And it was in the glow of this triumph that, aged nineteen, he returned home, not for the first time since going to the station in the doolie – naturally enough there had been the vacations – but for the first time as a young man of proven worth, and of ambitions that now pointed to the necessity of making the passage across the black water, to England, to sit for the examinations of the Indian Civil Service, which in those days was the only place where the examinations could be taken: a rule which effectively restricted the number of Indians able to compete.
He found his parents less jubilant over his academic success than they were concerned about his failure to fulfil a primary function: to be married, to increase, to ensure at least one son who could officiate eventually in his funeral rites and see him on the way, with honour, to another world.
The girl they had in mind, whose name was Kamala and whose horoscope, according to the astrologers, was in an auspicious confluence with his own, was already fifteen; in fact, they said, nearly sixteen.
‘Kamala!’ he shouted. ‘Who, what, is Kamala?’ and would not even listen to the answer.
The Kumar home was a rambling rural agglomeration of low buildings built around a central courtyard, walled within a large compound, on the outskirts of the principal village within their holding, a distance of five miles from the town where the English sub-divisional officer had his headquarters. Five miles by buffalo cart to the nearest outpost of civilisation, Duleep thought. Ah! What a prison! He played with Shalini and in intervals of playing retaught her the lessons he was pleased to find she had not forgotten in the three months that had gone since he last saw her. Between them now there was an adoration; she, in his eyes, such a sweet-tempered pretty and intelligent child, and he, in hers, a handsome, godlike but miraculously earthbound and playful brother whose wisdom knew no end, and kindness no inexplicable boundaries of sudden silence or bad temper; no temper anyway when they were together. But she heard his shouting at her brothers, quarrelling with her father. Once too, when he thought he was alone, she heard him weeping; and gathered flowers to charm away his unhappiness so that he should smile again, and tell her tales of Rama, the god-king.
In the end he decided to strike a bargain with his parents. He would agree in principle to the marriage with the girl Kamala. But there could be no question of actual marriage until he had completed his studies in England and sat for the examinations. He would submit only to a formal betrothal.
And how long, his father wanted to know, would he be away in England?
Two or three years, perhaps. His father shook his head. By then Kamala would be eighteen or nineteen and still living with her parents. Did Duleep want his wife to be a laughingstock before ever she came to his bed? And had he thought of the cost of going to England to study? Where did he think so much money was coming from? Duleep was prepared for this objection. He would sign away to his elder brothers whatever proportion of his inheritance might be reckoned to equal the cost of his studies abroad.
There are only so many maunds to a sack, and you cannot give up what has not yet come to you,’ his father pointed out. ‘Besides which your inheritance is what makes you an attractive proposition to your future parents-in-law.’
‘My education, my career, mean nothing to them?’ Duleep asked.
His father shook his head. ‘What you call your career has not yet begun. Perhaps you have overlooked the advantage of the dowry your wife would bring to this household? With such advantage money might be found to send you to England. But you would have to marry first. You are nineteen already. And all your brothers were married before their nineteenth year. Your future wife will soon be sixteen. By that age all your elder sisters were already married. I have had to find three dowries already. I am not a man with a bottomless pocket. And in a few years there will be yet another dowry to find for Shalini.’
Family affairs were the one thing there was always time for. The negotiations with his father extended over many days. Towards the end of them Duleep went to him and said, ‘Very well. I will marry Kamala. But then immediately I will go to England.’
For these interviews they met in the room his father had, these past few years, set aside for meditation – an act which might have warned them all of what was to come later. In this room there was no furniture. They sat on rush mats on the tiled floor. On the whitewashed walls there was no decoration other than a highly coloured lithograph of the God of Fortune, Ganesha, in a little rosewood frame, and, on the sill of the small unglazed barred window, a pewter jug that usually held a handful of marigolds or frangipani.
‘I do not wish you,’ his father said now, raising a new objection, ‘to enter the administration. If you are not content to look after your property then I suggest that you become a lawyer. For this you can study, I believe, in Calcutta.’
‘What have you got against the administration?’ Duleep asked.
‘It is the administration of a foreign government. I should feel shame for my son to serve it. Better he should oppose the administration in the courts to help his own people.’
‘Shame?’ Duleep said. ‘But you do not feel shame to be kept waiting on the verandah of the little burra-sahib. You have said yourself: What is an insult? What is hurt pride?’
‘I should feel shame,’ old Kumar said, ‘if the little burrasahib were my own son.’
It was a subtle point. It took a day or two for Duleep to swallow it, to judge the actuality of his father’s sudden antipathy towards the Raj which, if it was not sudden, had always been kept well concealed.
