He emerged from his desk looking flustered and clutching a number of papers. Putting down the desk lid, he carefully spread out the papers and smoothed their corners with uncertain fingers.
‘Now,’ he went on more firmly, ‘our good friend and caste brother, Kasher Chand Rana Sahib, has, as you will remember, a daughter a trifle younger than yourself, and it would give us both pleasure to see you united.’
‘Father –’ broke in Ajit; but Ram Singh lifted his hand for silence.
‘Here is a photograph of her,’ he said, as he put into Ajit’s reluctant hand a formal studio portrait of a magnificent woman who had the bearing of an Amazon.
‘Her father has not pressed her to marry, since she has shown no preference for anyone. He tells me, however, that you would not be unwelcome.’ He omitted to say that Bimla Chand Rana’s temper was so famous that a number of men had persuaded their fathers to excuse them from marrying her. Ajit knew of it, because ever since he was a small boy he had been teased by his friends about a promise that his mother had made to Mrs Chand Rana, that Ajit should marry Bimla when he grew up.
Ajit looked at the imposing photograph.
‘Father,’ he said, panic-stricken, ‘Father, I can’t – I’m –’
‘Don’t you like the look of her now she is grown up?’ asked Ram Singh, taking up a copy of her horoscope. ‘If you really don’t like her, I could advertise for someone else. I know we should get some good replies – you are an excellent catch, you know.’
He smiled lovingly upon his son. He wanted him to enjoy his wife – and Bimla Chand Rana was a beauty.
Ajit dropped the photograph on to the divan.
‘Father, I can’t marry anybody.’
Ram Singh looked annoyed.
‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘It is necessary to marry. Why can’t you marry?’
Ajit bowed his head until it nearly touched his father’s knees.
‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘but I am already married.’
‘Married already!’ exclaimed Ram Singh. ‘When? To whom?’ And added without much hope, ‘To an Indian fellow student?’
‘Last month to an English lady named Margaret Delaney,’ whispered Ajit, while a second Ajit inside was praying: ‘Ramji, don’t let the shock make him ill.’
Ram Singh gasped.
‘Not in my family,’ he muttered. ‘It could not happen in my family. Ajit, you have lain with a foreign woman – you, whom I love above everyone – you have married an English woman.’ His voice rose to a wail: ‘Ajit, you are joking.’
‘It is true, Father.’ Ajit could feel the pain of his father, and it was a great pain.
‘What will your uncles say? This is impossible.’
Ajit said afterwards that while he sorrowed for his father, he could hear my voice at the time of our parting saying: ‘Ajit, darling, don’t desert me, will you?’ Ajit had not resented my entreaty. He knew of the work I had done amongst bitter, disillusioned women, and he knew, too, that I had learned to love him truly and dreaded that somehow he would be taken away from me, as the other men I had loved were taken.
He had promised passionately that I should join him, and that promise he remembered as he faced the disgust in his father’s eyes. The old man’s face was flushed and his moustache was trembling. He sat in silence, as he collected his thoughts, and regarded steadily the son who had betrayed his family and his caste.
Ajit awaited judgement, his head still bowed. Far away, he could hear the clatter of Cook Maharaj’s tava and tongs as he made bread for the house servants’ meal. It was a homely, familiar sound and seemed to string together all the quiet pursuits and gentle relationships of the family. Tears stung in his eyes as he listened.
While he sat, Ram Singh’s agile mind had evidently already been at work on the question of extricating his son from what must have appeared to him as a dreadful predicament; for he leaned forward, his face passive, and lifting his son’s chin with his thin fingers, he said: ‘Weep not, my son. We will untangle this unfortunate knot which you have tied.’ He dropped his hand to the desk and fidgeted with Bimla’s horoscope. ‘We can probably come to some arrangement with this woman, whereby for a reasonable allowance, she would relinquish her claims upon you, and if she desired she could later divorce you. For our part, we will invoke the old Hindu law and simply obtain a second wife for you – a good Indian wife, like Bimla.’ The dark flush eased away from Ram Singh’s cheeks, as he went on: ‘I presume that no one here knows of your English marriage, and for all purposes of inheritance the second wife here in India would be considered the first wife. An English woman would probably have no knowledge of our laws and is not, therefore, likely to make troublesome demands upon the family at my death.’
