by Anita Desai
When they got back to their house – DII/69 in that colony named after a leader of Harijans – the careful brown paper parcel that Deven had been making of the evening and tying up with care, came apart. Sarla handed him a postcard that had arrived by the evening post with fingers damp from a bucket of washing. ‘Here,’ she said with an eloquent sniff. She had read it, obviously. He took it and knew his doom had searched him out and found him after all.
‘Dear Sir,’ said the small, precise handwriting, in English. ‘I’m happy to learn of your decision to work as my secretary. Please report earliest date convenient. I am wanting to dictate some poems to you. Murad Sahib is wanting to publish same. Time is fleeting. Yours faithfully …’ The name was signed in elegant, elaborate Urdu.
Chapter 5
‘THIS IS WHAT I don’t like about you,’ Murad said, making a face around the toothpick he had inserted between his lips. ‘Always saying no, I can’t, how can I, I am afraid, I will be hurt, I will be killed –’
‘I am not saying that,’ protested Deven, holding his head in his hands with despair. ‘I am only saying I have my job, I can’t lose my job, my salary. I have my family – a wife, a son. I can’t let them starve –’
‘Who is saying they will starve?’ Murad feigned bewilderment. ‘Here you are getting extra work, and you are howling about starvation.’
‘Murad, it is not work I can do, I am telling you only. I don’t even live in Delhi. I have no time.’
‘Then you should have told me that long ago instead of saying you wanted to write for my magazine. You have no time. All right. Go back to your village, rot there with your buffaloes and your dung heaps. Why come and pretend you are a poet and have written things to be published in my magazine? Go away, don’t waste my time – there are many better poets than you to be found in the streets of Delhi.’
But this was too categorical for Deven who always sheltered in ambiguity. ‘Listen, I did say I would write for your paper, yes. I said I would interview Nur, An interview with Nur, that was all I promised. For that I travelled to Delhi, I went to see the man in his own house, and allowed myself to be dragged into his kind of society. For an interview. How could you imagine, how could you tell him I was going to be his secretary and take dictation from him? You think I will give up a job in a foremost college of North India, give up my salary, provident fund, pension, housing and medical allowance to be that – that madman’s secretary – fill his inkpots, take down his curses and abuses? How could you tell him such a thing, Murad, how?’
‘There are many people who would consider it an honour, a very great honour,’ said Murad, severely, looking at Deven with contempt while he dug inside his mouth with a toothpick. ‘I know five, six people who would be happy to go and fill his inkwell and sharpen his pens, thinking it a golden chance to learn the art of poetry from a great master. You are forgetting our Indian tradition, Deven. You are forgetting the guru-shishya tradition – how the shishya sits at the feet of his guru, for years, years – sometimes till his own hair is white – happy only to learn, and to serve, and through service learn, before he tries to do any work of his own. But people like you – they want to travel by first class – everything easy, just go straight ahead. No time to sit at a guru’s feet, and study – you are only thinking of getting ahead –’
Deven interrupted with a sputter of indignation. ‘I don’t know why you are going on and on about this guru and shishya. I never said I was looking for a guru. I have given up thinking I can ever write poetry. I am only a poor lecturer, temporary, earning my living. I tell you I haven’t time, I can’t serve Nur, I can’t go and become his secretary, and you had no business – no business, do you hear,’ his voice rose and threatened to splinter, ‘to tell him I would.’
Murad removed the toothpick from his mouth. ‘Listen to me,’ he said loudly and slowly as if talking to a moron. ‘I did not tell him you would be his secretary. When I saw him at the urs of Khwaja Nizamuddin Auliya, I went up to him to pay my respects. Yes, I have much respect for great men like him, for poets and artists. I went and bowed to take the dust off his feet. And I asked him only if he had spoken to you and agreed to let you interview him – you remember you did not come back and tell me what had happened, you simply ran away, disappeared without a word –’ he looked more and more severe and Deven winced at the accuracy of his memory – ‘and he said yes, he had agreed, that you got on very well, and that he wished you to know that he was waiting for you to come so that you could begin. That is all.’
