In Custody

by Anita Desai

And that was how he had come to this pink house in the lane, so unusually quiet, pleasantly decorated, apparently deserted. To begin with, he had had a fright for the back door was guarded by a man who looked like a champion wrestler, black whorls of hair springing out of the openings of his red, gilt-buttoned shirt, gold studs in his ears, a large mouth swilling betel juice, and oil leaking out of his curly hair that glinted blue in the light. Deven had had to swallow the impulse to mumble, ‘Sorry, a mistake,’ and flee. Instead, he murmured Nur’s name, whereupon the man moved a step back and shouted to someone. A woman appeared – tall, surprisingly well-dressed in a flashy way, adorned with pearl rings and glass bangles, clothed in some light gauzy material that almost veiled her pock-marked complexion and heavily-powdered face. Lifting her hand to her forehead, she greeted him silently with no more than a twist of her lips over a piece of scented betel nut that she held between them, and then gave her permission for him to be led upstairs. He had asked for a minute, and gone out to whistle for Chiku, who sat morosely in a cycle rickshaw outside with the tape recording equipment on his knees, waiting sullenly in the heat. Deven had helped him to carry the various pieces of equipment up the tiled staircase which smelt unpleasantly of both urine and cheap perfume, to the top of the house, past doors hung with flowered curtains through which he glimpsed beds, sleeping figures, mirrors and toilet articles – but of course he did not stop to investigate. Chiku, on the other hand, mounted the stairs slowly, stopping before every door and staring in with open curiosity, his mouth slightly open, breathing heavily in his adenoidal way. Outside the doors were shoes, or empty glasses, littered trays. Was this a hotel? Deven gave a slight twitch of apprehension at the thought that there might be a bill to be paid.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ he snapped at Chiku, ‘we must have everything ready by the time Nur Sahib arrives – we can’t waste time – it is to be done in three days flat.’

  Three days.

  ‘How long will it take you, Deven-bhai?’ Murad asked, reflectively chewing a wad of paan while his eyes swivelled around, taking in the scene – the bolsters and cushions scattered on the mattress laid out with white sheets, the spittoon, the silver box of paan, the glasses and jars of water in one corner, the recording equipment piled in another, the garlanded oleograph of a shock-headed saint from the South hanging on the wall, beneath a tube of blue fluorescent lighting, and the idle figures seated on the mats, slouching or sprawling as they waited for the poet to make his appearance.

  Deven frowned a little, as though he had a slight headache. He did not care to answer. He could not. The days were slipping by like some kind of involuntary exudation, oozing past. He seemed to have no control over them, or what occurred during them. ‘This is not something that can be done to a timetable,’ he muttered and was enraged by the way Murad slowly nodded his head as though his suspicions had been confirmed. ‘Coming in?’ he asked testily.

  Murad gave a snort. ‘Don’t often come to such places,’ he leered. ‘Not in this quarter of the city anyway.’

  ‘Oh, what is your quarter then?’ Deven challenged him, infuriated at having his so painfully made arrangements derided.

  Murad looked momentarily surprised at such a show of spirit. ‘Well, my friend, I had no idea it was yours,’ he said, shifting the wad of betel leaves around his mouth and starting to chomp on them again.

  ‘It isn’t mine – it is Nur Sahib’s,’ said Deven defensively, ‘and we are occupying it only till the recording is done.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Murad, putting one foot into the room at last after having debated the matter for so long. He was dressed in white leggings and a loose kurta already mapped with perspiration. ‘That is just what I came to see – how it is getting on – so I can get an idea how long it will take.’

  Deven waved his hand with a fine carelessness he did not really feel. The gesture faded on the air from lack of conviction. ‘How long? What does it matter? Can a poet be pinned down by time? He can’t be expected to keep an eye on his watch, Murad-bhai – he is immortal and belongs to all time.’

  Murad made a disgusted face. ‘What’s the matter – are you drunk – at this time of the morning?’

  But Deven did not need to drink in order to feel this hazardous euphoria trickling through him – it was not drink that caused it, but Nur.

