by Anita Desai
‘What is the matter?’ Nur mocked, glaring at him with small bloodshot eyes. Why did he choose to pick on Deven, the only one who had remained silent and not expressed any opinion at all? ‘Forgotten your Urdu? Forgotten my verse? Perhaps it is better if you go back to your college and teach your students the stories of Prem Chand, the poems of Pant and Nirala. Safe, simple Hindi language, safe comfortable ideas of cow worship and caste and the romance of Krishna. That is your subject, isn’t it, professor?’ He threw back his head and cackled with laughter but the rest fell silent. They all stopped talking and arguing and laughing and turned to look at Deven with a curiosity they had not felt before.
‘I am no poet, only a teacher,’ Deven mumbled, but no one heard.
Then, unexpectedly, he was saved by the tall man who would not sit but teetered and swayed above them, his head framed by a neon sign that flashed ‘Atlas Bicycles, Nation’s Favourite’ in letters of acid green. ‘Have you heard Sri Gobind’s latest poem cycle?’ he bawled. ‘They are saying in the bazaar that it will win the Sahitya Akademi award for Hindi this year. For Urdu we can of course expect the same verdict as usual: “No book was judged worthy of the award this year.” Why such treatment for Urdu, my friends? Because Urdu is supposed to have died, in 1947. What you see in the universities – in some of the universities, a few of them only – is its ghost, wrapped in a shroud. But Hindi – oh Hindi is a field of greens, all flourishing, and this is its flower,’ he cried, and throwing back his head, recited fulsomely:
‘Sun, moon, stars,
sky, Planets, clouds, comets, I,
God made them all as he made me,
A star too I must be.’
While the others laughed, Nur gave him a bloodshot look, saying, ‘Do you think they have nothing better to recite in the bazaars of Delhi? I tell you there are better things to be heard in the streets of my Delhi. Even the hit song from Sholay is better. And wait till you hear my Chunna sing it. Call that boy,’ he suddenly ordered the servant boy who sat on his heels, dozing. ‘Bring him to me,’ he shouted, giving the boy a shove that sent him toppling.
‘He is sleeping,’ the boy protested indignantly.
‘What he is doing is immaterial. It is what he will grow up to do that I am interested in. The son of a poet must grow up to be a singer of songs. Go tell his mother to wake him and bring him here – I want him to sing for my friends. Friends, I want you to listen to a child sing a film song rather than listen to – to these – these –’ he waved his hand helplessly at the gathering around him.
‘No, Nur Sahib, how can you say that? Are you angry with me for reciting Sri Gobind’s immortal verse? All right, I will give it up – I will throw it away with all these dirty dishes,’ said the tall man, casually kicking out at a heap of tin trays so that they went slithering across the terrace, scattering rice, gravy and tin spoons as they went.
Someone lifted his glass high over his head, saying, ‘Yes, smash it all up, smash it,’ and dropped the glass with a crash. Another got to his feet and wove his way to where Nur sat, shouting, ‘Nur Sahib, I will sing for you. Hear me sing the song I wrote for Azadi – only the damned director stole it and used it without paying me a paisa,’ and instead of singing he began to cry with a great heaving of shoulders and rubbing of eyes. Laughing, his companions crowded around him and patted him violently on the back, calling, ‘Here, give him a paisa, poor fellow,’ and, ‘Here, Bobby, here’s twenty paise for your song. Now sing.’ ‘Yes, sing,’ they all bellowed.
Deven, who was watching with his back tightly pressed into the wall as if he hoped it would give way and allow him to escape, saw the crowd before him part and Nur emerge through a crack and go stumbling away without anyone’s noticing. ‘That damned, stupid, disobedient –’ he was muttering to himself. ‘I’ll go myself and fetch – fetch –’
The others were still laughing and thumping Bobby and did not seem to notice that he was no longer in their midst. Perhaps this was his usual manner, and time, of departure. After watching for a moment or two to see what direction the old man was taking, Deven started to follow him, in an instinctive choice of the poet’s company, however terrifying, rather than that of the rabble. As he lifted the bamboo mat in the lighted doorway and saw Nur slipping out of the other door, he heard their voices behind him:
‘If you won’t sing your song, you’ll have to listen to Gobind-ji’s:
“Butter, milk, curds, ghee,
Sweets, drinks, food for me –
God made them all and God made me,
Butterballs all, butterball me.”’
Dropping the mat in place, Deven hurried through the empty room, wondering how the old, helpless man could have moved with such speed. If only he could catch up with him, he might have a word with him about his poetry after all, and the interview. Desperately he called out his name: ‘Nur Sahib!’ and ran out on to the veranda to search for him.
Deven never quite believed what happened next. He was so confused and shattered by it that he did not know what it was that shattered him, just as the victim of an accident sees and hears the pane of glass smash or sheet of metal buckle but cannot tell what did it – rock, bullet or vehicle. The truth was that he did not really want ever to think back to that scene. If his mind wandered inadvertently towards it, it immediately sensed disaster and veered away into safer regions.
