‘Choudhry, can I scratch my back a little?’
Choudhry began to experience the fits all over again. He seemed to hear the sound of clapping in his brain, his cheeks fluttered, and five thousand tinkling coins took the shape of tiny stars that hopped and receded further and further from him. Brown, black, grey and yellow—all the shades collided with one another, and he felt as though a mushroom was sprouting on his skull.
The question now was whether he should endeavour to paint or surrender to the madness that was going to envelop him. At this rate, he would soon be seen in tatters rolling in the dirt in the street like a mad dog, his thin, haggard body bruised and scratched. Or he would be compelled to drown his burning head in the waters of the small pond.
His steps led him automatically towards the pond, which was not far. It was his usual haunt. Sitting on the bank he would gaze for hours together at the shimmering and swaying reflection of the setting sun on water. He was a poet—a natural one. He lived in the world but was distanced from it. He was not old, but one couldn’t call him young either. He was too careless to trim his beard, which grew unwieldy and dishevelled and had now become grizzled.
‘Ohh! . . .’ Something quivered in his armpit again. He seemed to hear Rani’s voice along with the croaking of a frog. Was it a frog? But the rainy season was yet to come. So it mustn’t be a frog but a cat purring. Well, if not a cat, it must be something else.
But when his pious eyes saw Rani and Ratna romping in the water, he thought for a moment it must be some delusion. His fancy tormented him by imagining such scenes. And today it had crossed all limits.
However, as he advanced, the tumultuous laughter stopped and the two images, transfixed as a marble statue, had their eyes pop out in surprise. How vivid the illusion was! Every feature stood out loud and clear—the bulge of Ratna’s thighs, his wet tuft of hair, his two deep-set eyes. And Rani’s tousled locks and her body the tint of a mixture of ashen grey, pink, brown, camphor white and blue. And the mole? The protuberant mole seemed to strike Choudhry like a bullet.
Ratna edged sideways and somehow made good his escape, picking up his dhoti, but Rani stood there undeterred, flapping the water with her hand. It seemed to Choudhry that someone had put him in a swing and given it a mighty push so that he was swinging higher and higher.
‘So you’re looking at my mole? How naughty!’ she said coquettishly to pacify Choudhry. Choudhry could barely hold himself back at the edge of the precipice.
‘Come out of the water,’ he said, pushing away the new Choudhry who was sinking slowly.
‘Oonh, you’ll hit me,’ she raised her head above the water.
‘I’ll flay you alive today.’ Choudhry had to convince himself that it was the same girl who had grown up like a frog in the gutter.
‘Won’t you feel ashamed, raising your hand to beat a woman?’
Choudhry flared up.
‘Do you beat naked women? . . . What a thing to do!’ She was half above the water. She was afraid, so her tone was belligerent.
‘Go away . . . you.’ Now she was coy.
The swinging stick dropped from Choudhry’s hand and his height increased by a few inches. His arms swelled and ants seemed to crawl inside his brain. A gust of cool, vapour-laden, black wind swept away everything. The sparks were ignited in full force and flames began to leap up. His hungry eyes landed on the black, protruding mole, which seemed to transform itself into a black stone and strike him on the forehead. He turned and ran like a vanquished dog to his room and lay down on the bed.
The same day Choudhry turned Ratna out. He kept on pleading that he had had the loincloth on all the time, but Choudhry was like a man possessed. He fought with a veritable army of ogres the whole night. It was as though someone was trying to bore a hole through his body with a drill but could not do so because a massive rock stood in the way.
That day he had a host of colours at his disposal. He mixed ochre with a little blue that produced a shade that was alive and deep and soggy like the bottom of the ocean. And for the eyes he mixed light green with black—no, just a hint of grey with pink at the edge of the eyes.
He wanted to look at himself in the mirror, something he had not done for a long time. Does an artist have to look at his face in the mirror? What can the mirror show him? The myriad paintings by him were the mirror in which he could see not only his face but also view every nook and crevice of his soul. His heart and mind, created and recreated in varying shades, were right there before him.
