Nigar, in her bridal attire, sat in a corner of the platform, her head bowed low. She looked very lovely in her tricoloured khadi sari. Babaji motioned for her to come closer and sat her next to Ghulam Ali, which caused more cries of delight.
Ghulam Ali’s face was unusually flushed. When he took the wedding contract from his friend and handed it over to Babaji, I noticed his hand was shaking.
A maulvi sahib was also present on the platform. He recited the Qur’anic verse customary at weddings; Babaji listened to it with closed eyes. The custom of ‘proposal and acceptance’ over, Babaji gave his blessing to the bride and groom. Meanwhile, the congratulatory showering of the couple with chhuwaras—dried dates—traditional at such events, had begun. Babaji snatched a dozen or so for himself and tucked them away.
Smiling shyly, a Hindu girlfriend of Nigar’s gave Ghulam Ali a tiny box as a present and whispered something in his ear. He opened the box and covered the parting in Nigar’s hair with powdered sindoor. The drabness of Jallianwala Bagh was enlivened again with a round of loud applause.
Babaji got up amidst all the noise. A hush instantly fell over the crowd.
The mixed fragrance of raat ki rani and jasmine wafted by on the light evening breeze. The scene was absolutely breathtaking. Babaji’s voice had acquired an extra measure of sweetness today. After congratulating the couple on their wedding, he said, ‘These two will work for their country and nation with even greater dedication now, because the true meaning of marriage is nothing but true friendship between a man and a woman. Ghulam Ali and Nigar will work together as friends for swaraj. Such marriages are commonplace in Europe—I mean marriages based on friendship and friendship alone. People who are able to exorcize carnal passion from their lives are worthy of our respect.’
Babaji explicated his concept of marriage at length. He firmly believed that the true joy of marriage was something above and beyond the bodily union of husband and wife. He didn’t consider sexual union as important as people generally made it out to be. Thousands of people ate just to satisfy their craving for flavour. But did this mean that to do so was incumbent on humans? Although few people ate solely out of the need to stay alive, they alone knew the true meaning of eating. Likewise, only those people who married out of the desire to experience the purity of this emotion and the sanctity of this sacred relationship truly enjoyed connubial bliss.
Babaji expounded on his belief with such clarity and profound sincerity that an entirely new world opened up before his listeners. I too was deeply touched. Ghulam Ali, who sat opposite me, was so engrossed in Babaji’s speech that he seemed to be drinking in every word. When Babaji stopped, Ghulam Ali briefly consulted with Nigar, got up, and declared in a trembling voice:
‘Ours will be just such a marriage. Until India wins her freedom, our relationship will be entirely like that of friends.’
More shouts of applause followed, brightening the dreary atmosphere in Jallianwala Bagh with cheery tumult for quite a while. Shahzada Ghulam Ali grew emotional, and streaks of red blotched his Kashmiri face. ‘Nigar!’ he addressed his bride in a loud voice. ‘Could you bear to bring a slave child into this world?’
Dazed in equal parts by the wedding and by Babaji’s lecture, Nigar lost what little presence of mind she had when she heard this question. ‘No! Of course not!’ was all she could get out.
The crowd clapped again, transporting Ghulam Ali to an even higher pitch of emotion. The joy at saving Nigar from the ignominy of birthing a slave baby went to his head, and he wandered off the main subject into the tortuous byways of how to free the country. For the next hour he spoke non-stop in a voice weighed down by emotion. Then, suddenly, his glance fell on Nigar, and he was struck dumb. He couldn’t get a word out. He was like a drunkard who keeps pulling out note after note without any idea of how much he is spending and then suddenly finds his wallet empty. The abrupt paralysis of speech irritated him greatly, but he immediately looked towards Babaji, bowed and again found his voice: ‘Babaji, bless us to remain steadfast in our vow.’
Next morning at six Shahzada Ghulam Ali was arrested. In the same speech in which he had vowed not to father a child until the country gained her freedom, he had also threatened to overthrow the English.
