by Vikram Seth
At any rate, the villager, considering his own purposes and his own problems, went on to the moneylender’s shop. The moneylender asked him what he wanted. The villager told him that he needed some money for his daughter’s wedding and had nothing to pledge in exchange.
‘That is all right,’ said the moneylender, looking at his face. ‘How much do you want?’
‘A lot,’ said the man. ‘Two thousand rupees.’
‘Fine,’ said the moneylender, and asked his accountant to count it out immediately.
While the accountant was counting out the money, the poor villager felt obliged to make some conversation. ‘You are a very good man,’ he said gratefully, ‘but the other people in your village seem peculiar to me.’ And he recounted what he had seen and heard.
‘Well,’ said the moneylender. ‘How would the people in your village have reacted to such news?’
‘Well, obviously,’ said the poor man, ‘the whole village would have gone to the family’s house to mourn with them. There would have been no question of ploughing your fields, let alone eating anything till the body was disposed of. People would have been wailing and beating their breasts.’
The moneylender turned to the accountant and told him to stop counting out the money. ‘It is not safe to lend anything to this man,’ he said.
The man, appalled, turned to the moneylender. ‘But what have I done?’ he asked.
The moneylender replied: ‘If you weep and wail so much about returning what has been given to you in trust by God, you will not be happy about returning what is given to you in trust by a mere man.’
While the pandit told this story there was silence. No one knew what to expect, and at the end of it they felt that they had been reproached for their grief. Pran found himself feeling upset rather than consoled: what the pandit had said was perhaps true, he thought, but he wished the Sikh ragis had come earlier.
Still, here they were now, all three of them, dark and full-bearded, their white turbans set off by a blue headband. One of them played the tabla, the other two the harmonium, and all three closed their eyes while they sang songs from Nanak and Kabir.
Pran had heard them before; his mother asked the ragis about once a year to sing at Prem Nivas. But now he thought not of the beauty of their singing or of the words of the saints, but of the last time he had heard tabla and harmonium in Prem Nivas: when Saeeda Bai had sung on the evening of Holi last year. He glanced across to where the women were sitting. Savita and Lata were sitting together, as they had been that other evening as well. Savita’s eyes were closed. Lata was looking at Mahesh Kapoor, who seemed once again to have distanced himself from what was going on. She had not seen Kabir, who was sitting far behind her, at the back of the covered area.
Her thoughts had wandered to the life of this woman, Pran’s mother, whom she had greatly liked but not much known. Had hers been a full life? Could her marriage be said to have been happy or successful or fulfilled: and if so, what did those words mean? What was at the centre of her marriage: her husband, her children, or the small puja room where every morning she prayed, allowing routine and devotion to create a purpose and imply an order in her daily and annual round? Here sat so many people who were affected by her death, and there sat her husband, the Minister Sahib, transparently fretful about the long proceedings. He was trying to indicate to the pandit that he had had enough, but was unable to catch his eye.
The pandit said: ‘I understand that the women would now like to sing some songs.’ No one came forward. He was about to speak again, when old Mrs Tandon said: ‘Veena, come forward, sit here.’ The pandit asked her to sit on the platform where the ragis had been singing, but Veena said, ‘No; down here.’ She was very simply dressed, as was her friend Priya and another young woman. Veena had on a white cotton sari with a black border. A very thin gold chain, which she kept touching, hung around her neck. Her dark-red tika was smudged. There appeared to be tears on her cheeks, and especially in the dark, puffy rings around her eyes. Her plump face looked sad and strangely placid. She took out a small book, and they began singing. She sang clearly, and from time to time moved her hand slightly in response to the words of the song. Her voice was natural and very affecting. After the first song was over she began, without even a pause, her mother’s favourite hymn, ‘Uth, jaag, musafir’:
‘Rise, traveller, the sky is light.
Why do you sleep? It is not night.
The sleeping lose, and sleep in vain.
The waking rise, and rise to gain.
Open your eyelids, you who nod.
O heedless one, pay heed to God.
Is this your way to show your love?
You sleep below, he wakes above.
What you have done, that you must bear.
Where is the joy in sin then, where?
When on your head your sins lie deep,
Why do you clutch your head and weep?
Tomorrow’s task, enact today.
Today’s at once; do not delay.
When birds have robbed the standing grain
What use to wring your hands in vain?’
Somewhere in the middle of the second stanza she stopped singing—the others continued—and began crying quietly. She tried to stop but couldn’t. She started to wipe her tears with the pallu of her sari and then simply wiped them away with her hands. Kedarnath, who was sitting in front, took out his handkerchief and threw it into her lap, but she didn’t notice. She slowly looked up, her eyes a little above the crowd, and continued singing. Once or twice she coughed. By the time she was singing the first verse again, her voice was clear; but now it was her irritable father who was in tears.
