In Custody

by Anita Desai

  ‘Since when has Nur become the resident of such a temple?’ challenged one of the men, pock-marked and not so young. ‘We met in a temple of another sort. Have you forgotten?’

  Deven flushed; it was not possible to misunderstand their innuendoes, they grew more blatant and ribald by the minute. It was the kind of talk Deven heard plenty of in and around the college, and had had much of when he had himself been a student, but he was not used to hearing it in the presence of the aged whom he had been brought up to consider very near sacred. The frequent use of the word temple made it still more blasphemous.

  When he could stand it no longer, he got up to go. This movement attracted Nur’s attention and he raised his hand to stop the chatter and asked Deven to help him out on to the terrace, ‘to escape from these – these devils from the gambling dens and drinking houses of my past’. Deven came forward eagerly to support him but the poet, after placing his hand on Deven’s shoulder, grew angry when it became clear that Deven did not know the procedure, the routine, and left behind such essential aids to his comfort as a footstool and a favourite bolster, so that the servant boy had to be sent for after all and Deven made to feel inadequate. When the boy appeared, more sullen than before, Deven tried to help him gather all the necessary cushions and bolsters to carry out to the terrace but found himself either ignored or rudely pushed out of the way. Was he wanted or not? he wondered.

  Then his bewilderment and resentment were sent spinning with a few hard words from the poet that he brought out of the depths of his being as if they were the bile that had collected there. ‘Wait till you are my age,’ he spat, ‘you – you boy without hair. Wait till you experience the afflictions I know. I sit upon them daily – not my crown but my throne of thorns. That is what piles are, my friend – oh, the pain, the suffering –’ he nearly wept, standing there in the middle of the room, wringing his hands while he waited to be led out.

  Deven hung his head, then lowered himself on to his knees beside the bed, running his fingers over the poet’s slippers and trying not to hear the poet’s curses, wondering what he could pick up and offer.

  When he got up from his knees, he saw the servant boy had led Nur out, the mat in the doorway was rolled up and the afternoon light stood there as solid as a pane of glittering glass. He hurried out after them to find the poet could proceed no further – a flock of pigeons had swooped down out of the coppery sky and blocked his way with their hurtling wings and violently struggling bodies. He stood there in the centre of their frenzy – slate, chocolate and snow – and the birds not only seethed around him but perched and teetered on his bald head and hands, furiously scrabbling with their hooked claws, raw and pink, and their gluttonous beaks as if they would tear the flesh from his bones and devour it if he had nothing else to give them. Their greed was monstrous, they coated him with their gluttony.

  Deven stumbled forward to rescue him, but the poet did not want to be rescued. He merely cried out weakly to the servant boy to give them grain and Deven was relieved to see that they unfastened their hooks from his flesh and swarmed after the boy and his tin can of grain that he flung through the air and scattered over the terrace for them.

  Deven waited till they had removed themselves to a distance, then hurried to Nur’s side and asked solicitously, ‘Sir, have they hurt you?’

  The poet stood still for so long, still slightly trembling from the assault, that Deven thought he was staring at the spectacle of the pigeons’ frenzied feasting, but after a while he turned his head slowly towards Deven and gave him a strange look from his cataract-curtained eyes. ‘Who would have thought,’ he muttered, dry-lipped, ‘that one day the bird, symbol of flight and song, would cease to be a poet’s inspiration and become a threat?’

  The words were spoken so slowly and with such precision that Deven could see them being etched in elegant hieroglyphs upon the copperplate of the Delhi sky. He stood open-mouthed, wondering how to console the poet for the inexorable procession of time, but when he spoke all he stuttered was, ‘Sir, will you please let me interview you for Murad’s journal?’ and then stood aghast at his own clumsiness.

