‘In the face of the falsehood and lure of the world, I could laugh,’ he said to himself.
And yet he felt cheated to be fading away imprisoned in this room with his allotted hours and days, how many he did not know, being conscious only of his heart beating, pounding at his chest in the silence of the morning, mingling with the hum of a long-drawn wail, far off like the din of his soul in strife, and near, as near as where the cock crowed on the roof of someone’s house in the gulley.
The illness seemed to have deafened his ears as if the burnt-up tissue in his body had risen in the haze and clogged that sense, but otherwise he felt lighter, more transparent. He applied his ears and listened attentively, his gaze fluttering as though he were looking for something which he had lost in this room or was trying to remember something which he had forgotten.
‘Allah-ho-Akbar,’ came the voice of the mullah.
‘Dur, dur, dog,’ Nur murmured rising out of his resignation, angered by the groans of a dry as dust formalist fed by the food of charity.
‘Call the faithful to prayer, call them to prayer, you dog. I hate you and I hate your God. I hate you all! To incur your wrath I spit on your face and I spit on the face of your God!’ And he was about to raise himself from his pillow to give his words the confirmation of the act when a choking cough seized him and he was caught in the paroxysms of an agony that seemed as if it would be his last.
‘Nur, Nur, my child, what is it my son? What is it, my darling son?’ his grandmother called, coming down the stairs.
She had the lines of her seventy odd years written on her face and hobbled miserably, shaking her head as if she were drunk.
He coughed and the effort seemed to stir each fibre of his being, the scourge of that uncertainty which had possessed him for months.
His grandmother bent her twisted, wrinkled face, straining to touch his forehead with her lips, but unable to do so as the salt tide of tears dimmed her sight. Her hands shook convulsively with the effort of bending.
‘What is it, my child? What is it, my son? May I be your sacrifice!’ she soothed with pouting lips.
‘Nothing, grandmother, nothing is the matter,’ he said gasping for breath as if he had lost a heartbeat. ‘I am all right, I am all right. You go and rest.’
‘Do have some of the tea I have made for you, my son,’ she said, ‘do have a sip. . . I will open the windows — the sun is shining outside.’ But as he had closed his eyes and paled for a moment, she opened her mouth, frightened and looked at him dazedly.
‘Achha, achha,’ he sighed impatiently lest she should fuss. ‘But don’t open the windows. You go and rest.’
She hobbled by the side of the bed and relaxed. Then with indifferent fingers she pulled the quilt, which he had thrown away on one side during the night, over his legs. Glancing around to see whether everything was in order she scanned his face casually, as if she had come to accept the deathlessness of his sick body, and she lingered by the bedside.
He felt oppressed by her presence as if she had disturbed him and brought on his spasm of coughing.
‘It isn’t that I am a child anymore, grandma,’ he said. ‘I will be all right, you go and rest.’
‘You are still a child to me, my son,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you will be all right? There is your tea. I have put it on the shelf. Now are you sure? I will see to the meal then. I will go.’ And looking around and under the bed, she lifted the chamber and said again: ‘Achha, I will go. But call me if you need anything...’
As the image of her hobbling, bent form receded, he pitied and hated her. She was his father’s mother. And always he had pitied and hated her. The pride of his love for his dead mother had never overcome the barrier of the wrong she had done him in allowing his father to marry again. And since she had aged too he had never been able to overcome her ugliness; and the weight of her doting affection had only increased the barrier.
In the prolonged weariness of five bedridden months the ebb and flow of his hope in life had infused in him a strange tenderness for everyone and he had loved her for her devotion. She was old and stupid and stumbling, but there was something so pitiable about her that he had let her take the place of his mother. And yet the bitterness of her calm acceptance of his father’s brutality persisted, the bitterness of those howls which he had uttered when his father beat him and the tears he had shed, tears of shame and chagrin when he had been made to accept the humiliation of orders from his stepmother, of the suffering they had all tried to extract from him.
