ANEES RAHMAN WAS Personal Assistant to a member of the Indian Legislative Assembly – MLA (Centre) for short. He was both a relative of one of the only two Muslim members of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, and a member of the ruling family of a small state in central India. Although he lived comfortably on a stipend from his ancestral state, he had no personal fortune by way of landholding or money. All he owned as property was two houses, one in Delhi and the other in a picturesque village situated on the banks of the river twenty miles from the capital. The only other thing of value he possessed was a fine education. Supported by his family, he had gone to England in the early thirties and qualified as Barrister at Law. He never practised the profession; he dabbled in politics but gave that up after a while. Helped by family contacts, he acquired his present non-governmental position and settled down in it. Although some years younger, he had been a friend of Roshan Agha and his family for many years. He had known Naim, but only slightly, barely a handshake or two and an Assalam-o-Alaikam. When Azra spoke to him, he agreed to take on Naim in a position in his office at the Assembly – rather less, it was understood, to get Naim to do any real work than to provide him with a place to go to each day and a routine to follow. Naim got an entry pass to the Assembly and a desk of his own in an office that he shared with three other staff. Once he got settled in, however, Naim found himself more and more involved in conversations initiated by Anees Rahman, and not always regarding work; Anees had found Naim an attractive listener to the outpourings of his active mind. Over a period of time the two men developed a personal friendship.
Azra had finally agreed to take a suite of rooms – a drawing room and two bedrooms – on the ground floor. Naim had amassed a great collection of books on various subjects. From books of general interest in the first year of his confinement, he had gone on to specialized reading, picking up books on a single topic at a time until he exhausted it according to his liking and ability, before going on to the next: religion, history, general science, ending with philosophy. This did not particularly clear his mind about anything; what he got out of it was a permanent habit of reading, no longer now for the sake of acquiring knowledge so much as to use it as a veil between himself and the world. Meticulously following doctor’s orders, Azra would be seen by the early risers in the neighbourhood of Roshan Mahal taking Naim for a walk, her hand on his left shoulder while he carried his old walking stick in his right hand. Naim had almost fully recovered, his limp nearly gone, but like his reading the stick in his hand and Azra by his shoulder had become a comforting habit, one that served to hide his embarrassment from onlookers. On their return, they had breakfast together, the only occasion after the walk in the morning when they sat face to face, although they exchanged no more than a few words. Naim habitually skipped the midday meal in order to control the weight he had put on during his confinement, causing him high blood pressure. Azra always took her evening meal with Roshan Agha who, suffering from chronic diabetes and heart problems, was almost permanently confined to his room. Naim had dinner in his room and afterwards read late into the night. They had separate bedrooms.
The country was in turmoil. The Cripps Mission had failed and Stafford Cripps’s offer of freedom ‘after the war is over’ had been rejected by the Congress Party. At the same time the ‘Quit India’ Movement was launched, which engaged in sabotage. Hearing reports of the blowing up of railway lines and suchlike, Naim was reminded of a part of his distant past but felt no movement in his blood. He had even given up reading the newspaper. Only Azra felt momentarily excited by it, reading the papers out aloud to Naim at breakfast. Getting a feeble response from Naim, she gave up after a few days. The war was at its height and a famine was raging in Bengal.
Anees Rahman, a short, stocky bull of a man, moved with the agility of an athlete, his energy never allowing him to stay in one position for long. In the middle of looking at some papers, he would jump up and go to the window to look outside, often talking quietly to himself while gesticulating busily with his hands. Back at his desk, he would no sooner settle down than leave his seat and go to the outer office to speak to one of his staff. He had also had Naim’s desk moved to his own private office, placing Naim’s seat opposite his own so that he could talk to him without having to get up.
One day he invited Naim to his house in the village for a stay over the weekly holiday. He picked Naim up at the end of office hours on Saturday afternoon and took him straight to the village. The journey took less than an hour. The village, although situated only a short distance from the river, was built on high ground, so that it remained safe from flooding when the river burst its banks during the monsoons. Anees’s house was right at the top of the hill from where the eye could see mile after mile of the plains on both sides of the river. The whitewashed house was simple but solidly built, with large gardens and old trees, lush green lawns sloping away from the front veranda of the house. The two men sat in cane chairs under the shade of an amaltas tree. The air was very still. There was not a sound to be heard, not even the chirp of a bird in the garden, except for the hiss of water coming faintly over from the great river that somehow had the effect of increasing the silence. Naim thought it was the quietest place he had been to, and mentioned it to Anees.
‘Yes,’ Anees said. ‘I have a rather agitated nature. I come here to calm myself.’
