A Suitable Boy

1.5

It was a little untraditional, Lata couldn’t help thinking, that Pran hadn’t ridden

up to the gate on a white horse with a little nephew sitting in front of him and

with the groom’s party in tow to claim his bride; but then Prem Nivas was the

groom’s house after all. And no doubt if he had followed the convention, Arun

would have found further cause for mockery. As it was, Lata found it difficult to

imagine the lecturer on Elizabethan Drama under that veil of tuberoses. He was

now placing a garland of dark red, heavily fragrant roses around her sister Savita’s neck—and Savita was doing the same to him. She looked lovely in her

red-and-gold wedding sari, and quite subdued; Lata thought she might even have

been crying. Her head was covered, and she looked down at the ground as her

mother had doubtless instructed her to do. It was not proper, even when she was

putting the garland round his neck, that she should look full in the face of the

man with whom she was to live her life.

The welcoming ceremony completed, bride and groom moved together to the

middle of the garden, where a small platform, decorated with more white flowers

and open to the auspicious stars, had been erected. Here the priests, one from

each family, and Mrs Rupa Mehra and the parents of the groom sat around the

small fire that would be the witness of their vows.

Mrs Rupa Mehra’s brother, whom the family very rarely met, had earlier in

the day taken charge of the bangle ceremony. Arun was annoyed that he had not

been allowed to take charge of anything. He had suggested to his mother, after

the crisis brought on by his grandfather’s inexplicable actions, that they should

move the wedding to Calcutta. But it was too late for that, and she would not

hear of it.

Now that the exchange of garlands was over, the crowd paid no great

attention to the actual wedding rites. These would go on for the better part of an

hour while the guests milled and chattered round the lawns of Prem Nivas. They

laughed; they shook hands or folded them to their foreheads; they coalesced into

little knots, the men here, the women there; they warmed themselves at the

charcoal-filled clay stoves placed strategically around the garden while their

frosted, gossip-laden breath rose into the air; they admired the multicoloured

lights; they smiled for the photographer as he murmured ‘Steady, please!’ in

English; they breathed deeply the scent of flowers and perfume and cooked

spices; they exchanged births and deaths and politics and scandal under the

brightly coloured cloth canopy at the back of the garden beneath which long

tables of food had been laid out; they sat down exhaustedly on chairs with their

plates full and tucked in inexhaustibly. Servants, some in white livery, some in

khaki, brought around fruit juice and tea and coffee and snacks to those who

were standing in the garden: samosas, kachauris, laddus, gulab-jamuns, barfis

and gajak and ice-cream were consumed and replenished along with puris and

six kinds of vegetables. Friends who had not met each other for months fell upon

each other with loud cries, relatives who met only at weddings and funerals

embraced tearfully and exchanged the latest news of third cousins thrice

removed. Lata’s aunt from Kanpur, horrified by the complexion of the groom, was talking to an aunt from Lucknow about ‘Rupa’s black grandchildren’, as if

they already existed. They made much of Aparna, who was obviously going to

be Rupa’s last fair grandchild, and praised her even when she spooned pistachio

ice-cream down the front of her pale yellow cashmere sweater. The barbaric

children from rustic Rudhia ran around yelling as if they were playing pitthu on

the farm. And though the plaintive, festive music of the shehnai had now ceased,

a happy babble of convivial voices rose to the skies and quite drowned out the

irrelevant chant of the ceremonies.

Lata, however, stood close by and watched with an attentive mixture of

fascination and dismay. The two bare-chested priests, one very fat and one fairly

thin, both apparently immune to the cold, were locked in mildly insistent

competition as to who knew a more elaborate form of the service. So, while the

stars stayed their courses in order to keep the auspicious time in abeyance, the

Sanskrit wound interminably on. Even the groom’s parents were asked by the fat

priest to repeat something after him. Mahesh Kapoor’s eyebrows were quivering;

he was about to blow his rather short fuse.