‘They all tried to oppress me, they have broken and crushed me and left me destroyed, and now they make a fuss of me and fetch me medicines and run here and there trying to save my life, the hypocrites!’ he muttered under his breath, and looked away at the books that lay by the bottles of medicine on the narrow shelf, crowded by the odds and ends of his stepmother, her looking glass, and her assortment of glass bangles.
As he turned over he felt the weakness of his lungs go silently to his head, and he lay still in a sleepy inertia through which the bundles of dirty clothes that hung like festoons from the coloured pegs on the walls, the stacks of cheaply painted trunks and the sacks of sugar over which the rats had pissed in stinking green patterns, seemed to become unbearably depressing. The whitewashed walls blackened by the soot of slow hearthfires in the gulley seemed to be crowding in on him and the feeling that he could never get up and escape from the sordid reality of his home into the world of tall mirrors and gilded chairs and mahogany tables depicted at the Mahna Singh Theatre, made him hopeless.
A fresh twitching of the lungs frightened him. He closed his eyes and tried not to move even the fraction of an inch, obsessed by the superstitious awe which the Doctor’s orders not to excite himself in anyway had spread over him.
And, for a moment, he lay resigned and apathetic like a corpse which does not care about the soil it is laid on, though his eyelids pressed heavily and his nerves quivered as if his inside had become more acutely sensitive to the fear and sorrow that had crushed him through the last months.
He felt a hard knot of saliva settling in the passage of his throat.
He stirred his throat and half opening his eyes, spat into the spittoon. He closed his eyes, afraid to see the dark-red-white flame trailing down from his mouth. He fell back exhausted. It was terrible to be so weak. He sought to rest again, closing his eyes in the warmth through which swirled the noise of sparrows twittering in the lane. He lent himself to the soothing warmth of the pillows beneath his head and accepted his helplessness.
‘What was I thinking before Grandma came?’ he asked himself. But there was no answer from the depths of his body which now seemed stretched in a repose morbidly expectant. His heavy heart beatout a refrain; ‘I must get well, I must get well,’ as if it were still drugged with its obstinate belief in existence. And there was a quickening at the back of his head.
In the dim light of the half-sleep which came over him, beyond the massed clouds of darkness, he was walking by the thick, muddy, sewage stream overflowing with slime, that ran in the shadow of the town’s red brick wall and into which people emptied rats, live snakes, dead dogs and cats... There was the foul reek of dung and urine from the trolley train which ran from the houses of the sweepers through the town wall past the gate of Lohgarh to the vast valley near the Bhagtanwallah Gate, where the refuse was burnt... He had often wanted to become an engine driver so that he could drive the little engine of this train... But the vision of the black-skinned, white-clad Master with a primly cut, scraggy beard had remained. The Master stood in the classroom, by the shoemakers’ houses, the corners of his eyes shot red with rage as if he were made of some unearthly clay, and he, Nur, had entered late. In one fearful moment he had trembled merely to see the fresh cane which lay on the table; he had known that the accusation in the Master’s eyes was coloured by revenge rather
than by the anger at his lateness: the Master had asked him to bring him a basket of sweets from his father’s shop and when he had begged his father to give him the gift to offer to the Master, the Chaudhri had refused, saying, ‘I don’t keep a shop for the purpose of charity, it is hard enough for me to make a living and pay your school fees.’ And, of course, he had never dared to tell this to the Master... The dread of the greedy dog, as he stood there, grimly seeped into his bones. And when the demon actually lifted the cane, he began to shriek in agony, whereupon the Master shouted to him, ‘Be quiet or I will give you one stripe more for everyone after which you howl!’ And as he howled and cried, ‘Oh spare me, oh spare me, Masterji,’ long before the sweep of every blow from the cane shimmered before his terror-stricken eyes, the ghost of the devil had worked himself up to an even grimmer rage so that his words tumbled over each other as he numbered the blows, while he begged, prayed, supplicated to the cruel tyrant, drifting further and further and shouting the more, though he knew that his protest would increase the sum of his punishment...
