A Suitable Boy(50)

‘So that’s how you think I fill my days, do you? Let me tell you, I work almost as hard as Ammaji. Which reminds me, I saw yesterday that they’d chopped the top of the neem tree down, the one you used to climb to get to the upstairs window. It makes a difference to Prem Nivas.’

‘Yes, she was very angry,’ said Maan, thinking of his mother. ‘The Public Works Department were just supposed to trim it to get rid of the vulture’s roost, but they hired a contractor who chopped down as much wood as possible and made off with it. But you know Ammaji. All she said was, “What you have done is really not right.” ’

‘If Baoji had been in the least concerned about these matters, he’d have done to that man what he did to that tree,’ said Veena. ‘There’s so little greenery in this part of town that you really learn to appreciate it when you see it. When my friend Priya came to Pran’s wedding, the garden was looking so beautiful that she said to me: “I feel as if I’ve been let out of a cage.” She doesn’t even have a roof garden, poor thing. And they hardly ever let her out of the house. “Come in the palanquin, leave on the bier”: that’s the way it is with the daughters-in-law in that house.’ Veena looked darkly over the rooftops towards her friend’s house in the next neighbourhood. A thought struck her. ‘Did Baoji talk to anyone about Pran’s job yesterday evening? Doesn’t the Governor have something to do with these appointments? In his capacity as Chancellor of the university?’

‘If he did I didn’t hear him,’ said Maan.

‘Hmm,’ said Veena, not very pleased. ‘If I know Baoji, he probably thought about it, and then pushed the thought aside as being unworthy of him. Even we had to wait in line for our turn to get that pitiful compensation for the loss of our business in Lahore. And that too when Ammaji was working day and night in the refugee camps. I sometimes think he cares for nothing but politics. Priya says her father’s equally bad. All right, eight o’clock. I’ll make your favourite alu paratha.’

‘You can bully Kedarnath, but not me,’ said Maan with a smile.

‘All right, go, go!’ said Veena, tossing her head. ‘You’d think we were still in Lahore from the amount we get to see you.’

Maan made a propitiatory sound, a tongue-click followed by a half-sigh.

‘With all his sales trips, I sometimes feel I have a quarter of a husband,’ continued Veena. ‘And an eighth of a brother each.’ She rolled up the chaupar board. ‘When are you returning to Banaras to do an honest day’s work?’

‘Ah, Banaras,’ said Maan with a smile, as if Veena had suggested Saturn. And Veena left it at that.





2.8


IT was evening by the time Maan got to the Barsaat Mahal, and the grounds were not crowded. He walked through the arched entrance in the boundary wall, and passed through the outer grounds, a sort of park which was for the most part covered with dry grass and bushes. A few antelope browsed under a large neem tree, bounding lazily away as he approached.

The inner wall was lower, the arched entranceway less imposing, more delicate. Verses from the Quran in black stone and bold geometrical patterns in coloured stone were embedded in its marble façade. Like the outer wall, the inner wall ran along three sides of a rectangle. The fourth side was common to both: a sheer drop from a stone platform – protected only by a balustrade – to the waters of the Ganga below.

Between the inner entrance and the river was the celebrated garden and the small but exquisite palace. The garden itself was a triumph as much of geometry as of horticulture. It was unlikely in fact that the flowers with which it was now planted – other than jasmine and the dark red, deep-scented Indian rose – were the same as those for which it had been planned more than two centuries ago. What few flowers remained now looked exhausted from the daily heat. But the well-tended, well-watered lawns, the great, shady neem trees dispersed symmetrically about the grounds, and the narrow sandstone strips that divided the flower-beds and lawns into octagons and squares provided an island of calm in a troubled and crowded town. Most beautiful of all was the small, perfectly shaped pleasure-palace of the Nawabs of Brahmpur, set in the exact centre of the inner gardens, a filigreed jewel box of white marble, its spirit compounded equally of extravagant dissipation and architectural restraint.

In the days of the Nawabs, peacocks used to roam the grounds, and their raucous voices would on occasion compete with the musical entertainments laid on for those reclining and declining rulers: a performance by dancing girls, a more serious performance of khyaal by a court musician, a poetry competition, a new ghazal by the poet Mast.