Ram Singh folded his hands in his lap and looked very satisfied about his solution to the problem. He had propounded the popular thesis that an English woman would do anything for money or jewellery. He waited.
Ajit was flabbergasted at the proposal. Such an idea had never occurred to him. It was so cold-blooded and showed such a disregard for the feelings of the persons concerned, such an inability to grasp what a marriage of love meant, that he was speechless for a moment. Then words poured out of him.
‘Father,’ he said, outrage in his voice, ‘I would never agree to such a settlement. I have promised her that she shall come to me here, and she shall come.’ He looked round wildly, trying to think of a way in which to appease the wrath immediately apparent in his father’s eyes. ‘I love her,’ he shouted defiantly. ‘I love her.’ And the walls of the big, bare house echoed back mockingly: ‘Love her, love her.’
‘Ajit!’ roared Ram Singh, infuriated at such a show of passion – but Ajit was past caring.
He thrust his face close to his father’s.
‘I will not marry anyone else,’ he said, his voice cold with rage.
Ram Singh stiffened. Such insubordination was insufferable. He picked up the horoscope and slapped it down again on to the desk. The sharp thwack on the desk brought Ajit to his senses, and before his father could say anything he had pulled himself together and was speaking in a carefully controlled voice.
‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘for marrying without your permission. I know in that respect I have done you a deep wrong. I had intended to come home and ask you first – but Margaret is so beautiful that I was afraid another would make her an offer before I could. I would have been far away, here in India – and she might in despair have accepted someone else for a husband.’
Afterwards he wrote to me: ‘When I was arguing with my father, I kept seeing you in my mind’s eye as you were on our wedding night. Never had I seen anyone so fair. I ached to touch you – to be with you – to be part of you – away from people who thought of women merely as useful additions to the family.’
Ram Singh apparently did not take in Ajit’s last remarks, and his thoughts were concerned only with avoiding the entry into his house of a casteless English woman. Condemnation burst from him.
‘I know English women,’ he shouted. ‘I have seen them – painted, loud-mouthed, immodest. They bare their shoulders and legs so that any sweeper can goggle at their charms. They take all from their husbands and give nothing.’ His moustache bristled, and he shuddered. ‘They humiliate their husbands with public discourtesy. They have affairs with other men. Do you know what they say about them in the bazaars? In the zenanas, hey?’
‘Margaret is not like that,’ broke in Ajit indignantly. ‘She is a refined, educated –’
‘Educated, you say? All the English women I ever met were supposed to be educated. But to what end? Allow such a woman in my family? No, a thousand times no.’ And the little man banged his inoffensive mahogany desk to emphasise his words.
‘Margaret is as good and kind as Mother,’ said Ajit, his voice again rising in anger.
‘How dare you compare her with your respected mother? You know what they call them here. Landlady’s daughters – a synonym for a leech, sucking
away the wealth of good families and bringing them to shame. Shame on you, my son, shame on you.’
Determinedly Ajit held down his anger and managed to say between gritted teeth: ‘Father, I have given my word to an honourable woman. She has married me in good faith, and I will bring her to India. I cannot marry anyone else.’
Ram Singh took a deep breath. ‘You dare to say what you will do, indeed.’ His voice was full of the fury he felt. ‘For the sake of our family, I will not have a casteless woman in this house-an English woman, moreover.’
With a gesture that would have done justice to a prosecuting counsel, he pointed his finger at his son. ‘Go to your room. Think carefully of the suggestions I have made. Although you have behaved foolishly I am ready to help you.’ His voice rose to a near shriek: ‘Go.’
