‘Hello, Uncle,’ Pervez said, appearing from the side, ‘adaab.’
‘Assalam-o-alaikam, betay.’ Ayaz Beg patted him on the head. ‘Congratulations. How are you?’
‘Thank you, Uncle. I am fine. Hello, Naim.’
They shook hands. Pervez held Naim’s hand for several minutes, pressing it warmly, smiling, searching for the old acquaintance in Naim’s eyes and finding it, no more than a spark but sufficient for a renewal. Suddenly, they found themselves surrounded by several of their group, followed by much shaking of hands and noise of greetings.
‘Where did you go, Naim? For so long – so long,’ asked Phoebe Gregson, the police superintendent’s daughter, in her typical, too cheerful way.
‘Are you deaf and blind, Phee, can’t you see he’s back from winning the war?’ Arshad said, pointing with exaggerated formality to the entire length of Naim’s erect posture.
‘Oh good, good, good,’ innocent-faced Talat, the only one who didn’t seem to have aged a day since Naim last saw her, enthused, ‘you are a war hero. Great! Are we allowed to worship you now?’
‘We read it in the newspaper,’ Shirin said.
‘What?’ Naim asked.
‘Of your exploits.’
‘It was nothing like that,’ Naim said. ‘It just happened by chance.’
‘Hulloo –’ someone from the back of the crowd cried. Sahibzada Waheeduddin proceeded vigorously to shake Naim’s hand. ‘Where have you been, old man? Oh, but of course you went off to the war. How wonderful! And you won fame, didn’t you? Splendid. Welcome back. Welcome.’
For once Naim felt utter contempt for these young men in comparison to their counterparts in England and elsewhere in Europe who had fought and died in the trenches.
‘Have you met Bilkees?’ asked Shirin.
‘Yes, yes,’ the sahibzada injected, ‘meet my wife …’
Bilkees Waheeduddin was a pale, slight young woman with fine, upper-class features.
‘Bilkees, you know Naim?’ Shirin said. ‘No? Our old friend Naim Ahmad Khan. Now,’ she paused, ‘victor of wars.’
There was good-natured laughter. Naim joined in with a thin smile. He was mildly annoyed and embarrassed. He felt the general gaiety around him was forced and saw how hard everyone was trying to avoid looking at the unmoving arm thrust permanently in his jacket pocket. Someone called out from the side, and the group broke up, going in different directions in pairs, promising to meet up again in a short while.
Walking among the crowd, Naim was introduced some time later to civil service colleagues of Pervez and Sahibzada Waheed, who greeted him with customary politeness. Further on, he came across some minor zamindars, wearing their high starched turbans, standing in a group of four, one of whom stopped Naim.
‘We heard you were in the war, young man,’ the man said cheerfully, ‘and you showed great bravery.’
‘Who told you?’ Naim asked him roughly.
‘Oh, we all know,’ the landowner said, looking pointedly at the sleeve-covered arm. ‘We are proud of you.’
Naim thought the man was going to touch his arm. He abruptly turned and walked away. On the way to the veranda he was halted by Pervez’s hand on his shoulder.
‘Naim, meet my wife Naheed.’
Trying hard to lighten his mood, Naim said ‘adaab’ to a plumpish, fair-skinned girl, who, unlike any other young woman there, offered her hand to him to shake and spoke to him in English.
‘How do you do?’
Slightly taken aback, Naim took her very soft hand for a second and mumbled a congratulation-cum-greeting. Pervez walked off, leaving the two of them standing there.
‘I have heard so much about you,’ she said to him.
‘I am visiting here after many years,’ Naim said.
‘Oh, yes? But they talk of you as if you were never away.’
‘Do they?’
