Haresh asked for a beer. Varun put on a song from Deedar, then left the drawing room; he had instructions from his mother to keep out of the way. Lata’s eye fell on the book of Egyptian mythology.
Haresh was more than a little bewildered by her change of mood. It made him feel uneasy. He was being truthful when he wrote in his letters that he had grown to be in love with her. He was sure she too was fond of him. Now she was treating him in a baffling manner.
The record had run its three-minute course. Lata did not get up to change it. The room was quiet. ‘I’m tired of Calcutta,’ she said light-heartedly. ‘It’s a good thing I’m going to the Botanical Gardens tomorrow.’
‘But I’d set tomorrow aside for you. I planned to spend it with you,’ said Haresh.
‘You never told me, Haresh.’
‘You said — you wrote — that you wanted to spend as much time as possible with me.’ Something had changed in their conversation at a certain point. He passed his hand across his forehead and frowned.
‘Well, we still have five days before I leave for Brahmpur,’ said Lata.
‘My leave will be over tomorrow. Cancel your Botanical trip. I insist!’ He smiled, and caught her hand.
‘Oh, don’t be mean—’ said Lata.
He released her hand at once. ‘I am not mean,’ he said.
Lata looked at him. The colour had left his face, and the laugh too had been wiped away. He was suddenly very angry. ‘I am not mean,’ he repeated. ‘No one has ever said that to me before. Don’t ever use that word for me again. I–I am going now.’ He got up. ‘I’ll find my way to the station. Please thank your family for me. I can’t stay for dinner.’
Lata looked completely stunned, but did not try to stop him. ‘Oh, don’t be mean!’ was an expression that the girls at Sophia Convent must have used twenty times a day to each other. Some of it had survived — especially in certain moods — in her present-day speech. It meant nothing particularly wounding, and she could not imagine for the moment why he was so wounded.
But Haresh, already troubled by something he could not lay his finger on, was stung to the depths of his being. To be called ‘mean’—ungenerous, lowly, base — and that too by the woman he loved and for whom he was prepared to do so much — he could tolerate some things, but he would not tolerate that. He was not ungenerous — far less so than her cavalier brother who had had hardly a word of appreciation for his efforts a few days earlier and who did not have the decency to spend an evening with him in order to reciprocate his hospitality. As for being base, his accent might not have their polish nor his diction their elegance, but he came from stock as good as theirs. They could keep their Anglicized veneer. To be labelled ‘mean’ was something not to be borne. He would have nothing to do with people who held this opinion of him.
16.23
Mrs Rupa Mehra almost had hysterics when she heard that Haresh had gone. ‘That was very, very rude of him,’ she said, and burst into tears. Then she turned upon her daughter. ‘You must have done something to displease him. Otherwise he would never have gone. He would never have gone without saying goodbye.’
It took Savita to calm her down. Then, realizing that Lata looked completely shell-shocked, she sat beside her and held her hand. She was glad that Arun had not been there to fling sawdust into the fire. Slowly she worked out what had happened, and what Haresh might have misconstrued Lata to have meant.
‘But if we don’t even understand each other when we speak,’ said Lata, ‘what possible future can we have together?’
‘Don’t worry about that for the moment,’ said Savita. ‘Have some soup.’
When all else fails, thought Lata, there is always soup.
‘And read something soothing,’ added Savita.
‘Like a law-book?’ There were still tears in her eyes, but she was trying to smile.
‘Yes,’ said Savita. ‘Or — since Sophia Convent is what started this confusion in the first place — why not read your autograph book from school? It’s full of old friends and eternal thoughts. I often look through mine when I’m feeling bad. I am quite serious. I’m not merely echoing Ma.’
It was good advice. A hot cup of vegetable soup appeared, and Lata, amused a bit by the idiocy of the suggested remedy, looked through her book. On the small pages of pink and cream and pale blue, in English and (from her aunts, and once from Varun in nationalistic mood) in Hindi, and even in Chinese (an unreadable but beautiful inscription from her classmate Eulalia Wong), the edifying or moving or amusing or facetious lines in their different inks and different hands stirred her memories and diminished her confusion. She had even pasted in a small fragment of a letter from her father, which ended with a rough pencil sketch of four little monkeys, his own ‘bandar-log’, as he used to call them. More than ever now she missed him. She read her mother’s inscription, the first in the book:
When the world has been unkind, when life’s troubles cloud your mind,
Don’t sit down and frown and sigh and moon and mope.
Take a walk along the square, fill your lungs with God’s fresh air,
Then go whistling back to work and smile and hope.
Remember, Lata darling, that the fate of each man (and woman) rests with himself.
Yours everloving,
Ma
On the next page a friend had written:
Lata—
Love is the star men look up to as they walk along, and marriage is the coal-hole they fall into.
Love and all good wishes,
Anuradha
Someone else had suggested:
It is not the Perfect but the Imperfect who have need of Love.
Yet another had written on a page of blue in a hand that sloped slightly backwards:
Cold words will break a fine heart as winter’s first frost does a crystal vase. A false friend is like the shadow on a sun-dial which appears in very fine weather but vanishes at the approach of a cloud.
Fifteen-year-old girls, thought Lata, took a serious view of life.
Savita’s own sisterly contribution was:
Life is merely froth and bubble.
Two things stand like stone:
Kindness in another’s trouble,
Courage in our own.
To her own surprise, her eyes became moist again.
I am going to turn into Ma before I’m twenty-five, thought Lata to herself. This quickly stemmed the last of her tears.
The phone rang. It was Amit for Lata.
‘So everything’s ready for tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Tapan’s coming along with us. He likes the banyan tree. You can tell Ma that I’ll take good care of you.’
‘Amit, I’m in a terrible mood. I’ll be terrible company. Let’s go some other time.’ Her voice, not yet quite clear, sounded strange even to herself, but Amit did not comment on it.
‘That will be for me to decide,’ he said. ‘Or rather, for both of us. If, when I come to pick you up tomorrow, you decide not to go, I won’t force the issue. How’s that? Tapan and I will go by ourselves. I’ve promised him now — and I don’t want to disappoint him.’
Lata was wondering what to say when Amit added: ‘Oh, I myself have them often enough: breakfast blues, lunchtime lows, dinner doldrums. But if you’re a poet, that’s your raw material. I suppose that the poem you gave me must have had some such origin.’
‘It did not!’ said Lata, with some indignation.
‘Good, good, you’re on your way to recovery,’ laughed Amit. ‘I can tell.’ He rang off.
Lata, still holding the receiver, was left with the thought that some people appeared to understand her far too little and others far too much.