THE TRIALS OF SIRU

(A short story)

NAYANTARA SAHGAL

When Siru, the eldest of the Moolchand brothers, recently tried to commit suicide, and for reasons that had nothing to do with money, people said he must have become unbalanced, perhaps been not quite normal to attempt so tragic and violent a death by his own hand. Had he speculated heavily on the Stock Exchange and lost, or been involved in some unsavoury financial scandal and chosen suicide as the way out, there would still have been talk, but people might have understood his behaviour in the light of his mis-fortune or disgrace. As it was, there had been no scandal, the Moolchand brothers enjoyed the highest reputation in business circles, and Siru himself was the mildest, most non-violent of men.

Whether he was normal at the time or not it would be impossible for anyone to decide, since normal is a treacherous word at the best times, and never easily defined. What I considered my own depressingly normal, average life was to Siru a riot of extremes. My simplest habit was by his standards an indulgence, and some of my views, I am sure, not far from depraved though he was too good-tempered to say so outright. What stunned me most about his faction was the thought that he who had never attempted any venture alone or faced a situation unaided, whose entire life had been moulded and conditioned by his joint family, should have felt so suddenly and desperately isolated after all. Moments of longing, fear, and frustration come and go in the course of a lifetime, sometimes leaving their scars, but when the inadequacies of a lifetime are crowded into a single mocking moment, they may, in this concentrated form, be too much to endure. I did not realize this till Siru was able to tell me about it afterwards.

I had known the Moolchand brothers a number of years. I dined with them frequently whenever I was in Bombay. They lived in a compact pink mansion in a wealthy residential area which, though it abounded in smart new apartment buildings with soaring rents had very few houses. The Moolchands who had acquired their plot when land was cheap were proud of their home. It was called ‘Moolchand House’ after the princely residences in the city, and though this sounded somewhat pretentious, there was nothing ostentatious about the brothers themselves.

They lived with their mother, their wives, and children under the same roof. The three men were remarkably alike: tubby, short, plump-faced and complacent, with comfortable little paunches and healthy appetites for the excellent vegetarian dishes that were served in such quantity at their table. Their wives, on the other hand, were all wand-thin and meek-voiced, with shallow complexions and poor appetites. The brothers and their wives seemed to meet only for the evening meal because they even slept apart, the men in a row of beds on one verandah, the women on another, in the manner of old-fashioned joint families. That there were large numbers of children all over the house mystified me.

Mild and cherubic as the men were, it was hard to believe they were astute men of business and a considerable power on the Stock Exchange. Their devotion to their millions was total and sincere. It left them no time for the enjoyment of the things money could buy. Their wealth was an end in itself, even their home showing few traces of it. One felt that such evidences of it as there were had been almost apologetically placed there, and not with the intention to adorn, few, really, could have been called adornments. In their immense drawing room, solid gold cigarette lighters, and photographs in ornate gold and silver frames, stood side by side with bright red plastic articles and shiny chromium ones, showing complete innocence in matters of taste. So utterly did the brothers lack distinction that I thought of them merely as three nice little men who happened to be enormously rich.

The Moolchand Enterprises necessitated a good deal of travel and the brothers made regular trips to Europe and North and South America. Yet their travels left them curiously unspoiled. Even at the Waldorf Astoria where they stayed when in New York, they had a standing order of Vegetable Plate (without the poached egg) twice a day. When compelled in the interests of business to visit a night club they kept their gaze averted from the beauties of the cabaret. The story is told that once a chorus girl perched on Siru’s lap during a cabaret only to be met by a look of such genuine consternation that even that hard-boiled young woman took pity on him and left him for more suitable quarry. The brothers did not smoke, touch meat, alcohol, eggs or onions. Brought up by stern parents and married while still in their teens, they were dutiful sons and kindly husbands.

It was dismaying to speculate how few everyday temptations life held for them. How safe they must feel, I often thought enviously, never in a moment of nervousness or agitation to crave a cigarette or a drink, never to feel a mouthwatering hunger at the smell of roasting meat, never to fall in love beyond reason. For though they were fond husbands, I could not believe their relationship with their docile wives, whose beds were on a different verandah, had anything to do with love. I could not imagine the Moolchand ladies in a state of abandon or disarray any more than I could picture the brothers other than neat and blandly self-possessed.