A woman of about thirty, wearing a gold-threaded gharara, came up to speak in an urgent manner to Naheed, making her turn summarily to Naim to say, ‘See you later,’ and quickly go off with the woman. Naim felt immensely relieved. He ascended the four marble steps and stepped on to the veranda. Turning left, because that side was empty of both guests and servants, he started walking slowly along the long, curved black-and-white tiled veranda, pausing once or twice to look through the thick white columns out at the guests and hosts, mixing, talking, now a bit more animatedly, standing on the paths, on the grass, and sitting in the sofa chairs laid out on the lawn in the afternoon sun of late autumn. The years had imparted to his features a hint of roughness that sat attractively on his face. Women unknown to him looked from a distance at this good-looking young man walking all by himself behind the columns – his body held straight, arm in his pocket – with affection, and the English among them, these sitting mostly on the sofas, smiled boldly at him. Walking on, he met unexpectedly, one after the other, three people. First was Roshan Agha, emerging from an inner room and coming face to face with him.
‘Adaab,’ Naim said, touching his forehead with his hand.
‘Good to see you, Naim,’ Roshan Agha said, placing his hand on Naim’s back, smiling but not looking him straight in the eye. He asked a string of questions in one breath. ‘How are you? How are matters in the village? I am sorry about Niaz Beg’s passing away. Are you faring well on your own?’
‘Very well, sir, everything’s all right.’
‘Yes, yes. I wanted you to come. Come more often. Our relations go back generations. Anything I can do in the village, do not hesitate to let me know.’ Roshan Agha hastened away, Naim saying ‘Thank you’ to his back.
Next was the aunt, coming down the stone staircase that descended from the upper storey near the end of the veranda. ‘How are you, Naim mian?’ she asked in her usual pinched manner, a forced civility that nevertheless expressed a half-formed disapproval of the world around her.
‘I am quite well, khala,’ Naim replied.
‘It’s been a long time,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Naim, ‘I have been busy.’
‘So I have heard.’ The older woman, who had all the time been looking past him at the people out in the open, moved sideways, seeming imperceptibly to shrink away from him and, without saying another word, stepped off the veranda, going on to join a group of women on the main lawn. Naim stood there trying to recover from his meeting with the woman. Just under the staircase was the last room in this wing of the house. Azra appeared in the doorway. She made no effort to step on to the veranda, nor did she utter a word to greet Naim. She stood there regarding him intently from head to foot with eyes at once warm and vacant, her gaze finally resting on the arm, of which only the jacket sleeve showed. Naim too was absolutely still, although his head, held high for so long, bowed ever so slightly as if bringing itself in line with Azra’s. A whole minute passed. When she spoke, her lips quivered.
‘I saw you once,’ she said.
‘Where?’
‘In the village.’
‘When?’
‘The night khala and I were coming back with Papa from a visit there.’
‘Where were you?’
‘In the car. You were riding a horse.’
Naim remembered the evening. ‘Did you see what happened there?’
‘Yes. We were inside the haveli. It was awful.’
‘Really? I thought you might have enjoyed it,’ he said briskly.
‘Why do you say that?’ she asked.
‘Isn’t that how you treat the muzaras?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You are wrong.’
‘The old man’s son was killed in the war,’ he said simply.
There was a brief silence. She kept looking him in the eye. ‘I heard all about you,’ she said.
‘What did you hear?’
‘That you went to the war. You were wounded.’
Naim’s left shoulder stiffened, his face changed colour. ‘Your war, not mine.’
What do you mean? I heard you insiste
d on going.’
‘A mistake.’
‘Why a mistake?’
‘Everyone died out there.’
‘People who go to war run that risk.’
‘Yes. Those who avoid death get a pension, the dead get nothing.’
‘I am sorry,’ she paused. ‘I also heard you were away again for a long time.’
Azra waited for him to say something. He quietly turned his face to look out at the brilliant sunshine falling on the very green grass and on the colourful dresses of the women that moved on it.
‘You know, Naim,’ Azra said, ‘you are too proud of yourself.’
