The tongawala’s whip landed a vicious lash on the horse’s scraggy rump. The startled animal reared violently on its hindlegs, jolting Nurullah downward on his seat as they turned into the compound. He righted himself when the creature dropped its legs disjointedly to the gravel and stumbled into a clumsy canter up the circular drive. The lawn they were skirting was scorched yellow where it had not gone dead brown. A hawk hovered high above, suspended in the brutal blaze.
Nurullah twisted round to look over his shoulder at the sun-struck two-tiered mansion ballooning out shiningly in the heat like an illustration in a child’s storybook. Its third less lofty tier of roof terrace was crowned by, of all things, a dome! He had the feeling he was approaching a monument.
The tongawala jerked to a stop under the columned portico to let Nurullah down and flicked his horse mechanically toward some tree shade further on where other tongas and a car or two waited. Wide shallow steps led to the verandah encircling the mansion. On the lawn side a steeper flight went down to a dry fountain baking in the sun. Stone fish stood on their tails around the rim of its cement basin with their mouths gaping open. A grizzled old mali with a wet rag on his head was inching along on his haunches down there, uprooting weeds and tufts of wizened grass with deft digs of his khurpi and flinging his dug-up waste into a bamboo basket. Nurullah watched a trail of loose dark earth lengthen behind him until the mali stood up on buckling bow legs, hitched his loincloth higher on his fleshless thighs, wound his headrag tighter and hoisted the basket onto it. Before Nurullah remembered to call after him he had clumped off like a rider astride a sagging sway-backed mare.
There was no other servant in sight. Once there had been an army of them and there must still be a chowkidar to show sightseers around. The place had been every patriot’s Mecca for the last eleven years, ever since the family and a couple of hundred other Akbarabadis had stood their ground when they were cavalry-charged outside the gates for demonstrating against the Prince of Wales’ visit in 1921. A trampled mess the horses’ hooves and club-swinging mounted police had made of them as they went down unresisting in obedience to the new creed: If blood must be shed in this battle, let it be your own.
Nurullah had joined the University of Akbarabad as a lecturer in English to First Years only six months ago and had never come here sightseeing. But he had been here once before, to a reception in the garden with his mentor, Professor Bhattacharya. His clearest recollection of that evening was of being prodded through the throng of guests by the professor’s sharp-knuckled little fist in his spine and halting every time Robin-da halted to socialize, as garrulously with once-met acquaintances as with his lifelong friends. Without the slightest warning Robin-da had propelled him into the host’s presence and introduced him with unnecessary flourish as ‘an impoverished but immensely promising young man’. To his own utter astonishment Nurullah had then behaved worse than the smitten sightseers who came here gaping like the fountain fish, expecting an encounter with celestial beings. He had stood there witless as an imbecile, forgetting even to do adab. He didn’t know what he had expected of the mansion’s owner, a condescending nod perhaps, the self-importance of one who has been present at great events and knows that none can take place without him. But instead the host, a bronze-haired man some years older and slightly taller than himself, with eyes of the light brown colour known as hazel, had taken Nurullah’s hand between both of his and given him a radiant smile.
He went up the verandah steps to a rose-reddish white-flecked floor. A closer look revealed an odd mosaic of roses sprinkled with rice grains. The front door being open and no servant in sight, he lifted the chik and walked in, to a big antechamber as bare as a bone. There was not a sign of the luxury he had heard so much about. It must have gone with the queer turn human behaviour had taken since the new creed. He looked about him for some remnant of the cushioned extravagances of the rich but there was none. An uncarpeted staircase angled sharply at a landing and went on up to a higher landing open to the fierce flooding heat of the upper verandah. A copper-bound globe light of dusty turquoise glass studded with glass rubies hung over the stairwell on a long ornamental chain, but not long enough to reach when the bulb needed changing. One of the army of servants must have had to heft a step ladder to the first landing and risk his neck leaning out sideways to do the job and that must have been when the globe got dusted. Every fixture in the house must have been designed for a regiment of servants in their muscular prime.
The bench beside the tall black telephone in the stairwell was the businesslike sort whose seat lifts up to provide storage space. Only the mirrored hatstand aflower with curly brass hooks looked like a piece of family furniture and it must have been out of use since the family’s callers took to wearing Gandhi caps. The door to the next room was open a crack and he could hear voices in conference. He sat down on the hard bench to wait, fanning himself with the envelope he was carrying, and wondered what had thrown him into confusion on his previous visit.
A portrait of the late master framed in sandalwood hung opposite him. Nurullah had seen gaudy replicas of it garlanded with marigolds in paan shops in the bazaar. There was a thread of wilting jasmine on this one, too frail and wispy for the proud grey head and commanding features. Incense smoke had already overpowered its fading scent on its own perfumed spiral into the high vaulted ceiling.