A few days after his arrest Ghulam Ali was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment and sent to the Multan jail. He was the forty-first ‘dictator’ of Amritsar and, if I remember correctly the figures quoted in the newspapers, the forty-thousandth political activist apprehended and imprisoned for taking part in the movement for independence.
Everybody thought that freedom was just around the corner. The astute British politicians, however, let the movement run its course. The failure of the major national leaders of India to reach an agreement pretty much took the teeth out of it.
Following their release, the freedom lovers tried to put the memory of their recent hardships behind them and get their interrupted business back on track. Shahzada Ghulam Ali was let go after only seven months. Even though the revolutionary fervour had subsided considerably by then, people did show up at the Amritsar railway station to greet him, and a few parties and rallies were held in his honour. I attended all of them. But they were largely lacklustre affairs. A strange fatigue seemed to have come over people, like runners returning listlessly to the starting line after being suddenly told, ‘Stop! We’ll have to do it over,’ in the middle of a dash.
Several years passed. The listlessness, the exhaustion still hung over India. My own life went through a series of upheavals, some major, some minor. A beard and moustache sprouted on my face. I entered college and twice failed in my FA. My father died. I knocked about looking for a job and found work as a translator for a third-rate newspaper. Fed up, I decided to go back to school and enrolled in Aligarh University, but I contracted tuberculosis and found myself wandering around rural Kashmir three months later, recuperating. Then I headed for Bombay. Witnessing three Hindu–Muslim riots in two years was enough to send me packing to Delhi. But that city, by comparison, turned out to be terribly drab, with everything moving at a snail’s pace. Even where there was some sign of activity, it had a distinctly feminine feel to it. Maybe Bombay isn’t so bad after all, I thought, even if your next-door neighbour has no time to ask your name. What of it? Where there is time, you see a lot of hypocrisy, a lot of disease. So after spending two uneventful years in Delhi I returned to fast-paced Bombay.
It had been eight years since I left home. I had no idea what my friends were doing; I barely remembered the streets and by-lanes of Amritsar. How could I? I hadn’t kept in touch with anybody from home. As a matter of fact, I’d become somewhat indifferent to my past in the intervening eight years. Why think about the past? What good would it do now to total up what was spent eight years ago? In life’s cash, the penny you want to spend today, or the one another may set his eyes on tomorrow is the one that counts.
Some six years ago, when I wasn’t quite as hard up, I’d gone to the Fort area to shop for a pair of expensive dress shoes. The display cases in a shop beyond the Army & Navy Store on Hornby Road had been tempting me for some time. But since I have a particularly weak memory, I wasn’t able to locate the shop in question. Out of habit I started to browse in other stores, even though I’d come specifically to buy shoes. I looked at a cigarette case in one store, pipes in another, and then I strolled on until I came to a small shop that sold footwear. I stopped and decided to look for a pair there. The attendant greeted me and asked, ‘Well, Sahib, what may we show you?’
For a moment or two I tried to remember what I had come to buy. ‘Oh, yes. Show me a pair of dress shoes with rubber soles.’
‘We don’t stock them.’
The monsoons will start any day now, I thought. Why not buy a pair of gumboots? ‘Well then, how about gumboots?’
‘We don’t sell those either,’ the man said. ‘Try the shop next door. We don’t stock any rubber footwear at all.’
‘Why?’ I asked out of c
uriosity.
‘Orders from the boss.’
There was nothing I could do but leave after that brusque but definitive reply. As I turned to go, my eyes fell on a well-dressed man with a child in his arms standing outside on the footpath buying a tangelo from a street vendor. I stepped out just as he turned towards the store. ‘You! Ghulam Ali!’
‘Saadat!’ he shouted and hugged me, the child in his arm sandwiched between us. Unhappy with the situation, the infant started to cry. Ghulam Ali called the man who had attended me, handed the child over to him and said, ‘Go! Take him home!’ Then he said to me, ‘It’s been ages, hasn’t it?’
