River of Fire

by Qurratulain Hyder

  He had been an Indian student himself fifteen years ago, organising similar conferences. Tonight he was a different person, inhabiting a separate world. A very different person indeed, in the spring of 1953. And he was dreadfully tired. How can I return to the soft quiet seasons once again?

  “Now take this tamasha, for instance,” he continued, “you are like a bunch of Salvation Army people.”

  Talat promptly broke into, “Onward Christian soldiers, marching on to war.”

  “It will only create intense nostalgia when you recall these evenings and faces in the future. Every moment, every season brings with it the memory of times past. Still, you hold conferences and sing community songs, and you are always organising.”

  Talat blinked.

  “You never see the inner drama,” he went on, “you do not acknowledge what is really happening. You’re simply not looking, all you do is to keep plotting, keep setting traps. But I’ll still escape. You,” he added after a pause, “cannot waylay me. I shall always be separate, and always be wandering. Now please go and call Roshan, I feel responsible for her and it is getting late.”

  Talat left. He lit another cigarette and listened to the song they were singing in the hall—Way down upon the Swanee River, far, far away/That’s where my heart is turning ever, that’s where the Old Folks stay. He used to sing this haunting American slave song around the bonfire at La Martiniere. Unwittingly, he joined in the refrain—

  All the world is sad and weary, everywhere I roam.

  Take me back to my old . . .

  Suddenly he noticed Talat standing in front, looking at him in wonderment. She literally couldn’t believe her ears. He stopped, sheepishly. Roshan came forward, carrying her overnight bag, and they said goodnight to Talat and left.

  Advancing towards his car he said gruffly, “Do you realise that a report has been sent against you to the Educational Advisor? Remember, you are here on a prestigious government scholarship.”

  “You,” she said defiantly, “have the moral outrage of someone who has found me in a den of iniquity. Who do you think you are—Senator McCarthy? There are many East Pakistanis here also, attending the conference as observers.”

  “Yeah, but they are Bengalis.”

  “What do you mean? Aren’t they Pakistanis like you and me?”

  “Sure, but they are Bengalis,” he replied obstinately and opened the limousine door for her.

  According to Muslim lore, if one wore that cap one became invisible but could still see others.

  50. The BBC Canteen

  On the way to London from the Fedin Conference Talat discovered that she had broken a sandal. She got off the train, dived into a shoe shop and after acquiring a new pair, caught a bus to St. John’s Wood. The moment she entered her flat the telephone rang.

  It was Chacha from BBC. Sajida Begum, an eminent educationist, had to be interviewed right away. “She has come to England after attending some conferences in western Europe and is due to go back home.” With the exuberance and boundless energy of a 24-year-old, Talat ran out again to do his bidding.

  The BBC canteen on Oxford Street was full of cheerful din as usual. Members of the Middle Eastern and Eastern Services were floating in and out of the hall. Indians and Pakistanis usually sat together because most of them belonged to the pre-Partition All India Radio. The Urdu Section included Siddique Ahmad Siddiqui, affectionately called Chacha or Uncle, Taqi Saiyid and Yawar Abbas, Attiya Hosain and Hamraz Fyzabadi. Ejaz Hussain Batalvi, Zarina, Feroze and Talat were frequent broadcasters.

  The canteen had no teaspoons. “Since it probably had no teaspoons during the war, it shall never have any—the British are great believers in tradition,” Chacha had once said dryly.

  A rotund, prosaic, bespectacled lady sat in a corner, stirring sugar in her cup with a fork. She was talking to Feroze who had come a day earlier from Cambridgeshire. Talat joined them.

  “No spoons,” the lady complained.

  “British tradition, ma’am,” Talat replied dutifully.

  Sajida Begum resumed her conversation with Feroze. “In Copenhagen I was interviewed over Denmark’s BBC,” she said, continuing to ignore Talat. Feroze who had known her in Aligarh before she migrated to the new country, introduced her to Talat. Sajida Begum was also a novelist.

  “Feroze tells me you work in the telegraph office,” she said patronisingly.

  “Yes, ma’am. Right now I am on leave for a fortnight.”

  “Then you will go back to delivering telegrams door-to-door?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m a cub-reporter on Fleet Street.”

  “She got a by-line for her very first story,” Feroze tried to rescue Talat.