Naim shot back a glance and caught her withdrawing into the room, her white silk gharara flying in her wake, head bowed and hands half covering her face. Naim stopped where he was for just a second before he felt his old resentment evaporate. He went into the room after her. Azra was slumped in a sofa chair too vast for her, almost hidden behind many cushions that she held up as if to protect herself. Naim found it difficult to speak to her standing up. Azra was looking up at him but the set of her mouth also indicated a certain resolve behind her moist eyes. Naim slowly lowered himself to kneel beside the chair so that his face was level with Azra’s. Looking in her eyes and seeing the determined conflict in them, Naim knew, although until now he had been only dimly aware of it, that this face had always been within him wherever he had been.
He took Azra’s hand and said quietly, ‘I am sorry, Azra. I am – very sorry.’
Azra’s eyes were on the verge of tears, but when she spoke her voice was without a quiver. ‘Women are not without pride or shame. But they do have feelings.’
Naim heard, for the first time, a grown-up voice. He looked up in astonishment and saw not the young, carefree girl he had known but someone who had become an adult beyond his imagination. A servant, entering the room, stopped short at what he saw and tiptoed back into the adjoining chamber.
A month later, the following scene was enacted in Roshan Mahal. It took place in Azra’s room where she sat on the edge of her bed, her back half-turned away from the only other person present in the room, who stood by the window. A sense of tension stretched across the room like a taut electric wire humming almost inaudibly as a high-voltage current passed through it.
‘It is preposterous – most preposterous,’ Azra’s aunt said.
‘Why, what is so terrible?’
‘It’s not done. Just not done.’
‘Why not? Is he a servant?’
‘That is not the point.’
‘That is exactly the point.’
‘Oh, Azra, don’t you know, don’t you just know? He is not from among us.’
‘He is no muzara either.’
‘Don’t you understand, it has never been done before. How much more unhappiness will you cause Roshan Agha? You refused a perfect match with Waheed a year ago. Do you think that didn’t cause your father pain? And now this – this p-p-peas–’
‘Don’t, khala, don’t call him a peasant. I kept quiet the first time, please don’t do it again. Isn’t he educated? Does he not come from what you’d call a “pure-blood family”? Does he not own land?’
‘Oh yes, a few acres, and those given to them by Roshan Agha. And some he got from the war, and at what cost? A cripp–’
It was as if a shock passed through Azra’s whole body. She turned round to face her aunt and screamed, ‘Don’t! Don’t utter that foul word, khala, don’t ever call him that.’
The older woman’s face drained of all blood. Her skin, already pale, turned ashen. She backed off towards the door. Trembling with a mixture of fright and anger, she said, as she went out of the room, ‘You were always obstinate. And not normal.’
What occurred in the following few months was an upheaval that shook the house built by Roshan Ali Khan of Rohtak, titled Roshan Agha I, a pillar, no doubt not a major one but a pillar all the same, on which the governing classes of the Raj stood. Every means was employed to contain it; family and friends were all arrayed against the headstrong young woman. She was sent off to her father’s house in the hill station of Simla, chaperoned by her ayah and a couple of servants. Bribing the ayah with tears and the servant with money, she sent messages to Naim. He came. Their trysts continued throughout her stay there and again, when she was brought back, in Delhi, more easily in the old city where they could use the annexe to the house of her dear friend Shirin. A year was spent thus, but in the end nothing availed Roshan Agha and the family. At the close of the following year, Azra and Naim were married off. No big feasts were held and no guests other than immediate family were invited to the nikah ceremony. A quiet affair as it was, news of it inevitably spread among the great houses of the country, becoming a minor scandal before it died down. It was, however, by no means an unprecedented occurrence. Cases such as these had been known among the high and the mighty, the rich and the well-known – including one in the famous Nehru family – but on most occasions the girl, for it was always a girl, was persuaded under unbearable pressure to step back from the line drawn by the family, or otherwise she was simply made to vanish, never to be seen or heard of again. Over the past hundred years, only two or three cases were known where the couple were allowed to unite and get on with their lives, mostly in relative obscurity. That, however, was not to be the case with Azra and Naim.