I probed his face. The swagger, the ever-so-slight trace of rakishness that had been such a prominent feature of his appearance had entirely disappeared. It was a common family man who stood before me, not the fiery young khadi-clad speech-maker. I remembered his last speech, when he had energized the otherwise bleak atmosphere of Jallianwala Bagh with his sizzling hot words, ‘Nigar! Could you bear to bring a slave child into this world?’ Instantly I thought of the child Ghulam Ali was holding in his arms until a few moments ago.
I asked him, ‘Whose child is that?’
‘Mine, of course,’ he answered, without the least hesitation. ‘I have an older one too. And you, how many do you have?’
For a second I felt it was somebody else talking. Hundreds of questions rattled in my mind: Had Ghulam Ali completely forgotten his vow? Had he dissociated himself entirely from political life? The ardour, the passion to win freedom for India—where had they gone? Whatever happened to that naked challenge? Where was Nigar? Had she been able to bear giving birth to two slave children after all? Maybe she’d died and Ghulam Ali had remarried.
‘What are you thinking?’ Ghulam Ali smacked me on the shoulder and said. ‘Come on, let’s talk. We’ve met after such a long time.’
I started, let out an elongated ‘Yes-s-s’, and fumbled for words. But Ghulam Ali didn’t give me a chance and began speaking himself instead: ‘This is my shop. I’ve been living in Bombay for two years. Business is good. I can easily save three, even four hundred rupees a month. What are you doing? I hear you’ve become a famous short story writer. Remember the time we ran off to Bombay together? But, yaar, that was a different Bombay. It was small. This one is huge. Or it seems so to me, anyway.’
Meanwhile, a customer walked in, looking for tennis shoes. Ghulam Ali told him, ‘No rubber stuff here. Please go to the shop next door.’
‘Why not?’ I asked Ghulam Ali as soon as the customer left. ‘I was looking for a pair of shoes with rubber soles myself.’
I’d asked the question only casually, but his face fell. ‘I just don’t like them,’ he said, softly.
‘What do you mean, “them”?’
‘Rubber—I mean things made of rubber.’ He tried to smile, but couldn’t. He let out a laugh instead, loud and dry. ‘Okay, I’ll tell you. It’s a silly thing, but somehow it’s had a significant impact on my life.’
Traces of deep reflection appeared on his face; his eyes, playful as ever, dimmed for a second and then lit up again. ‘That life—it was absolutely phoney! To tell you the truth, Saadat, I’ve completely forgotten the days when this thing about being a leader had gotten into my head. The past four, five years have been pure bliss. I can never thank God enough for all He’s given me. I have a wife, children . . .’
‘Thanking God enough’ got him started about his business venture: the initial investment, the profit he’d made in a year’s time, the money he had in the bank now.
I interrupted him. ‘But what’s this “silly thing” that had a profound impact on your life?’
The glow once again disappeared from his face. ‘Ye-e-e-s,’ he said. ‘It had a profound impact. Thank God it no longer does. I guess I’ll have to tell you the whole thing.’
Meanwhile, the attendant returned. Ghulam Ali left him in charge of the store and ushered me into his room in the rear. Here, leisurely, he told me why he had developed such a dislike for rubber goods.
‘You know how I got started on my political career. And you also know what kind of character I had. We were pretty much alike. I mean, let’s be honest, our parents couldn’t brag about us being without blemish. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Maybe you get my drift. I wasn’t endowed with a strong character. But I had this desire to do something. That’s what drove me to politics. I swear to God that I was not a fake. I could have laid down my life for the country. I still can. All the same, I feel—in fact, it’s a conclusion I’ve come to after much serious thought—that India’s politics and her leaders are all pretty green, as green as I used to be. A tidal wave rises, but I think it doesn’t rise on its own, it’s deliberately created . . . Perhaps I haven’t been able to lay it all out for you clearly.’
