In Custody

by Anita Desai

  The elegance and floridity of her Urdu entered Deven’s ears like a flourish of trumpets and beat at his temples while he read. The essential, unsuspected spirit of the woman appeared to step free of its covering, all the tinsel and gauze and tawdriness, and reveal a face from which the paint and powder had been washed and which wore an expression that made Deven halt and stumble before he could read on.

  No doubt the men whose company you keep and make Nur Sahib keep have filled your ears with the poison of their gossip. Like them, you thought I was a prostitute who dazzled Nur Sahib’s eyes with my dance and so inveigled my way out of a house of prostitution into the house of a distinguished poet. Is that not an insult to the poet you claim to idolize, quite apart from the insult to me? Do you imagine it was possible for a common dancing girl to win the heart of a great poet? Is it not clear that it was my mind in which he was interested, that if I did inveigle my way into his heart it was by my talk, my poetry and whatever wit I have? You should allow me to prove this to you by placing before you my own poetry.

  Judged by Nur Sahib’s standards, the poems I enclose for you to read may appear to be minor works. Kindly remember that unlike Nur Sahib and unlike your respected self, I am a woman and have had no education but what I have found and seized for myself. Unlike poets and scholars who have won distinctions, I have had no patron apart from my honoured husband, no encouragement and no sympathy. Yet there must have been some natural gift if Nur Sahib himself was impressed by my early verse. It is the reason why he married me in his old age, to have at his side an intellectual companion of the kind he did not have in his first marriage. None of your friends credit him with even so much intelligence although they profess to worship him.

  It is therefore necessary that I prove my gifts and abilities to you and to other scholars and devotees of the art of poetry. It is for this reason that I am enclosing my latest poems for you to read and study and judge if they do not have some merit of their own. Let me see if you are strong enough to face them and admit to their merit. Or if they fill you with fear and insecurity because they threaten you with danger – danger that your superiority to women may become questionable. When you rose to your feet and left the mehfil while I was singing my verse, was it not because you feared I might eclipse the verse of Nur Sahib and other male poets whom you revere? Was it not intolerable to you that a woman should match their gifts and even outstrip them? Are you not guilty of assuming that because you are a male, you have a right to brains, talent, reputation and achievement, while I, because I was born female, am condemned to find what satisfaction I can in being maligned, mocked, ignored and neglected? Is it not you who has made me play the role of the loose woman in gaudy garments by refusing to take my work seriously and giving me just that much regard that you would extend to even a failure in the arts as long as the artist was male? In this unfair world that you have created what else could I have been but what I am?

  Ask yourself that when you peruse my verses, if you have the courage …

  But Deven did not have the courage. He did not have the time. He did not have the will or the wherewithal to deal with this new presence, one he had been happy to ignore earlier and relegate to the grotesque world of hysterics, termagants, viragos, the demented and the outcast. It was not for the timid and circumspect to enter that world on a mission of mercy or rescue. If he were to venture into it, what he learnt would destroy him as a moment of lucidity can destroy the merciful delusions of a madman. He could not allow that.

  Sarla, coming in with her duster, looked at him tearing up a bundle of blue sheets of paper into strips, and cried, ‘You’re dropping rubbish all over the floor I have just swept!’

  In the morning he set off for the registrar’s office to ask for an interview with the Principal so that he could explain the whole matter before the board meeting on the final day of the summer vacation. The tape could not be presented before the board, that was out of the question; he would have to engage the Principal’s sympathies and prevent such a thing from happening. The tape, the shameful tape, must not be heard by anyone.

  ‘Papa, buy us a watermelon,’ Manu screamed from the house as he unlatched the gate. He nodded and waved to the boy and then turned to find the postman thrusting a letter at him. Taking it without a word as if it were an injection being jabbed into his arm, stiffening it and filling it with hot lead, he pocketed the letter and set off, telling himself this would have to stop, it had to be made to stop –

  The clerk outside the registrar’s office told him that the sahib was busy at a meeting in the Principal’s office and he would have to wait for an interview. Deven stood still for a moment, pondering, and then left. How many more bills, more requests from Nur could he place before them after all? Nur would never stop writing, demanding. The letters would keep pouring in the way the tapes had kept on grinding. He had launched himself, and them, upon a course it now seemed impossible to stop.