They were always referred to as the Moolchand brothers, never as Siru, Hira, and Manohar, and they seemed to have no separate identities. I wondered what would happen if circumstances forced them to live and work separately, and conduct distinct, individual lives. One night after dinner at their house Siru and I talked about this and Siru told me he saw no need for this situation ever to arise. He defended the joint family as providing a solid bulwark against the very things a man on his own might be prey to–loneliness, loss, financial straits. It was a refuge in time of need and a benefactor at all times. It had been for centuries. It was the very core of Hindu life.

“We have a widowed aunt who has lived with us for the last fifteen years, ever since her husband was killed in an accident. Where should she have gone, what would she have done, but for our joint family?” he asked.

“But you are not a widowed aunt,” I protested.

“Still, What would I gain by breaking away and living alone?” he demanded.

“Your privacy, the opportunity to express yourself, discover own individual tastes and ideas.”

“If the things you want to say are better said in unison, why say them alone?” he demanded, and I had to admit the justice of his view.

“But doesn’t a strictly private life with your wife matter?” I insisted.

He gave me his amiable grin. “It is private enough. Naturally we can meet only after the others are asleep.”

He told me of his early married life when the need to meet had been more urgent. He and his wife had chosen the roof of the house as their place of meeting, stealing up there after the rest of the family had fallen asleep. I could not help wondering what would have happened if the other two brothers had one night by chance chosen the same rendezvous, and all three amorous Moolchands had converged on the roof with the same idea in mind only to disperse hastily again. As an exercise in ingenuity, patience, and self-control, the system had its advantages and the Moolchands were well-known for all the three virtues.

“You talk of breaking up the joint family,” said Siru, “in my grandfather’s, and even in my father’s time such talk would have been blasphemous. My father started life as a poor man. He was barely literate when he came to Bombay from his village in Marwar. He started in business by setting up a small provision store, living in the room behind the store and he taught himself to read by the light of a kerosene lantern. But he would rather have died than turn away even a distant relation who came to him for shelter. Family counted for more in those days. It’s true times have changed. My own children’s upbringing is very different from my own. I went to the local municipal school and did my lessons on a slate. They are going to an English school. Some of these changes are necessary, of course, but if we undermine our joint family system we strike at the very heart of our social structure.”

“The system has its advantages,” I agreed, “but it can also give a man a false feeling of security and rob him of all initiative.”

“Joint effort is better than isolated effort,” said Siru solemnly.

“Oh yes, in business perhaps. I was thinking in terms of personality.”

Siru looked at me blankly.

“Work is a man’s business. What else should concern him?”

What he said was so true to himself that it was difficult to dispute it.

“Probably nothing else should,” I answered, “but sometimes it does all the same–perhaps after you’ve finished work for the day, or in the early hours of the morning before you begin. Even conceivably during working hours, other thoughts may intervene.”

Siru laughed politely.

“I wonder if it is easier for a vegetarian to be singleminded,” I said.

“There is no doubt about it.” he affirmed, “diet plays an important part in our inclinations and concentration comes more easily to a vegetarian. In my family we have been vegetarians for generations. My father was a particularly strict one .”

Overshadowing the Moolchand brothers still, though he had long been dead, was the memory of their father, Maganlal Moolchand. a genius in his own way, who had risen from extreme poverty and near-illiteracy to a position of enormous wealth and power. Those who had known him recalled a gaunt, fierce-eyed man, relentless of purpose–a fanatic who, had he not possessed an astounding talent for making money, might have made history as the prophet of some terrible flesh-mortifying religious order. He had had none of the smiling rotundity of his sons. They had obviously inherited their looks from their mother.