All he was willing to admit, even to himself, was that it was the sound of a child crying that led him along the veranda and down the stairs to a lower floor. Doors opened on to the unlit verandas all around the silent well of the courtyard where one bare electric bulb burned. From some of the doorways, light fell through the curtains or bamboo mats that hung there. Others were solidly, impassively dark. Some rustled with furtive life, concealed by darkness. Others seemed dead, or asleep, or empty. Deven tiptoed past them, peering in through his spectacles, his heart thumping against his ribs like a fish in a trap. The child wailed and wailed in one of the rooms. Then a woman began to scream, rapidly and hysterically. There was a sound of protest, possibly from Nur – certainly in an aged and weak strain. The woman’s voice rose sharply. It was cut short by a howl so appalling that Deven raced forwards and flung open a closed door, certain he would find the poet in a pool of blood, a dagger through his heart, his son weeping beside the corpse.
He fell with a cry upon the body that lay upon the floor. It lay face downwards, arms and legs spreadeagled across the thick mattress unrolled upon the terrazzo floor. Then there was another howl but it did not come from the prostrate body, it came from the figure that stood over it, a small shaking creature in white, draped in a silver shawl from which ringlets of gleaming black hair escaped and danced upon a forehead as white as chalk, made still paler by contrast with the kohl-ringed eyes and the blood-red mouth. Deven sat back on his knees, open-mouthed with terror at this apparition of fury and vengeance.
‘Get up!’ she screamed. ‘Get up! Go and have Ali clean you. How can you wallow in such filth, such muck? See what you have done to my room, in my room – see!’
‘No, no,’ begged Deven, but his voice was only a whisper as he reached out trembling fingers to stroke the great back of his fallen hero, trying to find life.
The figure on the mattress gave a heave and then began to quiver with sobs that sounded like small, squelching giggles. It was crying; it was alive. ‘It was a pain,’ he wept, ‘a pain in my stomach, janum – I swear – I am ill, these ulcers of mine –’
‘Ulcers? Then why did you drink? Why do you nightly have that rabble up there in your room, drinking? It isn’t ulcers that has made you vomit on my floor, it is drink.’ She shook with outrage, a fierce and infuriated apparition in white and silver. Bending, she half-lifted the fallen figure from the mattress in an effort to thrust it out of her offended sight, but Deven clasped his arms around the fallen poet, trying to achieve an exit more gently, less violently, whereupon she turned round and screamed, ‘If you want to be his servant, then you clean it up. Lis
ten to me, will you? Leave that – that poor beast on the floor and go and clean it up, I tell you.’
Releasing the poet, Deven looked up at her, helplessly.
‘What is the matter?’ she cried. ‘Aren’t you willing to do that for your – your hero? All of you who come to see him and lead him on with your hero-worship, do you care for him or for the food and drink with which he pays you to come –’
‘What are you saying?’ Deven hissed in horror at her perverse interpretation of the soirée upstairs. ‘We come to pay our respects, out of regard for a – a great man, a poet –’
‘How? How?’ she hissed back at him, and her scarlet lips were speckled with spit, he saw. ‘He was a poet, a scholar – but is he now? Look at him!’ She pointed dramatically at Nur who was huddled, whimpering, on the mattress, holding his knees to his chest and rocking from side to side in agony. ‘Do you call that a poet, or even a man? All of you – you followers of his – you have reduced him to that, making him eat and drink like some animal, like a pig, laughing at your jokes, singing your crude songs, when he should be at work, or resting to prepare himself for work –’
Deven dropped his eyes and his head sank in admission of this indubitable truth. His submission seemed to enrage her and throw her into another paroxysm. Marching across the room to a shelf where books and papers were stacked, she began to fling them at him, saying, ‘See what you’ve done to him? See what he’s done in my room? Am I to stand for this in my room, in my house? Did he marry me to make me live in a pigsty with him? Am I to live like a pig with all the rest of you?’ With each question she flung another handful of papers at Deven and when he was deep in them, turning his head from side to side to avoid their impact, growing giddy and muddled and frantic as more and more descended on him, she screamed, ‘Don’t you see? It is there!’ and pointed at a pool of yellow vomit in a corner of the room. He stared across it and only then noticed the crying child – the little fat boy who had thrown down the coins the poet had given him, now sitting against the wall with his legs stretched out before him and his fists thrust into his eyes, howling with sleepiness and terror. Following the direction of Deven’s eyes, she too stared at the child, then swooped down upon him and picked him up in a fierce embrace. ‘See what my child has to witness – the depths to which his father has been brought by you – you –’
‘No, no,’ Deven protested, and to remove any such signs of the poet’s degradation, he grabbed some handfuls of paper she had flung at him and, crawling forwards to the tell-tale stain, began to scrub the floor with them, made desperate in his movements by the sobbing of the terrified child and the retching of the poet at the other end of the room as well as the outrage that the woman exhaled as though she were a fire-eater in the middle of a performance.
‘Take it away from here,’ she commanded, standing by the bookshelf and holding the child as if out of the swill. ‘Go fetch water. Wash the floor. I want it washed and polished. I will have my room clean, my house clean. D’you hear? D’you think I entered this house to keep company with swine?’