But Deven did not feel reassured: there was something about Murad that did not make for reassurance. He watched, thin-lipped, while Murad cleared the teacups off his table and began to arrange his papers on its filthy top, and said weakly, ‘Then he must have misunderstood me. I only mentioned the interview, I never spoke about being his secretary. He did not even say he wanted a secretary. Who has put this idea into his head if not you? Now I can’t go near him – if I go to him for the interview, he may make me sit down and start working for him –’
‘See!’ Murad shouted, suddenly slamming the flat of his hand upon a pile of papers on the desk. ‘You see what I mean? Always afraid, always saying how can I, I will be killed, murdered, caught, made to do this, made to do that. Who can make you do what you don’t want to do? Have you no tongue? Can you not speak? Can you not say, Nur Sahib, I have come for the interview I spoke of the other day. Please give me two hours of your time, Nur Sahib, that is all, then I must go back to my Hindi class in Lala Ram Lal College, Mirpore, to my wife and son, to my vegetarian meal and glass of milk –’
Deven got up sadly, knowing he could expect no help here. ‘No one ever listens to me,’ he said pathetically, pulling down the hem of his bush-shirt, feeling the pen in his shirt pocket, smoothing down his hair. ‘That is the trouble – he won’t listen to me.’
Murad had buried his head in his papers busily and looked up briefly to glare at him. ‘Why should he listen to you?’ he snapped. ‘You are supposed to go there and listen to him. And go at once, will you, go quickly – I’ve wasted enough time on you already. By now another man would have interviewed him and brought me the piece.’ He picked up a pencil that was halved in the middle and blue at one end and red at the other and began to make slashing lines across the pages in front of him, very impressively.
In the final examination at school, he had scored higher marks than Deven, although he had borrowed Deven’s notes and often asked for Deven’s help.
Once in the lane that ran along the back of the hospital wall, there was no chance of turning and fleeing, as all his best instincts told him to, for the door leading to the house stood wide open and other people were streaming along the lane towards it as well, all the traffic going in that one direction, making a turning round and retreating out of the question for anyone as anxious as Deven to avoid collision or attention. Men in dazzling white stood posted by the door to welcome all who came, and excited children in velvet caps and satin jackets ushered them over the threshold, already buried under a hill of shoes and sandals discarded by the guests who had entered the courtyard from which all the old litter had been cleared to make room for what appeared to be a soirée.
After his first alarmed palpitations had subsided, Deven began to feel relieved at the sight of such a crowd – perhaps he would not be noticed. Surely it was Nur himself who was going to recite his poetry, he would be seated on the divan that was spread with carpets and cushions, and Deven could hide behind the people sitting cross-legged and waiting on the cotton durries and white sheets spread in the open courtyard, and the two would not need to meet at all.
He dropped on to his knees and sank down behind a row of large, well-fed, passive men with splendid caps and turbans that would surely conceal him from whoever had the place of honour on the divan. But he was not to be left in peace: more people were pouring in through the small wooden doorway, and it seemed he was in everyone’s way. He found himself at first huddling and crouchi
ng and making himself as small as possible, then having to shift further up the line in order to make room for the latecomers, and finally having to push back and assert himself in order to breathe. People at the back began to press forward with the words, ‘Brothers, make room for us here, please move up,’ and others with no speech but only appropriate gestures, forcefully made. As he found himself moving up closer and closer to the front row, his face stiffened with embarrassment and displeasure. He kept it lowered almost on to his knees and did not see the performer coming out of the lighted room to be seated on the divan and was only made aware of it by the applause and shouted welcome.
