A Suitable Boy, Page 89

  Later he returned to his room. For some reason the taps and flushes in his bathroom did not work, but there were buckets and brass pots of water sufficient for his needs. After a few days of going out into the fields, or the fairly rudimentary facilities of the SDO’s bungalow, the marble-tiled bathroom of Firoz’s room, even if he had to pour his own water, was for Maan an extreme luxury. Apart from a tub and shower and two sinks, there was a dusty-seated European-style toilet and an Indian one as well. The former was inscribed in a kind of quatrain as follows:

  J B Norton & Sons Ld

  Sanitary Engineers

  Old Court House Corner

  Calcutta

  The latter said, more simply:

  Norton’s Patent

  ‘The Hindu’

  Combined Closet

  Calcutta

  Maan, as he used the latter, wondered whether anyone before him in this erstwhile stronghold of the Muslim League had meditated on this subversive inscription, rebelling perhaps at the thought that this item of their common cultural heritage should have been so arbitrarily ascribed by the British to those of the other and rival religion.

  10.9

  The next morning Maan met the munshi as he was bicycling in; they exchanged a few words. The munshi was eager to know if everything had been to Maan’s satisfaction: the food, the room, the behaviour of Waris. He apologized for Waris’s crudity: ‘But, Sir, what can we do, they are such yokels hereabouts.’ Maan told him that he planned to be taken around town by the yokel, and the munshi licked his moustache in nervous displeasure.

  Then he brightened up and informed Maan that he was going to arrange a hunt for him the next day.

  Waris packed lunch, offered Maan a choice of hats, and showed him around the sights of the town, telling him all about the improvements that had taken place since the time of the Nawab Sahib’s heroic great-grandfather. He shouted roughly at people who stared at the white-shirted, white-trousered sahib. By late afternoon they had returned to the Fort. At the gate the porter spoke sternly to Waris:

  ‘Munshiji said you were to be back by three. There is a shortage of wood in the kitchen. He is very annoyed. He is sitting with the estate tehsildar in the big office room and he says you are to report to him immediately.’

  Waris grimaced. He realized he was in some sort of minor trouble. The munshi was always irritable at this time of day; it was like a malarial cycle. Maan, however, said:

  ‘Look, I’ll come with you and explain things.’

  ‘No, no, Maan Sahib, why bother? A hornet bites the haramzada’s penis at four thirty every day.’

  ‘It’s no trouble.’

  ‘You are very good, Maan Sahib. You must not forget me when you go away.’

  ‘Of course I won’t. Now let’s see what your munshi has to say.’

  They entered the hot paved courtyard and walked up the stairs to the large office room. The munshi was sitting not at the big desk in the corner (reserved presumably for the Nawab Sahib) but cross-legged on the floor in front of a small, wooden, brass-inlaid writing desk with a sloping surface. The knuckles of his left hand were pressed into his grey-and-white moustache. He was looking disgustedly at an old woman, very poor by the look of her tattered sari, who was standing before him, her face streaked with tears.

  The estate tehsildar was standing behind the munshi and was looking angry and fierce.

  ‘Do you think you can enter the Fort like this under false pretences and then expect us to listen to you?’ said the munshi testily. He did not notice Maan and Waris, who were standing just outside the door; they had paused when they heard the sound of his raised voice.

  ‘I had no other way,’ faltered the old woman. ‘Allah knows I have tried to speak to you—please, Munshiji, listen to my prayers. Our family has served this house for generations—’

  The munshi interrupted her: ‘Were you serving this house when your son tried to get his tenancy on to the village records? What does he want to do? Take away the land that does not belong to him? If we have taught him a lesson, that is nothing strange.’

  ‘But it is only the truth—the land has been farmed by him—’

  ‘What? Have you come here to argue and to teach me about truth? I know how much truth there is in what you people say.’ An abrasiveness now appeared beneath the smoothness of his voice. Nor did he bother to disguise his pleasure in exercising the power of crushing her under his heel.

