A Suitable Boy

  Maan woke up, sweating, and was relieved to return to the familiar objects of his room in Prem Nivas—the stuffed chair and the overhead fan and the red rug and the five or six paperback thrillers.

  Quickly dismissing the dream from his mind, he went to wash his face. But as he looked at his startled expression in the mirror a picture of the women in the dream came vividly back to him. Why were they laughing at me? he asked himself. Was the laughter unkind . . .? It was just a dream, he went on, reassuringly. But though he kept splashing water on his face, he could not get the notion out of his head that there was an explanation, and that it lay just beyond his reach. He closed his eyes to recapture something of the dream once more, but it was all extremely vague now, and only his unease, the sense that he had left something behind, remained. The faces of the women, the villagers, the ticket collector, the policemen, had all been washed away. What could I have left behind? he wondered. Why were they laughing at me?

  From somewhere in the house he could hear his father calling sharply: ‘Maan, Maan—are you awake? The guests will start arriving for the concert in half an hour.’ He did not answer and looked at himself in the mirror. Not a bad face, he thought: lively, fresh, strong-featured, but balding slightly at the temples—which struck him as being a bit unfair, considering that he was only twenty-five. A few minutes later a servant was sent to inform him that his father wished to see him in the courtyard. Maan asked the servant if his sister Veena had arrived yet, and heard that she and her family had come and gone. Veena had in fact come to his room but, finding him asleep, had not let her son Bhaskar disturb him.

  Maan frowned, yawned, and went to the clothes’ cupboard. He wasn’t interested in guests and concerts and he wanted to go to sleep again, dreamlessly this time. That was how he usually spent the evening of Holi when he was in Banaras—sleeping off his bhang.

  Downstairs the guests had started coming in. They were most of them dressed in new clothes and, apart from a little red under the nails and in the hair, were not outwardly coloured by the morning’s revels. But they were all in excellent humour, and smiling, not just from the effect of the bhang. Mahesh Kapoor’s Holi concerts were an annual ritual, and had been going on at Prem Nivas for as long as anyone could remember. His father and grandfather had hosted them as well, and the only years that anyone could remember that they had not been held were when their host had been in jail.

  Saeeda Bai Firozabadi was the singer tonight, as she had been for the last two years. She lived not far from Prem Nivas, came from a family of singers and courtesans, and had a fine, rich, and powerfully emotional voice. She was a woman of about thirty-five, but her fame as a singer had already spread outwards from Brahmpur and nowadays she was called for recitals as far away as Bombay and Calcutta. Many of Mahesh Kapoor’s guests this evening had come not so much to enjoy their host’s—or, more accurately, their unobtrusive hostess’s—excellent hospitality as to listen to Saeeda Bai. Maan, who had spent his previous two Holis in Banaras, knew of her fame but had not heard her sing.

  Rugs and white sheets were spread over the semi-circular courtyard, which was bounded by whitewashed rooms and open corridors along the curve, and was open to the garden on the straight side. There was no stage, no microphone, no visible separation of the singer’s area from the audience. There were no chairs, just pillows and bolsters to lean on, and a few potted plants around the edge of the sitting area. The first few guests were standing around sipping fruit juice or thandai and nibbling kababs or nuts or traditional Holi sweets. Mahesh Kapoor stood greeting his guests as they came into the courtyard, but he was waiting for Maan to come down to relieve him so that he could spend a little time talking to some of his guests instead of merely exchanging perfunctory pleasantries with all of them. If he doesn’t come down in five minutes, said Mahesh Kapoor to himself, I’ll go upstairs and shake him awake myself. He may as well be in Banaras for all his usefulness. Where is the boy? The car’s already been sent for Saeeda Bai.

  2.3

  The car had in fact been sent for Saeeda Bai and her musicians more than half an hour ago, and Mahesh Kapoor was just beginning to be concerned. Most of the audience had by now sat down, but some were still standing around and talking. Saeeda Bai was known on occasion to have committed to sing somewhere and then simply gone off on an impulse somewhere else—perhaps to visit an old or a new flame, or to see a relative, or even to sing to a small circle of friends. She behaved very much to suit her own inclinations. This policy, or rather tendency, could have done her a great deal of harm professionally if her voice and her manner had not been as captivating as they were. There was even a mystery to her irresponsibility if seen in a certain light. This light had begun to dim for Mahesh Kapoor, however, when he heard a buzz of muted exclamation from the door: Saeeda Bai and her three accompanists had finally arrived.