  The old man made no answer however. He suddenly launched himself into one of those curious, bandy-legged, stiff-jointed but swift and precipitous passages that the old are capable of on occasion and, arriving at the edge of the couch that had already been prepared for him, he lowered himself and sat stroking his knees and looking as if he were seriously thinking of an answer. But before he could actually give one, an ancient gnome of a man with wild white hair tied up in a cotton scarf hobbled across the terrace and came chuckling towards him. The poet saw him and let out a groan of protest but the old man only giggled and laid him down on the couch with a gentle push, then rolled up his sleeves and began to massage him, pummelling and pounding him and making him gasp and choke. All the time the gnome laughed and sang snatches of song and kept up such a barrage of talk that Deven could do nothing but stand silently to one side, waiting for this act in the poet’s routine to come to an end. The pigeons seemed to have accepted the end of theirs and were busily settling on ledges, in wooden crates, baskets and on bamboo poles, tucking their feet under their wings and their beaks into their feathers, as if withdrawing their weapons in truce, shifting and grumbling till darkness drew a cover across them and put them out for the night. Deven, listening, gathered that the gnome was a professional masseur Nur had known in his more athletic years, who still served a large community of wrestlers and athletes whom Nur apparently knew for they gossiped about them, the matches they had won or lost, their fortunes and physiques. In between his cries of pain and pleasure, Nur said enough to make it clear to the incredulous Deven that he was, or at any rate had been, a connoisseur of the sport and kept very much in touch with what went on in the akhadas on the banks of the Jumna.

  ‘But Bhim Singh, the greatest of them all, he is finished, his career is over,’ pronounced the gnome, sitting back on his heels and rolling down his sleeves to show that the session was over.

  ‘He can never be finished,’ Nur protested. ‘I’ve felt his muscles – like rocks, like boulders.’

  ‘Yes, but the Bombay cinema has finished what even a steamroller could not. They have given him a contract to act in a film about a champion, and he has signed, the fool,’ cried the gnome, picking up his bag of bottles and tins of oils and lotions and hobbling away while Nur continued to lament, ‘The fool, the fool …’

  Immediately the servant boy appeared as if summoned by name and helped him rise from the low bed, then led him back into the house for a bath. It seemed the poet led a life as busy as that of a whole hospital. Wondering if there was any point in waiting longer, Deven sank on to a rug spread out on the terrace in sheer despair. No one paid him any attention although more and more people began to come out of the room and up the stairs and spread out on the terrace and filled the space there as if it were a public park or a promenade to which they were accustomed to repair at this hour when the white-hot sky became blotched with the city’s soot and faded to grey and then to mauve and finally to an uneasy, disturbed darkness. It could not become wholly dark because then the shops and cinema houses and restaurants and streets of the bazaar below lit up for the night and the sky was tinged sporadically red and orange and yellow and violet, like an old hag at a fair crazily dancing a dance of seven veils. The noises of the street and its traffic intensified as well and through the steady rumble coiled and uncoiled the long steely loops of song blaring out of a cinema house at the end of the street. The rooftop did not really raise one above the din of the streets; it was as if they were inside a balloon, floating above but remaining enclosed.

  Deven sat cross-legged upon the mat, crushed by an excess of noise, light and people, trying to be unobtrusive himself and succeeding with no effort at all. He was uneasy about the lateness of the hour and the atmosphere of perpetual wakefulness, yet he felt reluctant to leave without seeing Nur once again and making one more sincere and positiv
e effort to arrange the interview. He could not waste the day and return to Mirpore without having accomplished even so much; nor could he face Murad again without showing himself capable of having made such an attempt. Yet his hopes of a dialogue about poetry in the centre of all this garishness began to seem, even to him, quite grotesque.

  Nur did eventually reappear, freshly bathed and looking truly poet-like in fresh, starched white muslin clothes, loose and flowing and free, but he was greeted with a jubilant shout of welcome, half-mocking and half-admiring, and his time and attention were entirely monopolized by his evening visitors, all of them far more at ease, familiar and capable of engaging his attention than Deven was. He remained hanging upon the fringe, looking hungry and desolate, while others reached out for glasses and drink, toasted each other, quoted poetry, burst into song and engaged in ribald repartee. It was clear to Deven that these louts, these lafangas of the bazaar world – shopkeepers, clerks, bookies and unemployed parasites – lived out the fantasy of being poets, artists and bohemians here on Nur’s terrace, in Nur’s company. Some might have written lyrics of the kind that blared endlessly from the cinema, or jingles for the radio; some might have acted small roles in a local theatre during a festival. Certainly they spoke as if they belonged to a world of hectic activity on the fringes of art and creativity. This did not surprise Deven; it was exactly the kind of circle he had been familiar with as a student, but what was astonishing was that the great poet Nur should be in the centre of it, like a serene white tika on the forehead of a madman. It was not where Deven had expected to find him. He had pictured him living either surrounded by elderly, sage and dignified litterateurs or else entirely alone, in divine isolation. What were these clowns and jokers and jugglers doing around him, or he with them?