  It was essential to find someone who could bring it to a halt. He must have had some residual confidence left in Siddiqui for he found himself standing by the wrought-iron gates that led to his house. Only the house no longer stood there. It was a heap of rubble from which dust rose like a ghost, and demolition labour whacked and pounded at whatever remained vertical. While they worked, they shouted loudly and savagely as if they were wrecking it out of personal vengeance. The decayed villa groaned as the last of it collapsed.

  ‘Go in, go in,’ said the cigarette and banana vendors at the gate. ‘You will find the sahib there – he stands under the tree watching all day,’ and they pointed at the dusty neem tree by the compound wall.

  Deven approached the tree and found Siddiqui under it, holding a black cotton umbrella over his head. When he saw Deven he waved in his direction quite gaily but a little vaguely, turning away to shout orders to some workmen and discuss something with a large moustachioed contractor. Having sent them off, he turned to Deven and cried ‘Come to see my ancestral home vanish in the dust of Mirpore, Deven-bhai?’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Deven faltered, ‘you didn’t tell –’

  ‘No, no, no. I was so busy, too busy to come to college lately. You see, I was made this offer by a Delhi businessman. He wants to develop this land – build a block of flats with shops on the ground floor, cinema house at the back, offices on top – all kinds of plans for putting this wasteland to use. And as I need the money – you know my weakness – the offer was too good to refuse, so –’ he giggled a little, rubbed at the dust on his forehead, and then turned enthusiastically to the contractor who had returned with a message that weighed down his lower jaw gravely.

  Deven was aware that he was in the way. Yet he could not bear to leave without making an attempt, even if badly timed and intrusive. ‘Siddiqui Sahib,’ he murmured, ‘will you be attending the meeting at the college tomorrow?’

  ‘No, no, no, I have no time, can’t you see. It is no small thing, developing an area like this,’ he said testily.

  ‘Yes,’ Deven agreed meekly, nodding, ‘but I thought if you could tell them – the librarian, at least, and the registrar, if not the Principal – testify to the value of the tape – however faulty, however poor, at least authentic, and of historic value,’ he pleaded, the sweat breaking out on his upper lip, ‘and made at such expense. If they can be persuaded to pay the bills I accumulated while recording it –’

  ‘That tape?’ Siddiqui cut him short impatiently. ‘That useless tape? But, my friend, it is a disaster, not worth anything. Useless to play it to them.’

  ‘It is poor, of course, Siddiqui Sahib,’ Deven replied, ‘but it is not without value. It has some importance to Urdu poetry after all. If only you, as head of the Urdu department, could persuade them that the project has been worthwhile, perhaps then the bills –’ he fumbled in his pocket, drew out his unopened letter, put it back, pulled out another piece of paper, this time the bill for the room he had unknowingly rented, and held it out to Siddiqui.

  ‘What is
this? Another bill? Who will pay it? The college? Never,’ said Siddiqui, but stretched out his hand and took it. With all the riches of his future as a property developer before him, he could afford a little magnanimity to the hopeless failures that peopled his meagre past. ‘I can put it up to them of course – but I don’t know if it will do any good.’

  ‘Siddiqui Sahib,’ Deven cried, ‘it was not my fault! I worked hard – I prepared for it and I worked – but I was fooled and cheated by everyone – the man who sold me the secondhand equipment, the technician who said he could do the recording but was completely inexperienced, by Murad who said he would pay and did not, by Nur who had never told me he wanted to be paid, and by his wife, wives, all of them –’

  ‘Oh,’ said Siddiqui, giving him a cool look from the heights of his new prosperity, ‘and why did you let them all cheat you? Why did you not take care and see that they didn’t? Look at me, standing all day in the hot sun, watching every brick fall so that I am not cheated. That is the only way to do it, Deven-bhai– hard work, hard work.’

