‘I see,’ smiled Mr Shastri; ‘and it is not so with your pro-fes-sion?’
‘Well,’ said Professor Mishra, ‘there’s always the odd case here or there, you know, but in general, in our department at least, one makes every attempt to ensure the pre-eminence of excellence… Simply because someone may, for instance, be the son of an illustrious person ought not, in our eyes –’
‘What’s that you’re saying, Mishra?’ cried Dr Seth from the next table. ‘Do repeat that – I didn’t quite hear you; nor did my friend Kapoor Sahib…’
Dr Seth was never happier than when walking through an emotional minefield – unless it was when he was dragging seven other troops along with him.
Professor Mishra pursed his lips sweetly and said: ‘My dear Dr Seth, I have quite forgotten what I was rambling on about – perhaps because I feel so relaxed in these delightful surroundings. Or perhaps it is your excellent whisky that has made my memory as limp as my limbs. But what an amazing mechanism the human body is: who could imagine that one could feed in, say, four arrowroot biscuits and one boiled egg and get an output, say, of three spades – and one trick down?’
Parvati quickly interjected: ‘Professor Mishra, a young lecturer was telling us just a few days ago about the pleasures of teaching. What a noble profession it must be.’
‘My dear lady,’ said Professor Mishra, ‘teaching is a thankless task, but one undertakes it because one feels one has a calling, as it were. A couple of years ago I had rather an interesting discussion on the radio about the concept of teaching as a vocation – with a lawyer by the name of Dilip Pandey, in which I said – or was it Deepak Pandey – anyway, I said –’
‘Dilip,’ said the Advocate-General. ‘He is now dead, in fact.’
‘Oh, is he? What a pity. Well, I made the point that there are three kinds of teachers: those who are forgotten, those who are remembered and hated, and the third, the lucky ones, and I hope I am one of them, those who are remembered and’ – he paused – ‘forgiven.’
He looked rather pleased with his formulation.
‘Oh, you are, you are –’ said his wife eagerly.
‘What’s that?’ cried Dr Kishen Chand Seth. ‘Speak louder, we can’t hear you.’ He banged his stick on the floor.
Towards the end of the second rubber, the librarian (having been requested to do so twice already by the users of the library) sent a note to the bridge room. If Parvati had not restrained him, Dr Kishen Chand Seth would have screamed in wrath upon receiving it. As it was, he could neither believe nor stomach the insubordination of the librarian in requesting that the volume of conversation in the bridge room be reduced. He would haul the fellow up before the committee. A useless fellow, who spent most of his time dozing in the stacks, who treated the job as a sinecure, who –
‘Yes, dear,’ said Parvati. ‘Yes, dear, I know. Now we at our table have finished our second rubber, but we’re talking quite quietly. Why don’t you concentrate on finishing yours, and then we can all go out onto the lawn; the film will begin in about twenty minutes. It’s a pity that in the monsoon they screen it indoors. Ah, yes, Pran and Savita are sitting there; eating chips, I suppose. She looks enormous. I think perhaps we’ll go and join them immediately, and you can follow.’
‘I am afraid we must now be going,’ said Professor Mishra, getting up hastily. His wife stood up too.
‘Must you go? Can’t you join us?’ asked Parvati.
‘No – no – far too busy these days – there are guests in the house – and I have been saddled with a good deal of unnecessary curriculum revision,’ explained Professor Mishra.
Mahesh Kapoor looked at him for a second, then returned to his cards.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ said the whale, and glided quickly out of sight, followed by his minnow.
‘How peculiar,’ said Parvati, turning back to the table. ‘What do you make of it?’ she asked Mr Shastri.
‘Force-ful per-son-al-it-y,’ was Mr Shastri’s opinion. Though it was unrevealing, it was delivered with a smile and conveyed the sense that Mr Shastri had some knowledge of the world, and did not opine where opinion was unnecessary.
Parvati had begun to have second thoughts about letting her husband follow her. For one thing, he might still need to be managed. For another, she did not relish meeting Mrs Rupa Mehra without his support. The reaction of Kishy’s daughter to her rose-spangled sari was unpredictable. So Parvati waited for a few more minutes to see if the rubber would end. It did. Her husband was on the winning side. With some glee he was rotting up his points for the hand – including an overtrick and a hundred honours. She breathed more freely.