The portrait’s painted eyes held whoever’s was looking into them from wherever the viewer sat. The whole effect left one in no doubt about the magnetic pull of the lawyer’s personality. He was best remembered for the treason trial after the Great War and his defence of the sole survivor of the bloodbath below Victoria’s statue in Company Bagh that had killed his three co-conspirators. The survivor had had to die too, on the gallows, but his lawyer’s chilling argument — a far cry from the emotional oratory of his contemporaries — had whipped the mask off a ruling power whose law courts condemned men to death for following its own example. ‘For the crime’, he had famously declared, ‘of putting their words to your music’ Nurullah could not believe he of all Indians had submitted to a martyr’s death, standing his ground and being trampled under horses’ hooves outside the gate. The arts of war must have been more his style as cold accuracy had been his hallmark at the trial. No one would ever forget his description of the 1919 slaughter in Company Bagh. One body, blown apart against Victoria’s pedestal, had died propped up by it with its chest ripped open and its legs flung wide. The second youth had caught the bullets in his back halfway up her marble skirts and fallen backward in a broken heap. The third had been gunned headfirst into the red, white and blue flower border, all three mown down for rising against the invader, what any Englishman would have considered his sacred duty. Then at a signal from the bandmaster the military band had played on.
The statue had escaped without a cracked chin or a chipped diadem. Very few had heard the actual shots and the screams of the nearest invitees had sunk into ‘Send him victorious, happy and glorious,’ so triumphantly had the band played on, brooking no more delay, for the diamond jubilee celebration to mark the anniversary of the day the Queen took over from the Company had already been delayed a year because of the war. News of the drama travelled sedately by beat of drum proclaiming martial law in the city.
In Company Bagh an officer read out the proclamation. Then he had a row of iron sheets lined up on a mound behind him machine-gunned in a deafening display of fire power. Ordering the machine guns turned around to face the thunderstruck assembled citizens he informed them they would likewise be riddled with holes if they ever again rose against the Sarkar. Nurullah had a newcomer’s interest in the sights, sounds and stories of this, his first city. Leaning on the iron railing put up that day in 1919 to fence off the bloodied marble he had thought that thus casually observed, years after the event, what one knew as history did not grow claws and tear into one’s flesh.
The antechamber was becoming a furnace. He edged into the adjoining room and stood pressed against the wall, invisible as a fly in the half-dark, revelling in the breeze of the two fast ceiling fans. Tinted skylights bathed the shuttered room in a light like cool green bottled water. The furniture had been pushed to the walls and people sat on a white floor sheet lounging against bolsters. A roar of laughter greeted his arrival making him break into a sweat again. He was about to start explaining his presence when he realized they hadn’t even seen him. They were enjoying an Urdu sher recited by a plump man in a sherwani who was shaking with laughter himself. A delayed boisterous shout came from a woman in thick white khadi like the rest of them after the couplet was translated for her. As his eyes got used to the gloom he saw she was wearing an enormous red canna behind one ear. The greybeard next to her drew his dhoti up to his knee to scratch his hairy shin, making a scraping rasping sound in a room that must once have heard nothing coarser than the whisper and rustle of silk. He seemed to be presiding because he called on the master of the house for an account of his tour of the province.
The master apologized for his dust-choked throat and started to speak but Nurullah, recalling that this was a son who at nineteen had stood distraught over his father’s trampled corpse on a road of trampled corpses, missed his opening remarks. Could a son forget the sight of a father done to death before his eyes? The thought sent a feverish spasm through Nurullah. A hundred hows and whys laid siege to his mind for he was unable to connect the atmosphere in this cool calm room, its spirited exchanges and its humour with atrocities seen and suffered. Many of those present must also have been there on that road, holding their ground when two lines of mounted police galloped upon them and horses reared up on their hind legs with their hoofs trembling high in the air before they came pounding down. To be sure the plump-cheeked man in the sherwani had referred to the new District Magistrate as one reputed to be a haramzada, and a younger dhoti-clad party member had roundly abused the police, calling them the bastard sons of foreign swine, but it was evidently just their way of talking.
He listened to the master describing his tour as a deeply moving experience of withering crops, dying cattle and famished shadows of men and women who had been driven into the fields when the rent collectors had seized their goods, grain and animals to recover the raised rents they could not pay. He had sat with them around their cooking fires and been impressed by their determination not to be cowed. Not so long ago their kin had been conscripted for the Great War as soldiers and as labour and rushed to relieve the British at Ypres and Flanders. The heirs of many who were killed were evicted from their holdings and those who survived the trenches came home to another war, against raised rents and impoverishing cesses. Remember the carbuncle cess a zamindar had levied to finance month-long temple prayers for his recovery from a septic carbuncle on his buttock? This raised a laugh but the master held up his hand.
‘In no free country could anyone force them to pay,’ he said, his anger straining to be heard. ‘They’re ready to organize a No Tax campaign with our help.’