  ‘But Siddiqui Sahib,’ said Deven, and his throat was so parched that his voice came out in a hoarse whisper, ‘I did – you know I did. There is nothing to see for it, only a mess, a failure. That is all anyone will see. But underneath it – underneath that lie my efforts, and my – my sincerity. Also my regard for the poet, and my love for poetry, you know. That should be considered, before you judge –’ and then his whisper was drowned by an enormous crash of bricks and plaster on to the terrace from where they spilt and spread, with a sad sigh, over what had been the lawn.

  In the cycle rickshaw going home – his legs felt strangely weak, he knew he could not walk – he opened the letter. It was not written in English this time but in Urdu and he read it while wobbling down the streets, so that the letters danced crazily before him, turning him giddy:

  My pigeons are dying. A new disease has broken out, unknown to the doctors of the bird hospital. It has claimed five already, each a champion. On the others, too, I see the grey mould that grows till it caps the bird’s head, closes its eyes and seals its beak and then afflicts the claws and feet, so that it slowly suffocates to death. There is no medicine to cure them. I watch them fall and find them lying on their sides, cold. When the last of my pigeons is gone, I will cease to write poetry for ever. I will go with them.

  Unless you can arrange for me to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca that alone can save my sinful soul that is now being punished –

  The rickshaw swerved suddenly to avoid a collision with someone who had stepped off the pavement directly in front of it, and Deven, lurching to one side, found himself staring into the face of one of his students, tight with hate, and heard him say in a low voice, ‘Meet us behind the college and see what we do to you.’

  Then the rickshaw driver recovered his balance and pedalled on. ‘All right, sahib?’ he shouted over his shoulder at Deven.

  Deven nodded. ‘All right,’ he said.

  That night, before the board meeting, Deven found himself unable to sleep. The house was more oppressive, the heat more unendurable, than on any other night that summer. He thought he heard thunder in the distance – perhaps the monsoon was coming, perhaps it was drawing close. It had to be because he could not endure any more of this heat, this waiting.

  He lay on his string bed in the courtyard, periodically rising to walk up and down, from one wall to another, barefoot so as not to wake his wife or their son. But Sarla woke when he struck a match to light a cigarette and moaned in protest, so he went in to smoke it on the veranda. There was no air here at all, it had all been consumed, leaving nothing. Out in the courtyard, Sarla lay awake, fanning herself and the boy with a palm leaf fan that rattled and rustled. Finally it fell from her tired hand and she slept again.

  After a while Deven lay down beside them quietly, straining to hear wind or thunder, but the stillness of the night hung intact and impenetrable. It was finally broken by a dog howling across the canal. A little later, shortly before dawn, he heard steps shuffling through the dust in the lane and voices singing. They grew clearer and louder, and it was obvious they were approaching. He slipped off his bed and went back to the veranda to peer at them through the lattice as the singers passed, all dressed in white, holding lamps. Mostly old women, wagging their heads as they sang with a demented air:

  ‘O will you come along with us –’

  The rear was brought up by a priest naked to the waist, pawing at the earth as he pranced along, clashing his cymbals with abandon.

  ‘What is it?’ Sarla asked, coming to stand beside him, haggard from broken sleep. ‘Why don’t you sleep?’

  He gave a disgusted snort, gesturing at the band of devotees. ‘I can’t sleep now,’ he said, ‘I’ll go for a walk,’ and before she could protest he slipped out of the door and left.

  He walked slowly at first, giving the procession of old widows time to move on, rousing family after family as they went and setting the dogs howling. They turned left towards the temple in the town and he turned right on to the path by the canal. It was not something he had ever done before, he was not accustomed to being out at such an hour, and he felt vaguely excited, hearing his pulse beat inside his ear. Was he actually hoping to meet the student with the grudge, with a knife? No, he would never have the courage to come out here in the night. There was nothing to be heard but the water rushing past the banks, although it was still too dark to see it. He could slip in if he was not careful. He felt weeds and pampas grass brush against his legs and his feet grew dusty and then muddy as he walked. Out in the invisible fields a lapwing gave a wild, startled cry and he could see the pale flash of its wings in the darkness that was growing dilute now in the east.

