In Custody

by Anita Desai

  It dragged on and on. Even the bazaar outside seemed stilled, half-asleep. The loudspeakers were silenced, traffic had come to a halt. Owls chuckled in the watchful trees. Deven’s head dipped lower and lower, swinging from the knob prominent at the back of his neck; often he was away, swimming through sleep slowly, only to be brought back to the scene by a slap on the knee by the excited Siddiqui crying, ‘Drink up, Deven, have another. At least drink with us if you won’t play with us. Do you see how Chotu plays? Oh I will make him pay, I will make him pay for this!’

  Deven had begun to fear his head would come off the knob and roll when the game broke up for what Siddiqui promised would be refreshments. Siddiqui helped him down the terrace steps and along the inky drive to the gate: the lateness of the hour and the uncounted glasses of rum had had a debilitating effect on Deven and surprisingly little on Siddiqui who was only a little dishevelled. While clawing at the iron scrollwork of the gate in search of the exit, Deven remembered to say, thickly, ‘But Siddiqui Sahib, Nur – Nur –’

  Siddiqui, slightly askew himself, his white hair rising in a peak above his head, clutched Deven by the elbow and whispered, ‘Have you got it? Can I hear it?’

  ‘Hunh?’ Deven clung to two iron bars, feeling the rust come off on the palms of his hands. ‘I don’t – understand, Siddiqui Sahib.’

  ‘The tape, Deven, the tape.’

  Deven’s knees softened and collapsed against the gate which sagged under his weight with a jarring sound. Nearly in tears, he sobbed, ‘No, no, no. There is no tape.’

  ‘But,’ said Siddiqui, pulling himself together and holding his unbuttoned shirt at the neck in an effort at propriety, ‘but the money was given, the tape recorder bought. You went to Delhi. Then where is the tape?’ He sounded crisp, interrogative.

  ‘No tape,’ Deven groaned, ‘no tape,’ struggling to lift himself off the gate in which he had got entangled. Swaying on his feet again, he planted his hands on Siddiqui’s shoulders to steady himself and decided to blurt it all out. ‘No tape. I could not begin recording. Nur – his wife – family – demanded payment. They want – they want money first.’ The word ‘first’ came out in a fusillade of spit.

  Siddiqui drew back. He freed himself from Deven’s grasp. Then he went and stood by the gatepost, leaning on it with one hand. ‘Hmm,’ he said.

  Frightened by his coolness, Deven stumbled after him, clutched at his fine muslin shirt as if he would tear it. ‘I can’t – go on, Siddiqui Sahib. Will have to – give up. It can’t – be done. Nur, you see, Nur –’

  ‘Look,’ said Siddiqui, standing upright now and speaking very clearly in a glass-thin tone. ‘It must be done. At my request, the funds were made available for a tape recorder. You purchased it. If you do not use it for the purpose for which it was bought, I will be held responsible for your – your deception. That tape is the property of the college, paid for in advance. You must make it. The college must have it.’ He looked at Deven with small fierce eyes like lit embers.

  Deven stumbled around Siddiqui in a full circle, clutching at his head which felt like a bag of broken glass. He must have become giddy and fallen, he found himself close to the ground, scrabbling in dust, seeing Siddiqui’s small pale toes in their sandals. ‘I can’t,’ he whined, ‘I can’t. Where is the money to pay his wife? And if I don’t bring the money, she has said she won’t let me enter the house. You don’t know, Siddiqui Sahib, you just don’t know about her – and the other – and the house – how it is –’

  ‘No, nor does the college. You have to deal with all those matters yourself since it was your idea and your proposal,’ said Siddiqui very severely. ‘That is your business, how you go about it. But the recording must be done, the tape has to be handed over to the authorities.’ Some lawyer in his family seemed to have passed on to him this new severity, this tone and attitude of a prosecutor.

  Deven was weeping – at least his face was wet when he felt it with his fingers. ‘How?’ he howled, jackal-like, on his knees, ‘Siddiqui Sahib, how?’