  She looked stunning. If she had not sung a word all evening but had kept smiling at familiar faces and looking appreciatively around the room, pausing whenever she saw a handsome man or a good-looking (if modern) woman, that would have been enough for most of the men present. But very shortly she made her way to the open side of the courtyard—the part bordering the garden—and sat down near her harmonium, which a servant of the house had carried from the car. She moved the pallu of her silk sari further forward over her head: it tended to slip down, and one of her most charming gestures—to be repeated throughout the evening—was to adjust her sari to ensure that her head was not left uncovered. The musicians—a tabla player, a sarangi player, and a man who strummed the tanpura—sat down and started tuning their instruments as she pressed down a black key with a heavily ringed right hand, gently forcing air through the bellows with an equally bejewelled left. The tabla player used a small silver hammer to tauten the leather straps on his right-hand drum, the sarangi player adjusted his tuning pegs and bowed a few phrases on the strings. The audience adjusted itself and found places for new arrivals. Several boys, some as young as six, sat down near their fathers or uncles. There was an air of pleasant expectancy. Shallow bowls filled with rose and jasmine petals were passed around: those who, like Imtiaz, were still somewhat high on bhang, lingered delightedly over their enhanced fragrance.

  Upstairs on the balcony two of the (less modern) women looked down through the slits in a cane screen and discussed Saeeda Bai’s dress, ornament, face, manner, antecedents and voice.

  ‘Nice sari, but nothing special. She always wears Banarasi silk. Red tonight. Last year it was green. Stop and go.’

  ‘Look at that zari work in the sari.’

  ‘Very flashy, very flashy—but I suppose all that is necessary in her profession, poor thing.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say “poor thing”. Look at her jewels. That heavy gold necklace with the enamel work—’

  ‘It comes down a bit too low for my taste—’

  ‘—well, anyway, they say it was given to her by the Sitagarh people!’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And many of those rings too, I should think. She’s quite a favourite of the Nawab of Sitagarh. They say he’s quite a lover of music.’

  ‘And of music-makers?’

  ‘Naturally. Now she’s greeting Maheshji and his son Maan. He looks very pleased with himself. Is that the Governor he’s—’

  ‘Yes, yes, all these Congress-wallahs are the same. They talk about simplicity and plain living, and then they invite this kind of person to the house to entertain their friends.’

  ‘Well, she’s not a dancer or anything like that.’

  ‘No, but you can’t deny what she is!’

  ‘But your husband has come as well.’

  ‘My husband!’

  The two ladies—one the wife of an ear, nose and throat specialist, one the wife of an important middleman in the shoe trade—looked at each other in exasperated resignation at the ways of men.

  ‘She’s exchanging greetings with the Governor now. Look at him grinning. What a fat little man—but they say he’s v
ery capable.’

  ‘Aré, what does a Governor have to do except snip a few ribbons here and there and enjoy the luxuries of Government House? Can you hear what she’s saying?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Every time she shakes her head the diamond on her nose-pin flashes. It’s like the headlight of a car.’

  ‘A car that has seen many passengers in its time.’

  ‘What time? She’s only thirty-five. She’s guaranteed for many more miles. And all those rings. No wonder she loves doing adaab to anyone she sees.’

  ‘Diamonds and sapphires mainly, though I can’t see clearly from here. What a large diamond that is on her right hand—’

  ‘No, that’s a white something—I was going to say a white sapphire, but it isn’t that—I was told it was even more expensive than a diamond, but I can’t remember what they call it.’

  ‘Why does she need to wear all those bright glass bangles among the gold ones. They look a bit cheap!’

  ‘Well, she’s not called Firozabadi for nothing. Even if her forefathers—her foremothers—don’t come from Firozabad, at least her glass bangles do. Oh-hoh, look at the eyes she’s making at the young men!’

  ‘Shameless.’

  ‘That poor young man doesn’t know where to look.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Dr Durrani’s younger son, Hashim. He’s just eighteen.’

  ‘Hmm. . . .’

  ‘Very good-looking. Look at him blush.’

  ‘Blush! All these Muslim boys might look innocent, but they are lascivious in their hearts, let me tell you. When we used to live in Karachi—’

  But at this point Saeeda Bai Firozabadi, having exchanged salutations with various members of the audience, having spoken to her musicians in a low tone, having placed a paan in the corner of her right cheek, and having coughed twice to clear her throat, began to sing.

  2.4

  Only a few words had emerged from that lovely throat when the ‘wah! wahs!’ and other appreciative comments of the audience elicited an acknowledging smile from Saeeda Bai. Lovely she certainly was, and yet in what did her loveliness lie? Most of the men there would have been hard-pressed to explain it; the women sitting above might have been more perceptive. She was no more than pleasing-looking, but she had all the airs of the distinguished courtesan—the small marks of favour, the tilt of the head, the flash of the nose-pin, a delightful mixture of directness and circuitousness in her attentions to those whom she was attracted by, a knowledge of Urdu poetry, especially of the ghazal, that was by no means viewed as shallow even in an audience of cognoscenti. But more than all this, and more than her clothes and jewels and even her exceptional natural talent and musical training, was a touch of heartache in her voice. Where it had come from, no one knew for sure, though rumours about her past were common enough in Brahmpur. Even the women could not say that this sadness was a device. She seemed somehow to be both bold and vulnerable, and it was this combination that was irresistible.

