The Householder Read online

  He was so surprised that she should make any suggestion—let alone such a sensible one—that he stood and stared at her. This confused her, and she bent her head lower and continued to pick at the hem of her sari. ‘What?’ Prem said. ‘What did you say?’ hoping that she had something else sensible to bring forward.

  But she would not say it again. Probably she thought he would laugh at her or scold her. She jumped up and ran into the kitchen, where she promptly began to shout at the servant-boy.

  Prem followed her and said, ‘You think he would?’

  ‘You call this clean?’ she was shouting, thrusting a saucepan under the boy’s nose. The boy stood quite still and stared into the distance with a patient look.

  ‘You think he would reduce our rent, if I asked him?’

  ‘Even to clean saucepans I have to teach you!’ Indu shouted.

  ‘Well, answer me,’ Prem insisted.

  ‘How do I know?’ she said. ‘There is a letter for you. It is lying on the bed.’

  It was from his mother, but he did not at once open it. Instead he lay down on the bed and thought about what Indu had said.

  The bed was their only really good piece of furniture. It had been a present from Indu’s uncle and was a large double-bed of shiny teak; the headrest was decorated with two carved cherubs who had their arms clasped about one another’s necks. The poky crooked little bedroom was really not good enough for this magnificent bed. Prem was very proud of it and liked to lie on it, even in the daytime. He lay there and thought about how he would ask Mr. Seigal to reduce his rent.

  Still thinking about this, he ripped open his mother’s letter. He read ‘My dearest son’ and after that, from the expressions of happiness and gratitude to God, realized that this letter was in reply to the one he had sent announcing Indu’s pregnancy. He finished reading in haste and some embarrassment, but was glad to find in the end that his mother intended to come and visit them. It would be nice to have her here: she would make the flat more comfortable and homelike, and also perhaps she would teach Indu how to cook the dishes he liked.

  Indu stood in the doorway and said shyly, ‘I also had a letter today.’ She was holding it out to him.

  ‘Who is it from?’

  ‘It is from my mother.’ He did not take it, though she was still holding it out to him; instead he said, ‘What does she write?’

  After a short pause, Indu said in a low voice, ‘She wants me to come home.’

  Prem had no comment to make. It did not, he thought, greatly matter to him whether she stayed or went.

  Indu confessed, ‘I wrote to her about …’ and ‘Yes, yes,’ said Prem in some irritation. ‘That is why she wants me to come home,’ Indu said.

  ‘My mother is coming to visit us,’ Prem said.

  After thinking this over for a while, Indu said, ‘Then she will be able to look after you here when I am gone.’

  ‘How can you go away when my mother is coming to visit us?’

  ‘Why not?’ Indu inquired. The innocence of her voice as she asked this made him quite angry. He shouted, ‘What do you mean why not? Have you no sense?’ She looked at him with her eyes wide in amazement. He had never before shouted at her.

  Now that he had started, he rather felt like shouting some more. But he thought of the Seigals downstairs and the servant-boy in the kitchen, and so changed to a fierce whisper. ‘Don’t you understand that my mother will be offended?’ he hissed, supporting himself on one elbow as he lay on the bed and leaning towards her.

  ‘Why are you whispering?’ she asked.

  ‘How stupid you are—do you want everyone to hear us quarrelling?’

  ‘I am not quarrelling.’

  He lay back again, feeling rather defeated. How stupid she is, he thought; one could not even argue with her.

  Indu said, ‘My mother wants me to come home.’

  ‘But how can you, when my mother is coming?’ He tried to sound terribly reasonable but only succeeded in sounding annoyed.

  ‘All girls go home when they are …’

  ‘Not at the beginning. Only in the end, when their time has come.’

  ‘Yes, at the beginning also.’ She was pouting. She pushed out her full lower lip and half closed her lids over her eyes. Her eyes were her best feature; they were very large and took up most of her face which was small though set on a long neck. ‘And my mother wants me to come,’ she said. Her voice too had turned sulky.

  ‘If your mother knew that my mother was coming to visit us, she would not want you to come.’ He kept looking at her. Really, he thought, she is not bad-looking. Yet he remembered that when he had first seen her, he had been disappointed.

  ‘Yes, she would want. I told you, all girls go home when they are in this condition.’

  ‘You talk as if it is my fault that you are——’ Before he could finish, she had asked, ‘Then whose fault is it?’ This struck him as definitely indelicate. He frowned, for he did not like girls to be indelicate. They should be remote and soulful; like Goddesses they should be. ‘It is not nice to talk like that,’ he reproved her.

  ‘What did I say? Only what is true.’

  He would have explained to her that it is not always right for a girl to say what is true; but what use was explaining? A girl should understand these things by herself.

  ‘How can I say no to my mother?’

  ‘If you explain to her that your mother-in-law is coming to visit you——’

  ‘She will say what is your mother-in-law against your own mother?’ And before Prem could even contemplate an answer, she shouted, ‘And she would be right to say so!’ and withdrew quickly into the sitting-room.

  Prem continued to lie on the bed. He felt sorry for himself, to be married to a wife who was not only quite different from what he had wished and hoped for, but who also opposed him in his wishes. He strained his ears, trying to hear what was going on in the sitting-room. He heard nothing except the servant-boy clattering in the kitchen, but he could guess that Indu was sitting there crying. He had seen tears in her eyes when she had left the room so hastily. It made him uncomfortable to think of her crouching alone in there, crying quietly to herself. She always cried very quietly. He had by accident discovered her on two occasions; when she had seen him, she had pretended to be blowing her nose.

  He wondered whether other people’s wives behaved like this too. It was strange, when he and Raj had been unmarried, they had discussed everything, their most secret thoughts; but now they could talk freely about nothing, least of all about their own wives whom they never as much as referred to. Yet Prem longed to talk to someone about his married state. It was such a new and unknown thing for him, he felt he could not deal with it. How, for instance, was he to deal with Indu crying to herself in the next room? He began to feel like crying himself; already a tear was trembling on his cheek. He brushed it aside with his hand and the feel of it made him want to cry more. He felt so alone and lonely, shut up in this small ugly flat with Indu who cried by herself in the sitting-room while he had to lie and cry by himself in the bedroom.

  If at least he had been happy in his work. But he felt just as alone and lonely in the college as he did at home. He stood in front of his class and talked to them about present and past participles; and though he tried to feel interested in what he was saying, he could not help being bored. His students, he could see, were not taking notes as industriously as they should have been; some of them were scribbling drawings on their notebooks, others leaning back and looking up at the ceiling; others were holding conversation together and not even bothering to keep to a respectful whisper. While in the other half of the classroom, Mr. Chaddha’s students were taut with attention, their heads bent all in a row over their notebooks, while Mr. Chaddha piped forcefully and with many emphatic gestures about trade in British India. Prem felt dispirited at this difference between his own and Mr. Chaddha’s half of the classroom. It occurred to him that really he ought to try and assert himself, and with
this in mind he called in a sharp voice to one of the students who was talking, ‘Please pay attention to my lecture.’

  The student stopped talking and looked at him in surprise; the others also stopped talking, and those who had been looking at the ceiling looked down again. They were all now staring at Prem and evidently expecting something more from him. ‘A vast network of railways was flung from coast to coast!’ Mr. Chaddha declaimed, sweeping one hand through the air. Prem cleared his throat and said in a voice considerably less severe than before, ‘In class one must always pay attention to what the teacher says.’ Then he hastily carried on with illustrations of present and past participles. His students relaxed again and returned to their own private preoccupations.

  Afterwards he sat in the staffroom and waited for Sohan Lal to finish eating. Sohan Lal sat perched on the end of a little bench with his back turned shyly to the room; he ate quickly and furtively, in a very humble way. It was not until he had quite finished and was packing up his tiffin-carrier again that Prem went and sat next to him. ‘I have been thinking what we were talking the other day,’ Prem said. He said this only as an opening; it was not only what they had been talking about the other day that he wanted to discuss, but many other things as well.

  Sohan Lal radiated his big smile of protruding teeth. Nothing could have been more encouraging to Prem to go on talking, to talk about everything that was on his mind. There was so much he wanted to say. ‘Things are very difficult for me,’ he began. Sohan Lal became serious and clicked his tongue in sympathy.

  ‘You see,’ said Prem,’ I have not been married long…’

  He stopped, shy not of Sohan Lal but of the place in which they were. Mr. Chaddha was looking through some students’ papers, with a frown on his face; from time to time he shook his head and said, ‘Senseless boys.’ Two other staff members were having an argument about the Socialist party. ‘I suppose it is like this for everybody?’ Prem inquired of Sohan Lal, forgetting that he had not yet made clear what he meant by ‘like this’.

  ‘Life is often difficult,’ said Sohan Lal encouragingly.

  ‘You see, I am all alone here,’ Prem said. ‘My family live in Ankhpur and I have no one to help me.’ This sounded so pathetic, even to himself, that he at once felt very sad. He said, ‘Yes, you are right, life is difficult.’

  The Principal came striding into the staff-room and said, ‘Good morning, gentlemen.’ He always addressed his staff, when several of them were gathered together, as ‘gentlemen’; this lent dignity to the school, giving the impression that he employed real professors and paid them a high salary.

  ‘I am inviting you all to a tea-party,’ Mr. Khanna announced. There was a moment’s silence and then Mr. Chaddha piped up, ‘Thank you, sir’, and rubbed his hands to demonstrate delight. The others, including Prem, also echoed ‘Thank you’ in voices they tried to make joyful.

  Mr. Khanna looked benevolent: ‘Social contact between our members of staff must be stimulated,’ he explained. ‘Only so will our college thrive and flourish.’ Mr. Chaddha said, ‘Hear, hear.’ ‘We must be,’ said Mr. Khanna, ‘like one big family. Mrs. Khanna has kindly consented to serve tea and other refreshments.’ Another staff-member also said, ‘Hear, hear.’ ‘It is on Sunday week at four-thirty p.m. sharp,’ Mr. Khanna said. ‘Of course, ladies are also invited.’ ‘Very charming,’ said Mr. Chaddha.

  ‘He means we must bring our wives?’ Prem asked Sohan Lal, after the Principal had gone. This was a new worry for him: how could he bring Indu? She would not know what to do or say, and perhaps bring disgrace on him. ‘I don’t know whether it will be possible for me to bring my wife,’ he said.

  ‘Ladies are usually very shy,’ Sohan Lal said.

  ‘It is not that alone,’ said Prem. He thought of words in which he could explain how difficult it would be for him to bring Indu. I hardly know her, he wanted to say; how can I bring someone I hardly know to such an important tea-party? Yet it seemed a strange thing to say about one’s own wife, especially after he had already confessed to Sohan Lal that Indu was pregnant.

  In the evening, on their way home, he talked rather more freely. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘it is not very long ago that I was a student living in my parents’ house.’ Sohan Lal nodded.’I had no worries there at all, except only that I should pass in my examinations.’ Sohan Lal was pushing his cycle along the edge of the road; he was looking down at the gutter, but his head was slightly inclined towards Prem which gave him the appearance of listening with great attention and sympathy.

  ‘Everything was so different then!’ cried Prem.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sohan Lal, quite sadly,’ when we are young and have no responsibilities life is very beautiful.’

  ‘Suddenly there are so many responsibilities,’ Prem said. ‘For instance, I never had to worry about money—of course, I never had much money but my father gave me an allowance and that was enough for tea and biscuits and cinema sometimes …’

  ‘When we are young, so many things cost nothing.’

  ‘That is true,’ Prem said. ‘We often went on picnics and that did not cost anything because our mothers gave us food to take and we had a very jolly time though we did not spend anything.’

  ‘In our youth the sky is blue and the trees are green and the birds sing. What worries can we have when things are like that?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Prem cried and he stood still in his excitement, ‘it was exactly like that! I remember our picnics …’

  ‘Good night, sir!’ called a group of students. They swaggered down the road, confident, idle young men in good clothes, with their arms slung around one another’s shoulders, joking as they went.

  Prem looked after them and said, ‘Of course, I know all things must come to an end.’ And then he added, ‘If only it did not happen so quickly.’

  Yet he found himself quite anxious to go home. This was a new sensation for him: he had never yet looked forward to going back to Indu. Nor was he exactly looking forward to her now; what he wanted was to take up yesterday’s discussion with her and make sure that she was not going to her father’s house. He did not tell himself that he wanted to quarrel with her; all he told himself was that the subject really must be gone into again.

  As he walked up the stairs, he heard her singing. She was squatting in the kitchen, kneading dough very deftly and quickly, so that her bangles jingled. When she saw him, she stopped singing and continued her work with her head lowered.

  ‘Where is the servant?’ Prem said.

  ‘He has gone out.’

  ‘He is always out,’ Prem said disapprovingly.

  ‘There is not much work. We don’t really need a servant.’

  ‘Of course we need a servant,’ Prem said. After all, he was the son of a Principal of a college and himself a professor, a man of education and some standing: it was not right that his wife should scour pots and wash floors. He felt annoyed that she should fail to realize this, and he at once vented his annoyance: ‘What do you think people will say if they come here and find we have no servant?’

  ‘But nobody comes,’ Indu pointed out. He made a sound of impatience. How completely she missed his point! She really seemed to be rather stupid.

  ‘If someone comes or does not come,’ he said with dignity, ‘we must keep up our honour. Would you eat dirt from the road even though no one saw you?’ He delivered this last allegory with some triumph, but it appeared she had not understood. At any rate she gave him no reply.

  He wandered into the sitting-room but as she did not follow him, he was soon back again to ask her, ‘Did you have another letter from your mother today?’ to which she only shook her head.

  ‘I think my mother will be coming to stay with us soon,’ he said.

  To this too she had no reply to give. He wondered whether her silence meant that she had acquiesced in his wishes or whether it was a silence of obstinacy and smouldering defiance. He tried to scrutinize her face, but she had already turned it away from h
im. This rather confirmed his suspicion that her silence meant defiance. He knitted his brows and wondered how to deal with the situation.

  He lacked a precedent for it not only in his own life but also in that of his parents. As far as he was aware, his mother had not been in the habit of defying his father. Of course, his father had been a very important man—the Principal of Ankhpur College—so that when he uttered an opinion everybody had stood silent and listened with respect. And Prem’s mother had been the most respectful of all. She had prefaced all her remarks to Prem and his sisters with ‘Your father says’, and to outsiders she said, ‘The Principal says.’ In the house everybody had had to tiptoe past his study, and at mealtimes he always had some special dish cooked in which no one else had been allowed to share. Prem had sometimes envied him his position of comfort and dignity and had looked forward to being married himself so that he could occupy a similar one. But Indu, it seemed, was not aware of the privileges due to him.

  Raj must have been through all this with his wife. He wished he could have talked to him about it, the way they used to talk together before they had been married. Raj would know better than Sohan Lal, who was a much older man and had been married a long time and so had probably forgotten what it was like in the beginning. How ridiculous, Prem thought, to feel shy with Raj; next time, he decided, he would talk to him quite freely. They would sit and have tea in one of the little eating-stalls they usually frequented and fully discuss their matrimonial troubles. Nothing, Prem promised himself, would be left unsaid.

  But on the next Monday Raj failed to turn up. Prem stood by the box-office in the cinema and waited for him for a whole hour and a half. He felt rather awkward standing there waiting, and was even afraid that the manager might send someone to ask what he wanted. To make himself less suspicious, he wandered round from time to time to look at the pictures of forthcoming attractions, and once he bought a packet of potato crisps from the refreshment bar. As usual, there were many young men standing around, talking and joking together and looking at girls. They made Prem feel lonely and even a little elderly. This feeling was heightened when one group of young men turned out to be his students. ‘Good evening, sir,’ they said, politely enough, but Prem noticed that when they thought he could no longer see them, they nudged one another and laughed. He remembered that Raj and he and their other friends had laughed and nudged in the same way when they had happened to meet one of their professors outside the college.