When he did look, he blinked with shock to find seated, in the centre of the divan, not Nur’s aged and benign figure in white but a powdered and painted creature in black and silver, coquetting beneath a shining veil which she held in place over her forehead while she turned her face from side to side, flashing smiles at her audience and making the ring on her nose glint with delight. She sat cross-legged and comfortable on the rug, her red-painted toes waggling with pleasure at the scene of which she was the undeniable centre. Nur was there too but not on the divan: he was at the back of the veranda, on a sagging cane chair, looking like a bag, or bolster, that someone had flung down on to it. His beard looked like rather old and yellowed stuffing that had leaked out of his chest and was tumbling across it, dustily. As Deven stared, open-mouthed with shock, at him, some young men came out, stood on either side of his chair, lifted him up by his arms and laughingly coaxed him to come to the front of the audience while an urchin dragged the chair along behind him and had it ready for him to sink on to, in the front row with Deven directly behind him. Perhaps he could have hidden, Nur would certainly not have been capable of turning right around and seeing him behind that large, sagging chair, but now Deven found he did not want to hide. Remembering the scene in which he had deserted him and fled that first night of their meeting, Deven was filled with an intense need to make amends and save the poet from whatever new humiliation that painted creature on the divan had devised for him that evening.
Struggling on to his knees and feeling them tremble under him, he whispered furtively, ‘Sir – I have come – Murad-bhai gave me your message.’
Nur tried to swivel around in his chair, could not quite manage it, so only one eye peered from a cloudy corner through the distorting lens of his steel-rimmed spectacles that were perched on the great beak of his nose, and rolled around under a withered eyelid in an effort to recollect the face tilted up to him with such pain and intensity in its expression. Then he stuttered slowly, ‘Yes, yes, yes – Murad-bhai – is coming? I sent him an invitation too.’
‘He didn’t tell me,’ Deven cried, stabbed to the heart by the thought that Murad had deceived him once again, had known something he had not divulged, had sent him here this evening knowing there would be this soirée that Deven had no wish and no reason to attend and never would have done had he suspected anything. ‘Murad – he – had an invitation?’ he stammered.
‘Yes, yes, yes – I told him to bring you along. I told him to bring his friends – everyone –’ his ineffective fingers waved in the air – ‘to listen to Imtiaz-bibi. She is going to recite her new – new –’ he stammered a bit, then turned away in irritation at his inability to remember.
‘Imtiaz Begum,’ called a voice from the audience, ‘you are like a star fallen into the well of the courtyard from which we have come to fetch water. When will you quench our thirst? Give us the Star poems. Will you give us the Star poems tonight?’
‘I can recite nothing – nothing – until my accompanists have had enough refreshments and decide to come out,’ she called back, joking, in an excited, high-pitched voice that grated on Deven’s ear like a fingernail on a glass pane, and a cry went up for the accompanists who now found themselves hustled down the stairs from the upper rooms and brought along like a team of oxen, or servants, to range themselves behind her on the divan and start tuning their instruments. Some of them were still wiping their mouths and dusting crumbs off their lapels. Imtiaz Begum drew a laugh when she leaned towards one of them and flicked some shreds of sweet off his shoulder, making him rear back as if stung.
‘So, had your last drink to help you survive this evening?’ she teased them, an awful menace under the mock sweetness of her tone, and her audience roared delightedly while the drummer and the harmonium player broke into a sweat and pretended to busy themselves with knocking the drums with the tuning hammer and strumming the harmonium. A young woman with bulging eyes staring out of the pale, triangular face of a fanatic, ran her fingers wildly over the strings of the upright tanpura, over and over and over, till Imtiaz Begum turned and asked her to please play in tune or not at all whereupon she stopped playing altogether and appeared paralysed.
Someone brought a silver box of betel nuts and leaves – the smile Imtiaz Begum gave was as sudden and swift as if scissors had cut it through her face, snip-snap, and the teeth were stained red besides. Those in the front row edged closer to her and carried on their banter but after a while she began to frown and press her hand to her forehead as if it hurt. She called petulantly for a glass of water. There was a delay. When it finally arrived, she thanked the red-faced bearer with an ornateness of speech that was heavily laced with sarcasm. Her audience tittered and she threw them a contemptuous look. Her mouth trembled with tension.
Deven looked anxiously at the poet who was shifting uneasily about in the cane chair, making it creak. He raised himself on to his knees in order to ask if he wanted something too – water, betel leaves, or simply to leave? But Nur, lowering his chin to his chest, only whispered, ‘It is her birthday. This is in her honour. It is an auspicious day, her birthday.’
