In Custody

by Anita Desai

  Chapter 6

  ALL THAT WEEK the college had been undergoing its annual spring cleaning – its walls washed and splashed with lime, its floors and corridors swept, fresh red gravel brought and spread on the worn and dusty driveway, and in the absence of flowerbeds and lawns, truckloads of potted plants arrived and were arranged on either side of the stairs, their burly, shaggy heads given a shaking and a sprinkling in an effort to make them look fresh and sylvan. A man on a ladder unscrewed all the fused bulbs from the ceiling lamps and screwed in new ones, his long face morose with the knowledge that within a week all would be stolen or smashed again. Money was unexpectedly found unspent and a water cooler bought for the students and set up at the end of a long corridor where it was destined to leak and rust in the centre of a permanent puddle that students’ shoes tracking through turned to liquid mud. The first graffiti were scratched into its blue metal flanks the night before the annual board meeting. No one noticed because that was the night when the frenzy of activity reached its zenith: a striped cotton marquee arrived on a lorry as if for a wedding and was erected on the sports field so that the early risers next morning, out for their constitutionals in their tennis shoes or off to fetch the milk in clattering cans, saw it risen from the dust like a magical balloon striped red, yellow and blue.

  It was in its shade that tea was served, at an unaccustomed hour of the morning, when the board meeting was over. Punctually at ten o’clock the members of the board had arrived in cars owned or hired by the college for the occasion, and up those flowerpot-flanked steps they had hurried, quickly and neatly folding their hands and bowing to the Principal who stood at the bottom of the stairs in a newly dry-cleaned grey suit, and then hurrying on like important public figures with not a moment to lose. The staff, given the day off from teaching, hung around the corridors, not knowing quite what to do with themselves. They had to be present. They were all to be introduced to the board after the meeting, but till then they could only cluster around the long windows that were slits cut into the veranda walls, gossiping and joking as the students did on other days. Today the students had a holiday and were away, except for those who lived in the hostel. A few of these had come out of curiosity and a lack of anything better to do, although that was all they discussed: that something better to do that they did not have.

  At last the weighty matter of the board meeting was over. Out streamed the members of the board, the Principal, the registrar, the administrative staff – relaxed now and smiling – moving leisurely down the corridors and the stairs. They had to be urged to come along for tea. It was not polite to rush, they hung back while the tea-makers in the marquee waited beside the smoking charcoal fires, the tin trays arranged with pink-flowered crockery, the plates of dry biscuits and saucers of nuts.

  Under the marquee, the ladies stood up from the three-piece sofa set that was reserved for the guests of honour, and the straight-backed chairs that had been brought out of the classrooms and arranged along three sides of the enclosure for the lesser guests. The Principal’s wife, in a new sari of Japanese nylon printed all over with sprigs of brown and violet flowers, came forward with folded hands to greet the chief guest. The Principal was perspiring as he introduced his wife to him (she was going through a difficult time of life and one could never tell what she might do or say; she had turned overnight from bovine and placid to unpredictable). After an anxious moment he allowed himself to smile – the chief guest had made a joke about it being a hard day for the ladies who had done so much to make the occasion a success, and his wife had smiled and said exactly what she ought to have said, i.e. not at all, it was a pleasure. So that was all right. They stepped aside from the flapping entrance of the tent to make way for the others who now streamed in, no longer required to postpone their thirst.

  There was such a sound of splashing and spilling then, of clinking and clattering, of sloshing and giggling, one might have been quite misled as to the seriousness of this annual affair. None of the staff ever quite forgot themselves – it would have taken something much stronger than sweet milky tea to do that – and they tingled with the possibility of the long arm of the administration reaching out and hauling them up to be introduced to Someone High Up. Every now and then they whipped out their handkerchiefs and wiped their faces or looked over their shoulders to see how close they were to, or how far from, those important guests of honour and even more importantly, the Principal, who was after all of a more direct concern to them. Their scholarly spectacles glinted, nervous hands smoothed down hair and tried to keep away from the cigarette packets in their pockets, throats were repeatedly cleared and a conscientious effort made to seek out ladies and be ostentatiously polite to them – in a relaxed manner, of course, as though they did it every day, without thinking. Then the tea tray was passed around, cups handed out, and the sounds and movements they made began to resemble those of children on a beach or, more accurately in view of their hopeless shabbiness, children collecting water at a municipal tap.