There was an instant babble of alarm. It was abnormally loud and assertive after the husk of a voice but the bitter-sweet reminder that some in this world are born free made Nurullah lose the thread of the argument.
‘Not so fast, Nikhil,’ spoke someone agitatedly above the rest. ‘Already we’re outlawed. Our public meetings and processions are banned. Our bank accounts, our property, our cars are up for grabs. At this rate we’ll lose our zamindar supporters.’
Nurullah made himself comfortable on the floor, resigned to a long wait. The greybeard intervened to say raised rents and rapacious extractions were nothing new. The robber Company had started them and the Crown had reduced kisans to serfdom by making zamindars outright owners of all cultivable land and revenue collectors for the Crown. There were no poorer peasants in the country but the question right now was whether the party could risk losing its zamindar supporters.
‘Every move we make is a risk,’ agreed the husk when it could be heard again, ‘but all our supporters know that estates will go to the cultivators the day we come to power.’
For some strange reason this statement had a magically silencing effect. Nurullah supposed it must be because that mythical day need not concern them this afternoon. The next thing he knew they were getting down to arrangements for a kisan conference here in Akbarabad to flag off a No Tax campaign.
‘I’m telling you from now it’ll be a dismal failure,’ the boisterous woman warned, ‘the authorities will see to it that the kisans don’t get here.’
‘There’s bound to be some show of force to discourage them,’ the master agreed, ‘but the Government won’t want another kisan uprising on its hands like they had ten years ago.’
A date was set and details discussed, disagreed, agreed. There was no end to their talk. Finally, it was noted that party workers who volunteered their help at meetings, boycotts and pickets must be instructed to keep the kisan delegates from turning violent no matter what the provocation, especially now that there were orders to shoot agrarian agitators. Nurullah had seen those puny volunteers at a meeting Robin-da had taken him to, mere chokras some of them, in their flapping khadi shorts, who wouldn’t be able to control a flea much less a roused kisan. But on that note of fantasy the worthy citizens who had argued every other issue threadbare got up to go, bland as butter and in complete accord. Nurullah found himself alone.
He looked about him at sofas and chairs upholstered in a fabric of green dragons and blue butterflies. Little round black-lacquered tables were wedged in among them. A blue-patterned pitcher glimmered in a wall niche. Scrolls of bamboos-and-willows hung on either side of it. A glass-shelved cabinet was empty but for the top shelf. He went over to admire two prancing green horses, a translucent stag with delicately branched antlers and a fat white seated goddess. These must be all that was left of the jade collection which had been confiscated in a sweep on valuables after the cavalry charge when the family had refused to pay the fines imposed for civil disobedience. In all his travels over Europe, the late master was said to have collected only Chinese things.
The master came back after seeing his colleagues off and before Nurullah could clear his throat to introduce himself, a smile of charmed surprise illumined a face both younger and older than thirty.
‘So, Nurullah! At last!’ spoke the husky voice, ‘I keep hearing about you from Robin-da!’
Nurullah who had been rehearsing what to say had the words ready on his tongue and he was acutely aware of the man waiting for him to respond. But the warmth of the hand resting on his shoulder, the eyes smiling into his, the sheer sweetness of this heart-stirring welcome to a stranger so bewildered him that he could only deliver the professor’s letter with a mumble and would have blundered out had it not been for the restraining hand. He heard himself replying to remarks he could not afterwards recall and was then seen off with the same courtesy and ceremony as the others before him. He had never known such civility, or met such a man — one who, in Sa’adi’s words, would by his honey-tongued gentleness ‘manage to guide an elephant with a hair.’
A week later he began to come and go. Robin-da’s letter had arranged for him to help Bhai (as he now called the master of the house) with his correspondence during his free time from teaching. Once he had to stay overnight to work late over the backlog that had piled up during Bhai’s tour of the province, and Bhai had suggested he move in.
‘Should I move in, Robin-da?’ he asked his mentor doubtfully after tea and samosas at the philosophy professor’s house when the other guests had gone.
Nurullah should have known the reply would be an astounded outburst from the tiny grasshopper frame.
‘Move in? Naturally, move in! What is there to ask? Why are you wasting time asking? Does an invitation like this come every day? Well, well, what an oddfellow you are, Nurullah, this obstructive attitude will be the curse of you. Why are you always putting obstructions? Put away this tendency. Move in, move in. Where will you get another such opportunity to study the Movement firsthand?’
Nurullah carried a tray of used cups and chutney-smeared plates to the kitchen for time to think up a tactful reply. He wished he’d asked Eknath’s advice earlier that evening, but Robin-da’s tea sessions were too lively for private exchange. Even that old bore, Matul, whose philosophy students slept soundly through his droning monotone, got witty here. And Matul’s wife, Hashi — Robin-da’s precious chatterbox niece — hung though she was with Matul and her bunch of clanking household keys, listened for a change, her eyes shining like fresh black ink in her much admired wax-white face.
