River of Fire

by Qurratulain Hyder

  I.T. was run by missionaries who probably belonged to the Bible Belt of America. Here, junior girls could not go out without a chaperone—Champa was considered too flighty even by the standards of this institution. So be it. Bye-bye, folks.

  45. The Broken Tanpura of Sultan Hussain Shah Nayak of Jaunpur

  Talat picked up her tanpura and came out onto the veranda. ‘Come home this monsoon,’ she tried to sing the melody in Raga Malhar but her voice stuck in her throat. Amir had come home from the wars and gone away for good, gone to Pakistan. Tehmina was sitting inside, making a new blouse on the sewing machine. Talat went in. Amir Reza must be in Karachi at this moment. It was almost as if he had never been here, never lived in Gulfishan. The First Act had come to a close, as it were, with his departure. How could he stay back here, weather our storms and fight our battles? She sat down near her older sister and began turning the handle of the machine.

  Tehmina raised her head and regarded Talat. The table-fan continued whirring. Inanimate things often have near-human expressions. A table-fan turning mechanically from side to side somehow looked so foolish, thought Talat.

  Outside a koel was crying koo-hoo, koo-hoo. Ram Autar was shouting in the distance. Suddenly she regained her self-confidence and began speaking, “Actually, Tim, emotions are unreliable. Intellectual empathy and personal equations also don’t mean a thing. In the ultimate analysis, one is utterly alone,” she ended profoundly.

  “There you go again,” said Tehmina and looked at her, amused. “Are you also hoping to become a Cambridge don some day?” she asked.

  Talat was hurt. “Do you think I am an ass?” she asked sadly.

  “Not at all, you are very intelligent. But you also happen to be a woman, silly billy.”

  Talat was shocked. “Tim, you are a revolutionary. I say, go ahead, fight, struggle. Work for the equality of men and women. You encouraged Bhaiya Saheb to acquire such a high opinion of himself—you ought to have thrown a shoe at his Greek nose!”

  “Talat! Don’t be rude.”

  “Oh yes, now defend him, too. So, what’s the difference between you and Ram Daiya? She is beaten regularly by Ram Autar and accepts it meekly. The other day when Hussaini’s wife took her aside and scolded him, the idiot yelled: ‘Don’t you dare say anything to my man.’” Talat broke off as she was on the verge of tears.

  She dashed out of the room, climbed onto her bicycle and pedalled furiously in the direction of Water Chestnut House. She found Kamal, Hari and Nirmala on the riverside steps playing “Kot-peece”, and cheating as usual. That cheered her up considerably and she joined in. Gautam arrived, like another disturbing thought. Nirmala was visibly upset, her brother and childhood friends looked away.

  Gautam sat down next to them and lit a cigarette. He seemed excited about his impending departure for America. “I’m leaving next week,” he gushed.

  “From now on a Washington-based journalist, eh?” Kamal remarked sombrely. “Hazrat Ganj will miss you.”

  “I’m sure it will. I was such an interesting fellow . . .Say,” he asked after a while, “where has Champa disappeared?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest,” Talat said dryly.

  “Her cottage was locked. I thought I would say bye to her, too.” He tried to sound casual.

  “She’s very secretive. May have gone home—she has got a scholarship to France, you know,” Kamal informed him.

  “Wow!” said Gautam. “I say, girls, let’s have some tea— thora cha, ekdum, jaldi, bandobast . . . as Bhaiya Saheb used to say, Col. Blimp style.”

  Talat and Nirmala rose to their feet and ambled away towards the kitchen. Jamuna was not around. Nirmala put the kettle on the brick-built cooking range and burnt some waste paper to ignite the coals. Then she wiped her eyes.

  “Is it smoke or are you really crying?” asked Talat good-humouredly.

  “Both.”

  “What a fool you are. I think he’s either confused or too philosophical about you. You know how he loves to reduce everything to metaphysical concepts.”

  “My foot.”

  “Or he intends to remain a confirmed bachelor and is aspiring to gurudom. Acharya Gautamdeva—something of that sort.”

  “My left toe.”

  “Still, I’m sure one day he will turn up in England and take you round the sacred fire.”

  “And then keep comparing me to Champa Baji so that I live in her shadow thereafter. No thank you.” She cried some more.

