In the City a Mirror Wandering

by Upendranath Ashk

  6 [Chetra and Baisakh are the Punjabi names for two months in the Hindu/Sikh calendar. The song ‘Baarah Maase’ presumably had a verse for every month of the year—trans.]

  12

  Hamid and Chetan set off for Hamid’s home at Jaura Gate, arms draped around one another’s necks, but after just a few steps, Hamid freed himself from Chetan’s arm. He said nothing; first he removed his own arm and, when Chetan didn’t get the hint and continued to walk along with his arm around Hamid’s neck, talking all the while, he slowly dislodged his shoulder from Chetan’s arm and separated from him as they entered Jaura Gate. His face showed no emotions and he didn’t slacken the pace of conversation, but Chetan noticed the gesture and his feelings were deeply hurt.

  *

  Although Hamid had studied with Chetan from the first year of college, his subject and section had been different. It was in the third year that he’d attracted Chetan’s attention, and he did it in such a way that Chetan found himself increasingly drawn to him. He was slender, refined and cheerful. If Chetan observed any flaw in Hamid it was that his upper row of teeth was slightly turned in, and Chetan did not much care for the way he looked when he smiled. Although he knew that Hamid was a very intelligent, bold and outgoing student, his smile made him look oddly sycophantic just because of that flaw in his teeth.

  In the first and second years, all Chetan knew about Hamid was that there was a handsome Muslim student in the other section, and since he was intelligent and quick-witted, the college bullies couldn’t get to him. They hovered around him but they couldn’t touch him. Chetan was himself partial to beauty. In those days, when his head had yet to be turned by the opposite sex—even before he first encountered Kunti at the Sheetala fair—he was very fond of beautiful boys of his own age or slightly younger. He liked being near them, talking to them, making friends with them, and if none of this was possible, just gazing at them from afar made him ecstatic. Once, early one morning, long ago, maybe he was studying in Class Nine or Ten, he’d gone to bathe at Neeli Kothi on Anant’s insistence. The citron and orange trees on either side of the gate were in blossom and the air was fragrant with their scent. When they got to the bricked tank, Chetan’s heart missed a beat. A fair, handsome boy was bathing there.

  Chetan had been to Neeli Kothi four times before. But each time he’d been terribly fatigued. Neeli Kothi was in the direction of Company Bagh, nearly two miles from Kallowani Mohalla. At that intersection with the main street, which nowadays goes towards the radio station, the left fork veered towards Neeli Kothi. Chetan didn’t know how its name had come to be Neeli Kothi or ‘blue mansion’. A Saraf family in Bara Bazaar had had the mansion built. There was an open paved area in front of the mansion and a garden in the corner to the left side, where there was a tall wheel-well that filled the deep, bricked tank with its wide stream of water. At the edge of the tank, there was a small room with coloured-glass windows for changing one’s clothes. In the hot season, it was satisfying to bathe in the tank beneath the thick well stream. No one lived in the mansion now. Perhaps a son of the owner had had smallpox, and the owner had built this house so his son could live in the fresh air, or just so he could bathe and wash in the morning, but the boys of Kallowani went there nearly every day in the summer. Sometimes the gardener did not hitch up the oxen to turn the wheel, so the boys took turns yoking themselves up and bathed until ten or eleven in the morning.

  The road to Neeli Kothi ran along both sides of Company Bagh. If he was not with Pyaru or Debu, Chetan would go by the street on the far side of Company Bagh which went by Lala Dayal Singh’s mansion, and which the boys of Kallowani Mohalla called Neeli Kothi Street. This street wasn’t deserted like Grand Trunk Road. Bungalows had been built almost all the way to Neeli Kothi and the road didn’t seem as long. But if Pyaru or Debu came along, then they’d go on the big road closer to Company Bagh. There was a dense jungle between the large street that went to Neeli Kothi and Grand Trunk Road. It was full of bushes, hills, ditches and countless trees, such as peepal and crown flower. Under the leadership of Debu and Pyaru, the boys would journey far into the woods to answer the call of nature. They’d play games and set strange conditions. The sun would get higher and higher in the sky, but they still wouldn’t be done. Chetan would grow exhausted and bored. And usually someone or other would fight with Debu or Pyaru, and someone would get beaten up. On his return, Chetan would always vow never to go back.

