A Suitable Boy, Page 93

  Firoz too must be deeply involved in the zamindari case, thought Maan, excusing his friend’s silence. As for the one silence that pounded most deeply in his ears, it had hurt him most of all in the days immediately following his own letter, when he could scarcely breathe without thinking of it. Now it too was a dull pain, mediated by the heat and the elastic days. Yet when he lay on the charpoy in the early evening light reading the poems of Mir, especially the one that reminded him of that first evening when he saw her in Prem Nivas, the memory of Saeeda Bai came back to Maan and pierced him with longing and bewilderment.

  He could not talk to anyone about this. Rasheed’s mildly Cassius-like smile when he saw him lost in tender contemplation of Mir would have turned to patent scorn if he had known whom he wished he were gazing at instead. The one time Rasheed had discussed love in general terms with Maan he had been as intense and definitive and theoretical about it as he was about everything else. It was clear to Maan that he had never experienced it. Maan was often exhausted by Rasheed’s earnestness; in this particular case he wished he had never opened the subject.

  Rasheed for his part was glad that he had Maan to talk to about his ideas and feelings, but he could not understand Maan’s monumental directionlessness. Having got as far as he himself had from a background where higher education had seemed as unattainable as the stars, he believed that will and effort could get him anywhere. He attempted bravely, fervently, and perhaps obsessively, to reconcile everything—family life, learning, calligraphy, personal honour, order, ritual, God, agriculture, history, politics; this world and all the other worlds, in short—into a comprehensible whole. Exacting with himself, he was exacting with others. And it seemed to Maan, who was somewhat in awe of his energy and sense of principle, that he was wearing himself out by feeling so deeply and taking on so insistently all the burdens and responsibilities of mankind.

  ‘By doing nothing—or worse than nothing—I’ve managed to displease my father,’ said Maan to Rasheed as they sat talking under the neem one day. ‘And by doing something—or better than something—you’ve managed to displease yours.’

  Rasheed had added in a troubled tone that his father would be much more than displeased if he knew just what he had succeeded in doing. Maan had asked him to explain what he meant, but he had shaken his head, and Maan, though uneasy about the remark, had not followed it up. He was by now used to Rasheed’s alternation of secretiveness with sudden, even intimate, confidences. As a matter of fact, when Maan had told him about the munshi and the old woman at Baitar Fort, Rasheed had been on the verge of unburdening himself about his own visit to the patwari. But something had stopped his tongue. After all, no one in this village, not even Kachheru himself, knew about that act of attempted justice; and it was best left so. Besides, the patwari had not been in the village for the past week or two, and Rasheed had not yet received the expected confirmation of his instructions.

  Instead Rasheed had said: ‘Did you get the woman’s name? How do you know the munshi won’t want to take his spite out on her?’ Maan, shocked by the possible consequences of his own impracticality, had shaken his head.

  A couple of times Rasheed did succeed in getting the reluctant Maan to discuss zamindari, but Maan’s opinions were characteristically and vexatiously nebulous. He had reacted instinctively, indeed, violently, to suffering and cruelty, but he did not have much of an opinion on the general rights and wrongs of the system. He did not want the legislation on which his father had worked for years to be thrown out by the courts, but neither did he want Firoz and Imtiaz to lose the larger part of their family estate. To Rasheed’s specific argument that the larger landlords did not work (or did not have to work) for their living, it was not to be expected that Maan would respond with proletarian indignation.

  Rasheed had no qualms about speaking harshly about his own family and their treatment of those who served them. About the Nawab Sahib, though, whom Rasheed had met only once, he spoke no ill to Maan. He had known quite early, as a result of their train journey from Brahmpur, that Maan was a friend of the young Nawabzadas; and he did not wish either to make Maan uncomfortable or to remind himself of past humiliation by describing the treatment he had received when he had gone to Baitar House in search of employment some months ago.

  10.19

  One evening, when Maan was working on some exercises that Rasheed had set him before going off to the mosque, Rasheed’s father interrupted him. He was carrying Meher, who was asleep, in his arms.

