‘Mmm, well, yes, it’s interesting that you should think so too,’ said Basil Cox.
Arun stared contentedly and contemplatively into the grey and comforting haze around them.
Suddenly the untuneful and slurred notes of ‘Two intoxicating eyes’ were followed by the fumbling of the key in the front door. Varun, fortified by Shamshu, the cheap but effective Chinese spirit that he and his friends could just about afford, had returned to the fold.
Arun started as if at Banquo’s ghost. He got up, fully intending to hustle Varun out of the house before he entered the drawing room. But he was too late.
Varun, tilting a little, and in an exceptional display of confidence, greeted everyone. The fumes of Shamshu filled the room. He kissed Mrs Rupa Mehra. She drew back. He trembled a little when he saw Meenakshi, who was looking even more dazzlingly beautiful now that she was so horror-struck. He greeted the guests.
‘Hello, Mr Box, Mrs Box — er, Mrs Box, Mr Box,’ he corrected himself. He bowed, and fumbled with the buttonhole that corresponded to the missing button. The drawstring of his pyjamas hung out below his kurta.
‘I don’t believe we’ve met before,’ said Basil Cox, looking troubled.
‘Oh,’ said Arun, his fair face beet red with fury and embarrassment. ‘This is, actually, this is — well, my brother Varun. He’s a little, er — will you excuse me a minute?’ He guided Varun with mildly suppressed violence towards the door, then towards his room. ‘Not one word!’ he hissed, looking with fury straight into Varun’s puzzled eyes. ‘Not one word, or I’ll strangle you with my bare hands.’
He locked Varun’s door from the outside.
He was his charming self by the time he returned to the drawing room.
‘Well, as I was saying, he’s a little — er, well, uncontrollable at times. I’m sure you understand. Black sheep and all that. Perfectly all right, not violent or anything, but—’
‘It looked as if he’d been on a binge,’ said Patricia Cox, suddenly livening up.
‘Sent to try us, I’m afraid,’ continued Arun. ‘My father’s early death and so on. Every family has one. Has his quirks: insists on wearing those ridiculous clothes.’
‘Very strong, whatever it was. I can still smell it,’ said Patricia. ‘Unusual too. Is it a kind of whisky? I’d like to try it. Do you know what it is?’
‘I’m afraid it’s what’s known as Shamshu.’
‘Shamshu?’ said Mrs Cox with the liveliest interest, trying the word out on her tongue three or four times. ‘Shamshu. Do you know what that is, Basil?’ She looked alive again. All her mousiness had disappeared.
‘I don’t believe I do, my dear,’ said her husband.
‘I believe it’s made from rice,’ said Arun. ‘It’s a Chinese concoction of some kind.’
‘Would Shaw Brothers carry it?’ asked Patricia Cox.
‘I rather doubt it. It ought to be available in Chinatown,’ said Arun.
In fact Varun and his friends did get it from Chinatown, from a hole-in-the-wall sort of place at eight annas a glass.
‘It must be powerful stuff, whatever it is. Smoked hilsa and Shamshu — how marvellous to learn two entirely different things at dinner. One never does, you know,’ Patricia confided. ‘Usually, I’m bored as a fish.’
Bored as a fish? thought Arun. But by now Varun had started singing to himself inside his room.
‘What a very interesting young man,’ continued Patricia Cox. ‘And he’s your brother, you say. What is he singing? Why didn’t he join us for dinner? We must have all of you around sometime soon. Mustn’t we, darling?’ Basil Cox looked very severely doubtful. Patricia Cox decided to take this for assent. ‘I haven’t had so much fun since I was at RADA. And do bring a bottle of Shamshu.’
Heaven forbid, thought Basil Cox.
Heaven forbid, thought Arun.
7.7
The guests were about to arrive at Mr Justice Chatterji’s house in Ballygunge. This was one of the three or four grand parties that he took it upon himself to give at short notice during the course of the year. There was a peculiar mixture of guests for two reasons. First, because of Mr Justice Chatterji himself, whose net of friendship and acquaintance was very varied. (He was an absent-minded man, who picked up friends here and there.) Secondly, because any party of this kind was invariably treated by the whole Chatterji family as an opportunity to invite all their own friends as well. Mrs Chatterji invited some of hers, and so did their children; only Tapan, who had returned for his school holidays, was considered too young to tag on his own list of invitees to a party where there would be drinking.
Mr Justice Chatterji was not an orderly man, but he had produced five children in strict alternation of sex: Amit, Meenakshi (who was married to Arun Mehra), Dipankar, Kakoli, and Tapan. None of them worked, but each had an occupation. Amit wrote poetry, Meenakshi played canasta, Dipankar sought the Meaning of Life, Kakoli kept the telephone busy, and Tapan, who was only twelve or thirteen, and by far the youngest, went to the prestigious boarding school, Jheel.
Amit, the poet, had studied Jurisprudence at Oxford, but having got his degree, had not completed, to his father’s exasperation, what should have been easy enough for him to complete: his studies for the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn, his father’s old Inn. He had eaten most of his dinners and had even passed a paper or two, but had then lost interest in the law. Instead, on the strength of a couple of university prizes for poetry, some short fiction published here and there in literary magazines, and a book of poetry which had won him a prize in England (and therefore adulation in Calcutta), he was sitting pretty in his father’s house and doing nothing that counted as real work.
At the moment he was talking to his two sisters and to Lata.
‘How many do we expect?’ asked Amit.
‘I don’t know,’ said Kakoli. ‘Fifty?’
Amit looked amused. ‘Fifty would just about cover half your friends, Kuku. I’d say one hundred and fifty.’
‘I can’t abide these large parties,’ said Meenakshi in high excitement.
‘No, nor can I,’ said Kakoli, glancing at herself in the tall mirror in the hall.
‘I suppose the guest list consists entirely of those invited by Ma and Tapan and myself,’ said Amit, naming the three least sociable members of the family.
‘Vereeeee funneeeee,’ said (or, rather, sang) Kakoli, whose name implied the songbird that she was.
‘You should go up to your room, Amit,’ said Meenakshi, ‘and settle down on a sofa with Jane Austen. We’ll tell you when dinner is served. Or better still, we’ll send it up to you. That way you can avoid all your admirers.’
‘He’s very peculiar,’ said Kakoli to Lata. ‘Jane Austen is the only woman in his life.’
‘But half the bhadralok in Calcutta want him as a match for their daughters,’ added Meenakshi. ‘They believe he has brains.’
Kakoli recited:
‘Amit Chatterji, what a catch!
Is a highly suitable match.’
Meenakshi added:
‘Why he has not married yet?
Always playing hard to get.’
Kakoli continued:
‘Famous poet, so they say.
“Besh” decent in every way.’
She giggled.
Lata said to Amit: ‘Why do you let them get away with this?’
‘You mean with their doggerel?’ said Amit.
‘I mean with teasing you,’ said Lata.
‘Oh, I don’t mind. It runs off my back like duck’s water,’ said Amit.