The song, taken from the hymn-book of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram, brought home to him like nothing else had his unrealized loss. Gandhi was dead, and with him his ideals. That preacher of non-violence whom he had followed and revered had died violently, and now Mahesh Kapoor’s own son—more beloved for the danger he was in—was lying in prison for violence of his own. Firoz, whom he had known from childhood, might die. His friendship with the Nawab Sahib, which had stood so much and so long, had shattered under the sudden power of grief and rumour. The Nawab Sahib was not here today, and he had prevented the two of them from visiting Firoz. That visit would have meant much to the dead woman. The lack of it had enhanced her grief and—who knew the workings of sorrow on the brain?—may have hastened her death.
Too late, and perhaps because of the love that everyone else around him so clearly bore her, he began to realize fully what he had lost, indeed, whom he had lost—and how suddenly. There was so much to do, and no one to help him, to advise him quietly, to check his impatience. His son’s life and his own future both seemed to him to be in hopeless straits. He wanted to give up and let the world take care of itself. But he could not let Maan go; and politics had been his life.
She would not be there, as she had always been, to help. The birds had robbed the standing grain, and here he was wringing his empty hands. What would she have said to him? Nothing direct, but possibly a few words of circuitous comfort, something that might, a few days or a few weeks later, have taken the edge off his despair. Would she have told him to withdraw from the election? What would she have asked him to do about his son? Which of his several duties—or conceptions of duty—would she have expected him to follow or have anticipated that he would follow, and which would she have wished him to? Even if in the weeks ahead it became clear to him, he did not have those weeks, but only days, and, indeed, very few of those.
17.29
When Maan was admitted to jail after the cremation, he was required to wash himself and his clothing, and he was provided with a cup and a plate. He was examined by the medical officer and weighed. A note was made of the condition of his hair and beard. As an unconvicted prisoner—with no previous convictions either—he was supposed to be kept separate from those undertrial prisoners who had previous convictions. But the district jail was crowded, and he was accomm
odated in a ward which contained a couple of undertrial prisoners who did know about jail life from experience—and who set out to educate the others about it. Maan they treated as a great curiosity. If he was really a Minister’s son—and the one newspaper they were permitted confirmed that indeed he was—what was he doing there? Why had he not managed to get bail on one pretext or another? If the charge being investigated was non-bailable, why had the police not been told to lessen the charge?
If Maan had been in anything resembling his normal state of mind, he would have made friends with a few of his present colleagues. Now he hardly sensed their existence. He could think of no one except those whom he could not see: his mother, and Firoz, and Saeeda Bai. His life, though not easy, was luxury compared to what it had been in the lock-up. He was allowed to receive food and clothes from Prem Nivas; he was allowed to shave his face and to exercise. The jail was comparatively clean. Since he was a ‘superior class’ prisoner, his cell was equipped with a small table, a bed, and a lamp. They sent him oranges, which he ate in a daze. They sent a quilt of kingfisher blue from Prem Nivas to protect him against the cold. It protected him and it comforted him, while at the same time it reminded him of home—and all that he had destroyed or lost.
Again, as a superior class prisoner, he was shielded from the worst degradations of jail life—the crowded cells and barracks where assorted horrors were perpetrated by the prisoners on one another. The Superintendent of the jail was also aware of whose son he was, and kept an eye on him. He was liberal in permitting him visits.
Pran visited him, and Veena, and his father too before he returned, heartsick, to campaign in his constituency. No one knew what to talk about to Maan. When his father asked him what had happened, Maan started trembling and could say nothing. When Pran said, ‘But why, Maan, why?’ he stared at him in a hunted manner and turned away.
There were not many safe subjects. Sometimes they talked about cricket. England had just defeated India in the fourth Test match of the series, the first match that had not ended in a draw. But though Pran could spin out cricket talk even in his sleep, Maan began to yawn after a few minutes.
Sometimes they talked about Bhaskar or Pran’s baby, but even these conversations took painful turns.
Maan would talk most easily about jail routine. He said that he wanted to work a bit, though it was not compulsory: perhaps in the jail vegetable garden. He asked about the garden in Prem Nivas, but when Veena began to describe it he started weeping.
He yawned a great deal during conversations without knowing why, sometimes when he wasn’t even tired.
The lawyer who was sent to visit him by his father often returned frustrated. Maan, when asked anything, said that he had talked about it all with the police and would not go over it again. But this was not true. When the Sub-Inspector and a few other policemen came to the jail to ask him questions, to get him to elaborate on his confession, he insisted that he had nothing more to say to them either. They asked him about the knife. He said he couldn’t remember if he had left it at Saeeda Bai’s or taken it along with him; he thought the latter. Meanwhile, the case against him grew through a combination of statements and circumstantial evidence.
No one who visited him mentioned Firoz’s turn for the worse, but he learned about it from the ward newspaper, the local Hindi paper, Adarsh. He also learned, from gossip among the prisoners, about the rumours floating around the Nawab Sahib and Saeeda Bai. He had fits of almost suicidal misery, from the worst of which he was guarded by the ritual of jail life.
Routine took over his days. The Jail Manual, to which the Brahmpur District Jail approximately adhered, read as follows:
To perform morning ablutions, etc:
After unlocking up to 7 a.m.