  But one particular day, neither Debu nor Pyaru came along. Anant was there, a couple of other boys were there, and after relieving themselves in the fields, they quickly reached Neeli Kothi. The handsome boy was perhaps with his older brother or a young uncle—Chetan saw a tall, thin man with a wheat-coloured complexion wearing a loincloth who was getting a massage; he had some sort of scar on his right leg. Perhaps he was the one for whom the mansion had been built. The beautiful boy was bathing openly right near him in the tank. Chetan and his companions stopped short because the owners were using the tank, so they didn’t have permission to bathe.

  He himself stood to one side, watching the boy the whole time. He was quite fair, with a body soft as butter. Chetan didn’t want to stare, but he found it hard to look away. And after that day, Chetan began to go to Neeli Kothi long before the other boys—sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend—but the beautiful boy didn’t come every day. If Chetan didn’t see him he felt listless. He learned the address of the boy’s family’s shop, and walking by there in the evenings, he’d sometimes catch a glimpse of him and feel electrified. He wanted to be able to sit near him somehow, to talk to him, but his shyness was always a barrier. If Pyaru had been in his place and set his heart on a boy, he’d have caught him somewhere or other—on the way from home to the shop or from the shop to home. He’d have staked out the front of his shop and whenever the opportunity arose, he’d have tripped the boy, and when he would start to cry, Pyaru would put his arm around him and behave affectionately or threateningly, telling him that if he avoided him he’d be beaten. But all these styles seemed barbaric and bestial to Chetan. And just one glance gave him enough enthusiasm to read and write and perform other tasks.

  One evening during that time, he had gone to Chowk Sudan on an errand. It was evening when the trunk sellers surrounded the large area of the chowk, and there was a crowd, everyone standing shoulder to shoulder. Chetan was trying to slip through the crowd when suddenly his foot got stuck. Just ahead of him, he saw an extremely beautiful, fair boy with sharp features, wearing a silk kurta and a fine dhoti so white it looked washed in milk, walking along with his brother or father. Chetan had never seen such a beautiful boy in the city; it was impossible he wouldn’t have seen him at rallies, or in galis and bazaars, at fairs put on by the Arya Samaj or other religious organizations, or in the tournaments held on the grounds of the government schools.

  ‘He’s definitely come from somewhere outside because even his clothes don’t look Punjabi,’ thought Chetan. But that was what he thought later. At the time, his heart just pounded and he stood rooted to the spot. All night long that face swirled around in his mind. Later he learned the boy’s name was Rajat. His father had been Punjabi. He had been an executive engineer. Most of his work had been in UP and he’d married there. Just a few months before, the father had died, so his wife had come to Jalandhar bringing the children with her as they had property in Kot Kishanchand . . . Chetan began going to Kot Kishanchand every evening.

  Kot Kishanchand, that is Kishanchand Fort, is one of the twelve neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Jalandhar. At some point of time these were estates. There were walls around the outside, with a large gate and a fort. In the corner of the Kot Kishanchand wall, where there had once been a tower with gun holes set in it, Rajat’s mother had built an outside door and stairs in the round part and turned it into a sitting room. Chetan had established a friendship with a neighbour friend of Rajat’s living in Kot Kishanchand and the first day he went into that sitting room he felt like a poor country b
oy who has suddenly been granted permission to enter the palace of the empress. Everything in that round room, the tables and chairs, the divan, the couch, the pictures, the curtains, looked like they were from some other world. When Chetan sat down, Rajat’s sister brought tea. The tea set, the netted cloth with the pearl fringe over the milk jug—it was like Chetan had arrived in some heavenly abode. They hardly ever drank tea in his home, and when they did, it was from glasses. He and his brothers would gulp down their tea holding the hot glasses in the cuffs of their kameezes, crouching near the stove in the kitchen.

  Chetan was unable to speak to Rajat that evening, nor to his younger brother or sister. He just listened to their delightfully polite conversation. He felt jealous of all those boys who went there every evening and when he came home, he lay awake until late at night thinking about every word and gesture made by Rajat, his younger brother, Lalit, and his sister.