  “Don’t be such a weeping willow, yaar. Men forget their previous infatuations once they get married, that’s what I’ve noticed,” Talat said wisely.

  “I feel so humiliated,” Nirmala replied and burst into tears again.

  Tehmina went across to the window after Talat had left. The First Act is over, she said to herself. If someone wrote a play about this my character would be described thus: Tehmina Begum, M.A., L.L.B. Homely, sensitive; does her best to hide her unhappiness. Courteous and humble. Proud. Strong.

  Some children of visiting relatives were playing “Kora Jamal Shahi” on the back lawn. Susan was hanging rainbow-coloured dupattas on the clothesline. Kamal returned from Water Chestnut House and began playing with the kids. One child chased the other outside a circle of sitting players. He would drop the whip behind a sitting player and thrash him if he was caught unawares. Kamal began running around. “Hello, Tim,” he yelled. Then he took up the refrain of the game, “Kora Jamal Shahi—Kora . . . peechhey dekha, maar khai.”

  Tehmina leaned against the railing and watched him. He shouted “Kora Jamal Shahi . . . Even Champa Baji is going away . . . peechhe dekha maar khai. Kora Jamal . . .”

  “Karachi?” Tehmina shouted back indifferently.

  “Paris! Kora Jamal Shahi . . .” he thrashed a little girl with the ‘whip’. She began chasing him in her turn.

  “How . . . ?” asked Tehmina.

  “She’s a go-getter, isn’t she? And Gautam has invited you to his farewell party, Saturday.” Kamal began running faster till he dropped the ‘whip’ behind another child and then, thrusting his thumbs in his coat pockets, trotted off towards the motor garage.

  India Coffee House was buzzing with animated conversation. Along with the regulars there were many newcomers—Hindu and Sikh refugees—well-dressed young men and women from across the new border. The citizens of Lucknow had never heard of Hindu Pathans who were now wandering the lanes of Aminabad, uprooted from the North West Frontier Province. There were rich refugees and poor refugees, but their influx had not altered the peaceful atmosphere of the city. There was no tension in Hazrat Ganj, only new faces.

  Half of Coffee House was occupied by Gautam’s friends. Some Urdu poets had been invited there to meet Louis MacNiece. “If you have a poet as Governor of U.P., this is bound to happen. Day after day she holds mushairas at Raj Bhavan. With her Hyderabadi-Urdu culture and graciousness Mrs. Naidu specially asked me to recite my poem to Mr. MacNiece,” a young Urdu poet announced proudly.

  “He has come to India to write about flies settled on corpses,” said Tehmina with disdain.

  “Well, we do have flies settled on thousands of corpses at the moment in the country,” responded a journalist. “Lahore is burning, Delhi is burning.”

  “The West had millions of dead bodies littered over half the world till only two years ago. We are not the only savages,” Tehmina argued vehemently.

  “Good old Tim is back in form,” Talat whispered to Nirmala. “She’ll be all right.”

  “This year the rains have been the heaviest,” the Urdu poet continued, “the Monsoon of Blood. It pours from the skies. There is blood on flowers, blood on our hands. People have bloodshot eyes . . .”

  “Not in Lucknow,” Kamal said smugly. “At least you should be thankful that the culture created by our ancestors has proved more powerful than the present insanity.”

  “Culture, culture everywhere, and not a drop to drink,” the Urdu poet addressed the host. “Gautam, are you taking us to Kapoor’s
Bar after this Gandhian meeting?”

  “No,” Gautam spoke for the first time. He was chain-smoking and very quiet.

  “Instead of riots we have a spate of mushairas in Lucknow in aid of the refugees,” Talat remarked.

  “I hate to be called a refugee.” A young former lecturer from Government College, Lahore, said unhappily. “Do you know what it means to us, to be driven out of our home-town, Lahore—the most beautiful city in the world?” There were tears in his eyes.

  “I was tuning my tanpura for my riaz in the morning to sing Khayal Jaunpuri, and one string snapped. Gautam, there’s symbolism for you. Hussain Shah’s tanpura broken into two,” said Talat ruefully.

  “The instrument is all right, you probably tuned it too tightly, or the string wasn’t strong enough,” Gautam was cryptic.

  “Who was Hussain Shah?” someone asked Talat.

  “Never mind.”