‘Well?’ demanded Robin-da impatiently, ‘don’t dawdle about. Be quick and speak your mind.’
How could he mortally offend his mentor by saying there was nothing to study in a Movement that had never so much as sent a shiver through the Raj — except once when a furious mob had burned a police thana with constables inside it. But even that had come to nothing when the Mahatma had called the Movement off and said the violence had run a rapier through his body so let us pray.
‘How old may you be?’ asked Robin-da sarcastically, as if he didn’t know.
‘Twenty-three, of course, Robin-da.’
‘Of course. And clogged with ideas from everywhere but here. Ask yourself what country your brain lives in, Nurullah, and why from morning to night you are passing on a meaningless mass of harks, yonders, skylarks and daffodils to your First Years. If you cannot produce something from the mysterious mechanism of your own mind, learn from those who can. Observe what is going on around you. Cultivate another way of seeing.’
This second scathing outburst was only the tea session winding down and needed no response. Not that Nurullah could have explained why dead English poets’ words of joy and sorrow, love and battle sang in his ears, or why what had begun as a livelihood — teaching mere print on a page — had entered his veins to drug and infatuate him. The dead poets echoed and re-echoed in him. ‘Forget it, yaar,’ Eknath had jibed, cutting into one of Nurullah’s favourite quotes, ‘at this rate you’ll never have a thought of your own.’ But if it had been forgettable it would not have been the poetry it was. Nurullah only knew that a world he had never seen loomed up around him, now ominous, now light and luminous. He was alive to its presence as one is to danger, or to an ache one cannot ignore. But what in any case, did it have to do with his dilemma?
He had a proper sense of his own worth and didn’t want to be taken for a hanger-on. Still less did he fancy living in a monument on public display. Since the cavalry charge in 1921 sightseers had been coming in hordes and not just peasants from this rack-rented province. Only this morning a patriarch from the distant south had sauntered up the drive ahead of his womenfolk, his hands clasped on his portly stomach. Behind them hulked an eagle-nosed Pathan from the far northwest. What was he, whose tribe provided the savage abusive prison guards at Port Blair, doing here? One and all they behaved like pilgrims to a shrine. Nurullah had seen them stroke the rice and roses of the verandah mosaic, follow Binda the chowkidar’s tottering tread around the house and stand gazing through open windows in a trance. He had seen worshippers like that, submerged waist-deep in the Ganga at daybreak lifting their arms and faces to the first ray of light, oblivious of the rubbish bobbing around them or the half-cremated corpses of paupers floating sluggishly past them on the turgid brown Ganga of the ghats. But there was that touch of trance about the town’s notables, too, when they came to call, though less like the Ganga and more like Romeo’s ‘Soft! What light through yonder window breaks!’
‘Too much literature addles the brain,’ said the professor shrewdly, and pleased with his little parting shot he advised Nurullah to hurry up and move in.
But Nurullah was comfortably settled in the room Robin-da had found for him at a nominal rent at Mrs Shona Tiwari and Tiwariji’s house. They were an amiable dreadfully untidy couple, uncannily lookalike, even to the gaps in their front teeth. He had a key to the side entrance and came and went as he pleased. He hardly ever saw them or their other lodger, the immaculate Misraji, who sat fanning himself on the front verandah with his frilled Orissa hand fan. Living with the family in the domed monument would be another matter, though Bhai’s was not a family in the usual sense, just his spry widowed mother, his six-year-old daughter and an ancient relative.
Ammaji spent a ritual hour spinning thread on her charkha every day, fulfilling her party pledge to spin two thousand yards of khadi thread a month. She kept her unwieldy Mahabharata on its stand beside her open to one of its blinding blue and orange illustrations of Krishna Bhagvan’s heroic exploits. When there was enough handspun thread she sent it to the Khadi Bhandar in the Chowk to one Gosiben, the Bhandar in-charge, who sent it somewhere else to be woven into cloth. Nurullah had not seen Gosiben but her penetrating nasal wail pierced the dawn on Sundays when she did her rounds with party workers singing national songs. It was a relief when the wail for martyrdom gave way to robust shouts of Bolo Bharat Mata ki jai! as the procession passed his rented room and turned the corner.
The child, Shãn, brooded menacingly over her convent homework. The relative appeared in the scorched garden before sundown to lift and lower a lionheaded cane, languidly directing the mali’s hose and watering can to patches of weeded soil, potted plants and newly dug beds. Between lifting and lowering, Pyare Chacha stood surveying the scene with immense dignity, one pointed jooti planted slightly forward and outward of its pair, one narrow crinkled hand placed over the other on the lion’s head, looking like a lifesize portrait of himself in shades of weak tea and tarnished silver.