  “You write stories, too? Romantic or progressive?”

  Feroze gave up—then grinned: “She is going to write a novella about her cousin, Comdr. Amir Reza. The Life and Times of a—of—a—”

  Talat got the hint. “Its title is going to be Romance de la Rose because our house in Lucknow is called Gulfishan and he used to speak in French.”

  Sajida Begum’s eyes gleamed behind her spectacles. Her attitude towards Talat changed instantly.

  “Do you often see him over here?”

  “No. When he is not flirting with upper-class English girls, he goes to Cambridge singing, ‘Lydia, O Lydia, O Encyclopaedia’.”

  “Why?”

  “Have you heard of Miss Roshan Kazmi? That’s why . . .”

  Sajida Begum looked worried. “Well, I have no ulterior motive nor any vested interest in him,” she said in the dreary monotone of bores. “My brother knows him and has asked him to look after me while I am here. Being so young and inexperienced, you see, I do feel lost sometimes.”

  On the way down to the basement studios Feroze whispered to Talat, “You know how ancient she is? Thirty-five! Almost Attiya and Champa Baji’s age.”

  “St. John’s Wood is becoming curiouser and curiouser. Sajida Apa has also rented a flatlet over there because she was told that all writers and artists live in that mohalla. Now she’s busy cultivating Bill Craig and Shanta because she wants them to publish her new novel,” Talat informed her friends in the BBC canteen a few days later.

  On a Sunday morning Sajida Begum dropped by at Greville Place and said to Talat darkly, “This Champa Ahmed seems to be the number two person in Bill’s office—Shanta is not around. I suspect there’s more to it than meets the eye. Talat, you must warn Shanta—let’s meet her this evening. A stitch in time saves nine. . . .”

  “Yes, and strike while the iron is hot. But it is none of my business, Sajida Apa. Besides, I’m going to interview Mr. and Mrs. Max Factor for the Women’s Page this evening. They’re here from Hollywood and are staying at the Dorchester.”

  “You must be joking! Max Factor is a lipstick, not a human being. Tomorrow you’ll say you are going to see Mr. Lipton or Miss Brooke Bond! Don’t take me to be such a simpleton, Talat Reza.”

  Dusk fell on Park Lane. Footmen stood at the entrance to the Dorchester Hotel, announcing the arrival of guests. Famous film stars, leading fashion columnists, debutantes, people who inhabited the glossy pages of The Tatler and Country Life. Countless diamonds glittered on Mrs. Max Factor’s mink coat as she glided into the Blue Room.

  ‘ . . . Father, Jewish immigrant from Balkans, started shop small back-room Hollywood. Max Factor, Empire at present . . .’ Talat jotted down rapidly. Mrs. Max Factor spoke to her for a full twenty minutes in an exclusive interview—Talat’s Conjeevaram sari did the trick.

  Talat happened to be one of the two women from the subcontinent who had found temporary work as a journalist on Fleet Street—the other was a Keralite married to an Englishman. Talat had come to be known as ‘the sari reporter’, her sari a kind of press card which gave her easy access to celebrities.

  The following week Talat received an excited call from Sajida Begum. “I met Amir Reza again. He is more handsome than Girigiri Peck, isn’t he? You and Kamal do not stop talking, but he i
s so quiet one wonders what he’s thinking about.”

  “Nothing much, Sajida Apa, nothing much.”

  “Well, to me he appeared ever so thoughtful and a little sad when we dined at Istamboul last evening.”

  “And a Hungarian violinist played Night in a Spanish Garden especially for you.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I guessed, Sajida Apa. So, my no-good cousin is taking you to fancy restaurants!”

  “You see, it happened like this—I met him at a party and somebody said, let’s go to Istamboul. Amir asked me if I would like to go along. I thought they were going to Turkey, so I said Yes! How was Mrs. Max Factor? A real person? Listen, that reminds me, you told me about an English goldsmith the other day who pierced the Queen’s ears for the Women’s Page . . .”

  “For the Coronation,” Talat corrected her.

  Sajida Begum paused awhile then said, “And then you interviewed the Queen’s beautician?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Henry Holland—she’s Oscar Wilde’s daughter-in-law.”

  “She must be very expensive.”

  “I should imagine so, although she gave me a free facial in her beauty parlour on Bond Street,” Talat added nonchalantly.