Nevertheless, he wanted to see the reflection of his face. He took a tin box, which had brought paints from far-off cities, and turned it upside down. Two crickets jumped out, brushed against his nose and flew away. He wiped off the spider’s web with his elbow and looked at his face. At first he could not see much. Whatever he could discern looked like some fine tassel-like undergrowth at the bottom of the ocean. Or like when the eyelashes get stuck and everything looks blurred and foamy. Then he could see a grotesque beard and eyes burning with hunger. Oh! Was it he? His own face? But he never looked like this. Did he? He turned the box upside down and tried to look at his face again. His beard was still visible, and when he closed one eye, he could also see his smudged nose and unkempt moustache. The moustache. If he had had a pair of scissors, he would have trimmed the moustache—trimmed it just a bit so it would look decent.
Rani had said Chunnan’s moustache made her sneeze—phun . . . phun . . . He made sniffling noises with his nose. He knew that Ratna had been wearing the loincloth. Or maybe he had worn a dhoti. . . or was going to wear it when he appeared on the scene. But what about Chunnan and his gurdhani? Choudhry had a curious feeling that the walls of his house were made of gurdhani and he was being squeezed between them. Then he got stuck on a heap of gurdhani like a half-crushed fly and was fluttering in the wind. When he got tired of pacing up and down and his legs almost gave way, he sat down on the stool. He lifted the screen from his half-finished work, and in a few moments the spots and dabs began to fly around and then became still. The shoulders glinted like polished leather, and the eyes sparkled with blue, black and green lights. And the mole? How did the mole come here? Protruding and coiled like a snake! Oh the mole! Tick! Tick! Tick! His heart beat like a clock.
He got up in a moment, and his feet led him towards Rani’s hut. It was a dirty, dingy and suffocating shack with a narrow door. He thought he would have its roof raised the next day. Oh no, that won’t do. The room where he stored his empty boxes would serve the purpose. He advanced in the darkness. His heart still beat like a clock while the darkness inside it clung to him like wet charcoal. His hands got stuck in the strings of the charpoy. He groped frantically in the darkness, but Rani was not there. Mosquitoes swarmed over his entire body and began sucking his blood. Large, whining mosquitoes. Then slab after slab of gurdhani fell over him.
The next morning he felt like holding Rani by her locks and asking: ‘Bastard, where were you last night?’
But she was sure to ask why he was in her hut and groping in her bed. He worked in silence. Rani, too, was quiet that day. He wanted her to speak so he would know where she had been the previous night. But she made a face and continued to sulk.
‘Are you tired?’ He asked gently as he saw her resting the pitcher on the floor. He didn’t want to fight with her that day.
‘Of course. Do you think I’m made of clay?’ She was massaging her waist with both hands.
Choudhry wanted to say something tender, but he felt shy of changing his tone.
‘Come on, that’s enough rest for now.’ He expected her to fight, but she quietly lifted the pitcher and struck the pose.
That day his colours turned belligerent and seemed to ridicule him. He had expected to paint the mole that day. Just like that. Couldn’t paintings have moles in them? But seeing how rebellious his colours were he dropped the idea.
As Rani got up to leave, a piece of gurdhani fell from her dhoti. She was not at all aware of it, but Choudhry
felt as though the roof had collapsed over his head.
‘This—this gurdhani?’ He was foaming at the mouth in anger. She stopped in her tracks to pick it up but seeing Choudhry’s mood, she changed her mind.
‘You can have it,’ she said shrugging insolently.
A death-like stillness paralysed Choudhry. He stared at Rani’s receding figure and then suddenly ground to smithereens the piece of gurdhani with his heels.
The next day Rani disappeared without a trace. She didn’t bother to take any clothes with her and left as she had come, to wallow in squalor and dirt again, no doubt.
Choudhry’s painting remained incomplete. Five thousand rupees got frozen in his mind like a black mark—a mark that looked like a tiny, protuberant mole. What a bad place for a black, singed mark! Right in his heart.
After this Choudhry lived in a state of mental agitation. He could not tell people about Rani’s disappearance lest they suspect him of some foul play. Days went by, and he continued painting. But no one was ready to pay even six annas for his paintings. This was because he started filling his flowers and twilight with such bizarre and frightening shades of brown and grey that people thought he was out of his mind. All his colours got mixed up and were reduced to a puddle.