  But Chetan hadn’t felt this way when he first saw Hamid. After seeing Kunti at the Sheetala fair, an imperceptible change had occurred in him. He would walk below Kunti’s window, and although sometimes he went as far as Kot Kishanchand in the evenings, and even saw Rajat there, Chetan no longer felt the same attraction to him—in fact, he even laughed when he thought about how he used to stare at him! (Although Rajat was still just as handsome, the saraaf’s son had turned out strangely soft and flabby.) Chetan couldn’t believe he used to go all the way to Neeli Kothi early in the morning just to catch a glimpse of him and then make a round of the shoe bazaar by way of Chhati Gali in the evening. It astonished him that he could have been in love with a boy with a name like ‘Ambarsariya Mull’ (which was how they pronounced Amritsariya Mull).

  Although his heart had not pounded when he’d seen Hamid, he certainly did like him. Chetan only found his smile unattractive, especially whenever he grinned. Chetan didn’t try to make friends with him, as he’d already grown out of that phase of enjoying talking with young men just to gaze at their beauty. But when the College Union was set up in the third year, and Hamid took part in the debates, Chetan saw there was no one who spoke more persuasively than him in the whole college. He was elected the head of the College Union after the very first meeting as a result of his speaking, and Chetan had become especially interested in him.

  But it was while they were acting in Mrs Manjri that he’d got close to Hamid. A production of the play Mrs Manjri was staged on the occasion of the annual meeting of the Arya Samaj (college section). Chetan played the role of Ray Bahadur Janakidas and Hamid played the orphaned Muslim youth. Although Chetan had acted very well and the audience had praised him too, he himself was transfixed by Hamid’s performance. He wasn’t surprised at the success of the play. He had been moved by his acting even during rehearsals. The drama was being directed by their English teacher, who’d come with a second-class MA from Government College, Lahore, and who had also begun the Union and the Drama Club at the college. But Hamid was the one who ran the rehearsals. At the rehearsals, Chetan got to know Hamid well, and he learned that he wasn’t just a good actor and speaker, but also very well read. It was during those rehearsals that Chetan and Hamid had become close friends. There could be no doubt that Hamid was very well read in both Urdu poetry and English, but Chetan had one talent that Hamid didn’t. Although he didn’t know that much Urdu or English poetry, he was a born poet. Despite the fact that Hamid knew Shelley and Keats, Wordsworth and Browning by heart, just as well as he did Iqbal and Tagore, Hafiz and Akhtar Shirani, he couldn’t write a single line of poetry, whereas Chetan, despite not having such command of these poets, wrote couplet upon couplet, poem upon poem, with ease. And whilst Chetan greatly admired the breadth of Hamid’s reading, Hamid had nothing but praise for Chetan’s natural-born genius. And the two of them grew to be close.

  One day after the play, Hamid brought Chetan to his home, and his smoky room full of newspapers and magazines and books left a lasting impression on Chetan’s mind.

  Hamid’s home was to the right, off a small yard where Jaura Gate opens out from a narrow gali and Rainak Bazaar begins. Chetan never went into the women’s quarters and of the men’s quarters he saw only Hamid’s room—which was neither especially small nor particularly large (if it had been any smaller, it would have been more like a storeroom). From the outside it looked as though it were built of baked bricks, but the walls inside were made of mud, with built-in shelves crammed with books and newspapers and magazines. There was no furniture in the room, just a low, square writing desk in the middle, with a dhurrie next to it, extending all the way to the wall. The dhurrie was spread with a filthy checked-linen sheet and two large bolsters. Stacks and stacks of newspapers, magazines and books lay about on the seat and the cloth, as well as in the corners of the room. The piles of reading matter had no small hand in making the room appear even more cramped than it was.

  Chetan had heard that Hamid was the son of the Dewan of the Nawab of Khairpur. But his clothing was utterly ordinary. He was handsome, so he looked good in an ordinary kameez and pyjamas, but Chetan certainly was surprised sometimes. Seeing Hamid’s room, he was even more surprised. Much later, he learned that the Dewan of Khairpur kept a famous Jalandhari prostitute in his home and that Hamid was her son. Hamid’s father had married three or four more times after that—and Hamid’s mother had been shut up in the walls of that house the whole time. She received a fixed income every month, which was what the two of them lived on.

