A Suitable Boy(698)

The civil ceremony, however, was such a brief and dry affair that almost no one attached any significance to it, although from the moment it was over, Haresh and Lata were legally man and wife. Only a dozen or so people attended, and Haresh was reproved by his mother for being late.

Lata had alternated between serene optimism and terrifying attacks of uncertainty for the last week. After the civil ceremony was over, she felt calm and almost happy, and fonder of Haresh than before. From time to time he had smiled at her as if he knew exactly when she had most needed reassurance.





19.9


AMIT, Kakoli, Dipankar, Meenakshi, Tapan, Aparna, Varun and even Hans had arrived together from Calcutta early that morning and had been present at the civil ceremony. Pran’s house was bursting at the seams. Dr Kishen Chand Seth’s house too, was entirely overrun. Only Prem Nivas, lacking its mistress, remained almost empty.

All manner of known and unknown people wandered in and out of Dr Kishen Chand’s house. Since he had decided to operate on the unusually pacific assumption that anyone whom he didn’t recognize must have been asked by someone else, or else must be involved with the lighting or the catering arrangements, he threatened very few people with his stick. Parvati kept an eye on him and made sure that no one came to grief.

It was a hot day. A few birds – mynas, babblers, sparrows, bulbuls and barbets – were disturbed in their nesting by this constant throng of noisy, busy humans. The beds in the garden had gone to seed; except for a few tobacco flowers, nothing on the ground was in bloom. But the trees – champa, jacaranda, and Sita ashok – were full of white or mauve or red blossom, and bougainvillaea – orange, red, pink and magenta – fell in great masses over the walls of the house and down the trunks of trees. From time to time, amid the continuous racket of the barbets, the call of a distant brainfever bird sounded high and insistent and clear.

Lata sat in an inner room with the other women for the singing and henna ceremonies. Kuku and Meenakshi, Malati and Savita, Mrs Rupa Mehra, Veena, Hema and her Taiji, all kept themselves entertained and Lata distracted by singing wedding songs, some innocent, some risqué, and dancing to the beat of a dholak while an old woman fitted them all with glass bangles of their choice – from Firozabad, she claimed – and another squeezed bold but delicate patterns of henna on their hands and feet. Lata looked at her hands, covered now with the moist, beautiful tracery, and began to weep.

She wondered how long it would take to set. Savita took out a handkerchief and wiped her tears for her.

Veena quickly began a song about her delicate hands and how she couldn’t draw water at the public well. She was her father-in-law’s favourite; he had felt sorry for her and had had a well made for her in the garden of the house. She was the favourite of her husband’s elder brother; he had given her a gold vessel for the water. She was the favourite of her husband’s younger brother; he had given her a silken rope for the bucket. She was the beloved of her husband, and he had hired two water-carriers for her. But her husband’s sister and mother were jealous of her, and had secretly gone and covered up the well.

In another song the jealous mother-in-law slept next to the newly-married bride so that her husband couldn’t visit her at night. Mrs Rupa Mehra enjoyed these songs as much as she always did, probably because it was impossible for her to imagine herself in any such role.

Malati – together with her mother, who had suddenly appeared in Brahmpur – sang, ‘You grind the spices, fat one, and we will eat!’

Kakoli clapped loudly while her henna was still green and moist – and smudged it completely. Her musical contribution was a variant of ‘Roly Poly Mr Kohli’, which, in the absence of her mother, she sang to the tune of a Tagore song:

‘Roly poly Mr Kohli

Walking slowly up the stairs.

Holy souly Mrs Kohli

Comes and takes him unawares.





Mr Kohli, base and lowly,

Stares at choli, dreams of lust,

As the holy Mrs Kohli

With her pallu hides her bust.’





19.10


BEFORE dusk the next day the guests began to gather on the lawn to the sound of the shehnai.

The men of the family stood by the gate and received them. Arun and Varun were dressed in fine, starched, white kurta-pyjamas embroidered with chikan work. Pran was dressed in the white sharkskin sherwani he had worn at his own wedding – though it had been winter then.

Mrs Rupa Mehra’s brother had come from Madras as usual, but had arrived too late for the bangle ceremony, which he had been expected to help perform. He knew almost none of the people he was greeting, and only a few of them looked familiar to him, perhaps from the time of Savita’s wedding. He greeted everyone decorously as they passed into the garden. Dr Kishen Chand Seth, on the other hand, overheated in the straitjacket of an extremely tight black achkan, got impatient after a while with this endless meeting and greeting, shouted at his son, whom he had not seen for more than a year, loosened a few buttons, and wandered off to supervise something. He had refused to stand in for his late son-in-law in the ceremonies on the grounds that sitting still and listening to priests would destroy both his circulation and his serenity.