Zafar’s family of five couldn’t physically fit in the room and he slept on the floor of a magazine office in another part of the old city, near Ghalib’s old house. He had once saved enough money to buy a better place. But in 1997, the year when the accounts had become computerised, his wife had fallen from the stairs and all his savings were spent on her treatment. She was there now, dressed in a black kameez with red flowers on it. She was a fat woman, with curly hair and pale skin. She was smiling, and though her face was made up, something in her eyes suggested damage, almost as if they were unused to emotions other than distress.
That night, as we ate a small feast on an oil cloth in the little room, a number of strong feelings occurred to me at once. There was the very romantic idea of the old city, even in total collapse, as still sheltering poets; there was the miracle of Zafar and his family retaining their refinement despite the squalor around them; there was also a feeling of dread for India, for any country that would let its men of learning live in conditions like these. When I thought harder about it, I was struck by how genteel and unlikely a calamity this was. Urdu had not died, but its literary culture in India had, and it had left its casualties, of which Zafar was one. His fate had been tied up with the fate of the language. I found it suddenly painful to think that the man who had helped me to understand and translate had himself ended up a prisoner of language. He had once said to me, ‘There is knowledge. Everything else comes and goes.’ But only now, seeing him in the poverty and decay that threatened always to diminish him, I understood how he must have clung to that exalted idea; and how at times, it must have been so difficult to defend. He had also reminded me, in relation to Urdu, that I had a tradition to uphold. The words then were just part of a lively argument; I hadn’t known about the life spent in service of that tradition, even as the infrastructure of literature collapsed around him. Zafar had also described himself as an intellectual mercenary. But here, as I’d found so often with him, he was only half right. There was no denying that the life that had aged him and left him covered in sores, himself like a tattered page out of Manto, had been a fighting life. But what had been fought for was not fortune, but his gentle manners, his decency and the six hundred years of poetry ready on his blackened lips. And watching Zafar Moradabadi sit back against the wall, smoking a Win cigarette, it was not so much the mercenary that came to mind as the martyr.
Aatish Taseer, New Delhi, 2008
* Loosely derived from Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem, ‘Sham-e-Firaq’
Ten Rupees
She was playing with the little girls at the far end of the alley. Inside the chawl, her mother hunted for her everywhere. Kishori sat waiting in their room; someone had been told to bring him tea. Sarita’s mother now began searching for her on all three floors of the chawl. Who knew which hole Sarita had gone and died in? She even went into the bathrooms, yelling, ‘Sarita… Sarita!’ But Sarita, as her mother was beginning to realise, was not in the chawl. She was outside on the corner of the alley, near a heap of garbage, playing with the little girls, utterly carefree.
Her mother was in a panic. Kishori sat waiting in the room; the men he’d brought—as promised, two rich men, with a motor car—waited in the main market; but where had her daughter vanished to? She couldn’t even use the excuse of dysentery anymore; she was well now. And rich men with motor cars didn’t come every day. It was Kishori’s benevolence that once or twice a month, he managed to bring clients with motor cars. Normally he was nervous of neighbourhoods like this, with their compound stench of paan and stale bidis. How could he bring rich men here? But because he was smart, Kishori never brought the men to the chawl. Instead, he brought Sarita, bathed and clothed, to them, explaining that ‘these are uncertain times; the place is crawling with police spies; they’ve taken away nearly a hundred working girls; there’s even a case against me in the courts; one has to tread very carefully.’
Sarita’s mother had by now become very angry. When she came down, Ramdi was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, cutting leaves for the bidis as usual. ‘Have you seen Sarita anywhere?’ Sarita’s mother demanded, ‘God knows which hole she’s gone and died in. And today of all days! Wait till I find her! I’ll give her a thrashing she’ll remember in every joint of her body. She’s a full grown woman, you know, and all she ever does is waste the day fooling around with kids.’
Ramdi said nothing and continued to cut the bidi leaves. But Sarita’s mother wasn’t really speaking to her; she was just ranting as usual as she walked past. Every few days, she would go off in search of Sarita, and repeat the same words to Ramdi.
