A Suitable Boy

  ‘What will you listen to next, Maheshji?’ Saeeda Bai asked his father. ‘What a grand audience you always provide in your house. And so knowledgeable that I sometimes feel myself redundant. I need only sing two words and you gentlemen complete the rest of the ghazal.’

  There were cries of ‘No, no!’, ‘What are you saying?’ and ‘We are your mere shadows, Saeeda Begum!’

  ‘I know that it is not because of my voice but through your grace—and that of the one above—’ she added, ‘that I am here tonight. I see your son is as appreciative of my poor efforts as you have been for many years. Such things must run in the blood. Your father, may he rest in peace, was full of kindness to my mother. And now I am the recipient of your graciousness.’

  ‘Who has graced whom?’ responded Mahesh Kapoor gallantly.

  Lata looked at him in some surprise. Maan caught her eye and winked—and Lata could not help smiling back. Now that he was a relative, she felt much easier with him. Her mind flashed back to his behaviour this morning, and again a smile curled up at the corners of her mouth. Lata would never be able to hear Professor Mishra lecturing again without seeing him emerge from the tub as wet and pink and helpless as a baby.

  ‘But some young men are so silent,’ Saeeda Bai continued, ‘that they might as well themselves be idols in temples. Perhaps they have opened their veins so often that they have no blood left. Hanh?’ She laughed delightfully.

  ‘Why should my heart not be tied to him?’ she quoted—

  ‘Today he is dressed in colourful clothes.’

  Young Hashim looked down guiltily at his blue, embroidered kurta. But Saeeda Bai continued unmercifully:

  ‘How can I praise his fine taste in dress?

  In appearance he is like a prince.’

  Since much Urdu poetry, like much Persian and Arabic poetry before it, had been addressed by poets to young men, Saeeda Bai found it mischievously easy to find such references to male dress and demeanour as would make it clear whom she was aiming her shafts at. Hashim might blush and burn and bite his lower lip but her quiver was not likely to run out of couplets. She looked at him and recited:

  ‘Your red lips are full of nectar.

  How rightly you have been named Amrit Lal!’

  Hashim’s friends were by now convulsed with laughter. But perhaps Saeeda Bai realized that he could not take much more amorous baiting for the moment, and she graciously permitted him a little respite. By now the audience felt bold enough to make its own suggestions, and after Saeeda Bai had indulged her taste for one of the more abstruse and referential ghazals of Ghalib—a strongly intellectual taste for so sensuous a singer—someone in the audience suggested one of his simpler favourites, ‘Where have those meetings and those partings gone?’

  Saeeda Bai assented by turning to the sarangi and tabla players and murmuring a few words. The sarangi began to play an introduction to the slow, melancholy, nostalgic ghazal, written by Ghalib not in his old age but when he was not much older than the singer herself. But Saeeda Bai invested each of its questioning couplets with such bitterness and sweetness that even the hearts of the oldest in the audience were moved. When they joined in at the end of a familiar sentimental line it was as if they were asking a question of themselves rather than displaying their knowledge to their neighbours. And this attentiveness brought forth a yet deeper response from the singer, so that even the difficult last couplet, where Ghalib reverts to his metaphysical abstractions, climaxed rather than ebbed away from the ghazal as a whole.

  After this wonderful rendition, the audience was eating out of the palm of Saeeda Bai’s hand. Those who had planned to leave at the latest by eleven o’clock found themselves unable to tear themselves away, and soon it was past midnight.

  Maan’s little nephew had gone off to sleep in his lap, as had many of the other young boys, and they had been taken off to bed by the servants. Maan himself, who had been in love often enough in the past and was therefore prone to a sort of cheerful nostalgia, was overwhelmed by Saeeda Bai’s last ghazal, and popped a thoughtful cashew nut into his mouth. What could he do?—he felt he was falling irresistibly in love with her. Saeeda Bai had now reverted to her playfulness with Hashim, and Maan felt a little jab of jealousy as she tried to get a response out of the boy. When

  ‘The tulip and the rose, how do they compare with you?

  They are no more than incomplete metaphors’

  produced no result beyond a restless shifting in his place, she attempted the bolder couplet:

  ‘Your beauty was that which once bewitched the world—

  Even after the first down came on your cheeks it was a wonder.’

