Chapter 1

1.1

‘You too will marry a boy I choose,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger daughter.

Lata avoided the maternal imperative by looking around the great lamp-lit garden of Prem Nivas. The wedding guests were gathered on the lawn. ‘Hmm,’ she said. This annoyed her mother further.

‘I know what your hmms mean, young lady, and I can tell you I will not stand for hmms in this matter. I do know what is best. I am doing it all for you. Do you think it is easy for me, trying to arrange things for all four of my children without His help?’ Her nose began to redden at the thought of her husband, who would, she felt certain, be partaking of their present joy from somewhere benevolently above. Mrs Rupa Mehra believed, of course, in reincarnation, but at moments of exceptional sentiment, she imagined that the late Raghubir Mehra still inhabited the form in which she had known him when he was alive: the robust, cheerful form of his early forties before overwork had brought about his heart attack at the height of the Second World War. Eight years ago, eight years, thought Mrs Rupa Mehra miserably.

‘Now, now, Ma, you can’t cry on Savita’s wedding day,’ said Lata, putting her arm gently but not very concernedly around her mother’s shoulder.

‘If He had been here, I could have worn the tissue-patola sari I wore for my own wedding,’ sighed Mrs Rupa Mehra. ‘But it is too rich for a widow to wear.’

‘Ma!’ said Lata, a little exasperated at the emotional capital her mother insisted on making out of every possible circumstance. ‘People are looking at you. They want to congratulate you, and they’ll think it very odd if they see you crying in this way.’

Several guests were indeed doing namaste to Mrs Rupa Mehra and smiling at her; the cream of Brahmpur society, she was pleased to note.

‘Let them see me!’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra defiantly, dabbing at her eyes hastily with a handkerchief perfumed with 4711 Eau de Cologne. ‘They will only think it is because of my happiness at Savita’s wedding. Everything I do is for you, and no one appreciates me. I have chosen such a good boy for Savita, and all everyone does is complain.’

Lata reflected that of the four brothers and sisters, the only one who hadn’t complained of the match had been the sweet-tempered, fair-complexioned, beautiful Savita herself.

‘He is a little thin, Ma,’ said Lata a bit thoughtlessly. This was putting it mildly. Pran Kapoor, soon to be her brother-in-law, was lank, dark, gangly, and asthmatic.

‘Thin? What is thin? Everyone is trying to become thin these days. Even I have had to fast the whole day and it is not good for my diabetes. And if Savita is not complaining, everyone should be happy with him. Arun and Varun are always complaining: why didn’t they choose a boy for their sister then? Pran is a good, decent, cultured khatri boy.’

There was no denying that Pran, at thirty, was a good boy, a decent boy, and belonged to the right caste. And, indeed, Lata did like Pran. Oddly enough, she knew him better than her sister did—or, at least, had seen him for longer than her sister had. Lata was studying English at Brahmpur University, and Pran Kapoor was a popular lecturer there. Lata had attended his class on the Elizabethans, while Savita, the bride, had met him for only an hour, and that too in her mother’s company.

‘And Savita will fatten him up,’ added Mrs Rupa Mehra. ‘Why are you trying to annoy me when I am so happy? And Pran and Savita will be happy, you will see. They will be happy,’ she continued emphatically. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she now beamed at those who were coming up to greet her. ‘It is so wonderful—the boy of my dreams, and such a good family. The Minister Sahib has been very kind to us. And Savita is so happy. Please eat something, please eat: they have made such delicious gulab-jamuns, but owing to my diabetes I cannot eat them even after the ceremonies. I am not even allowed gajak, which is so difficult to resist in winter. But please eat, please eat. I must go in to check what is happening: the time that the pandits have given is coming up, and there is no sign of either bride or groom!’ She looked at Lata, frowning. Her younger daughter was going to prove more difficult than her elder, she decided.

‘Don’t forget what I told you,’ she said in an admonitory voice.

‘Hmm,’ said Lata. ‘Ma, your handkerchief ’s sticking out of your blouse.’