Sarita’s mother would also tell the chawl’s women that she wanted Sarita to marry a clerk some day. This was why she had always impressed upon Sarita the importance of education. The municipality had opened a school nearby and Sarita’s mother wondered if she should admit her daughter there. ‘Sister, you know, her father had such a desire that his daughter should be educated!’ At this point she would sigh, and repeat the story of her dead husband, which every woman in the chawl knew by heart. If you were to say to Ramdi, ‘Alright, when Sarita’s father worked in the railways and the big sahib insulted him, what happened?’ she would immediately reply, ‘Sarita’s father foamed at the mouth and said to the sahib, “I’m not your servant; I’m the government’s servant. You have no right to throw your weight round here. And careful—you insult me again and I’ll rip your jaws out and shove them down your throat.” Then, what? What was bound to happen happened! The sahib was livid and insulted Sarita’s father again. Sarita’s father came forward and delivered such a powerful blow to the sahib’s neck that his hat flew off his head and landed ten paces away and he saw stars in the daytime! But the sahib was not a small man either. He retaliated by kicking Sarita’s father on the back with his army boot, and with such force that his spleen burst, and there and then, by the railway lines, he fell to the floor and breathed his last. The government ran a court case against the sahib and extracted a full five hundred rupees in compensation from him for Sarita’s mother. But her luck was bad. She developed a taste for the lottery, and within five months, she had squandered the money.’
This story was always ready on Sarita’s mother’s lips, but nobody was sure whether or not it was true. In any case, it didn’t evoke any compassion for her in the chawl, perhaps because everyone there was also deserving of compassion. And no one was anyone’s friend. The men, by and large, slept during the day and were awake at night as many worked the night shift at the nearby mill. They lived together, but they showed no interest in each other’s lives.
In the chawl, virtually everyone knew that Sarita’s mother had sent her young daughter into prostitution. But since these were people who treated each other neither well nor badly, they felt no need to expose her when she’d say, ‘My daughter knows nothing of this world.’
One morning, when Tukaram made an advance on Sarita, her mother began to screech and yell, ‘For God’s sake, why doesn’t anyone control this wretched baldy? May the lord make him blind in both the eyes with which he ogles my virgin daughter! I swear, one day, there’ll be such a brawl that I’ll take this darling of yours and beat his head to a pulp with the heel of my shoe. Outside, he can do whatever he wants, but in here he’d better learn to behave like a decent human being, do you hear?’
Hearing this, Tukaram’s cross-eyed wife appeared, knotting her dhoti as she approached. ‘You wretched witch, don’t you dare let one more word escape your lips! This virginal daughter of yours even makes eyes at the boys who hang around the hotel… Do you think we’re all blind? You think we don’t know of the clerks who come to your house? This daughter of yours, Sarita, why does she get all made up and go out? You really have some nerve, coming in here with airs of respectability. Go get lost, somewhere far away, go on!’
There were many well-known stories about Tukaram’s cross-eyed wife. Everyone knew that when the kerosene oil dealer would come with his kerosene, she would take him into her quar
ter and lock the door. Sarita’s mother loved to draw attention to this. In a voice brimming with hatred, she would repeat, ‘And your lover, the kerosene oil dealer… Two hours at a time, you keep him locked up in your quarter, what are you doing? Sniffing his kerosene oil?’
The spats between Tukaram’s wife and Sarita’s mother never lasted long because one night Sarita’s mother had caught her neighbour exchanging sweet nothings with someone in pitch darkness. And the very next night, Tukaram’s wife had seen Sarita with a ‘gentleman man’ in a motor car. As a result, the two women had made a pact between themselves, which is why Sarita’s mother now said to Tukaram’s wife, ‘Have you seen Sarita anywhere?’
Tukaram wife’s turned her squinting eye in the direction of the street corner, ‘There, near the dump. She’s playing with the manager’s girls.’ Then in a lower voice, she added, ‘Kishori’s just gone upstairs. Did you see him?’