  To begin with, Nur had spoken only of drink and food. Tucking up his feet under him – the white corpse-like feet of the aged who walk little – he had chosen this as a topic of primary interest to the dismay of Deven who had just signalled to Chotu to set the machine going and begin the recording of Nur’s imperishable words.

  ‘The biryani will have to be sent for from the bazaar, Deven Sahib,’ he said at once, panting as though he had hurried here to give instructions. ‘I would like a good mutton biryani from Jama Masjid for my lunch. There is a man, a refugee from Peshawar, at the back of the mosque, who makes it the way I like – with real saffron, the kind that gives rice not only colour but fragrance as well, and of course the rice must be the long fine kind from Dehra Dun. Do you know, he left Peshawar and came here because he could no longer get that kind of rice there? He said he couldn’t make his biryani without it so he came and settled down here. A good neighbour for me to have. If you send someone to him with my order, he will have it sent here – he knows this house,’ he beamed at his court, in the best of humours. ‘I have often had it sent,’ he laughed in happy reminiscence. ‘At the end of a long night, dawn breaking over the mosque, I would go out on the balcony and shout – it was a race between me and the mullah, who called first, I for my biryani or he for the first prayers of the day. Oh how I would shout, the whole house would wake up, bibi-ji would be so angry and come and scold,’ he waggled his toes with delight, like pale worms weaving out of the grave, ‘but she would send the boy to fetch it and I would sit down and eat it while others were unrolling their mats and preparing to pray, infidel that I was in my youth. Ah, that biryani, that aroma of rice and saffron at dawn, it made me remember Allah more acutely than the mullah’s call could.’

  And Deven, who had been frantically gesturing and grimacing at Chiku across the room to halt the machine, dropped his head and listened, certain that now Nur would begin to quote from his poetry, possibly the verse sequence about his profligate youth, the one that played on the many words for wine, goblet, and server of wine …

  But Nur had moved up another rung of the ladder to the subject of drink. ‘There are those who think whisky is the only drink to be had with biryani – so Rafiq used to think who so often shared that biryani at dawn with me – but I have found,’ and his voice dropped to the dark brown level of profundity, ‘I have found that rum will do as well, if not better,’ and he turned towards Deven and fixed him with a sly look. ‘So a bottle of rum you must get, Deven-bhai, if I am to eat your biryani – it cannot be washed down with anything less, not Khan Sahib’s biryani. What do you say?’ he turned to the young men who had accompanied him up the stairs to this room – the same rabble that surrounded him every night on the terrace – and rolled his eyes at them so comically that they shouted with delighted approval. To turn him senile seemed their sole object, Deven bitterly noted.

  ‘Rum!’ they called, while others howled ‘Biryani!’ and Deven, flustered, looked around to see who would finance all this festivity. They all looked back at him in smiling anticipation.

  He had then had to make his panicky appeal to Murad. ‘Murad,’ he had pleaded on the telephone, ‘without cash, I am sunk. All the college gave me, I handed over to his begum. It is payment to Nur. I had not – not expected all these expenses, these incidentals. I can’t go back to my college – there are limits, after all – but without cash, I can’t get Nur to perform even for five minutes.’

  Murad made exasperated sounds at the other end of the line. Was he angry? Amused?

  Deven was dancing from foot to foot in agony. The chemist from whose shop he had telephoned watched him with hostile suspicion, ignoring a pl
eading customer at the counter. Deven had told him he had to phone for news of a patient who was in hospital and required some rare and costly drugs. He dropped his voice to a murmur. ‘Bring some cash. After all, it is for your magazine. You must have some funds. I tell you, it will all be useless, this setting up of all these arrangements, if I don’t have cash for – for incidentals. At least provide me with enough to feed him his meals, and some drink, that’s all.’

  He had been able to elicit no more than a few grunts from Murad who seemed not to like to communicate on the telephone and made no response apart from these stifled sounds. But he had come next morning after all and stuck his head in at the door with the look of a doubtful gargoyle, and when Deven asked, ‘Have you brought –?’ he gave a grim nod or two and said menacingly, ‘Yes, but I am going to cut it from your fee, you know,’ and then surveyed the room in order to make an estimate for himself.