‘Oh!’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra, worriedly tucking it in. ‘And tell Arun to please take his duties seriously. He is just standing there in a corner talking to that Meenakshi and his silly friend from Calcutta. He should see that everyone is drinking and eating properly and having a gala time.’

‘That Meenakshi’ was Arun’s glamorous wife and her own disrespectful daughter-in-law. In four years of marriage Meenakshi’s only worthwhile act, in Mrs Rupa Mehra’s eyes, had been to give birth to her beloved granddaughter, Aparna, who even now had found her way to her grandmother’s brown silk sari and was tugging at it for attention. Mrs Rupa Mehra was delighted. She gave her a kiss and told her: ‘Aparna, you must stay with your Mummy or with Lata Bua, otherwise you will get lost. And then where would we be?’

‘Can’t I come with you?’ asked Aparna, who, at three, naturally had views and preferences of her own.

‘Sweetheart, I wish you could,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra, ‘but I have to make sure that your Savita Bua is ready to be married. She is so late already.’ And Mrs Rupa Mehra looked once again at the little gold watch that had been her husband’s first gift to her and which had not missed a beat for two and a half decades.

‘I want to see Savita Bua!’ said Aparna, holding her ground.

Mrs Rupa Mehra looked a little harassed and nodded vaguely at Aparna.

Lata picked Aparna up. ‘When Savita Bua comes out, we’ll go over there together, shall we, and I’ll hold you up like this, and we’ll both get a good view. Meanwhile, should we go and see if we can get some ice-cream? I feel like some too.’

Aparna approved of this, as of most of Lata’s suggestions. It was never too cold for ice-cream. They walked towards the buffet table together, three-year-old and nineteen-year-old hand in hand. A few rose petals wafted down on them from somewhere.

‘What is good enough for your sister is good enough for you,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra to Lata as a parting shot.

‘We can’t both marry Pran,’ said Lata, laughing.

 

1.2

The other chief host of the wedding was the groom’s father, Mr Mahesh Kapoor, who was the Minister of Revenue of the state of Purva Pradesh. It was in fact in his large, C-shaped, cream-coloured, two-storey family house, Prem Nivas, situated in the quietest, greenest residential area of the ancient, and—for the most part—over-populated city of Brahmpur, that the wedding was taking place.

This was so unusual that the whole of Brahmpur had been buzzing about it for days. Mrs Rupa Mehra’s father, who was supposed to be the host, had taken sudden umbrage a fortnight before the wedding, had locked up his house, and had disappeared. Mrs Rupa Mehra had been distraught. The Minister Sahib had stepped in (‘Your honour is our honour’), and had insisted on putting on the wedding himself. As for the ensuing gossip, he ignored it.

There was no question of Mrs Rupa Mehra helping to pay for the wedding. The Minister Sahib would not hear of it. Nor had he at any time asked for any dowry. He was an old friend and bridge partner of Mrs Rupa Mehra’s father and he had liked what he had seen of her daughter Savita (though he could never remember the girl’s name). He was sympathetic to economic hardship, for he too had tasted it. During the several years he had spent in British jails during the struggle for Independence, there had been no one to run his farm or his cloth business. As a result very little income had come in, and his wife and family had struggled along with great difficulty.

Those unhappy times, however, were only a memory for the able, impatient, and powerful Minister. It was the early winter of 1950, and India had been free for over three years. But freedom for the country did not mean freedom for his younger son, Maan, who even now was being told by his father:

‘What is good enough for your brother is good enough for you.’

‘Yes, Baoji,’ said Maan, smiling.

Mr Mahesh Kapoor frowned. His younger son, while succeeding to his own habit of fine dress, had not succeeded to his obsession with hard work. Nor did he appear to have any ambition to speak of.

‘It is no use being a good-looking young wastrel forever,’ said his father. ‘And marriage will force you to settle down and take things seriously. I have written to the Banaras people, and I expect a favourable answer any day.’

