East Into Upper East (14 page)

But Dipti knew, just as Arun did, that this was not how men and women should be together. They had formed their own idea on the subject, and it was the opposite of what they had observed between their parents. Their plan was to try out their theories on each other, and having already begun at the most basic, or essential, level in their afternoons together, they found that it was indeed a far cry
from Raju's suitcase being flung out of Indu's bedroom, or that unspecified humiliation that Dipti's mother whispered to her about. Instead, they learned to grope their way around together in a completely new world that opened up for them, in infinite sweetness, at the touch of delicate fingers and the mingling of their pure breath.

“Yes, and if she gets pregnant?” Having found yet another blossom on her pillow, Indu could no longer refrain from confronting her son. He shrugged—his usual response to any of her questions he did not care to answer. But his father, who was still there and more and more on sufferance, interposed: “Ah, don't spoil it for him.”

Indu seized the opportunity to turn on her husband: “Oh yes—having ruined my life, now you send your son out to do the same to another innocent girl . . . Not that I care what happens,” she returned to Arun. “This time the shoe's on the other foot: it's not
you
who'll get pregnant and have to be married whether you want to or not.”

If Raju had not been in such a precarious position in his wife's household—or if he had had the least bit of malice in him, which he did not—he could have pointed to himself as an unfortunate example of what Indu was talking about: for he, though still a student at the time, and from a very poor family, had been forced to marry Indu when she was found to be pregnant after their months of delight on her parents' roof.

This thought did arise in Indu, filling her with bitterness: “But of course,” she told her son, “you can always follow your father's fine example and never spend a single rupee on your child's support—well, what else have you been doing your whole life long!” she said to Raju, as though he had dared utter a word of protest. “Sitting around in Bombay, running after film stars, while I'm working myself into a nervous breakdown to raise this child and give him a decent education fit for my father's grandson—oh leave me alone, leave me alone!” she cried, though neither her husband nor her son had made a movement toward her. She ran into her bedroom—if there had been a door instead of only a curtain she could have banged it—and flung herself face down on to her bed.

Father and son remained together in silence. Raju would have liked to follow and comfort her but knew that his good intention would meet only with rejection. At last he said to Arun in a low voice, “Go. Go to her.”

But Arun would not. It was not in his nature to dispense tender consolation to a woman in tears. He loved his mother fiercely and suffered because she did; but at this moment he also felt sorry for his father. Everything that Indu accused him of was true—Raju had got her pregnant and had never been able to provide for her and Arun but had let them struggle along on their own. But this was because he couldn't provide even for himself let alone a family, because he was—so his son thought with contempt and pity—just a poor devil. Raju would have liked to be generous, and if his pocket had not been chronically empty, he would have put his hand in it and pulled out bundles of bank notes to fling on his wife's table—“Here, take.”

Dipti's feelings for her father were equally confused. Immensely proud of him for being what he was in the world, she could not forget what he was at home, behind closed doors with her mother. At the same time, she blamed her mother for the way she submitted to his treatment, crouching under his fury like an animal unable to defend itself. Yet she was a proud woman. Haughty and imperious with servants, with petitioners, with her husband's clerks, she passed among them like a queen, walking with slow majesty, as though her own massive weight and that of all her jewels and brocades were difficult to carry.

All this was before the scandal, which broke slowly, with a minor paragraph in one or two newspapers, and proceeded to mount with headlines in all of them, and photographs in the news magazines. At first Dipti's father brushed away the accusations against him, he joked with the visitors assembled around him on his verandah and made them laugh at the expense of journalists and other gossip-mongers who had nothing to do in their offices except kill flies and make up lies about him. Then, when the stories persisted and questions began to be asked in Parliament, he grew angry, he challenged his cowardly accusers—this too on his verandah amid his friends—to come out with one single fact against him. And when they did—not with one but with many, how he had taken money from industrialists, businessmen and foreign investors—he blustered and demanded proof. This was forthcoming: there were letters and diary entries as well as the huge unexplained wealth he had accumulated
in movable and immovable properties. Denying everything, he demanded an inquiry where he could, he said, easily prove himself as innocent as a newborn child. Cartoons of him in this latter role promptly appeared in the press. Although his resignation was demanded not only by the opposition but by his own party, he refused to submit it and hung on to his position, and to his official residence, until given the chance to clear himself before a committee to be appointed from the highest in the land.

During these difficult times, Dipti continued to attend her classes at the University, holding her head high. It was only when she was alone with Arun, during their afternoons in his mother's house, that she sometimes gave way to her feelings—and then only with silent tears, hiding her face against his chest. They never discussed the case and only referred to its essentials—as when she informed him that a committee of inquiry had been set up, or that her father had drafted his letter of resignation. Arun received the information without comment. Like Dipti herself, he had no desire to discuss the affair, and when other students did so within his hearing—and they spoke of it constantly, cynically, with jokes, everyone convinced of Dipti's father's guilt and gloating over it—he harshly reproved them. They nudged each other and grinned behind his back and called him “the son-in-law.”