  Deven felt this transformation go through him as well, a pleasantly relaxing, self-forgetting process, but when he realized that the Principal was just behind him, he grew tense again, quite still, holding the tin spoon upright in his cup of tea, forgetting to stir in his fear of a hand upon his collar: the summons. Then, feeling the crowd press against him to make way for the royal progress, and seeing the backs of their heads as they moved on towards the table where the Principal’s wife stood smiling, one arm outflung from under the brown and purple Japanese nylon folds towards a dish of charmingly arranged biscuits beside a vase stuffed with charming marigolds just beginning to die, he relaxed, he stirred his spoon blithely round and round in his cup and looked up to greet whoever came his way.

  Fatefully, it was the head of the Urdu department, Abid Siddiqui who, in keeping with the size and stature of that department, was a small man, whose youthful face was prematurely topped with a plume of white hair as if to signify the doomed nature of his discipline. It was perhaps unusual to find a private college as small as Lala Ram Lal’s offering a language such as Urdu that was nearly extinct, but it happened that Lala Ram Lal’s descendants had not inherited quite so big a fortune as to endow the entire college on their own, and had had to accept a very large donation from the descendants of the very nawab who had fled Delhi in the aftermath of the 1857 mutiny and built the mosque as well as some of the largest villas in Mirpore. They had been absolutely determined however not to allow this family’s name upon the signboard over the gate. The Muslim family had felt slighted and threatened to withdraw its donation. A compromise was therefore made and it was promised a department in which its language would be kept alive in place of the family name. Being occupied with more interesting matters such as the purchase of land and cement and steel and the tenders to be floated and the profits to be made therefrom, the college authorities had disregarded the probability that very few citizens of Mirpore would opt to study, or allow their offspring to study, a language that had become doomed the day the Muslims departed across the newly-drawn border to the new country of Pakistan. In fact, if a few Muslim families had not stubbornly remained behind and had had young ones to send to the college to study Urdu, the department would have remained as empty as the cell from which the condemned prisoner is extracted to be hanged. Abid Siddiqui made up the entire staff of the department and even so found he had scarcely any work to do on account of the size of his classes. Perhaps this was why he tended to wander about the college grounds, his head slightly to one side, looking inquiringly about him as if he were a small bird in search of a modest worm. This made him one of the few people in Lala Ram Lal College from whom Deven did not shrink. He turned to greet him with a smile.

  Catching his eye, Siddiqui said, ‘Sharma Sahib, the annual day tea is better than the daily tea, isn’t it?’ and Deven responded with an eager laugh, thinking a conversation so brightly begun might well end as cheerfully.

  ‘The annual day tea is different from the dai
ly tea in every way,’ he laughed – giggled actually.

  ‘No, it is not a representative day, a typical day,’ agreed Siddiqui. ‘Look, we are being served nuts by ladies who do not normally recognize us.’

  ‘And whom we are not prepared to recognize daily either,’ said Deven with an unaccustomed roguishness as he stretched out his hand towards a saucer of salted cashew nuts before it was whisked out of his reach. ‘Expensive eatables,’ he said, munching. ‘Cashew nuts, forty rupees a kilo, at least.’

  Siddiqui looked after the disappearing tray a little sadly. ‘Hard times,’ he agreed in a murmur. ‘Hard times.’

  ‘Even in your department?’ Deven asked, with a slyness that quite shook him by its originality. ‘No, don’t tell me, Siddiqui Sahib. It may be the smallest department in the college but it is better so – the quality is the finest.’

  ‘Like the cashew nuts?’ Siddiqui gave a painful smile. ‘Yes, Urdu is becoming a rarity – it is only grown for export. To Pakistan, or to the Gulf. Have you heard, Faiz has gone to Beirut, to edit an Urdu magazine there?’