His thoughts were terribly muddled. I gave him a cigarette. He lit it, took a few long drags and continued, ‘What do you think? Doesn’t every effort India has made to free herself look unnatural? Perhaps not the effort, maybe I should say the outcome of the effort. Why have we failed to achieve freedom? Are we a bunch of sissies? Of course we aren’t. We’re men. But the environment is such that our energies fall short of what’s needed to reach our goal.’
‘As if there is a barrier between us and freedom?’ I asked.
His eyes gleamed. ‘Absolutely. But not like a solid wall or an impenetrable rock. It’s like a membrane at the most, a cobweb, created by the way we conduct our politics and live our sham lives. Lives in which we deceive others, and ourselves even more.’
His thoughts were still in a jumble. He seemed to be trying to make an accounting of all his past experiences on the spot. He stubbed out the cigarette, looked at me and said, ‘A person should stay the way God made him. He does not need to shave his head, wear red ochre clothes, or cover his body with ash to perform good deeds, does he? You might say a person does all those things out of his own free will. That’s just it. This novelty, “out of his own free will”, is precisely what leads people astray, at least that’s what I think. Their lofty position makes them indifferent to natural human weaknesses. But they completely forget that it is not their character, thinking or beliefs that will endure in the minds of simple people—as a matter of fact, these disappear into thin air in no time at all. What does endure, rather, is the image of their shaven heads, red ochre garb and ash-smeared bodies.’ Ghulam Ali grew terribly excited. ‘The world has seen a whole host of reformers. Nobody remembers their teachings. But crosses, sacred threads, beards, bracelets and underarm hair survive. We’re more experienced than our ancestors a thousand years ago. I can’t understand why none of these contemporary reformers can see that he’s disfiguring humans beyond all hope of recognition. There are times when I feel like screaming: “For God’s sake, haven’t you deformed him enough already? At least take pity on him now and let him be! You want to make him a God, while the poor thing, he’s having a hard time just holding on to his humanity.”
‘Saadat, I swear to God this is how I feel. If it’s wrong and false, then I don’t know what is right and true. For two full years I’ve wrestled with my mind. I’ve argued with my heart, with my conscience, in fact with every pore of my body. In the end, I feel humans must remain humans. If a couple wants to curb their carnal passion, let them. But the entire human race? For God’s sake! What good will all that “curbing” accomplish?’
He stopped briefly to light another cigarette, letting the entire matchstick burn itself out, shook his head ever so slightly, and continued: ‘No, Saadat, you cannot know the incredible misery I’ve been through, in my body and in my soul. But it couldn’t be otherwise. Whoever attempts to go against nature is bound to come to grief. The day I made that vow in Jallianwala Bagh—you remember, don’t you, that Nigar and I would not bring any slave children into this world—I felt an electrifying surge of happiness. I felt that with that declaration my head had started to soar upward until it touched the sky. However, when I got out o
f jail the painful realization slowly took hold of me that I had curbed a vital part of my body and soul, that I had crushed the prettiest flower in my garden between my palms. At first the thought brought an exhilarating sense of pride: I had done what others could not. Slowly, when my reasoning became clear, the bitter truth began to sink in. I went to see Nigar. She had given up her job at the hospital and joined Babaji’s ashram. Her faded colour, her altered mental and physical condition—I thought I was mistaken, that my eyes were being deceived. Spending a year with her convinced me that her torment was the same as mine, although neither of us wanted to mention it to the other, feeling the noose of our vow tighten around us.
‘All that political excitement simmered down within a year. Khadi clothes and the tricolour flag no longer seemed so attractive. And even if the cry of “Inqilab Zindabad” did go up now and then, it had lost its previous resonance. Not a single tent could be seen anywhere in all of Jallianwala Bagh, except for a few pegs left in the ground here and there as reminders of a time gone by. The political fervour had pretty much run out of steam.
‘I spent most of my time at home, near my wife . . .’ He stopped, the same wounded smile playing on his lips once again. I kept quiet so as not to interrupt his train of thought.
