A Suitable Boy, Page 90

  Halfway to the station, the bus stopped at another small tea-stall, and here a blind man got on. His face was covered with cauliflower-like swellings, and he had a small snub nose. He walked with the help of a stick, and felt his way on to the bus. He could tell which bus it was from a distance by its characteristic sounds. He could also recognize people instantly by their voices, and he liked talking to them. One of his trouser legs was rolled long and the other short. Looking upwards he now sang out in a carefree and untuneful voice:

  ‘Oh You Who Give, don’t give anyone poverty.

  Give me death, but do not give misfortune.’

  He sang this and lyrics of a similar nature while going around the bus collecting small coins and upbraiding the miserly with a volley of relevant couplets. Rasheed, whenever he travelled on this bus, was one of his more generous benefactors, and the beggar recognized his voice immediately. ‘What?’ he cried. ‘You’ve only spent two nights at your father-in-law’s? Shame, shame! You should spend more time with your wife, a young man like you. Or is that baby who is crying your own—and is that your wife with you here? Oh, Wife of Abdur Rasheed, if you are here on this bus, forgive this unfortunate for his insolence and accept his blessing. May you have many more sons, and all with lungs as loud. Give—give—God rewards the generous. . . .’ And he moved on through the bus.

  Meher’s mother blushed furiously beneath her burqa, and then started giggling. After a while she stopped. Then she started sobbing, and Rasheed touched her shoulder gently.

  The beggar got off at the last stop, the railway station. ‘Peace to you all,’ he said. ‘And health and safety to all who travel on Indian Railways.’

  Rasheed discovered that the train was only a little late, and was disappointed. He had hoped to take a rickshaw and visit his elder brother’s grave which was half an hour away in a graveyard outside this small town. For it was at this station that his brother had met with his death by falling under a train three years ago. Before the news had come to his family, the people of the town had arranged for the burial of his crushed remains.

  It was now about noon and extremely hot. They had been sitting on the platform for only a few minutes when Rasheed’s wife started shivering. Rasheed held her hand and said nothing. Then he said in a low voice: ‘I know, I know what you must be feeling. I wanted to visit him too. We’ll do it next time we are here. There was no time today. Believe me, there was no time. And with all this luggage—how could we?’

  The baby, resting in an improvised crib of a few bags, continued to sleep. Meher too was exhausted and had dozed off. Rasheed looked at them and closed his eyes as well.

  His wife said nothing, but moaned softly. Her heart was palpitating swiftly, and she seemed dazed. ‘You are thinking of Bhaiyya, aren’t you?’ he said. She started sobbing again, and trembling uncontrollably. Rasheed felt a sense of pressure building up at the back of his head. He looked at her face, beautiful even through the veil—beautiful perhaps because he knew it was beautiful. He spoke again, holding her hand in his and stroking her forehead:

  ‘Don’t cry—don’t cry—Meher and the baby will wake up—we’ll have left this inauspicious place soon. Why grieve, why grieve, when you can do nothing about it. . . . Look, it could also be the heat. Take your veil off—let the air play a little on your face. . . . We would have had to rush there, and we might have missed the train and have had to spend the night in this miserable town. Next time we’ll make time. It is my fault, I should have left the house earlier. But perhaps I could not have borne the grief of it myself. The bus stopped again and again and we got delayed. And now, believe me, Bhabhi, there is no time at all.’

  He had addressed her as he used to do in the old days, using the word for sister-in-law. For she had been his brother’s wife, and Meher had been his brother’s child. He had married her at his mother’s dying behest; his mother could not bear that her infant granddaughter should remain fatherless or her daughter-in-law (whom she loved) a widow.

  ‘Take care of her,’ she had said to Rasheed. ‘She is a good woman and will make you a good wife as well.’ Rasheed had promised to do as she had asked, and had kept his difficult and binding promise.