  He watched the sky pale to grey, the feathery plumes of the pampas grass to mauve. He did not want the day to dawn. He had hoped to stretch the night endlessly by walking on and on. Day would bring with it the board meeting, an inquiry, an interrogation, exposure and blame. Yes, and what else? The bills would be returned to him to pay. The tape would be played and declared a disaster, even a hoax. There would be criticism. Who was he to have been entrusted with such a project as well as college funds? He would be sent for, he would have to appear before them, and plead for sympathy, for mercy, for acquittal. If it was not forthcoming, he would be censured, perhaps dismissed. O God, if he was, he would be ruined and Sarla and Manu with him. He would have to pawn, even sell her jewellery to clear his debts, she would have to be sent back to her parents to his eternal disgrace, and the boy would grow up to consider his father a failure – a disgraceful, thoughtless, irresponsible and hopeless failure. Where would it all end? Why, seeing it all so clearly, could he not halt it?

  The student leaping out of the bushes with a knife would be a simple solution, one to be hoped for by comparison. But the bushes stood still, still dark with night, no breeze to stir them. There was no release or escape.

  Walking on, he kept his eyes on the clay path, a chalky streak beside the dark water that ran deep in its bed of reeds. He remembered how he had walked there with Manu and how a parrot had let fall its brilliant tail feather and he had picked it up and handed it to Manu who had put it behind his ear and laughed so that it had seemed an omen, a joyous, delightful omen. Then they had returned to the house and found Nur’s letter, the first of Nur’s letters.

  Nur – he tried to think of him as separate from his letters, his senile demands, to feel again for him as he had when Nur had first allowed him into his presence, in his still, shaded study. When he remembered the joy of hearing his voice and listening to him quote poetry, then quoting his lines back to him, binding them together in a web, an alliance, he knew this was what he would have to recover, to retrieve. If he could do that, it would give him a reason, and strength, to survive whatever came. He had to believe that.

  He was hurrying along the path now, fleeing through the weeds and grasses that caught at him, tearing at the loose pyjamas on his legs, and at his feet
in their open sandals. Brushing them aside, he tried to return to his old idolatry of the poet, his awe of him, his devotion when it had still been pure, and his gratitude for his poetry and friendship, that strange, unexpected, unimaginable friendship that had brought him so much pain.

  That friendship still existed, even if there had been a muddle, a misunderstanding. He had imagined he was taking Nur’s poetry into safe custody, and not realized that if he was to be custodian of Nur’s genius, then Nur would become his custodian and place him in custody too. This alliance could be considered an unendurable burden – or else a shining honour. Both demanded an equal strength.

  The faintly glimmering path by the black canal was like a thread he had to follow to the end. Where was the end? Was there one? He had a vision of Nur’s bier, white, heaped with flowers, rose and marigold, bright blazing flowers on the white sheet. He saw the women in the family weeping and wailing around it. He heard the funeral music play. He saw the shroud, the grave – open. When Nur was laid in it, would this connection break, this relation end? No, never – the bills would come to him, he would have to pay for the funeral, support the widows, raise his son …

  He stopped, panting for breath, on the canal bank and stared at the water that stopped and turned concentrically in a whirlpool at that point. The whirlpool was an opening into the water, leading into its depths. But these were dark and obscure. The sky was filling with a grey light that was dissolving the dense blackness of night. It glistened upon a field of white pampas grass which waved in a sudden breeze that had sprung up, laughing, waving and rustling through the grasses with a live, rippling sound. He thought of Nur’s poetry being read, the sound of it softly murmuring in his ears. He had accepted the gift of Nur’s poetry and that meant he was custodian of Nur’s very soul and spirit. It was a great distinction. He could not deny or abandon that under any pressure.