  It being Holi, she began her recital with a few Holi songs. Saeeda Bai Firozabadi was Muslim, but sang these happy descriptions of young Krishna playing Holi with the milkmaids of his foster-father’s village with such charm and energy that one would have had to be convinced that she saw the scene before her own eyes. The little boys in the audience looked at her wonderingly. Even Savita, whose first Holi this was at her parents-in-law’s house, and who had come more out of duty than from the expectation of pleasure, began to enjoy herself.

  Mrs Rupa Mehra, torn between the need to protect her younger daughter and the inappropriateness of one of her generation, particularly a widow, forming a part of the downstairs audience, had (with a strict admonition to Pran to keep an eye on Lata) disappeared upstairs. She was looking through a gap in the cane screen and saying to Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, ‘In my time, no women would have been allowed in the courtyard for such an evening.’ It was a little unfair of Mrs Rupa Mehra to make such an objection known to her quiet, much-put-upon hostess, who had in fact spoken about this very matter to her husband, and had been impatiently overruled by him on the grounds that the times were changing.

  People came in and out of the courtyard during the recital, and, as Saeeda Bai’s eye caught a movement somewhere in the audience, she acknowledged the new guest with a gesture of her hand that broke the line of her self-accompaniment on the harmonium. But the mournful bowed strings of the sarangi were more than a sufficient shadow to her voice, and she often turned to the player with a look of appreciation for some particularly fine imitation or improvisation. Most of her attention, however, was devoted to young Hashim Durrani, who sat in the front row and blushed beetroot whenever she broke off singing to make some pointed remark or address some casual couplet towards him. Saeeda Bai was notorious for choosing a single person in the audience early in the evening and addressing all her songs to that one person—he would become for her the cruel one, the slayer, the hunter, the executioner and so on—the anchor, in fact, for her ghazals.

  Saeeda Bai enjoyed most of all singing the ghazals of Mir and Ghalib, but she also had a taste for Vali Dakkani—and for Mast, whose poetry was not particularly distinguished, but who was a great local favourite because he had spent much of his unhappy life in Brahmpur, reciting many of his ghazals for the first time in the Barsaat Mahal for the culture-stricken Nawab of Brahmpur before his incompetent, bankrupt, and heirless kingdom was annexed by the British. So her first ghazal was one of Mast’s, and no sooner had the first phrase been sung than the enraptured audience burst into a roar of appreciation.

  ‘I do not stoop, yet find my collar torn . . .’ she began, and half-closed her eyes.

  ‘I do not stoop, yet find my collar torn.

  The thorns were here, beneath my feet, not there.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Justice Maheshwari helplessly, his head vibrating in ecstasy on his plump neck. Saeeda Bai continued:

  ‘Can I be blameless when no voice will blame

  The hunter who has caught me in this snare?’

  Here Saeeda Bai shot a half-melting, half-accusing look at the poor eighteen-year-old. He looked down immediately, and one of his friends nudged him and repeated delightedly, ‘Can you be blameless?’ which embarrassed him yet further.

  Lata looked at the young fellow with sympathy, and at Saeeda Bai with fascination. How can she do this? she thought, admiring and slightly horrified—she’s just moulding their feelings like putty, and all those men can do is grin and groan! And Maan’s the worst of the lot! Lata liked more serious classical music as a rule. But now she—like her sister—found herself enjoying the ghazal too, and also—though it was strange to her—the transformed, romantic atmosphere of Prem Nivas. She was glad her mother was upstairs.

  Meanwhile, Saeeda Bai, extending an arm to the guests, sang on:

  ‘The pious people shun the tavern door—

  But I need courage to outstare their stare.’

  ‘Wah! wah!’ cried Imtiaz loudly from the back. Saeeda Bai graced him with a dazzling smile, then frowned as if startled. However, gathering herself together, she continued:

  ‘After a wakeful night outside that lane,

  The breeze of morning stirs the scented air.

  Interpretation’s Gate is closed and barred

  But I go through and neither know nor care.’

  ‘And neither know nor care,’ was sung simultaneously by twenty voices.

  Saeeda Bai rewarded their enthusiasm with a tilt of her head. But the unorthodoxy of this couplet was outdone by that of the next:

  ‘I kneel within the Kaaba of my heart

  And to my idol raise my face in prayer.’

  The audience sighed and groaned; her voice almost broke at the word ‘prayer’; one would have had to be an unfeeling idol oneself to have disapproved.

  ‘Though blinded by the sun I see, O Mast,

  The moonlight of the face, the clouds of hair.’

  Maan was so affected by Saeeda Bai’s recitation of this final
couplet that he raised his arms helplessly towards her. Saeeda Bai coughed to clear her throat, and looked at him enigmatically. Maan felt hot and shivery all over, and was speechless for a while, but drummed a tabla beat on the head of one of his rustic nephews, aged seven.