In Custody

by Anita Desai

  What saved Chiku – apart from the need to keep this amateurish bumbling disguised from Nur himself – was a commotion that broke out downstairs just then, such screams and yells and sounds of beating that not only could Deven not get beyond a choked exclamation but even Nur had to refrain from reciting, for a fourth time, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. The quarrelling voices were clearly female, their tongues like whips used with practised artistry. Someone appeared to be resisting eviction, then a man’s footsteps were heard thumping purposefully up the stairs, the screams became shriller, the sounds of beating more violent and eventually there followed a sound like the muffled roll of a body falling heavily down the stairs, to which everyone listened with their mouths open.

  Deven got to his feet and went towards the door, slightly shaking at the prospect of getting involved in a scene of violence but feeling he owed it to Nur to protect him from such vulgarity. He did not go out, however, because everyone called him back, quite jovially. ‘Let them be, bhai, such things go on here all the time,’ said a young man with a mouthful of paan, in a squeezed kind of giggle, ‘only not usually in the day. Someone has overstayed.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Deven asked him sharply; he particularly disliked this character who came dressed in clothes so loose as to be almost indecent and sat against the wall with his legs stretched out casually so that his dirty bare feet pointed at Nur, insultingly. ‘How do you know?’ he repeated.

  Everyone laughed but no one answered. Nur, who had been listening with his head to one side like a canny old bird’s, winked and began to tell of a brawl in which he had been implicated. The men laughed so much that the story became too garbled and broken for Deven to follow.

  That evening, when Nur had left and the others were collecting their belongings and preparing to follow him down the stairs, the young man in the loose clothes and with the dirty feet sidled up to Deven and said, ‘Do you know if he comes here to do the recording for you or is he hunting for a new wife?’ Deven stared, stupefied. ‘Didn’t you know,’ the man went on, nudging him in the ribs with a right-angled elbow, ‘don’t tell me you didn’t know – he found his second wife here, in this brothel. Who knows, he may be looking for a third!’ Doubling up with laughter, he rolled away before Deven could catch him by his throat and silence him. Looking down at his helplessly shaking hands, Deven felt it all beyond his grasp, his control. In taking Nur’s art into his hands, did he have to gather up the stained, soiled, discoloured and odorous rags of his life as well? He knew he could not.

  Chiku, watching, broke in upon his thoughts by asking, ‘D’you want me to play the day’s recording for you? Shall I play the tape?’

  Deven felt he could not bear that. ‘Pack it up. Put it away,’ he said.

  Thereafter he entered the house with daily trepidation. Even the room at the top no longer seemed private, an enclosed world. Although the house backed on to a quiet lane, it opened out on to one of the main streets of the bazaar and the cacophony of traffic pouring up and down it rose and entered the room through all the open doors and windows. Quite often there was a traffic jam when the angry impatient blaring of horns and bicycle bells grew so frantic that all conversation and recitation had to be suspended, making Nur’s face retreat into the shadow of a frown.

  There was an occasion when an overloaded lorry backed into the lane, then could not get out again. A crowd collected to give advice which the driver resented and a vociferous altercation broke out. Forgetting Nur, every man in the room went out on to the balcony to watch. Several of the women of the house emerged on to their balconies below, and the young men, instead of looking studiously away as Deven did, leant over the rails to whistle and wave to them. When he tried to pull them away and force them inside, saying ‘Nur Sahib is waiting,’ they shook him off, and one even snarled, ‘Want your milk teeth knocked out, puppy?’ The last pretence of the gathering in this room being a mehfil, a tribute to the poet, collapsed.

  Nur, however, took the interruption as an occasion to give the servant boy instructions for a meal of kebabs and parathas that he wished especially prepared at his favourite restaurant. Deven heard him say, ‘Go, collect the money from Deven Sahib and then go and give the order.’ Deven could not refuse to pay but, turning upon Chiku and seeing that the brainless boy was recording Nur’s involved instructions about the kebabs, cried ‘Switch that off, can’t you? Is this something to be recorded?’

