by Vikram Seth
‘And Luts will traipse after you obediently?’ said Meenakshi, stretching her long neck.
‘Lata is a sensible and a good girl, and she will do as I tell her. She is not wilful and disobedient like girls who think they are very modern. She has been well brought up.’
Meenakshi stretched back her head lazily, and looked first at her nails and then at her watch. ‘Oh, I have to be somewhere in ten minutes,’ she said. ‘Ma, will you look after Aparna?’
Mrs Rupa Mehra silently conveyed her irked consent. Meenakshi knew too well that her mother-in-law would be pleased to look after her only grandchild.
‘I’ll be back by six thirty,’ said Meenakshi. ‘Arun said he’d be a little late at the office today.’
But Mrs Rupa Mehra was annoyed, and did not respond. And behind her annoyance a slow panic was beginning to build and take hold of her.
7.41
Amit and Lata were browsing among the innumerable bookstalls of College Street. (Kuku had gone to meet Krishnan at the Coffee House. According to her he needed to be ‘appeased’, though to her irritation Amit did not ask what she meant by that.)
‘One feels so bewildered among all these millions of books,’ said Lata, astonished that several hundred yards of a city could actually be given over to nothing but books—books on the pavement, books on makeshift bookshelves out in the street, books in the library and in Presidency College, first-, second-, third- and tenth-hand books, everything from technical monographs on electroplating to the latest Agatha Christie.
‘I feel so bewildered among these millions of books, you mean.’
‘No, I do,’ said Lata.
‘What I meant,’ said Amit, ‘was “I”, as opposed to “one”. If you meant the general “one”, that would be fine. But you meant “I”. Far too many people say “one” when they mean “I”. I found them doing it all the time in England, and it’ll survive here long after they’ve given up that idiocy.’
Lata reddened but said nothing. Bish, she recalled, referred to himself exclusively and incessantly as ‘one’.
‘It’s like “thrice”,’ said Amit.
‘I see,’ said Lata.
‘Just imagine if I were to say to you: “One loves you,”’ Amit went on. ‘Or worse still, “One loves one.” Doesn’t that sound idiotic?’
‘Yes,’ Lata admitted with a frown. She felt he was sounding a bit too professional. And the word ‘love’ reminded her unnecessarily of Kabir.
‘That’s all I meant,’ said Amit.
‘I see,’ said Lata. ‘Or, rather, one sees.’
‘I see one does,’ said Amit.
‘What is it like to write a novel?’ asked Lata after a pause. ‘Don’t you have to forget the “I” or the “one”—?’
‘I don’t know exactly,’ said Amit. ‘This is my first novel, and I’m in the process of finding out. At the moment it feels like a banyan tree.’
‘I see,’ said Lata, though she didn’t.
‘What I mean is,’ continued Amit, ‘it sprouts, and grows, and spreads, and drops down branches that become trunks or intertwine with other branches. Sometimes branches die. Sometimes the main trunk dies, and the structure is held up by the supporting trunks. When you go to the Botanical Garden you’ll see what I mean. It has its own life—but so do the snakes and birds and bees and lizards and termites that live in it and on it and off it. But then it’s also like the Ganges in its upper, middle and lower courses—including its delta—of course.’
‘Of course,’ said Lata.
‘I have the feeling,’ said Amit, ‘that you’re laughing at me.’
‘How far have you got so far with writing it?’ she said.
‘I’m about a third of the way.’
‘And aren’t I wasting your time?’
‘No.’
‘It’s about the Bengal Famine, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you have any memory of the famine yourself?’
‘I do. I remember it only too well. It was only eight years ago.’ He paused. ‘I was somewhat active in student politics then. But do you know, we had a dog even then, and fed it well.’ He looked distressed.
‘Does a writer have to feel strongly about what he writes?’ asked Lata.
‘I haven’t the least idea,’ said Amit. ‘Sometimes I write best about the things I care about least. But even that’s not a consistent rule.’
‘So do you just flounder and hope?’
‘No, no, not exactly.’
Lata felt that Amit, who had been so open, even expansive, a minute ago, was resisting her questioning now, and she did not press it further.