  This found its mark. There were two puns here, one mild and one not so mild: ‘world’ and ‘wonder’ were the same word—aalam—and ‘the first down’ could possibly be taken as meaning ‘a letter’. Hashim, who had a very light down on his face, tried his best to act as if ‘khat’ simply meant letter, but it cost him a great deal of discomfiture. He looked around at his father for support in his suffering—his own friends were less than no help, having long ago decided to join in teasing him—but the absent-minded Dr Durrani was half-asleep somewhere at the back. One of his friends rubbed his palm gently along Hashim’s cheek and sighed strickenly. Blushing, Hashim got up to leave the courtyard and take a walk in the garden. He was only half on his feet when Saeeda Bai fired a barrel of Ghalib at him:

  ‘At the mere mention of my name in the gathering she got up to go. . . .’

  Hashim, almost in tears, did adaab to Saeeda Bai, and walked out of the courtyard. Lata, her eyes shining with quiet excitement, felt rather sorry for him; but soon she too had to leave with her mother and Savita and Pran.

  2.5

  Maan, on the other hand, did not feel at all sorry for his lily-livered rival. He came forward, and with a nod to the left and the right, and a respectful salutation to the singer, seated himself in Hashim’s place. Saeeda Bai, happy to have a prepossessing if not quite so sprig-like a volunteer as her source of inspiration for the rest of the evening, smiled at him and said:

  ‘By no means forsake constancy, O heart,

  For love without constancy has weak foundations.’

  To which Maan replied instantly and stoutly:

  ‘Wherever Dagh has sat down he has sat down.

  Others may quit your assembly, not he!’

  This met with laughter from the audience, but Saeeda Bai decided to have the last word by repaying him in his own poet:

  ‘Dagh is ogling and peeping once more.

  He will trip up and get ensnared somewhere.’

  At this just response the audience burst into spontaneous applause. Maan was as delighted as anyone that Saeeda Bai Firozabadi had trumped his ace or, as she would have put it, tenned his nine. She was laughing as hard as anyone, and so were her accompanists, the fat tabla player and his lean counterpart on the sarangi. After a while, Saeeda Bai raised her hand for silence and said, ‘I hope that half that applause was intended for my witty young friend here.’

  Maan replied with playful contrition: ‘Ah, Saeeda Begum, I had the temerity to banter with you but—all my arrangements were in vain.’

  The audience laughed again, and Saeeda Bai Firozabadi rewarded this quotation from Mir with a lovely rendition of the appropriate ghazal:

  ‘All my arrangements were in vain, no drug could cure my malady.

  It was an ailment of my heart that made a final end of me.

  My term of youth I passed in tears, in age I closed my eyes at last;

  That is: I lay awake long nights till dawn and sleep came finally.’

  Maan looked at her, bewitched, entranced and enraptured. What would it be like to lie awake long nights till dawn, listening to her voice in his ear?

  ‘We who were helpless were accused of independent thought and deed.

  They did whatever they desired, and us they smeared with calumny.

  Here in this world of darkness and of light this is m
y only part:

  To somehow pass from day to night and night to day in misery.

  Why do you ask what has become of Mir’s religion, his Islam?

  Wearing the brahmin’s mark he haunts the temples of idolatry.’

  The night continued with alternating banter and music. It was very late now; the audience of a hundred had thinned to a dozen. But Saeeda Bai was now so deep in the flow of music that those who remained, remained spellbound. They moved forward into a more intimate group. Maan did not know whether he was held there more by his ears or by his eyes. From time to time Saeeda Bai paused in her singing and talked to the surviving faithful. She dismissed the sarangi and tanpura players. Finally she even dismissed her tabla player, who could hardly keep his eyes open. Her voice and the harmonium were all that were left, and they provided enchantment enough. It was near dawn when she herself yawned and rose.

  Maan looked at her with half-longing, half-laughing eyes. ‘I’ll arrange for the car,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll walk in the garden till then,’ said Saeeda Bai. ‘This is the most beautiful time of night. Just have this’—she indicated the harmonium—‘and the other things—sent back to my place tomorrow morning. Well, then,’ she continued to the five or six people left in the courtyard:

  ‘Now Mir takes his leave from the temple of idols—

  We shall meet again . . .’

