‘But you promised,’ Aparna pointed out.
‘Did I, sweetheart? When?’
‘Just now! Just now!’
‘Your Daddy will take you,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra.
‘Your Varun Chacha will take you,’ said Arun.
‘And Kalpana Aunty will come with us,’ said Varun.
‘No,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra, ‘I will be talking with her tomorrow about old times and other matters.’
‘Why can’t Lata Bua come with us?’ asked Aparna.
‘Because she’ll be going to Calcutta tomorrow, with Haresh Phupha,’ said Varun.
‘Because they’re married?’
‘Because they’re married.’
‘Oh. And Bhaskar can come with us, and Tapan Maama.’
‘They certainly can. But Tapan says that all he wants to do is to read comics and sleep.’
‘And the Lady Baby.’
‘Uma’s too small to enjoy the zoo,’ Varun pointed out. ‘And the snakes will frighten her. They might even gobble her up.’ He laughed sinisterly and rubbed his stomach, to Aparna’s delight.
Uma was at the moment herself the object of enjoyment and admiration. Savita’s aunts were cooing over her; they were extremely pleased that, despite their predictions, she had not turned out to be ‘as black as her father’. This they said in full hearing of Pran, who laughed. For the colour of Haresh’s skin they had nothing but praise; it would cancel out the flaw of Lata’s complexion.
With matters of such Mendelian moment did the aunts from Lucknow and Kanpur and Banaras and Madras occupy themselves.
‘Lata’s baby is bound to be born black,’ suggested Pran. ‘Things balance out within a family.’
‘Chhi, chhi, how can you say such things?’ said Mrs Kakkar.
‘Pran has babies on the brain,’ said Savita.
Pran grinned — rather boyishly, Savita thought.
On the 1st of April this year, he had received a phone call that had sent him beaming back to the breakfast table. Parvati, it appeared, was pregnant. Mrs Rupa Mehra had reacted with horror.
Even when she had recalled the date, she had remained annoyed with Pran. ‘How can you joke this year when things are so sad?’ she demanded. But in Pran’s view one might as well try to be cheerful, however sad the core of things might be. And besides, he felt, it would not be such a terrible thing if Parvati and Kishy had a baby. At present they each dominated the other. A baby would redirect the equation.
‘What’s wrong with having babies on the brain?’ said Pran to the assembly of aunts. ‘Veena’s expecting, and Bhaskar and Kedarnath seem to be quite happy about it. That’s some good news in a sad year. And Uma too will need a brother and a sister sooner or later. Things won’t be quite so tight on my new salary.’
‘Quite right,’ the aunts agreed. ‘You can’t call it a family unless there are at least three children.’
‘Contract and tort permitting, of course,’ said Savita. Unhardened by the law she was looking as lovely and soft as ever in a blue-and-silver sari.
‘Yes, darling,’ said Pran. ‘Contract and tort permitting.’
‘Our congratulations, Dr Kapoor,’ said a strikingly inaudible voice behind him.
Pran found himself pulled into the middle of a little pride of literary lions: Mr Barua, Mr Nowrojee, and Sunil Patwardhan.
‘Oh, thank you,’ said Pran, ‘but I’ve been married a year and a half now.’
Mr Nowrojee’s face registered a fleeting and wintry smile.
‘I meant, of course, congratulations on your recent elevation, so’—he smiled sadly—‘so very richly deserved. And I have been meaning to tell you for many months now how very much I enjoyed your Twelfth Night. But you disappeared so early from Chatterji’s reading. I notice he is here this evening — I sent him a sheaf of villanelles a month ago, but have had no response so far; do you think I should trouble him with a reminder?’
‘It was Mr Barua who was the producer this year, Mr Nowrojee,’ replied Pran. ‘Mine was Julius Caesar, the year before.’
‘Oh, of course, of course, though one often wonders with Shakespeare — as I said to E.M. Forster in — was it—1913?—’
‘So, you bastard, you’ve managed to get Joyce on the syllabus after all,’ broke in Sunil Patwardhan. ‘An awful decision, an awful decision. I was just talking to Professor Mishra. He sounded stricken.’
‘Stick to mathematics, Sunil.’
‘I plan to,’ said Sunil. ‘Have you read Joyce on the sound of cricket bats?’ he asked, turning to Mr Barua and Mr Nowrojee: “Pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.” And that was early Joyce! Shall I do an imitation of Finnegan waking?’
‘No,’ said Pran. ‘Spare us the joy.’
19.14
Food was served at the far end of the garden and the guests roamed around, meeting each other, replenishing their plates, and congratulating the bride and groom and their families. Gifts and envelopes of money piled up near the decorated swing where the two of them were now sitting. One by one Lata met those whom she had not met before.
Kalpana Gaur said: ‘I don’t know who I am — I don’t know if I’m part of the groom’s party or the bride’s.’
‘Yes,’ said Haresh, ‘it’s a problem. A serious problem. The first problem of our married life.’
While Haresh laughed and joked with all his friends, and accepted their boisterous humour and congratulations, Lata said very little.
When Mr Sahgal, her uncle from Lucknow, approached them with a repellent smile, she held Haresh’s hand tightly.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Haresh.
‘Nothing,’ said Lata.
‘But there must be—’
Mr Sahgal was holding out his hand to congratulate Haresh. ‘I must congratulate you,’ he said. ‘I saw from the very beginning that you two would get married — it was meant to be so — it is a match that Lata’s father would have approved of. She is a very, very good girl.’ Lata had closed her eyes. He looked at her face, at the lipstick on her lips, with a slight sneer, before moving away.
Elsewhere, Dr Durrani, eating kulfi with an absorbed air, was talking to Pran, Kedarnath, Veena and Bhaskar. ‘So, er, interesting, as I was saying to your son, this insistence on the number seven. . seven, um, steps, and seven, er, seven, circles round the fire. Seven er, notes to the scale, speaking in terms of a modulus, of course, and seven days to the, er, week.’ He suddenly remembered something and frowned, inching his bushy eyebrows upwards. ‘I must apologize, it’s Thursday, you see, so my son, my, er, elder son, could not be present. He has to be, er, er, elsewhere—’
The Durrani invitation had been a dreadful mistake in Mrs Rupa Mehra’s eyes — and, once extended, was unretractable. ‘Do come along — and, of course, bring your family,’ Dr Kishen Chand Seth had told him over bridge, but Dr Seth was disappointed that the mad wife and villainous son had not turned up. Dr Durrani himself was so inoffensively vague that he was incapable of locating the groom at his own wedding.
Amit, meanwhile, had been set upon by two elderly women, one of whom was wearing a glorious ruby pendant, like a radiating star, on her breast.
She said: ‘That man told us that you’re the son of Mr Justice Chatterji.’
‘I am,’ said Amit with a smile.
‘We know your father very well from our Darjeeling days. He would come up every year for the Puja holidays.’
‘He still tries to.’
‘Yes, but we’re not there any longer. You must remember us to him. Now, tell me, are you the clever one?’