  The old woman started trembling. ‘It was a mistake. He should not have done it. But apart from our land, what do we have, Munshiji? We will starve if you take our land away. Your men have beaten him up, he has learned his lesson. Forgive him—and forgive me, who have come to you with folded hands, for having given birth to the miserable boy.’

  ‘Go,’ said the munshi. ‘I have heard enough. You have your hut. Go and parch grain. Or sell your withered body. And tell your son to plough someone else’s fields.’

  The woman started weeping helplessly.

  ‘Go,’ repeated the munshi. ‘Are you deaf as well as stupid?’

  ‘You have no humanity,’ said the old woman between sobs. ‘A day will come when your deeds will be weighed. On that day, when God says—’

  ‘What?’ The munshi had stood up. He stared into the woman’s wrinkled face with its tearful and downcast eyes and its bitter mouth. ‘What? What was that you said? I was thinking of being lenient, but now I know what it is my duty to do. We cannot have people like you creating trouble on the Nawab Sahib’s land after having enjoyed his grace and hospitality for years.’ He turned to the estate tehsildar. ‘Get the old witch out of here—throw her out of the Fort and tell the men that I want her out of her house in the village by tonight. That will teach her and her ingrate of a son—’

  He stopped in mid-sentence and stared, not in real or pretended anger but in unsimulated terror. His mouth closed and opened, he panted almost soundlessly, and his tongue moved towards his moustache.

  For Maan, white-faced with rage, his mind a blank of fury, was walking towards him like an automaton, looking neither left nor right, and with murder in his eyes.

  The tehsildar, the old woman, the manservant, the munshi himself—no one moved. Maan grabbed hold of the munshi’s fat, rough-stubbled neck and started shaking him wordlessly and violently, hardly mindful of the terror in the man’s eyes. His own teeth were bared, and he looked terrifying. The munshi gasped and choked—his hands flew up to his neck. The tehsildar stepped forward—but only a step. Suddenly Maan let the munshi go, and he crumpled downwards on to his desk.

  No one said anything for a minute. The munshi gasped and coughed. Maan was stunned by what he had just done.

  He could not understand why he had reacted in this disproportionate way. He should simply have yelled at the munshi and put the fear of God into him. He shook his head. Waris and the tehsildar each stepped forward now, one towards Maan, one towards the munshi. The old woman’s mouth was open in horror, and she was repeating ‘Ya Allah! Ya Allah!’ softly to herself.

  ‘Sahib! Sahib!’ croaked the munshi, finding his voice at last. ‘Huzoor knows it was only a joke—a way of—these people—I never intended—a good woman—nothing will happen—her son, his field back—Huzoor must not think—’ Tears were rolling down his cheeks.

  ‘I am going,’ said Maan, half to himself, half to Waris. ‘Get me a rickshaw.’ He was sure he had come within an inch of killing the man.

  The resilient munshi suddenly leapt forward and almost lunged at Maan’s feet, touching them with his hands and his head and lying gasping and prostrate before him. ‘No, no, Huzoor—please—please—do not ruin me,’ he wept, unmindful of his audience of underlings. ‘It was a joke—a joke—a way of making a point—no one means such things, I swear by my father and mother.’

  ‘Ruining you?’ said Maan, dazed.

  ‘But your hunt tomorrow—’ the munshi gasped out. He realized well enough that he was in double jeopardy. Maan’s father was Mahesh Kapoor, and such an
incident would not increase his tenderness towards the Baitar Estate. And Maan was Firoz’s friend; Firoz was volatile and his father was fond of him and sometimes listened to him; and the munshi feared to think what might happen if the Nawab Sahib, who liked to imagine that an estate could be run painlessly and benevolently, came to hear of the munshi’s threats to an old woman.

  ‘Hunt?’ said Maan, staring at him.

  ‘And your clothes are still in the wash—’

  Maan turned away in disgust. He told Waris to follow him. He went to his room, dumped his belongings in his bag and walked out of the Fort. A rickshaw was summoned to take him to the station. Waris wanted to accompany him, but Maan did not let him come.

