brahmpur Literary Society on Friday? He would only go if there was a chance of meeting her.
At first Lata thought of asking Malati once again what she should do. Then, partly because Malati could hardly be expected to manage her love-life in every detail, and partly because Malati would probably have told her not to go and to ignore the letter, Lata decided to consult herself and the monkeys.