A Suitable Boy

1.13

In the event, it was not necessary to go to Dr Kishen Chand Seth for advice. He

drove to the university the next day in a fury and arrived at Pran Kapoor’s house.

It was three in the afternoon, and hot. Pran was at the department. Lata was

attending a lecture on the Metaphysical Poets. Savita had gone shopping.

Mansoor, the young servant, tried to soothe Dr Kishen Chand Seth by offering

him tea, coffee or fresh lime juice. All this was brushed brusquely aside.

‘Is anyone at home? Where is everyone?’ asked Dr Kishen Chand Seth in a

rage. His short, compressed and very jowly appearance made him look a little

like a fierce and wrinkled Tibetan watchdog. (Mrs Rupa Mehra’s good looks had

been the gift of her mother.) He carried a carved Kashmiri cane which he used

more for emphasis than for support. Mansoor hurried inside.

‘Burri Memsahib?’ he called, knocking at the door of Mrs Rupa Mehra’s

room.

‘What? . . . Who?’

‘Burri Memsahib, your father is here.’

‘Oh. Oh.’ Mrs Rupa Mehra, who had been enjoying an afternoon nap, woke

into a nightmare. ‘Tell him I will be with him immediately, and offer him some

tea.’

‘Yes, Memsahib.’

Mansoor entered the drawing room. Dr Seth was staring at an ashtray.

‘Well? Are you dumb as well as half-witted?’ asked Dr Kishen Chand Seth.

‘She’s just coming, Sahib.’

‘Who’s just coming? Fool!’

‘Burri Memsahib, Sahib. She was resting.’

That Rupa, his mere chit of a daughter, could ever somehow have been

elevated into not just a Memsahib but a Burri Memsahib puzzled and annoyed

Dr Seth.

Mansoor said, ‘Will you have some tea, Sahib? Or coffee?’

‘Just now you offered me nimbu pani.’

‘Yes, Sahib.’

‘A glass of nimbu pani.’

‘Yes, Sahib. At once.’ Mansoor made to go.

‘And oh—’

‘Yes, Sahib?’

‘Are there any arrowroot biscuits in this house?’

‘I think so, Sahib.’

Mansoor went into the back garden to pluck a couple of limes, then returned

to the kitchen to squeeze them into juice.

Dr Kishen Chand Seth picked up a day-old Statesman in preference to that

day’s Brahmpur Chronicle, and sat down to read in an armchair. Everyone was

half-witted in this house.

Mrs Rupa Mehra dressed hurriedly in a black-and-white cotton sari and

emerged from her room. She entered the drawing room, and began to apologize.

‘Oh, stop it, stop it, stop all this nonsense,’ said Dr Kishen Chand Seth

impatiently in Hindi.

‘Yes, Baoji.’

‘After waiting for a week I decided to visit you. What kind of daughter are

you?’

‘A week?’said Mrs Rupa Mehra palely.

‘Yes, yes, a week. You heard me, Burri Memsahib.’

Mrs Rupa Mehra didn’t know which was worse, her father’s anger or his

sarcasm.

‘But I only arrived from Calcutta yesterday.’

Her father seemed ready to explode at this patent fiction when Mansoor came

in with the nimbu pani and a plate of arrowroot biscuits. He noticed the

expression on Dr Seth’s face and stood hesitantly by the door.

‘Yes, yes, put it down here, what are you waiting for?’

Mansoor set the tray down on a small glass-topped table and turned to leave.

Dr Seth took a sip and bellowed in fury—

‘Scoundrel!’

Mansoor turned, trembling. He was only sixteen, and was standing in for his

father, who had taken a short leave. None of his teachers during his five years at

a village school had inspired in him such erratic terror as Burri Memsahib’s

crazy father.

‘You rogue—do you want to poison me?’

‘No, Sahib.’

‘What have you given me?’

‘Nimbu pani, Sahib.’

Dr Seth, jowls shaking, looked closely at Mansoor. Was he trying to cheek

him?

‘Of course it’s nimbu pani. Did you think I thought it was whisky?’

‘Sahib.’ Mansoor was nonplussed.

‘What have you put in it?’

‘Sugar, Sahib.’

