‘Which book?’
‘I don’t think she knows yet. A novel, probably.’
‘She shouldn’t be reading novels but studying for her exams.’
This was, as it happened, what the bookseller was telling Lata at almost the same moment. Luckily for his business, students rarely took his advice.
He reached out for the book with one hand, and extracted wax from his ear with the other.
‘I’ve studied enough, Balwantji,’ said Lata. ‘I’m tired of my studies. In fact, I’m tired of everything,’ she ended dramatically.
‘You look just like Nargis when you say that,’ said Balwant.
‘I am afraid I only have a five-rupee note.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Balwant. ‘Where is your friend Malatiji?’ he continued. ‘I never see her these days.’
‘That’s because she’s not wasting her time buying novels,’ said Lata. ‘She’s studying hard. I hardly see her myself.’
Kabir entered the shop, looking quite cheerful. He noticed Lata and stopped.
The whole of their last meeting flashed before Lata’s eyes — and, immediately afterwards, their first meeting in the bookstore. They looked at each other for a few seconds before Lata broke the silence with a hello.
‘Hello,’ replied Kabir. ‘I see you’re on your way out.’ Here was another meeting brought about by coincidence, and to be governed, no doubt, by awkwardness.
‘Yes,’ said Lata. ‘I came in to buy a Wodehouse, but I’ve bought myself a Jane Austen instead.’
‘I’d like you to have a coffee with me at the Blue Danube.’ It was a statement more than a request.
‘I have to get back,’ said Lata. ‘I told Savita I’d be back in an hour.’
‘Savita can wait. I was going to buy a book, but that too can wait.’
‘Which book?’ asked Lata.
‘What does it matter?’ replied Kabir. ‘I don’t know. I was just going to browse. Not in Poetry or Mathematics, though,’ he added.
‘All right,’ said Lata recklessly.
‘Good. The cake will be better, at least. Of course, I don’t know what excuse you’ll make if someone you know walks in.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Lata.
‘Good.’
The Blue Danube was just a couple of hundred yards along Nabiganj. They sat down and placed their orders.
Neither spoke. Finally Lata said:
‘Good news about the cricket.’
‘Excellent.’ India had just won the fifth Test match against England in Madras by an innings and eight runs, and no one could quite believe it.
After a while the coffee came. Stirring it slowly, Kabir said: ‘Were you serious?’
‘About what?’
‘You are writing to this man?’
‘Yes.’
‘How serious is it?’
‘Ma wants me to marry him.’
Kabir said nothing, but looked down at his right hand as it kept stirring the coffee.
‘Aren’t you going to say something?’ she asked him.
He shrugged.
‘Do you hate me?’ asked Lata. ‘Don’t you care whom I marry?’
‘Don’t be stupid.’ Kabir sounded disgusted with her. ‘And please stop those tears. They won’t improve your coffee or my appetite.’ For again, though she was half unconscious of them, tears had slowly filled Lata’s eyes and were falling down her cheeks one by one. She did not try to wipe them away, nor did she take her eyes off Kabir’s face. She did not care what the waiters or anyone else thought. Or even he, for that matter.
He continued to stir his coffee with a troubled look.
‘I know of two mixed marriages—’ he began.
‘Ours wouldn’t work. No one else will let it work. And now I can’t even trust myself.’
‘Then why are you sitting here with me?’ he said.
‘I don’t know.’
‘And why are you crying?’
Lata said nothing.
‘My handkerchief is dirty,’ said Kabir. ‘If you haven’t brought a handkerchief, use that napkin.’
Lata dabbed at her eyes.
‘Come on, eat your cake, it’ll do you good. I’m the one who’s been rejected, and I’m not sobbing my poor little heart out.’
She shook her head. ‘Now I must go,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
Kabir did not try to dissuade her.
‘Don’t leave your book behind,’ he said. ‘Mansfield Park? I haven’t read that one. Tell me if it’s any good.’
Neither of them turned around to look at the other as Lata walked towards the door.
18.17
So unsettled was Lata by her meeting with Kabir — but when was she not unsettled by a meeting with him? she wondered — that she took a long walk near the banyan tree. She sat down on the great, twisted root, remembered their first kiss, read some poetry, fed the monkeys, and fell into a reverie.
Walks are my panacea, she thought, bitterly; and my substitute for any decisive action.
The next day, however, she took action of the most decisive kind.
Two letters arrived for Lata by the morning post. She sat on the verandah with its trellis of yellow jasmine and slit open both envelopes. Mrs Rupa Mehra was not at home when they arrived, or she would have recognized the handwriting on the envelopes and demanded to know what news they contained.
The contents of the first envelope consisted of eight lines and a heading, typewritten and unsigned:
A MODEST PROPOSAL
As you’ve asked for black and white,
May I send these lines to you
In the tacit hope you might
Take my type at least as true.
Let this distance disappear
And our hearts approach from far
Till we come to be as near
As acrostically we are.
Lata began to laugh. The poem was a little trite, but it was skilful and entirely personalized, and it pleased her. She tried to recall exactly what she had said; had she really asked for black and white or merely told Amit that that was all she would believe? And how serious was this ‘modest’ proposal? After thinking the matter over, she was inclined to believe it was serious; and, as a result, it pleased her somewhat less.
Would she have preferred it to be determinedly sombre and passionate — or not to have been written in the first place? Would a passionate proposal have been in Amit’s style at all — or at least in his style with her? Many of his poems were far from light in either sense of the word, but it seemed almost as if he hid that side of himself from her for fear that looking into that dark, pessimistic cynicism might trouble her too greatly and make her shy away.
And yet, what was it he had said about her own poem, the despairing one that she had hesitantly shown him? That he had liked it — but only, he had implied, as a poem. If he disapproved of gloom, what was he doing as a poet? Would he not — at least for his own sake — have been far better off in the practical profession of law? But perhaps he did not disapprove of gloom as such in himself or others, only on the fruitless dwelling on it — which, she had to admit, that poem of hers had been guilty of. Clearly, the unhappiness or unease of Amit’s own strongest poems was typical not of his daily behaviour but of certain moments of intensity. Still, Lata felt that high hills rarely rise direct and isolated from the plains, and that there had to be some deeper organic connection between the poet of ‘The Fever Bird’ and Amit Chatterji as she knew him than he himself encouraged herself or others to believe.
And what would it be like to be married to such a man? Lata got up and paced restlessly about the verandah. How could she consider him seriously — Meenakshi and Kuku’s brother, her own friend and guide to Calcutta, the purveyor of pineapples, the castigator of Cuddles? He was just Amit — to convert him into a husband was absurd — the thought of it made Lata smile and shake her head. But again she sat down, and again she read the poem, and she looked out beyond the hedge to the campus, from where the sloped and slated roof of the examination hall was distantly visible. She realized that she had the poem by heart already — as she had his earlier acrostic, and ‘The Fever Bird’, and other poems besides. Without any attempt on her part to learn them, they had become a part of herself.