Ghalib at Dusk

by Nighat M Gandhi

  Kamila had disappeared into one of the rooms, and now, the oldest sister, Amila, came out and asked if I’d like tea. But then, she sat down on the charpai next to her mother, as if unwilling to leave. Amila was about twenty-nine. She was thin, but had a protruding belly that made her look pregnant. Her eyelids drooped and their skin was folded over, making her eyes appear shut. Like her mother and sister, smiling was difficult for Amila.

  It was getting quite dark in the aangan. Lights had come on in the rooms of the house. I could see the warm yellow, lighted rectangle of a door and the lighted square of a window of the sitting room. I scratched my soles from time to time where the mosquitoes had started biting.

  At that instant, all the lights went out.

  We sat in the vast darkness. Generators in the surrounding houses and the shops below started whirring one after another, dissonant noises in a peaceful evening. The night was moonless, and thick clouds had hidden the stars. Kamila reappeared in the rectangle of the door, which had glowed yellow before the lights went out. She was holding up a lantern and adjusting its glass dome. A sickly jaundiced flame lit up her face. She looked gaunt, like the ghost of some past inhabitant of the house. She retreated into the room with the lantern where, I presumed, Babar bhai sat with his visitor, taking away the only source of light with her.

  ‘The power cuts have started,’ I said, speaking into the darkness. I couldn’t make out the faces of Aunty and Amila.

  ‘Yes, they are getting worse,’ Amila said.

  ‘Things just get worse every year,’ Aunty mumbled.

  ‘Arre, this is nothing,’ Amila said. She hadn’t gone to make tea after all. ‘It’s worse when they cut it off all night. It’s impossible to sleep without the fan and the mosquitoes make it worse. But you’re gone in the summer. You go away to your in-law’s place every summer, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I prefer to be in Pune in the summer,’ I replied a little guiltily. ‘It gets so hot here in Allahabad. But it’s not so much the heat. It’s the power cuts that kill me.’ What about the aangan, can’t you sleep out here under the stars on hot summer nights, I wanted to ask. But I remembered Kamila’s earlier reply to the same question, about how the mosquitoes bothered them.

  Someone coughed. It was most likely Babar bhai’s father, whom I had taken to calling Uncle.

  ‘Nishat beti, you’ve had to wait a long time today,’ he said in a phlegm-thick voice as he got closer to me.

  ‘That’s all right. Maybe I should come another day,’ I said, straining my eyes to see him. In the dark, he appeared ghostly, his loose kurta flapping about his bony body like an over-size shawl thrown over a scarecrow.

  ‘No, no. Wait for a few minutes more. Babar is almost done with his student.’

  ‘How’s your health?’ I asked Uncle by way of making conversation.

  ‘What can I say of my health? I’m lucky to live as long as I have with all the adulterated food these days. Even milk is more water than milk. What can you eat? What can you drink these days? What’s safe?’

  ‘What about the packaged milk? Isn’t that supposed to be better? We got rid of our milkman and started buying the packets.’

  ‘Arre, those packets aren’t any better.’ Uncle shook his head. ‘Have you seen the stretchy skin on the surface after you boil the milk?’

  ‘The malai?’

  ‘Don’t call that malai,’ Uncle snapped. ‘Allah knows what it is. All the synthetic things they add to food—that’s what’s making us all sick. People used to live well into their eighties and nineties, and they used to be healthy. Not any more.’

  ‘We are after all what we eat,’ I said. ‘And think.’

  ‘There was a tailor master,’ Uncle started. He liked telling anecdotes from his past, when the milkman delivered milk that was pure milk. ‘His shop was at the corner of the chowraha as you go left from our house. He lived to be ninety-two years old. Munshi-ji, we used to call him. I never saw him fall sick. Every day he rode his bicycle to work and rode it back. Six kilometres each way. And he ate only daal and rice for lunch, and only one roti soaked in milk for supper. That’s all. But in his time, food was pure. I was just a boy then. I used to watch him come and go on his bicycle every day.’