‘You buffoon! I have my nimbu pani made with salt, not sugar,’ roared Dr

Kishen Chand Seth. ‘Sugar is poison for me. I have diabetes, like your Burri

Memsahib. How many times have I told you that?’

Mansoor was tempted to reply, ‘Never,’ but thought better of it. Usually Dr

Seth had tea, and he brought the milk and sugar separately.

Dr Kishen Chand Seth rapped his stick on the floor. ‘Go. Why are you staring

at me like an owl?’

‘Yes, Sahib. I’ll make another glass.’

‘Leave it. No. Yes—make another glass.’

‘With salt, Sahib.’ Mansoor ventured to smile. He had quite a nice smile.

‘What are you laughing at like a donkey?’ asked Dr Seth. ‘With salt, of

course.’

‘Yes, Sahib.’

‘And, i***t—’

‘Yes, Sahib?’

‘With pepper too.’

‘Yes, Sahib.’

Dr Kishen Chand Seth veered around towards his daughter. She wilted before

him.

‘What kind of daughter do I have?’ he asked rhetorically. Rupa Mehra waited

for the answer, and it was not long in coming. ‘Ungrateful!’ Her father bit into an

arrowroot biscuit for emphasis. ‘Soggy!’ he added in disgust.

Mrs Rupa Mehra knew better than to protest.

Dr Kishen Chand Seth went on:

‘You have been back from Calcutta for a week and you haven’t visited me

once. Is it me you hate so much or your stepmother?’

Since her stepmother, Parvati, was considerably younger than herself, Mrs

Rupa Mehra found it very difficult to think of her other than as her father’s nurse

and, later, mistress. Though fastidious, Mrs Rupa Mehra did not entirely resent

Parvati. Her father had been lonely for three decades after her mother had died.

Parvati was good to him and (she supposed) good for him. Anyway, thought Mrs

Rupa Mehra, this is the way things happen in the world. It is best to be on good

terms with everyone.

‘But I only arrived here yesterday,’ she said. She had told him so a minute

ago, but he evidently did not believe her.

‘Hunh!’said Dr Seth dismissively.

‘By the Brahmpur Mail.’

‘You wrote in your letter that you would be coming last week.’

‘But I couldn’t get reservations, Baoji, so I decided to stay in Calcutta another

week.’ This was true, but the pleasure of spending time with her three-year-old

granddaughter Aparna had also been a factor in her delay.

‘Have you heard of telegrams?’

‘I thought of sending you one, Baoji, but I didn’t think it was so important.

Then, the expense. . . .’

‘Ever since you became a Mehra you have become completely evasive.’

This was an unkind cut, and could not fail to wound. Mrs Rupa Mehra bowed

her head.

‘Here. Have a biscuit,’said her father in a conciliatory manner.

Mrs Rupa Mehra shook her head.

‘Eat, fool!’ said her father with rough affection. ‘Or are you still keeping

those brainless fasts that are so bad for your health?’

‘It is Ekadashi today.’ Mrs Rupa Mehra fasted on the eleventh day of each

lunar fortnight in memory of her husband.

‘I don’t care if it’s ten Ekadashis,’ said her father with some heat. ‘Ever since

you came under the influence of the Mehras you have become as religious as

your ill-fated mother. There have been too many mismatched marriages in this

family.’

The combination of these two sentences, loosely coupled in several possible

wounding interpretations, was too much for Mrs Rupa Mehra. Her nose began to

redden. Her husband’s family was no more religious than it was evasive.

Raghubir’s brothers and sisters had taken her to their heart in a manner both

affecting and comforting to a sixteen-year-old bride, and still, eight years after

her husband’s death, she visited as many of them as possible in the course of

what her children called her Annual Trans-India Rail-Pilgrimage. If she was

growing to be ‘as religious as her mother’ (which she was not—at least not yet),

the operative influence was probably the obvious one: that of her mother, who

had died in the post-First-World-War influenza epidemic, when Rupa was very

young. A faded image now came before her eyes: the soft spirit of Dr Kishen

Chand Seth’s first wife could not have been more distant from his own

freethinking, allopathic soul. His comment about mismatched marriages injured

the memory of two loved ghosts, and was possibly even intended as an insult to

the asthmatic Pran.

