A Suitable Boy(696)

A footnote read as follows:

Arrangements have now been made for the manufacture of Dr Van de Velde’s jellies (‘Eugam’): Lubricant, Contraceptive and Proconceptive. They are made by Messrs. Harman Freese, 32 Great Dover Street, London, S.E.1, who are also the makers of the author’s other preparations and pessaries (‘Gamophile’) referred to in ‘Fertility and Sterility in Marriage’.



From time to time Dr Van de Velde quoted approvingly the Dutch poet Cats, whose folk wisdom did not emerge well in translation:

Listen my friend, and know the reason why:

All beauty lies in the beholder’s eye.



But for all that, Lata was glad that her mother had cared enough for her to overcome her own embarrassment and put this book in her hands. She still had a few weeks to prepare herself for Life.

Lata looked thoughtful through most of dinner, glancing at Pran and Savita and wondering whether Savita too had received an Ideal Marriage before her wedding. There was jelly for pudding, and to Mrs Rupa Mehra’s puzzlement – and everyone else’s – Lata began to laugh and would not explain why.





19.5


LATA took her final exams as if in a trance: sometimes she got the impression that she was someone other than herself. She felt she had done well, but this was combined with a curious, dislocated feeling – not like the panic of the previous year, but a sense that she was floating above her physical self and looking down on it from a height. Once, after a paper was over, she wandered down from the examination hall and sat on the bench beneath the gul-mohur tree. Again the dark orange flowers lay thick below her feet. Had it only been a year since she had met him?

If you love him so much, can you be happy to leave him miserable?

Where was he? Even if his exams were being held in the same building, he did not stand on the steps afterwards. He did not pass by the bench.

Just after the last paper, there was a concert by Ustad Majeed Khan, to which she went with Malati. Kabir was nowhere to be seen.

Amit had written her a brief note of congratulation, but – after their few moments in the bookshop and the coffee house – Kabir had as good as disappeared.

Whose life am I living? Lata wondered. Was my acceptance just a reaction?

Despite Haresh’s encouraging letters and her own cheerful replies, Lata began to feel both uncertain and very lonely.

Sometimes she sat on the banyan root and looked out over the Ganga, recollecting what it was pointless to recollect. Would she have been happy with him? Or he with her? He was so jealous now, so intense, so violent, so unlike the casual cricketer whom she had seen laughing and practising at the nets a year ago. How different he was now from the knight who had rescued her from the gul-mohur bench and from Mr Nowrojee’s.

And I? she asked herself. How would I have acted in his place? With a jovial attempt at good fellowship? Even now I almost feel it’s he who’s left me – and I can’t bear it.

Two weeks more, she thought, and I will be the Bride of Goodyear Welted.

Oh, Kabir, Kabir – she wept.

I should run away, she thought.

I should run away, she thought, far from Haresh, far from Kabir, far from Arun and Varun and Ma and the whole Chatterji clan, far from Pran and Maan and Hindus and Muslims and passionate love and passionate hatred and all loud noises – just me and Malati and Savita and the baby.

We’ll sit on the sand on the other side of the Ganga and go to sleep for a year or two.





19.6


THE wedding arrangements proceeded with great verve and much conflict. Mrs Rupa Mehra, Malati, Dr Kishen Chand Seth and Arun each tried to act as major-domo.

Dr Kishen Chand Seth insisted on asking Saeeda Bai to sing at the wedding. ‘Who else can one ask,’ he said, ‘when Saeeda Bai is in Brahmpur? Her throttling has opened her throat, they say.’

It was only when he realized that the entire Prem Nivas contingent would boycott the wedding that he relented. But by then he was off onto something else: the length of the list of invitees. It was too long, he claimed: his garden would be destroyed, his pockets emptied.

Everyone reassured him that they would be careful not to expand their own invitation list, and everyone went ahead and invited everyone they met. As for Dr Kishen Chand Seth, he was the worst offender of all: half the Subzipore Club and half the doctors of Brahmpur were invited, and almost anyone who had ever played bridge with him. ‘A wedding is always a time for settling scores,’ he explained cryptically.

Arun arrived a few days early and tried to take over the management of events from his grandfather. But Parvati, who apparently realized how good it was for her husband to exhaust himself with excitement, put paid to his attempts at usurpation. She even shouted at Arun in front of the servants, and he retreated before ‘that harridan’.