by Anita Desai
They walked past shady-looking and evil-smelling shops where herbal medicines and panaceas were being wrapped in paper packets by men who looked too ostentatiously like quacks, past booths in which astrologers and palmists and soothsayers had spread out the exotic tools of their trade – elaborately illustrated scrolls, mynah birds in cages, birth-stones and gems in open boxes – and pavement stalls where scarves and handkerchiefs and underwear were heaped in mounds of starched cotton, or thick glasses and enamel plates balanced on each other in precarious display, and came out into a circle lined with silversmiths and jewellery shops.
Here Deven halted in despair. He knew he could not be near the poet’s residence in this pullulating honeycomb of commerce. Spreading out his arms, he told the boy, ‘We must be lost. This is not the right place. It is no use to go further. I’m not going on.’ His desperation made the blood beat in his ears so that he didn’t hear the frantic ringing of a bicycle bell and was very nearly run over by a cycle rickshaw heavily loaded with parcels heading for the railway station. Its driver, acrobatic as a monkey with a red cap, managed to swerve in time, doing no more than running over Deven’s foot, but his parcels slid off the slippery rexine seat and were scattered over the street. Deven was so dazed by this near-accident that it took him a while to realize he was being accused of having caused it, and abused filthily and loudly. The boy was helping the rickshaw driver collect the parcels but when Deven bent to help, he was shoved aside by a blow from his elbow and forced to move on. Breathlessly they hurried down a narrow lane that was lined with nothing but gutters and seemed to serve as a latrine for the entire neighbourhood. The high green walls that threw it into deep shadows belonged to a hospital of ayurvedic medicine. It was as gloomy as a prison.
Deven broke into a hobble in order to get to the end of it without inhaling the sickly air there. The boy pursued him, panting, ‘Cup of tea? Here’s a teashop – have a cup of tea at least, sahib.’
‘No, no tea,’ Deven hissed at him. ‘I want to get to Nur Sahib’s house by three o’clock. Where is it? Do you know where it is or not?’
‘Very far,’ said the boy, gazing back at him steadily and standing firm outside the tea stall where packets of tea and baskets of eggs dangled in the sooty doorway in invitation. ‘It will be better to have some tea and a rest first.’
‘No rest, no tea,’ Deven bawled at him, bending down to bare his teeth in the boy’s face.
The boy shrugged but his expression did not change. Stepping over a flowing gutter, shoving aside a great humped bull that was quietly munching paper bags from an open dustbin that lay on its side, spilling its contents across the gutter so that it was blocked and had begun to flood, he turned a corner into another lane. On one side of it stretched the high wall of the gloomy green hospital and along the other was a row of small, tightly shut wooden doors set into straight, faded walls. There was no signboard on any of them but the boy went up to one and beat on it with the palms of his hands till, after a long interval, it was opened.
Then Deven knew it was not the familiar nightmare because if it was, the door would have remained shut.
Before he could make out who had opened the door and now stood behind it, he heard an immense voice, cracked and hoarse and thorny, boom from somewhere high above their heads: ‘Who is it that disturbs the sleep of the aged at this hour of the afternoon that is given to rest? It can only be a great fool. Fool, are you a fool?’
And Deven, feeling some taut membrane of reservation tear apart inside him and a surging expansion of joy at hearing the voice and the words that could only belong to that superior being, the poet, sang back, ‘Sir, I am! I am!’
There was an interval and then some mutters of astonishment and horror at this admission. In that quiet pause, pigeons were heard to gurgle and flutter as if in warning from the wings.
‘Shall I let him in?’ called the opener of the door, still hidden behind it. It was a female voice, high-pitched and frayed with irritation.
‘Bring him then,’ moaned the poet in the upper reaches of the building which rose in tiers around a small inner courtyard where a tap dripped, a broken bicycle lay and a cat slept.