Marriage was the last thing on Maan’s mind; he had caught a friend’s eye in the crowd and was waving at him. Hundreds of small coloured lights strung through the hedge came on all at once, and the silk saris and jewellery of the women glimmered and glinted even more brightly. The high, reedy shehnai music burst into a pattern of speed and brilliance. Maan was entranced. He noticed Lata making her way through the guests. Quite an attractive girl, Savita’s sister, he thought. Not very tall and not very fair, but attractive, with an oval face, a shy light in her dark eyes and an affectionate manner towards the child she was leading by the hand.

‘Yes, Baoji,’ said Maan obediently.

‘What did I say?’ demanded his father.

‘About marriage, Baoji,’ said Maan.

‘What about marriage?’

Maan was nonplussed.

‘Don’t you listen?’ demanded Mahesh Kapoor, wanting to twist Maan’s ear. ‘You are as bad as the clerks in the Revenue Department. You were not paying attention, you were waving at Firoz.’

Maan looked a little shamefaced. He knew what his father thought of him. But he had been enjoying himself until a couple of minutes ago, and it was just like Baoji to come and puncture his light spirits.

‘So that’s all fixed up,’ continued his father. ‘Don’t tell me later that I didn’t warn you. And don’t get that weak-willed woman, your mother, to change her mind and come telling me that you aren’t yet ready to take on the responsibilities of a man.’

‘No, Baoji,’ said Maan, getting the drift of things and looking a trifle glum.

‘We chose well for Veena, we have chosen well for Pran, and you are not to complain about our choice of a bride for you.’

Maan said nothing. He was wondering how to repair the puncture. He had a bottle of Scotch upstairs in his room, and perhaps he and Firoz could escape for a few minutes before the ceremony—or even during it—for refreshment.

His father paused to smile brusquely at a few well-wishers, then turned to Maan again. ‘I don’t want to have to waste any more time with you today. God knows I have enough to do as it is. What has happened to Pran and that girl, what’s her name? It’s getting late. They were supposed to come out from opposite ends of the house and meet here for the jaymala five minutes ago.’

‘Savita,’ prompted Maan.

‘Yes, yes,’ said his father impatiently. ‘Savita. Your superstitious mother will start panicking if they miss the correct configuration of the stars. Go and calm her down. Go! Do some good.’

And Mahesh Kapoor went back to his own duties as a host. He frowned impatiently at one of the officiating priests, who smiled weakly back. He narrowly avoided being butted in the stomach and knocked over by three children, offspring of his rural relatives, who were careering joyfully around the garden as if it were a field of stubble. And he greeted, before he had walked ten steps, a professor of literature (who could be useful for Pran’s career); two influential members of the state legislature from the Congress Party (who might well agree to back him in his perennial power struggle with the Home Minister); a judge, the very last Englishman to remain on the bench of the Brahmpur High Court after Independence; and his old friend the Nawab Sahib of Baitar, one of the largest landowners in the state.

 

1.3

Lata, who had heard a part of Maan’s conversation with his father, could not help smiling to herself as she walked past.

‘I see you’re enjoying yourself,’ said Maan to her in English.

His conversation with his father had been in Hindi, hers with her mother in English. Maan spoke both well. Lata was struck shy, as she sometimes was with strangers, especially those who smiled as boldly as Maan. Let him do the smiling for both of us, she thought.

‘Yes,’ she said simply, her eyes resting on his face for just a second. Aparna tugged at her hand.

‘Well, now, we’re almost family,’ said Maan, perhaps sensing her awkwardness. ‘A few minutes more, and the ceremonies will start.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Lata, looking up at him again more confidently. She paused and frowned. ‘My mother’s concerned that they won’t start on time.’ ‘So is my father,’ said Maan. Lata began smiling again, but when Maan asked her why she shook her head.

‘Well,’ said Maan, flicking a rose petal off his beautiful tight white achkan, ‘you’re not laughing at me, are you?’

‘I’m not laughing at all,’ said Lata.

‘Smiling, I meant.’

‘No, not at you,’ said Lata. ‘At myself.’

‘That’s very mysterious,’ said Maan. His good-natured face melted into an expression of exaggerated perplexity.

‘It’ll have to remain so, I’m afraid,’ said Lata, almost laughing now. ‘Aparna here wants her ice-cream, and I must supply it.’

