The Householder (22 page)

Indu looked up at the sky. ‘If it rains, my clothes will be spoilt,' she said anxiously. She put back her shoe and they walked on. A group of children came scampering up, shouting, ‘They are going to the wedding!' They skipped beside and in front of them, escorting them into the village street. It was a narrow winding street with open booths on both sides—booths selling embroidered slippers, booths selling cheap cotton cloth, booths selling vegetables or fruits or sweetmeats or chunks of meat hung up on hooks. Over the shops were wooden verandas and arched windows set in thin crumbling walls. Prem and Indu, escorted by the troupe of triumphant children, walked down the street with the measured dignity of invited wedding guests.

‘Up here!' cried the children. They stood aside, grinning, while Prem and Indu walked into a dark doorway by the side of a booth selling coloured drinks in bottles. The stairs too were very dark. Upstairs Sohan Lal met them; he was excited and rather flustered but glad to see them. Indu was taken off to join the women, and Prem, catching a glimpse into the room where the women sat, noticed how she was received with the deference due to a pregnant woman, with appraising looks and a special solicitude for her comfort. This made him feel rather proud.

The men were congregated in a long bare room overlooking the street. No one talked much, and there was an air of constraint about the whole party; evidently the hosts were not used to entertaining nor the guests to being entertained. The bridegroom sat silent and unregarded on a chair. He wore a long white silken coat and a pink turban from which streams of orange flowers dangled over his face. He was cracking his finger joints. Near him sat a group of old men with hollow grey-stub-bled cheeks and scraggy leathery necks rising out of their best shirts; they were discussing the price of grain in desultory tones.

Downstairs in the street the band struck up. ‘Ah,' said the old men, raising their heads to listen. ‘It is time to go,' they said. Sohan Lal peered out of the window at the band below. He rubbed his hands, smiled and said in an uncertain voice, ‘Yes, time to go.' The guests got up but as there was no one to lead the way, they only stood around and looked embarrassed. The bridegroom remained on his chair and stared down at his own shoes. Then a woman's voice called from outside the door, ‘Come! What are you doing?' and everyone at once began moving. Sohan Lal motioned to the bridegroom, who got up and let himself be led downstairs. The horse on which he was to ride to the house of the bride was already waiting outside the cold-drink stall. He was helped on to it, watched all along the street by delighted children, by bored shopkeepers sitting inside their booths and women peeping out from upstairs windows.

Prem stood inside the doorway with the other wedding guests and remembered, with great poignancy, his own wedding. He thought he knew just how the bridegroom was feeling. He had caught a glimpse of his face through the streams of flowers dangling down from the turban and had noted the expression of numb endurance. That was how he too had felt, on the day they had married him to Indu. He had not, when it had come to that ultimate point, wanted to be married at all. So he had let everything happen around him—the sweetmeats, the flowers, the band, the coloured lights, the excited bejewelled women—and had sat silent and withdrawn. He had, he remembered, felt rather resentful. Why should he be taken to be married to this girl whom he had seen only once and whom he had not found at all pretty? And he had been afraid too. He had known that, from that day on, everything would be different for him.

The band, which consisted of only four men in frayed uniforms, struck up again. The bridegroom sat lowering upon his horse. Then it began to rain. A few fat raindrops came splashing down, threatening more to come. ‘Hurry now, hurry!' everyone shouted. The women, shimmering in silks and satins, came out of the house and bundled into the horse-carriages which had been ordered for them, though the bride's house was only a short way up the street. Prem caught a brief look at Indu and saw how the other women solicitously helped her up into the carriage. The band played merrily and the bridegroom sat stoic and unmoving while the rain came down and soaked into his fine clothes and garlands. The procession moved forward rather hurriedly. Children skipped alongside and two very dirty pariah dogs stood and barked at the band. Prem's heart leapt with the gay wedding music, and he looked at the glum bridegroom and smiled with superior knowledge.

Prem's behaviour at the college was nowadays very circumspect. He avoided contact with Mr. and Mrs. Khanna as much as he had formerly sought it. Far from wishing to be noticed for his good qualities, he now wanted only, like Sohan Lal, not to be noticed at all. He taught his classes as well as he could and though this was not, he knew, very well, yet he was satisfied as long as his students did not make their inattentiveness too noticeable. He had ceased actively to hope for a rise in salary; all he wanted was not to lose his job.

