“Oh yes!” he said in a joyful voice. “Very, very well.”
She continued to hold him. She said, “Why aren’t you writing any dramas for me these days?”
“I will write,” he said. “As many as you like.” And then he clung to her, as if afraid to be let go from her embrace.
But when she told Bakhtawar Singh that they could now meet more frequently, he said it would be difficult for him. Of course he wanted to, he said—and how much! Here he turned to her and with sparkling eyes quoted a line of verse that said that if all the drops of water in the sea were hours of the day that he could spend with her, still they would not be sufficient for him. “But . . .” he added regretfully.
“Yes?” she asked, in a voice she tried to keep calm.
“Sh-h-h—Listen,” he said, and put his hand over her mouth.
There was an old man saying the Muhammedan prayers in the next room. The hotel had only two rooms, one facing the courtyard and the other the street. This latter was usually empty during the day—though not at night—but today there was someone in it. The wall was very thin, and they could clearly hear the murmur of his prayers and even the sound of his forehead striking the ground.
“What is he saying?” Bakhtawar Singh whispered.
“I don’t know,” she said. “The usual—la illaha il lallah . . . I don’t know.”
“You don’t know your own prayers?” Bakhtawar Singh said, truly shocked.
She said, “I could come every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.” She tried to make her voice tempting, but instead it came out shy.
“You do it,” he said suddenly.
“Do what?”
“Like he’s doing,” he said, jerking his head toward the other room, where the old man was. “Why not?” he urged her. He seemed to want it terribly.
She laughed nervously. “You need a prayer carpet. And you must cover your head.” (They were both stark naked.)
“Do it like that. Go on,” he wheedled. “Do it.”
She laughed again, pretending it was a joke. She knelt naked on the floor and began to pray the way the old man was praying in the next room, knocking her forehead on the ground. Bakhtawar Singh urged her on, watching her with tremendous pleasure from the bed. Somehow the words came back to her and she said them in chorus with the old man next door. After a while, Bakhtawar Singh got off the bed and joined her on the floor and mounted her from behind. He wouldn’t let her stop praying, though. “Go on,” he said, and how he laughed as she went on. Never had he had such enjoyment out of her as on that day.
But he still wouldn’t agree to meet her more than once a week. Later, when she tried ever so gently to insist, he became playful and said didn’t she know that he was a very busy policeman. Busy with what, she asked, also trying to be playful. He laughed enormously at that and was very loving, as if to repay her for her good joke. But then after a while he grew more serious and said, “Listen—it’s better not to drive so often through Police Lines.”
“Why not?” Driving past his office after her visits to the ladies in the Civil Lines was still the highlight of her expeditions into town.
He shrugged. “They are beginning to talk.”
“Who?”
“Everyone.” He shrugged again. It was only her he was warning. People talked enough about him anyway; let them have one more thing. What did he care?
“Oh nonsense,” she said. But she could not help recollecting that the last few times all the policemen outside their hutments seemed to have been waiting for her car. They had cheered her as she drove past. She had wondered at the time what it meant but had soon put it out of her mind. She did that now too; she couldn’t waste her few hours with Bakhtawar Singh thinking about trivial matters.
But she remembered his warning the next time she went to visit the ladies in the Civil Lines. She wasn’t sure then whether it was her imagination or whether there really was something different in the way they were with her. Sometimes she thought she saw them turn aside, as if to suppress a smile, or exchange looks with each other that she was not supposed to see. And when the gossip turned to the S.P., they made very straight faces, like people who know more than they are prepared to show. Sofia decided that it was her imagination; even if it wasn’t, she could not worry about it. Later, when she drove through the Police Lines, her car was cheered again by the men in underwear lounging outside their quarters, but she didn’t trouble herself much about that either. There were so many other things on her mind. That day she instructed the chauffeur to take her to the S.P.’s residence again, but at the last moment—he had already turned into the gate and now had to reverse—she changed her mind. She did not want to see his wife again; it was almost as if she were afraid. Besides, there was no need for it. The moment she saw the house, she realized that she had never ceased to think of that sad, bedraggled woman inside. Indeed, as time passed the vision had not dimmed but had become clearer. She found also that her feelings toward this unknown woman had changed completely, so that, far from thinking about her with scorn, she now had such pity for her that her heart ached as sharply as if it were for herself.
Sofia had not known that one’s heart could literally, physically ache. But now that it had begun it never stopped; it was something she was learning to live with, the way a patient learns to live with his disease. And moreover, like the patient, she was aware that this was only the beginning and that her disease would get worse and pass through many stages before it was finished with her. From week to week she lived only for her day in Mohabbatpur, as if that were the only time when she could get some temporary relief from pain. She did not notice that, on the contrary, it was on that day that her condition worsened and passed into a more acute stage, especially when he came late, or was absentminded, or—and this was beginning to happen too—failed to turn up altogether. Then, when she was driven back home, the pain in her heart was so great that she had to hold her hand there. It seemed to her that if only there were someone, one other living soul, she could tell about it, she might get some relief. Gazing at the chauffeur’s stolid, impassive back, she realized that he was now the person who was closest to her. It was as if she had confided in him, without words. She only told him where she wanted to go, and he went there. He told her when he needed money, and she gave it to him. She had also arranged for several increments in his salary.
The Raja Sahib had written a new drama for her. Poor Raja Sahib! He was always there, and she was always with him, but she never thought about him. If her eyes fell on him, either she did not see or, if she did, she postponed consideration of it until some other time. She was aware that there was something wrong with him, but he did not speak of it, and she was grateful to him for not obtruding his own troubles. But when he told her about the new drama he wanted her to read aloud, she was glad to oblige him. She ordered a marvelous meal for that night and had a bottle of wine put on ice. She dressed herself in one of his grandmother’s saris, of a gold so heavy that it was difficult to carry. The candles in blue glass chimneys were lit on the roof. She read out his drama with all the expression she had been taught at her convent to put into poetry readings. As usual she didn’t understand a good deal of what she was reading, but she did notice that there was something different about his verses. There was one line that read “Oh, if thou didst but know what it is like to live in hell the way I do!” It struck her so much that she had to stop reading. She looked across at the Raja Sahib; his face was rather ghostly in the blue candlelight.
“Go on,” he said, giving her that gentle, self-deprecating smile he always had for her when she was reading his dramas.
But she could not go on. She thought, what does he know about that, about living in hell? But as she went on looking at him and he went on smiling at her, she longed to tell him what it was like.
“What is it, Sofia? What are you thinking?”
There had never been anyone in the world who looked into her eyes the way he did, with such love but at the
same time with a tender respect that would not reach farther into her than was permissible between two human beings. And it was because she was afraid of changing that look that she did not speak. What if he should turn aside from her, the way he had when she had asked forgiveness for the drunken servant?
“Sofia, Sofia, what are you thinking?”
She smiled and shook her head and with an effort went on reading. She saw that she could not tell him but would have to go on bearing it by herself for as long as possible, though she was not sure how much longer that could be.
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