‘Try the pistachio ice-cream,’ suggested Maan. His eyes followed her pink sari for a few seconds. Good-looking girl—in a way, he thought again. Pink’s the wrong colour for her complexion, though. She should be dressed in deep green or dark blue . . . like that woman there. His attention veered to a new object of contemplation.

A few seconds later Lata bumped into her best friend, Malati, a medical student who shared her room at the student hostel. Malati was very outgoing and never lost her tongue with strangers. Strangers, however, blinking into her lovely green eyes, sometimes lost their tongues with her.

‘Who was that Cad you were talking to?’ she asked Lata eagerly.

This wasn’t as bad as it sounded. A good-looking young man, in the slang of Brahmpur University girls, was a Cad. The term derived from Cadbury’s chocolate. ‘Oh, that’s just Maan, he’s Pran’s younger brother.’

‘Really! But he’s so good-looking and Pran’s so, well, not ugly, but, you know, dark, and nothing special.’

‘Maybe he’s a dark Cad,’ suggested Lata. ‘Bitter but sustaining.’

Malati considered this.

‘And,’ continued Lata, ‘as my aunts have reminded me five times in the last hour, I’m not all that fair either, and will therefore find it impossible to get a suitable husband.’

‘How can you put up with them, Lata?’ asked Malati, who had been brought up, fatherless and brotherless, in a circle of very supportive women.

‘Oh, I like most of them,’ said Lata. ‘And if it wasn’t for this sort of speculation it wouldn’t be much of a wedding for them. Once they see the bride and groom together, they’ll have an even better time. Beauty and the Beast.’

‘Well, he’s looked rather beast-like whenever I’ve seen him on the university campus,’ said Malati. ‘Like a dark giraffe.’

‘Don’t be mean,’ said Lata, laughing. ‘Anyway, Pran’s very popular as a lecturer,’ she continued. ‘And I like him. And you’re going to have to visit me at his house once I leave the hostel and start living there. And since he’ll be my brother-in-law you’ll have to like him too. Promise me you will.’

‘I won’t,’ said Malati firmly. ‘He’s taking you away from me.’

‘He’s doing nothing of the sort, Malati,’ said Lata. ‘My mother, with her fine sense of household economy, is dumping me on him.’

‘Well, I don’t see why you should obey your mother. Tell her you can’t bear to be parted from me.’

‘I always obey my mother,’ said Lata. ‘And besides, who will pay my hostel fees if she doesn’t? And it will be very nice for me to live with Savita for a while. I refuse to lose you. You really must visit us—you must keep visiting us. If you don’t, I’ll know how much value to put on your friendship.’

Malati looked unhappy for a second or two, then recovered. ‘Who’s this?’ she asked. Aparna was looking at her in a severe and uncompromising manner.

‘My niece, Aparna,’ said Lata. ‘Say hello to Malati Aunty, Aparna.’

‘Hello,’ said Aparna, who had reached the end of her patience. ‘Can I have a pistachio ice-cream, please?’

‘Yes, kuchuk, of course, I’m sorry,’ said Lata. ‘Come, let’s all go together and get some.’

 

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.

 

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 fi re 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 newlyweds 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 forbidden 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.

 

1.6

Her lord and master the Minister of Revenue was meanwhile accepting congratulations from the Chief Minister of Purva Pradesh, Shri S.S. Sharma. Sharmaji was rather a hulking man with a perceptible limp and an unconscious and slight vibration of the head, which was exacerbated when, as now, he had had a long day. He ran the state with a mixture of guile, charisma and benevolence. Delhi was far away and rarely interested in his legislative and administrative fief. Though he was uncommunicative about his discussion with his Home Minister, he was nevertheless in good spirits.

Noticing the rowdy kids from Rudhia, he said in his slightly nasal voice to Mahesh Kapoor: ‘So you’re cultivating a rural constituency for the coming elections?’