After a while he wiped the perspiration off his forehead, put out his cigarette and said, ‘We were both struck by a strange curse. You know how much I love Nigar. I’d think: “What kind of love is this? When I touch her, why don’t I allow the sensation to peak? Why do I feel so guilty? As if I’m committing a sin?” I love Nigar’s eyes so much. One day when I was feeling normal . . . I mean just how one should feel, I kissed them. She was in my arms—or rather I should say, I had the sensation of My holding a tremor in my arms. I was about to let myself go, but managed to regain control in time. For a long while afterwards, several days in fact, I tried to convince myself that my restraint had given my soul a pleasure few had experienced. The truth was that I’d failed. And that failure, which I wanted to believe was a great success, made me the most miserable man on earth. But as you know, people eventually find ways to get around things. Let’s just say I found a way around it. We were both drying up. Somewhere deep inside a crust had started to form on our pleasures. “We are fast turning into strangers,” I thought. After much thinking we felt that we could . . . without compromising our vow . . . I mean that Nigar wouldn’t give birth to a slave child . . .’ The wounded smile appeared a third time, dissolved immediately into a loud laugh, with a distinct trace of pain in it; then he continued in an extremely serious tone of voice: ‘Thus started this strange phase of our married life. It was like a blind man suddenly had sight restored in one eye. I was seeing again. But soon the vision blurred. At first we thought . . .’ He seemed to be fishing for the right word. ‘At first we felt satisfied. I mean we hadn’t the foggiest idea that we’d start feeling terribly dissatisfied before long. As though having one eye wasn’t enough. Early on we felt we were recovering, our health was improving. A glow appeared on Nigar’s face, and her eyes shone. For my part, my nerves no longer felt so hellishly strung out all the time. Slowly, however, we turned into rubber dummies. I experienced this more than she did. You wouldn’t believe it, but, by God, every time I pinched the flesh of my arms, it felt like rubber. Absolutely. As though I didn’t have any blood vessels. Nigar’s condition, I believe, was different. Her perspective was different too. She wanted to become a mother. Every time a woman in our lane had a baby, Nigar would sigh quietly. I didn’t much care about having children. So what if we didn’t have any? Countless people in the world don’t either. At least I had remained steadfast in my vow. And that was no mean achievement. Well, this line of thinking did comfort me quite a bit, but as the thin rubbery web began to close around my mind, I became more and more anxious. I grew overly pensive, the feel of rubber clung to my mind. At meals the food felt chewy and spongy under my teeth.’ A shudder went through his body as he said this. ‘It was disgusting! All the time it felt as though soap lather had stuck to my fingers and wouldn’t wash off. I started to hate myself. I felt all the sap had drained out of me and something like the thinnest of skins was left behind—a used sheath.’ He started to laugh. ‘Thank God I’m rid of that abomination now, but at what cost, Saadat! My life had turned into a dried-up, shrivelled-up piece of sinew, all my desires smothered. But, oddly, my sense of touch had become unusually keen, almost unnaturally keen. Maybe not keen, but focused, in one direction only. No matter what I touched, wood, glass, metal, paper or stone—they all had the same clammy tenderness of rubber that made me sick! My torment would grow even worse when I thought about the object itself. All I needed to do was grab my affliction in my two fingers and toss it away, but I lacked the courage. I longed for something to latch on to for support, for the merest straw in this ocean of torment, so that I might reach the shore. I kept looking for it desperately. One day as I sat on the rooftop in the sun reading, rather browsing, through a religious book, my eyes caught a Hadith,* and I jumped for joy. The “support” was staring at me. I read the lines over and over again. I felt as if water had gushed through the desiccated arid landscape of my life. It was written: “It is incumbent on man and wife to procreate after they are married. Contraception is permissible only in the event of danger to the lives of parents.” Then and there I peeled off my affliction and threw it aside.’
My Name Is Radha Page 25