Two days later Nurullah, still only half decided, crossed the reddish-pink verandah mosaic carrying his small trunk on his head, his bedroll under one arm and his tiffin carrier. He waved Ramdin, the mali, away when he came hurrying on his buckling bow legs to help. His luggage deposited upstairs, he was taken to an outhouse to cyclostyle notices of the kisan conference. Bhai looked in when he was stacking the cyclostyled sheets and tying them into bundles, and Nurullah assured him he would smuggle the bundles out for distribution after dark with three of his trusted students. Bhai was vastly amused.
‘No need for all that rigmarole, just distribute them,’ he said. ‘We don’t work in the dark, Nurullah, because we have nothing to hide. I’ve already informed the District Magistrate about our plans.’
He added warmly, ‘I hope you’re going to be at the public meeting on the last day.’
Nurullah, who had had no intention of being there, had felt dutybound to attend and was caught in the middle of the crowded shamiana when the furor began. The speeches had scarcely ended when he heard the sickening thud of lathis on both sides of the packed gathering. Cursing his own stupidity he willed the kisan crowd to break up its solid seated ranks and get out of this death trap. In rising panic he realized no one was getting up. A reedy voice behind him called ‘Eeeen-kalab’ in a wierdly unlikely longdrawn out summons to revolution, and ‘Zindabad’ rose roaring in his ears, but the only movement he could see was flailing arms and legs being dragged out of the shamiana. He searched frantically for an exit but trapped as they all were in a monster’s snapping jaws, there was no escape. In horrifying minutes the monster came battering its way through. Nurullah was struggling to his feet when a blow between his shoulder blades sent him sprawling face down on the coir matting where he lay winded till he was booted over on his back, seized by his arms and dragged out of the shamiana. Outside was a welter of bodies painfully disentangling in a fog of dust. Some lay writhing on their backs, others folded knees to chest like crumpled question marks on mud that was scoured by the trails of dragged bodies. He rolled onto his hands and knees and crawled his way out of the welter. On the main road the speakers, Bhai among them, were getting into a barred police van in orderly single file.
Nurullah spent the next hour helping to lift and carry the worst injured on durries making do for stretchers, for removal by the volunteers. Dazedly following their directions he learned that some were being taken back to the mansion where a dispensary had been set up in one wing after the Prince of Wales’ visit. The volunteers were marvelling at the moderation of the police. What a change, said the old ones, from the murderous assault that time, or the well-aimed.brutality on the Salt Marchers on Dandi beach two years ago. Nurullah shudderingly recalled a foreign journalist’s account of the carnage on Dandi beach. Rods had descended on unprotected heads, leaving fractured skulls and broken shoulders on the sand. Then the police had borne down on the inert bloodied bundles and savage kicking had begun.
‘They aren’t used to non-violence,’ he heard a volunteer say regretfully, ‘ahimsa turns them into mad dogs.’
Nurullah unlocked his bicycle from the jungle of machinery at the entrance and reached home as Ammaji and Shãn were getting into a car. He was beckoned in beside the driver to go with them to Akbarabad Jail in case Bhai had any instructions for him, but when they got there he was not allowed into the jail office. He tramped back down the road to a tree stump in the shade. A burning breeze blew his sweat dry. He felt filthy, disordered and disgraced. His kurta was torn, the skin of his back was raw, his face was gashed and bleeding and his arms had nearly been wrenched out of their sockets. Anger flamed through him on a tide of delayed reaction. Rigid on the tree stump he relived the shame of crawling on all fours among other kicked and beaten crawlers. The misbegotten order forbidding them to return blow for blow had reduced men to this craven condition.
A hundred yards distant two convicts yoked together like oxen were hauling water from a well in a leather bucket and emptying it into a trough. He watched them plodding back and forth until their dreary dementing drill swam out of focus. It was a relief to hear the grate and clang of rusted iron as the massive jail gate was pulled shut, bolted and padlocked. Bhai’s solitary figure stood behind it gripping the bars and Ammaji was coming down the road holding Shãn by the hand.
Suddenly snatching her hand from Ammaji’s, Shãn went storming, stumbling back. Nurullah raced after her but she was there before him, her arms wrapped round her father’s legs through the bars, screaming frenziedly. The noise was harrowing. Nothing like a child sobbing her heart out, it was all the furies unleashed, and she kept at it with the stamina of a mourner at Mohurrum. Nurullah stood by helpless, as did Bhai on the other side, his face contorted with anguish, his hands nailed to the bars far above her. When at last she slackened her convulsive grip on his legs and hiccoughed to a stop, Nurullah picked her up and carried her to the car where Ammaji took charge, saying she should have been prepared, it happened every time. At home he tried to lift Shãn out but she shoved him aside with both fists and darted into the house without a backward glance. Like an arrow to its mark, thought Nurullah, noting that today had set the girl’s rebellious spirit apart from her surroundings in some impressive way.