  Could he, did he, approve of it all? Deven wondered. It was impossible to tell, for the old man either lay against the bolsters on the couch, groaning, or sat up to drink from a glass held out to him by the servant boy, then doubled over, his head bent almost as low as his knees, and groaned again. Deven thought he must be ill, or in pain, or grievously tired, yet he kept holding out his glass to be refilled when it was empty, and later, when trays of food were brought up by several young men in filthy pyjamas, tattered vests and with waiters’ napkins slung over their shoulders, he became quite alert and bright-eyed, demanded to inspect all the dishes before they were passed around and then ate what seemed to Deven unwise quantities of very rich and greasy dishes of biryani, and highly spiced kebabs, korma, kofta and dal.

  Nur eating was not at all a dignified or impressive sight: he plunged his hands into the food, lowered his face into it, lifted handfuls to his mouth from where it dropped or leaked on to his lap. The small kneeling boy was kept busy with a towel and several napkins but did not seem to be succeeding at all in keeping him sightly. Deven tried to avert his face and concentrate on the plate of food which someone had thrust roughly at him and which he had gratefully accepted, realizing that he had not had anything since tea that morning at the bus terminal and was hungry almost to the point of tears. While he ate, he was aware that it was entirely the wrong sort of food for his rather delicate digestive system and that he would regret it all within a few hours, but Nur suddenly lifted his head, with grains of rice and drops of gravy sticking to various portions of it, and called across to him, ‘How do you like our Jama Masjid cooking, my friend? Kings and poets alike have sampled it. Is it anything like what you get in your college hostel?’ and Deven was so taken aback and so flattered that he had been remembered and not only he himself but his humble origins as well, that he nodded and ate with reckless rapidity to show how much he appreciated the favour.

  But the poet’s attention had already wandered – there were so many others to attract it, more loud and brazen than Deven could be even in his most heated dreams. It was amazing how many people wanted to recite their verse to him rather than listen to him recite his, Deven noted bitterly, while others seemed to believe that he needed a clown to entertain him and joked and gestured with crude abandon. Then there were those who argued heatedly and so fluently as to suggest they had been through these debates many times before and Nur had always played the arbitrator. No one would have thought such an old and frail man would have so much energy to expend on so many others and their preoccupations and demands, yet now the energy seemed to be there although Deven would never have believed it earlier when the old man lay on the bed in the darkened room, half-asleep and barely able to respond.

  Perhaps the rooftop of his house caught some of the electricity that seemed to rise from the city, its sparks flying from the wildly circling and flashing neon signs that lit up the sky, its cacophonous noises from the traffic in the streets, the shops in the bazaar and the cinema soundtrack, now reaching its deafening climax in which songs, screams, gunshots, armoured tanks, galloping horses and hysterical laughter and weeping all joined together in an incredible chorus. It seemed to excite him, made him raise his voice above it and, in a way, even blend with it.

  Deven sat gloomily with his back against the parapet, wondering how, out of all this hubbub, the poet drew the threads and wove his poetry or philosophy. Yet, when he paid attention to his talk, he discovered that it was, after all, about his poetry.

  ‘Cowards – babies,’ he was taunting a group of young men who stood around unsteadily, glasses tilting and dribbling in their hands. ‘You recite verses as if they were nursery rhymes your mother had composed. I tell you, we must get over this rolling of Urdu verses into little sugar pills for babies to suck. We need the roar of lions, or the boom of cannon, so that we can march upon these Hindi-wallahs and make them run. Let them see the power of Urdu,’ he thundered. ‘They think it is chained and tamed in the dusty yards of those cemeteries that they call universities, but can’t we show them that it can still let out a roar or a boom?’