  Waris’s last words to him were: ‘I sent a junglefowl to the Nawab Sahib. Could you see if he got it? And give my best to that old fellow, Ghulam Rusool, who used to work here.’

  10.10

  ‘So tell me,’ said Rasheed to his four-year-old daughter Meher as they sat on a charpoy outside his father-in-law’s house, ‘what have you learned?’

  Meher, who was sitting on her father’s lap, rattled off her version of the Urdu alphabet as follows:

  ‘Alif-be-te-se-he-che-dal-bari-ye!’

  Rasheed was not pleased. ‘That is a very abridged version of the alphabet,’ he said. He reflected that during his absence in Brahmpur, Meher’s education had very considerably regressed. ‘Now, Meher, you must try harder than that. You are a bright girl.’

  Though Meher was indeed a bright girl, she did not evince any further interest in the alphabet beyond adding two or three letters to her list.

  She was pleased to see her father, but had been very shy with him when he had walked into the house the previous evening after an absence of several months. It had taken all her mother’s persuasion and even the bribe of a cream biscuit to make her greet Rasheed. Finally, and very hesitantly, she had said, ‘Adaab arz, Chacha-jaan.’

  Very softly, her mother had said, ‘Not Chacha-jaan. Abba-jaan.’ This correction had brought on another attack of shyness. Now, however, Rasheed had re-established himself in her good graces, and she was chatting away with him as if the intervening months had not existed.

  ‘What do they sell in the village shop?’ asked Rasheed, hoping that Meher might give a better account of herself in practical affairs than she had with the alphabet.

  ‘Sweets, savouries, soap, oil,’ said Meher.

  Rasheed was pleased. He bounced her up and down on his knee, and asked for a kiss, which he promptly got.

  A short while later, Rasheed’s father-in-law emerged from the house where he had been talking to his daughter. He was a tall, gentle man with a well-trimmed white beard, and was known in the village as Haji Sahib in recognition of the fact that he had performed the pilgrimage to Mecca some thirty years earlier.

  Seeing his son-in-law and granddaughter still talking away outside the house and making no attempt at activity, he said:

  ‘Abdur Rasheed, the sun is getting higher, and if you must go today, you had better make a move soon.’ He paused. ‘And be sure that you eat a large spoonful of ghee from that canister at every meal. I make certain that Meher does, and that’s why her skin looks so healthy and her eyes shine as bright as diamonds.’ Haji Sahib bent down to pick up his granddaughter and hugged her. Meher, who had figured out that she, her baby sister, and her mother would be going to Debaria with their father, clung to her Nana with great affection, and extracted a four-anna coin from his pocket.

  ‘You come too, Nana-jaan,’ she insisted.

  ‘What have you found?’ said Rasheed. ‘Put it back. Bad habit, bad habit,’ he said, shaking his head.

  But Meher appealed to her Nana, who let her keep her doubtfully gotten gains. He was very sad to see them go, but he went inside to fetch his daughter and the baby.

  Rasheed’s wife emerged from the house. She was wearing a black burqa with a thin veil across her face, and was holding the baby in her arms. Meher went over to her mother, pulled at her burqa, and asked to hold the baby.

  ‘Not now, Munia is asleep. In a little while,’ her mother said in a soft voice.

  ‘Have something to eat. Or at least a glass of sherbet before you go,’ said Haji Sahib, who a few minutes earlier had been pressing them to make haste.

  ‘Haji Sahib, we must go,’ said Rasheed. ‘We should spend a little time near the town.’

  ‘Then I’ll come with you to the railway station,’ said Haji Sahib, nodding slowly.

  ‘Please don’t trouble yourself,’ said Rasheed.

  A sudden look of more than ordinary concern, even anxiety, crossed the sober features of the old man.

  ‘Rasheed, I am worried that—’ he began, then stopped.

  Rasheed, who respected his father-in-law, had unburdened himself to him about his visit to the patwari, but he knew that that was not the source of the old man’s concern.