  ‘I really should be going now,’ I said a little restlessly.

  ‘How can you go in the dark all alone?’ Uncle said. His daughters were never allowed to go out unaccompanied any time of day, and though he liked me, I had a feeling he didn’t approve of my ways. ‘All the streets are dark. It’s not a good idea. Babar will be free in a minute. You should go only when the lights come back.’ He seemed worried that I would walk back alone, but even more worried that I would leave without seeing Babar bhai—his son, the lone jewel in the weathered crown of the family with a once-glorious past—a family of professors, judges, and collectors, before Independence. The younger men of the family had migrated and become the settled gentry of Pakistan, leaving Uncle baffled in his search for suitable husbands for his daughters. He had stayed behind in the land of his forefathers, in his ancestral home in Allahabad.

  On one of my previous visits Uncle had told me about this house. His grandfather had built it in 1936 for thirty-six thousand rupees. This was a joke in the family, given what it would cost now to build a similar house. The house was a sprawling structure with several interconnecting stairways between the floors to ensure complete privacy for the womenfolk. The grandfather had died, leaving the house to be divided among his sons. And the sons had died too, leaving the house to be cut up into still smaller chunks by their sons. The portion that Uncle had inherited was a mere one-eighth of the original house. The rest of his cousins had sold off their portions and moved to better, more convenient accommodation, and some had moved to Pakistan. Only Uncle had stayed on in the house where his childhood had been spent. ‘When I was a child,’ he’d told me, ‘there was so much of the house to run around in. It was a maze. If I went down one staircase in the back, my cousins would be calling me from another in the front. My aunts would cook for at least fifty people every day. There were so many of us, and also the relatives, who kept coming to stay with us from the villages.’

  ‘The children have to have their dinner. They have school tomorrow,’ I said dully.

  Uncle asked Amila to go and see if Babar bhai’s visitor was ready to leave. Then he started pacing the length of the aangan. I would’ve liked to listen to the rhythmic squeaking of his slippers on the damp floor but the noise from the generators drowned every sound.

  In a few minutes, Babar bhai appeared in the doorway.

  He walked towards me slowly, balancing the crutch under his left arm like an expert performer, trying his best to make it look like he was walking unassisted. In his right hand dangled the lantern. The flame bobbed in the darkness, unevenly lighting up his shorter leg. When he got close, he handed the lantern to Amila, and apologized to me. He asked Amila to show his visitor out since there was no light on the stairs. Amila disappeared with the lantern, leaving Babar bhai and I in the dark. Don’t they have another lantern or lamp in the house, I wondered? I found their disorganization irritating. Uncle and Aunty had also disappeared, along with Amila. They usually left us alone, not wishing to disturb us in our literary discussions. I had difficulty starting a conversation with Babar bhai in the dark although I had been conversing with his family without a thought. We listened to the gurrh-gurrh of the generators for several minutes.

  Deftly, he rested the crutch against the back of the chair and seated himself. Amila returned with the lantern and set it on the small table between Babar bhai and me. I could see his face now, though not clearly in the weak light. I opened my purse and took out the sheet of paper on which I had written the shers.

  ‘Let’s see what you have here,’ Babar bhai said.

  I stood at the side of his chair and held the lantern close to his face so he could read. His eyes, large and luminous, lit up his intelligent face. His hair was thick and wavy, his voice dee
p. An attractive man, except for the misaligned legs.

  Ashiqi sabr-talab our tammana betaab

  Dil ka kya rang karun khun-e-jigar hone tak.

  Love demands patience and Desire remains tumultuous

  How shall I console my heart until the liver’s work is done.

  Babar bhai read the first sher.

  ‘The first line is clear,’ I said. ‘But in the second, what does Ghalib mean by khun-e-jigar hone tak?’