  ‘But why?’ Deven looked concerned. ‘That will not help the Urdu cause. Why not write for magazines in India? We still have some, Siddiqui Sahib, and it is a good cause to support.’

  ‘Good causes are also lost causes, Sharma Sahib.’

  ‘No, no,’ Deven protested. ‘Here is the leading Urdu journal in Delhi planning a special number on new Urdu poetry – it can surely not be a lost cause.’

  ‘Oh? Which one is that? Do they hope to get any worthwhile poetry to publish?’

  ‘Of course,’ Deven exclaimed, quite shocked by Siddiqui’s ignorance and lack of confidence in his cause. ‘Even – even Nur Shahjehanabadi is going to have some of his previously unpublished poems in it: it will be a great event.’

  Siddiqui cocked his bushy white eyebrows when he heard that – he was clearly impressed, and being one of the nicer members of the staff, he did not mind showing it. ‘If Nur Shahjehanabadi produces any poetry after fifteen years of silence, that will be a great event certainly, in this small world of Urdu poetry. He is a whale in a pail of water, I have always thought.’

  Just then the Principal and his chief guest, having filled their teacups at the table and talked to the ladies who clustered there, safely on the other side of the table, turned back to the crowd and made their way towards the upholstered sofa set. People fell back to make way for the royal progress, and Deven found himself pressed into a closer proximity with Abid Siddiqui than he had ever entered before. It made him more confidential in his manner; there were, after all, only two teacups between them. Dropping his voice and speaking into his ear, as if it were a secret, he murmured, ‘And I have been asked to interview him so that the interview may appear along with the poems.’

  Now both the eyebrows crawled upwards in incredulity. ‘You are going to meet him?’ Siddiqui asked, a little disbelievingly. When Deven had come to him a year ago as a prospective lecturer, in anticipation of better days in the Urdu department, he had not detected much of note in that craven young man: he now wondered if he could have been mistaken. ‘You are going to see him?’

  Deven smiled. ‘I have been to his house on many occasions,’ he pronounced slowly, for full effect, and for the first time in his life felt that the occasion called for pomposity, a state to which he had always secretly aspired. ‘I have had many conversations with him. In fact,’ he plunged on recklessly, ‘I may do more than an article for Awaaz – I might write a biography. He has even said he might dictate his memoirs to me.’

  Siddiqui too began to smile. This was clearly a fantasy, to be humoured but not trusted. His manner became appropriately facetious. ‘To you? A-ha. The great poet came to Mirpore and asked you to be his official biographer, I suppose?’

  Deven was hurt. It was clear that his words were not being taken for the truth. He became aggressive. ‘How can he be expected to come to Mirpore at his age, to see anyone?’ he protested. ‘Of course it is I who go and call on him. The matter of his autobiography came up just like that – I did not suggest it, or plan it – but he wants someone to listen to him and take down his memoirs.’

  Siddiqui had lowered his head to the teacup’s lip, reflectively, like a bird regarding a dot inside that might, or might not, turn out to be an insect. It was not possible to see his expression when he said, after a minute of silence, ‘Stranger things have happened, I suppose.’

  Deven was not sure if he ought to laugh or feel insulted. He made a snorting sound that could have meant either. ‘I know you don’t believe me but I will prove it to you, you will see.’

  ‘You could always turn it into a work of imagination,’ Siddiqui murmured. ‘You know, a few facts and some fantasy. It is said to be a fashionable form in – in other parts of the world,’ he became a little vague: his connections with those parts was tenuous.

  Deven was stung. ‘I am not going to write it at all,’ he retorted. ‘I am going to record it. Tape it. Yes, I am looking for a tape recorder. The editor of Awaaz has told me to get a tape recorder and put it all on tape. That is how it is done these days – in other parts of the world,’ he added, a bit viciously. ‘And one day, when it is done, I will invite you to come and listen. Then you can see if it is the voice of Nur – or a fantasy.’