Lata tried to imagine what Savita was thinking. How could she have agreed

to get married without knowing this man? Kind-hearted and accommodating

though she was, she did have views of her own. Lata loved her deeply and

admired her generous, even temper; the evenness was certainly a contrast to her

own erratic swings of mood. Savita was free from any vanity about her fresh and

lovely looks; but didn’t she rebel against the fact that Pran would fail the most

lenient test of glamour? Did Savita really accept that Mother knew best? It was

difficult to speak to Savita, or sometimes even to guess what she was thinking.

Since Lata had gone to college, it was Malati rather than her sister who had

become her confidante. And Malati, she knew, would never have agreed to be

married off in this summary manner by all the mothers in the world conjoined.

In a few minutes Savita would relinquish even her name to Pran. She would

no longer be a Mehra, like the rest of them, but a Kapoor. Arun, thank God, had

never had to do that. Lata tried ‘Savita Kapoor’ on her tongue, and did not like it

at all.

The smoke from the fire—or possibly the pollen from the flowers—was

beginning to bother Pran, and he coughed a little, covering his mouth with his

hand. His mother said something to him in a low voice. Savita too looked up at

him very quickly, with a glance, Lata thought, of gentle concern. Savita, it was

true, would have been concerned about anyone who was suffering from

anything; but there was a special tenderness here that irritated and confused Lata. Savita had only met this man for an hour! And now he was returning her

affectionate look. It was too much.

Lata forgot that she had been defending Pran to Malati just a short while ago,

and began to discover things to irritate herself with.

‘Prem Nivas’ for a start: the abode of love. An idiotic name, thought Lata

crossly, for this house of arranged marriages. And a needlessly grandiloquent

one: as if it were the centre of the universe and felt obliged to make a

philosophical statement about it. And the scene, looked at objectively, was

absurd: seven living people, none of them stupid, sitting around a fire intoning a

dead language that only three of them understood. And yet, Lata thought, her

mind wandering from one thing to another, perhaps this little fire was indeed the

centre of the universe. For here it burned, in the middle of this fragrant garden,

itself in the heart of Pasand Bagh, the pleasantest locality of Brahmpur, which

was the capital of the state of Purva Pradesh, which lay in the centre of the

Gangetic plains, which was itself the heartland of India . . . and so on through the

galaxies to the outer limits of perception and knowledge. The thought did not

seem in the least trite to Lata; it helped her control her irritation at, indeed

resentment of, Pran.

‘Speak up! Speak up! If your mother had mumbled like you, we would never

have got married.’

Mahesh Kapoor had turned impatiently towards his dumpy little wife, who

became even more tongue-tied as a result.

Pran turned and smiled encouragingly at his mother, and quickly rose again in

Lata’s estimation.

Mahesh Kapoor frowned, but held his peace for a few minutes, after which he

burst out, this time to the family priest:

‘Is this mumbo jumbo going to go on forever?’

The priest said something soothing in Sanskrit, as if blessing Mahesh Kapoor,

who felt obliged to lapse into an irked silence. He was irritated for several

reasons, one of which was the distinct and unwelcome sight of his arch political

rival, the Home Minister, deep in conversation with the large and venerable

Chief Minister S.S. Sharma. What could they be plotting? he thought. My stupid

wife insisted on inviting Agarwal because our daughters are friends, even though

she knew it would sour things for me. And now the Chief Minister is talking to

him as if no one else exists. And in my garden!

His other major irritation was directed at Mrs Rupa Mehra. Mahesh Kapoor,

once he had taken over the arrangements, had set his heart on inviting a beautiful and renowned singer of ghazals to perform at Prem Nivas, as was the tradition

whenever anyone in his family got married. But Mrs Rupa Mehra, though she

was not even paying for the wedding, had put her foot down. She could not have

‘that sort of person’singing love-lyrics at the wedding of her daughter. ‘That sort

of person’ meant both a Muslim and a courtesan.