In a corner of the room he sat alternately hating his mother, who stood in the chamber of horrors, in the oblivion of her hell raging with fire and water, for not coming to his rescue, and loving her as she stood with tears of despair in her eyes and arms outstretched, appealing to the angel Gabriel to help her son. ‘Oh mother, don’t be silly; don’t whine like a pauper,’ he said as he nursed his smarting limbs, unable to lift his eyes for shame, as the tears welled in them against his will. ‘We have some prestige. The Chaudhri is respected by the whole bazaar and I shall ask him to report to the Head Master...’ But if the Chaudhri saw the Head Master the Munshi would become far more revengeful... Already he had made a slip at spelling and the Master was putting pencils between his fingers and pressing them hard, hard, harder, and Nur could see himself writhing and shrieking and crying as he rolled on the floor to release his cracking bones from the Master’s grasp...
The torment flushed his face above the dream which strayed vaguely back from the school compound to the cement tank in which the devout at the mosque washed their feet in muddy water...
He was swaying up and down, reading the Suras aloud by the light of the cotton wick soaked in olive oil in the earthen saucer lamp in a corner of the mosque, the Koran laid on a bookrest before him, when he felt himself dozing from the fatigue of a long day. Suddenly from the darkness behind him there was a kick in his ribs and Maulvi Shahab-Din stood, caressing his beard and shouting: ‘Beware, son of a swine, and recite the Suras or else your mean, dirty father will tell me that I don’t deserve any new clothes this year because I haven’t taught you to remember the Suras...’ And coming home through the dark, dirty lane where bulls roamed and fakirs prowled, he slipped into the gutter and bruised his elbow and cried to his grandmother. His father was in the lavatory upstairs and terror seeped into the house. The Chaudhri came down suddenly and gave him two slaps for complaining and whining all the time, and he was sulking with the shame of his humiliation, not showing his face to anyone, refusing to eat his food and abusing grandma, and she was saying she would buy him some sweets at a shop which stock English peppermints.
Now the barren waste of a flat plain arose, rank with cactus and brown burnt grass smouldering in the heat of the day, beyond which loomed a fortress, dirtied by time to an ochre, brown cinnabar, except for the crimson cupolas and battlements overgrown with moss. He was wandering alone in it, making for the moat which was full of stones and splinters and knife-edged grass, and as he drifted across it, sulking and forlorn, he was whimpering in a broken, self-pitying voice: ‘Why doesn’t God give me death?’ The fortress became the formal red brick building of the Government High School and beyond were two mounds like pyramids in the desert of Kerbala; a caravan of camels, tied nose to tail, tail to nose, was travelling slowly in the torrid glare of a blue sky whitening with the hot sighs of the burnt earth and with his sobs, as he ran to and fro, looking for the shade of a palm tree, on bare feet blistering with the fire of the bright yellow sand... He was weeping with broken, spluttering cries, the sweat was pouring down his body, and he was tired of his fruitless search for the oasis in the barren expanse of the sun-soaked land. Now he was on the outskirts of the Railway Station, and by a dump of iron girders, wooden beams, the cinders of burnt coal and rubbish, stood a grove of trees surrounding a tank. He stooped and put his mouth to the pool in the forest like an animal and drank off the liquid till his belly was bursting.
As he turned round to look at the jungle it was Gol Bagh where he had gone to play cricket with his friends during the school days... He was alone and it was twilight and he was hurrying home, afraid that his father would beat him if he had happened to come home from the shop to relieve himself and found that Nur hadn’t returned. But not all the alacrity he put into his steps could shorten the long dusty distance to Lohgarh past the fuelwood stalls, past the dirty, greasy cookshops for travellers, compared to which his father’s shop was a luxury palace, past the pedlars who hawked cabbages, turnips, cucumbers and melons as they bent over their three-wheeled, square, box-structured wheelbarrows, to guard against the pilfering Hindu women who refused to move without getting something for nothing after they had made their purchases, past the panting Kashmiri coolies, loaded with sacks of flour on their back, their brows glistening with sweat and feet coated with mud, and past the stream of dead Hindus swathed in red cloth painted with golden stars borne hurriedly along for a late funeral by groups of men chanting, ‘The name of God is Truth...’ The slow chant seemed to become muffled, turning into the whisper of a breeze which was creeping into him with the premonition that one of the ghosts, which according to the Hindus strayed about the earth before rising to heaven, was following him and would pounce on him if he looked back...