‘I have been dreaming of fools,’ the voice above went on muttering. ‘I am surrounded by fools. Fools will follow me, pursue me and find me out and capture me so that in the end I myself will join their company. Bring him up then, bring him up,’ and again Deven felt another warm, moist tide of jubilation rise and increase inside him at being recognized, named and invited into the presence of a man so clearly a hero. On tiptoe, trembling a little, he stepped over the high threshold into the house, then stopped, remembering the boy who had brought him here and the need to dismiss him. Surely he ought to be rewarded for his part in what had turned out to be a gloriously successful pursuit. His face lit to a radiance, he smiled at the boy and thrust the folded newspaper wrapping into his hands with benign absent-mindedness, then turned back into the house and, rejoicing, obeyed the wave of the henna-painted hand from behind the door and began to run up flight after flight of wooden stairs from which dust rose at every step.
It was to him as if God had leaned over a cloud and called for him to come up, and angels might have been drawing him up these ancient splintered stairs to meet the deity: so jubilantly, so timorously, so gratefully did he rise. This, surely, was the summons for which he had been waiting all these empty years, only he had not known it would assume this form. In his mortal myopia and stupidity, he had expected it to come from Sarla when he married her, or from the head of the department at his college who alone could promote and demote and alter his situation in life, or even from Murad who, after all, lived in the metropolis and edited a magazine. The poetry he had read and memorized lay beneath all these visible tips of his submerged existence, and he had thought of it more as a source of comfort and consolation than as a promise of salvation. He had never conceived of a summons expressed in a voice so leonine, splendid and commanding, a voice that could grasp him, as it were, by the roots of his hair and haul him up from the level on which he existed – mean, disordered and hopeless – into another, higher sphere. Another realm it would surely be if his god dwelt there, the domain of poetry, beauty and illumination. He mounted the stairs as if sloughing off and casting away the meanness and dross of his past existence and steadily approaching a new and wondrously illuminated era.
Although there were no angels singing ‘Hallelujah! Hallelujah!’ in accompaniment, the pigeons cooed loudly with agitation and the old man could be heard muttering incredulously, ‘Fool, says he’s a fool – hah!’ and Deven took that as sufficient invitation to enter.
The room in which the poet lay resting, like a great bolster laid on a flat low wooden divan, was in semi-darkness. Not only were the bamboo screens hanging in every doorway let down to keep out the sun that beat upon the top floor of the building most fiercely, but the walls were lined with dark green tiles that added to the shadowy gloom. The few pieces of furniture – a single armchair with elongated arms that seemed designed for some earlier, larger species of man, a small gate-legged table piled with very shabby books, a revolving bookcase with more of them, several solid cushions and bolsters cast upon the cotton mats on the floor, were like objects carved out of this murkiness, heavy and palpable with gloom.
In the midst of all the shadows, the poet’s figure was in startling contrast, being entirely dressed in white. His white beard was splayed across his chest and his long white fingers clasped across it. He did not move and appeared to be a marble form. His body had the density, the compactness of stone. It was large and heavy not on account of obesity or weight, but on account of age and experience. The emptying out and wasting of age had not yet begun its process. He was still at a moment of completion, quite whole. This gave him the power and the dignity to be able to say to the intruding stranger, in a murmur, ‘Who gave you permission to disturb me?’
‘Sir,’ croaked Deven, fumbling in his shirt pocket for Murad’s lett
er, ‘I have a letter here –’
‘Couldn’t it wait?’ sighed the old man in a fading voice. Was he drifting back into sleep? There was an age, after all, when the difference between sleep and waking became very faint and could be crossed at ease, continually.
‘Sir, I have come to Delhi only for one day. I must return to my college in Mirpore,’ Deven stammered. ‘I have a letter here from Murad Beg – editor of Awaaz –’
‘Can’t you see, it is too dark for me to read? I am resting. I don’t know where my spectacles are. Read it to me. Now that you have ruined my sleep you might as well read it to me.’
Deven unfolded the letter, trying to hush the loud crackling made by the sheets of paper, and then tried to read audibly and smoothly Murad’s floridly written letter of introduction. It flustered him to have to read the flattering names Murad had called him, just as the wheedling, begging tone of his request for an interview made him uncomfortable. A poet of such godlike magnitude ought to have been presented with a prayer or a petition but not with flattery or bribes.