  Nur drew himself back and glared briefly at Deven, then said to the young men who were beginning to return to the room from the balcony, the successful exit of the lorry having caused the lower balconies to empty, ‘Poets, you know, are not supposed to live on meat and bread. They are expected to be able to survive on verse,’ and just as Chiku removed the microphone from before him and began to put away his equipment, he half-rose upon his haunches like some aged lion goaded into protest, and thundered out one of his earliest, almost forgotten poems that had once caused the literary world to be shaken like a straw stack in a storm, so livid and loud was it with dissent.

  When he stopped, Deven pounced upon Chiku, almost shaking him by the shoulders, and asked, ‘Did you record that? Did you?’

  Chiku eyed him balefully. ‘Just after you told me to stop?’ he asked, then refused to pay Deven any more attention and went into a corner and sulked while Nur sat back in his usual reclining posture and accepted the congratulations and adulation of his listeners.

  That evening, when the crowd was dispersing noisily down the stairs in the wake of the departing Nur, Deven went across to Chiku to warn him to perform his duties with some measure of human intelligence, whereupon Chiku turned upon him and gave in his notice.

  ‘My sister’s marriage is next week and I must go. I am the only brother. My parents have left all the arrangements to me. I have no time for all this poetry-shoetry. You can get some technician to finish the job. Please give me my pay – I am leaving.’

  ‘You cannot have your pay unless you finish the job,’ Deven heard his voice scream shrilly. No one had told him that the boy had to be paid. He had assumed his services were thrown in with the rotten secondhand tape recorder.

  ‘Our contract was for three days – and it is now three weeks, nearly,’ Chiku retorted.

  ‘There was no contract.’

  ‘I will speak to my uncle. I will go to Murad Sahib.’

  ‘There’s no need. Stay here and finish the job and you will get paid.’ Deven fought to control his voice and subdue it to its normal pitch. He turned around to leave before the boy could answer but at the door could not refrain from adding, bitterly, ‘Chiku! What kind of name is Chiku? Couldn’t your parents even find you a proper name?’

  Down in the street he telephoned Murad from the chemist’s shop to complain about Chiku. Murad was not sympathetic. ‘We told the boy it would take a week at the most,’ he reminded Deven, ‘and it is now three weeks.’

  ‘Three weeks?’ Deven was alarmed to have Chiku’s charge confirmed.

  ‘What is the matter with you, can’t you count? Poetry gone to your head, has it – Nur’s “timeless, immortal” poetry? Of course it is three weeks, and what the bills are mounting up to, God only knows. Of course you poet types don’t think about such matters. But now that I am reminding you, will you please wind up your circus, send your star performer home, transcribe that interview and bring it to me so that I can finally send this issue to the press? You are holding it up. My friend Sahay reserved this week to do my printing, he refused three other jobs to take up mine, he is also losing money, we are all losing money.’

  ‘Murad, I assure you I am also the loser in this. I am gaining nothing by drawing it out so long –’

  ‘Then will you please cut it short? I want the interview latest by the end of the week, hear?’

  But Deven, as he left the chemist’s shop, still felt the vibrations from Nur’s majestic roars in his ears and felt loath to put an end to the recording when it seemed Nur had just roused himself to begin rec
iting in the manner of his fabled youth. Deven felt as if he had at last netted some of the treasure out of that turbid, churned-up ocean he had been drearily dredging. Now he needed only to somehow direct Nur into recollecting the years when he had first begun to write and attract the attention of connoisseurs and patrons of Urdu poetry; he needed his reminiscences of the literary world of that period, of the poets and writers who had been his friends and enemies, and of course the work he had done in those heady days.

  Given a little more time – another week, or perhaps two – he would have not only a brilliant recording with which to dazzle the Urdu department of his college – and, who knew, such distinguished Muslim institutions as the Jamia Millia and the Aligarh University as well – but enough material for an interview and perhaps even a slim volume of memoirs. He could almost see it lying between his hands – he would have it bound in a soft, sky-blue cover like a sheet of the sky in which Nur’s pigeons flew, and its title inscribed in the poet’s hand, distinctively.