  Sajida Begum disappeared from the scene for a while. “I’m leaving for a six-week study tour of Britain,” she said before going underground. “Study tour” was a rather dubious term, anyway.

  A reasonably slim lady wearing fashionable goggles and the latest ‘sheath’ dress over her shalwar entered the BBC canteen one afternoon. Nobody could recognise her—she had been transformed by Oscar Wilde’s daughter-in-law!

  “The importance of being earnest in the pursuit of you-know-who,” said Talat in an aside.

  “Hear, hear! how witty some people have become around here,” said Feroze meanly and blinked. She still could not believe her eyes.

  However, Sajida Begum in her new incarnation failed to cheer them up, for a few days earlier Nirmala had been diagnosed with tuberculosis of the lungs in Cambridge. Kamal had made a frantic call to Amir Reza and both of them had accompanied a very scared Nirmala to the Chest Hospital in London. Hari Shankar was not available on the phone in New York.

  Sajida Begum was waiting to be complimented on her new urchin cut, which did not suit her. Then, suddenly realising why they were so quiet, she sighed. “Very sad. I rang up Capt. Reza to congratulate him on his promotion and he told me. I hope it is not galloping T.B.”

  “Don’t be ghoulish, Sajida Apa,” said Talat angrily, “Nirmala is okay. She’ll soon be taken to Lidhurst Sanatorium, for full recovery.”

  “An aunt of mine had T.B., she died in Bhawali Sanatorium,” Sajida Begum responded smugly.

  “Thoo—thoo, Sajida Apa, that must have been in 1853. T.B. is completely curable today.”

  Sajida Begum persisted, “Heroines of old Urdu novels always died of tuberculosis of the lungs. French novels, even . . . remember Camille?”

  “Shoo—shoo, Sajida Apa!” the girls chorused furiously. Placidly, she moved on to another table and was greeted by the members of the Urdu unit.

  “Capt. Reza told Mummy that Nirmal would be out of the woods in no time,” said Zarina. “He came to see us yesterday.”

  They carried their cups of coffee from the counter and Zarina said to Surekha and Feroze, “My father began legal practice as Sir Zaki Reza’s junior in Allahabad and Lady Reza was a friend of Mummy’s. After her death, Mummy says, Reza used to come to our place with his governess, Nina, but he hated her. He’s still a little orphan, deep within. He comes to ‘The Laurels’ for solace and advice, which he gets in plenty from Mummy.”

  Zarina’s mother was an expansive and warm-hearted English-woman, everybody’s refuge in trouble. Gautam also went to see her whenever he needed to, and his barrister father had also been a friend of Sir Zaki’s in Allahabad.

  “Now Capt. Reza is very worried about you, Talat, because these two McCarthy characters have been sent to witch-hunt in the BBC.”

  “The BBC has refused to be witch-hunted, if that’s the correct expression,” Talat replied.

  “Yeah . . . And he is distressed about Roshan. She went off to Rumania even though he had told her not to. ‘Stupid woman’, he growled, ‘sacrificing her chance of a Fulbright for the sake of dancing about in a one horse-town like Bucharest.’

  “‘Aye, aye, sir,’ I said.

  “‘And she is here on a government scholarship and her father is a senior army officer. And do you know what she told me? That she went to the youth festival because she wanted to psychoanalyse the Commies! And she travelled on fake travel papers which the Rumanians had issued. Was it an honourable thing to do?’ he thundered.

  “‘Aye, aye, sir,’ I agreed. It was not an honourable thing to do. Oh, he was livid. After he left, Mummy said Roshan should be mothering this Little Boy Blue instead of behaving like an Independent Brainy Woman. Men don’t like it. Still, the frequency of their quarrels is increasing, which means they’ll get married soon. Mummy said Nirmal will be out of the hospital and we’ll all go to the Woking Mosque for the Kazmi-Reza wedding sooner than you expect. Insha Allah.”

  51. John and Mary’s Painting Book

  “Do you remember that painting book, Talat,” asked Kamal, “in which two English children roam the countryside in a tiny red car?”