  The feasting and drinking did not continue without pause, blessedly: Nur, at his age and in his poor state of health, could not sustain his expensive whims. The boy servant who accompanied him to the house every morning saw to it that he was indulged as befitted his status, but not beyond that.

  To Deven’s relief, there were times when, without undue prompting, he fished out his metal-rimmed spectacles, searched for the school copybooks till they were brought to him, cleared his throat with painful exaggeration and then read his verse to a rapt audience. Then Deven beckoned joyfully across the room to Chiku, like a trainer flagging off a race, and Chiku would stir himself and begin to fiddle and twiddle and carry long wires and short microphones about the room, switching the sullen frown on his face to a self-important one. He would raise his hand imperiously, demanding that the electric fans be switched off as they were making a disturbing noise or the sparrows chased out of the room. Nur would be irritated beyond endurance by such interruptions and begin a peroration upon the evils of technology – ‘You say it has freed him from the law of gravity and sent him into space – but in what kind of vehicle? A vehicle that is made of steel is only a steel trap. Man is not set free by the aeroplane, he is trapped in it. And how is the soul of a poet to rise and float when you keep trying to catch it in a box between your knees?’ – so that Deven would be obliged to offer him a drink and make a signal to switch on the fans in an effort to cool him down. Grumpily he would agree to forgive them and recite a verse sequence he had written in his youth on flight and that was familiar to his audience, easy and loved.

  Ravished by its sweet tones and murmured sibilances, Deven would sink back on his heels and shut his eyes, nodding gently in agreement with the poet’s sentiments, and fail to notice that Chiku was still fumbling with the machine and not taking any of it down. When his clumsy impatient fingers had finally put things in working order and switched on the machine, it was too late: Nur had come to the end of his recitation and was reminiscing about his pigeons and the races and combats and competitions he had held with them on the roof, about pet fantails and prize tumblers, failing to notice how his audience yawned and muttered and winked.

  When he did notice at last, he turned melancholy. ‘None of you know this royal game of course. In the old days the sky of Delhi was like a shining tapestry – not the thick quilt of smoke and fumes it is now. The air was as brilliant as a piece of silk, the sun sparkled upon it like a huge gold pendant fashioned by a jeweller, and when the fantails flew towards it, they turned into gems and dazzled the eyes. Even with only two rupees in my pocket, I was a rich man then,’ he mused, and related a long, involved tale about a neighbour, a greedy rogue, who had coveted them and tried to rob him of them. He began to curse as if the theft had taken place that very morning instead of fifty years ago.

  Deven realized belatedly that he was now speaking in prose, of the commonest variety, and tried to convey to the oblivious Chiku that the recorder might be switched off, but Chiku appeared to be dozing and every now and again Nur did throw in a line or two of verse, like a well-polished blade of steel cutting through the tangled thread of his reminiscences, making it seem worthwhile to keep on recording. It could all be edited later, Deven thought hazily, and gave himself up to trying to follow Nur’s long and intricately technical description of the training of a champion; he had never imagined there was so much to the hobby of a pigeon fancier and wondered what bearing, if any, such sport could have upon the art of poetry. He therefore listened intently but the others made it obvious that they did not.

  Making a face, Nur wound up, ‘Useless to talk about it – it is like pulling out the tail feathers of my beauties to show you and leaving my pets naked. Urggh,’ he exploded, waving his hands before his face as if to blot out the view. ‘I can only bear the sight of you if you give me some rum – no, plenty of rum because there are plenty of you.’

  They laughed indulgently and filled his glass from the bottle Murad had brought with him and planted behind the earthenware jar of water provided by the establishment. Then of course the others wanted a drink too and there was much running up and down the stairs, fetching and carrying and passing around. Only when a glass was passed to Chiku was it discovered that he was fast asleep, the tape recorder still on, doggedly recording all Nur’s abuses and expletives. Horrified, Deven snatched back the glass and hissed at him, ‘Brought you here to drink and sleep, did I? Can’t even stay awake on the job.’

  ‘What sort of job is this that goes on for twelve hours a day?’ grumbled Chiku, rubbing his bleary eyes and snuffling.

