by Anita Desai
Turning on to his side he tried to give the tailor an indication of his wish to sleep. He wanted silence in which to plot his strategy for the recording next morning. How was he to bring it to a fully rounded, beautifully completed and satisfying end? That, he sighed, was the question, and it could not be evaded much longer.
Next morning he was determined to begin the proceedings by opening out the copybook he had purchased and explaining to Nur that he would be taking dictation, but that day Nur had lost all interest in reciting his verse, said he had slept badly and was tired and asked some of his young admirers to recite theirs instead. Deven tried to suppress his dismay and listen patiently, but he could scarcely restrain the trembling of his lips as he sat with his head sunk below his shoulders, plucking at loose bits of cotton in the mat and trying to shut out the sound of some lowly mediocrity’s voice reciting banalities. Chiku pointedly leant over and asked, ‘You had better tell me – do you want me to record everything that is recited here?’
Deven was still trying to control himself before he answered the insolent fool when Nur, who had over-heard, turned to them and said, looking directly into Deven’s face, ‘Has this dilemma come to you too then? This sifting and selecting from the debris of our lives? It can’t be done, my friend, it can’t be done, I learnt that long ago,’ and he broke into a verse that Deven had never heard before, that no one in the room had heard before, that entered into their midst like some visitor from another element, silencing them all with wonder. Nur looked about him with a faint, pleased smile, as if amused and gratified by the effect it had on them. Then he spoke the few lines again slowly and this time Deven had the presence of mind to open up his copybook and start scribbling them down. ‘Here, give it to me,’ Nur told him, seeing what he was about, and seizing the book from him, he wrote in it himself, holding it on his knee, stopping to lick the pencil now and then, peering at the letters with his cataract-filled eyes, while around him the babble broke out again as his audience excitedly discussed this new verse of his, praising it in such exaggerated terms that one might have been hard put to it to decide whether they were being truly appreciative or merely parodying satisfaction and admiration. This was the audience Nur had always had to try his verses on, Deven saw, revolted by their flattery, and he knelt behind Nur in reverential silence, watching him write, keeping himself apart from the others, the one true disciple in whose safe custody Nur could place his work.
But very soon Nur’s hand tired. He threw away the pencil and demanded a drink. ‘They are over, my writing days,’ he said, drinking noisily. ‘My schoolboy days are done.’ Putting down the glass, he kneaded his hands together, pulling at the joints, trying to bend the fingers, flexing and unflexing them, with a brooding look on his face as of a driver who wonders if his vehicle has broken down for good, and fears that it has. ‘The music, it is over,’ he mumbled.
‘Sir, you are a musician who has no need of an instrument,’ called a young man in a purple shirt and gold chains. ‘You can play on even when your hands can no longer move.’
‘Such is the glory of a poet,’ exclaimed another, striking his full, round thigh.
Nur gave them a look from under his heavy eyebrows, twisting up his lips sceptically. After another drink, he announced ‘The blood, it is still.’
A loud protest broke out. Another bottle of rum was opened and a fresh drink poured. Someone shouted hilariously, ‘Call up the women. Let us have women and dance. Then let us see whose blood is stilled.’ Deven jerked up his head to see who could be so crude, so insolent, but Nur was smiling as he shook his head.
‘Women and dance have long since overtaken me and left me behind,’ he muttered sorrowfully. ‘Now even the glass slips from my hand and spills.’ He clutched it so tightly that Deven feared it might break between his fingers and cut him. ‘Then what is left, my friends, what remains?’
‘Sir, your poetry. Your volumes of verse. They are left. They will be with us always,’ Deven whispered passionately at his elbow.
‘You keep them,’ Nur said curtly in a tone of dismissal. ‘You keep them and let me go to what I have waiting for me – six feet of earth in the cemetery by the mosque.’ Calling to his servant boy, he rose heavily to his feet with his help, and began to shuffle towards the door.