  “Vajid Ali Shah and Sultan Baz Bahadur and Hussain Shah—they’re all irrelevant today,” commented someone else.

  “Did Beethoven become irrelevant in Europe during the recent war?” Tehmina shot back.

  “Hear, hear,” said Nirmala loyally.

  “Secularism is enshrined in the philosophy of the Congress,” Tehmina continued in her university-union manner. “Pandit Nehru made a derelict old lady, a direct descendant of Bahadur Shah Zafar, sit next to him on the ramparts at Red Fort on the 15th of August.”

  “How sweet!” Talat exclaimed. Hari and Kamal groaned.

  “Pandit Nehru has a sense of history, and this was a touching symbolic gesture.” Tehmina concluded her little speech. Suddenly Talat had visions of Tehmina Reza turning into one of the leaders of new India. No, she won’t be a willing wallflower. The same thought had struck the Urdu poet.

  “You can become another Begum Aizaz Rasooi1 . . .” he said aloud.

  “I beg your pardon?” Tehmina was enraged.

  “I mean another woman leader like Begum Aizaz Rasooi.”

  “Then she may be made a governor or an ambassador some day and cock a snook at Bhaiya Saheb,” Nirmala whispered to Talat approvingly.

  “Here is tomorrow’s India on the anvil, political ambitions in the making,” S.P. Kaushal remarked cynically. He wrote abstract poetry in English and was in charge of English programmes at the radio station.

  “I have no political ambitions,” Tehmina replied sharply. “I’ll merely work for the Party as a sympathiser.”

  On the other side of the table they were discussing life’s new, expanding horizons.

  “They already have television in London.”

  “And Gautam is going all the way to America by air,” another friend commented. Talat interrupted him as a grim reminder: “Have you read Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s latest poem. The Morning of Freedom? Yeh daag daag ujala, yeh shab-gazida sahar . . .” She went on to recite the poem. The audience became very still.

  Pothan Abraham, the Malayali who worked for The Pioneer, broke the silence. “Now translate it into pidgin English, I couldn’t understand a word.”

  “Translate Urdu poetry into English? How can you render jigar ki aag as the liver’s fire?”

  “Try,” said Abraham, smoking his pipe dreamily.

  Talat pondered a while, then began, “Okay—This blighted dawn, this darkened sun. This is not the morn we waited for. We went forth in the desert of heaven, hoping to reach our destination of stars. We hoped that, somewhere, we would come ashore from the placid river of the night, that the barge of sorrow would end its cruise. Whence came the early morning breeze, where did it go? The wayside lamp does not know. The night’s burden has not diminished, the hour of deliverance for eye and heart has not arrived. Face forward! For our destination is not yet in sight.”

  There was gloomy silence again.

  Meanwhile, Malcolm got busy with his pen and sketchbook. He was a jovial young man from Lai Bagh, a talented artist who used to sit in the Coffee House and sketch the pretty girls who came in.

  Now he drew a victoria with a winged horse, and Talat inside it with her broken tanpura. The victoria was taking off from Monkey Bridge, heading west.

  Talat looked at the sketch intently and said, “Malcolm, kindly mend the tanpura, it cannot be broken forever.”

  “Perhaps it is, dear lady, perhaps it is,” said Kaushal soberly.

  “You mean Humpty can never be put together again?” asked Talat, raising an eyebrow.

  “Talat!” Tehmina admonished her as usual. “From Faiz Ahmed Faiz you descend to Humpty-Dumpty—grow up!”

  1 A flamboyant leader of that era, wife of a taluqdar of Sandila.

  46. The Hon’ble Cyril Ashley of Sidney Sussex College

  The Hon’ble Cyril Derek Edwin Howard Ashley looked at the time again as he paced up and down under the international clock in the tube station at Piccadilly. He had invited Champa Ahmed to see “Waters of the Moon” tonight. He opened the latest New Statesman and Nation and began scanning its pages. The weekly magazine carried a fiery letter to the Editor by one Gautam Nilambar, on the subject of India’s Partition and world peace. Cyril was keen on going to the Indian dancer, Surekha’s, place to meet this person and thrash out the issue with him. But Surekha had told him that Nilambar, who had just been transferred from Moscow to India House, had left for Bonn.