‘Oh don’t be so sensitive!’ said Dr Kishen Chand Seth brutally. Most women,

he had decided, spent two-thirds of their time weeping and whimpering. What

good did they think it did? As an afterthought he added, ‘You should get Lata

married off soon.’

Mrs Rupa Mehra’s head jerked up. ‘Oh? Do you think so?’ she said. Her

father seemed even more full of surprises than usual.

‘Yes. She must be nearly twenty. Far too late. Parvati got married when she

was in her thirties, and see what she got. A suitable boy must be found for Lata.’

‘Yes, yes, I was just thinking the same,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra. ‘But I don’t

know what Lata will say.’

Dr Kishen Chand Seth frowned at this irrelevance.

‘And where will I find a suitable boy?’ she continued. ‘We were lucky with

Savita.’

‘Lucky—nothing! I made the introduction. Is she pregnant? No one tells me

anything,’said Dr Kishen Chand Seth.

‘Yes, Baoji.’

Dr Seth paused to interpret the yes. Then he said: ‘It’s about time. I hope I get

a great-grandson this time.’ He paused again. ‘How is she?’

‘Well, a bit of morning sickness,’ began Mrs Rupa Mehra.

‘No, i***t, I mean my great-granddaughter, Arun’s child,’ said Dr Kishen

Chand Seth impatiently.

‘Oh, Aparna? She’s very sweet. She’s grown very attached to me,’ said Mrs

Rupa Mehra happily. ‘Arun and Meenakshi send their love.’

This seemed to satisfy Dr Seth for the moment, and he bit his arrowroot

biscuit carefully. ‘Soft,’ he complained. ‘Soft.’

Things had to be just so for her father, Mrs Rupa Mehra knew. When she was

a child she had not been allowed to drink water with her meals. Each morsel had

to be chewed twenty-four times to aid digestion. For a man so particular about,

indeed so fond of, his food, it was sad to see him reduced to biscuits and boiled

eggs.

‘I’ll see what I can do for Lata,’ her father went on. ‘There’s a young

radiologist at the Prince of Wales. I can’t remember his name. If we had thought

about it earlier and used our imaginations we could have captured Pran’s

younger brother and had a double wedding. But now they say he’s got engaged

to that Banaras girl. Perhaps that is just as well,’ he added, remembering that he

was supposed to be feuding with the Minister.

‘But you can’t go now, Baoji. Everyone will be back soon,’ protested Mrs

Rupa Mehra.

‘Can’t? Can’t? Where is everyone when I want them?’ retorted Dr Kishen

Chand Seth. He clicked his tongue impatiently. ‘Don’t forget your stepmother’s

birthday next week,’ he added as he walked to the door.

Mrs Rupa Mehra looked wistfully and worriedly from the doorway at her

father’s back. On the way to his car he paused by a bed of red and yellow cannas

in Pran’s front garden, and she noticed him get more and more agitated.

Bureaucratic flowers (among which he also classified marigolds, bougainvillaea

and petunias) infuriated him. He had banned them at the Prince of Wales

Medical College as long as he had wielded supreme power there; now they were

making a comeback. With one swipe of his Kashmiri walking stick he lopped off

the head of a yellow canna. As his daughter tremblingly watched, he got into his

ancient grey Buick. This noble machine, a Raja among the r****e of Austins and

Morrises that plied the Indian roads, was still slightly dented from the time

when, ten years ago, Arun (on a visit during his vacation from St George’s) had

taken it for a catastrophic joyride. Arun was the only one in the family who

could defy his grandfather and get away with it, indeed was loved the more for

it. As Dr Kishen Chand Seth drove off, he told himself that this had been a

satisfying visit. It had given him something to think about, something to plan.

Mrs Rupa Mehra took a few moments to recover from her father’s bracing

company. Suddenly realizing how hungry she was, she began to think of her

sunset meal. She could not break her fast with grain, so young Mansoor was

dispatched to the market to buy some raw bananas to make into cutlets. As he

went through the kitchen to get the bicycle key and the shopping bag, he passed

by the counter, and noticed the rejected glass of nimbu pani: cool, sour, inviting. He swiftly gulped it down