He was not pleased when, one day, in the middle of his lecture, the door of the classroom opened and Hans came walking in. True, Hans tried to create as little disturbance as possible by walking with big silent strides on the tips of his boots, hunching his head between his shoulders and laying an admonitory forefinger on his lips. But he was not, even with these mollifying precautions, a figure easily ignored. He was wearing shorts laced at the sides with green string and held up with embroidered braces; on his feet he had large nailed boots which creaked as he tried silently to progress. He slid into an empty seat and sat there, all attentiveness, his hands folded on the desk, his head laid in a listening attitude to one side. Prem's students craned to stare at him, they nudged one another, tittered and discussed him in urgent whispers. Prem cleared his throat and then raised his voice: ‘The inseparable preposition
sa
is more often used in poetry than in colloquial Hindi.' Only Hans seemed to be listening. He nodded and looked intelligent, intent only on the lecturer and apparently oblivious of the students who were taking such an interest in him all around.

When at last the bell rang for the end of the lesson, Hans rose, beaming, and advanced towards Prem. ‘I wanted to hear you lecture,' he said. ‘That is why I have come creeping in quiet like a mouse.' Prem threw an uneasy glance at his students, who stood expectantly smiling. ‘My lessons are finished now,' Prem said, making for the door.

Hans followed him. ‘What a nice college,' he said. ‘It is so homelike. Let me go and see upstairs.' The students had now followed them into the corridor and other students, coming out of other classrooms, also stopped to look.

‘The Principal lives upstairs,' Prem said.

‘Good, I would like to meet.'

‘Move along there now,' cried Mr. Chaddha testily, emerging from the classroom and finding the corridor blocked with students who had stopped to look at them.

‘This is your colleague?' Hans asked with genuine pleasure. He advanced on Mr. Chaddha with outstretched hand: ‘I am Hans Loewe.'

Mr. Chaddha shook the proffered hand and said, ‘I would be interested to know from what country you are from.'

Prem was through the door and out in the street in no time. He knew it was not polite of him to run away like that, but it was the only way that occurred to him. It was some time before he heard Hans running behind him. ‘Wait!' Hans was shouting, but Prem neither waited nor looked back.

‘Why did you go away?' Hans asked, when he had caught up; he sounded not aggrieved, merely surprised. ‘I wanted to meet the Principal of your college for a discussion. There are many things in the educational policy in India I would like to have explained to me.' He tucked his arm into Prem's. ‘Come, we will take the bus to my house and have conversation.'

Although he would have preferred to go home to Indu, Prem did not feel—especially after the effort of his precipitate flight from the college—that he had the strength to resist Hans. So soon they were with Kitty, who sat darning a big grey stocking. ‘Well,' she said to Prem, ‘quite the little stranger, aren't we?'

‘You make him shy,' Hans accused her. He dusted a chair with his hand, then patted it and told Prem, ‘Come, sit. I will tell you a news.'

‘What news?' Kitty said. Hans winked at her heavily, but to no effect. ‘That you're going away, you mean?'

‘Ach!' Hans cried, ‘now you have spoilt it!' Prem failed to get the point of this exchange, for he was looking up at the walls which, with the rains, had come out in patches of mildew. He was surprised when Hans came and sat on the floor at his feet and placed a tender hand on his knee: ‘Our friendship has meant much to me,' Hans said in a voice thick with feeling.

‘How about a nice cup of tea?' Kitty said.

Hans became quite angry with her: ‘We are talking here together, perhaps for the last time in the whole of our life.…' He looked up at Prem, and his pale blue eyes behind the rimless spectacles were loving and sad. ‘Who knows,' he sighed, ‘when we can meet again?'

‘Oh,' Prem said in surprise, ‘you are going away?'

‘What a song and dance about nothing,' Kitty said.

Hans frowned at her: ‘You have no feeling for friendship.'

‘I believe very much in friendship,' Prem said ardently. ‘For me a friend is like a brother, only with a friend you can talk more than you can talk with your brother, and you tell him everything.' He met Kitty's stare, felt confused at having said so much and dropped his eyes like a shy young girl.

‘The way you talk,' Kitty said calmly, ‘anybody'd think there wasn't any such thing as the Infinite.'