He also quarreled with his mother—his father was back in Bombay where he claimed to have been hired as a scriptwriter for a major production—for Indu had strong opinions about the affair.

“What do you know about it?” he challenged her.

“I know what I read in the papers plus what I've seen with my own eyes . . . You're not trying to tell me,” she went on, “that they were living on his salary? . . . All that vulgar display—tcha, and everything in the lowest taste possible of course, but what can you expect from people like that.”

“People like what?”

She refused to be intimidated by his angry frown: “Uncultured, uneducated people. Peasants,” she threw the word out with contempt.

“Oh yes, only you're very grand and cultured.”

“Yes I am. And so are you.” She tried to touch his face, glorying in his light complexion, his aristocratic features, but he jerked away and said, “And what about my father? Is he so very grand too?”

“Forget about your father. Think of your grandfather, who
he
was . . . God forgive me for what I did—dragged his name in the mud by marrying your father—all right, by getting pregnant from him, stupid, stupid girl that I was! . . . Arun, are you sure that you're doing everything—or she's doing everything—you know, so that she doesn't—?”

“Why, what are you afraid of?”

“That you'll ruin your life the way I ruined mine.”

He wouldn't listen any more. He turned his back on her and went out of the house, through the compound, into the street, and walked for a long time through the lanes of the city, all the way to Mori Gate where he sat outside a tea stall smoking cigarettes, immersed in his thoughts.

A few evenings later he had to take the same walk again. It happened after his mother had come home from work and was cooking their dinner in the little attached shed that served as their kitchen. There was a commotion outside, and from the window he saw that the children of the compound as well as one or two repressed little servant boys and the old sweeper woman employed by all the tenants had come running to see the spectacle that was unfolding outside Indu's house. A long shiny car with satin curtains had drawn up; a chauffeur jumped out to open the back door from which emerged Dipti's mother, in all the glory of an orange brocade sari with golden border and her full array of ornaments. Indu too had come to look but went quickly running in again to fix her hair, which was straggling over her forehead damp with perspiration from her cooking. She was in the somewhat stained cotton sari she wore for housework, and with no time to change, she had to maintain her dignity with a display of the breeding and fine manners she had acquired in her father's house and at her convent school. The chauffeur carried in a basket of fruit and several boxes of pastries and other sweets, then returned to his car to chase away the children scratching at its bright blue enamel paint. Arun too had to chase them off when they peered in at the window of the living room to see what was going on. This was not anything that required Arun's presence, so he went out and repeated the walk to the tea stall outside Mori Gate where he sat for a long time, not wanting to return and hear what Indu had to say about her visitor and the mission on which she had come.

But of course he had to hear all about it for days on end. Indu was indignant—“Yes, now they come running when they're in disgrace and think no one will take the girl off their hands. How old is she now?” Arun didn't answer so she answered herself, “Old enough to have been married long ago, I'm sure, only now who'll have her?”

“Dipti wants to be a college lecturer.”

“She may want but her mother wants something different . . . Who do they think we are?” She was incensed. “Who do they think they are?”

Arun did not tell Dipti about her mother's call, or its purpose. Yet she may have suspected it—even seen signs of it on her afternoon visits: for days the pastries that had been brought lay moldering in their golden boxes (Arun didn't like them and his mother, who loved and could never afford them, was too proud to eat them). Dipti pretended not to see them. Secrets grew like a wall between her and Arun, making them often avoid each other's eyes. But as if to make up for the lack of words, their lovemaking became more passionate and they clung to each other as if fearful of being torn apart. They also grew more careless, and when Indu came home from work, she sometimes found an undergarment forgotten on her bedroom floor.

Now she changed her tactics with her son. She sidled up to him with sighs; she took his hand in hers, and when he snatched it away, she smiled and said that yes, he was too big now for her fondling. Smiling more, she recalled their past together, when he had been a little boy and had crept into her bed and kissed her and promised her that, when he grew up, he was going to be a policeman and guard and take care of her forever. He squirmed at these memories—they were like little stab wounds in his soul—but she went right on, talking not of the past now but of the future she had always envisaged. No, he was not going to be a policeman, except perhaps a very high-ranking one who sat at a desk and controlled whole districts. A year from now, after he had graduated, he would take the entrance exam of the Indian Administrative Service and he would pass with flying colors—ah, she knew it! Wasn't he his grandfather's grandson and with the same brains? He would rank among the country's ruling élite, rising from one eminent bureaucratic post to the next. As for marriage—everyone knew that once a boy had passed into that corps, all the best families would come running
with their daughters and their dowries. Well, he was free to accept them or not, as he pleased, just as long as he kept himself unencumbered and at liberty to pursue all his advantages.

Arun broke away from her—for while she spoke she had drawn closer to him, winding a lock of his hair around her finger—“What is it?” he said through clenched teeth. “What are you trying to tell me?”

He knew all too well, for it was his own thoughts she was expressing, digging up what he was trying to suppress and hide from himself.