What he did not add, because he did not know it, was that Meenakshi had other plans for Lata. Now that she was staying with the Chatterjis, she began to work on Amit. Kakoli was a willing accomplice. Both of them liked Lata, and both of them thought that she would be just the right match for their elder brother. She would put up with his quirks, and appreciate his work. She was intelligent and literary; and though Amit could subsist on very little conversation in life (unlike his sisters, or even Dipankar), what conversation he did have could not be fatuous or vacuous — unless, of course, it was with his brothers or sisters, where he was comparatively unbuttoned.
At any rate, Kakoli — who had once told him that she reeeeeally pitied the woman who had to marry him — had decided that she needn’t pity Lata, who would be capable both of understanding and of handling her eccentric brother.
Perhaps Meenakshi’s plotting was a good thing. Amit, who had liked Lata a great deal, would not have been prodded into action had it not been for his energetic and conniving sisters.
Instead of employing the usual Kakoli-couplets, which had proven to be ineffectual, the two sisters were much more gentle with Amit this time. Meenakshi told him that there was a vague Other on the scene. At first she had thought it was a fellow called Akbar or something who was acting with Lata in As You Like It, but the main contender had turned out to be a bumptious cobbler, who was utterly unsuited to Lata; she thus implied that Amit would be rescuing Lata from an unhappy marriage by intervening. Kakoli simply told him that Lata liked him, and that she knew he liked Lata, and that she couldn’t see what he was making such a fuss about. Why didn’t he send her a love letter and one of his books?
Neither Meenakshi nor Kakoli felt they had much chance of success unless they had appraised Amit’s feelings for Lata correctly; but if they had, then they would act as the necessary spurs to action. They did not know much about his time at Oxford and what affairs, if any, he had had there, but they did know that in Calcutta he had rebuffed all the efforts of his female admirers or their mothers to get to know him better. He had remained faithful to Jane Austen. He appeared to be content to lead a life of contemplation. He had a strong, if not very patent, will, and never did anything he didn’t want to. As for the law, in which he had earned his degree, in spite of Biswas Babu’s exhortations and his father’s annoyance, Amit had showed no signs of exerting himself in it at all.
His justification to himself for his idleness went something like this: I need not worry about money; I shall never be in real want. Why earn more than I need? If I take up practising law, apart from boring myself and being irritable to everyone around me, I will achieve nothing of permanent worth. I will be just one among thousands of lawyers. It is better to write one lasting sonnet than to win a hundred spectacular cases. I think I can write at least one lasting sonnet in my life — if I allow myself the scope and time to do so. The less I clog up my life with needless busy-ness, the better I find I write. Therefore I will do as little as possible. I will work on my novel whenever I can, and write a poem whenever inspiration seizes me, and leave it at that.
It was this scheme of his that had been threatened by his father’s ultimatum and Dipankar’s abscondence. What would happen to his novel if he was saddled with financial drudgery?
Unfortunately, doing as little as possible by way of breadwinning was accompanied in Amit’s case by doing as little as possible in his social life as well. He had a few good friends, but they were all abroad — friends from his university days, to whom he wrote and from whom he received short letters, corresponding in style to the desultory conversations he used to have with them. They had been quite different from him in temperament and usually it was they who had befriended him. He was reserved, and found it difficult to make the first move, but was not slow to respond. In Calcutta, however, he had not responded much to anyone. The family had sufficed for society whenever he had needed it. It was because Lata was a member of the clan by marriage that he had felt obliged to make sure she was taken care of at the Chatterji party. Because she was quasi-family he had talked to her almost from the first in an easy and casual manner that normally came to him after months of acquaintance. Later he had grown to like her for herself. That he should have bothered to take her around Calcutta to show her the sights of the city had struck both his sisters and Dipankar as an unusual expenditure of energy. Perhaps Amit too had found his Ideal.
It had stopped there, however. After Lata left Calcutta, they did not correspond. Lata had found Amit kind and comforting; he had taken her out of her sadness into the world of poetry, into the history of the city, and — equally important — into the open air, whether of the cemetery or of College Street. Amit for his part had liked Lata a great deal, but had stopped short of declaring his fondness for her. Though he was a poet and had some insight into human emotion in general, he was far too reticent in his own life for his own happiness. When he was at Oxford, he had been wordlessly attracted to a woman, the sister of one of his friends, and as lively and explosive as a firecracker; only later did he learn that she had liked him too — and had finally in impatience given up on him and attached herself to someone else. ‘Wordlessly’ meant that he had not said what he had felt for her. He had, however, written a great many words, rhymed and somewhat reasoned, about his feelings, though he had crossed out most of them, published very few of those that were left, and sent or shown her none.
Meenakshi and Kakoli did not know of this affair (or non-affair), though everyone in the family believed that there had to be some explanation for all the unhappy love poems in his first, very successful, volume. Amit was, however, more than capable of fending off in his acid way any sisterly inquiries that approached too closely his sensitive, fertile, lazy core.
His second volume showed a kind of philosophical resignation unusual in a man who was not yet thirty — and who was fairly famous. What on earth, wondered one of his English friends in a letter, was he resigned about? He did not realize that Amit was probably, and perhaps even undiagnosed by himself, lonely. He had no friends — either men or women — in Calcutta; and the fact that this was the fault of his own lack of effort and sociability didn’t mitigate his resultant mood: a sort of jocular weariness, and even at times plain if private despondency.
His novel, set in the period of the Bengal famine, took him outside himself into the lives of others. But even here Amit wondered from time to time if he hadn’t chosen too black a canvas. The subject was complex and deep — man against man, man against nature, the city against the countryside, the desperate expediencies of war, a foreign government against an unorganized peasantry — perhaps he would have been better off writing social comedy. There was enough material for it in the family around him. And he had a taste for it; he often found himself escaping into light reading — detective stories, the ubiquitous Wodehouse, even comics — from his task of weighty prose.
When Biswas Babu had broached the question of marriage with Amit, he had stated, with his usual vibratory emphasis: ‘An arranged marriage with a sober girl, that is the solution.’ Amit had said that he would reserve judgement on the matter, though he had felt immediately that nothing would be more repugnant to him; he would rather live a bachelor all his days than under a canopy of feminine sobriety. But after his walk in the cemetery with Lata, when she had not been put off by his whimsical manner and the wild and whirling nature of his words, and had responded to them with surprising liveliness, he had begun to wonder if the fact that she was ‘a sober girl’ should count so greatly against her. She had shown no awe of him, though he was well known, nor any defensive need to emphasize her own opinions. He remembered her unselfconscious gratitude and pleasure when he had given her a garland of flowers for her hair after the dreadful lecture at the Ramakrishna Mission. Perhaps, he thought, my sisters are right for once. But, well, Lata will be coming to Calcutta at Christmas, and I can show her the great banyan tree at the Botanical Gardens, and we’ll see how things work out from there. He felt no sense of urgency about events, only a very mild foreboding about the cobbler, and no concern at all about this Akbar fellow.