  “Yes, I do. They stop at a road-house marked ‘Teas’, and John fills the car’s tank with a toy petrol tin . . . and they pluck bright red apples from a very green tree. It was just like this place,” said Talat looking around, “and there was a blue stream and a china white motor-boat and a windmill and horse-carts, and cottages of pre-war England. I even remember the names of the colours we used—cobalt blue, crimson lake, viridian. We used to get loads of such books on our birthdays, published by some mysterious ‘Father Tuck, London E.C.4.’ They’re still there, in Khyaban.”

  The waitress brought the bill. “There has been a terrible world war but England’s countryside is still the same, spread out like John and Mary’s painting book,” Talat continued.

  “We are the same, too, we carry all of our past with us wherever we go,” said Kamal.

  Gautam was listening to their conversation in silence. He understood the importance of their childhood for these people, including Nirmala, and recalled with a pang how irritated he had been when she had mentioned hers that morning in the Koh-i-Noor. After that, he was meeting her again for the first time, a T.B. patient now, because he had been away on the Continent. If he had married her in Lucknow her life could have been very different, she may not have been lying in a sanatorium hovering between hope and despair. Half of Nirmala’s lungs were soon to be removed. Had intellectual flirtation with Champa been so important to him? What is it that a man really wants?

  Hari Shankar, who had flown in from New York, was absorbed in studying the willow pattern on the crockery. “This is so typically English,” he remarked.

  “Let’s go,” said Kamal abruptly, rising from his chair. Quietly, they walked down towards Gautam’s sleek American limousine.

  The sanatorium sprawled over a low hill, surrounded by magnificent parkland. Inside, there were flowers everywhere and smiling staff faces, gleaming corridors and beautiful drawing rooms. In this haven of rest and comfort people waited for their end, watching television; or recovered and went back into the world to live, until some other kind of end overtook them.

  Nirmala’s room was surrounded by gardens on three sides.

  “Isn’t it like Kishwar Apa’s room in Nishat Mahal Hostel?” she said cheerfully to Talat. Gautam smiled sadly as she turned to him. “See, we had three hostels in Chand Bagh—Nishat Mahal, Naunihal Manzil and Maitri Bhawan—”

  Gautam nodded. They were addicted to their past because it was safe and intact, more so for Kamal and Talat because there was no fear of Partition in it. “We were day students, as you know, but had so many friends in the hostels, didn’t we, Talat? And also in Lady Kailash Hostel—I say, have y
ou started work for the Majlis Mela?” she asked Talat eagerly.

  “You’ll be with us for next year’s Mela, Insha Allah,” replied Kamal.

  “Insha Allah,” she repeated with a cheery smile. After a while she said, “Bhaiya Saheb brought me to the hospital, he has been here several times.”

  “Cho chweet,” Hari mimicked the girls. Everybody laughed.

  Nirmala continued, “He told Roshan—she had come with him last time—what rakhi was all about, Pakistan notwithstanding. It’s also Lucknow wazedari. Everyone has been here to see me except Champa Baji and Cyril. Well, I don’t expect Cyril to come, I hardly knew him, but Champa Baji . . .”

  There was silence. Then Hari mimicked some more people and made everybody laugh again. It was time to leave.

  Suddenly Nirmala broke down. “You all will go away and I’ll be left alone again—it’s terrible when one’s family and friends turn into visitors.”

  A nurse came in and gave them all a broad smile.

  52. The Boat-House

  “Your Lucknow friends are over there, under the apple trees. Oh, they’re leaving! Should we follow them to Lidhurst?” asked Cyril, looking out of the road-house window. “I came here with the intention of taking the road to Lidhurst but you didn’t seem too keen,” he added.

  Cunningly, she tried to divert his attention. “Look, Shakespearean actors!” A touring company had just arrived at the inn, wearing Elizabethan costumes. They were also on their way to Lidhurst to enact a few scenes for the patients at the sanatorium.

  Nirmala had already been taken to the hospital when Champa started working for Cyril Ashley in Cambridge. She could not tell him why she had such a bad conscience about Nirmala. In fact, she hadn’t told him anything about herself or the way she used to confide in Gautam—she hadn’t even told him about Gautam or Amir. Western men weren’t interested in a girl’s past, they weren’t nosey. Thank god.

  They boarded a launch and sailed downstream. The Louisa Jane passed through overhanging trees and creepers which formed dark watery tunnels. Cyril looked bored, like a husband. Everything seemed slightly worn out, including Cyril Ashley himself. The launch stopped in front of a boat-house and they went ashore.