Mahesh Kapoor muffed his responses, and the priest repeated them gently.

‘Yes, yes, go on, go on,’said Mahesh Kapoor. He glowered at the fire.

But now Savita was being given away by her mother with a handful of rose

petals, and all three women were in tears.

Really! thought Mahesh Kapoor. They’ll douse the flames. He looked in

exasperation at the main culprit, whose sobs were the most obstreperous.

But Mrs Rupa Mehra was not even bothering to tuck her handkerchief back

into her blouse. Her eyes were red and her nose and cheeks were flushed with

weeping. She was thinking back to her own wedding. The scent of 4711 Eau de

Cologne brought back unbearably happy memories of her late husband. Then she

thought downwards one generation to her beloved Savita who would soon be

walking around this fire with Pran to begin her own married life. May it be a

longer one than mine, prayed Mrs Rupa Mehra. May she wear this very sari to

her own daughter’s wedding.

She also thought upwards a generation to her father, and this brought on a

fresh gush of tears. What the septuagenarian radiologist Dr Kishen Chand Seth

had taken offence at, no one knew: probably something said or done by his

friend Mahesh Kapoor, but quite possibly by his own daughter; no one could tell

for sure. Apart from repudiating his duties as a host, he had chosen not even to

attend his granddaughter’s wedding, and had gone furiously off to Delhi ‘for a

conference of cardiologists’, as he claimed. He had taken with him the

insufferable Parvati, his thirty-five-year-old second wife, who was ten years

younger than Mrs Rupa Mehra herself.

It was also possible, though this did not cross his daughter’s mind, that Dr

Kishen Chand Seth would have gone mad at the wedding had he attended it, and

had in fact fled from that specific eventuality. Short and trim though he had

always been, he was enormously fond of food; but owing to a digestive disorder

combined with diabetes his diet was now confined to boiled eggs, weak tea,

lemon squash, and arrowroot biscuits.

I don’t care who stares at me, I have plenty of reasons to cry, said Mrs Rupa

Mehra to herself defiantly. I am so happy and heartbroken today. But her

heartbreak lasted only a few minutes more. The groom and bride walked around the fire seven times, Savita keeping her head meekly down, her eyelashes wet

with tears; and Pran and she were man and wife.

After a few concluding words by the priests, everyone rose. The newly-weds

were escorted to a flower-shrouded bench near a sweet-smelling, rough-leafed

harsingar tree in white-and-orange bloom; and congratulations fell on them and

their parents and all the Mehras and Kapoors present as copiously as those

delicate flowers fall to the ground at dawn.

Mrs Rupa Mehra’s joy was unconfined. She gobbled the congratulations

down like f*******n gulab-jamuns. She looked a little speculatively at her

younger daughter, who appeared to be laughing at her from a distance. Or was

she laughing at her sister? Well, she would find out soon enough what the happy

tears of matrimony were all about!

Pran’s much-shouted-at mother, subdued yet happy, after blessing her son and

daughter-in-law, and failing to see her younger son Maan anywhere, had gone

over to her daughter Veena. Veena embraced her; Mrs Mahesh Kapoor,

temporarily overcome, said nothing, but sobbed and smiled simultaneously. The

dreaded Home Minister and his daughter Priya joined them for a few minutes,

and in return for their congratulations, Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had a few kind

words to say to each of them. Priya, who was married and virtually immured by

her in-laws in a house in the old, cramped part of Brahmpur, said, rather

wistfully, that the garden looked beautiful. And it was true, thought Mrs Mahesh

Kapoor with quiet pride: the garden was indeed looking beautiful. The grass was

rich, the gardenias were creamy and fragrant, and a few chrysanthemums and

roses were already in bloom. And though she could take no credit for the sudden,

prolific blossoming of the harsingar tree, that was surely the grace of the gods

whose prized and contested possession, in mythical times, it used to be