A servant laid out tea on the table. The sun was still up. After tea, Anees asked the servant to get his fishing tackle out. Within fifteen minutes they were sitting on two low wooden stools by the river bank with Anees’s line in the water, the sinker bobbing on the surface and a small pot of squirming earthworms, dug up by the servant, by their side. Naim noticed the change in Anees: he had become quiet. Sitting absolutely still, gazing at the slow movement of the broad plank of water sparkling in the late afternoon sun, he seemed to Naim, for the first time since he had known him, to be in a reflective mood. There was a large family of refugees from Bengal living in the open on the bank of the river. They had not erected a shelter, nor did they appear to be doing anything towards the provision of food for themselves and their several children. There were only some rumpled dirty sheets on the ground by way of bedding.
Nodding his head in their direction, Naim asked, ‘Aren’t the village people doing something for them?’
‘They get cooked food from the village,’ Anees replied. ‘But they don’t want to stay. They are moving on to the city. At least that is what they keep saying. I think they have lost their sense of direction.’
Naim laughed drily. ‘God help them.’
‘What has God to do with it?’ Anees said, unleashing another of his speeches on the unsuspecting Naim. ‘It’s a man-made disaster. And only man will suffer.’
A bit surprised, Naim slowly nodded, ‘Yeees.’
‘You have only seen the living,’ Anees said, ‘I have seen the dead in Bengal. Piles and piles of them. If you can spare a day’s supply of rice, you sell it. If you haven’t, you beg. The difference between rich and poor is a handful of rice. No, not between rich and poor, actually between life and death. We live our lives according to simple rules. When we are young we read history and come to know of the disasters that befell our ancestors. From these lessons, we deduce some rules. Look before you leap, that sort of thing. My father gave me a book called Golden Rules. Did you read the book of golden rules when you were young?’
‘I was never young,’ Naim said, laughing.
‘When we grow up we see that there is no such thing as a regular shape of history. Come floods, come epidemics, come famine. But they are never the same. Like each life, each disaster is different. There is a fixed pattern, it’s called helter-skelter.’ He laughed ironically. ‘In order to form a reasonable pattern, we invent the idea of justice. When that doesn’t work, we go further into helter-skelter and invent God. I will tell you one thing: there are no golden rules.’
This was yet another aspect of Anees that Naim witnessed: the man, no longer restless, sitting patiently like an old angler, giving quiet words to his desperation.
Later, as their friendship grew, it became, at Anees’s insistence, a regular feature of Naim’s life to accompany Anees to his village house once every two or three weeks. Gradually, there came a point when, one day, Anees told Naim the story of his life. He was thought of as a minor aristocrat, Anees said, an idea carefully cultivated by himself and others. He was nothing of the sort. He had been disinherited because his mother had been insufficiently respectable to qualify as a proper wife to his father, so she stayed in the position of a concubine all her life. The old nawab only married her on his deathbed, a marriage that became the subject of a dispute in the courts of law, initiated by the legitimate heirs, on the basis that the dying man was in no fit state to have reached a rational decision. In order, eventually, to avoid publicity, said Anees, he renounced all his claims in return for the grant of two houses and a reasonable sum of money as a yearly stipend. He had never, he said, been back to the state, although his wife and two children were being kept and well looked after there by the present ruler.
Naim, hesitant though he was in the beginning, now began to look forward to these trips to the house on the river bank in company with Anees, recognizing in him a companion soul in trouble. He also liked the place, as it reminded him of his own village. Being neither a believer – in anything! – nor the opposite but, as it were, shuffling somewhere in between, Naim took comfort from the silence of the vast plains and the memory of what had been left behind.
He did go back to his village once, when he received the news that his mother was unwell.
‘Shall I come?’ Azra asked him.
‘No,’ he replied softly.
‘I would like to.’
‘I am certain she is only sick with something minor. Maybe she only wants to see me.’ He laughed. ‘Really no need for you to go. She’ll get well.’
But that was not to be. By the time he arrived at the village, she was dead. He was surprised at how little grief he felt at his mother’s death compared to the time that his father passed away. What he felt immensely was the absence of Ali, someone to whom he hadn’t given a thought for a long time. Naim’s eyes searched for him.
‘I have no enmity with him,’ Rawal said. ‘It was long time ago. I would like him to come back here. Only Aisha,’ he said, with a hint of remorse in his voice, ‘died.’