  Maan completed the couplet: ‘. . . if it be God’s will.’

  He looked at her for an acknowledging nod, but she had turned towards the garden already.

  Saeeda Bai Firozabadi, suddenly weary ‘of all this’ (but what was ‘all this’?) strolled for a minute or two through the garden of Prem Nivas. She touched the glossy leaves of a pomelo tree. The harsingar was no longer in bloom, but a jacaranda flower dropped downwards in the darkness. She looked up and smiled to herself a little sadly. Everything was quiet: not even a watchman, not even a dog. A few favourite lines from a minor poet, Minai, came to her mind, and she recited, rather than sang, them aloud:

  ‘The meeting has dispersed; the moths

  Bid farewell to the candlelight.

  Departure’s hour is on the sky.

  Only a few stars mark the night. . . .’

  She coughed a little—for the night had got chilly all of a sudden—wrapped her light shawl more closely around her, and waited for someone to escort her to her own house, also in Pasand Bagh, no more than a few minutes away.

  2.6

  The day after Saeeda Bai sang at Prem Nivas was Sunday. The light-hearted spirit of Holi was still in the air. Maan could not get her out of his mind.

  He wandered about in a daze. He arranged for her harmonium to be sent on to her house early in the afternoon, and was tempted to get into the car himself. But that was hardly the time to visit Saeeda Bai—who had, anyway, given him no indication that she would be pleased to see him again.

  Maan had nothing as such to do. That was part of his problem. In Banaras there was business of a kind to keep him busy; in Brahmpur he had always felt himself to be at a loose end. He didn’t really mind, though. Reading was not something he enjoyed much, but he did like wandering around with friends. Perhaps he should visit Firoz, he thought.

  Then, thinking of the ghazals of Mast, he jumped into a tonga, and told the tonga-wallah to take him to the Barsaat Mahal. It had been years since Maan had been there, and the thought of seeing it appealed to him today.

  The tonga passed through the green residential ‘colonies’ of the eastern part of Brahmpur, and came to Nabiganj, the commercial street that marked the end of spaciousness and the start of clutter and confusion. Old Brahmpur lay beyond it, and, almost at the western end of the old town, on the Ganga itself, stood the beautiful grounds and the still more beautiful marble structure of the Barsaat Mahal.

  Nabiganj was the fashionable shopping street where the quality of Brahmpur were to be seen strolling up and down of an evening. At the moment, in the heat of the afternoon, there were not many shoppers about, and only a few cars and tongas and bicycles. The signs of Nabiganj were painted in English, and the prices matched the signs. Bookshops like the Imperial Book Depot, well-stocked general stores such as Dowling & Snapp (now under Indian management), fine tailors such as Magourian’s where Firoz had all his clothes (from suits to achkans) made, the Praha shoe shop, an elegant jeweller’s, restaurants and coffee houses such as the Red Fox, Chez Yasmeen, and the Blue Danube, and two cinema halls—Manorma Talkies (which showed Hindi films) and the Rialto (which leaned towards Hollywood and Ealing): each of these places had played some minor or major role in one or another of Maan’s romances. But today, as the tonga trotted through the broad street, Maan paid them no attention. The tonga turned off on to a smaller road, and almost immediately on to a yet smaller one, and they were now in a different world.

