A Suitable Boy

1.4

Lata soon lost Malati to a clutch of college friends, but before she and Aparna

could get much further, they were captured by Aparna’s parents.

‘So there you are, you precious little runaway,’ said the resplendent

Meenakshi, implanting a kiss on her daughter’s forehead. ‘Isn’t she precious,

Arun? Now where have you been, you precious truant?’

‘I went to find Daadi,’ began Aparna. ‘And then I found her, but she had to go

into the house because of Savita Bua, but I couldn’t go with her, and then Lata

Bua took me to have ice-cream, but we couldn’t because—’

But Meenakshi had lost interest and had turned to Lata.

‘That pink doesn’t really suit you, Luts,’said Meenakshi. ‘It lacks a certain—

a certain—’

‘Je ne sais quoi?’ prompted a suave friend of her husband’s, who was

standing nearby.

‘Thank you,’ said Meenakshi, with such withering charm that the young

fellow glided away for a while and pretended to stare at the stars.

‘No, pink’s just not right for you, Luts,’ reaffirmed Meenakshi, stretching her

long, tawny neck like a relaxed cat and appraising her sister-in-law.

She herself was wearing a green-and-gold sari of Banaras silk, with a green

choli that exposed more of her midriff than Brahmpur society was normally

privileged or prepared to see

‘Oh,’ said Lata, suddenly self-conscious. She knew she didn’t have much

dress sense, and imagined she looked rather drab standing next to this bird of

paradise.

‘Who was that fellow you were talking to?’ demanded her brother Arun, who,

unlike his wife, had noticed Lata talking to Maan. Arun was twenty-five, a tall,

fair, intelligent, pleasant-looking bully who kept his siblings in place by

pummelling their egos. He was fond of reminding them that after their father’s

death, he was ‘in a manner of speaking’, in loco parentis to them.

‘That was Maan, Pran’s brother.’

‘Ah.’ The word spoke volumes of disapproval.

Arun and Meenakshi had arrived just this morning by overnight train from

Calcutta, where Arun worked as one of the few Indian executives in the

prestigious and largely white firm of Bentsen & Pryce. He had had neither the

time nor the desire to acquaint himself with the Kapoor family—or clan, as he

called it—with whom his mother had contrived a match for his sister. He cast his

eyes balefully around. Typical of their type to overdo everything, he thought,

looking at the coloured lights in the hedge. The crassness of the state politicians,

white-capped and effusive, and of Mahesh Kapoor’s contingent of rustic

relatives excited his finely tuned disdain. And the fact that neither the brigadier

from the Brahmpur Cantonment nor the Brahmpur representatives of companies

like Burmah Shell, Imperial Tobacco, and Caltex were represented in the crowd

of invitees blinded his eyes to the presence of the larger part of the professional

elite of Brahmpur.

‘A bit of a bounder, I’d say,’ said Arun, who had noticed Maan’s eyes

casually following Lata before he had turned them elsewhere.

Lata smiled, and her meek brother Varun, who was a nervous shadow to Arun

and Meenakshi, smiled too in a kind of stifled complicity. Varun was studying—

or trying to study—mathematics at Calcutta University, and he lived with Arun

and Meenakshi in their small ground-floor flat. He was thin, unsure of himself,

sweet-natured and shifty-eyed; and he was Lata’s favourite. Though he was a

year older than her, she felt protective of him. Varun was terrified, in different

ways, of both Arun and Meenakshi, and in some ways even of the precocious

Aparna. His enjoyment of mathematics was mainly limited to the calculation of

odds and handicaps on the racing form. In winter, as Varun’s excitement rose

with the racing season, so did his elder brother’s ire. Arun was fond of calling

him a bounder as well.

And what would you know about bounding, Arun Bhai? thought Lata to

herself. Aloud she said: ‘He seemed quite nice.’

‘An aunty we met called him a Cad,’ contributed Aparna.

‘Did she, precious?’ said Meenakshi, interested. ‘Do point him out to me,

Arun.’ But Maan was now nowhere to be seen.

‘I blame myself to some extent,’ said Arun in a voice which implied nothing

of the sort; Arun was not capable of blaming himself for anything. ‘I really

should have done something,’ he continued. ‘If I hadn’t been so tied up with

work, I might have prevented this whole fiasco. But once Ma got it into her head

that this Kapoor chap was suitable, it was impossible to dissuade her. It’s

impossible to talk reason with Ma; she just turns on the waterworks.’

What had also helped deflect Arun’s suspicions had been the fact that Dr Pran

Kapoor taught English. And yet, to Arun’s chagrin, there was hardly an English

face in this whole provincial crowd.

How fearfully dowdy! said Meenakshi wearily to herself, encapsulating her

husband’s thoughts. ‘And how utterly unlike Calcutta. Precious, you have smut

on your nose,’ she added to Aparna, half looking around to tell an imaginary

ayah to wipe it off with a handkerchief.