  ‘Please don’t worry, Haji Sahib,’ said Rasheed, his face also reflecting momentary pain. Then he busied himself with their bags and tins and canisters and they all set off for the road that led past the outskirts of the village. Here there was a small tea-stall where the bus to the town and the railway station stopped. A little crowd of passengers had gathered, together with a larger crowd of those who had come to see them off.

  The bus clattered to a halt.

  Haji Sahib was in tears as he embraced first his daughter, then his son-in-law. When he took Meher up in his arms, she followed one of his tears with her finger, frowning. The baby slept through all this, even though she was passed from arm to arm.

  With a great deal of bustle everyone got on to the bus except for two passengers; a young woman in an orange sari and a little girl of about eight, obviously her daughter.

  The woman was embracing a middle-aged woman—presumably her mother, whom she had come to visit, or perhaps her sister—and weeping in a loud voice. They hugged and clutched each other with theatrical abandon, wailing and keening. The younger woman gasped with grief and cried:

  ‘Do you remember the time when I fell down and hurt my knee. . . .’

  The other woman wailed: ‘You are my only one, my only one. . . .’

  The little girl, who was dressed in mauve with one pink ribbon around her single plait, was looking profoundly bored.

  ‘You fed me food—you gave me everything. . . .’ continued her mother.

  ‘What will I do without you. . . . Oh God! Oh God!’

  This went on for a few minutes despite the desperate honks of the driver’s horn. But to drive off without them would have been unthinkable. The other passengers, though the spectacle had palled and they were now getting impatient, would never have allowed it.

  ‘What is happening?’ said Rasheed’s wife in a low, troubled voice to Rasheed.

  ‘Nothing, nothing. They are just Hindus.’

  Finally, the young woman and her daughter came aboard. She leaned out of the window and continued to wail. With a sneeze and a growl the bus jolted forward. Within seconds, the woman stopped wailing and turned her attention to eating a laddu, which she took out of a packet, broke into two equal hemispheres and shared with her daughter.

  10.11

  The bus was so ill that it kept collapsing every few minutes. It belonged to a potter who had made a spectacular change of profession—so spectacular in fact that he had got himself ostracized by his local caste-brethren until they found his bus indispensable for getting to the station. The potter drove it and tended it, fed and watered it, diagnosed its sneezes and false death rattles, and coaxed its carcass along the road. Clouds of grey-blue smoke rose from the engine, raw oil leaked from its sump, the smell of burning rubber seared the air whenever it braked, and it punctured or blew a tyre every hour or two. The road, made of vertically laid bricks and little else, was cratered with holes, and the wheels had lost all memory of their shock absorbers. Rasheed felt he was in danger of castration every few minutes. His knees kept knocking the man in front of him because t
he back boards of the seat were missing.

  None of the regular passengers, however, thought that there was any cause for complaint. This was far better and more convenient than a journey of two hours in a bullock-cart. Whenever the bus stopped involuntarily somewhere, the conductor leaned out of the window and looked at the wheels. Another man then jumped out with a pair of pliers and climbed under the bus. Sometimes the bus stopped because the driver wanted to chat to a friend along the route—or simply because he felt like stopping. Nor did the driver have any compunctions about pressing his customers into service. Whenever he needed the bus push-started he would turn around and yell in the powerfully vocalic local dialect:

  ‘Aré, du-char jané utari aauu. Dhakka lagaauu!’

  And when the bus was about to move, he would summon them with a battle cry of:

  ‘Aai jao bhaiyya, aai jao. Chalo ho!’

  The driver took particular pride in the signs (in standard Hindi) displayed in the bus. Above his seat for instance, it said Officer Seat and Don’t talk to the driver when the bus is in motion. Above the door it said: Only disembark when the bus has come to a halt. Along one wall of the bus, the following message was painted in a murderous scarlet: Do not travel when drunk or with a loaded gun. But it said nothing about goats, and there were several in the bus.