Maganlal had, of course, lived in a starker and much less complex world than his sons, growing up in a village, struggling long years in Bombay to make a living, and even after his struggles were over, living very much like the villager he was, rustic in his tastes. There had never been any conflict in his mind about the choices he made, never any doubt that what he believed was right. In all his business dealings he had never seen a contract. He had given his word and it had been accepted. Similarly he had taken others at their Word and it was part of his genius that he had seldom made a mistake in his assessment of any man who did business with him. He had always regarded Bombay as mononstrously artificial, a barbarous jungle of granite far removed from the values he had been taught to revere. He had used it as he thought fit, and scorned compromise with the society it represented. People who had done business with him had had to sit on the floor beside him and make the best they could of his stumbling English. He had spoken it when he had been compelled to, but he had made no effort to improve it. He would not have sympathized with his sons’ attempts to compromise with their environment, or the environment itself which had made nationality and a creed out of riches.

Though the Moolchand brothers lived, for the most part, as their father would have wished them to, I had the feeling that they did so from habit and out of respect for his memory rather than from the belief that this was the only true path. Their austerity sat incongruously on them, making me wonder what the men beneath were like and what they might develop into without the towering personality of Maganlal in the background, or each other to bolster it. Or perhaps I thought so because they looked so austere. There is really no reason why a rotund man should not have the deepest religious convictions or value the things of the spirit. But I continued to feel that the younger Moolchands were wrapped cocoon-like in a shell chosen for them and seemed unable to emerge from it. Their pink mansion was a concession to the luxury expected of them by the circles in which they moved, while the comparative simplicity within was a homage to their father. I don’t know why I pictured them more easily than as they were with fat little cigars in their mouths and plates of delectable pastries on their tea table. They never partook of either.

“Once I stole two silver rupees from my father’s money box,” Siru told me, “I could have asked for the money and he would probably have given it to me, but I was passing by the money box and finding it open I could not resist helping myself. Afterwards I was too frightened to confess and when father discovered I had taken it–he always found out everything in the end–he thrashed me with a switch. He demanded complete obedience and truthfulness from us and he got it.”

“Yours must have been a very harsh upbringing,” I said.

“We owe everything we are, and have, to my father,” Siru said simply.

Maganlal had had no use for any sowing of wild oats either. Acrording to tradition and the custom of his community, he had arranged his sons’ marriages before any such urges became uncontrollable.

I liked Siru and his brothers because I did not see much of them. Otherwise I should have found them palling. They were good men but humourless. They were not interested in books or in the arts, and they had no hobby other than going to the races. They went now and then for their wives’ sake, because the Moolchand ladies, though they themselves dressed with drab simplicity and used no aids to beauty, enjoyed watching the elegant and frivolous fashions that vied with the horses for attention. Many a man found it difficult not to stare at a pretty face or an unusual fashion, but none of this diverted the young millionaires. They smiled genially at the colourfully dressed crowds as they sipped tea and ate cucumber sandwiches. They did not bet.

Though they were members of two sports’ clubs, they rarely took any exercise. I had never known any of them, so much as to, take a walk. I remember my surprise on seeing Siru walking along Marine Drive by himself one cloudy night last July. It was about ten o’clock and a storm was threatening, so the pavement was empty of its usual crowd of strollers and peanut and coconut vendors. A strong wind whipped giant waves to a frenzy against the sea wall. Except that his suit was damp with sea spray, Siru looked his tidy self, the wind not having succeeded in dislodging many strands of his well-oiled hair. He looked scarcely believable. It was almost symbolic that this tubby immaculate figure should remain undisturbed by wind and weather. He had, I supposed, to a great extent conquered his environment, or at least succeeded in ignoring it so that it did not encroach upon him very much either physically or emotionally. But this was before his trials began.

The next night at dinner at the Moolchands’ I was told there had been a domestic crisis. The young Goan nanny, employed to look after Siru’s children, had been found in the arms of a visiting cousin, who had evidently not been as strictly brought up as the Moolchands. Siru’s wife was inclined to forgive her and let her stay on since the cousin’s visit was temporary, and the shortage of nannies chronic. She was a useful girl, willing to do other jobs about the house besides looking after the children, till now given no cause for complaint. I was surprised to find Siru adamant that she must go. I had never seen him so upset. He hardly touched his food.

“Give her another chance,” begged Mrs. Siru, “it will be so hard to replace her.”