‘I’m enjoying it here,’ Varun ventured, seeing Lata look hurt. He knew that

she liked Brahmpur, though it was clearly no metropolis.

‘You be quiet,’ snapped Arun brutally. His judgement was being challenged

by his subordinate, and he would have none of it.

Varun struggled with himself; he glared, then looked down.

‘Don’t talk about what you don’t understand,’ added Arun, putting the boot

in.

Varun glowered silently.

‘Did you hear me?’

‘Yes,’said Varun.

‘Yes, what?’

‘Yes, Arun Bhai,’ muttered Varun.

This pulverization was standard fare for Varun, and Lata was not surprised by

the exchange. But she felt very bad for him, and indignant at Arun. She could

not understand either the pleasure or the purpose of it. She decided she would

speak to Varun as soon after the wedding as possible to try to help him withstand

—at least internally—such assaults upon his spirit. Even if I’m not very good at

withstanding them myself, Lata thought.

‘Well, Arun Bhai,’ she said innocently, ‘I suppose it’s too late. We’re all one

big happy family now, and we’ll have to put up with each other as well as we

can.’

The phrase, however, was not innocent. ‘One big happy family’ was an

ironically used Chatterji phrase. Meenakshi Mehra had been a Chatterji before

she and Arun had met at a cocktail party, fallen in torrid, rapturous and elegant

love, and got married within a month, to the shock of both families. Whether or

not Mr Justice Chatterji of the Calcutta High Court and his wife were happy to

welcome the non-Bengali Arun as the first appendage to their ring of five

children (plus Cuddles the dog), and whether or not Mrs Rupa Mehra had been

delighted at the thought of her firstborn, the apple of her eye, marrying outside

the khatri caste (and to a spoilt supersophisticate like Meenakshi at that), Arun

certainly valued the Chatterji connection greatly. The Chatterjis had wealth and

position and a grand Calcutta house where they threw enormous (but tasteful)

parties. And even if the big happy family, especially Meenakshi’s brothers and

sisters, sometimes bothered him with their endless, unchokable wit and

improvised rhyming couplets, he accepted it precisely because it appeared to him

to be undeniably urbane. It was a far cry from this provincial capital, this Kapoor

crowd and these garish light-in-the-hedge celebrations—with pomegranate juice

in lieu of alcohol!

‘What precisely do you mean by that?’ demanded Arun of Lata. ‘Do you

think that if Daddy had been alive we would have married into this sort of a

family?’

Arun hardly seemed to care that they might be overheard. Lata flushed. But

the brutal point was well made. Had Raghubir Mehra not died in his forties but

continued his meteoric rise in the Railway Service, he would—when the British

left Indian government service in droves in 1947—certainly have become a

member of the Railway Board. His excellence and experience might even have

made him Chairman. The family would not have had to struggle, as it had had to

for years and was still forced to, on Mrs Rupa Mehra’s depleted savings, the

kindness of friends and, lately, her elder son’s salary. She would not have had to

sell most of her jewellery and even their small house in Darjeeling to give her

children the schooling which she felt that, above everything else, they must

have. Beneath her pervasive sentimentality—and her attachment to the

seemingly secure physical objects that reminded her of her beloved husband—

lay a sense of sacrifice and a sense of values that determinedly melted them

down into the insecure, intangible benefits of an excellent English-medium boarding school education. And so Arun and Varun had continued to go to St

George’s School, and Savita and Lata had not been withdrawn from St Sophia’s

Convent.

The Kapoors might be all very well for Brahmpur society, thought Arun, but

if Daddy had been alive, a constellation of brilliant matches would have been

strewn at the feet of the Mehras. At least he, for one, had overcome their

circumstances and done well in the way of in-laws. What possible comparison

could there be between Pran’s brother, that ogling fellow whom Lata had just

been talking to—who ran, of all things, a cloth shop in Banaras, from what Arun

had heard—and, say, Meenakshi’s elder brother, who had been to Oxford, was

supposed to be studying law at Lincoln’s Inn, and was, in addition, a published

poet?

Arun’s speculations were brought down to earth by his daughter, who

threatened to scream if she didn’t get her ice-cream. She knew from experience

that screaming (or even the threat of it) worked wonders with her parents. And,

after all, they sometimes screamed at each other, and often at the servants.

Lata looked guilty. ‘It’s my fault, darling,’ she said to Aparna. ‘Let’s go at

once before we get caught up in something else. But you mustn’t cry or yell,

promise me that. It won’t work with me.’

Aparna, who knew it wouldn’t, was silent.

But just at that moment the bridegroom emerged from one side of the house,

dressed all in white, his dark, rather nervous face veiled with hanging strings of

white flowers; everyone crowded forward towards the door from which the bride

would emerge; and Aparna, lifted into her Lata Bua’s arms, was forced to defer

once again both treat and threat.