‘Nothing,’ said Lata.
‘Hah!’ said Malati in affectionate scorn. ‘So what did you two talk about?’
‘Nothing,’ said Lata. ‘Seriously, Malati, he just came up and started talking nonsense, and I said nothing in reply. Or monosyllables. Don’t add chillies to boiled potatoes.’
They continued to stroll down Nabiganj.
‘Quite tall,’ said Malati, a couple of minutes later.
Lata said nothing.
‘Not exactly dark,’ said Malati.
Lata did not think this was worth responding to either. ‘Dark’, as she understood it, referred in novels to hair, not skin.
‘But very handsome,’ persisted Malati.
Lata made a wry face at her friend, but she was, to her own surprise, quite enjoying her description.
‘What’s his name?’ continued Malati.
‘I don’t know,’ said Lata, looking at herself in the glass front of a shoe shop.
Malati was astonished at Lata’s ineptness. ‘You talked to him for fifteen minutes and you don’t know his name?’
‘We did not talk for fifteen minutes,’ said Lata. ‘And I hardly talked at all. If you’re so keen on him, why don’t you go back to the Imperial Book Depot and ask him his name? Like you, he has no compunctions about talking to anyone.’
‘So you don’t like him?’
Lata was silent. Then she said, ‘No, I don’t. I’ve no reason to like him.’
‘It’s not all that easy for men to talk to us, you know,’ said Malati. ‘We shouldn’t be so hard on them.’
‘Malati defending the weaker sex!’ said Lata. ‘I never thought I’d see the day.’
‘Don’t change the subject,’ said Malati. ‘He didn’t seem the brazen type. I know. Trust my five-hundredfold experience.’
Lata flushed. ‘It seemed pretty easy for him to talk to me,’ she said. ‘As if I was the sort of girl who. .’
‘Who what?’
‘Who can be talked to,’ ended Lata uncertainly. Visions of her mother’s disapproval floated across her mind. She made an effort to push these away.
‘Well,’ said Malati, a little more quietly than usual as they entered the Blue Danube, ‘he really does have nice looks.’
They sat down.
‘Nice hair,’ continued Malati, surveying the menu.
‘Let’s order,’ said Lata. Malati appeared to be in love with the word ‘nice’. They ordered coffee and pastries.
‘Nice eyes,’ said Malati, five minutes later, laughing now at Lata’s studied unresponsiveness.
Lata remembered the young man’s temporary nervousness when she had looked straight at him.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘But so what? I have nice eyes too, and one pair is enough.’
1.16
While his mother-in-law was playing patience and his sister-in-law was fending off Malati’s leading questions, Dr Pran Kapoor, that first-class husband and son-in-law, was battling with the departmental problems he was reticent about burdening his family with.
Pran, though a calm man by and large, and a kind man, regarded the head of the English Department, Professor Mishra, with a loathing that made him almost ill. Professor O.P. Mishra was a huge, pale, oily hulk, political and manipulative to the very depths of his being. The four members of the syllabus committee of the English Department were seated this afternoon around an oval table in the staff room. It was an unusually warm day. The single window was open (to the view of a dusty laburnum tree), but there was no breeze; everyone looked uncomfortable, but Professor Mishra was sweating in profuse drops that gathered on his forehead, wet his thin eyebrows, and trickled down the sides of his large nose. His lips were sweetly pursed and he was saying in his genial, high-pitched voice, ‘Dr Kapoor, your point is well taken, but I think that we will need a little convincing.’
The point was the inclusion of James Joyce on the syllabus for the paper on Modern British Literature. Pran Kapoor had been pressing this on the syllabus committee for two terms — ever since he had been appointed a member — and at last the committee had decided to agree whether to consider it.
Why, Pran wondered, did he dislike Professor Mishra so intensely? Although Pran had been appointed to his lecturership five years ago under the headship of his predecessor, Professor Mishra, as a senior member of the department, must have had a say in hiring him. When he first came to the department, Professor Mishra had gone out of his way to be gracious to him, even inviting him to tea at his house. Mrs Mishra was a small, busy, worried woman, and Pran had liked her. But despite Professor Mishra’s open-armed avuncularity, his Falstaffian bulk and charm, Pran detected something dangerous: his wife and two young sons were, so it seemed to him, afraid of their father.
Pran had never been able to understand why people loved power, but he accepted it as a fact of life. His own father, for instance, was greatly attracted by it: his enjoyment in its exercise went beyond the pleasure of being able to realize his ideological principles. Mahesh Kapoor enjoyed being Revenue Minister, and he would probably be happy to become either Chief Minister of Purva Pradesh or a Minister in Prime Minister Nehru’s Cabinet in Delhi. The headaches, the overwork, the responsibility, the lack of control over one’s own time, the complete absence of opportunity to contemplate the world from a calm vantage point: these mattered little to him. Perhaps it was true to say that Mahesh Kapoor had contemplated the world sufficiently long from the calm vantage point of his cell in a prison in British India, and now required what he had in fact acquired: an intensely active role in running things. It was almost as if father and son had exchanged between themselves the second and third stages of the accepted Hindu scheme of life: the father was entangled in the world, the son longed to separate himself into a life of philosophical detachment.
Pran, however, whether he liked it or not, was what the scriptures would call a householder. He enjoyed Savita’s company, he basked in her warmth and care and beauty, he looked forward to the birth of their child. He was determined not to depend on his father for financial support, although the small salary of a department lecturer—200 rupees per month — was barely enough to subsist on—‘to subside on’, as he told himself in moments of cynicism. But he had applied for a readership that had recently fallen open in the department; the salary attached to that post was less pitiful, and it would be a step up in terms of the academic hierarchy. Pran did not care about titular prestige, but he realized that designations helped one’s designs. He wanted to see certain things done, and being a reader would help him do them. He believed that he deserved the job, but he had also learned that merit was only one criterion among several.
His experience of the recurrent asthmatic illness that had afflicted him since childhood had made him calm. Excitement disturbed his breathing, and caused him pain and incapacitation, and he had therefore almost dispensed with excitability. This was the simple logic of it, but the path itself had been difficult. He had studied patience, and by slow practice he had become patient. But Professor O.P. Mishra had got under his skin in a way Pran had not been able to envisage.
‘Professor Mishra,’ said Pran, ‘I am pleased that the committee has decided to consider this proposal, and I am delighted that it has been placed second on the agenda today and has at last come up for discussion. My main argument is quite simple. You have read my note on the subject’—he nodded around the table to Dr Gupta and Dr Narayanan—‘and you will, I am sure, appreciate that there is nothing radical in my suggestion.’ He looked down at the pale blue type of the cyclostyled sheets before him. ‘As you can see, we have twenty-one writers whose works we consider it essential for our B.A. students to read in order for them to obtain a proper understanding of Modern British Literature. But there is no Joyce. And, I might add, no Lawrence. These two writers—’