  10.12

  Most respected Maulana Abdur Rasheed Sahib,

  I am taking up my pen to write with much hesitation, and without the knowledge of my sister and guardian. I thought you would want to know how my Arabic was faring in your absence. It is faring well. I am practising every day. At first my sister tried to appoint another teacher for me, an old man who mumbles and coughs and makes no attempt to correct me when I make mistakes. But I was so unhappy that Saeeda Apa discontinued him. You never used to let me get away with any mistakes, and I am afraid I was tearful at times when it seemed I could do nothing right. But you never let me get away with tears either, and did not let me turn to something easier after I had collected myself. I have now come to realize the value of your teaching method, and I miss having to make the effort that I had to when you were here.

  Nowadays I spend my time mainly in housework of one kind or another. Apa is in a bad mood these days, I think because her new sarangi player has been playing indifferently. So I am afraid to ask her to let me do something of interest. You advised me not to read novels, but I have so much time on my hands that I find myself turning to them. But I do read the Quran Sharif every day, and copy out a few excerpts. I will now copy out one or two quotations from the surah I am reading, complete with all the special vowel-marks to show you how my Arabic calligraphy is progressing. But I fear it is not progressing at all. In your absence, it is at best standing still.

  Have they not regarded the birds above them

  spreading their wings, and closing them?

  Naught holds them but the All-Merciful. Surely

  He sees everything.

  Say: ‘What think you? If in the morning

  your water should have vanished into

  the earth, then who would bring you

  running water?’

  The parakeet, who was looking feeble the day before you left, has lately begun to say a few words. Saeeda Apa has taken a fancy to him, I am happy to say.

  I hope you will return soon, as I miss seeing you and hearing your criticisms and corrections, and I hope that you are well and in good spirits. I am sending this letter through Bibbo. She will post it; she says this address should be sufficient. I pray that it reaches you.

  With many good wishes and renewed respects,

  Your student,

  Tasneem

  Rasheed read this letter slowly, twice, sitting by the side of the lake near the school. He had returned to Debaria to find that Maan had come back a little earlier than expected, and, after inquiries, he had followed him to the lake to make sure he was all right. He appeared to be fine, from the vigorous way he was swimming back from the far end.

  Rasheed had been surprised to receive the letter. It had been waiting for him at his father’s house. He was interested to see the excerpts, which he recognized instantly from the chapter of the Quran called ‘The Kingdom’. How like Tasneem, he thought, to select the most gentle excerpts from a surah that contained terrible descriptions of hellfire and perdition.

  Her calligraphy had not deteriorated. If anything it had slightly improved. Her own appraisal of it was both modest and just. There was something in the letter—quite apart from the fact that it had been sent to him behind Saeeda Bai’s back—that troubled him, and despite himself he found his thoughts turning to Meher’s mother, who was sitting inside his father’s house, probably fanning the baby. Poor woman, good-hearted and beautiful though she was, she could barely write her own name. And he once again thought: If I had had any choice, would it ever have been a woman like her whom I would have chosen as my partner and companion through this life?

  10.13

  Maan laughed a little, then coughed. Rasheed looked at him. He sneezed.

  ‘You should dry your hair,’ said Rasheed. ‘Don’t blame m
e if you catch a cold. Swimming and then not drying your hair is an absolutely certain way of catching a cold. Summer colds are the worst. Your voice sounds bad too. And you look much darker, more burned by the sun than when I saw you just a few days ago.’

  Maan reflected that his voice must have been affected by the dust of the journey. He hadn’t actually shouted at anyone, not even at the marksman or the munshi. On his return from Baitar, perhaps to relieve his feelings, he had made straight for the lake near the school, and had swum across and back a few times. When he got out, he saw Rasheed sitting on the bank, reading a letter. Next to him was a small box—of sweets, it appeared.

  ‘It must be all this Urdu you’ve been teaching me,’ Maan said. ‘All those guttural letters, ghaaf and khay and so on—my throat can’t survive them.’