‘No, janum, no,’ wept the poet, in between retching sounds that were tearing him to pieces. ‘I tell you – I had this pain here – my ulcers –’
‘Don’t talk to me!’ her voice rose hysterically. ‘Don’t talk to me about ulcers. It was drink, it was your party, your friends, your horrible, inferior life –’
‘He is ill,’ Deven protested, and crept towards the door with the dirty sheets of paper in his hand. ‘Please, please, he is ill, and aged. I beg you –’
‘Ill? He is foolish, foolish to spend time with you, to have friends like you, to ignore his wife and child –’ here the woman stopped her high-pitched abuse as her voice broke, and she turned her face away as if to hide a moment of weakness. Deven took her momentary inattention as an opportunity to slip out of the room with the sopping bundle of paper, desperate to get rid of it.
For a while he stood on the veranda outside, in the dark, a little to one side of the lighted doorway, struggling to control his breathing while he listened to the voices continue inside – the one accusing, the other placating; the one harsh, the other helpless – and the child’s crying reduced gradually to watery hiccups and occasional wrenching sobs. He wondered if he ought to return, to bring about justice and mercy. But the papers between his fingers oozed and stank. He stared at them in repulsion, not quite certain how he came to be holding them. He almost threw them over the railing into the courtyard below but it was obvious that there were people at every door, in every nest of shadows, listening and watching for it to be safe to come out and resume whatever was the normal life of this household. So he clutched them tightly in order to overcome his own repulsion and then did what every instinct in him told him to do – raced down the veranda, hurled himself down the stairs, broke through the door into the lane, and there dropped the disgusting parcel into the gutter, and fled. He was at the end of the lane, at the corner where the street light blazed with normality, before it occurred to him that those papers he had thrown away might have been inscribed with Nur’s verse.
Those were the two moments of the evening that stayed, that even his conscience or his memory’s selective talents refused to let go – the moment when he had stood above the well of the courtyard, listening to the voices inside, and the moment he had erupted out of the house, dropped the papers and run. What exactly had happened in between? There were times when he remembered a totally different scene: how he had marched in and thrust away the vengeful figure of a white and silver witch, how he had raised Nur in his arms and seen to his ills and rescued him from them… but then his congenital inability to satisfy himself with fantasy would apply a brake, the wild careening of his imagination crash to a halt, and he would be faced with that one truth again – how he had abandoned the poet in his agony, desecrated the paper on which he wrote his verse, and run.
Even to remember it made his breath come short and fast.
Chapter 4
DAWN WAS BREAKING at the end of the road as Deven rattled homewards in the bus. At least, that was how the poets described it, he thought bitterly as he looked through the dust filming the windowpane at the sooty darkness lightening to grey as if the soot and smuts were being dissolved in dishwater. Shapes began to emerge out of this watery murk, dim and formless to begin with, then gradually assuming the lines and dimensions of trees, houses, smokestacks, shacks. Dawn and poetry, he thought as he spat out a shred of tobacco from his mouth that felt painfully unclean at this hour of morning, all that was simply not real, not true; it was humbug, hypocrisy and not to be trusted. If it were true then it would have stood the test of actual experience, and it had not. Oh, it had not, it had not. Henceforth he would avoid that mirage, that dream that so easily twisted into nightmare. Any reality was preferable, he told himself, even if it was the smeared window of a country bus bumping along the rutted road homewards.
He groaned aloud and rolled his head about on the palms of his hands in a very real agony.
An early milkman sitting across the aisle asked kindly, ‘Are you ill, son? Are you sick?’
Deven rolled his head from side to side in denial, then raised it and stared stoically out at the yellow roadside with its barbed wire fence trampled into the dust and emaciated cattle slowly heaving themselves up from the shelter of thorn trees where they had slept, and swaying across the barren fields in search of fodder, like some prehistoric beasts who have not been informed that they are now outdated. After the nightmare he had lived through, the still calm of this morning scene seemed to him positively idyllic. He stared and stared, noting every signboard and landmark along the way – ‘Mita Sugar Factory’, ‘Friends Cycle Repairs’, ‘Modi Tyres and Tubes’, a grove of blackened acacia trees, a tumble of broken mud huts, ‘Punjab Eating House: Hot Food Cold Drinks’ – and they struck at his eyes and the aching temples that were the legacy of a sleepless night, like small vicious pebbles. There was no idyll that could not be broken.
‘Here, son, a pinch of tobacco – try it and see how you feel,’ coaxed the kindly milkman, leaning across the aisle to him with a small flat tin that he opened with one green fingernail to offer the tobacco.
Deven shrank back, muttering his thanks and refusal awkwardly. He would have preferred being ignored to any kindness now.
‘Clears the head,’ urged the man, ‘makes it spin around so you think it’s coming right off – then you stop feeling giddy and you find it’s been cleared, made as good as new.’
‘No, no,’ Deven raised his voice angrily, and turned resolutely to the window. He heard the tobacco tin snap shut.