Ghalib at Dusk

by Nighat M Gandhi

  ‘I’ve ruined everything. I have. Wretched fate!’ Babar bhai struck his forehead with his hand in agitation. ‘You’re never coming back again! I know. I know. Forgive me. I don’t know what came over me. I held it all inside so long it was killing me, and I had to let it out today. You won’t stop coming, will you? Give me your word, please say you won’t. I’ll never bring this up again,’ he begged. ‘I don’t want to lose you. Please believe me. You mustn’t stop coming here.’

  As I walked home that evening, I knew that I was perhaps not the first woman Babar bhai had fancied he was in love with. What he perhaps wanted, more than anything else from a woman, was to be told he was loved. Loved for his passion for poetry, loved for his suffering poet’s face and burning eyes, loved for his mind.

  The conversation of the evening lay raw before me. Wanting who? Me? Compliments feel good, even from an incomplete man. The pleasure I felt, had become fused with anger, guilt and pity. I had watched him for months, holding himself back, wanting to say what he feared would make him lose me.

  I was approaching the street corner where I turned left to go towards our block of flats. The street was dark, the street lamps unlit even though power had come back. I picked my steps carefully, frowning at the unevenness of the unpaved road. The worst thing would be to step into cow dung, mounds of which lay scattered all over the streets. Sickly light bulbs flickered in vendors’ cabins that were nothing more than covered wooden carts propped up with bricks. There was a paanwalla’s shack at the crossing where I turned left. A few men were smoking bidis and chewing paan in front of the shop. I felt their eyes on my back as I went past them. Next to the paanwalla’s shop, a man with a cart full of eggs in neat stacks and loaves of sliced bread was frying omelettes in a smoking pan. I smelled the sharp odour of cheap cooking oil. A couple of men were waiting for their omelettes. Their heads turned to stare as I went past them. And then there was the mutton stall where a butcher in a greasy vest sat hacking meat into small pieces. The blood red carcass of a freshly skinned goat hung from a hook. He didn’t have any customers waiting, so he had plenty of time to survey me as I walked past him.

  I also felt a pair of deep dark eyes following me. I heard the knocking of a wooden crutch on the hard ground, and a pair of very thin long arms reaching out far into the dark, encircling me like vines. I hastened my pace. I was almost home. As soon as I turned right at the next street, I would see the gate to our flats and the guard sitting at the entrance. My steps were shaky, and I was sweating by the time I reached the gate. The guard said ‘namaste’ to me. I walked into the compound and looked back. The guard, a young man in his twenties, who had asked me for used clothes for his children, was sitting in his chair and his eyes too seemed to follow me.

  My two girls were standing at the railing on the second floor landing. As soon as they saw me, they rushed down to meet me, screaming.

  ‘Mamma, mamma, what took you so long? Did you get lost? Papa said he was going out to look for you,’ my seven-year old said breathlessly. I picked up my three-year-old in my arms and smoothed her curls as she nuzzled her soft face against my shoulder. I squeezed my older daughter’s hand.

  ‘It was dark, the lights had gone out,’ I said.

  ‘But what took you so long, mamma?’ she repeated.

  ‘I had to talk to Babar bhai about poetry. I didn’t understand some things. So I wanted him to explain those things to me.’

  ‘Did he explain it?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘And now you know everything?’

  ‘Now I understand some things. Not everything,’ I smiled.

  After that conversation, which took place about a year back, there was no way I could visit Babar bhai again. Though there were times I wanted to. I gave up marking out difficult couplets to take to him for discussion. At the end of that year I mentioned Babar bhai casually in a conversation to a friend, the only one I felt I could trust.

  ‘Did you go back and see him?’ she asked.

  ‘No, how could I? What was I going to say to him after all he’d said?’

  ‘But you should have gone back, at least once. All that’s in here,’ she tapped the side of my head, ‘needs to come out.’

  ‘But I couldn’t. May be I can write about it, you know,’ I said. ‘I write sometimes. Though, it won’t resolve anything,’ I said.

  ‘It’ll unburden you,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not guilty,’ I said.

  ‘But you’re sad. You’re pained. You feel burdened with the unexplained.’

  So several months later, one day when the girls were at school and my husband at work, I sat down and started writing about that wet monsoon evening when I had gone to Babar bhai’s house and the power had gone out, we had sat in his aangan in the dark and he had explained Ghalib’s poetry to me, and told me how he felt about me. I wrote the things I wanted to write, for no reason at all—the way the feeble door and its rusted chain reminded me of the door to the Chittagong house of my childhood, the way Aunty, Kamila and Amila reminded me of my grandmother and my aunts back then when we all lived together in the house in Chittagong—a house that’s perhaps been demolished to build a stack of newer, narrower ones in its place—-the way I came to sense their sadness through the greyness of their clothes and the slowness of their speech. The feelings of that evening poured out of me—of loss and desire unfulfilled—things half-formed and unnamable, delicate in their incompleteness.