  Siddiqui was a small man but looked down from his height with all the contempt of a giant for a worm. For a moment it seemed he was preparing to utter his true opinion of Deven, of all craven, cringing creatures on earth. But the evening held better kinds of entertainment for him; appearing to lose interest in the spectacle at his feet, he only said, ‘If you need more money, we shall have to request the authorities.’

  ‘Can you do that, Siddiqui Sahib, can you – will you?’ babbled Deven, so crazy with relief that he quite forgot he had sworn to give up Nur, give up the house in Old Delhi, give up the entire idea of the interview and the memoirs and the recording in exchange for the calm and safety of his old uneventful non-existence.

  ‘Since you are incapable,’ said Siddiqui cruelly, ‘I will have to, won’t I?’ He turned away from the abject creature at his feet and looked over his shoulder at the house, the terrace. Out there, Chotu and his friends were laughing and singing something in chorus. Siddiqui smiled with a little tremor of his lips. ‘You had better go, you had better leave it to me and go,’ he said and shoving Deven aside with his knee, he turned and went briskly, almost running, towards the house where his own private Eden was being staged.

  Later Deven could not understand how it had all come about – how he, the central character in the whole affair, the protagonist of it (if Murad were to be disregarded), the one on whom depended the entire matter of the interview, the recording and the memoirs, to which Siddiqui was no more than an accessory, having arrived on the scene accidentally and at a later stage, and in which he played a minor role – how he, in the course of that evening, had relinquished his own authority and surrendered it to Siddiqui who now emerged the stronger while he, Deven, had been brought to his knees, abject and babbling in his helplessness. How?

  What had Siddiqui and Chotu given him to drink that had brought him down to such a despicable level? He suspected the drink because his mental misery was accompanied by a physical wretchedness – he now spent his time running to the lavatory at the end of the courtyard, doubled up in pain, and emerging with his white face glistening with perspiration.

  Yet, when Sarla gave him some herbal tea to drink and went off to fetch some powders from the homoeopath in the bazaar, he had only to take a sip of the hot, spiced and aromatic infusion to know it was not the food or drink or even anything malevolent about Siddiqui, but only his own panic. Shaken by it as by a physical disorder, he could not even control his body any longer. How did others control their lives, manage and organize and arrange and even succeed? He was still doubled over by the table, taking small sips of the tea and trying to keep his hands away from the packet of cigarettes that lay on the table, when his son brought him a yellow envelope. It was a telegram and he opened it with nervous fingers.

  ‘Inform immediately when recording will begin and transcript sent to Awaaz office stop entire issue held up on account of delay stop explanation demanded Murad.’

  He crumpled it up and threw it across the table but so weakly that it did not fall off but lay there in full view. To get away from it he had to leave the house.

  He was standing outside the canteen door and feeling in his pocket for some change when he heard Siddiqui calling him. He went up slowly, trying to compose himself as he did so, very conscious of the dignity he needed to assemble for this encounter. Siddiqui gave him a cold smile and said, ‘It’s done. You are a lucky chap, Deven, I’ve noticed how things come your way while the rest of us have to go out and work for them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Deven asked bleakly, certain he was being mocked. All his life he had never even glimpsed the beautiful face of the goddess of Luck. Sarla regularly performed puja before a tinted oleograph of the goddess Lakshmi that hung in the corner by her dressing table, offering it flowers, incense and candles, but the flat pink face of the deity in the blue sari never responded. Neither he nor Sarla had ever had a smile from her in return.

  ‘I mean, the
registrar has come to your rescue again. I spent the whole afternoon with him yesterday, you know – why don’t you come and have a cup of coffee with me and I’ll tell you all about it.’

  He did. It seemed that Siddiqui had called on the registrar and by talking of their college days in Lucknow and by recalling all the prizes Rai had won in cricket and tennis had put him in such an excellent frame of mind that when it was explained to him that the money sanctioned by the Principal for the tape recorder was not sufficient to cover the entire project and that more funds were required, the registrar promised to forward their case and see that it was dealt with ‘sympathetically’.

  ‘And what is more, he has,’ Siddiqui exclaimed, once more the bright bird who did no one any harm. He was chuckling with pride and delight.