‘I’ll send you a book of my poems sometime,’ said Amit. ‘And you can form your own opinion about how much or how little I feel.’
‘Why not now?’ asked Lata.
‘I need time to think of a suitable inscription,’ said Amit. ‘Ah, there’s Kuku.’
7.42
Kuku had performed her errand of appeasement. Now she wanted to go home as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, it had begun to rain once more, and soon the warm rain was battering down on the roof of the Humber. Rivulets of brown water began running down the sides of the street. A little farther there was no street at all, just a sort of shallow canal, where traffic in the opposite direction created waves that shook the chassis of the car. Ten minutes later the car was trapped in a flash flood. The driver inched forward, trying to keep to the middle of the road, where the camber created a slightly higher level. Then the engine died.
With Kuku and Amit to talk to in the car, Lata did not fret. It was very hot, though, and beads of perspiration formed on her forehead. Amit told her a bit about his college days and how he had begun writing poetry. ‘Most of it was terrible, and I burned it,’ he said.
‘How could you have done that?’ asked Lata, amazed that anyone could burn what must have been written with so much feeling. But at least he had burned it and not simply torn it up. That would have been too matter-of-fact. The thought of a fire in the Calcutta climate was odd too. There was no fireplace in the Ballygunge house.
‘Where did you burn the poems?’ she asked.
‘In the washbasin,’ interjected Kuku. ‘He nearly burned the house down too.’
‘It was awful poetry,’ said Amit by way of extenuation. ‘Embarrassingly bad. Self-indulgent, dishonest.’
‘Poetry I don’t desire
I will immolate with fire,’
said Kuku.
‘All my sorrow, all my pain:
Ashes flowing down the drain,’
continued Amit.
‘Aren’t there any Chatterjis who don’t make flippant couplets?’ asked Lata, unaccountably annoyed. Weren’t they ever serious? How could they joke about such heartbreaking matters?
‘Ma and Baba don’t,’ said Kuku. ‘That’s because they’ve never had Amit as an elder brother. And Dipankar’s not quite as skilled as the rest of us. It comes naturally to us, like singing in a raag if you’ve heard it often enough. People are astonished we can do it, but we’re astonished Dipankar can’t. Or only once a month or so, when he has his poetic periods. . . .
Rhyming, rhyming so precisely—
Couplets, they are coming nicely,’
gurgled Kakoli, who churned them out with such appalling frequency that they were now called Kakoli-couplets, though Amit had started the trend.
By now most of the motor traffic had come to a halt. A few rickshaws were still moving, the rickshaw-wallahs waist-deep in the flood, their passengers, laden with packages, surveying the watery brown world around them with a kind of alarmed satisfaction.
In due course the water subsided. The driver looked at the engine, examined the ignition wire, which was moist, and wiped it with a piece of cloth. The car still wouldn’t start. Then he looked at the carburettor, fiddled a bit here and there, and murmured the names of his favourite goddesses in correct firing sequence. The car began to move.
By the time t
hey got back to Sunny Park it was dark.
‘You have taken your own sweet time,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra sharply to Lata. She glared at Amit.
Amit and Lata were both surprised by the hostility of their reception.
‘Even Meenakshi has returned before you,’ continued Mrs Rupa Mehra. She looked at Amit, and thought: Poet, wastrel! He has never earned an honest rupee in his life. I will not have all my grandchildren speaking Bengali! Suddenly she remembered that the last time Amit had dropped Lata home, she had had flowers in her hair.
Looking at Lata, but presumably addressing both of them—or perhaps all three of them, Kuku included—she continued: ‘You have put up my blood pressure and my blood sugar.’
‘No, Ma,’ said Lata, looking at the fresh mango peels on the plate. ‘If your blood sugar has gone up it’s because of all those dussehris you’ve been eating. Now please don’t have more than one a day—or at most two.’
‘Are you teaching your grandmother to suck eggs?’ asked Mrs Rupa Mehra, glowering.
Amit smiled. ‘It was my fault, Ma,’ he said. ‘The streets were flooded not far from the university, and we got caught.’
Mrs Rupa Mehra was in no mood to be friendly. What was he smiling for?
‘Is your blood sugar very high?’ asked Kakoli quickly.