Mahesh Kapoor smiled. Ever since 1937 he had stood from the same urban constituency in the heart of Old Brahmpur—a constituency that included much of Misri Mandi, the home of the shoe trade of the city. Despite his farm and his knowledge of rural affairs—he was the prime mover of a bill to abolish large and unproductive landholdings in the state—it was unimaginable that he would desert his electoral home and choose to contest from a rural constituency. By way of answer, he indicated his garments; the handsome black achkan he was wearing, the tight off-white pyjamas, and the brilliantly embroidered white jutis with their up-turned toes would present an incongruous picture in a rice field.

‘Why, nothing is impossible in politics,’ said Sharmaji slowly. ‘After your Zamindari Abolition Bill goes through, you will become a hero throughout the countryside. If you chose, you could become Chief Minister. Why not?’ said Sharmaji generously and warily. He looked around, and his eye fell on the Nawab Sahib of Baitar, who was stroking his beard and looking around perplexedly. ‘Of course, you might lose a friend or two in the process,’ he added.

Mahesh Kapoor, who had followed his glance without turning his head, said quietly: ‘There are zamindars and zamindars. Not all of them tie their friendship to their land. The Nawab Sahib knows that I am acting out of principle.’ He paused, and continued: ‘Some of my own relatives in Rudhia stand to lose their land.’

The Chief Minister nodded at the sermon, then rubbed his hands, which were cold. ‘Well, he is a good man,’ he said indulgently. ‘And so was his father,’ he added.

Mahesh Kapoor was silent. The one thing Sharmaji could not be called was rash; and yet here was a rash statement if ever there was one. It was well known that the Nawab Sahib’s father, the late Nawab Sahib of Baitar, had been an active member of the Muslim League; and though he had not lived to see the birth of Pakistan, that above all was what he had dedicated his life to.

The tall, grey-bearded Nawab Sahib, noticing four eyes on him, gravely raised his cupped hand to his forehead in polite salutation, then tilted his head sideways with a quiet smile, as if to congratulate his old friend. ‘You haven’t seen Firoz and Imtiaz anywhere, have you?’ he asked Mahesh Kapoor, after walking slowly over.

‘No, no—but I haven’t seen my son either, so I assume. . . .’ The Nawab Sahib raised his hands slightly, palms forward, in a gesture of helplessness. After a while he said: ‘So Pran is married, and Maan is next. I would imagine you will find him a little less tractable.’

‘Well, tractable or not, there are some people in Banaras I have been talking to,’ said Mahesh Kapoor in a determined tone. ‘Maan has met the father. He’s also in the cloth business. We’re making inquiries. Let’s see. And what about your twins? A joint wedding to two sisters?’

‘Let’s see, let’s see,’ said the Nawab Sahib, thinking rather sadly about his wife, buried these many years; ‘Inshallah, all of them will settle down soon enough.’

 

1.7

‘To the law,’ said Maan, raising his third glass of Scotch to Firoz, who was sitting on his bed with a glass of his own. Imtiaz was lounging in a stuffed chair and examining the bottle.

‘Thank you,’ said Firoz. ‘But not to new laws, I hope.’

‘Oh, don’t worry, don’t worry, my father’s bill will never pass,’ said Maan. ‘And even if it does, you’ll be much richer than me. Look at me,’ he added, gloomily. ‘I have to work for a living.’

Since Firoz was a lawyer and his brother a doctor, it was not as if they fitted the popular mould of the idle sons of aristocracy.

‘And soon,’ went on Maan, ‘if my father has his way, I’ll have to work on behalf of two people. And later for more. Oh God!’

‘What—your father isn’t getting you married off, is he?’ asked Firoz, halfway between a smile and a frown.

‘Well, the buffer zone disappeared tonight,’ said Maan disconsolately. ‘Have another.’

‘No, no thanks, I still have plenty,’ said Firoz. Firoz enjoyed his drink, but with a slightly guilty feeling; his father would approve even less than Maan’s. ‘So when’s the happy hour?’ he added uncertainly.

‘God knows. It’s at the inquiry stage,’ said Maan.

‘At the first reading,’ Imtiaz added.

For some reason, this delighted Maan. ‘At the first reading!’ he repeated. ‘Well, let’s hope it never gets to the third reading! And, even if it does, that the President withholds his assent!’ He laughed and took a couple of long swigs. ‘And what about your marriage?’ he demanded of Firoz.