More unpleasant developments followed. People started asking him about Rani. He replied that he didn’t know where she had gone. But such straightforward answers did not satisfy them.
‘Choudhry has sold Rani to someone.’
‘To a trader for several thousand rupees.’
‘He had illicit relations with her . . . Must have got rid of her somehow.’
The conjectures were endless. Choudhry’s life was reduced to a dark dungeon. It seemed that people wanted to roast him alive and devour him. That was not all. What a stir it created when the police caught Rani while she was leaving a blood-soaked bundle on the road! Immediately the village was raided, and Choudhry lost whatever sanity was left in him. The riddle concerning Rani’s disappearance was solved easily. Choudhry was dumbfounded. What injustice! A lifetime of piety and goodwill was destroyed by this unfounded accusation. But God knew that he had not sinned, and he hoped he would be saved as all innocents are saved. Truth always triumphs. But . . . how he wished he were guilty! Well, he was guilty anyway—of being born into this world.
Yes, he wished he were an accomplice! Imprisonment, pain, suffering, calamity, public disgrace—he would have taken it all upon himself, smiling. If he had known that he would be acquitted in that manner, he would not have pleaded innocence to God and prayed to Him. True, there was that mole. Well, yes. But wasn’t God aware of the weaknesses of human beings? It is He who burdened them with these weaknesses. But little did Choudhry know that when Rani would be interrogated by the police and he would be trapped in the net of logic by lawyers, she would use this strategy to free, or in other words, destroy him completely!
‘It was not Choudhry’s,’ she swore before a crowded court. ‘Choudhry is impotent,’ she blurted out carelessly.
‘Ask Rama or Chunnan. How do I know which one it is? Hunh!’
A black mountain crashed over Choudhry’s existence. It was accompanied by lightning and a quiet peal of thunder. And far away, quite far, a deep black, round, protruding dot gyrated like a top.
To this day, sitting by the road, Choudhry traces lines with a piece of charcoal—long, conical, round lines—like a singed mark.
The Zenana
THE WEDDING SUIT
A clean sheet was spread, once again, on the chauki, the wooden board, that day. Sunlight filtered in through the chinks of the tiled roof, making odd patterns in the courtyard. The women of the neighbourhood were sitting around silently with awed anticipation as though a momentous event was going to unfold. Mothers clasped their babies to their breasts. Only some sickly, irritable infant was occasionally heard crying.
‘No, no, my darling,’ the scrawny mother said, letting the baby lie on her knees and bouncing him as though she were shaking a winnowing tray. The baby, after a few hiccups, fell silent.
That day many expectant eyes were riveted on the thoughtful face of Kubra’s mother. The two short pieces of cloth had been strung together, but no one dared to apply the scissors at this point. As far as cutting and measuring cloth was concerned, Kubra’s mother’s skill was undisputed. No one knew how many dowries she had prepared with her shrunken hands, how many suits she had stitched for new mothers and their babies, and how many shrouds she had measured and ripped. Whenever someone in the mohalla ran short of fabric while stitching and all her efforts at measuring and cutting bore no fruit, the case was brought to Kubra’s mother. She would smoothen the edge of the fabric, break the starch in it, arrange the fabric sometimes in the form of a triangle, sometimes in the shape of a square. Then, her imagination fiercely at work with her scissors, she would measure the cloth in a final glance and break into a smile.
‘Well, the sleeve and the hem will come out of this. For the lapels, take some snippets from my sewing box.’ And thus the crisis would come to a resolution. She would cut the cloth and hand over the bundle of snippets to the woman.
But that day the piece of cloth was smaller than usual, and everyone was sure that Kubra’s mother would fail to show her wizardry this time round. That is why they were all looking at her intently, holding their breath. Kubra’s mother’s face bore a resolute look without any trace of anxiety. She scrutinized the four-finger-long piece of fabric. The sunlight reflected on the red twill and lit up her bluish-yellow face, which suddenly brought to light the deep wrinkles on her face, like darkening clouds. It was as though a forest had caught fire. She smiled and picked up the scissors.