Old Mrs Framjee whose car it was waited on the front steps with her son, Nusli. The aged lady was wearing one of her lace-edged saris pinned about with brooches. Her stately height, her hump and her drooping cheeks gave her the noble look of a sorrowful camel. She received Ammaji into her open arms as Nurullah had seen her do every time they met or parted, and held the smaller woman to her aged bosom in a close customary embrace. Short neat sixty-year-old Nusli in his round black topi looked on. They went indoors where a roomful of callers greeted Ammaji’s entry into the Chinese room. A dishevelled man came out, glanced approvingly at Nurullah’s torn kurta and gashed face and requested him to send in drinking water.
Dying of thirst himself Nurullah poured two glassfuls from the surahi in the pantry, drained them and hollered for Kallu. He left the cook filling glasses on a tray and started up the stairs to take a bath. He would take formal leave of Ammaji in the morning. Shãn’s lung-bursting farewell had allowed no talk with Bhai and nothing had been said on the way home but for the driver’s cryptic comment on the sky, as they drove home under its livid sagging load of unshed rain.
He was halfway up the stairs when Robin-da emerged from the Chinese room guturally intoning a complicated alaap in his tuneless voice, a sure sign in him of suppressed excitement. He caught sight of Nurullah and twirled an imperious finger toward the door without interrupting his alaap. Nurullah reluctantly accompanied him across the burnt-out grass to the neglected tennis court where, screened from the house by a trellis draped with some bedraggled creeper, more time was wasted ambling to the far end of the red gravel till the alaap vibrated to a growl and Robin-da spoke, suddenly brisk.
‘There’s a message for you. Nikhil wants you to tutor Shãn until his release. Of course I told Ammaji you would.’
Nurullah fought down his irritation — minor compared with the day’s earlier punishment — and dismissed the message from his mind. Robin-da now chatty and mellow, explained that the Sacred Heart Convent did not suit Shãn’s temperament and what school fed children on anything but Elsewhere? He had seen the child scowling into space trying to conjure a dog for a composition titled My Dog. The venerable pundit who taught her Hindi at home was no better. He and his kind picked out titles from old Board Examination papers. This one’s 1919 favourite was The Moonlight of Winter. All this must alas continue. What Nikhil had in mind was its correction.
‘Counter-teaching is required, Nurullah. Cast your mind about for ways to correct what she is taught. Cultivate in her another way of seeing.’
Taking Nurullah’s baffled silence for consent he began his tuneless humming again. Thunder rumbled and subsided as they headed back to the portico where Robin-da had parked his bicycle. He raised each tiny foot methodically against the opposite kneecap to examine the soles of his chappals and knock red grit off them with fastidious flicks of his thumb and middle finger. Nurullah stood holding the cycle while the professor tucked up his gauzy dhoti with a metal clip, mounted and trundled off, wobbling over a bump.
Upstairs he made for the white-tiled bathroom. Furnished with a long tub on curved brass claws and a flush toilet instead of a common commode it had dazzled Nurullah when he first saw it. With rare delight he had pulled the chain and watched the flood it released. But for his bath he had stuck to the less daunting brass pail. The water gushed out lukewarm but two pailfuls revived him.
No other room he had lived in had had a dressing table. He towelled his head dry at its tilting oval mirror. The mirror stand had two toy drawers (for what miniature belongings he could not imagine) resting on a table with two regular drawers. He had had nothing to put in any of them. The deep mirror-doored almirah was empty too but for his few pyjama-kurtas. Now he wished he had made use of all that shelf and hanging space for his books. He took them out of his trunk, wiped their spines on the khadi bedspread and lined up history, poetry and his carefully chosen collection of Lives on the shelves. The pointlessness of it struck him as he was laying his world atlas on the hanging side with his teaching notes, textbooks, pens, ink bottle and blotting paper, but he decided to leave them there till morning.
It was his first meal in the dining room. Dim bulbs (for economy) made every room shadowy after dark but here the elaborately carved black table and purplish-red walls intensified the gloom. Chinese scrolls hung here too, Mountain and Water behind him, Tiger and Rushing Waterfall on the opposite wall behind Bhai’s empty chair at the head of the table. Some callers had stayed for dinner. The Framjees, needless to say, and a Dr Bihari who had vowed not to cut his hair until swaraj. It was thinning and hung in limp grey strings to his jaws. The boisterous woman had stayed on too. Miss Basappa was stout at close quarters. The yellow canna bobby-pinned behind her ear had withered and collapsed long since but Miss Basappa herself was all energy. ‘You were there!’ she shouted triumphantly down the table, ‘I saw you!’
Nurullah was thankful he had seated himself at the bottom of the table, leaving empty chairs between himself and the others. Doing as they did he clutched his fork in his left fist, pronged a slithering kidney and sawed at it with the knife in his right. This left right left right made no sense when one right hand was all one needed.