Sarita’s mother looked around her and in a still lower voice said, ‘He’s sitting inside… But Sarita’s never to be found at such times. She doesn’t think, she understands nothing, all she does is spend the day running around.’ With this, Sarita’s mother walked towards the dump. Sarita jumped up when she saw her mother approaching the cemented urinal, the laughter leaving her eyes… Her mother grabbed her arm roughly and said, ‘Come on, come into the house, come in and die… Do you have nothing better to do than play these rowdy games?’ On the way in, in a softer voice, she said, ‘Kishori’s here. He’s been waiting a long time. He’s brought men with motor cars. Go on, run upstairs and get dressed. And wear that blue georgette sari of yours. Oh and listen, your hair’s a terrible mess, get dressed quickly and I’ll come up and comb it.’
Sarita was very happy to hear that rich men with motor cars had come for her, granted she was more interested in the motor cars than in the rich men who drove them. She loved riding in motor cars. When the car would roar down the open streets and the wind would slap her face, then everything would become a whirlwind and she would feel like a tornado tearing down empty streets.
Sarita was no older than fifteen, but with the interests of a girl of thirteen. She didn’t like spending time with grown women at all. Her entire day was taken up, playing silly games with the younger girls. They liked especially to draw chalk lines on the street’s black tar surface, and remained so absorbed in this game that one might almost believe that the street’s traffic depended on them drawing their crooked little lines. Sometimes Sarita would bring out old pieces of sackcloth from her room. And for hours she and her young friends, would remain immersed in the singularly monotonous business of dusting them and laying them out on the footpath to sit on.
Sarita was not beautiful. Her skin was a dusky wheat colour, its texture smooth and glistening in Bombay’s humid climate. Her thin lips, like sapodilla skins, also blackish, were always quivering faintly and a few tiny beads of sweat trembled on her upper lip. She looked robust despite living in squalor; her body was short, pleasing and well-proportioned. She gave the impression that the sheer vitality of her youth had subdued all contrary forces. Men on the streets gazed at her calves whenever her dirty skirt flew up in the wind. Youth had bestowed on them the shine of polished teak. These calves, entirely unacquainted with hair, had small marks on them that recalled orange skins with tiny, juice-filled pores, ready to erupt like fountains at the slightest pressure.
Her arms were also pleasing. The attractive roundness of her shoulders made itself apparent through the baggy, badly stitched blouse she wore. Her hair was thick and long, with the smell of coconut oil rising from it. Her plait, thick like a whip, would thump against her back. But the length of her hair made her unhappy as it got in the way of the games she played; she had invented various ways of keeping it under control.
Sarita was free of all worry and anxiety. She had enough to eat twice a day. Her mother handled all their household affairs. Every morning Sarita filled buckets of water and took them inside; every evening she filled the lamp with one paisa’s worth of oil. Her hand reached habitually every evening for the cup with the money, and taking the lamp, she’d make her way downstairs.
Sarita had come to think of her visits to hotels and dimly lit places with rich men, which Kishori organised four or five times a month, as jaunts. She never gave any thought to the other aspects of these jaunts. She might even have believed that men like Kishori came to all the other girls’ houses too and that they also went on outings with rich men. And what happened on Worli’s cold benches and Juhu’s wet beaches, perhaps happened to all the other girls as well. On one occasion she even said to her mother: ‘Ma, Shanta’s quite old now. Why not send her along with me too? The rich men who just came took me to eat eggs and Shanta loves eggs.’ Sarita’s mother parried the question. ‘Yes, yes, some day I’ll send her along with you. Let her mother return from Pune, no?’ Sarita relayed the good news to Shanta the next day, when she saw her coming out of the bathroom. ‘When your mother returns from Pune, everything will be alright. You’re going to come with me to Worli too!’ Sarita began to recount the night’s activities as if she was reliving a beautiful dream. Shanta, two years younger than Sarita, felt little bells ring through her body as she listened to Sarita. Even when she’d heard all Sarita had to say, she was unsatisfied. She grabbed her by the arm and said, ‘Come on, let’s go downstairs where we can talk.’ There, near the urinal where Girdhari the merchant had laid out dirty coconut husks to dry on gunny sacks, the two girls spoke till late about subjects that made them tingle with excitement.