Yes, but who was she? Why should her birthday be celebrated in this manner? How could she claim monopoly of the stage with her raucous singing that now afflicted their ears, her stagey recitation of melodramatic and third-rate verse when the true poet, the great poet, sat huddled and silent, ignored and uncelebrated, Deven asked himself, determinedly not listening with more than a fraction of his attention. She was not worth listening to, he would not listen to her, he had not come to listen to her, he grumbled to himself, and scowled at the spectators who were bobbing their heads, swaying from side to side, beating time with their hands on their knees, giving forth loud exclamations of wonder and appreciation – like puppets, he thought, or trained monkeys. Yes, why not call a monkey trainer from the street and watch a monkey perform instead? It would not be very different, and the monkey would not demand so much applause and accord.
Deven’s face was distorted with dislike of the scene. He had expected to come in and be admitted into the presence of the revered poet; he had hoped to put questions to him at last, to listen, and record his words. Instead, there was the thrumming of the drums and drawling of the harmonium and above that the thin, high-pitched voice flaunting itself before the audience like some demented dervish of sound. Just as Deven had suspected, the voice proved nasal and grating, often on the verge of cracking. If the audience applauded and cried ‘Wah! Wah!’ it was because it often did crack, giving out that authentic sound of heartbreak that was considered indispensable to the arts of music and poetry. When Deven brought himself to listen to a line or two, it was just as he thought: she said she was a bird in a cage, that she longed for flight, that her lover waited for her. She said the bars that held her were cruel and unjust, that her wings had been hurt by beating against them and only God could come and release her by lifting the latch on the cage door, God in the guise of her lover. When would he come? She languished, panting for the clouds that would carry him to her and the rain that would requite her thirst. Oh, it was all very beautiful, very feeling, very clever. Oh, she had learnt her tricks very well, the monkey. Did she not have the best teacher in the world to put these images, this language into her head? It was clear she had learnt everything from him, from Nur, and it was disgraceful how she was imitating his ver
ses, parodying his skills, flaunting before his face what she had stolen from him, so slyly, so cunningly.
Deven clasped his arms around his knees and found them trembling under his chin with restrained rage, with emotion. He listened to the sounds of pleasure and appreciation going up from the audience in little bright bubbles that burst in the air, and felt murderous. The women with their veils held decorously over their heads while they vigorously chewed betel leaves and cried ‘Ah-ha-ha’ whenever a poetic phrase particularly touched them, the children in their rippling satiny garments who jumped and sprang and clapped as if at some wedding or festival, all pressing upon him in the small, tightly-packed courtyard where the air grew rapidly more stifling, gave him the same sensation he had when his wife’s family came to visit them and her sisters and aunts and cousins climbed on to a string cot in the veranda and sat with their babies and their knitting, the needles flashing as rapidly as their tongues, then fell silent when they glimpsed him hurrying down the path on his way to college with a book tucked under his arm, only to burst into titters as soon as he was out of the gate. What was this conviviality of steamy femininity that found him a figure of fun and even reduced the aged and revered figure of the poet Nur to a pathetic old cushion that spilt out old stale cotton?
This woman, this so-called poetess, belonged to that familiar female mafia, he thought, looking at her with unconcealed loathing. She would need only to shed her silver and black carnival costume and take on the drabness of their virtuous clothing. Dressed as she was, she would of course be barred from their society – they would have thought her no better than a prostitute or dancing girl. Was she one? Narrowing his eyes in order to feign worldly wisdom, he wondered at her background, at her age. Impossible to detect under that floury layer of powder and the glistening of lipstick and rouge. She could be fifty, painted to look like a summer rose, he thought derisively. Who was she and how was it that Murad had not mentioned her? Nur must have given him some explanation when issuing the invitation. Had Nur said, ‘My wife will recite’ or, ‘Imtiaz Begum will perform’? Why did Nur submit to her insane whim of performing in his house, the house of a poet?