Fortunately no one noticed a sawed slice flying off his plate. They were going over the day’s events with subdued satisfaction. In their opinion it had all been quite perfect. Word came during dinner that Bhai and his cellmates had been permitted to sleep in the cellyard because of the heatwave, chained to their iron cots to prevent them from escaping over the wall.
‘Like dangerous criminals,’ said Miss Basappa, making them all laugh.
Head down to prevent another mishap, Nurullah grappled as tensely with their bizarre acceptance of being kicked and beaten as with the slippery innards on his plate. Old Zenobia Framjee was assuring Ammaji she would make her Nusli speak severely to Kallu about serving up a mixed grill on the hottest night of the year just because no one had remembered to give him an order and when he should know by now there was no Lea and Perrins Worcester Sauce or anything English in the house to flavour English cooking. It was not as if the old black rascal had nothing to fall back on but the British army’s diet he had cooked before being fired from the army Mess.
‘He wasn’t a c-c-c-cook,’ Nusli reminded his mother, ‘only a m-m-m-masalchi.’
‘Never mind that. Any cook’s mate learns cooking. And haven’t I taught him Bhaji-ma Bheja and Frenchbeans-ma-Gosh?’
Kallu reappeared with the grill, rocked backward a step into the pantry and out again. He flashed the aged lady a grin and salaamed her with a reckless flourish of his right hand, dangerously tilting the grill in his left. Mrs Framjee gave him a curt nod and ordered her Nusli out of the side of her mouth to find out if the old rascal was still getting a rum ration from the army. She and Ammaji began to commiserate the loss of the family’s beloved Hafiz Ali, who had had to go when economies began and boycott put an end to buying British goods. Now he came to Government House, Akbarabad from Government House, Lucknow with the Governor’s staff for two weeks every winter and called here without fail bearing marvels he had specially prepared in the Governor’s kitchen. Nothing to beat these Mohammedans for loyalty, grumbled old Zenobia Framjee, glaring after Kallu’s unsteadily departing back, and no one had known how to smoke river fish as Hafiz Ali had. Nurullah heard about Hafiz Ali’s artistry with mutton, his versatility with vegetables, his crystallized cherries and sugared violets, whatever those might be. All the talk of food whetted Miss Basappa’s appetite and she demanded more about the old days with the enthusiasm of a hefty toddler at story time. Pyare Chacha gladly obliged, starting with a quick survey of the family’s migration from the Kashmir valley to the plains, and going on to the late master’s father’s narrow escape from crossfire in Delhi in 1857.
A stylish chronicler Pyare Chacha turned out to be. After Father’s father’s providential escape during the Mutiny he resurrected a genealogy brimful of vanished bhabhis, chachas and diddas and breathed life into the trivial doings of these remote extinct relatives, be it Basso Masi’s perilous journey to Kashmir by tonga with only a one-eyed servant in attendance or Kishen Chacha’s art of peeling fruit all in one strip. Fluid gestures of his crinkled ivory hands unravelled generations of relationship over the table’s carved black surface, his fingers as fluent as his tongue. But to what purpose, marvelled Nurullah, or was this pastime normal to people who had ancestors? The saga of ancestry and pedigree made him, a kith-and-kinless upstart in their midst, feel like an unhammered nail jutting out of a masterpiece of wood carving.
He laid his knife and fork carefully side by side on his empty plate as he saw the others doing. He was finding it hard to keep awake but Shãn was drinking it all in, as enthralled by the saga as her elders.
‘We’re too wound up to go to bed mark my words,’ observed old Zenobia Framjee from the other side of her mouth to Ammaji, ‘we’ve had too much excitement today.’
After the hot meaty blast of fried innards a scent of saffron drifted deliciously to Nurullah from the sweet being served by the shuffling bearer, Beni, in the Framjees’ own silver dish. He had just finished helping himself to golden strands of sewain when Nusli, leaning forward to catch his eye, told him to s-s-s-see to the jammed f-f-f-flush of the t-t-t-toilet adjoining the late master’s study. It was a hideous shock. If Nusli Framjee had casually assumed he was a lackey here, so would other people. Nusli looked puzzled but nodded when Ammaji murmured that the Christian Workshop was sending a plumber.
Pyare Chacha’s chronicle had moved from the dead to the living. Nurullah learned perforce about talented cousins who had grown up here and gone away to futures in government service and British companies — what other futures were there, as he charitably put it. Naturally they hadn’t wanted to be a burden on a household that was selling its cars and carriages, cutting down staff and starting strict economies in response to the Mahatma’s clarion call from his hut ‘to enter a dynamic condition of conscious suffering.’ Nurullah thought it more likely the cousins had bolted like bats at daylight at the sound of the clarion call, but Pyare Chacha was halo-ing and garlanding them in memory the same as Basso Masi, Kishen Chacha and the rest. Family bonds were notoriously sticky but he had never seen anything like this glue. You couldn’t pry them apart. The leg of one of them could have been the arm of another, as legend had it Krishna Bhagvan’s feet, enthroned in Radha’s heart, blistered when she drank scalding milk.