Now, as she changed hurriedly into her blue georgette sari behind a makeshift curtain, she was aware of the cloth tickling her skin, and her thoughts, like the fluttering of a bird’s wings, returned to riding in the motor car. What would the rich men be like this time; where would they take her? These, and other such questions, didn’t enter her mind. She worried instead that the motor would run only for a few short minutes before their arrival at the door of some hotel. She didn’t like to be confined to the four walls of hotel rooms, with their two metal beds, which were not really meant for her to fall asleep on.
She put on the georgette sari, and smoothing its creases, came and stood for a moment in front of Kishori. ‘Take a look, Kishori, it’s alright from the back, no?’ Without waiting for a reply, she moved towards the broken wooden suitcase in which the Japanese powder and rouge were kept. She took a dusty mirror, wedged it between the window rods, and bending down, put a mixture of rouge and powder on her cheeks. When she was completely ready, she smiled and looked at Kishori, her eyes seeking appreciation.
She resembled one of those painted clay figures that appear during Diwali as the showpiece in a toy shop, with her bright blue sari, lipstick carelessly smudged on her lips, onion pink powder on her dark cheeks.
In the meantime, her mother arrived. She did Sarita’s hair quickly and said, ‘Listen, darling, speak nicely to the men and do whatever they ask. They are important; they’ve come in a motor car.’ Then addressing Kishori, she said, ‘Now, hurry up, take her to them. Poor fellows, I don’t know how long they’ve been left waiting.’
In the main market, a yellow car was parked outside a long factory wall, near a small board that read, ‘It is forbidden to urinate here’. Inside, the three young Hyderabadi men waiting for Kishori held their handkerchiefs to their noses. They would have liked to park the car ahead somewhere, but the factory wall was long and the stench of urine drifted down its entire stretch. When the young man who sat at the wheel caught sight of Kishori at the street corner, he said to his two other friends, ‘Well, brothers, he’s come. It’s Kishori and… and…’ He fixed his gaze on the street corner. ‘And… and… well, she’s just a little girl! You take a look… that one, man… the one in the blue sari.’
When Kishori and Sarita approached, the two young men sitting in the back removed their hats and made room for her in the middle. Kishori reached forward, opened the door and swiftly installed Sarita in the back. Closing the door,
he said to the young man at the wheel, ‘Forgive me, we were delayed; she was at one of her friends’ places. Well, so?’
The young man turned around and looked at Sarita, then said to Kishori: ‘Alright, but listen…’ He slid across the seat and appeared at the other window. Whispering in Kishori’s ear, he said, ‘She’s not going to kick up a fuss, is she?’
Kishori placed his hand over his chest in reply. ‘Sir! You must have faith in me.’ Hearing this, the young man took two rupees out of his pocket and handed them to Kishori. ‘Go, have fun!’
Kishori waved them off and Kafayat started the engine.
It was five in the evening. Bombay’s bazaars were clogging with traffic from cars, buses, trams and pedestrians. Sarita was lost between the two young men. She would keep her thighs clamped tightly together, place her hands over them and start to say something, then mid-sentence, fall into silence. What she would have liked to say to the young man driving was, ‘For God’s sake, let it rip. I’m suffocating in here.’
For a long time, no one said anything. The young man at the wheel continued to drive and the two young Hyderabadis in the back, under their long, dark coats, suppressed their nervousness at being so close to a young girl for the first time, a young girl whom, for at least a while, they could call their own and touch without fear or danger.
The young man at the wheel had been living in Bombay for the past two years and had seen many girls like Sarita, both in daylight and at night. His yellow car had hosted girls of various shade and quality and so he felt no great nervousness now. Of his two friends who had come from Hyderabad, one, who went by the name of Shahab, wanted a full tour of Bombay. And it was with this in mind that Kafayat—the young owner of the car—out of friendship, asked Kishori to organise Sarita. To his other friend, Anwar, Kafayat said, ‘Listen, man, if there ends up being one for you too, what harm is there?’ But, Anwar, less assertive, never overcame his shyness enough to say, ‘Yes, get one for me too.’
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