  What he was actually gazing at was the stationery shop in front of which he had stopped to study the shelves filled with copybooks of the kind Nur used for his writing, reams of foolscap, school textbooks, geometry boxes and pencils, calendars and coloured maps, and it struck him that if he bought some paper and took down Nur’s words, he would not be wholly reliant on the idiot Chiku and his maddening machine. Then nothing would be lost. Nothing should be lost.

  He pulled out some money from his pocket to pay for the copybooks and was dismayed to find that he did not have enough: he could not afford even the equipment of a small schoolchild. ‘Just one, please, not three,’ he mumbled shamefacedly and tried not to notice the look of contempt on the shopkeeper’s face as he reduced his purchases.

  He was grateful, after the ignominies of the day, to creep off to the small flat in Darya Ganj he had chosen to shelter in rather than go to his mother’s family home and ask for accommodation. He imagined that must still stand where it had stood in his childhood, inhabited perhaps by a new generation of relations, but a reluctance to resume his relationship with them had made him turn into a dark lane remembered from his schooldays and find his way up the stairs to an old schoolfriend’s home instead. Raj, born with one leg shorter than the other, had been the least intimidating of his schoolfellows. He had lost touch with him after he went to live in Mirpore. Then he had received, to his great astonishment, a postcard from Cairo informing him that Raj was teaching in a school there. The exotic notion of his handicapped friend fetching up in Egypt had struck him speechless; he had not even replied. Now, standing in the doorway and asking the gently smiling old aunt if Raj had returned, he received no answer. Yet she must have recognized him for she beckoned him in with a calm welcome that old ladies do not generally proffer to strangers ringing their doorbells at night. Stepping in, he had seen that she was just serving a meal to a spectacled and skeletal male guest whose sparse beard made him look unwashed and who was seated cross-legged on the kitchen floor. Did she actually recognize him, the schoolboy Deven, or did she take him for another beggar who must be fed in accordance with the rules of piety? She wore not only the widow’s white clothes but also the chain of wooden beads and other such insignia of the initiated. It was with the gestures of a trained devotee that she bade him sit down and accept the tray she handed him. Then she proceeded to fill it with a gratifying variety of foods. When he politely protested, the spectacled man who was shovelling in rice and pickles by the handfuls, told him, ‘Eat, eat. She enjoys when you eat,’ so he did. Later, when she had removed the trays and brought them betel leaves and nuts, he tried to find out if she really remembered him by talking about Raj and asking questions about him, but it was always the guest who replied. He seemed to know the family well. His intimacy with them went so far that it was he who suggested Deven spend the night there. ‘You are from outside Delhi? You are needing a room? Then stay here – lie there in the veranda and sleep. No need to go to a hotel when Sister is here to look after us,’ he guffawed, throwing her a sly look. ‘Na, Sister-ji?’ he asked, and since she made no reply beyond nodding, Deven gratefully accepted the offer, thinking it was for three nights at the most and he would write and tell Raj about it, expressing his gratitude.

  No one objected to his extending his stay. The old lady continued to smile piously while she served him his meals. The spectacled man grew more loquacious however and Deven learnt that he was not a relation at all but the tailor who worked in a small shop under the staircase and had moved in after Raj left ‘to give Sister-ji some protection, na’. He had his own corner in the flat where he kept his mat and his belongings but the stuffs and materials of his trade spread the starchy, chemical smell of unwashed textiles through the whole flat and snippets and bits of thread and fluff floated around indiscriminately even though his workplace was downstairs, at street level. Deven felt vaguely uneasy to be sharing the restricted sleeping space with a tailor, a man of the working class, but could hardly object or permit himself to act as a superior when their hostess treated them with such benignly equal hospitality. In fact, the tailor’s position appeared to be one of slightly greater privilege, and Deven soon found out the reason. The old lady’s piety consisted not only in the feeding of whoever came to be fed – large numbers of sadhus in white or saffron, carrying begging bowls came regularly for the purpose of helping her to fulfil her earthly duties and earn her merit in her next incarnation – but also in performing long and elaborate pujas at dawn and dusk. Possibly at other hours as well but it was these occasions that Deven witnessed. She had one wall of the kitchen turned into a veritable temple, with tinted oleographs of saints, plaster images of her pet gods, incense-holders, fresh garlands, saucers of offerings and lamps ranged along the shelves and in the niches. While she sat, or stood, or bowed, and tended this family of domesticated gods, the tailor played the role she had assigned him – of a devotional singer. It turned out that he had a fine tenor voice quite unexpected in a man so lacking in physical comeliness, and a huge repertoire of devotional songs that he rendered with great emotion. The old lady smiled in appreciation, and after lighting all her lamps and joss-sticks and making all the offerings for the day – or hour – sat down cross-legged beside him and beat time with a pair of tin cymbals, clashing them with intense passion, often allowing the veil to slip off her head and display its pale, bony nakedness, the smoothness contrasting starkly with the withered and drooping skin of her face, while he played on a small drum held between his knees and made the walls resound with the full-throated abandon of his voice in a joyous hymn.