Naim sent Rawal to look for Ali at the cloth mill. From the information Rawal got at the mill, he travelled to the cement factory. On the third day, Rawal returned empty-handed. Ali had moved away from there, he said, and nobody knew where he had gone. Naim stayed in the village for seven days. During that time he went one day to Aisha’s village to give his condolences to her family. The had no information about Ali’s whereabouts either. Naim went back to Delhi, to his routine at Roshan Mahal and his association with Anees.
The war was over. A quarter of a million Indian troops had become casualties on the fields of Europe and elsewhere. Those who survived returned to a turbulent land. The struggle for independence had hotted up. Times had changed, and Naim saw Anees Rahman undergo a gradual transformation. Over the years he became mellower, then morose and finally bitter, although he never lost the attractive sides of his personality. He had started going back for short trips to his state to see his wife and two children, now grown up. He never stayed for long. ‘I feel out of place there,’ he would say as he rushed back to Delhi. ‘Always will.’ His physical energy had diminished. On one occasion he said to Naim, ‘Life wastes us with such savagery,’ and Naim felt that he was looking at a man who had died. He shivered at the thought of seeing his own image in the other man. But the two of them had by now become so firmly dependent on one another as friends, not least because they had none other, that they gravitated together, now more frequently, each Saturday to the riverside house which had become their place of sanctuary from the world. Once there, they would sit by the river bank or, if the weather did not allow it, on the veranda and talk, or not, descending into long silences. At times, when he became maudlin, Anees talked about death.
‘It is easy, if you prepare yourself for it,’ he would say.
‘How do you prepare yourself for it?’
‘If you have kept your moments whole, the moments of your lifetime, if you have kept them whole, death will hold no terror for you. Just as a moment in its completion passes to give rise to another, so will you pass through the moment of death to another birth. Only a divided moment causes pain, leading to a divided death.’
‘So you think these, what you call moments of our time, can be made “whole” with the power of the mind?’
‘No,’ Anees shook his head, ‘you design your time not with the amount of thought but with the volume of grief that you hold.’
Conversations such as these would at times go on at length before coming inevitably to their inconclusive end. They knew that their discourse, albeit largely one-sided in favour of Anees, was carried on not for the sake of imparting information, knowledge or wisdom but to provide a shade – of voice, or presence – as shelter for one another. During periods of silence, both felt like two separate mausoleums within which their spirits flew like imprisoned birds, striking their heads against the walls while outside the world rushed onwards on its inexorable path without catching their voices.
Despite their closeness, Anees never invited Naim to his house in the city where he mainly lived, although Naim knew where it was, having seen it from outside while driving past it as a passenger in Anees’s car. Only on one occasion did Naim visit the house to call upon Anees unannounced, and that was towards the end of their time together as they knew it. It was a night when Naim couldn’t sleep. He was feeling restless on account of something that had happened earlier in the evening. There had been a gathering of the family in Roshan Agha’s bedroom. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss whether to move or to stay in the event that the partition of the country, which seemed increasingly likely, eventually became a reality. Roshan Agha was torn between two points of view. Having never worked on it, he had no attachment to the land itself; his loyalty lay with the ownership – of land and, by virtue of that, of people. On the other side was his late conversion to the cause of the Muslim League and their demand for a separate homeland for the Muslims to be called Pakistan. But these were the passions of an old and weak man, unable to force through his opinions. The meeting was dominated by Pervez. His arguments were rational: Roshan Agha will be able to claim, to the fullest extent, the lands in the new country abandoned by Hindus and Sikhs who will inevitably move back from there to India; and so far as his own career in the civil service was concerned, there would be unlimited chances for promotion right to the top as there would certainly be a severe shortage of Muslim administrators in Pakistan, given that there weren’t many in the whole of India as it was.
‘How do you know the Hindus will leave their lands and migrate to this side?’ asked Azra.
‘Don’t you see what is going on? Already Hindus and Sikhs are beginning to riot, demanding that if Muslims want a separate country let them all go there. Besides, we have had reports.’
‘Reports of what?’
‘Of retaliations taking place in the north of the country, in areas proposed to become Pakistan.’
‘I don’t believe people will actually pull up their roots and go,’ Azra said. ‘Even if that happens it’s bound to be a temporary phase. You can’t deny nationality to people who have always lived here. It is unimaginable.’
‘Well,’ Pervez said, ‘in that case, where’s the problem? We can all come back.’
There was a brief silence, broken by Roshan Agha. ‘What do you think, Naim?’ he asked.
Everyone looked at Naim. Naim gazed absent-mindedly at Azra. ‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled.
‘A decision,’ Pervez’s wife spoke up, ‘has to be taken on the basis of common sense.’