  Without any preliminaries he said to Maan: ‘Now that you’re by yourself can I ask you a question? I’ve been wondering about it for some time.’

  ‘Of course,’ Maan replied, setting down his pen.

  Rasheed’s father sat down.

  ‘Now, let me see,’ he began, ‘how do I put this? Not being married is considered by my religion and yours to be. . . .’ He paused, searching for the word. He had sounded disapproving.

  ‘Adharma? Against correct principles?’ suggested Maan.

  ‘Yes, call it adharma,’ said Rasheed’s father, relieved. ‘Well, you’re twenty-two, twenty-three. . . .’

  ‘Older.’

  ‘Older? That’s bad. You should have got married by now. I believe that a man between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five is in the prime of his life.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Maan, nodding in wary agreement. Rasheed’s grandfather had brought up the subject at the very beginning of his stay. No doubt Rasheed would be plaguing him next.

  ‘Not that I noticed any falling off in my strength even when I was forty-five,’ continued Rasheed’s father.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Maan. ‘I know some people who are old at that age.’

  ‘But then, you see,’ continued Rasheed’s father, ‘then came the death of my son, and the death of my wife—and I fell apart.’

  Maan remained silent. Kachheru arrived with a lantern, and placed it a little distance away.

  Rasheed’s father, who had intended to advise Maan, gently swerved off into his own memories: ‘My elder son was a wonderful boy. In a hundred villages there was no one like him. He was strong as a lion and over six feet tall—a wrestler and a weight-lifter—he did English exercises. He would lift two maunds of iron easily. And he had a wonderful fresh face; and was always so good-natured and smiling—he greeted people with such great friendliness that he would make their hearts happy. And when he wore the suit I got made for him, he looked so good that people said he should be a Superintendent of Police.’

  Maan shook his head sadly. Rasheed’s father was telling his story without tears, but not coldly—as if he were recounting with sympathy the story of someone other than himself.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ he went on, ‘after his accident at the railway station, I don’t know what happened to me. I didn’t leave the house for months. My strength drained away. I was unconscious for days. He was so young. And then a little later his mother died.’

  He looked up towards the house, half-turning away from Maan, and continued:

  ‘This house was ghostly. I don’t know what would have happened to me. I was so full of grief and weakness that I wanted to die. There was no one in the house even to offer me water.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Where is Rasheed?’ he asked somewhat coldly, turning back to Maan.

  ‘At the mosque, I think.’

  ‘Ah, yes, well, finally, Baba took me in hand and said I should pull myself together. Our religion says that the izzat, the honour of an unmarried man is half that of a married man. Baba insisted that I should get a second wife.’

  ‘Well, he was speaking from experience,’ said Maan with a smile.

  ‘Yes. Well, Rasheed has told you no doubt that Baba had three wives. We two brothers and our sister are all from different wives. He didn’t have three wives at the same time, mind you, just one wife at a time. “Marté gae, karté gae.” When one died he married another. There’s a tradition of remarriage in this family: my grandfather had four wives, my father three and I tw
o.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why not, indeed,’ said Rasheed’s father, smiling. ‘That’s just what I thought eventually—once I’d got over my grief.’

  ‘And was it difficult to find a wife?’ asked Maan, intrigued.

  ‘Not really,’ said Rasheed’s father. ‘By the standards of this place we are well off. I was advised to get not a young woman but someone who had been married before—a widow or a woman who had been divorced. So I did get married again—it’s been about a year now—to a woman who is fifteen years younger than me—that’s not much. She’s even related to my wife—of blessed memory—in a distant way. And she handles the house well. My health has improved again. I can walk unaided to my land two miles away. My eyesight is fine, except for seeing things up close. My heart is fine. My teeth, well, my teeth were past treatment anyway. One should be married. No question about it.’

  A dog began to bark. Others joined in after a while. Maan tried to veer away from the subject by saying:

  ‘Is she asleep? Can she sleep through all this?’