  The moment he set foot in that room, Chetan learned the secret of Hamid’s vast knowledge. While Chetan didn’t own even one book of his own, Hamid’s room was crammed full of newspapers, magazines and books. Since Hamid didn’t live far from Kallowani Mohalla, Chetan began to go daily to his home after that day and he spent quite a bit of time in his company. Hamid smoked a great deal and when he smoked near Chetan, his head would start to throb, but in his greed to take advantage of Hamid’s companionship and consume all the reading material at his house, he didn’t mind the headaches and slowly became accustomed to the smoky room.

  *

  But perhaps Hamid and Chetan wouldn’t have become such close friends if Chetan had not got him Meenakshi Ramarao’s photo (which Hamid had attempted to get, unsuccessfully) and thus impressed him deeply.

  *

  Meenakshi was the MA-pass daughter of a judge from Madras. The cinema director Advani had gone to Madras for an outdoor shoot, where he’d met the judge and his daughter, and there he’d persuaded her to work in his upcoming film. Until that time, only prostitutes, illiterate girls from poor homes, or Anglo-Indian girls worked in the movies, but as soon as talkie films entered the scene, the Anglo-Indian girls were completely cut out of the business. Actresses like Sulochna, Madhuri and Savita (it may be that to this day, no other heroine has surpassed her in beauty) may have reached the peak of their genius, but they were suddenly useless just because their Hindustani accents sounded too English. And not every beautiful prostitute could be a heroine once microphones were introduced into films; talkies also demanded better acting and facial expressions, bringing about a demand for new, educated girls in the industry. Meenakshi was not only an MA and beautiful, but she was also the daughter of a judge, and her interest in cinema created a huge splash in film magazines, which were full of interviews with her. Her quotes, remarks and photos were being printed right and left. Chetan somehow had the impression from her remarks that she was not that attracted to films or to acting, but rather that it was the film director himself who had drawn her into the industry. He saw a photo of Advani—he was a handsome, well-built young man with a broad forehead and large, round eyes. He’d come from England just a few years earlier, after getting an education in film directing. And Chetan wasn’t surprised when, a few years later, Meenakshi Rama Rao became Meenakshi Advani. But at that time, Advani Sahib was garnering much praise for bringing such an educated girl into the movies.

  Chetan wasn’t particularly fond of Meenakshi. She didn’t blossom with youthfulness like his favouri
te actresses Sulochna and Zubeida . . . She had a wide face, a broad forehead and slightly sunken cheeks with jutting cheekbones. Certainly her lips were thin and lovely and there was intelligence in her eyes, but although her face looked intellectual, there was no youthful attractiveness about her. Chetan was so smitten with the carefree beauty of Sulochna that his heart beat quicker just seeing a picture of her. One day he had seen a picture of Sulochna pinned up in a paan shop. The paan seller had torn it from a weekly newspaper, cut out her silhouette with a pair of scissors, pasted it on a piece of paper and had it framed. Chetan had stopped in the bazaar and stared at it for a long time. Then he’d asked the shopkeeper if he would sell it. The shopkeeper asked him for one rupee. One rupee seemed a small price to Chetan for such a valuable item. With much ingenuity, he managed to save up one rupee, fearing the whole time that someone else might make off with the picture. In the meantime, he went once every day to gaze at it. After he bought it, he hung it up in the small room next to the sitting room (where he’d set out a dhurrie, a bolster, covered by a linen sheet on the floor, and a small, low desk for writing and reading, just like Hamid).

  But Hamid liked Meenakshi much better than Sulochna. ‘It’s not her intellectualism,’ Hamid had said, ‘but the nobility she exudes. Sulochna and Zubeida may be beautiful, but they look vulgar.’

  Chetan did not agree with him. Sulochna may have been playful, but she looked every inch an empress. She was shapely and tall as a cypress, with delightfully sharp features; her eyes were large and round, and radiated a peculiar mixture of warmth and haughty distance—‘How could a vulgar woman possess such qualities!’ Chetan felt bitter, but he smiled to himself ironically at Hamid’s loathing for vulgar women—he who was himself the son of a prostitute. He thought of a cutting response, but all he said was, ‘Then you should put up a picture of Meenakshi in your room.’