They made, in that moment, a small, private, entirely deliberate choice — to notice the shadow, weigh it honestly, and then set it aside in favour of the joy actually in front of them, trusting, as young people in love are entitled to trust, that the deeper bond between their two families would prove sturdier than any passing remark from a relative who did not, in the end, know either household half so well as he seemed to believe.
It was, Kamala would reflect much later, precisely the choice every reasonable person in either family had been making, in one form or another, for the better part of a year — noticing each small crack as it appeared, weighing it, and choosing, each time, to trust the larger structure over the growing evidence of the smaller fractures within it.
It was simply the choice anyone makes who loves something too much to imagine it breaking — right up until the day it finally does.
— Later that evening, once the guests had gone and the formal patra had been carefully filed away among the household’s most treasured documents, Satyen Babu found Bipin Babu alone under the mango tree, the two of them lingering a while longer in the cool December dark before the evening properly ended.
“Nirmal meant no real harm,” Satyen Babu said, without preamble, having clearly been turning the afternoon’s small unpleasantness over in his own mind.
“I want you to know I don’t hold his remark against your family, Bipin, whatever tactlessness prompted it.” “Nor do I hold Prabir’s presence against yours,” Bipin Babu said, “though I confess it required rather more effort on my part than I expected, watching a Forward Bloc man mingle so easily among my own relatives on my son’s engagement day.” “Effort well spent, I hope.” “Entirely well spent,” Bipin Babu said, and meant it. This story is hosted at novelping dot com.
“Today was not a day for politics, Satyen, whatever certain guests seemed to believe.
Today was a day for exactly what we both signed our names to this afternoon — a promise, made freely, by two young people who love each other, joining two households that have loved each other for a great deal longer than either of us has spent arguing about Congress or the Forward Bloc.” “Well said.” Satyen Babu clasped his old friend’s hand, the gesture carrying, for the length of that particular evening, all the old warmth of nineteen years.
“Whatever comes, Bipin — whatever the newspapers bring us in the months ahead — I do not believe there exists a disagreement large enough to undo what we signed our names to this afternoon.” It was the second time, in as many years, that one or the other of them had made almost exactly this same promise beneath this same tree — a promise offered, each time, in perfect sincerity, by two men who genuinely believed it, and who had, so far, every reasonable evidence to support that belief.
Neither man, standing together in the cool December dark with the formal patra safely filed away and their children’s happiness settled, for the moment, beyond any real doubt, had the smallest reason yet to imagine that the very next season would bring a test their friendship had never before been asked to withstand — nor that the small, easily-dismissed shadow of that afternoon’s careless remark was not, as both of them so readily assumed, an isolated and forgettable unpleasantness, but the first faint outline of a storm that had already, quietly, begun to gather.