Another matter about which Arun wrote to his mother was his meeting with Haresh. The loss of face he had suffered at the Khandelwals’ still made him flush whenever he thought about it. He told Mrs Rupa Mehra precisely what he thought of his prospective brother-in-law: that he was a short, pushy, crass young man with too good an opinion of himself. He had a smattering of the grimy Midlands over a background of the malodorous alleys of Neel Darvaza. Neither St Stephen’s nor the culture of London had had much effect on him. He dressed dressily; he lacked the social graces; and his English was oddly unidiomatic for one who had studied it at college and had lived two years in the country. As for mixing in Arun’s kind of company (the Calcutta Club and the Tollygunge Race-course: the elite of Calcutta society, both Indian and European), Arun could not see how it would be possible. Khanna was a foreman – a foreman! – in that Czech shoemaking establishment. Mrs Rupa Mehra could not seriously believe that he was fit material to marry a Mehra of their class and background, or to drag her daughter down with him. Arun added that Meenakshi, by and large, agreed with him.
What he did not add, because he did not know it, was that Meenakshi had other plans for Lata. Now that she was staying with the Chatterjis, she began to work on Amit. Kakoli was a willing accomplice. Both of them liked Lata, and both of them thought that she would be just the right match for their elder brother. She would put up with his quirks, and appreciate his work. She was intelligent and literary; and though Amit could subsist on very little conversation in life (unlike his sisters, or even Dipankar), what conversation he did have could not be fatuous or vacuous – unless, of course, it was with his brothers or sisters, where he was comparatively unbuttoned.
At any rate, Kakoli – who had once told him that she reeeeeally pitied the woman who had to marry him – had decided that she needn’t pity Lata, who would be capable both of understanding and of handling her eccentric brother.
Perhaps Meenakshi’s plotting was a good thing. Amit, who had liked Lata a great deal, would not have been prodded into action had it not been for his energetic and conniving sisters.
Instead of employing the usual Kakoli-couplets, which had proven to be ineffectual, the two sisters were much more gentle with Amit this time. Meenakshi told him that there was a vague Other on the scene. At first she had thought it was a fellow called Akbar or something who was acting with Lata in As You Like It, but the main contender had turned out to be a bumptious cobbler, who was utterly unsuited to Lata; she thus implied that Amit would be rescuing Lata from an unhappy marriage by intervening. Kakoli simply told him that Lata liked him, and that she knew he liked Lata, and that she couldn’t see what he was making such a fuss about. Why didn’t he send her a love-letter and one of his books?
Neither Meenakshi nor Kakoli felt they had much chance of success unless they had appraised Amit’s feelings for Lata correctly; but if they had, then they would act as the necessary spurs to action. They did not know much about his time at Oxford and what affairs, if any, he had had there, but they did know that in Calcutta he had rebuffed all the efforts of his female admirers or their mothers to get to know him better. He had remained faithful to Jane Austen. He appeared to be content to lead a life of contemplation. He had a strong, if not very patent, will, and never did anything he didn’t want to. As for the law, in which he had earned his degree, in spite of Biswas Babu’s exhortations and his father’s annoyance, Amit had showed no signs of exerting himself in it at all.
His justification to himself for his idleness went something like this: I need not worry about money; I shall never be in real want. Why earn more than I need? If I take up practising law, apart from boring myself and being irritable to everyone around me, I will achieve nothing of permanent worth. I will be just one among thousands of lawyers. It is better to write one lasting sonnet than to win a hundred spectacular cases. I think I can write at least one lasting sonnet in my life – if I allow myself the scope and time to do so. The less I clog up my life with needless busy-ness, the better I find I write. Therefore I will do as little as possible. I will work on my novel whenever I can, and write a poem whenever inspiration seizes me, and leave it at that.
It was this scheme of his that had been threatened by his father’s ultimatum and Dipankar’s abscondence. What would happen to his novel if he was saddled with financial drudgery?
Unfortunately, doing as little as possible by way of breadwinning was accompanied in Amit’s case by doing as little as possible in his social life as well. He had a few good friends, but they were all abroad – friends from his university days, to whom he wrote and from whom he received short letters, corresponding in style to the desultory conversations he used to have with them. They had been quite different from him in temperament and usually it was they who had befriended him. He was reserved, and found it difficult to make the first move, but was not slow to respond. In Calcutta, however, he had not responded much to anyone. The family had sufficed for society whenever he had needed it. It was because Lata was a member of the clan by marriage that he had felt obliged to make sure she was taken care of at the Chatterji party. Because she was quasi-family he had talked to her almost from the first in an easy and casual manner that normally came to him after months of acquaintance. Later he had grown to like her for herself. That he should have bothered to take her around Calcutta to show her the sights of the city had struck both his sisters and Dipankar as an unusual expenditure of energy. Perhaps Amit too had found his Ideal.