A Suitable Boy

1.12

One of the reasons why Lata was studying in Brahmpur was because this was

where her grandfather, Dr Kishen Chand Seth, lived. He had promised his

daughter Rupa when Lata first came to study here that he would take very good

care of her. But this had never happened. Dr Kishen Chand Seth was far too

preoccupied either with bridge at the Subzipore Club or feuds with the likes of

the Minister of Revenue or passion for his young wife Parvati to be capable of

fulfilling any guardian-like role towards Lata. Since it was from his grandfather

that Arun had inherited his atrocious temper, perhaps this was, all in all, not a

bad thing. At any rate, Lata did not mind living in the university dormitory. Far

better for her studies, she thought, than under the wing of her irascible Nana.

Just after Raghubir Mehra had died, Mrs Rupa Mehra and her family had

gone to live with her father, who at that stage had not yet remarried. Given her

straitened finances, this seemed to be the only thing to do; she also thought that

he might be lonely, and hoped to help him with his household affairs. The

experiment had lasted a few months, and had been a disaster. Dr Kishen Chand

Seth was an impossible man to live with. Tiny though he was, he was a force to

reckon with not only at the medical college, from which he had retired as

Principal, but in Brahmpur at large: everyone was scared of him and obeyed him

tremblingly. He expected his home life to run on similar lines. He overrode Rupa Mehra’s writ with respect to her own children. He left home suddenly for weeks

on end without leaving money or instructions for the staff. Finally, he accused

his daughter, whose good looks had survived her widowhood, of making eyes at

his colleagues when he invited them home—a shocking accusation for the

heartbroken though sociable Rupa. The teenaged Arun had threatened to beat up

his grandfather. There had been tears and yells and Dr Kishen Chand Seth had

pounded the floor with his stick. Then Mrs Rupa Mehra had left, weeping and

determined, with her brood of four, and had sought refuge with sympathetic

friends in Darjeeling.

Reconciliation had been effected a year later in a renewed bout of weeping.

Since then things had jolted along. The marriage with Parvati (which had

shocked not just his family but Brahmpur at large because of the disparity of

age), Lata’s enrolment at Brahmpur University, Savita’s engagement (which Dr

Kishen Chand Seth had helped arrange), Savita’s wedding (which he had almost

wrecked and from which he had wilfully absented himself): all these were

landmarks along an extremely bumpy road. But family was family, and, as Mrs

Rupa Mehra continually told herself, one had to take the rough with the smooth.

Several months had now passed since Savita’s wedding. Winter had gone and

the pythons in the zoo had emerged from hibernation. Roses had replaced

narcissi, and had been replaced in their turn by the purple-wreath creeper, whose

five-bladed flowers helicoptered gently to the ground in the hot breeze. The

broad, silty-brown Ganga, flowing due east past the ugly chimneys of the

tannery and the marble edifice of the Barsaat Mahal, past Old Brahmpur with its

crowded bazaars and alleys, temples and mosques, past the bathing ghats and the

cremation ghat and the Brahmpur Fort, past the whitewashed pillars of the

Subzipore Club and the spacious estate of the university, had shrunken with the

summer, but boats and steamers still plied busily up and down its length, as did

trains along the parallel railway line that bounded Brahmpur to the south.

Lata had left the hostel and had gone to live with Savita and Pran, who had

descended from Simla to the plains very much in love. Malati visited Lata often,

and had grown to like the lanky Pran, of whom she had formed such an

unfavourable first impression. Lata too liked his decent, affectionate ways, and

was not too upset to learn that Savita was pregnant. Mrs Rupa Mehra wrote long

letters to her daughters from Arun’s flat in Calcutta, and complained repeatedly

that no one replied to her letters either soon enough or often enough.

Though she did not mention this in any of her letters for fear of enraging her

daughter, Mrs Rupa Mehra had tried—without success—to find a match for Lata in Calcutta. Perhaps she had not made enough effort, she told herself: she was,

after all, still recovering from the excitement and exertion of Savita’s wedding.

But now at last she was going back to Brahmpur for a three-month stint at what

she had begun to call her second home: her daughter’s home, not her father’s. As

the train puffed along towards Brahmpur, the propitious city which had yielded

her one son-in-law already, Mrs Rupa Mehra promised herself that she would

make another attempt. Within a day or two of her arrival she would go to her

father for advice.