‘Very high,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra with distress and pride. ‘I have even been having karela juice, but it has no effect.’
‘Then you must go to my homoeopathic doctor,’ said Kakoli.
Mrs Rupa Mehra, diverted from her attack, said, ‘I already have a homoeopath.’
But Kakoli insisted that her doctor was better than anyone else. ‘Doctor Nuruddin.’
‘A Mohammedan?’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra doubtfully.
‘Yes. It happened in Kashmir, when we were on holiday.’
‘I am not going to Kashmir,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra decidedly.
‘No, he cured me here. His clinic is here, in Calcutta. He cures people of everything—diabetes, gout, skin troubles. I had a friend who had a cyst on his eyelid. He gave him a medicine called thuja, and the cyst dropped right off.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Amit energetically. ‘I sent a friend of mine to a homoeopath, and her brain tumour disappeared, and her broken leg mended, and though she was barren she had twins within three months.’
Both Kuku and Mrs Rupa Mehra glared at him. Lata looked at him with a smile of mixed reproof and approval.
‘Amit always makes fun of what he can’t understand,’ said Kuku. ‘He clubs homoeopathy together with astrology. But even our family doctor has slowly become convinced of the effectiveness of homoeopathy. And ever since my terrible problem in Kashmir I am a complete convert. I believe in results,’ continued Kuku. ‘When something works I believe in it.’
‘What problem did you have?’ asked Mrs Rupa Mehra eagerly.
‘It was the ice-cream in a hotel in Gulmarg.’
‘Oh.’ Ice-cream was one of Mrs Rupa Mehra’s weaknesses too.
‘The hotel made its own ice-cream. On the spur of the moment I ate two scoops.’
‘And then?’
‘Then—then it was terrible.’ Kuku’s voice reflected her trauma. ‘I had an awful throat. I was given some allopathic medicine by the local doctor. It suppressed the symptoms for a day, then they came back again. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sing, I could hardly speak, I couldn’t swallow. It was like having thorns in my throat. I had to think before I decided to say something.’
Mrs Rupa Mehra clicked her tongue in sympathy.
‘And my sinuses were blocked completely.’ Kuku paused, then went on:
‘Then I had another dose of medicine. And again it suppressed the condition, but it came back again. I had to be sent to Delhi and flown back to Calcutta. After dose number three, my throat was inflamed, my sinuses and nose were both infected, I was in a terrible state. My aunt, Mrs Ganguly, suggested Dr Nuruddin. “Try him and see,” she told my mother. “What’s the harm?”’
The suspense, for Mrs Rupa Mehra, was unbearable. Stories involving ailments were as fascinating for her as murder mysteries or romances.
‘He took my history, and asked me some strange questions. Then he said: “Take two doses of pulsetilla, and come back to me.” I said: “Two doses? Just two doses? Will that be enough? Not a regular course?” He said: “Inshallah, two doses should be enough.” And it was. I was cured. The swelling disappeared. My sinuses cleared up completely and the thing never recurred. Allopathic treatment would have required puncturing and draining the sinuses to relieve an endemic complaint—which is what it would have become if I hadn’t gone to Dr Nuruddin; and you can stop laughing, Amit.’
Mrs Rupa Mehra was convinced. ‘I’ll go with you to see him,’ she said.
‘But you mustn’t mind his strange questions,’ said Kakoli.
‘I can handle myself in all situations,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra.
When they had left, Mrs Rupa Mehra said pointedly to Lata:
‘I am very tired of Calcutta, darling, and it is not good for my health. Let us go to Delhi.’
‘What on earth for, Ma?’ said Lata. ‘I’m beginning to have a good time here. And why so suddenly?’
Mrs Rupa Mehra looked closely at her daughter.
‘And we have all those mangoes to eat still,’ laughed Lata. ‘And we have to make sure that Varun studies a little.’
Mrs Rupa Mehra looked severe. ‘Tell me—’ she began, then stopped. Surely Lata could not be pretending the innocence that was written so plainly on her face. And if she wasn’t, why put ideas into her head?
‘Yes, Ma?’
‘Tell me what you did today.’