‘All right,’ Duleep told him a few days later. ‘I have thought about it. I will become a lawyer. Perhaps a barrister. But for this I must study in England.’
‘And first you will marry the girl Kamala?’
‘Yes, Father. First I will marry Kamala.’
*
Of his close family only his mother and an aunt had seen Kamala Prasad, his future wife. To do so they had paid a visit to the Prasads’ home. Pleased with what they saw and with what was known about her upbringing, they reported back to Duleep’s father. Reassured by the astrologers and satisfied with the proposed dowry, all that remained from the Kumars’ point of view – granted Duleep’s obedient submission to their wishes – was to seal the arrangement with a formal betrothal and then to fix the date of the wedding.
Kamala Prasad lived some twenty miles away. For the betrothal ceremony only male Prasads made the journey to the Kumars’ house: the prospective bride’s father and uncles, and two of her married brothers. They brought sweets and small gifts of money, but came in the main to satisfy themselves that the house Kamala would live in was up to the standard they had been led to expect. Duleep, who had watched his brothers perform the same duties, bowed to his future father-in-law and then knelt to touch his feet in a gesture of humility. The father-in-law marked Duleep’s forehead with the tilak – the sign of auspiciousness. For a while the guests sat in formal conversation, took some refreshment and then went back to the station on the first stage of their journey home. The ceremony left little impression on him; it had seemed rather pointless, but for Shalini, with Duleep as the centre of attraction, it had been magical. ‘On your wedding day, will you wear a sword and ride a horse, just like a king?’ she asked.
‘Well, I suppose so,’ he said, and laughed, and privately thought: What a farce! His main interest lay in the arrangements he had begun to make with the advice and help of the principal of the Government College to go to England in September for the opening of what, fascinatingly, was called the Michaelmas term.
The betrothal ceremony took place in January, and then almost immediately there was difficulty over fixing the date of the wedding. The astrologers said that the ideal time fell in the second week of March. Kumar suggested the first week in September. The boat on which he had booked his passage through an agent in Bombay left in the second week. The astrologers shook their heads. If the wedding could not be managed in the second week of March it would n
eed to be postponed until the fourth week of October.
‘It is all nonsense,’ Duleep insisted. ‘All they mean is that by April the weather will be too hot and from June until October likely to be too wet.’ He had no intention of spending nearly six months as a married man before setting out for England. In fact he had no intention of sleeping with a barely sixteen-year-old girl, however pretty, however nubile. He would go through the ceremony. He would even spend one night or two with her so that she would not be disgraced. But he would not make love to her. He would kiss her and be kind to her, and tell her that when he returned from England as a young man qualified in an honourable profession it would be time enough for her to take on the duties of a wife and the burdens of motherhood. He almost hoped that she would turn out to be unattractive.
Sometimes he woke in the middle of the night and thought that every step he had taken since leaving the college had been the wrong one. He had given up his plan to enter the administration. He had submitted to the demands of his parents to marry. He had undertaken to study for a profession his heart had not been set on. All he had succeeded in hanging on to was his determination to go to England. When he woke in the mornings the prospect of England was enough to enable him to enter the new day bright and cheerful, and he could not help responding to the warmth of parental approbation that had settled about him. He heard his father say once to an old friend, ‘After his marriage, of course, Duleepji is to continue his studies in England,’ as if that had been his father’s wish, not his own, and he judged that paternal pride could grow like good seed in the most unlikely ground so long as that ground were first soaked with the sweat of filial duty. But, in the darkness of half-sleep and half-waking, he would search without success for a practical interpretation of that single, challenging word, England; for an interpretation that would ease him, bring comfort that extended beyond his general desire to his particular purpose. Power – in the sense he understood it – seemed to have been potentially lessened by his all too easy, equivocal agreement to enter the services of the law where power was interpreted, perhaps challenged, but never directly exercised. In myself, he thought, there is possibly a fatal flaw, the dark root of the plant of compromise that never bears any blossom that isn’t rank-smelling; and turned over, to sleep again, his hand upon the firm breast of the submissive, loving girl who now always followed him into his dreams.
He had his way. The astrologers discovered an unexpected conjunction of fortunate stars. The marriage was arranged to take place in the first week of September. ‘You see, Shalini,’ he told his little sister, ‘it was all nonsense, as I said,’ but stopped himself from adding, ‘Like the Kumars, the Prasads carry the burden of too many daughters and are only too anxious to have Kamala off their hands, even at the tail-end of the wet monsoon.’ Looking at Shalini he found himself assessing the burden that she, in her ninth year, already represented in terms of the complicated sum of her necessary dowry and her parents’ desire that she should be happy, and suitably matched, transferred to a household that would bring honour to them and good fortune to her, be given to a husband who would bless her with kindness and whom she would find it possible to feel affection for and be dutiful to, and so give satisfaction to him and to his family, and to herself and to hers.