  ‘Let’s look at the first line first,’ Babar bhai said. ‘The path of true love is tortuous and requires tremendous patience on the part of the lover. But the lover’s desires want instant gratification. Desire can’t wait. So the essential conflict between desire and patience is outlined in the first line. This brings us to the second line. The heart is the seat of all desires. And the liver is the seat of patience. How should the lover contain his heart till the liver’s work is done? The liver sheds blood, or khun-e-jigar when the limits of patience and suffering are exhausted. So Ghalib poses the playful question: how can he, the lover, contain these warring emotions, the passionate desire for the beloved versus the patient waiting that is required of lovers, before the beloved is won? It is only when the limits of patience have been exhausted that the heart can have free rein to indulge its desires unabashedly. This sher is about the complex etiquette of winning the beloved’s love. Passion knows no patience, and the lover must be patient for it is the fate of lovers to wait.’

  I had set down the lantern on the table and started scribbling on a small notepad. I looked up from the pad when Babar bhai stopped speaking and saw he was watching me. There was something in his look—a pleading, a yearning—that unsettled me. I hurried him on to the next sher.

  Hai kahan tammana ka dusra qadam yaa rab

  Ham ne dasht-e-imkaan ko ek naqsh-e-pa paya.

  Where is the second step of longing, oh Lord?

  We found the desert of possibilities to be one footstep.

  He had finished reading the sher when the lights came back on. The aangan remained dark, but the generators stopped droning, and the square and rectangle of the window and door of the sitting room glowed again.

  ‘Shouldn’t we go in?’ I asked Babar bhai.

  ‘Why not stay here?’ he said. ‘It’s so much cooler outside.’

  ‘But I felt a few rain drops.’

  ‘I don’t mind a slight drizzle,’ he said. ‘I quite like it.’

  ‘I suppose it’s all right,’ I said, though I felt a little uneasy.

  ‘This sher of Ghalib’s is most unusual in that he didn’t even include it in his divan,’ Babar bhai said. ‘Ghalib considered it technically flawed and dropped it. But it has remained one of his most debated shers among Urdu scholars and critics.’

  ‘Where’s the flaw?’ I asked.

  ‘In the repetition of pa in the phrase naqsh-e-pa paya.’

  ‘I quite like that repetition—it’s rhythm and lyricism,’ I said. ‘But what does it mean?’

  Babar bhai smiled. ‘This sher takes the investigation into the nature of desire a step further. What should be my next step, asks Ghalib of God, after all my possible desires are satisfied. All worldly desires fall into one category. One forsakes the world to seek union with God. But that too is a desire, the desire to become infinite, the desire to become one with God. Or become God. And that, we all know, is a desire that can’t be fulfilled as long as one is human. Therefore, the realm of possibilities, or dasht-e-imkan, for desires that can be fulfilled remains as small as a footprint or naqsh-e-pa. That is, so long as desire’s next step, or tammana ka dusra qadm, the ultimate desire, where one goes beyond all earthly desires, to become part of God, remains unattainable.’

  Amila walked towards us from the kitchen. She walked slowly. And though it was hard to see her expression in the weak light of the lantern, which we had left burning even after the lights came back as there was no other light in the aangan, I imagined a weariness in her walk.

  ‘You shouldn’t have bothered with tea,’ I said to Amila. ‘I was about to leave.’

  ‘Árre, it’s nothing,’ said Amila. She put down the two mugs on the little table next to the lantern and began her slow sad walk back towards the kitchen, the empty tray swinging at the end of her arm. I sensed not just tiredness, but a disappointment in her walk.

  She and her sister had the responsibility of running the house, of answering the door, making tea for all of Babar bhai’s visitors, and showing them out. They even bought groceries and ran errands—responsibilities, which would be an older brother’s in a normal household. I wondered if they didn’t want to scale the prison-like walls of this lovely old house some night and be gone. Like most old houses, the rooms of this house were separated from the cooking and washing areas by the large open aangan. How, I wondered, did Babar bhai get up on dark nights, find his crutches, and escort himself to the toilet across the expanse of the aangan? I imagined him lying awake in the night, controlling the urge to pee.