Zenobia had rightly predicted that Shãn would not go to bed but the girl stopped her tantrums when she was persuaded to choose a record from a box in the Chinese room and the gramophone was wound up. Nurullah recognized the jhik-jhik rhythm of the moomphally song, an arresting contrast to the insipid ailing noises of their other records. The sprightly old Parsi dame jabbed a loose hairpin back into her sparse grey bun, pinned her sari more securely to her hair and took Shãn’s hands in hers. Leaning over the child she guided her forward, back and sideways along an invisible square, the pale crumpled skin of her upper arms swaying to the call of The Peanut Vendor.
‘Remember, Shãndarling,’ she instructed, ‘if the lady treads on her partner’s toes it’s the gentleman who has to say “My fault”. And when the dance is over he says “Lovely”.’
This glimpse of life on the moon brought a gleam of animation to Shãndarling’s obstinate face. Nurullah who could not imagine the lives the cousins had fled to pictured them shod in patent leather, jhik-jhikking talentedly to the moomphally song along invisible squares murmuring ‘My fault’ and ‘Lovely’.
When he got into bed at last the welts and bruises on his back shrieked protest making him turn cautiously to one side. He was wide awake. His thoughts marched backward over the past week to the kisans’ arrival, sixteen hundred of them. Some had come uneventfully by bullock cart but the train travellers had had stories to tell of armed police blocking off wayside stations and beating back kisan delegations to prevent them from boarding. Nurullah could see them hoisting themselves up by the handrails of third class railway carriages, hauling up their staffs and bundles and clambering aboard with the dogged defiance of men possessed as he had seen them staying obdurately seated in the shamiana waiting to be battered, though Allah knows even a goat doesn’t willingly stay put to perish.
In the dark he relived the nightmare. Hundreds of eyes around him had flashed defiance and he had sensed a mammoth crouching force. Let go it would have torn like a cyclone through fields of sugarcane. By any reckoning this should have happened as it had ten years ago when drought and destitution had driven them to rampage in their thousands from one zamindar’s estate to another, breaking open godowns of grain, and when the police opened fire, fighting them with axes, spears and stones.
Hatchet blows penetrated Nurullah’s doze, landing on the leaves below his window. An answering hiss steamed up from the soil and cool earth-scented air gusted through his mosquito net. He drowsed on his other side to the sound of steady soothing rain falling straight down from an overburdened sky and dreamed of Chinese tapestries, of Hafiz Ali fashioning myriad-leaved pastries, sugaring violets, rendering choice cuts of meat into choicest silk, of Ramdin in langot and headrag on his bent bow legs in the portico holding a rose like a beggared parody of a Moghul emperor to welcome absconding cousins home. Nurullah reminded himself to take leave of Ammaji first thing in the morning and drifted in half-sleep to an Akbarabad story of a woman weeping wildly over a dead body outside the gates within earshot of receding horses’ hooves. On the deserted untarred road outside the jail today her arm held out to Shãn had fallen weakly to her side. What if he had not been there to fetch the hysterical girl back to the car? Had there been an able body around since the flight of the cousins, jhik-jhikking talentedly to the moomphally song wherever they were with their patent leather toes polished to a glare they could see their faces in? He was not aware of reversing a decision before he fell fathoms deep into sleep, only of the mesmerising radiance of a smile and a voice exclaiming huskily, ‘So, Nurullah! At last!’
Nevertheless, Nurullah knew himself to be a man of the twentieth century who lived by reason and this was his first thought on waking. This, not some spell cast at midnight, had decided him to stay. It was a service he owed Bhai, along with the fact that an able body was a dire necessity here with the cousins fled. But if spell it was, it was the first he had encountered outside the printed page and daylight made common sense of it. Bhai was one of the privileged who had seen the world, crossed oceans and set foot in the free countries of Nurullah’s world atlas. This alone could explain his attraction for one who had never left his province or even been near the towering mountain reaches of it where snow reared gigantically for miles. The Indian Ocean halfway down the peninsula was harder to imagine, and then only to reflect sombrely on how different history would have been if Akbar the Great had secured the sea around his empire as he had the land he ruled. Skilled strategist that he had been, why had the Great been stoneblind to the sea?
Ammaji was at her charkha early as usual. Her outsize Mahabharata was open to a bright blue Krishna grown huge, trampling the 101-headed orange serpent Kaliya Nag to death in a poisoned pool of the Yamuna. Pyare Chacha was down by the fountain getting the creeper at its base thinned out. He lifted his cane in languid salute as Nurullah pedalled past after breakfast. The sun was mild, the air was humid. It was the day, the last of July 1932, that Nurullah began counting his stay in the house.