It made the old man on the bed curl up his lips and make a spitting sound through his beard. He unclasped his thin fine fingers with their pale, fish-like skin and fish-like spattering of the brown freckles of age, and waved them dismissively. ‘That joker – he should paint his face, wear a false nose, and perform in a travelling circus,’ he said derisively. ‘Are you a part of his circus?’
‘No, no, sir,’ Deven protested, still standing stooped over the letter in his hand, not quite read to the end. ‘I sometimes – he sometimes asks me to contribute to his magazine. He has asked me to interview you for the special issue on Urdu poetry. It is a great honour for me, sir, a great privilege. I mean, if you allow me –’ he added quickly, looking anxious. Should he have told the poet about the monograph he had written on him and that still awaited publication? Or would the poet consider that presumptuous rather than flattering? He hesitated.
The house was very still, miraculously silent. The tall hospital walls cut it off from the hubbub of the bazaar, Deven supposed. All he could hear were the pigeons complaining to and consoling each other up on the dusty ledges of the high skylights, and the laboured sound of the poet’s breath, snarled in his throat with some elderly phlegm.
‘Urdu poetry?’ he finally sighed, turning a little to one side, towards Deven although not actually addressing himself to a person, merely to a direction, it seemed. ‘How can there be Urdu poetry when there is no Urdu language left? It is dead, finished. The defeat of the Moghuls by the British threw a noose over its head, and the defeat of the British by the Hindi-wallahs tightened it. So now you see its corpse lying here, waiting to be buried.’ He tapped his chest with one finger.
‘No, sir, please don’t talk like that,’ Deven said eagerly, perspiration breaking out on his upper lip and making it glisten. ‘We will never allow that to happen. That is why Murad is publishing his journal. And the printing press where it is published is for printing Urdu books, sir. They are getting large orders even today. And my college – it is only a small college, a private college outside Delhi – but it has a department of Urdu –’
‘Do you teach there?’ A wrinkled eyelid moved, like a turtle’s, and a small, quick eye peered out at Deven as if at a tasty fly.
Deven shrank back in apology. ‘No, sir, I teach in – in the Hindi department. I took my degree in Hindi because –’
But the poet was not listening. He was laughing and spitting as he laughed because he did it so rustily and unwillingly. Phlegm flew. ‘You see,’ he croaked, ‘what did I tell you? Those Congress-wallahs have set up Hindi on top as our ruler. You are its slave. Perhaps a spy even if you don’t know it, sent to the universities to destroy whatever remains of Urdu, hunt it out and kill it. And you tell me it is for an Urdu magazine you wish to interview me. If so, why are you teaching Hindi?’ he suddenly roared, fixing Deven with that small, turtle-lidded eye that had now become lethal, a bullet.
‘I studied Urdu, sir, as a boy, in Lucknow. My father, he was a schoolteacher, a scholar, and a lover of Urdu poetry. He taught me the language. But he died. He died and my mother brought me to Delhi to live with her relations here. I was sent to the nearest school, a Hindi-medium school, sir,’ Deven stumbled through the explanation. ‘I took my degree in Hindi, sir, and now I am temporary lecturer in Lala Ram Lal College at Mirpore. It is my living, sir. You see I am a married man, a family man. But I still remember my lessons in Urdu, how my father taught me, how he used to read poetry to me. If it were not for the need to earn a living, I would – I would –’ Should he tell him his aspirations, scribbled down on pieces of paper and hidden between the leaves of his books?
‘Oh, earning a living?’ mocked the old man as Deven struggled visibly with his diffidence. ‘Earning a living comes first, does it? Why not trade in rice and oil if it is a living you want to earn?’
Crushed, Deven’s shoulders sagged. ‘I am – only a teacher, sir,’ he murmured, ‘and must teach to support my family. But poetry – Urdu – these are – one needs, I need to serve them to show my appreciation. I cannot serve them as you do –’
‘You don’t look fit to serve anyone, let alone the muse of Urdu,’ the old man retorted, his voice gaining strength from indignation. Or perhaps he was wider awake now; he sounded upright even if he was still reclining. ‘Sit down,’ he commanded. ‘There, on that stool. Bring it closer to me first. Close. Here, at my side. Now sit. It seems you have been sent here to torment me, to show me to what depths Urdu has fallen. All right then, show me, let me know the worst.’ He rolled out the syllables, in a lapidarian voice, as if he were inscribing an epitaph. ‘I am prepared for suffering. Through suffering, I shall atone for my sins.’ He groaned. ‘Many, many sins,’ and shifted on the wooden bed as if in pain.