Ajit got up and bowed to his trembling parent, who sat very straight and stared at the opposite wall, on which hung a picture of Gandhi. He did not acknowledge his son’s bow, and Ajit marched out of the room, speechless with anger.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Ajit marched across the drawing-room and into the hall.
Khan was seated cross-legged by the hall door. He had evidently moved from the office door at the sound of altercation.
‘What are you doing here?’ hissed Ajit, provoked to further rage at the thought that a servant had overheard his father upbraiding him.
Khan lowered the lids of his mild, slanting eyes. ‘Burra Sahib said that I must stay within call,’ he said.
Ajit grunted, realising that it was not the man’s fault if he had overheard.
At that moment there was a roar from the inner room. ‘Pani.’
The servant jumped to his feet. ‘You see,’ he said.
‘I understand,’ said Ajit with a sigh. ‘Get the water for him.’
Ajit walked swiftly along the verandas towards his room. Before he could reach it, however, he was engulfed by a horde of male cousins who had come over from his uncles’ house to greet him. He had to stop and sit with them for a while, make jokes and drink tea, which Nulini and Shushila brought as his mother had gone to the cloth bazaar.
He behaved as cheerfully as he could, but Nulini looked at him curiously as she handed round the teacups. She made pan for each man to chew and then withdrew. Shortly afterwards, Ajit was able to escape too, on the promise that he would come soon to his uncles’ house to make his obeisances to them.
Thakkur had put chattays over the windows of his room, to cool it. The water dripped down them in a slow, melancholy fashion. The interlude with his cousins had calmed him, but he felt weak as if he had lost a lot of blood from a wound.
He turned on the table fan, kicked off his slippers, and, to comfort himself, sat down on the divan and wrote to me. In page after page he poured out his troubles and his love. He wrote with the blissful trust that I would surely understand him. And I did understand.
He wrote that the reputation of English women in India was unfortunate. Everybody could quote at least one scandal that had been created in times past by marriages contracted by young Indians sent to study in England. Many students had never mixed with women before going to England, nor had they ever had to think for themselves, since autocratic parents had always arranged their lives for them in detail. The sudden freedom from parental control was often too much for them; they experimented with everything that came to their notice; they smoked, they drank, they had affairs with women.
The fairness of the women was intoxicating and they often fell in love and married a white skin, regardless of the type of woman to whom it belonged, and some proud Indian families had been faced with prostitutes, or little better, as daughters-in-law.
‘I am not alone in my fight to choose my own wife,’ he wrote. ‘There are men here, who, estranged from their families, are facing near-ruination as their parents try to prevent or break up their marriage. But do not fear, my Rani, we shall not go hungry – and I hope that my father will see sense soon.’
There was a break in the letter here as if he had left it unfinished and then come back later to complete it. It continued: ‘He has, of course, brought up the question of caste, as you are in our society casteless, and he thinks it is wrong of me to marry outside our caste. I cannot tolerate this point of view. Caste is obsolete and must go. People like us should make the first moves towards its abolition; in fact, many already have. I cannot think of a single acquaintance of mine, who is under fifty, who would hold aloof from you because you had no caste, and you need not fear insult because of it. New ideas are clamouring at our gates and we must let them in.
‘Our strength – yours and mine – lies in that we are financially independent of Father. I have saved and so have you and this can be our capital. Never fear, dearest one, that we shall come to real harm – only I would be infinitely happier if Father acquiesced to our marriage.’
And so on, assuring me of his eternal love. I wondered, and I feared. Was he telling me the truth? Could his father ruin us in the same way that other fathers had their sons?
I remembered the dark velvet of his skin and the matching deep timbre of his voice, and I ached for my husband.
Ajit put down his pen. Again and again, he had got up from his chair, to pace up and down the room, and then gone back to write more. How could he explain to me the formal, yet deep, relationship between parents and children in India, the invisible ties which made families and caste more important than the State or the country.