“Another chance?” he repeated, “another chance to do what she was doing when I found her?”

His face had a suffocated look, combining anger with an agony of remembered embarrassment. He seemed more put out than the incident warranted, and I found it extraordinary that a man of forty, the father of a family, and the shrewd possessor of a fortune, should be so easily disturbed. He looked so unhappy. I had a ridiculous impulse to tell him not to cry and checked it with difficulty. The cousin, a young man not long out of college, who answered to the nickname of Vinno, made matters worse by strolling into the room with his hands in his pockets, a cigarette; hanging from one corner of his mouth. Siru had no objection to anyone smoking but he looked at his cousin with obvious distaste. The youngster should have known better than to smoke in front of an elder man with such nonchalance.

“I hope you’re not going to dismiss her on my account” the young man said.

“I am the head of this house,” said Siru.

Vinno shrugged his shoulders.

“I didn’t intend to get the poor girl into trouble.”

“What did you intend?” asked Siru.

“A bit of fun,” said Vinno indifferently, his cigrette bobbing up and down.

“I understand from your father that you are engaged to be married,” Siru told him.

“If you can call it that,” Vinno replied good-naturedly; “it was all arranged for me. Of course, I gave my consent. I was away at the time and I sent back a telegram: ‘Serve up damsel with appropriate trimmings’.”

Small sounds of mirth escaped from Manohar and Hira and were quickly stifled by the look on Siru’s face. He grew scarlet. He was so angry he might have looked formidable had he been a larger man. He got up and left the room, clicking the door shut behind him, and without his restraining presence the nervous giggling gave way to squeals of laughter and questioning.

Siru was prevailed upon to let the nanny remain. He was not made of the stuff of dictators and he hated to see his wife inconvenienced, but the unpleasantness of the episode stayed with him. He had been so safe, so untouched in his world of bland food family cooperation, and carefully regulated desires. The servant girl, and his unmannerly cousin, had destroyed all that between them, sweeping away all decency by making love in broad daylight on the sofa in his study. The very thought of it nauseated him, and he was repelled by Vinno’s nonchalance. His brothers, instead of supporting him, had sniggered and talked nonsense behind his back. For the first time, he felt, they were ranged against him. It could never have happened in his father’s lifetime. He felt miserable and defeated, for even anger did not come easily to him, and he could not sustain it for any length of time. He had failed as head of his family.

Somebody, he felt helplessly, should have been punished. His cousin was to blame but the boy was his flesh and blood, and flesh and blood, however tiresome and underserving, had to be shielded, no matter at what cost. Besides, even if he had wanted, it would not have been easy, to punish that self-assured young man. Vinno would think nothing, even now, of defying Siru’s authority, or ridiculing again in front of his brothers. That he had behaved in a disgraceful way, did not even occur to him. All Siru’s rigorous upbringing and business training had not equipped him to deal with vinno’s wisecracks.

The girl should have been dismissed. Instead, she was still here and since she had misbehaved once, she might do so again, with Hira or Manohar perhaps, on another sofa. The idea was intolerable. The girl must be spoken to very firmly, he decided, and a promise of good behaviour extracted from her on pain of dismissal. Then he would feel justified in allowing her to remain, once the cousin had departed, life would resume its quiet tempo and go on as before. Siru could not, of course, speak to her in front of the family, knowing their light-hearted view of the incident. He must find her alone.