  ‘I shall make my body into a clay lamp,

  My soul its wick and my blood oil.

  Ah, the light of this lamp would reveal

  The face of my Beloved to me.’

  If Deven came upon them during such a performance, there was nothing for it but to retire to a corner and sit down quietly and wait till it was over when Raj’s aunt would get to her feet with a sigh, the only time she appeared a little sad, and go off to cook them a meal, and the tailor would put away his drum, take out a packet of cigarettes and tell Deven about his latest customers and their whims.

  ‘She came in a long, long car with a pile like this – this – of materials. “There is a wedding in the family, I need thirty blouses by Sunday,” she says. O Ma, by Sunday? I say, how can I, a poor tailor who has no assistant, and bad eyes also, only just recovering from conjunctivitis? I always say that to frighten people away if I can’t take on more work, but nothing frightens her away. She is counting out the materials – two cambric, two two-by-two, two rubia voile, two satin silk, two Benares brocade – and each one a different style. What styles, I tell you, even a courtesan of the Moghul courts never thought up any like them – here an opening, there an opening, what is there left for me to sew, only tapes to hold them together?’ he laughed through his sharpened, blackened teeth, making a sound like a whistle. Then he exhaled, ‘O Ma-a. Let more such fish fall into my net and I will be
able to move out of Darya Ganj. I know a place in Tolstoy Lane where they are wanting a ladies’ tailor. If I can become a full partner there, O Ma-a!’

  This Deven had to endure if he wished to eat and sleep in the flat and it was so very convenient being within walking distance of the lane where he worked all day, and a place moreover where no one questioned him about his family, job, occupation or anything at all, that he did so patiently. He sometimes felt a twinge of guilt at the expense he was causing the polite and hospitable old woman, but when he once stopped in the market on the way to buy her a basket of fruit, he found that she offered it to the gods instead of eating it and after that distributed it all amongst a band of monks who had come visiting, so he did not buy her any more: he had a fastidious dislike of the monks’ soft flesh, unmarked by toil. Lowering himself on to the mat in the veranda that night, he was not able to relax and stretch out and give himself up to what was surely well-earned rest. He felt uneasy at having been so forcefully reminded that day of his initial three days’ stay having stretched to three weeks. What must that insufferably loquacious tailor take him for – just another leech? In his role as the widow’s protector, might he not one day throw Deven out if he suspected him of having sponged for too long? Crossing his arms under his head, he listened to the tailor’s lascivious monologue about a new customer, a foreign woman, fair, droning on in his corner like a trapped mosquito, and tried to discover in him some sign of a poisonous sting. But the tailor seemed as pleased as ever to have a captive listener.

  Through the veranda railing he could see the night sky lit to a chemical incandescence by the violet street lamps that shone into the veranda as well as the small park across the road. So late at night, the park was deserted, considered unsafe by the residents of this backwater of Darya Ganj, although by day it was filled with old men sitting in the shade, errand boys stopping for a game of marbles or a quiet smoke, and furtive couples behind the bushes. Once it had also held Deven and Raj, copying down each other’s homework or playing a desultory game of cricket – Raj with his shorter leg in a clumsy orthopaedic boot and Deven trying to hide away from Murad’s more demanding friendship and avoid going home to his own family. Even then he had always been running away from someone.