Thakkur came to say that tea was ready, but Ajit said he did not want any. Later, Thakkur brought his dinner on a brass thali and again he refused to eat. Thakkur removed the tray and went away grumbling that Maharaj had made all the dishes his young master liked and now they would be wasted.
Ajit laid his head on his desk. Thakkur made him feel like the unrepentant boy, who had on many occasions been banished to this room to do his homework. Depression flooded through him.
He moved to his divan and lay down on it, and watched listlessly as a few flies danced in the failing light. They would soon die in the summer heat, he thought. How would I endure the heat of summer? Shahpur was hotter than Delhi; he would have to take care that I observed caste rules of cleanliness, so as to lessen the chance of my falling sick. As he thought of me, desire throbbed in him, desire to see, touch and hear me. What was the use of writing? What was the use? He turned over on to his stomach and beat his pillow with one fist.
When there was a sharp swish-swish of skirts brushing along the veranda outside the room, he imagined for a second that the intensity of his longing had brought me to him. But when he looked up, it was his mother who stood uncertainly on the threshold.
He sprang up and went to her, as she surveyed him anxiously.
‘Ajit, Thakkur is right – you have a fever – your eyes are too bright – I thought you were studying – otherwise I would have come to see you earlier.’
She entered, and with a graceful movement, sat down on the divan.
‘Is it malaria? You have not eaten all day.’
Ajit sat down beside her, and she turned the table fan so that it did not blow directly on him.
‘No, Mother,’ he said, with a wry smile, ‘I have no temperature.’
She took his hand and felt his pulse. ‘No,’ she said doubtfully, after counting carefully, ‘there is no fever.’
She made herself comfortable by tucking her feet up under her and arranging her sari. It was clear to Ajit that she knew something was wrong and wanted to hear more about it. He imagined that his father must have told her at least in part of the quarrel of the morning, and his heart sank. That meant the news would go through the family like a cholera germ. To his surprise, however, she did not mention the matter. She said instead: ‘Tomorrow is Holi. We are having a tea party for you and I have asked all your old friends. Your uncles are coming and Dr Chand Rana is bringing Mrs Chand Rana and Bimla. Bimla has grown into a great beauty since you last saw her – I think you will like her.’
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p; ‘Ji, hun,’ assented Ajit without enthusiasm. He shivered slightly. Beautiful, certainly – beautiful as a volcano – liable to eruption.
‘Shushila has been buying powder for days, so that she can play colour with you,’ went on his mother, all the time watching his face through her veil. He could feel her eyes taking in every slight alteration in his expression. She must have noticed him shiver at the mention of Bimla.
The tension in Ajit eased as he heard of Shushila’s preparations for the Spring Festival. Of course, he would play with her. They would have tremendous battles with the small boys nearby, each one of them armed with a pail of coloured water. Honour would not be satisfied until every shirt in the neighbourhood had been drenched with rainbow colours. Her day should not be spoiled by his perplexities, he vowed to himself.
‘Of course – both Bhim and I will play with her, Mother.’
Mrs Singh chatted on, her lively hands from time to time flashing out from her lap to emphasise a point. She took Ajit’s silence for granted – he was being courteous in allowing his elder to speak uninterrupted, and he let her run on until finally she had exhausted her news. Then she tried to persuade him to take some food, but he declined gently.
Then she said: ‘Tell me about England. How do ladies live there? How many servants do they have?’
He did his best to describe to her a servantless country, where even high-caste, rich ladies ofted did their own cooking, swept their own floors and made their own clothes, and even went to the bazaar by themselves.
All this Mrs Singh could visualise better than many ladies of her caste and class. She herself had been brought up in a village, the daughter of a small landlord, and had been married to Ajit’s father when she was thirteen, long before his grandfather had made the money which had laid the foundations for the remarkable prosperity of his sons. She could herself cook, and had as a very young girl worn the blouse and skirt of a village woman and played in the fields, at harvest time. She had known more freedom in her native village than she knew now, in spite of her husband’s lifting of her purdah.
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