  Rasheed’s father looked lovingly down at his granddaughter: ‘Yes, she’s asleep. She’s very fond of me.’

  ‘I noticed that when you came from the fields with the umbrella today she ran after you in the heat.’

  Rasheed’s father nodded with pride.

  ‘When I ask her if she wants to live in Debaria or Brahmpur she always says Debaria—“because you, Dada-jaan, are here.” And once when I went to her mother’s village, she left her Nana and ran after me.’

  Maan smiled to think of this passionate competitiveness between the two grandfathers. He said: ‘Presumably, Rasheed was with you.’

  ‘Well, he may have been. But even if he hadn’t been, she would have run after me.’

  ‘In that case she must love you very much,’ said Maan, laughing.

  ‘Indeed she does. She was born in this house—which people later began to call ill-fated and inauspicious. But in those dark days she was like a gift of God to me. It was I who pretty much brought her up. In the morning, tea—tea and biscuits! “Dada-jaan”, she’d say, “I want tea and biscuits. Cream biscuits”—none of this dry stuff. She’d tell Bittan, a maidservant here, to go and fetch her cream biscuits from my special tin. Her mother would be making the tea in a corner. And she wouldn’t eat from her mother’s hands. I had to feed her.’

  ‘Well, luckily now there’s another child in the house,’ said Maan. ‘To keep her company.’

  ‘Doubtless,’ said Rasheed’s father. ‘But Meher has decided that I belong to her alone. When she’s told that I’m her sister’s Dada too, she refuses to believe it.’

  Meher shifted in her sleep.

  ‘There has been no child like this in the whole family,’ said Rasheed’s father definitively.

  ‘She seems to operate on that assumption,’ agreed Maan.

  Rasheed’s father laughed, then continued: ‘She has a right to do so. Oh, I remember, there used to be an old man in this village. He had fallen out with his sons, and had come to live with his daughter and son-in-law. Well, he had a pomegranate tree, which for some reason used to bear much better fruit than ours.’

  ‘You have a pomegranate tree?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course, inside. I’ll show you some day.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘What do you mean, how?’ said Rasheed’s father. ‘It’s my house. . . . Oh, I see what you mean. I’ll shunt the women around as you go through. You’re a good boy,’ he said suddenly. ‘Tell me, what do you do?’

  ‘What do I do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not much of anything.’

  ‘That’s very bad.’

  ‘My father thinks so too,’ agreed Maan.

  ‘He’s right. He’s quite right. No young men want to work these days. It’s either studies or staring at the sky.’

  ‘Actually I do have a cloth business in Banaras.’

  ‘Then what are you doing here?’ said Rasheed’s father. ‘You should be making money.’

  ‘Do you think I shouldn’t be here?’ asked Maan.

  ‘No, no—of course, you are welcome,’ said Rasheed’s father. ‘We are glad you are here as our guest. Though you have chosen a hot and boring time to come. You should visit at the time of Bakr-Id. Then you’ll see the village at its most festive. Yes, do that—remember to. . . . Oh, yes, pomegranates. This old man was very lively, and he and Meher made a fine pair. She knew that whenever she went to his house she’d get something. So she was always forcing me to take her there. I remember the first time he gave her a pomegranate. It wasn’t ripe. Still, we peeled it with great excitement, and she ate six or seven spoonfuls of the grains and we kept the rest for breakfast!’

  An old man walked past. It was the Imam of the Debaria mosque.

  ‘You will drop by tomorrow evening, won’t you, Imam Sahib?’ asked Rasheed’s father in an anxious manner.

  ‘At this time tomorrow—yes. After the prayer,’ added the Imam in mild rebuke.

  ‘I wonder where Rasheed is,’ said Maan, looking at his unfinished exercises. ‘He’ll probably be returning any minute.’

  ‘He is probably taking a walk around the village,’ said his father in an outburst of quite virulent anger, ‘talking to all the low people. That is his style. He should show more sense of discrimination. Tell me, has he taken you to the patwari with him?’

