‘What precisely do you mean by that?’ demanded Arun of Lata. ‘Do you think that if Daddy had been alive we would have married into this sort of a family?’
Arun hardly seemed to care that they might be overheard. Lata flushed. But the brutal hint was well made. Had Raghubir Mehra not died in his forties but continued his meteoric rise in the Railway Service, he would – when the British left Indian government service in droves in 1947 – certainly have become a member of the Railway Board. His excellence and experience might even have made him the Chairman. The family would not have had to struggle, as it had had to for years and was still forced to, on Mrs Rupa Mehra’s depleted savings, the kindness of friends and, lately, her elder son’s salary. She would not have had to sell most of her jewellery and even their small house in Darjeeling to give her children the schooling which she felt that, above everything else, they must have. Beneath her pervasive sentimentality – and her attachment to the seemingly secure physical objects that reminded her of her beloved husband – lay a sense of sacrifice and a sense of values that determinedly melted them down into the insecure, intangible benefits of an excellent English-medium boarding-school education. And so Arun and Varun had continued to go to St George’s School, and Savita and Lata had not been withdrawn from St Sophia’s Convent.
The Kapoors might be all very well for Brahmpur society, thought Arun, but if Daddy had been alive, a constellation of brilliant matches would have been strewn at the feet of the Mehras. At least he, for one, had overcome their circumstances and done well in the way of in-laws. What possible comparison could there be between Pran’s brother, that ogling fellow whom Lata had just been talking to – who ran, of all things, a cloth shop in Banaras, from what Arun had heard – and, say, Meenakshi’s elder brother, who had been to Oxford, was studying law at Lincoln’s Inn, and was, in addition, a published poet?
Arun’s speculations were brought down to earth by his daughter, who threatened to scream if she didn’t get her ice-cream. She knew from experience that screaming (or even the threat of it) worked wonders with her parents. And, after all, they sometimes screamed at each other, and often at the servants.
Lata looked guilty. ‘It’s my fault, darling,’ she said to Aparna. ‘Let’s go at once before we get caught up in something else. But you mustn’t cry or yell, promise me that. It won’t work with me.’ Aparna, who knew it wouldn’t, was silent. But just at that moment the bridegroom emerged from one side of the house, dressed all in white, his dark, rather nervous face veiled with hanging strings of white flowers; everyone crowded forward towards the door from which the bride would emerge; and Aparna, lifted into her Lata Bua’s arms, was forced to defer once again both treat and threat.
1.5
IT was a little untraditional, Lata couldn’t help thinking, that Pran hadn’t ridden up to the gate on a white horse with a little nephew sitting in front of him and with the groom’s party in tow to claim his bride; but then Prem Nivas was the groom’s house after all. And no doubt if he had followed the convention, Arun would have found further cause for mockery. As it was, Lata found it difficult to imagine the lecturer on Elizabethan Drama under that veil of tuberoses. He was now placing a garland of dark red, heavily fragrant roses around her sister Savita’s neck and Savita was doing the same to him. She looked lovely in her red-and-gold wedding sari, and quite subdued; Lata thought she might even have been crying. Her head was covered, and she looked down at the ground as her mother had doubtless instructed her to do. It was not proper, even when she was putting the garland round his neck, that she should look full in the face of the man with whom she was to live her life.
The welcoming ceremony completed, bride and groom moved together to the middle of the garden, where a small platform, decorated with more white flowers and open to the auspicious stars, had been erected. Here the priests, one from each family, and Mrs Rupa Mehra and the parents of the groom sat around the small fire that would be the witness of their vows.
Mrs Rupa Mehra’s brother, whom the family very rarely met, had earlier in the day taken charge of he bangle ceremony. Arun was annoyed that he had not been allowed to take charge of anything. He had suggested to his mother after the crisis brought on by his grandfather’s inexplicable actions, that they should move the wedding to Calcutta. But it was too late for that, and she would not hear of it.
Now that the exchange of garlands was over, the crowd paid no great attention to the actual wedding rites. These would go on for the better part of an hour while the guests milled and chattered round the lawns of Prem Nivas. They laughed; they shook hands or folded them to their foreheads; they coalesced into little knots, the men here, the women there; they warmed themselves at the charcoal-filled clay stoves placed strategically around the garden while their frosted, gossip-laden breath rose into the air; they admired the multicoloured lights; they smiled for the photographer as he murmured ‘Steady, please!’ in English; they breathed deeply the scent of flowers and perfume and cooked spices; they exchanged births and deaths and politics and scandal under the brightly-coloured cloth canopy at the back of the garden beneath which long tables of food had been laid out; they sat down exhaustedly on chairs with their plates full and tucked in inexhaustibly. Servants, some in white livery, some in khaki, brought around fruit juice and tea and coffee and snacks to those who were standing in the garden: samosas, kachauris, laddus, gulab-jamuns, barfis and gajak and ice-cream were consumed and replenished along with puris and six kinds of vegetables. Friends who had not met each other for months fell upon each other with loud cries, relatives who met only at weddings and funerals embraced tearfully and exchanged the latest news of third cousins thrice removed. Lata’s aunt from Kanpur, horrified by the complexion of the groom, was talking to an aunt from Lucknow about ‘Rupa‘s black grandchildren’, as if they already existed. They made much of Aparna, who was obviously going to be Rupa’s last fair grandchild, and praised her even when she spooned pistachio ice-cream down the front of her pale yellow cashmere sweater. The barbaric children from rustic Rudhia ran around yelling as if they were playing pitthu on the farm. And though the plaintive, festive music of the shehnai had now ceased, a happy babble of convivial voices rose to the skies and quite drowned out the irrelevant chant of the ceremonies.