This was more in the line of Mrs Rupa Mehra’s daily questioning, and Lata was relieved to see her mother behaving more in character. Lata had no intention of being torn away from Calcutta and the Chatterjis. When she thought how unhappy she had been when she had first come here, she felt grateful to that family—and most of all to the comfortable, cynical, considerate Amit—for the way they had absorbed her into their clan—almost as a third sister, she thought.
Meanwhile Mrs Rupa Mehra was also thinking about the Chatterjis, but in less charitable terms. Meenakshi’s remarks had made her panic.
I will go to Delhi, by myself if necessary, she was thinking. Kalpana Gaur will have to help me to find a suitable boy at once. Then I will summon Lata. Arun is completely useless. Ever since his marriage he has lost all feeling for his own family. He introduced Lata to this Bishwanath boy, and since then he has done nothing further. He has no sense of responsibility for his sister. I am all alone in the world now. Only my Aparna loves me. Meenakshi was sleeping, and Aparna was with the Toothless Crone. Mrs Rupa Mehra had her granddaughter transferred immediately to her own arms.
7.43
The rain had delayed Arun as well. When he returned home he was in a black temper.
Without more than a grunt apiece for his mother, sister and daughter, he marched straight into the bedroom. ‘Damned swine, the whole lot of them,’ he announced. ‘And the driver too.’
Meenakshi surveyed him from the bed. She yawned:
‘Arun, darling, why such fury?
Have a chocolate made by Flury.’
‘Oh, stop that moronic Blabberji blather,’ shouted Arun, setting down his briefcase and laying his damp coat across the arm of a chair. ‘You’re my wife. You can at least pretend to be sympathetic.’
‘What happened, darling?’ said Meenakshi, composing her features into the required emotion. ‘Bad day at the office?’
Arun closed his eyes. He sat down on the edge of the bed.
‘Tell me,’ said Meenakshi, her long, elegant, red-nailed fingers slowly loosening his tie.
Arun sighed. ‘This bloody rickshaw-wallah asked me for three rupees to take me across the road to my car. Across the road,’ he repeated, shaking his head in disgust and disbelief.
Meenakshi’s fingers stopped. ‘No!’ she exclaimed, genuinely shocked. �
��I hope you didn’t agree to pay.’
‘What could I do?’ asked Arun. ‘I wasn’t going to wade knee-deep through water to get to my car—or risk the car crossing the flooded section of the road and stalling. He could see that—and he was smirking with the pleasure of having a sahib by the balls. “It’s your decision,” he said. “Three rupees.” Three rupees! When normally it would be two annas at the most. One anna would have been a fairer price—it was no more than twenty steps. But he could see there was no other rickshaw in sight and that I was getting wet. Bloody profiteering swine.’
Meenakshi glanced at the mirror from the bed and thought for a moment. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘what does Bentsen Pryce do when there’s a temporary shortage of, oh, jute in the world market and the price goes up? Don’t they put up their prices to whatever level the market will bear? Or is that only a Marwari practice? I know that’s what goldsmiths and silversmiths do. And vegetable sellers. I suppose that was what the rickshaw-wallah was doing too. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been shocked after all. Or you.’
She had forgotten her intention to be sympathetic. Arun looked at her, injured, but saw, despite himself, the unpleasantly forceful logic of her words.
‘Would you like to do my job?’ he demanded.
‘Oh no, darling,’ said Meenakshi, refusing to take offence. ‘I couldn’t bear to wear a coat and tie. And I wouldn’t know how to dictate letters to your charming Miss Christie. . . . Oh, by the way, some mangoes came from Brahmpur today. And a letter from Savita.’
‘Oh.’
‘And Ma, being Ma, has been glutting away at them without regard for her diabetes.’
Arun shook his head. As if he didn’t have troubles enough already. His mother was incorrigible. Tomorrow she’d complain that she wasn’t feeling well, and he’d have to take her to the doctor. Mother, sister, daughter, wife: he suddenly felt trapped—a whole bloody household of women. And the feckless Varun to boot.
‘Where’s Varun?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Meenakshi. ‘He hasn’t returned, and he hasn’t called. I don’t think he has, anyway. I’ve been taking a nap.’