‘Do you think you have a monopoly on common sense?’ Azra said sharply.
Naheed shrugged in a couldn’t-care-less way. ‘Let’s face it, Naim is –’
She was cut short by her husband. ‘Naim has no great stake here anyway,’ Pervez said, ‘no family of his own, no property to speak of.’ He was immediately embarrassed at having said that. ‘I mean,’ he stammered, ‘I mean he is not tied down here, that is what I mean. He can go on living with us wherever we go.’
During the tense silence that followed, Naim left his chair and the room. Back in his own room, he couldn’t read. He could hear the voices of the other four, who had resumed the discussion. Naim lay flat on his bed, with a book opened and turned face down on his chest, staring at the ceiling. He got up and paced the room, then came back to bed. In time, the meeting in Roshan Agha’s room broke up. He heard Azra go to her room and settle in bed. Extra lights in the house were turned off as a routine by the servants, and in the bedrooms by the occupants. Night had fallen. There was complete quiet in the house. Still sleep was nowhere near Naim’s head. He switched his bedside lamp off and switched it back on again several times. Finally, he thought a walk in the garden might do the trick. He slipped on his dressing gown, picked up the walking stick and went out, trying not to make a sound. He had regained full health but carrying the stick had become a firm habit. Walking on the grass wearing slippers, around which the dew drops touched his bare feet, he felt perked up. A cool night breeze blew after what had been a hot July day. There was more than usual lightness in his head – a thoughtless vacuum. Stepping easily on to the hard ground, he approached the main gate and walked out of the house without being fully conscious of it. He walked on.
It was midnight now and Naim was walking through a heavily built-up part of the city. He was looking closely, stopping and starting, at houses and shops. He was in an area he vaguely recognized. After a while he realized that his uncle’s old house was in a mohalla just like this one. A momentary thought, that it was his house now and he had never looked after it, passed through his mind. He thought that if he tried he could probably find the house. After all he had stayed there many times. There was no street lighting and in the dark of the night he went on, peering at the shut doors of houses, until he found himself in an area that ceased to be familiar. He stopped for a moment and thought of retracing his steps. Suddenly a group of dark shadowy figures emerged from a street, running soundlessly on bare feet. They disappeared down another side street. A few minutes later two police constables, carrying lathis, appeared out of the first street. One of them shone his torch on Naim.
‘Oi, who are you?’ he asked severely.
‘Me?’
‘Do you see anyone else here, you sisterfucker?’
‘No,’ Naim answered.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I am just walking.’
‘Just walking? At this time? Are you a thief?’
‘No, no. I am –’
The constable hit him on the left arm with his lathi, and then pulled back sharply.
‘What is in your hand?’
‘Nothing.’
The constable shone his torch again and Naim rolled up his sleeve to show him in the light. The constable struck his lathi lightly twice on the hand and looked up in suspicious wonder.
‘What is your name?’
‘Naim Ahmad Khan.’
The constable looked at his companion and said, ‘A Musla.’ Then he turned round and, pointing to the wall, ordered, ‘Go and sit there, and wait.’
Naim went and sat on an upturned crate lying outside a shop. The two constables hurried down the other street and disappeared. Naim sat on the crate and waited. A half-hour passed. Nobody came, other than a dirty stray pup out of an open drain who looked up at the man sitting outside the shop. Naim raised his stick to it but the pup wouldn’t move. It was now that he realized he had picked up his uncle’s walking stick instead of his regular one without noticing. Tired of waiting, Naim got up and walked away.
Quite without knowing it, he was walking towards Anees’s house. It took him the better part of an hour to get there. A weak electric bulb burned outside the door. After hesitating for a few minutes, he rang the doorbell. Nobody answered. He rang again, and again, until the spring-action bell exhausted its coil. He started knocking on the door with his stick. In the end, a sleepy servant opened the door. Naim had never seen him before, but he received Naim as if he knew him.
‘Come, come welcome, nawab sahib ji,’ the servant bowed low in greeting. ‘Are you all right, sir, everything all right at this time? Everything all right here, only sarkar is sleeping. I will go wake him, he will be happy.’
Anees looked anything but happy as he appeared a few minutes later, trying to rub sleep out of his eyes and looking at his wristwatch. Wordlessly, he regarded Naim from head to foot for a whole minute, then put his arm round him and led him to the drawing room.
‘Sit down,’ he said and went to a wooden cabinet. He poured himself a whisky. ‘You want some?’ he asked, raising the bottle.
Naim waved his hand.