Meanwhile he did his best to combat his dislike of Vinno. He felt duty-bound to look after him and being the kind-hearted soul he was, I think, felt deeply distressed by the boy’s uncouth manners. Siru tried, in his own mild way, to win over. One evening he took us all to the cinema, and after the show we dropped in at a small restaurant for refreshment. It was crowded, and we squeezed around one of the few empty tables, and gave our order. The ladies asked for milk shakes, the men ordered orange squashes, and Vinno remarked loudly that since he could not get a proper drink he would take black coffee, making several people turn around and stare at us. He had a roving eye and he soon fixed it on a young and strikingly pretty girl near us. He did not stop smoking or remove his hands from his pockets to raise his cup to his lips, and there was a deliberate in the glance he directed towards the girl. Hira and Manohar followed it guiltily, and agreed that she was attractive while the ladies discussed her fashionable bare-backed blouse with animation. The girl, realising she was the focus of attention, kept glancing toward Vinno almost against her will. There developed between them the curious silent flirtation found in countries, where men and women share a very limited common social life, and where the most smouldering glance need never have a sequel. This, far from lessening its intensity, seems to heighten it, since all passion must be channelled into a brief interval and must depend for its fervour on the language of the eyes alone. It had all the qualities of a duel, set in motion by Vinno’s challenging look. The young people took expert measure of each other, and then the sparring of their glance began, careful at first, and later growing bolder and more frankly sensual. Hira and Manohar joked about it while Siru was goaded into discomfort. Vinno, equally unconscious of both reactions, continued his game. His flagrant exhibitionism annoyed, but did not anger me, and I was surprised at Siru’s tight-lipped expression. We drove back through driving rain, Siru silent all the way.

Unused to a private life, unaccustomed even to private thoughts, Siru found he had to share them with someone, and he spoke to me about what he considered his deplorable weekness in letting Vinno’s offensive behaviour continue. The boy, against Siru’s express wishes, had brought alcohol into the house, and kept a bottle of whisky in his bedroom. Though Siru never saw it he felt it constituted an impertinent rejection of his authority. He was also afraid it might lead to more trouble with the nanny. The thought of finding her alone and having a talk with her became an obsession with him, and yet he invented obstacles for himself and postponed the issue, uncertain of his ability to cope with it. In the end, to reassure himself he was still master of the house, he did seek her out. It was a Saturday afternoon and the other members of the family were in their rooms. Walking past the nanny’s door, he heard her singing inside, and pushing open the door, went in.

It was a clear afternoon during the monsoon. Sunlight streamed into the narrow room, flecking the Goan girl’s dark skin with gold and gilding the crucifix above her bed. The sun glinted in a small mirror above the bureau and dappled the dusty floor. Siru noted these little details with a sharp sense of delight. After days of ceaseless drumming rain and the noisy upheaval of thunder, the room bathed in light looked restful, and he was filled with peace. He did not know it was the girl’s afternoon off, and that she was getting ready to go out. He only saw that she looked different and he wondered at her beauty. She had on a flowered cotton dress instead of her uniform, and her black hair, unbound, hung in a tangle of curls to her shoulders nearly hiding the rings she wore in her ears. His sudden appearance so startled her, she dropped the bottle of cologne she was holding, and it broke on the uncarpeted floor, permeating the room with its cheap, sweetish scent.

Siru stopped her as she was about to bend down and retrieve the pieces. He was seized with a terrible longing to take this warm-skinned girl in his arms, to hold her for a moment in that sunlit room. There was a fragile tenuous quality about the stillness which the shattering of glass had not been able to dispel, and he scarcely dared breathe, for fear of destroying it. He took her arm and led her to the bed, sitting down beside her. She looked nervous but said nothing, waiting for him to speak. But Siru could not speak. If there were words to describe his joy at having found her alone in the golden afternoon, he did not know them. He knew nothing except that she was near him and he could lose his fingers in her thick black hair and trail them over her incredibly warm, soft skin. Her bewilderment changing to shock, the girl stammered that he should go away, and tried to get up. Siru’s fingers tightened on her arms and he pressed her back on the bed. She struggled, pushing him away, and Siru sliding off the slippery coverlet, grasped her ankles, refusing to be shaken off.

Looking down at the little man so ludicrously crouched at feet, his plump hands glued to her ankles, the Goan girl, fear forgotten, began to laugh softly. The sound jarred on Siru. It threatened the peace and serenity of his mood. He looked up at her in anguish, beseeching her to, stop, but the sight of his face seemed to send her into fresh gales of laughter. She should have been lying in his arms, not laughing at all, he thought confusedly. With sudden cruel perception he saw himself as he must appear to her. She did not look upon him as a lover, but as a clown. There were bits of broken glass lying about on the floor, and picking one up, he slashed it across his face and neck with deliberate savagery. He heard her screaming but he had fainted before the others arrived to carry him to his own room.

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