  Maan was so taken aback by the tone that he hardly registered the question.

  ‘The patwari. Have you visited the village patwari?’ There was a touch of iron in the voice as the question was repeated.

  ‘No,’ said Maan, surprised. ‘Is something the matter?’

  ‘No,’ said Rasheed’s father. After a pause he said: ‘Please don’t mention that I asked you this.’

  ‘If you like,’ said Maan readily, but he was still puzzled.

  ‘Well, I’ve done enough damage to your studies,’ said Rasheed’s father. ‘I’d better not disturb you any further.’ And he walked back to the house with Meher in his arms, frowning in the light of the lantern.

  10.20

  Maan, quite concerned now, fetched the lantern and tried to get back to reading and copying the words that Rasheed had written out for him. But Rasheed’s father was soon back, this time without Meher.

  ‘What’s a giggi?’ he asked.

  ‘A giggi?’

  ‘You don’t know what a giggi is?’ The disappointment was palpable.

  ‘No. What is it?’ asked Maan.

  ‘I don’t know either,’ said Rasheed’s father in distress.

  Maan looked at him, mystified.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked him.

  ‘Oh,’ said Rasheed’s father. ‘I need one—immediately.’

  ‘If you don’t know what it is, how do you know you need one?’ said Maan.

  ‘It’s not for me but for Meher,’ said Rasheed’s father. ‘She woke up and said, “Dada, I want a giggi. Give me a giggi.” And now she’s crying for it, and I can’t find out from her what it is or what it looks like. I’ll have to wait till—well, till Rasheed comes back. Maybe he knows. Sorry to have disturbed you again.’

  ‘No, not at all,’ said Maan, who hadn’t minded this interruption. For a while he couldn’t get back to his work. He tried to decide whether a giggi was to be eaten or to be played with or to be ridden on. Finally he picked up his pen again.

  Baba, who had returned from the mosque, seeing him sitting by himself in the open courtyard, joined him a minute later. He greeted him, then coughed and spat on the ground.

  ‘What is a young man like you doing wasting your eyes on a book?’

  ‘Well, I’m learning to read and write Urdu.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I remember: seen, sheen . . . seen, sheen. . . . Why bother?’ said Baba, and cleared his throat again.

  ‘Why bother?’

  ‘Yes—tell me what is there in Urdu apart from a few sinful poems?’

  ‘Now I’ve begun i
t, I should carry it through,’ said Maan.

  It was the right thing to say. Baba approved of this sentiment, then added: ‘Now Arabic, you should learn Arabic. That’s the language to learn. Then you can read the Holy Book. You might stop being a kafir.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ said Maan cheerfully.

  ‘Oh, most assuredly,’ said Baba. He added: ‘You aren’t taking what I’ve said badly?’

  Maan smiled.

  ‘One of my best friends is a thakur who lives a few villages away,’ continued Baba reminiscently. ‘In the summer of ’47 around the time of Partition, a crowd gathered on the road to Salimpur in order to attack this village because of us Muslims. And Sagal too. I sent an urgent message to my friend, and he and his men went out with lathis and guns, and told the mob that they’d have to reckon with them first. And a good thing too. Otherwise, I’d have died fighting, but I’d have died all right.’

  It suddenly struck Maan that he had become a universal confidant.

  ‘Rasheed said that you were the terror of the tehsil,’ he told Baba.

  Baba nodded his head in vigorous approval. He said emphatically: ‘I was strict with people. I turned him’—he pointed in the direction of the roof—‘out of the house, naked in the fields, at the age of seven because he would not study.’

  Maan tried to imagine what Rasheed’s father might have been like as a boy, with a book instead of a paan-pouch in his hand. But Baba was continuing:

  ‘In the time of the English, there was honesty. The government was firm. How can you govern unless you are firm? Now, when the police catch some criminal, the Ministers and MPs and MLAs say, “He’s my friend: release him!” And they do.’

  ‘That’s too bad,’ said Maan.