A deep sigh of relief rose from the crowd of women. Babies were separated from breasts and laid on the ground, eagle-eyed virgins leapt to thread the needles and newlywed brides put on their thimbles. By that time Kubra’s mother’s scissors were running along the fabric.
At the far end of the seh-dari, the veranda, Hamida sat thoughtfully on a couch, her chin resting on her palm, her feet dangling.
When lunch was over, Bi Amma settled down on the chauki in the seh-dari, opened her sewing box and spread out her a multicoloured array of snippets. Sitting on the stone mortar and scrubbing utensils, Kubra observed the red-coloured snippets and a tinge of red flushed her pale, muddy complexion. As Bi Amma spread the network of design made of silver sequins on her knees with her delicate hands, her wilted face suddenly brightened up with hope. Golden flowerets glowed like tiny candles against her deep, moat-like wrinkles. At every stitch, the golden embroidery sparkled and the candles fluttered.
No one knew when the sequins for the muslin dupatta were first made and put into the depths of the heavy, coffin-like wooden box. The edges of the sequined network had faded, so had the gilt border; the spools of gold thread wore a forlorn look. But there was no sign of Kubra’s wedding party yet.
When one set of clothes meant to be worn on chauthi got old, it was set aside with the remark that the bride would wear it on her second or later visits to her parents and preparations for a new suit would start, raising new hopes. After a careful search, a new bride would be selected for the first snip and the sheet would be spread on the chauki in the seh-dari. The women of the mohalla would gather with babies at their breasts and paandaans in hands, their anklets tinkling.
‘The border of the underwear can be taken off this, but there won’t be enough for the bodice.’
‘Well, sister! Just listen to her! Are you going to use the twill for the bodice, surely not?’ Everyone looked worried.
Like a silent alchemist, Kubra’s mother measured the length and width with her eyes while the women whispered jokes among themselves about undergarments and broke into guffaws. While someone burst into a wedding song, another, now emboldened, lustily sang a number about wicked in-laws. This led to dirty jokes and giggles. At this juncture the unmarried girls were ordered to leave the scene, to cover their heads and sit somewhere near
the tiling. As another burst of laughter rang out, the girls heaved deep sighs and longed for the day when they would be allowed to join in the laughter.
Far away from this hustle and bustle, Kubra, overcome by shyness, sat in the mosquito-infested room, her head bent low. Meanwhile, the sartorial process would reach a delicate point. Some gusset would be cut against the grain and the women would be at their wits’ end. Kubra would watch nervously from a chink in the door.
That was the problem! Not a damned suit could be stitched without some hassle or the other. If a gusset was cut on the reverse, there was sure to be some trouble arising out of the gossip of the naain, the barber woman. Either the groom would be found to have a mistress or his mother would provide a hurdle by demanding solid gold bracelets.
If the hem got warped, it meant that the marriage would fall through due to disagreement on mehr, or there would be a scuffle over the bedstead with legs covered with silver work. The omens associated with the suit of chauthi were indeed portentous. In case of any mishap, all of Bi Amma’s resourcefulness and practice would be in vain. No one knew why, at the critical moment, some trivial problem would crop up and hamper progress.
Kubra’s mother had started to prepare her dowry at an early stage. Even if a small snippet was left, she would immediately stitch the cover of a bottle with it, decorating it with lace of gold thread, and then put it away. There’s no telling about a girl—she grows up by leaps and bounds, as a cucumber grows. When the marriage took place, such farsightedness would pay off.
However, after Abba’s death, even such foresight came to no avail. At that moment Hamida was reminded of her father. Abba was tall and frail, like Muharram’s aalam. If he bent down once, it was difficult for him to straighten up. At the crack of dawn, he would break a neem twig to brush his teeth, and seating Hamida on his knees, he would get lost in his world of thought. As he brushed absent-mindedly, sometimes a small splinter from the twig would find its way into his gullet, and he would start coughing. Hamida would get down from his knees in a huff. She didn’t like her father shaking all over with the cough. Her father would laugh at her childish pique, and the phlegm would get stuck in his chest, making him writhe like a slaughtered pigeon. Then Bi Amma would come to his rescue and thump his back.
Manto and Chughtai Page 14