To be on parade in the enclosure:
7 a.m. to 9 a.m.
To be locked up in cell or barracks:
9 a.m. to 10 a.m.
To bathe and take the midday meal:
10 a.m. to 11 a.m.
To be locked up in cell or barracks:
11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
To take exercise, have evening meal, and be searched and locked up:
3 p.m. to locking up.
He was a model prisoner, and never complained about anything. Sometimes he sat at the table in his cell and looked at a piece of paper on which he planned to write a letter to Firoz. But he could never begin it. He took to doodling instead. Having hardly slept in the lock-up, he slept for long hours in his jail cell.
Once he was lined up for an identification parade, but he was not told whether it was to be for himself or for some other prisoner. When he saw that his lawyer was present, he realized it was for himself. But he did not recognize the self-important-looking clerk who walked down the line and paused a little longer when he came to him. And he did not care whether he had been identified or not.
‘If he dies, you could well be hanged,’ said one experienced prisoner with a sense of humour. ‘If that happens we’ll all be locked up for the morning, so I’m counting on you to spare us the inconvenience.’
Maan nodded.
Since he was not responding satisfactorily, the prisoner went on: ‘After every execution do you know what they do with the ropes?’
Maan shook his head.
‘They dress them with beeswax and ghee to keep them smooth.’
‘In what proportions?’ asked another prisoner.
‘Oh, half and half,’ said the knowledgeable one. ‘And they add a bit of carbolic acid to the mixture to keep off the insects. It would be a pity if white ants or silverfish chewed them away. What do you think?’ he asked Maan.
Everyone turned to look at Maan.
Maan, however, had stopped listening. Neither had the man’s sense of humour amused him nor had his cruelty upset him.
‘And in order to preserve them from rats,’ continued the expert, ‘they put the five ropes—they have five ropes in this jail, don’t ask me why—they put all five ropes in a clay pot, stop up the top, and suspend it from the roof of the storeroom. Think about that. Five Manila ropes, one inch in diameter, each fattened on a diet of ghee and blood slithering about like snakes in a pot, waiting for their next victim—’
He laughed delightedly and looked at Maan.
17.30
Maan may have paid no attention to any distant hazard to his neck, but it was impossible for Saeeda Bai not to be conscious of what had happened to hers. For days afterwards she could hardly speak except in a croak. Her worlds had fallen apart around her: both her own world of nuance and attraction, and her daughter’s world of innocence and protection.
For Tasneem was now branded by the rumours. She herself continued to be less than fully aware of them; this was not through lack of intelligence but rather because the outside world had once again been cut off from her. Even Bibbo, whose taste for both intrigue and gossip had caused enough damage already, pitied Tasneem, and did not say anything that could hurt her. But after what had happened in front of Tasneem’s eyes to the Nawabzada, the only man whom she had ever felt any deep emotion for, she felt it was safest to withdraw into herself, into her novels and household work. He was in severe danger still; she could tell from the answers that Bibbo gave her that his life was in danger. She could do nothing for him; he was a distant and retreating star. She assumed he had been injured trying to disarm the drunken Maan, but she did not ask what had impelled Maan to become so drunken and murderous. Of the other men who had shown some interest in her, she heard nothing, nor did she wish to hear anything. Ishaq, increasingly influenced by Majeed Khan, retreated from the scandal and neither wrote nor visited. Rasheed wrote another crazy letter to her; but Saeeda Bai tore it up before it reached Tasneem.
More fiercely than ever before, Saeeda Bai tried to protect—and harry—Tasneem. Tender and furious by turns, she once again relived the long torment of having to be a sister to her daughter, of suffering her own strong-willed mother to determine both the course of her own life and the course
of the life that Saeeda had been forced, in shame and agony, to relinquish to her.
Saeeda Bai could not now sing, and it seemed to her that she would never again be able to, even if her throat allowed it. The parakeet, however, unmindful of her trauma, burst into a blaze of speech. He took on a sort of grotesque croak in imitation of the mistress of the house. This was one of Saeeda Bai’s consolations. The other was Bilgrami Sahib, who not only helped her medically but stood by her through this ordeal of press and police, of fear and distress and pain.
She realized now that she loved Maan.
When his two lines of misspelt Urdu came to her, she wept bitterly, oblivious to the feelings of Bilgrami Sahib, who was at her side. She imagined the guilt and trauma of his imprisonment, and was terrified to think of where it might end. When she heard of the death of his mother, she again wept. She was not the kind of woman who thrives on ill treatment or values those who misprize her, and she could not understand why Maan’s attack should have caused her to feel what she did. But perhaps it had merely forced her to realize what she had felt before, but had not known. His note to her said nothing except how sorry he was and how much he loved her still.
When the next instalment of the stipend came from Baitar House, Saeeda Bai, who needed the money, returned it unopened. Bilgrami Sahib, when she told him what she had done, said that he would not have advised it, but that it was well done. For anything she needed now, she should depend on him. She accepted his help. He once again asked her to be his wife and to give up her singing and her profession. Although she did not know if she would ever regain her voice, she refused him once again.