  Siddiqui was clearly intrigued. When Mr Trivedi, the head librarian, came up to them to chat, he brushed him aside and, taking Deven by the elbow, said, ‘You must tell me more about this, Sharma Sahib – it is the first time I have heard of a biography on tape. You have to admit, it is not done like that in our part of the world. What is this, please – the age of electronics entering the royal court of poetry over which the Moghuls once presided? Tell me, what is this all about?’

  In a corner, sheltering behind one of the poles that propped up the striped canopy over their heads, Deven babbled the whole story as if it were a stream of water from a tap turned on by a sympathetic hand. He did not care much if Siddiqui believed him or not, he was not concerned about persuading him, he was merely relieved to be able to talk about it and hear someone else’s opinions and comments on what seemed even to him sometimes a fantastical and improbable project. Describing it to someone else gave it lineaments and dimensions, a certain substance and reality that he himself occasionally doubted. When Siddiqui listened to him closely, stroking his small spade-shaped beard as he did so, and watching his face with sharp, bird-bright eyes, and finally said, ‘Strange, wonderfully strange, Sharma Sahib, but even stranger things happen, it is true,’ he felt sufficiently relieved of doubts and hesitations, at least for the moment, to cry out enthusiastically, ‘Siddiqui Sahib, won’t it be a great thing for Urdu literature? Don’t you think every reader of Urdu will find it interesting? What about your department, eh? Won’t they want to listen to the tapes? Perhaps I will have copies made and send them to the Urdu departments of all universities in India. Murad Sahib says it is the rage in Delhi – people tape record music recitals, poetry recitations, everything. Perhaps your department will buy a cassette player one day, and a library of tapes for its students. And whenever you like you will be able to switch it on – and hear the poet’s voice reciting his own poetry.’

  Now Siddiqui threw back his head and laughed – not derisively, but disbelievingly. He laughed like a boy, delightedly. Clasping Deven’s arm, above the elbow, he cried, ‘Wonderful! Wonderful! Truly all our poets will become singing birds to us then. We will be able to hear the voice of the koel, the bul-bul, whichever songster we wish to hear –’

  ‘Yes, Siddiqui Sahib, why not make a proposal to the Principal? Why not ask him to buy the department some equipment? Today they must have discussed the budget of the past year and the new year; why not suggest to them that they allocate some funds for buying your department a tape recorder, tapes, a cassette player, and to begin the era of electronics in our college?’

  They laughed like children at an absurdly funny joke. Some of the staff and guests who heard them tu
rned to stare. This was an occasion of some formality after all, and few people forgot themselves to such an extent as these two in their inadequate hiding-place behind the bunting-wrapped pole under the shamiana. Neither of them noticed: they were enjoying themselves too much.

  ‘Sharma Sahib, how can a timid rabbit like myself approach King Leo in his den? And that too on the day of the royal durbar? But I will tell you what we can do,’ Siddiqui added, nodding his head brightly. ‘Let us go together and try to corner King Leo’s chief minister, Mr Jackal, and put it to him. As you say, with the new budget under discussion, this may be just the time to find Mr Jackal in a good frame of mind, seeing his treasury full.’

  ‘Mr Jackal?’ Deven giggled, mopping his face which was quite heated and red. He had begun to feel as if he were suffering from a hallucination: never in his life had things gone so smoothly, so spontaneously, the various counters falling into place quite fortuitously, without plan or scheme. He had only just begun to see the pattern of the board before him and discern the direction of the game that he had been playing so thoughtlessly and carelessly.

  ‘Yes, yes, the registrar of course, the registrar,’ chuckled Siddiqui, and clasping their spare hands together as if they had just signed a treaty and were posing for the photographers, they both burst into laughter.

  The laughter faded away when they found him sitting alone on a straight-backed chair behind the upholstered sofa set, quite left out of the tête-à-tête the Principal was having with the chief guest and indeed any other conversation in his vicinity. Looking gloomily into space and wagging the leg he had laid across one knee, he looked very much the extra in the game, one who belonged to no department and had no part to play.