A Suitable Boy(458)
‘What do you think of your daughter?’ asked Mrs Rupa Mehra.
‘She has a nice smile, considering that she’s a baby,’ said Pran.
As he had thought, Mrs Rupa Mehra did not approve of his flippancy. She told him that if he had given birth to the baby he would have appreciated her more.
‘Quite right, Ma, quite right,’ said Pran.
He wrote a short note back to Savita, informing her that the baby met with his approval, and reassuring her that slippery people were necessary in the scheme of things. When Mrs Rupa Mehra returned upstairs with the baby, Mr and Mrs Mahesh Kapoor followed, and Pran stared at the ceiling, lost in his thoughts, more happy about the present than worried about the future.
The baby was a little difficult to feed on the first day. At first she didn’t want to acknowledge the breast, but once Savita brushed her finger against her cheek she turned around quite swiftly and opened her mouth. This was the opportunity for the nipple to be put to the baby’s mouth. The baby’s face registered an expression something like surprise. She also had a little difficulty in pulling properly. After that there was no trouble, except that she tended to go to sleep while feeding, and had to be woken up to complete her feed. Sometimes Savita tickled her behind the ears, sometimes on the soles of her feet. The baby was comfortable and contented to the extent that she required a great deal of persuasion to wake up at times.
Grandmother, mother and baby each had a bed in the private room. Lata had to go for classes in the morning, but usually managed to relieve her mother’s watch for an hour or two around lunchtime. Sometimes Mrs Rupa Mehra, Savita, and the baby would all be sleeping, with only Lata watching, and an occasional nurse stopping by to ensure that everything was all right. It was a quiet time, and Lata used it to learn her lines. At other times she simply mused. If the baby woke, or needed its nappy changed, she took care of what needed to be done. The baby was content to be rocked by her.
Sometimes, sitting here, with the marked script of Twelfth Night open on her lap, Lata substituted the word ‘happiness’ for ‘greatness’ in the famous quotation. She wondered what one could do to be born happy, to achieve happiness, or to have it thrust on one. The baby, she thought, had arranged to be born happy; she was placid, and had as good a chance as anyone of happiness in this world, her father’s poor health notwithstanding. Pran and Savita, different though their backgrounds were, were a happy couple. They recognized limits and possibilities; their yearnings did not stretch beyond their reach. They loved each other – or, rather, had come to do so. They both assumed, without ever needing to state it – or perhaps without even thinking explicitly about it – that marriage and children were a great good. If Savita was restless – and at the moment in the shaded noon light her sleeping face showed no restlessness but, rather, a peace and pleasure that Lata wondered at – if she was restless, it was because she feared the undoing by forces outside themselves of this great good. She wanted above all to ensure that no matter what happened to her husband, insecurity and unhappiness would not unavoidably thrust themselves on their child. The law-book resting on the table on one side of her bed balanced the baby resting in the cot on the other.
Nowadays, when Mrs Rupa Mehra fussed about Savita or her as-yet-nameless granddaughter, or voiced to Lata her fears about Pran’s health or Varun’s shiftlessness, Lata was not so impatient as she had earlier been. Her mother appeared to her now as the guardian of the family; and with life and death so near each other here in the hospital, it seemed to Lata that all that provided continuity in the world or protection from it was the family. Calcutta, Delhi, Kanpur, Lucknow – the visits to endless relatives – the Annual Trans-India Rail-Pilgrimages that Arun mocked so relentlessly and the water-works that vexed him, the sending of cards to third cousins thrice removed on their birthdays, the family gossip at every ritual ceremony from birth to death, and the continual recollection of her husband – that absent but no doubt still benevolently supervising god – all these could be seen as part of the works of a corresponding domestic goddess, whose symbols (false teeth, black bag, scissors and thimble, gold and silver stars) would be remembered with tenderness long after she was gone – as she herself was over-fond of pointing out. She wanted Lata’s happiness just as Savita wanted her baby’s; and had tried to arrange for it in as determined a manner as she could. Lata no longer resented it.
Thrust so suddenly into the marriage market this year, forced to travel from city to city, Lata had begun to look at marriages (the Sahgals, the Chatterjis, Arun and Meenakshi, Mr and Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, Pran and Savita) with more than a disinterested eye. But whether it was owing to the hectoring of her mother or her overly copious love or the vision of these different families or Pran’s illness or the birth of Savita’s baby or all of them combined, Lata felt she had changed. The sleeping Savita was perhaps a more powerful adviser than the voluble Malati.