  ‘You are making excuses,’ said Rasheed. ‘This is an excuse not to study. In fact you haven’t studied more than four hours since you’ve been here.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ said Maan. ‘All I do from morning to night is repeat the alphabet forwards and backwards and practise writing Urdu letters in the air. Why, even when I was swimming just now I kept imagining letters: when I swam breaststroke, I was writing qaaf, when I swam backstroke, I was writing noon—’

  ‘Do you want to go up there?’ asked Rasheed, with some impatience.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Maan.

  ‘I mean, is there even the slightest truth in what you have been saying?’

  ‘Not the slightest!’ laughed Maan.

  ‘So when you go up there, what will you say to God?’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Maan. ‘I have topsy-turvy views about all that. Up is down to me, and down is up. In fact, I believe that if there is paradise anywhere, it is here, here on earth. What do you think?’

  Rasheed did not much care for flippancy on serious subjects. He did not think paradise was on earth: certainly not in Brahmpur, certainly not here in Debaria, nor in his wife’s virtually illiterate village.

  ‘You look worried,’ said Maan. ‘I hope it isn’t anything I said.’

  Rasheed thought for a few seconds before answering. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t your answer exactly. I was wondering about Meher’s education.’

  ‘Your daughter?’ asked Maan.

  ‘Yes. My elder daughter. She’s a bright girl—you’ll meet her in the evening. But there are no schools like this’—he waved an arm towards the nearby madrasa—‘in her mother’s village—and she will grow up ignorant unless I do something about it. I try to teach her whenever I’m here, but then I go to Brahmpur for a few months, and the illiterate environment takes over.’

  It never struck Rasheed as odd that he loved Meher every bit as much as his own daughter. Perhaps one element of this bond was precisely that Meher had at first been for him purely an object of love, not of responsibility. Even when, a year or so ago, she stopped calling him Chacha and started calling him Abba, some of that sense of the uncle—who would come home and spoil her with presents and affection—remained. With a start, Rasheed recalled that the baby was about as old as Meher had been when her father had died. Perhaps this too had been in her mother’s mind when she had lost control of her emotions and broken down at the station.

  Rasheed thought of his wife with tenderness, but not with passion, and he felt that she too felt no passion for him, merely a sense of comfort when he was with her. She lived for her children and the memory of her first husband.

  This is my life, the only life I will live, thought Rasheed. If only things had been different, we might each have been happy.

  At first the very thought of sharing a room with her for an hour had troubled him. Then he grew used to the brief visits he paid to her in the middle of the night when the other men were asleep in the courtyard. But even when fulfilling his obligations as a husband he wondered what she was thinking. Sometimes he imagined that she was close to tears. Had she begun to love him more after the baby had been born? Perhaps. But the women of the zenana in her father’s village—her elder brothers’ wives—were often quite cruel even when they teased each other, and she would not have been able to express her affection for him openly, even if there had been much to express.

  Once more Rasheed began to unfold the letter he had received, then stopped and said to Maan:

  ‘So—how is your father’s farm?’

  ‘My father’s farm?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well,’ said Maan. ‘It should be all right. Not much going on at this time of the year.’

  ‘But haven’t you just visited the farm?’

  ‘No. Not exactly.’

  ‘Not exactly?’

  ‘I mean, no. No, I meant to, but—I got caught up in things.’

  ‘So what have you been doing?’

  ‘Losing my temper mainly,’ said Maan. ‘And trying to kill wolves.’

  Rasheed frowned, but did not follow up these interesting possibilities. ‘You are being flippant as usual,’ he said.

  ‘What are those flowers?’ asked Maan, to change the subject.

  Rasheed looked across the tank to the far shore.

  ‘The purple ones?’

  ‘Yes. What are they called?’

  ‘Sadabahar—or evergreen,’ said Rasheed, ‘because it’s always spring for them. They never seem to die, and no one can get rid of them. I think they’re beautiful—though they often grow in foul places. . . .’ He paused. ‘Some people call them “behayaa”—or “shameless”.’ He was lost in meditation for a long while, one thought leading to another.