Firoz looked a little evasively around the room. It was as bare and functional as most of the rooms in Prem Nivas—which looked as if they expected the imminent arrival of a herd of constituents. ‘My marriage!’ he said with a laugh.

Maan nodded vigorously.

‘Change the subject,’ said Firoz.

‘Why, if you were to go into the garden instead of drinking here in seclusion—’

‘It’s hardly seclusion.’

‘Don’t interrupt,’ said Maan, throwing an arm around him. ‘If you were to go down into the garden, a good-looking, elegant fellow like you, you would be surrounded within seconds by eligible young beauties. And ineligible ones too. They’d cling to you like bees to a lotus. Curly locks, curly locks, will you be mine?’

Firoz flushed. ‘You’ve got the metaphor slightly wrong,’ he said. ‘Men are bees, women lotuses.’

Maan quoted a couplet from an Urdu ghazal to the effect that the hunter could turn into the hunted, and Imtiaz laughed.

‘Shut up, both of you,’ said Firoz, attempting to appear more annoyed than he was; he had had enough of this sort of nonsense. ‘I’m going down. Abba will be wondering where on earth we’ve got to. And so will your father. And besides, we ought to find out if your brother is formally married yet—and whether you really do now have a beautiful sister-in-law to scold you and curb your excesses.’

‘All right, all right, we’ll all go down,’ said Maan genially. ‘Maybe some of the bees will cling to us too. And if we get stung to the heart, Doctor Sahib here can cure us. Can’t you, Imtiaz? All you would have to do would be to apply a rose petal to the wound, isn’t that so?’

‘As long as there are no contraindications,’ said Imtiaz seriously.

‘No contraindications,’ said Maan, laughing as he led the way down the stairs.

‘You may laugh,’ said Imtiaz. ‘But some people are allergic even to rose petals. Talking of which, you have one sticking to your cap.’

‘Do I?’ asked Maan. ‘These things float down from nowhere.’

‘So they do,’ said Firoz, who was walking down just behind him. He gently brushed it away.

 

1.8

Because the Nawab Sahib had been looking somewhat lost without his sons, Mahesh Kapoor’s daughter Veena had drawn him into her family circle. She asked him about his eldest child, his daughter Zainab, who was a childhood friend of hers but who, after her marriage, had disappeared into the world of purdah. The old man talked about her rather guardedly, but about her two children with transparent delight. His grandchildren were the only two beings in the world who had the right to interrupt him when he was studying in his library. But now the great yellow ancestral mansion of Baitar House, just a few minutes’ walk from Prem Nivas, was somewhat run down, and the library too had suffered. ‘Silverfish, you know,’ said the Nawab Sahib. ‘And I need help with cataloguing. It’s a gigantic task, and in some ways not very heartening. Some of the early editions of Ghalib can’t be traced now; and some valuable manuscripts by our own poet Mast. My brother never made a list of what he took with him to Pakistan. . . .’

At the word Pakistan, Veena’s mother-in-law, withered old Mrs Tandon, flinched. Three years ago, her whole family had had to flee the blood and flames and unforgettable terror of Lahore. They had been wealthy, ‘propertied’ people, but almost everything they had owned was lost, and they had been lucky to escape with their lives. Her son Kedarnath, Veena’s husband, still had scars on his hands from an attack by rioters on his refugee convoy. Several of their friends had been butchered.

The young, old Mrs Tandon thought bitterly, are very resilient: her grandchild Bhaskar had of course only been six at the time; but even Veena and Kedarnath had not let those events embitter their lives. They had returned here to Veena’s hometown, and Kedarnath had set himself up in a small way in—of all polluting, carcass-tainted things—the shoe trade. For old Mrs Tandon, the descent from a decent prosperity could not have been more painful. She had been willing to tolerate talking to the Nawab Sahib though he was a Muslim, but when he mentioned comings and goings from Pakistan, it was too much for her imagination. She felt ill. The pleasant chatter of the garden in Brahmpur was amplified into the cries of the blood-mad mobs on the streets of Lahore, the lights into fire. Daily, sometimes hourly, in her imagination she returned to what she still thought of as her city and her home. It had been beautiful before it had become so suddenly hideous; it had appeared completely secure so shortly before it was lost forever.