‘I hope,’ he told himself, thinking of his own future wife, ‘that I can find it in my heart not to hate her.’
The first list of guests on the groom’s side which his father prepared ran to nearly three hundred names. After negotiations with the Prasad family the list was cut to just below two hundred. There would be twice that number on the bride’s side. To the bride’s family the cost would be crippling. In the middle of August the Prasads began to gather. The Kumars also gathered. They came from the Punjab, from Madras, from Bengal, from Lucknow and the home province, and from Bombay, from as far off as Rawalpindi. Duleep was the last of old Kumar’s sons. There would only be one other marriage in this particular generation: Shalini’s. The house was full. The guest house that had been erected outside the compound for the weddings of Duleep’s sisters was also full.
The journey to Delali was made early in the morning of the day of the wedding. Miraculously the rains had ended early, which was counted a good omen. In Kamala’s home the first ceremonies had been going on for two days. Three coaches of the train to Delali were reserved for the groom’s party. A delegation of Prasads was at Delali station to meet them. Duleep and his family were taken to the house of a brother of the bride’s father. And there Duleep was dressed in the style of a warrior king, in tight white trousers, embroidered coat, sword, cloak and sequined turban upon which was placed a tinsel crown from which garlands of roses and jasmine hung, half shadowing his face, filling his nostrils with their sweet narcotic scent. As evening came he was led out to the caparisoned horse on which he mounted, with his best man, a young cousin, behind him in the saddle. The procession to the bride’s house began at half-past six. It was accompanied by men with lanterns, drums, trumpets and fireworks. The evening was loud with the noise and explosion of their progression. It gave him a headache. The procession was followed by the people of Delali who wanted to see for themselves what kind of a husband old Prasad’s youngest daughter had managed to get hold of. They shouted good-natured insults and Duleep’s champions replied in kind.
Dismounting at the entrance to the bride’s house, he was led through the compound to the married women’s courtyard, sat down, and put through the first of his ordeals.
‘So next week you are going to England,’ one of the women said. ‘Do you tire so quickly that you need to run away?’
‘Oh no,’ Duleep replied, entering into the spirit of the testing, ‘but a young husband is wiser to accept the truth of the saying: Moderation in all things.’
‘Perhaps the bride will have different ideas,’ another woman said.
‘The pot of honey,’ Duleep said, ‘tastes better after a long abstinence.’
‘What if the honey should go sour?’ an even bolder woman asked.
‘To a faithful tooth even the sourest honey tastes sweet.’
The women laughed and hid their faces. Duleep was a man. The news was quickly carried to the bride who had sat for hours in her inner chamber, after her ritual purifying bathe, attended by the women whose job it was to clothe her in her red robes and heavy jewellery, put henna on her hands and feet and kohl on her eyes.
‘As handsome as a prince,’ they said, ‘and bold with it. Ah, what eyes! But also gentle. Assuredly yes, you are fortunate. Such husbands do not grow on trees. He will be worth the waiting for, after the initial taste.’
The second ordeal was the ceremony itself which was due to begin at the auspicious hour of half an hour before midnight, in the main courtyard, and would go on for hours, in accordance with the Vedic rites. He sat next to his bride, facing the sacred fire on the other side of which the pandit sat. She was heavily veiled and kept her head bowed. Duleep dared not look at her. But he had the impression of her scent and smallness and temporary magnificence. The veil over her head was tied to the pommel of his sword which, in the olden days, he would have had to use to cut off the branch of a tree to show his vigour. Already they were united, indissolubly, throughout life and perhaps beyond it. And he had not yet seen her face. She had not yet looked at his. If she saw anything of him at all it could be no more than his gold, embroidered slippers and tight-trousered legs. Unless she had peeped. He did not think she had. The pandit was intoning mantras. Incense was thrown on the flames of the fire. Duleep and Kamala walked round the fire with Duleep leading, and then again, reversing the order, with Kamala ahead. She received rice into her cupped hands, and poured it into his, and he threw it into the flames. Together they walked the seven auspicious steps, and then the pandit recited their names and the names of their forbears, and Kamala was led away and he would not be close to her again until the night after the next when she would be led by his own mother into his room at home. But already it was m
orning. Tomorrow, then, Kamala would travel to Duleep’s house, in clothes brought to her as gifts from the Kumars.