Hans became thoughtful. He sat on the floor, with his legs drawn up and his chin resting gloomily on his knees. ‘You are right,' he said after a while. ‘I forget the source of my being and so become I attached to friends and other things which are only Maya.'

Kitty pushed the needle in and out of her grey stocking, darning with thick clumsy fingers. She said, ‘We mustn't forget the Eternal Essence, must we?'

Prem felt sorry that Hans was going away and he wanted to say so. Only he felt shy, with Kitty sitting there so square and practical, darning her stocking. He did not wish his finer feelings to be disapproved of.

Hans got up. He said to Prem in a brisk manly way: ‘Yes, now I am taking again the rucksack on the back. I am going to the south. There I hope perhaps to meet with a guru who will guide me.'

Prem swallowed and said, ‘It is a pity our friendship cannot continue.' But he had wanted to say something much warmer, something expressive of all his deep feelings about friendship.

Hans shrugged and clapped his hands against his thighs in a gesture of resignation. ‘We must be non-attached,' he said. ‘If there is friend or enemy, if there it is hot or cold, our feeling must always be the same.' He trailed off rather and made the same resigned gesture as before. Prem said, ‘I will think of you often.'

‘People are always together in the One, aren't they?' Kitty said. She tried to bite her thread off with her teeth, couldn't and grumbled, ‘Can't think who keeps running off with the scissors.'

‘So,' Hans said, holding out his hand to Prem. Prem got up and took it and felt sad. Hans tried to smile; but looking up, Prem was surprised to notice that his eyes were swimming with tears. Prem was touched, but at the same time slightly guilty because he himself was not deeply enough stirred to bring up tears. He blinked his eyes several times but it was no use: he did not feel sad enough to want to cry. Maybe he no longer needed a friend as urgently as he had done. After all, he had Indu now.

She lay curled up on their big double bed, with her chin cupped in her hand and a thoughtful expression on her face. She asked, ‘Do you think your friend would like kheer or carrot halwa?'

‘Shall I telephone to his office and ask him?'

‘For you perhaps it is a joke, but I have to make all preparations.'

He stretched himself out beside her and lay with his head close to hers and his chin, like hers, cupped in his hand.

‘Inviting guests brings a lot of trouble to the woman of the house,' she said with an important frown.

Prem also looked solemn. ‘I think it will be better to tell them not to come.'

She shot him a quick anxious glance. ‘In your condition,' he said, still solemn, ‘you must have all rest.' But seeing the disappointed look on her face, he burst out laughing and darted his head forward quickly to rub his nose against hers.

‘Thank you,' Indu said indignantly, ‘today you are in a good mood for jokes.' She dusted at her nose and wrinkled it in an unconvincing display of distaste.

But she really was very serious about providing proper entertainment for their guests. On Sunday morning, when Prem woke up, she was already bustling about in the kitchen and shouting at the servant-boy. ‘You owl! How many times must I tell you for korma the meat must be soaked in curds!' She shouted at Prem too when he showed himself in the kitchen: ‘There is no need for you to come in here! Today we are too busy to listen to any jokes from you!'

Prem hovered uncomfortably between the sitting-room and the bedroom. Soon the flat was full of delicious smells, of onions frying in clarified butter, of freshly ground spices and tender browned meat. Prem glimpsed into the kitchen and saw Indu deftly rolling mince balls between her palms, biting her lip in an effort of concentration, her bangles jingling and jangling up and down. Prem too began to be rather nervous. He wanted Raj and his wife to carry away a good impression of his household, so that on the way home they should say to one another, ‘Prem's wife knows how to run her house'; and then Raj would no longer think of him as the inexperienced Ankhpur schoolboy that he had been, but as a settled husband and householder, on a par with Raj himself.

When everything was finished, Indu dressed herself in a pink georgette sari and gold ear-rings and was ready to receive their guests. Prem too was ready and both of them sat and waited. ‘You are sure they will come?' Indu said, folding and unfolding her fingers. ‘Of course—he promised,' Prem answered anxiously. Indu got up and bustled about in the kitchen for a while. When she came back, she said, ‘Perhaps they could not find our house.' ‘Oh, yes, it is very difficult to find,' Prem said, attempting a jocular tone which however he was too nervous to carry off. Indu did not even hear him: ‘Oh,' she moaned, twisting her hands, ‘what will happen to all the food I have prepared if they don't come?'