A Suitable Boy(492)

It had stopped there, however. After Lata left Calcutta, they did not correspond. Lata had found Amit kind and comforting; he had taken her out of her sadness into the world of poetry, into the history of the city, and – equally important – into the open air, whether of the cemetery or of College Street. Amit for his part had liked Lata a great deal, but had stopped short of declaring his fondness for her. Though he was a poet and had some insight into human emotion in general, he was far too reticent in his own life for his own happiness. When he was at Oxford, he had been wordlessly attracted to a woman, the sister of one of his friends, and as lively and explosive as a firecracker; only later did he learn that she had liked him too – and had finally in impatience given up on him and attached herself to someone else. ‘Wordlessly’ meant that he had not said what he had felt for her. He had, however, written a great many words, rhymed and somewhat reasoned, about his feelings, though he had crossed out most of them, published very few of those that were left, and sent or shown her none.

Meenakshi and Kakoli did not know of this affair (or non-affair), though everyone in the family believed that there had to be some explanation for all the unhappy love poems in his first, very successful, volume. Amit was, however, more than capable of fending off in his acid way any sisterly inquiries that approached too closely his sensitive, fertile, lazy core.

His second volume showed a kind of philosophical resignation unusual in a man who was not yet thirty – and who was fairly famous. What on earth, wondered one of his English friends in a letter, was he resigned about? He did not realize that Amit was probably, and perhaps even undiagnosed by himself, lonely. He had no friends – either men or women – in Calcutta; and the fact that this was the fault of his own lack of effort and sociability didn’t mitigate his resultant mood: a sort of jocular weariness, and even at times plain if private despondency.

His novel, set in the period of the Bengal famine, took him outside himself into the lives of others. But even here Amit wondered from time to time if he hadn’t chosen too black a canvas. The subject was complex and deep – man against man, man against nature, the city against the countryside, the desperate expediencies of war, a foreign government against an unorganized peasantry – perhaps he would have been better off writing social comedy. There was enough material for it in the family around him. And he had a taste for it; he often found himself escaping into light reading – detective stories, the ubiquitous Wodehouse, even comics – from his task of weighty prose.

When Biswas Babu had broached the question of marriage with Amit, he had stated, with his usual vibratory emphasis: ‘An arranged marriage with a sober girl, that is the solution.’ Amit had said that he would reserve judgment on the matter, though he had felt immediately that nothing would be more repugnant to him; he would rather live a bachelor all his days than under a canopy of feminine sobriety. But after his walk in the cemetery with Lata, when she had not been put off by his whimsical manner and the wild and whirling nature of his words, and had responded to them with surprising liveliness, he had begun to wonder if the fact that she was ‘a sober girl’ should count so greatly against her. She had shown no awe of him, though he was well-known, nor any defensive need to emphasize her own opinions. He remembered her unselfconscious gratitude and pleasure when he had given her a garland of flowers for her hair after the dreadful lecture at the Ramakrishna Mission. Perhaps, he thought, my sisters are right for once. But, well, Lata will be coming to Calcutta at Christmas, and I can show her the great banyan tree at the Botanical Gardens, and we’ll see how things work out from there. He felt no sense of urgency about events, only a very mild foreboding about the cobbler, and no concern at all about this Akbar fellow.





13.35


MOURNFULLY, languishingly, Kuku was warbling to her own accompaniment on the piano:

‘In this house I am so lonely.

I am loved by Cuddles only.’



‘Oh, do shut up, Kuku,’ said Amit, putting down his book. ‘Must we have this non-stop nonsense? I’m reading this unreadable Proust, and you’re making it worse.’

But Kuku felt that it would be a dereliction of inspiration to stop. And a betrayal of Cuddles, who was leashed to the far leg of the piano.

‘Chatterjis can go to hell,

I will live in Grand Hotel.’





What room number is or where,

With my Cuddles – I don’t care !’



Her left-hand accompaniment livened up, and the rather Schubert- ian melody gave way to jazz: ”

‘I would like room 21: