The Householder (6 page)

She said, ‘What do I understand of these things?'

‘You must learn to understand. A wife must help her husband and be a support to him.' Was she going to laugh again? He saw her lip tremble and her head turn farther away from him. How ridiculous she was; like a child. He looked at the nape of her long neck and noticed how very fine strands of hair curled there in a most childlike manner.

‘Next Sunday you will have to come with me to the college,' he said. ‘The Principal is giving a tea-party for staff members and their wives.'

Her head turned back quickly towards him. Her eyes were stretched wide open—obviously she was very startled. ‘It is to stimulate social contact between the whole staff,' Prem said. He was rather pleased with the effect his news had on her. ‘The Principal wants us all to be like one big family.'

‘How can I go?'

‘Why not?'

‘I—' She stopped, and laughed, but it was a tearful laugh.

‘Of course you must come. Mr. Khanna said specially that it was very important for all wives to come.' On this uncompromising note he left her and went to lie on their big bed, supporting his head against the cherubs.

She followed him after a while and suggested timidly, ‘You could say I was sick.' Her hands were still full of dough.

‘Why should I say you are sick?'

‘Then they would not expect me to come.'

‘But I told you—you must come! You must accompany me and make a good impression.' A look of anguish appeared on her face; then she turned and walked away with her head lowered. He wished it were night and all dark and she beside him in the bed. He felt ashamed of the wish and got up and had a bath in cold water, trying not to think of her.

The baby did not occur to him very often. When he thought of it, he thought of it more in connection with money troubles and how its arrival would necessitate a higher salary or a lower rent or, better still, both. Only sometimes he wondered vaguely whether it would be a boy or a girl. Though one morning, as he passed a boisterous group of students on their way to the college, it occurred to him that he might have a son who would grow up to be like these boys. The thought did nothing much to him except to create new money worries. He had a fair idea how much these boys must be costing their parents. The Khanna Private College was not cheap. Mr. Khanna specialized in boys from well-off families who were not clever enough to get admission into the better colleges. He kept them for a year or so, during which time he ostensibly trained them to get past the admission tests. That most of them did so was perhaps due less to their own hard work than to Mr. Khanna's contacts, which were very good. Meanwhile the boys had a pleasant time. They wore stylish clothes, travelled fast on motor-scooters, paid frequent visits to cinemas and restaurants. Some of them even had girls.

Prem could not help envying his students. He hoped his son would grow up like them, healthy and confident and rich. Though this last was, in view of his own salary, hardly possible. It made him feel sad to think that he would not be able to give his son a motor-scooter; and, as usual, when he was sad or thoughtful, he became philosophical. God has drawn a circle round each of us, he thought, and we cannot step over the line that He has drawn. It seemed to him a good thought, which he would like to have shared with his students.

He was standing in front of his class, analysing a sentence for them into its component parts, and was regretfully aware that they were, as usual, bored. Probably they were thinking of what they were going to do in the evening. Prem wished he could have stopped talking about subject and predicate and discussed other, more important, matters with them. The bored look would disappear from their faces and they would lean forward in their seats and eagerly listen to him. He would tell them about how only a short time ago he too had been a student like them, but how now he was married and was about to have a son whom he would have to support and send to college. He was sure they would be sympathetic and interested. Though, in their pursuit of pleasure, they gave an impression both of frivolity and arrogance, he knew from the compositions they wrote for him that they were also capable of sentiment. He suspected that they too spent long hours lying on their backs with their arms clasped behind their heads, as he and Raj had done, to discuss or simply meditate on important aspects of life. It was on that level that he wished to appeal to them. He was sure that there he could establish a contact with them which as a teacher he had quite failed to do.

It seemed to him that he was failing in everything—as a husband and as a teacher. His father had been so successful in both capacities. But Prem felt he had no vocation for either. He did not know what he did have a vocation for. The only thing he had done successfully so far was to have been a student who lived in his father's house and went for walks with his friends. He still felt that that alone was his true condition, even though he had been married now and employed in Khanna Private College for some months. It was as if all the time he were waiting to go home to be looked after and cared for by his family.

Yet he wanted very much to be a successful man. His father, both as a Principal and a father, had always impressed upon him the importance of being a successful man. ‘You must strive, strive and strive again!' his father had said, looking very impressive as he said it, with his jaw set and his hand striking down emphatically upon the table. Prem had taken this as referring mainly to his examinations, and he had been glad to be able to pass them. But now he realized that that had after all not been the end of striving, and that something more was required of him.

In the staffroom he listened to the other lecturers discussing Sunday's tea-party, as they had been doing ever since the Principal had announced it. Mr. Chaddha, glancing up from his book for a moment, interposed, ‘I am looking forward to a pleasant afternoon. Mrs. Chaddha has also consented to be present.' He cleared his throat, crossed his legs and again concentrated his attention with raised eyebrows on his book. Though he was so small and thin and birdlike, there was something very authoritative about him, and he radiated a confidence which Prem could not help wishing he possessed. He realized that he should be looking up to Mr. Chaddha and trying to emulate him; and he wondered why it was that he should feel more drawn towards Sohan Lal, who was manifestly unsuccessful and unconfident. He knew his father would have urged him towards Mr. Chaddha; and while not exactly turning him away from Sohan Lal, would nevertheless have brought it to his notice that there was really not much of a good example to be got from poor Sohan Lal, who found it hard to keep discipline among his students and was repressed and melancholy through the effort of supporting a large family on a small income.

In his disappointment with himself, it again occurred to Prem that he really ought to make a second attempt on Mr. Khanna for the rise in salary. The first attempt had to be regarded in the light merely of groundwork, on which he must now start building an edifice of persuasion. But these things, he told himself, had above all to be done with subtlety and tact; and what occasion better for subtlety and tact than a tea-party? Anything could happen at a tea-party: meeting him thus, for the first time on social terms, Mr. Khanna might take a great liking to him; or perhaps Indu, if she behaved nicely, might make a good impression and dispose Mr. Khanna to regard them as a deserving young couple who should be given all help and encouragement in their struggle with life. So he decided to postpone his second attempt on the Principal till after Sunday's tea-party had given him opportunity to improve his position.

But his first attempt on his landlord was still open. He disliked the prospect of asking Mr. Seigal for a reduction in rent, and half realized that dislike had been quietly prompting him to indefinite postponements. But it was such postponements, he now told himself, which were responsible for his position of unsuccess. ‘Strive and strive and strive again!' he exhorted himself, with a show of bravery; and turned promptly to the wrong person for advice and encouragement.

‘Mr. Sohan Lal,' he said, ‘do you think it is possible to ask a landlord to take less rent?'

The bell rang, indicating the end of their little break. Mr. Chaddha shut his book smartly and got up at once to go to his class-room. Prem felt constrained to follow him. He was always afraid of arriving in the class-room later than Mr. Chaddha, for he knew his students would be noisy and perhaps disturb Mr. Chaddha. Sohan Lal too got up to go to his class-room; but, like Prem, he did so if not reluctantly then at least with a certain melancholy resignation.

‘A landlord must understand that a man's burdens increase as he becomes older,' Prem said, out in the narrow little corridor.

‘They increase,' agreed Sohan Lal with a gentle sigh. They were standing outside his class-room. His students were having a pretence game of volley ball. They were tossing a rubber from one to another, shouting ‘Pass this side!' and taking up attitudes of mock defence. Sohan Lal glanced in apprehensively.

‘A landlord must have feeling. When a person is in difficulties, he cannot only say to him go away.'

‘It would be wrong,' Sohan Lal agreed.

‘On the contrary, he must help that person and be like a father to him. We must all have love and help one another.'

‘Here, this side!' came lusty voices out of Sohan Lal's class-room, and there was a noise of pushing and laughing, of hard young bodies in energetic action. From farther down the corridor came Mr. Chaddha's voice raised in lecture tone. Reluctantly—for he found his present discussion very interesting—Prem started towards his classroom. He could hear Sohan Lal ineffectively calling to his students: ‘Please be in your seats!'

On the way home he reverted to thoughts about how people ought to help one another and love one another. ‘What am I by myself?' he thought. ‘I can do nothing, I am weak and helpless and need the support of a father.' He wanted to go to Mr. Seigal and say to him, ‘You are my father', and stand before him, humble and submissive, like a child. Then Mr. Seigal would see that it was his duty to reduce the rent.

When he reached the house, he at once knocked on the Seigals' door before he could weaken in his resolution. Through the fly-screen he could see the Seigals' son Romesh sitting on the sofa, reading a film magazine. Romesh called ‘Come in' and seemed pleased to see Prem. He showed his magazine and said,' I am very fond of the cinema. I go three times a week, and sometimes four.'

Romesh Seigal was very much like Prem's students—healthy, cheerful, wearing good clothes and an expensive wristwatch. So Prem found himself addressing him in the same way as he addressed his students; he said ‘And your studies?' in a somewhat stern voice.

‘I am not too fond of studies,' Romesh said frankly.

‘You must study hard,' Prem said, ‘and pass in your examinations. Then perhaps you will be able to secure a good position with the Government and your parents will be pleased.'

‘I find studies very boring,' Romesh said, ‘I like only pictures very much.'

‘What will you learn from going to pictures? This is only amusement for an idle hour. While you are a student, you must learn and strive to pass in your examinations and not think of amusement at all.'

‘Quite right,' said Mr. Seigal, emerging from the next room. Prem got up and greeted him with hands deferentially joined. Though it was past six o'clock in the evening, Mr. Seigal seemed to have only just got up from his afternoon sleep. His hair and his shirt were rumpled and wet with perspiration, and he was yawning so widely that tears came into his eyes.

‘This is what I am always telling him,' said Mr. Seigal when he had finished yawning.

‘We were having a little chat,' said Prem, feeling rather sheepish.

‘Please take trouble with him,' said Mr. Seigal. ‘You are a teacher, a lecturer in a college, he can learn only what is good from you.'

Though at any other time Prem might have felt flattered by these observations, now he found them rather awkward. He wanted Mr. Seigal to look on him as another son, as helpless and dependent as his own son Romesh, and here he was being set up as a mentor to that son. He shuffled his feet and smiled deprecatingly. He wanted to look young and foolish, yet somehow, after what Mr. Seigal had said, he could not help feeling elderly and responsible; and so when he spoke he spoke in that role, as one weighed down by years and responsibilities.' It is our duty,' he said,' to guide young men and set them on the right path in Life.'

Mr. Seigal grunted as he picked up a newspaper, yawned some more and rubbed his hand over his hair. Romesh had gone back to reading his film magazine, humming a melancholy love song as he did so.

‘In our ancient writings it is written,' Prem continued, ‘that there are four stages to a man's life. When he is young, he is a student, learning from his father and his teachers——'

‘Has the tea been brought?' Mr. Seigal inquired of Romesh.

‘After that comes the life of the householder,' Prem said. ‘In this stage a man must raise a family and see to their needs …' He thought of Indu and the coming baby and felt instantly depressed. At this point he would like to have joined his hands in supplication and asked for a reduction in rent. But he felt shy, especially before Romesh whom he was to serve as a good example, so he continued: ‘The third stage is when a man retires from his duties as a householder and spends his time in contemplation.'

‘They have made vegetables samusas with our tea,' Romesh told his father.

‘Thus it may be clearly seen,' Prem concluded miserably, skipping the fourth stage, of which he was not quite sure, ‘that each stage of life has its own duties and obligations.' Oppressed by a sense of failure, he took his leave rather quickly. Upstairs Indu was sitting knitting pink bootees. He said to her at once, ‘There are some things in which a wife can be very helpful to her husband.' Indu moved her lips silently, counting her stitches; she seemed in deep concentration. ‘A wife must share her husband's burden!' Prem suddenly shouted.