Nor could anyone stop him, he simply propelled himself forwards so that they had to fall aside and make way. Deven hurried after him, crying disconsolately, ‘Sir, please – let us carry on with the recording. If you are tired, I will send for tea, and food. After a rest, we can resume –’
‘No, I will not resume,’ Nur told him, shaking his head and continuing to shake it as he was led up the lane to the back door of his house, Deven following in an agitated dance. Adamant up to the very door, he said, ‘All one can resume, at my age, is the primordial sleep. I am going to curl up on my bed like a child in its mother’s womb and I shall sleep, shall wait for sleep to come.’
The door in the wall opened and the servant boy helped him over the threshold and led him in. The door shut.
Chapter 10
THE ROOM WAS empty when Deven returned next morning. He stood in the doorway, holding aside the strings of blue and green glass beads that formed the curtain and saw it bare, stripped, the light from the dust-filmed windows falling on the marble tiles bleakly. Only the sparrows nesting in the skylight twittered and quarrelled, scattering twigs as they rustled about in their nest. Out in the back lane a man was crying his wares – the earthen water jars that were strapped to his donkey’s back. ‘Su-ra-hi!’ he wailed, as if warning of doom, ‘su-ra-hi!’ Stupidly, Deven wondered where he had heard that call before – here, or in Mirpore, or where? The call that had seemed to announce summer, heat and thirst – but summer was already here, devastating everything, laying waste his life, like this desolate room.
Chiku arrived at the top of the stairs, having toiled his way up with his equipment, heaving for breath exaggeratedly. ‘Hunh,’ he grunted, looking over Deven’s shoulder, ‘carry it all the way up and they aren’t even here.’
‘They’re gone,’ Deven said, still stunned. ‘Nur Sahib has gone.’
‘Hadn’t you better fetch him? It’s late – and so hot,’ Chiku complained, perspiration welling out of the folds of his neck and oozing down his chest and back.
‘I don’t think he means to come back.’
‘Then – then, it’s over?’
‘Yes,’ said Deven, ‘over.’ He let go of the strings of beads that tinkled glassily against each other, again reminding him of something: Sarla’s glass bangles clinking as she worked? Home, Mirpore, quotidian life drawing close, closing in?
‘You should have told me,’ Chiku burst out in a shrill voice. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve wasted another day – my sister is crying – my mother is saying I have not helped them – I have other things to do and you don’t even give me notice …’
‘Heh, who is there? What is going on up there?’ shouted a voice at the foot of the stairs. The tall woman with the pock-marked face, holding a pink veil across it, glared through two huge rims of kohl.
They leant over the banisters and stared back at her mournfully.
‘The same circus!’ she exclaimed to someone hidden from their sight. ‘What is this? Yesterday Safiya Begum sent word the room is no longer required, today you come back to it. Do you think you have bought yourself a room here? What do you think this is – some sort of shelter for vagabonds? I tell you this is a respectable house – I won’t have it. Bulu, show them off,’ she barked, so fiercely that the veil slipped from her face, which was puffy, swollen with some kind of distemper. She had had a bad night, or was sick, or even afraid – Deven could not begin to guess at the squalors of her life.
Chiku had already begun to crawl down the stairs like a spider with its load. Deven caught him up, relieved him of some of it, and began to follow him down. The bouncer Bulu met them on the landing, clad only in a lungi wrapped around his waist, so that his chest was b
are and his muscles bulged and glistened. ‘Leave at once,’ he commanded, unnecessarily.
At the back door the woman stood watching them. As they descended the stairs into the lane, she called after them, ‘The bill has been sent to Safiya Begum; see that it is paid. I have friends amongst the police who see to it that no one owes me anything, see?’ She did not shut the door after them but stood glaring through the two baleful kohl-rims of her eyes at them as they stood helplessly in the sun, holding pieces of the recording equipment, looking sadly for a rickshaw to take them away.
Murad did not sound at all pleased with the idea of arranging for the tapes to be heard in Delhi before Deven took them with him to Mirpore. ‘What is the use if you haven’t edited it yet? It will have to be cut, won’t it? Why don’t you do all that work before you bring it here?’