  ‘Well,’ said Maan, ‘what were you thinking of?’

  ‘My mother,’ said Rasheed. After a pause he continued in a quiet voice: ‘I loved her, God protect her spirit. She was an upright woman, and well educated as women go. She loved my brother and me, and only regretted that she never had a daughter. Perhaps that’s why—well, anyway, she was the only one who appreciated my wish to educate myself, to make something of myself and do something for this place.’ Rasheed said ‘this place’ with such bitterness that it sounded almost as if he detested it. ‘But my love for her has tied my life up in knots. And as for my father—what does he understand of anything outside property and money? I have to be discreet even in what I say at home. I’m always looking up towards the roof and lowering my voice. Baba, for all his piety, understands things—things one might not expect him to. But my father has contempt for everything I revere. And it has become worse lately with the changes in the house.’ Maan guessed that Rasheed meant his father’s second wife.

  But Rasheed was continuing with great bitterness. ‘Look all around you,’ he said. ‘Or look at history. It’s always been the same. The old men cling to their power and their beliefs, which admit all their worst vices but exclude the least fault and strangle the smallest innovation of the young. Then, thank God, they die, and can do no more harm. But by then we, the young, are old, and strive to do what little mischief they left undone. This village is the worst,’ continued Rasheed, pointing behind the school to the low buildings of Debaria’s twin village of Sagal. ‘Worse even than ours, and also, of course, more pious. I’ll show you one good man in this village—I was on my way to see him when I saw you tempting fate by swimming alone. You’ll see the state to which he has been driven by the others—and, I suppose, by the just or unjust anger of God.’

  Maan was astonished to hear Rasheed talk in this vein. Rasheed’s education before Brahmpur University had been a traditionally religious one, and Maan knew how firmly he believed in God and his Prophet and the Book, the transmitted word of God—even to the extent of refusing to abridge Tasneem’s lesson from the Quran when summoned by Saeeda Bai. But Rasheed was not contented with the world that God had made, nor did he understand why it had been arranged in the pathetic way it had. As for the old man, Maan recalled that Rasheed had referred to him briefly during their long walk around the village, but he did not feel particularly eager to be shown assorted samples of village m
isery.

  ‘Were you always so serious about the state of things?’ asked Maan.

  ‘Far from it,’ said Rasheed, with a rather twisted smile at the corner of his mouth. ‘Far from it. When I was younger, well, I was concerned only with myself and my fists. I’ve told you about this before, haven’t I? I would look around and notice certain things. My grandfather was treated by everyone around him with great respect. People would come from far away to ask him to solve disputes. Sometimes he’d do this with great severity, beating the offenders. This I considered proof of the fact that beating people was a cause of his being honoured. I beat people up too.’

  Rasheed paused to look up the slope towards the madrasa, then continued:

  ‘At school I was always hitting the kids. I’d find one by himself, and I’d beat him up. Sometimes I’d come across a boy in the fields or along the road and I’d slap him hard across the face.’

  Maan laughed. ‘Yes, I remember you telling me that,’ he said.

  ‘It’s no laughing matter really,’ said Rasheed. ‘And certainly my parents didn’t think so. My mother would beat me very rarely, if at all; well, she did once or twice. But my father—he would beat me regularly.

  ‘Baba, however, who was the real authority in the village, treated me with great love, and his presence would often save me. I was his favourite. He was very regular about his prayers. So I too would always say my prayers even though I did very badly at school. But every so often I would thrash a boy, and his father would report it to Baba. Once Baba told me to sit down and stand up one hundred times while holding my ears as a punishment. Some of my friends were standing around, and I refused to do any such thing. Perhaps I would have got away with it. But my father happened to be passing, and he was so shocked by my insolence towards his father that he hit me across the face very hard. I began crying from shame and pain, and I decided to run away. I ran quite far—till the mango trees beyond the threshing-ground to the north—before they sent someone after me and brought me back.’