Deven, to his astonishment, heard himself repeat the poet’s familiar words as he had heard his father recite them to him when he had sat beside him on the mat in the corner of the veranda of the old house. ‘Through suffering I shall atone for my sins.’ He repeated it twice, and then, as if unwinding a kite’s thread from the spool that his memory still held, he went on reciting that great poem of Nur’s that his father had loved to recite and that he still read, ceremoniously, whenever he felt sad or nostalgic and thought of his father and his early childhood and all that he had lost. It rose above him into that upper realm occupied by poetry and hovered over their heads, an airborne kite.
‘Many sins, and much suffering; such is the pattern Fate has traced on my tablet, with blood….’
His voice grew steadier as he found his memory not failing him but flooding in confidently and carrying him along on its strong current. He could almost feel the smoothness of his father’s reed pens which he played with while he listened, and smell the somewhat musty, but human and comforting, odour of his father’s black cotton coat with the missing buttons and the torn pockets, thickly darned at the corners. A tender, almost feminine lilt entered his voice with those memories and the poet listened engrossed, now and then joining in with his own cracked voice as if he had forgotten the lines and was happy to be reminded.
‘My body no more than a reed pen cut by the sword’s tip,
Useless and dry till dipped in the ink of life’s blood.’
He broke off, chuckling. ‘Your pronunciation is good. Very clean, chaste. Do you remember more?’ and Deven, swaying upon the stool, recited on and on in a voice that grew increasingly sing-song. As he continued, he began to be overcome by the curious sensation that he was his own mother, rocking back and forth on her heels as she half-sang, half-recited a story in the night, and that the white bolster-like figure on the bed beside him was a child, his child, whom he was lulling to sleep. He understood completely, in these minutes, how it must feel to be a mother, a woman. He had not known before such intimacy, such intense closeness as existed in that dark and shaded room where his voice merged with those of the pigeons to soothe the listening, lulled figure before him.
He was also aware, with the welling up of a drop of sadness that now rose and trickled through him, moistly, that this moment that contained such perfection of feeling, unblemished and immaculate, could not last, must break and disperse.
When the mat in the doorway was lifted aside by a boy in striped pyjamas and a vest bringing in a tumbler of tea, that miraculous intimacy came to an abrupt end. It was not to be recovered. Nur angrily sent the boy away again to fetch tea for the guest but other people began to come in who must have been in the building all that time, asleep or biding their time, and took the bringing in of tea as a signal to come swarming up the stairs, into the room, filling it with noise. Deven looked across at the figure on the bed, helplessly, regretting that he had not even discussed the proposed interview with him. Now others demanded his attention while someone thrust a metal tumbler of scalding tea into Deven’s hand. He nearly dropped it in agony, then recovered himself and clutched it with blistering fingertips while waiting for an opportunity to have another word with Nur.
There seemed little chance of that since the servant boy was demanding to know what Nur wanted for his dinner tonight, whether it was to be prepared at home or ordered from the bazaar; a child – too young to be his son, Deven thought, and wondered if it could be a grandchild – wandered around, whining petulantly for some money but when he was given it, flung it upon the floor and cried; then there were some young girls who came to pick up the crying child and carry him off, and were evidently surprised to find the room full of men for they hastily covered their heads with their veils and hurried away, grumbling at the invasion; also several loutish young men who stated they had been waiting downstairs to be summoned, had been playing cards at which all claimed to have lost money and demanded their host make up to them for their losses since he was responsible for them. Deven was scandalized by their audacity but the poet did not mind at all. Laughing, he reprimanded them for their dissolute habits and threatened them with expulsion from his home which was, he said, a temple of domesticity as they could see.