  There was just enough room for the tonga to get through among the bullock-carts, rickshaws, cycles and pedestrians who thronged both the road and the pavement—which they shared with barbers plying their trade out of doors, fortune tellers, flimsy tea-stalls, vegetable-stands, monkey-trainers, ear-cleaners, pickpockets, stray cattle, the odd sleepy policeman sauntering along in faded khaki, sweat-soaked men carrying impossible loads of copper, steel rods, glass or scrap paper on their backs as they yelled ‘Look out! Look out!’ in voices that somehow pierced through the din, shops of brassware and cloth (the owners attempting with shouts and gestures to entice uncertain shoppers in), the small carved stone entrance of the Tinny Tots (English Medium) School which opened out on to the courtyard of the reconverted haveli of a bankrupt aristocrat, and beggars—young and old, aggressive and meek, leprous, maimed or blinded—who would quietly invade Nabiganj as evening fell, attempting to avoid the police as they worked the queues in front of the cinema halls. Crows cawed, small boys in rags rushed around on errands (one balancing six small dirty glasses of tea on a cheap tin tray as he weaved through the crowd), monkeys chattered in and bounded about a great shivering-leafed pipal tree and tried to raid unwary customers as they left the well-guarded fruit-stand, women shuffled along in anonymous burqas or bright saris, with or without their menfolk, a few students from the university lounging around a chaat-stand shouted at each other from a foot away either out of habit or in order to be heard, mangy dogs snapped and were kicked, skeletal cats mewed and were stoned, and flies settled everywhere: on heaps of foetid, rotting rubbish, on the uncovered sweets at the sweetseller’s in whose huge curved pans of ghee sizzled delicious jalebis, on the faces of the sari-clad but not the burqa-clad women, and on the horse’s nostrils as he shook his blinkered head and tried to forge his way through Old Brahmpur in the direction of the Barsaat Mahal.

  Maan’s thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the sight of Firoz standing by a pavement stall. He halted the tonga at once and got down.

  ‘Firoz, you’ll have a long life—I was just thinking about you. Well, half an hour ago!’

  Firoz said that he was just wandering about, and had decided to buy a walking stick.

  ‘For yourself or for your father?’

  ‘For myself.’

  ‘A man who has to buy himself a walking stick in his twenties might not have such a long life after all,’ said Maan.

  Firoz, after leaning at various angles on various sticks, decided upon one and, without haggling about the price, bought it.

  ‘And you, what are you doing here? Paying a visit to Tarbuz ka Bazaar?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t be disgusting,’ said Maan cheerfully. Tarbuz ka Bazaar was the street of singing girls and prostitutes.

  ‘Oh, but I forgot,’ said Firoz slyly: ‘Why should you consort with mere melons when you can taste the peaches of Samarkand?’

  Maan frowned.

  ‘What further news of Saeeda Bai?’ continued Firoz, who, from the back of the audience, had enjoyed the previous night. Though he had left by midnight, he had sensed that, Maan’s engagement notwithstanding, romance was once again entering his friend’s life. Mor
e, perhaps, than anyone else, he knew and understood Maan.

  ‘What do you expect?’ asked Maan, a little glumly. ‘Things will happen the way they will. She didn’t even allow me to escort her back.’

  This was quite unlike Maan, thought Firoz, who had very rarely seen his friend depressed. ‘So where are you going?’ he asked him.

  ‘To the Barsaat Mahal.’

  ‘To end it all?’ inquired Firoz tenderly. The parapet of the Barsaat Mahal faced the Ganga and was the venue of a number of romantic suicides every year.

  ‘Yes, yes, to end it all,’ said Maan impatiently. ‘Now tell me, Firoz, what do you advise?’

  Firoz laughed. ‘Say that again. I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Maan Kapoor, beau of Brahmpur, at whose feet young women of good families, heedless of reputation, hasten to fling themselves like bees on a lotus, seeks the advice of the steely and stainless Firoz on how to proceed in a matter of the heart. You’re not asking for my legal advice, are you?’

  ‘If you’re going to act like that—’ began Maan, disgruntled. Suddenly a thought struck him. ‘Firoz, why is Saeeda Bai called Firozabadi? I thought she came from these parts.’

  Firoz replied: ‘Well, her people did in fact originally come from Firozabad. But that’s all history. In fact her mother Mohsina Bai settled in Tarbuz ka Bazaar, and Saeeda Bai was brought up in this part of the city.’ He pointed his stick towards the disreputable quarter. ‘But naturally Saeeda Bai herself, now that she’s made good and lives in Pasand Bagh—and breathes the same air as you and I—doesn’t like people to talk about her local origins.’

  Maan mused over this for a few moments. ‘How do you know so much about her?’ he asked, puzzled.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Firoz, waving away a fly. ‘This sort of information just floats around in the air.’ Not reacting to Maan’s look of astonishment, he went on, ‘But I must be off. My father wants me to meet someone boring who’s coming to tea.’ Firoz leapt into Maan’s tonga. ‘It’s too crowded to ride a tonga through Old Brahmpur; you’re better off on foot,’ he told Maan, and drove off.