  Deven stared open-mouthed. He could not see why anyone should help him. He no longer knew if he ought to be – or even if he wanted to be – helped. Were these people really helping him to succeed in a unique and wonderful enterprise or simply locking him up more and more firmly in a barred trap? And was the trap set by Murad, by Siddiqui, or by Nur and his wives? All he knew was that he who had set out to hunt Nur down was being hunted down himself, the prey.

  ‘Can’t you look more pleased? You wanted money to pay Nur for the recitation and the Principal has even sanctioned that. Actually it is money presented to the library by a benefactor – one Lala Bhagwan Das – but it has not yet been used, so can be spent on the recording since the tapes will eventually be placed in the library as a nucleus of a future collection. The librarian objected at first that since the tape would be of benefit only to the Urdu department, it was not fair to deprive the other departments of their share of the library funds. But of course that is absurd because what good are books on bridge-building, agronomy and chemistry to Urdu students? Also, if he starts this library of tapes, he can encourage other departments to take up audio-visual methods of teaching. So the librarian has been persuaded and the Principal has agreed to release funds for payment to Nur for the recording. You are to go to the registrar’s office and collect them – and then off to Delhi again, eh, Deven-bhai? Your luck is too good, my friend, too good,’ hooted Siddiqui, and burst out laughing at the baffled expression on Deven’s face.

  There were still two obstacles to be cleared before he could begin to move towards Nur, poetry, success and immortality. They lay before him like two heaps of debris, of rubbish piled up in the way, and he knew he would have to tackle them before he could proceed.

  One was the interview with the head of the Hindi department, a small vicious ferret of a man called Trivedi who had long ago published a few short stories in a women’s magazine now defunct and which no one remembered, and had been teaching at the Mirpore college since long before Deven joined. He looked at everyone with the same expression of manic hatred and as if he were calculating the right time to dart out and bite. Deven had faced it so often, he had even come to expect it, and merely hunched his shoulders a little as he mumbled his request for a week’s leave.

  As was expected, Trivedi bawled, ‘A week’s leave? Just before the end of term? What for? Why can’t you wait till college closes? Two months are not enough for you? Is there no limit to young men’s laziness these days? What sort of example is this to your students? Are they also to be let off a week early?’

  Deven stood his ground – being firmly seated on a chair across the desk from Trivedi and with his hands clutching the edges of it helped him to do so – and mumbled a long incoherent explanation while Trivedi pulled dreadful faces, like an actor practising the rudra rasa, the furious temper – opening his mouth, baring his teeth, narrowing his eyes, cupping his ear with one hand and scowling; his students found these a subject for hilarity but Deven’s risibility had long ago been numbed and paralysed.

  ‘Eh?’ Trivedi said at last. ‘An Urdu poet? His memoirs? His poetry? Tape recording?’ he screeched. ‘What are you talking about? Why can’t it wait? Why can’t it be done in the summer vacation?’

  ‘Sir, many other people are involved. The publication of the journal is being held up. Nur Sahib himself is eager to begin before the heat grows worse as he is in poor health. His wife is needing the money for the household, sir. And the – the other wife who was ill and is beginning to recover and may refuse to let him do the recording if she hears about it –’

  ‘What? What? What?’ sputtered Trivedi, shaking his pen and making large drops of ink fly from it across the desk. ‘What rubbish is all this? Have you gone mad? All of you? I always thought a mad dog must have run through this college, biting staff and students alike – you are all mad, rabid, that’s what it is,’ he foamed at the lips. ‘You had better get out of here –’

  ‘On leave, sir?’ cried Deven, jumping up and trying not to get any more blobs of ink on the front of his white bush-shirt. ‘One week’s leave, sir?’

  ‘One week? It would be a relief to me if it were one year,’ bawled Trivedi, ‘and I did not need to see your stupid mug again. I’ll have you demoted, Sharma – I’ll see to it you don’t get your confirmation. I’ll get you transferred to your beloved Urdu department. I won’t have Muslim toadies in my department, you’ll ruin my boys with your Muslim ideas, your Urdu language. I’ll complain to the Principal, I’ll warn the RSS, you are a traitor –’

  ‘Yes, sir, I’ll go, sir,’ Deven said and left just in time to avoid the inkpot that was hurled at the door, hit the wall and smashed in an explosion of black ink. Being treated like a schoolboy made him feel like one. He gave a little smothered laugh.

