Lata stared at him.
Mrs Rupa Mehra, who had been brought up never to open gifts when they were given but to wait till she was alone, quite forgot herself.
‘Open it,’ she ordered Lata.
‘I don’t want it,’ said Lata. ‘You open it.’ She pushed the packet across. Something jangled inside.
‘Savita would never behave like this,’ began her mother. ‘And Mausaji has taken the afternoon off just for you — just so that Maya and I can have the time to talk. You don’t know how much of an interest he takes in you. He is always saying you are so intelligent, but I am beginning to doubt it. Say thank you.’
‘Thank you,’ said Lata, feeling dirtied and humiliated.
‘And you must tell me all about the film when you come back.’
‘I will not go to the film.’
‘What?’
‘I will not go to the film.’
‘Mausaji will be with you, Lata — what are you worried about?’ said her mother uncomprehendingly.
Kiran looked at Lata with a bitter glance of jealousy. Mr Sahgal said, ‘She is like my own daughter. I will see that she doesn’t eat too many ice-creams and other unhealthy things.’
‘I will not go!’ Lata’s voice rose in defiance and panic.
Mrs Rupa Mehra was struggling with the packet. At this cry of rank rebellion, her fingers lost control of themselves. Normally she unpacked every gift with infinite care in order to be able to reuse the paper later. But now the paper ripped open.
‘See what you’ve made me do,’ she said to Lata. But then, looking at the contents, she turned to Mr Sahgal, perplexed.
The present was a puzzle, a pink plastic maze with a transparent top. Seven little silver balls were to be jiggled around the square maze so that, with luck, they would eventually come to rest in the central cell.
‘She is such a clever girl, I thought I would give her a puzzle. Normally she would be able to do it in five minutes. But on the train everything shakes so much that it will take her an hour,’ Mr Sahgal explained in a gentle voice. ‘Time passes so slowly sometimes.’
‘How thoughtful,’ murmured Mrs Rupa Mehra, frowning a little.
Lata lied that she had a headache, and returned to her room. But she did, indeed, feel ill — sick to the pit of her stomach.
9.18
Mr Sahgal’s car took them to the station late in the afternoon. He was working, and did not come. Kiran stayed behind with Pushkar. Mrs Sahgal came with them and chattered sweetly and vacuously throughout.
Lata did not say a word.
They were immersed in the crowds on the platform. Suddenly Haresh appeared.
‘Hello, Mrs Mehra. Hello, Lata.’
‘Haresh? I said you were not to come,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra. ‘And I told you to call me Ma,’ she added mechanically.
Haresh smiled, pleased to have surprised them.
‘My own train back to Cawnpore leaves in fifteen minutes so I thought I would give you a hand. Now where is your coolie?’
He installed them in their compartment cheerfully and efficiently, and made sure that Mrs Rupa Mehra’s black handbag was placed where it was both within reach and theft-proof.
Mrs Rupa Mehra looked mortified; it had been a hard decision for her to buy two first-class tickets from Kanpur to Lucknow, but she had felt she had to convey a certain impression to a potential son-in-law. Now he could clearly see that they usually travelled not even by second but by Inter class. And indeed, Haresh was puzzled, though he did not show it. After all this talk by Mrs Rupa Mehra about travelling in saloons and having a son in Bentsen Pryce, he had expected a different style from them.
But what does all that matter? he asked himself. I like the girl.
Lata, who had first seemed glad — relieved, he would have said — to see him, now appeared withdrawn, hardly aware of her own presence, or her mother’s, or her aunt’s, let alone his.
As the whistle blew, a scene came to Haresh’s mind. It was set at about this time of day. It had been warm, so it could not have been many months ago. He had been standing at the platform of a busy station, about to catch a train himself, and his coolie had been about to disappear into the crowd ahead. A middle-aged woman, her back turned partly towards him, had been boarding another train together with a younger woman. This younger woman — he knew now that it had been Lata — had had on her face such a look of intensity and inwardness, perhaps even hurt or anger, that he had caught his breath. There had been a man with them, the young man whom he had met at Sunil Patwardhan’s party — that English teacher whose name eluded him. Brahmpur, yes — that was where he had seen them before. He had known it; he had known it, and now it all came back to him. He had not been mistaken, after all. He smiled, his eyes disappearing.
‘Brahmpur — a pale blue sari,’ he said, almost to himself.
Lata turned to him through the window with a questioning look.
The train began to move.
Haresh shook his head, still smiling. Even if the train had been stationary, he would probably not have explained himself.
He waved as the train pulled out, but neither mother nor daughter waved back. However, being an optimist, Haresh put this down to their anglicized reticence.
A blue sari. That’s what it was, he kept thinking to himself.
9.19
Haresh had spent his day in Lucknow at Simran’s sister’s house. He told her that he had met a woman just yesterday who — since he had no chance of succeeding with Simran — was someone he was thinking seriously about as wife material.
He did not put it exactly like that; but even if he had it would not have been intrinsically offensive. Most marriages he knew had been decided on that basis, and the deciders were usually not even the couple themselves but their elders: fathers or male heads of the concerned families — with the wished-for or unwished-for counsel of dozens of others thrown in. In the case of one of Haresh’s distant rural cousins, the go-between had been the village barber; by virtue of his access to most of the houses in the village, this had been the fourth marriage he had been instrumental in arranging that year.
Simran’s sister sympathized with Haresh. She knew how long and faithfully Haresh had loved her sister, and she felt that his heart still belonged to her.
Haresh himself would not have thought of this as casually metaphorical. He and his heart did belong to her. She could do with it and with him what she pleased, and he would still love her. The pleasure in Simran’s eyes whenever they met — the sadness underlying that pleasure — the increasing certainty that her parents would not yield, that they would cut her off from themselves — that her mother, emotional woman that she was, might very well even carry out the threat against herself that she now spoke of in every letter to her and every day when she was home — all these had worn Simran down. Her correspondence, erratic even in England (partly because she herself would receive Haresh’s letters erratically, whenever the friend to whose address they were sent visited her) became even more so. Sometimes weeks would pass, and Haresh would not hear from her; then he would get three letters in as many days.
Simran’s sister knew how hard it would be for her to hear the news that Haresh had decided he might live his life with someone else — or even consider doing so. Simran loved Haresh. Her sister loved him too — even if he was the son of a Lala, which among the Sikhs was something of a term of contempt for Hindus. Her brother too had been part of the conspiracy. When he and Haresh were both seventeen he had been paid to sing ghazals on his friend’s behalf under his sister’s window: Simran had been annoyed with Haresh for some reason, and Haresh had been trying to appease her. He had had to hire her brother because he himself had, together with a love of music and a belief in its power to move unyielding hearts, a singing voice that even his beloved Simran (who liked his speaking voice well enough) had declared to be tuneless.