  ‘Let him have a drink, poor lad,’ said his neighbour, an obese and jovial fellow who was looking on, amused: to him Chiku was an addition to the entertaining spectacle, the tamasha.

  ‘No,’ hissed Deven, ‘he is not to have a drink,’ and sat down beside him to make certain he did not: the boy would have to be prodded into doing his work, manually.

  It was not Chiku’s ineptitude alone that threatened to sabotage Deven’s painstakingly constructed project: all the idle men, buffoonish and heedless, attempted ceaselessly to turn it all into a drinking party, edging closer to the poet, coming between him and Deven with their proffered bottles and glasses. Time and again they would deflect him from any attempt to get work done and induce him to speak on matters Deven felt could not be of interest to academic circles. Yet the matter was not a simple one of separating prose from poetry, life from art: at times, when Nur was relating a story of his youth, of his education, his travels, his loves or quarrels, it would occur to Deven that this had some bearing on his art after all. Jerking into action, he would urge Chiku to switch on the machine only to have Nur come to the end of his tale, abruptly. A pause would follow, not exactly of silence because outside the traffic blared and bleated and in the room the electric fans clicked wildly and a nestful of sparrows in the skylight flapped and twittered, but certainly of silence from the poet.

  Frantic to make him resume his monologue now that the tape was expensively whirling, Deven once forgot himself so far as to lean forward and murmur with the earnestness of an interviewer, ‘And, sir, were you writing any poetry at the time? Do you have any verse belonging to that period?’

  The effect was disastrous. Nur, in the act of reaching out for a drink, froze. ‘Poetry?’ he shot at Deven, harshly. ‘Poetry of the period? Do you think a poet can be ground between stones, and bled, in order to produce poetry – for you? You think you can switch on that mincing machine, and I will instantly produce for you a length of raw, red minced meat that you can carry off to your professors to eat?’

  Deven hung his head, shamed. Chiku sniggered. The tape whirred, recording adversity and humiliation.

  Yet there were times when Nur would quietly, soberly recite his verse without any cajoling or prompting at all from Deven. This happened occasionally early in the mornings, as soon as he arrived, when he was fresh enough to be brisk and attentive to his business, and before the waves of dissolute idleness sent out by his aimlessly indolent audience reached him and overcame him. Settling his spectacles upon his n
ose with a fine scholarly gesture, he would open out one of his child’s copy books on his knees and begin to read in a voice that was sing-song yet powerful, breaking off to give Deven the background for the writing of a verse or point out the similarity of his ideas and images to those of the poets he chiefly admired. To Deven’s astonishment, these turned out to be Byron and Shelley from whom he liked to quote frequently and fulsomely.

  ‘O wild west wind, thou breath of autumn’s being,’ he would intone in a voice like an approaching thunderstorm that made even Chiku look up and pay attention, or more gently and trippingly, with affection:

  ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit,

  Bird thou never wert …’

  Once he broke off the recitation of his own well-known verse sequence on the enticements and frailties of women that the world knew as the Rose poems, to ask Deven for his own preferences in poetry and while Deven mumbled and cast around wildly for one title or one line that would save him from giving the impression of total illiteracy, he raised his hand and said, ‘Listen! Listen to the greatest lines that were ever written by anyone,’ and intoned dramatically:

  ‘O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

  Alone and palely loitering?’

  The recitation was so long, so filled with finely timed pauses and gestures, that Deven had begun to wonder if it did not have some bearing upon that aspect of the poet’s private life into which he had unwillingly had such a terrifying glimpse, and had even begun to see certain psychological connections before he realized that Nur was just winding up a third rendering of what was evidently his favourite poem. Fortunately, a hoarse cough overcame him at this point and while the servant boy ministered to his throat with a glass of suitably warmed water, Deven turned aside discreetly to suggest to Chiku in a whisper that the second and third rendition could be erased from the tape, only to discover that Chiku, once again napping, had forgotten to turn the tape in time so that there were three renditions of Keats’s long narrative but not a line left of Nur’s own poem that he had recited later. Deven felt a crimson title rising inside his ear and threatening to implode within his head.