  Dealing with Sarla was a different matter. Sarla never lifted her voice in his presence – countless generations of Hindu womanhood behind her stood in her way, preventing her from displaying open rebellion. Deven knew she would scream and abuse only when she was safely out of the way, preferably in the kitchen, her own domain. Her other method of defence was to go into the bedroom and snivel, refusing to speak at all, inciting their child to wail in sympathy.

  Which would it be this time, Deven wondered, as he informed her, while eating his breakfast of last night’s cold, dry puris and a cup of tea, that he would not be accompanying her to her parents’ home after all, that he was going to be too busy to join her there later, that in fact he was starting the vacation a week early in order to take up some extra work that had come his way in Delhi, and that it would suit him if she took the boy and departed for her parents’ home a week earlier, in which case he would see her off before leaving himself.

  Sarla had not had so many words addressed to her for a long time. She stood open-mouthed at his side, holding a bowl of yoghurt aslant so that it dripped on to the table and splashed.

  ‘Take that away, see what you’ve done,’ Deven told her sharply.

  She moved a step backwards. ‘And – and what am I to tell my parents? How am I to explain all this?’ she finally managed to say in a strangled voice.

  ‘Tell them what I’ve told you – that is the explanation,’ he said, glaring at her.

  ‘They – they will ask where you are, what you are doing,’ she stammered.

  ‘How can I tell them? They are illiterate, how can they understand my work?’ Deven yelled and rose from the table, pushing away the metal tray with a new forcefulness. He was impatient now, a man short of time, needing to hurry. When would he clear all these heaps of rubbish out of the way and see the open stretch of road before him? And where would it lead him – to yet another pile of refuse, or to the clear shining horizon at last?

  Chapter 9

  THEN BEGAN A period when events moved at such a pace and images and sensations packed themselves in so closely that Deven quite lost the earlier vision of the shining horizon and the empty road, hurled as he was upon the flying horse of a merry-go-round that turned upon its axle with such rattling speed that he could decipher no one image, follow no single sequence and was merely aware of the rush of things as they sped by, now mounting by stages, now descending, in circles around him,
leaving him giddy, somewhat sick, and almost giggling with exhilaration.

  ‘So, Deven, at last you’ve arranged it,’ Murad said as he stuck his head in at the door with a cautious air. ‘No wonder you are grinning from ear to ear.’

  Deven snapped his teeth together. ‘No, I’m not,’ he muttered, also cautious.

  ‘You look as if you’ve just had twin sons, or published that rotten book of your poetry at last.’ Still standing outside with his hand on the doorpost, he wrinkled his large pock-marked nose so that the pock-marks all merged together into a dark scowl.

  ‘What is wrong, Murad?’ Deven asked nervously. ‘It is a big room, a quiet house. Nur’s begum arranged it, you know.’

  She had been waiting at the other side of the door when he timidly struck it with the palm of his hand. Opening it a crack, she had whispered in the exaggerated manner demanded of melodrama, ‘Have you brought it?’ and Deven had inserted the bulging envelope through the crack, proudly instructing her, ‘Count it – it’s all here.’ But she had only slipped it into her blouse, lifting her faded veil to do so and revealing the dyed hairs combed sparsely across a nearly bald scalp. She looked older and shabbier in the glare of the summer morning. She had hardly any teeth left and they were quite blackened. Shutting one eye, she pointed over his shoulder down the lane at one of the tall houses that backed on to it. Jerking her chin, she said, ‘There, the last one in the row, that pink house. Go in by the back door, the woman will meet you and take you to a room upstairs – I have arranged everything, she is known to me, an old friend. The room is at the top, quiet, with a separate entrance, and no connection with the rest of the house. It will be all right. Go and wait there and I will send Nur Sahib.’