  Cyril was the younger son of Lord Barnfield of Barnfield Hall, Surrey. His grandfather, Lord George Thomas Ashley, had controlled considerable interests in the jute and rubber trade in the City. Cyril’s great-grandfather, Cyril Ashley, the son of a poor village parson, had gone out to India in the eighteenth century as a factor in the East India Company. He traded in indigo in Bengal and Bihar and had also acquired great wealth at the Court of the King of Oudh. After his death, his widow had returned to England with their little son who, on growing up, had started his business in rubber. He bought a number of villages, was created a hereditary peer and sat in the House of Lords. His son served his country in far-flung outposts of the Empire as a suave and shrewd diplomat. He was an expert on Near Eastern affairs and knew how to deal with the troublesome Afghans and the arrogant Ottomans. In India he tolerated a few upper class Mohammedans because they were very refined and cultured. He met the Anglicised Hindu-Bengali elite in Calcutta’s Great Eastern Hotel, and north Indian wogs in Delhi’s Imperial Hotel whenever he visited India. His grandfather, Sir Cyril Ashley, must have been a very romantic person indeed. A portrait, “Nabob Cyril Ashley and his Bibi” by a Royal Academy artist hung in the main drawing-room of the Manor in Surrey.

  Lord George died in 1940. He was survived by two sons, Lord David and the Hon’ble Cyril Ashley. Cyril had been a child during the Roaring Twenties and grew up in the Thirties. Many artists and writers came to his town house in South Kensington to meet his avant-garde stepmother, Lady Ellen, who smoked, painted weird canvasses and read The Daily Worker. Bloomsbury was anti-fascist, Auden and Spender were the leaders of progressive thinking, Unity Theatre produced communist plays and the Group Theatre was staging plays written by Louis MacNiece, Auden and Isherwood. It was fashionable to talk of the Spanish Civil War and be a Leftist.

  The East was being intellectually rediscovered—Eliot and Ezra Pound were quoting from Sanskrit and classical Chinese. With the family’s age-old India connection it was quite natural that Cyril be interested in that country’s history and archaeology. From Winchester he went to Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, where he read Indian History. Soon the War broke out and he joined the Royal Air Force. In 1945 he returned to Cambridge and resumed reading about the wars the British had waged in the East. He was specialising in the East India Company’s problems of governance in India.

  The Barnfield family was past its prime. Communists lurked in the Barnfield rubber plantations in Malaya, and the Mau Mau had appeared in Kenya. Lord David still had his tea gardens in Sylhet, which was now in East Pakistan. He opened his Manor to the public every Sunday, but financial worries had made the peer an old man while still in his forties. And he was
still a bachelor.

  Cyril continued his studies at Cambridge, indifferent to the material problems of worldly existence. He married a middle class Jewish girl, Rose Lyn, whom he had met at a bottle-party in Chelsea. She was a potter by profession, but not a successful one. That was why Cyril was attracted to her—he didn’t like terribly accomplished women. His wife worked in a ceramics factory in Staffordshire. Every now and then he looked with surprise at the gold ring on his left-hand finger, then remembered that he was married and had a very understanding wife. Once or twice a month they spent the weekend in the country or came down to London, where she had a basement flat in Swiss Cottage.

  Once he bought a shilling ticket along with the Sunday crowds and went sight-seeing to his own home in Surrey. His brother was away on the Continent, and the new guide did not recognise Master Cyril. He toured the house, went from room to room and wondered . . . It’s funny, I was born here.

  The Manor stood beside a little lake. Its oldest wing was built in the early fifteenth century and had real blown-glass windows, as well as a lady chapel. A new wing was added in the eighteenth century, the Age of Prosperity. Outside, there were Italian statues and marble fountains, even a sad-eyed Buddha who sat on a pedestal in the rock garden—a silent reminder of the days of the Barnfields’ Oriental glory.

  As a young boy Cyril used to stroll in the park, and often walked down to the two open graves which belonged to the Middle Ages. They turned into tiny pools after the rains, and Cyril would sit on the rough grey edges and ponder the mysteries of life and death. For outsiders the place was redolent of high romance. Cyril could find nothing romantic about it, not even story-book material in the fabulous personality of his ancestor, ‘Nabob’ Sir Cyril Ashley. Who knows, he must have plundered a lot of Indians to become what he had become.