‘Murad, I will do all that later, when I get back to Mirpore – I have to go back immediately, all the examination papers have to be corrected – but at least come down to Jain Sahib’s shop to listen to the tapes before I take them away. That will give you an idea of the material I will be sending you for the magazine. Don’t you want to know?’ Deven pleaded.
Jain, picking his teeth with a matchstick as he watched Deven’s face, muttered, ‘I told you – what is the use? Take it with you – listen to it at home – what is the use of playing it here in my shop?’
Deven glared at him and shouted into the phone. ‘You must come. I am waiting for you in Jain Sahib’s shop. At least listen to a part of it – only a small part. We must make sure the quality is good.’
Chiku suddenly disentangled himself from a coil of wires and emerged, dusting his hands, and wiped his face with his sleeve. ‘All right, I have set it up and now I am going. Uncle, please play the tape for him,’ he jerked his chin at Deven in an insolent way and went off, leaving both Deven and the proprietor to protest loudly and ineffectually at his departure.
It occurred to Deven that it might be preferable to take all the equipment to a more congenial setting – say, Murad’s house – and listen to the tapes there. He had never visited it but he felt it would be substantial, even lavish – surely it would have many rooms and offer privacy. But when Murad walked in, frowning with unwillingness, and heard the suggestion, tentatively and weakly made, he brushed it aside. ‘No,’ he said, throwing out his arms as if to bar the entrance to his father’s house. ‘We can’t go there. My mother will be resting – my sisters will be sleeping. We can’t disturb them.’ Flinging himself down in a metal chair and folding his arms, he set his jaw. ‘Jain Sahib, please put it on. Quick. I can’t stay.’
He was obliged to stay for quite a while, however, because Jain Sahib did not seem to know how to start the machine. He shook and pummelled the box, pressed all the switches in a row, fiddled, cursed and shouted for help. Murad sat scowling and throwing exasperated looks at Deven who grew more and more agitated. Eventually a boy was brought in from the courtyard at the back, so covered in grease as to resemble a motor mechanic rather than an electronics technician. He brought along his tools, fiddled for long minutes and at last produced a sudden, loud blare of sound, cut it short and took what seemed hours before they were able to settle down to listen.
It was a fiasco. There was no other word for it. Disbelievingly, Deven had the first tape removed, the second tried and then the third and the fourth. The cardboard carton that held them seemed bottomless, there were so many. Everyone’s tempers were frayed by the constant stopping and starting. When the tapes could be induced to produce sound, there seemed to be nothing to listen to – long intervals of crackling and sputtering interspersed with a sudden blare of horns from the street, the shrieking of nest-building birds, loud explosions of laughter and incoherent joviality, drunken voices bawling, singing, stopping short. Where was Nur? Occasionally his voice wandered in like some lost mendicant off a crowded street, offering a few lines of verse in a faint, foundering voice, then breaking off to say, much more firmly and positively, ‘Fetch me another glass of rum. What have you ordered for lunch today? Has someone gone to collect it? I need more rum if I am to wait for so long.’ Or else wandering through some difficult and involved tale of his vagabond days, stopping to groan and complain of the agony piles were causing him, pleading for some relief from discomfort, cursing his age, calling for palliatives in the way of food and drink, then sinking into silence while some young admirer of his bawled out advice or encouragement with bawdy undertones that made the audience yelp like a pack of jackals.
Deven found himself sinking lower and lower upon his seat, his eyes fixed upon his dusty, cracked shoe-caps, feeling a tightening about his heart. His breath was short and shallow and if anyone had noticed, they would have seen his nostrils turning very pale and waxen.
At last Murad said, ‘Stop all this. We’ve wasted enough time. It’s no good. You should have had the tapes played back to you as soon as each was done – then you could have gone back and repeated what was missing and corrected what was wrong. Why did you leave it so late?’
Stung by this devastating and accurate criticism, Deven got to his feet although he could hardly stand, he felt so physically wrecked by the disaster. ‘Murad – I will somehow – somehow salvage something from this. I have to. I can – I can easily put together enough material for an article for your journal. You will have that – you will. But my college – the college paid for the tapes –’ he began to stammer.
