‘How about Proust?’ asked a distracted-looking lady, who had begun knitting the moment the poems stopped.
Amit was surprised that anyone read Proust in Brahmpur. He had begun to feel rather happy, as if he had breathed in too much oxygen.
‘I’m sure I’d love Proust,’ he replied, ‘if my mind was more like the Sundarbans: meandering, all-absorptive, endlessly, er, sub-reticulated. But as it is, Proust makes me weep, weep, weep with boredom. Weep,’ he added. He paused and sighed. ‘Weep, weep, weep,’ he continued emphatically. ‘I weep when I read Proust, and I read very little of him.’
There was a shocked silence: why should anyone feel so strongly about anything? It was broken by Professor Mishra.
‘Needless to say, many of the most lasting monuments of literature are rather, well, bulky.’ He smiled at Amit. ‘Shakespeare is not merely great but grand, as it were.’
‘But only as it were,’ said Amit. ‘He only looks big in bulk. And I have my own way of reducing that bulk,’ he confided. ‘You may have noticed that in a typical Collected Shakespeare all the plays start on the right-hand side. Sometimes, the editors bung a picture in on the left to force them to do so. Well, what I do is to take my pen-knife and slit the whole book up into forty or so fascicles. That way I can roll up Hamlet or Timon – and slip them into my pocket. And when I’m wandering around – in a cemetery, say – I can take them out and read them. It’s easy on the mind and on the wrists. I recommend it to everyone. I read Cymbeline in just that way on the train here; and I never would have otherwise.’
Kabir smiled, Lata burst out laughing, Pran was appalled, Mr Makhijani gaped and Mr Nowrojee looked as if he were about to faint dead away.
Amit appeared pleased with the effect.
In the silence that followed, a middle-aged man in a black suit stood up. Mr Nowrojee began to tremble slightly. The man coughed a couple of times.
‘I have formulated a conception as the result of your reading,’ he announced to Amit. ‘lt has to do with the atomic age and the place of poetry, and the influence of Bengal. Many things have happened since the War, of course. I have been listening for an hour to the very scintillation of India, that is what I said to myself when I formulated my conception…’
Immensely pleased with himself, he continued in this vein for the verbal equivalent of about six paragraphs, punctuated with ‘You understand?’ Amit nodded, less amiably each time. Some people got up, and Mr Nowrojee in his distress pounded an imaginary gavel on the table.
Finally the man said to Amit: ‘Would you care to comment?’
‘No thank you,’ said Amit. ‘But I appreciate your sharing your remarks with us. Any other questions?’ he asked, emphasizing the last word.
But there were no more questions. It was time for Mrs Nowrojee’s tea and her famous little cakes, the delight of dentists.
18.3
AMIT had hoped to talk to Lata a little, but he was mobbed. He had to sign books, he had to eat cake for fear of offending, and the sweet old lady, foiled once, insisted on asking him again whether he had been in love with an English girl. ‘Now you can answer, there is no audience now,’ she said. Several other people agreed with her. But Amit was spared: Mr Nowrojee, murmuring that his defence of rhyme had been so very heartening and that he himself was an unashamed devotee of rhyme, pressed into Amit’s hand the suppressed triolet, and asked Amit to read it and tell him what he thought. ‘Now, please be quite honest. Honesty such as yours is so refreshing, and only honesty will do,’ said Mr Nowrojee. Amit looked down at the poem in Mr Nowrojee’s thin, small, careful, upright handwriting:
A TRIOLET TO THE SONGSTER OF BENGAL
Fate snatched away sweet Toru Dutt
At the soft age of twenty-two.
The casuarina tree was cut.
Fate snatched away sweet Toru Dutt.
No bulbuls haunt its branches but
Her poems still haunt me and you.
Fate snatched away sweet Toru Dutt
At the soft age of twenty-two.
Meanwhile, Professor Mishra was talking to Pran in another corner of the room. ‘My dear boy,’ he was saying. ‘My commiserations go deeper than words. The sight of your hair, so short still, reminds me of that cruelly abridged life…’
Pran froze.
‘You must take care of your health. You must not undertake new challenges at a time of bereavement – and, of course, family anxiety. Your poor brother, your poor brother,’ said Professor Mishra. ‘Have a cake.’
‘Thank you, Professor,’ said Pran.
‘So you agree?’ said Professor Mishra. ‘The meeting is too soon, and to subject you to an interview –’