A Suitable Boy(445)

‘Well, do you plan to back your threat up with action? To fall upon the knives of life or shoot yourself with the guns of life?’

Maan started. This lapse into practicality was in poor taste. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said.

‘I don’t think so either,’ said Pran. ‘Anyway, don’t. I’ll miss you. So will all the people who were in this room. So will all the people whose regards you’ve brought me. So will Baoji and Ammaji and Veena and Bhaskar. So will your creditors.’

‘You’re right!’ said Maan in a determined manner. He polished off the last two jamuns. ‘You’re absolutely right. You’re a pillar of strength, you know that, Pran? Even when you’re lying down. Now I feel I can face everyone and everything. I feel as if I’m a lion.’ He roared experimentally.

The door opened, and Mr and Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, Veena, Kedarnath and Bhaskar came in.

The lion subsided, and looked a little shamefaced. He hadn’t visited home for two days, and though there was no reproach in his mother’s eyes, he felt bad. While she said a few words to Pran, she arranged a fragrant bunch of bela from the garden in a vase that she had brought with her. And she asked Maan about the Nawab Sahib’s family.

Maan hung his head. ‘They are all very well, Ammaji,’ he said. ‘And how is the frog? Recovered enough to be hopping around like this?’ He gave Bhaskar, a hug, then exchanged a few words with Kedarnath. Veena went over to Pran, put her hand on his forehead, and asked not how he was but how Savita was taking his illness.

Pran shook his head. ‘I couldn’t have timed it worse,’ he said.

‘You must take care of yourself,’ said Veena.

‘Yes,’ said Pran. ‘Yes, of course.’ After a pause he added, ‘She wants to study law – in case she becomes a widow and the child an orphan – I mean, fatherless.’

‘Don’t say such things, Pran,’ said his sister sharply.

‘Law?’ said Mr Mahesh Kapoor equally sharply.

‘Oh, I only say them because I don’t believe them,’ said Pran. ‘I’m protected by a mantra.’

Mrs Mahesh Kapoor turned to him and said, ‘Pran – Ramjap Baba also said one other thing; he said your chances for a job would be affected by a death. Do not make fun of fate. It is never good. If any of my grown-up children were to die before me, I would want to die myself.’

‘What’s all this talk of dying?’ said her husband, impatient with all this needless emotion. ‘This room is full of mosquitoes. One just bit me. Tell Savita she should concentrate on her duties as a mother. All this law will do her no good.’

Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, surprisingly, demurred.

‘Unh! What do you understand about anything?’ said her husband. ‘Women should have rights. I’m all for giving them property rights. But if they insist on working, they won’t be able to spend time on their children, and they’ll be brought up neglected. If you had been working, would you have had time to nurse Pran? Would he have been alive today?’

Mrs Mahesh Kapoor said nothing further on the subject. She looked back on Pran’s childhood, and thought that what her husband had said was probably true.

‘How’s the garden, Ammaji?’ asked Pran. The scent of the bela blossoms had filled the room.

‘The zinnias under Maan’s window are out,’ said his mother. ‘And the malis are laying down the new lawn. Since your father resigned, I’ve had a little time to spend on it, though we have to pay the malis ourselves now. And I’ve planted a few new rose bushes. The ground’s soft. And the pond-herons have been visiting.’

Maan, who had so far been rather subdued and un-leonine, could not resist quoting from Ghalib:

‘The breeze of the garden of faithfulness has dispersed from my heart,

And nothing remains to me except unfulfilled desire.’



He lapsed into atypical moroseness.

Veena smiled; Pran laughed; Bhaskar’s expression did not change, for his mind was on other things.

But Kedarnath looked more perturbed than usual; Mrs Mahesh Kapoor scanned her younger son’s face with fresh anxiety; and the ex-Minister of Revenue told him irritably to shut up.





13.5


MRS MAHESH KAPOOR walked around her garden slowly. It was early morning, cloudy, and comparatively cool. A tall jamun tree, though rooted in the pavement outside, spread its branches over a corner of the garden walk. The purple fruit had indelibly stained the stone path; the pits lay scattered around a corner of her lawn.

Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, like Maan, was very fond of jamuns, and felt that their arrival was more than adequate compensation for the departure of the mango season. The jamun-pickers, who had been given a contract by the horticultural section of the Public Works Department, walked along the street in the early morning, climbing each tree and shaking down with their long lathis dark, olive-sized, sweetly acerbic fruit. Their women, standing below, collected them on large sheets to sell them in the busy market near Chowk. Every year there would be a tussle about the rights to the fruit that fell on Mrs Mahesh Kapoor’s side, and every year it would be peacefully settled. The jamun-pickers would be allowed to enter her garden as long as they gave her a share of the fruit and an undertaking not to trample all over her lawn and flower-beds.