Murad appeared for a moment to comprehend his anguish. Turning to Jain, he said harshly, ‘What is all this? What kind of tape recorder did you give us? And what sort of technician is your nephew? He knows nothing about recording – nothing.’
Jain glared back at him. ‘What are you saying, Murad Sahib?’ he snarled, making a stabbing gesture of his hand at him. ‘Take care what you are saying. What is my nephew to do if you don’t even get a studio for him to work in but set him to work in the middle of the Chandni Chowk bazaar? He can do wonders with professional artistes – you should hear his recording of Asha Rani’s songs – but what sort of artiste was this?’ He twisted his head in order to look at Deven with heavy accusation as though facing the true culprit.
Immediately Murad swung around too. ‘That is also true,’ he agreed. ‘What can one expect of a recording if it is not done in a studio? The quality of the performance has also to be taken into account, Deven, you can’t say that is not important.’
‘But Murad,’ said Deven in a faltering tone, ‘it was Nur. Nur, you know …’ Then he fell silent. He had had so little confidence to begin with, it was so easily shaken and the two of them had destroyed whatever remained of his faith in this project, in the transferring of Nur’s greatness, in which he never ceased to believe, on to the tapes.
Murad appeared to enjoy seeing someone so thoroughly beaten. He threw an arm around Deven’s shoulders and said cheerfully, ‘The tapes are hopeless as they are now. You will have to do a lot of work on them to get anything out of it at all. You had better take them back to Mirpore and see if you can cut and edit them and put together at least one passable tape for your college. Otherwise that Principal of yours – or is it the board – will have you by the throat, na?’ he laughed unpleasantly.
Squeezed suffocatingly in Murad’s embrace, Deven wondered what such a friendship really meant. Without sympathy, without compatibility, what was there under these jests, these embraces? Nothing but familiarity, custom. It was really custom that was the lasting ingredient of friendship, nothing but long custom, and custom could be a well from which one never rose, a trap from which there was no release.
Murad did release Deven however, and marched off, shouting over his shoulder, ‘At least send me the article, will you? And some of the verse he recited – that will do for me. Of course your college is another matter.’
The thought of his college, of having to justify the spending of the library funds on something totally unusable, made Deven turn upon Jain with one last unexpected surge of spirit. ‘The equipment
was bad,’ he shouted. ‘When I saw it that first time, I told you I didn’t want secondhand equipment, it is no good. The tapes also were rotten, cheap. You sent me a technician who knows nothing about recording. It is nothing to do with the performance – or the artiste. The artiste was the greatest – the best –’ his voice rose to a shriek, and cracked. He was perspiring from every pore of his body, streaming with the salt fluid like someone mortally injured in a street accident.
Even the phlegmatic Jain was impressed. Half-rising from his bent steel chair, he motioned to Deven with both hands, each bearing an array of rings set with large gems, patting the air between them pacifyingly as if to send out the beneficial rays of these gems to his agitated customer. ‘Calm down, calm down, no one is cutting your throat or robbing you. It is only a technical matter, nothing more. You can edit the tape, eliminate the noises, leave in only the voice. It can be done, it is not so difficult, not impossible; why get so upset? Can you not find someone to help you?’
‘In Mirpore?’ Deven tried to laugh, but his voice was all in splinters, he could not assemble it into anything meaningful. ‘There are only two or three electrical goods shops in Mirpore – and mechanics who repair radios, irons, lamps, nothing else. Who will know how to handle these tapes and turn them into audio-visual aids for teaching in a college department?’
Jain chewed his lip, ostensibly thinking over Deven’s only too evident problems. Then he gestured again with those flashing gems that sent out electric red and blue rays as if from some ejector, at the greasy boy crouching in a corner by the tape recorder. ‘Take that boy,’ he said, as if he were offering Deven a seat. ‘He is Pintu, another nephew of mine. Take him to Mirpore. He will go with you.’