‘I know you don’t drink. You should, you know,’ Anees said, coming to sit in a sofa beside Naim. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ Naim said with a small laugh. Strangely, he was feeling lightly cheerful.
‘Good God, Naim,’ said Anees, still not over his astonishment. He kept raising his wristwatch and glancing at it. ‘What is the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ Naim said. ‘I came out for a walk. It was hot indoors.’
‘It was too. But at this time?’
‘I walked around.’
‘Long walk, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Naim said, slowly nodding his head.
‘The city is becoming dangerous, do you know that?’
‘Yes,’ Naim said, ‘I think I saw them.’
‘Who?’
‘Dangerous people.’
‘You did? Who were they?’
‘Police constables,’ Naim said, laughing briefly again.
His light mood failed to communicate itself to Anees. His face solemn, Anees was becoming increasingly worried. He leaned forward.
‘Naim, are you feeling well?’
‘Very well. Why do you ask?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ Anees said. ‘You want tea, breakfast, coffee?’
‘No, no, thank you.’
Anees sat quietly looking at Naim for a few minutes. Naim looked back and saw Anees as though from a long way away, almost disappearing in the distance.
Anees looked at his wristwatch again, finished the whisky in his glass and got up. ‘Come on, I will drive you home.’
It was in the early hours of the morning when Naim entered his bedroom. No one except the chowkidar at the main gate knew he had been absent. He lay in bed, still trying unsuccessfully to sleep. He gave up as daylight came up in the window. He took a leisurely bath, got dressed and sat in his favourite armchair, an unread book in his lap, until it was time for breakfast and then off to the office.
Naim didn’t find Anees at the office. He sat at his desk for a few minutes and came out of the office. Walking along long covered verandas, he emerged on the second-storey balcony that went all the way round the great building. Many a time he had stood there with Anees, looking out over the large square a couple of hundred yards from the Assembly. It had always been bustling with people going about their business in this the capital city of India. On this day, he looked out and saw a different scene. There was a crowd all right, but it wasn’t of people moving in any kind of controlled motion. Pushing and shoving each other, they weren’t going anywhere. Naim was reminded of Anees’s phrase ‘helter-skelter’. He smiled to himself. In the square, some arms were raised along with muffled slogans that reached Naim’s ears. Presently, a contingent of police arrived. They formed a circle three-quarters of the way round the crowd, leaving the fourth side free for the people to move away from the Assembly building. For a few minutes the police attempted to scare-drive the men, and some women, away with raised lathis, then they stopped, rearranging themselves on the orders of someone Naim couldn’t see. Moments later, the lathi charge began. The people started running, not just to the open side but whichever way they were facing, their arms flailing and cries rising from their throats in place of shouted slogans. Some who broke through the lines and rushed towards the Assembly were pursued by the police. A constable’s lathi fell on the head of an emaciated man with coal-black skin who had come within fifty yards of the building. The man fell to the ground. Surprisingly, his cry of pain, heard by Naim on the balcony, was mixed with his last slogan: ‘Jai Hind’.
Then a shiver ran through Naim. For a few moments he stood absolutely still, his body tense and his eyes fixed on a figure in the fleeing crowd. It is him, he said to himself. It’s him! The figure of a man, the one who had turned this anonymous crowd into a familiar body, was appearing and disappearing between frantic bodies. Frantically too, Naim raised his cane in the air and waved it as if giving a signal, before he realized the futility of it; they were too far and going away. The crowd had drawn back and scattered. The man went behind a tree once and did not appear again, neither to one side nor the other. Naim walked several steps along the balcony to the right, then the left, craning his neck to spot him. The man had vanished with the crowd. Naim stood there looking at the tree, and in the branches of that tree he thought he saw something. It wasn’t the man he had seen, it was a young girl in a mauve silk shalwar-kameez who was climbing up with her dress swept by a cross-wind against her round hips and thighs, their firm flesh trembling. In a second she was gone. Naim rubbed his eyes. The tree, although present in its bare ordinariness, seemed to be sliding back, as if the earth beneath it was slipping. Naim looked down at the floor under his feet; it wasn’t an earthquake. He felt that he was himself slipping back. Suddenly he was seized by the feeling that not just the tree and the crowd and the man in it but everything – everything he had known – was receding, becoming too far and going away. Some words echoed in his head. Sitting by the shifting waters of the Jamna, Anees had once said to him, ‘For every man there comes a time when he knows he has lost it,’ and Naim had thought this another of Anees’s little homilies at the time.
Naim came out of the Assembly building. The place was now almost deserted. Passing by the tree, he looked up into its dense branches and dusty leaves but as if he were little concerned. He kept walking away.