  Babar bhai was not in a mood to be hurried. He quoted Parveen Shakir, quite out of context. We had discussed her as a romantic poet before.

  Rag rag mein tera lams utarta dikhai de

  Jo bhi kaifyat de jism ko intihaai de

  Every vein flooded by the magic of your touch

  Every sensation my body receives most intense

  he recited. ‘Now look at a modern woman’s expression of desire. There’s nothing metaphysical in this sher. Its content is purely physical and visual. Her fearless statement of the physical pleasure she derives from her lover’s touch is quite startling. Many critics have called this honesty obscene.’

  ‘Because it’s coming from a woman?’ I said. ‘Women aren’t expected to revel in physical pleasure, I suppose, much less write passionately about it.’

  I handed one of the tea mugs to Babar bhai. Our hands touched and for no reason at all, I felt my heart miss a beat. Babar bhai took a sip and set down the mug on the table again.

  We drank our tea in silence for a while.

  ‘I have to tell you something,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’ I said, waiting for him to begin what I suspected he had wanted to say for months.

  ‘You think of me as incomplete,’ he said. ‘But I’m not incomplete intellectually, emotionally, physically. I feel like any other human being!’

  ‘I know,’ I mumbled, rendered speechless by his impassioned voice.

  ‘You only know what your reading tells you. You know it intellectually. But you don’t know it the way I know it in every nerve and vein, down to the tips of my twisted leg.’

  I was silent.

  ‘I know what desire is. I know what torture love is. I have lain awake at nights and felt mad with desire.’

  ‘Have I done anything?’ I said. I felt cornered and confused.

  ‘My God! How simple you are. Or are you pretending? Have you done anything? You’ve done nothing and yet you’ve done everything.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said, feeling defenceless.

  ‘Can you put your hand on my heart? Feel the way it pounds. Can you do that?’

  ‘No!’ I said. My own heart was pounding quite senselessly. I was angry because I felt accused. But there was thrill, triumph, even pleasure pulsing along with the anger.

  ‘You see!’ Babar bhai laughed a sickly, mocking laugh. ‘You’re afraid.’

  ‘It has nothing to do with fear or your … physical limitations,’ I said, faltering to find the right words. ‘I’ve never felt that way about you.’

  ‘You won’t let yourself feel. Let me ask you something. What’s wrong with me, if you don’t care about my leg? I’m not unbearably ugly, am I? I’ve often been told that I have a very expressive face. Don’t I have a mind that an intelligent woman may find attractive?’

  ‘You do, you do. But, I’m a married woman—perhaps another woman, surely you’ve known other women, you have so many students,’ I said.

  ‘Let’s not skirt the issue. I’m not ta
lking of other women. I’m asking you. I’m saying, why wouldn’t you even think of me. I’m not worth that much trouble. Isn’t that true?’

  ‘I’m not sure what you’re saying,’ I said. ‘I should leave now.’

  ‘Oh, don’t you know what I’m saying? I’m saying you won’t even allow yourself to think about me. It scares you to think you could love a cripple.’

  ‘I should be going,’ I said, getting up. ‘It’s really quite late.’

  ‘Running away?’ he said. ‘Of course, you have the freedom to. And I, chained as I am to this,’ he grabbed the side of his crutch as if he’d fling it at me, ‘I cannot follow you. But, tell me honestly, did it come as a surprise to you?’

  ‘What?’ I avoided his eyes.

  ‘You must have known how I’ve felt all these months?’

  ‘Not really. But what did you want me to do? You’re making it seem like it’s my fault that, that I—I’ve led you to feel the way you do.’

  I stood up and slung my purse strap over my shoulder. If I didn’t get away from him soon, he might make me say things I had no intention of saying.