The Nawab Sahib did not notice that anything was the matter, but Veena did, and quickly changed the subject even at the cost of appearing rude. ‘Where’s Bhaskar?’ she asked her husband.

‘I don’t know. I think I saw him near the food, the little frog,’ said Kedarnath.

‘I wish you wouldn’t call him that,’ said Veena. ‘He is your son. It’s not auspicious. . . .’ ‘It’s not my name for him, it’s Maan’s,’ said Kedarnath with a smile. He enjoyed being mildly henpecked. ‘But I’ll call him whatever you want me to.’

Veena led her mother-in-law away. And to distract the old lady she did in fact get involved in looking for her son. Finally they found Bhaskar. He was not eating anything but simply standing under the great multicoloured cloth canopy that covered the food tables, gazing upwards with pleased and abstract wonderment at the elaborate geometrical patterns—red rhombuses, green trapeziums, yellow squares and blue triangles—from which it had been stitched together.

 

1.9

The crowds had thinned; the guests, some chewing paan, were departing at the gate; a heap of gifts had grown by the side of the bench where Pran and Savita had been sitting. Finally only they and a few members of the family were left—and the yawning servants who would put away the more valuable furniture for the night, or pack the gifts in a trunk under the watchful eye of Mrs Rupa Mehra.

The bride and groom were lost in their thoughts. They avoided looking at each other now. They would spend the night in a carefully prepared room in Prem Nivas, and leave for a week’s honeymoon in Simla tomorrow.

Lata tried to imagine the nuptial room. Presumably it would be fragrant with tuberoses; that, at least, was Malati’s confident opinion. I’ll always associate tuberoses with Pran, Lata thought. It was not at all pleasant to follow her imagination further. That Savita would be sleeping with Pran tonight did not bear thinking of. It did not strike her as being at all romantic. Perhaps they would be too exhausted, she thought optimistically.

‘What are you thinking of, Lata?’ asked her mother.

‘Oh, nothing, Ma,’ said Lata automatically.

‘You turned up your nose. I saw it.’ Lata blushed.

‘I don’t think I ever want to get married,’ she said emphatically.

Mrs Rupa Mehra was too wearied by the wedding, too exhausted by emotion, too softened by Sanskrit, too cumbered with congratulations, too overwrought, in short, to do anything but stare at Lata for ten seconds. What on earth had got into the girl? What was good enough for her mother and her mother’s mother and her mother’s mother’s mother should be good enough for her. Lata, though, had always been a difficult one, with a strange will of her own, quiet but unpredictable—like that time in St Sophia’s when she had wanted to become a nun! But Mrs Rupa Mehra too had a will, and she was determined to have her own way, even if she was under no illusions as to Lata’s pliability.

And yet, Lata was named after that most pliable thing, a vine, which was trained to cling: first to her family, then to her husband. Indeed, when she was a baby, Lata’s fingers had had a strong and coiling grasp which even now came back with a sweet vividness to her mother. Suddenly Mrs Rupa Mehra burst out with the inspired remark:

‘Lata, you are a vine, you must cling to your husband!’ It was not a success.

‘Cling?’ said Lata. ‘Cling?’ The word was pronounced with such quiet scorn that her mother could not help bursting into tears. How terrible it was to have an ungrateful daughter. And how unpredictable a baby could be.

Now that the tears were running down her cheeks, Mrs Rupa Mehra transferred them fluidly from one daughter to the other. She clasped Savita to her bosom and wept loudly. ‘You must write to me, Savita darling,’ she said. ‘You must write to me every day from Simla. Pran, you are like my own son now, you must be responsible and see to it. Soon I will be all alone in Calcutta—all alone.’

This was of course quite untrue. Arun and Varun and Meenakshi and Aparna would all be crowded together with her in Arun’s little flat in Sunny Park. But Mrs Rupa Mehra was one who believed with unformulated but absolute conviction in the paramountcy of subjective over objective truth.

***

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