  Here a young man with yellow teeth and red eyes made a rude remark. Those who heard it, laughed. Nur seemed not to object but to agree. ‘Yes, all right, that will also be a kind of assault – on their noses anyway. Yes, let Urdu issue from any orifice as long as it drives them away. But make its presence felt,’ he thundered, thumping down his glass on his knee so that the liquor flew from it.

  ‘Nur Sahib,’ responded a tall man who swayed on his feet as if only tenuously tethered to the roof, ‘Nur Sahib, I am telling you the time for poetry is over. To feed the Hindi-wallahs with Urdu poetry is like feeding cows with – hunks of red meat. Turn to journalism instead, Nur Sahib. Reach out to the people directly. We have a message for them. Tell them in plain speech. Use your powers for the purpose of – attack and vengeance!’

  ‘Wah, wah, very fine, very fine,’ mocked a young man sitting cross-legged on a mat. ‘He calls for attack thirty years after his claws have been extracted and his teeth filed. You are laughable, my friend, laughable. How do you expect to attack? With what weapons – with metaphor and alliteration? If you want arms, you had better cross the border and go find them in Pakistan. Here we live as hijras, as eunuchs.’

  Deven watched Nur’s face with curiosity. He could make nothing out of that tortured, scowling expression behind the ruffled beard. Turning his head to one side pettishly, he growled at the servant boy, ‘More biryani,’ and it seemed to Deven that the conversation had taken a turn that displeased the old man and that he did not wish to continue.

  But after he had downed another helping of biryani and drunk another glass of country liquor, Nur was once again taking vigorous part in the conversation. It was obviously one that was repeated night after night, everyone spoke as if on cue, fluently, and there was a lack of spontaneity, a staleness. There was the India camp and the Pakistan camp, the pure-Persian camp and the demotic-Hindustani camp. They quarrelled and mocked and taunted and lost their tempers, but as if acting assigned roles. There was no evidence of anyone persecuting anyone else or of winning anyone over to his side through argument or persuasion. The dialogue was as stale as the rice and gravy l
ying on tin trays all over the terrace. Nur sat hunched, listening, while he picked his teeth and occasionally spat into the tin spittoon under the divan. Then, raising his shaggy head so that it looked severe and granolithic, he interrupted the babble to say, ‘Wrong, wrong, for thirty years you have been wrong. It is not a matter of Pakistan and Hindustan, of Hindi and Urdu. It is not even a matter of history. It is time you should be speaking of but cannot – the concept of time is too vast for you, I can see that, and yet it is all we really know about in our hearts,’ he pressed his hand to his chest and there was comparative silence now for him to speak into. In that silence, Deven’s heart gave a series of knocks. It gave him a sense of victory and triumph that Nur had so effectively stopped the raucous babble around him and placed the whole argument in perspective. That, he saw, was the glory of poets – that they could distance events and emotions, place them where perspective made it possible to view things clearly and calmly. He realized that he loved poetry not because it made things immediate but because it removed them to a position where they became bearable. That was what Nur’s verse did – placed frightening and inexplicable experiences like time and death at a point where they could be seen and studied, in safety. His joy at this recognition made his heart beat a tattoo inside his chest so that it was a minute or two before he could calm himself and listen to Nur again. Looking up, he saw to his alarm Nur pointing at him as if he had all along been aware of him in that dark corner. ‘He has come to speak for me,’ Nur said. ‘Through his throat, my words will flow. Listen and tell me if my poetry deserves to live, or if it should give way to – that fodder chewed by peasants, Hindi?’ he spat at the man who had disparaged his vocation.

  Deven responded with such an expression of terror that those who noticed laughed. He felt as if Nur had noticed his childish moment of satisfaction and decided maliciously to wreck it. All his joy and the regard and the honour he had accorded Nur dispersed as if over the ledge into the night. Nur was inviting him to join the fray, allowing the sublime concept of time to dwindle into the mere politics of language again. He could not possibly have opened his mouth or uttered a word. He knew he ought not to have stayed, listening to this kind of talk, he a Hindu and a teacher of Hindi. He had always kept away from the political angle of languages. He began to sweat with fear.