Though there were people about, though he had walked far away from the funeral ground enclosed by a high wall where the dead were burnt, he was possessed by the dread, so that he started running fast, heading straight for his father’s shop instead of going home under the lonely shadow of the city wall... In the sullen eyes, staring out of the Chaudhri’s body was a cruel power. ‘Where have you been, rape mother?’ and Nur trembled to see the sweat pouring down his father’s hot, angry face in the light of the smoking kerosene lamp. ‘Where are your shoes, swine? Where have you lost them? Where have you been eating the dust?’ the Chaudhri burst out as he caught hold of a rope and came to hit him. ‘There is no talk, Chaudhriji, forgive him,’ a customer interceded, taking Nur under shelter. Whereupon the Chaudhri swung back to his seat scattering the flies off the foodstuff and cursing: ‘What is the use of having a son! He goes about loafing! As if I was a millionaire and he had nothing to do. It wouldn’t occur to him to come to help me for a few hours. And now he has lost his shoes! Where did you lose your shoes?’ Nur was dumb with terror and began to sob, feeling as if one of the evil ghosts had come and taken possession of his father and would probably follow him home and kill him in the dark of the lane. ‘Why don’t you speak?’ the Chaudhri said and leapt upon him dealing blows till the whole bazaar crowded round to save him from his father’s wrath. The customer who had been shielding him had lifted him and brought him home... He was still weeping and didn’t want to face anyone, not even his benefactor nor his grandmother. He only wanted to sleep... But there was broad daylight out of the windows and the air didn’t seem sinister... What was that?...
He opened his eyes with a start, so suddenly that the pupils under his heavy-eyelids smarted and there was a cracking ache at the back of his head. There stood Gama, a tall black boy who had been a class-fellow of Nur’s since the Infant form till he had been left behind in the fifth class through successive failures, and had given up schooling to become a tonga-driver for Fateh Ali, the contractor.
‘Still asleep, Nur, childling?’ Gama asked. ‘How are you now? I was passing this way. I thought I would look in and see you.’
‘C
ome, do sit down,’ Nur said in a slow voice. ‘I was just dozing, just thinking, half dreaming, curiously enough I was dreaming about our old school.’
‘And I opened the windows and let in the sunshine on that purgatory,’ Gama said with a mischievous light in his eyes. Then sitting down on an edge of the bed, he bent his head and continued: ‘What is there in education, brother? Waste of time.’ He was half chagrined as he had never been able to outlive the reproach of having failed in his education, and half-audacious because of a genuine contempt for learning that he had achieved since he had become a tonga-driver.
‘Education, education, brother,’ said Nur affecting a learned voice, ‘education means wisdom; wisdom means the correlation of the growth of body and mind: the correlation of the growth of body and mind is achieved through knowledge and knowledge is power: if you have enough recommendations, that is.’ After this he smiled a nervous, apologetic smile as if he were afraid that in spite of his faint mockery, Gama might think he was showing off his superior knowledge, for his friend, in spite of the fact that he was earning more than hundreds of MAs, had a feeling of inferiority engendered by the exaggerated respect for degrees that people had, specially as he was employed in a profession which was well known for its low hooliganism. Seeing, however, that Gama was smiling good humouredly, Nur added: ‘You are right, brother. You are right.’ And he heaved a deep breath and changed his side as if to shake off his lethargy. Gama’s visit had surprised him.
Lament on the Death of a Master of Arts… and Other Stories Page 2