The modest wedding apart, Roshan Agha, who loved Azra more than any other person in the world, did whatever he could; he built the couple a large house, not in the city but in Roshan Pur at both Naim and Azra’s insistence, Azra more for the sake of Naim than herself. Within months, they had settled down to village life, Azra planning and supervising the planting of a vast garden around the house – the first time she had done anything which could properly be called work – and Naim, now the supreme head of the village and all the lands that belonged to it, throwing himself enthusiastically into all the various duties that went with the job.
CHAPTER 17
IT WAS THE end of April and already it was too hot to expose human flesh to the sun. The comforting days of spring were over and now, quickly, in a matter of days, the sky would become a blazing sheet and begin to scorch the earth. It was the time of year when golden wheat swayed in gusts of dusty wind in fields as far as the eye could see, and those who had grown it spent their days impatiently sharpening the blades of their hand scythes, their eyes shadowed by fear of a storm or rain that would destroy their livelihood; it was the time when the first white buds of chambeli appeared like sugardrops on their green shoots, spreading the faintest whiffs of fragrance that told of approaching summer.
After a breakfast of sweet wheat porridge and tea, Naim and Azra made a round of the garden – Azra’s big interest now in the place. Followed by Naim and two men who were actually share-cropping muzaras but had learned to tend a proper garden under Azra’s guidance, she examined every shrub and plant and each tree as if they were pets with whom she was renewing acquaintance after her return from a two-week stay in Delhi. Stopping by the beds of winter flowers whose dying petals and leaves were falling one by one as the green summer plants began to bloom, picking a withered fruit from the young orange tree and looking up at the next to appreciate the little conical spheres, moustached and green, that would soon be ripe guava, she completed her round just as the sun became unbearable and sweat appeared on all their brows.
Ordering a jug of lemonade, Azra sat down under a tall bohr tree, whose fruit was the favourite of parrots who also nested in the deep crevices made by time and weather in its enormous trunk during its century-long growth. Resting his elbows on the waist-high boundary wall of the house that ran just outside the tree, Naim leaned over it, looking out. A woman was passing through the fields with a cane tray carrying her man’s first meal of the day on her head. It would, Naim knew, be a couple of rotis with onion and green coriander chutney or a lump of mango achar. A crow flew overhead, casting a shadow over the woman’s tracks. Wheeling down suddenly, it landed lightly on t
he tray and tried to beak out the bread from under the cloth that covered it. The woman lashed out and the crow flew away. The tray, which had not been touched by the woman’s hand, stayed on her head in perfect balance with the practised swaying of her young body. Naim kept watching the progress of her torso through the standing crop until she disappeared.
The servant brought lemonade in a pot, two glass tumblers and the three-day-old English newspaper and placed them on the table. Showing the mildest of interest in the newspaper, Azra leaned over to look at the large photograph on the front page, reading the caption underneath it without picking up the paper. She poured some lemonade into the tumbler and leaned back to sip it. Although on her return from Delhi she had spent a joyful night in bed with her husband, there was a kind of tiredness, a sense of extreme indifference in her eyes, as if upon completing a tour of the garden her business with the world had come to an end. Things were not going the way either of them had envisaged. She had been going more and more often to Delhi and staying longer there.
‘Come and have some lemonade,’ she said to Naim.
Naim came back to sit in the other chair and filled a tumbler of the cool beverage for himself. They sat in silence for some time, listening to the parrots’ raucous cries overhead, until the birds flew away, making a still shriller racket.
‘Desai sisters,’ Azra said, pointing to the photograph visible on the folded newspaper under the main headline.
Naim picked up the paper and read the caption under the picture.
‘Picketing,’ continued Azra, ‘outside shops selling imported goods.’
‘Yes,’ Naim said.
‘I met them in Delhi this time.’
‘Did you?’ Naim said, sipping his drink.
‘You have heard of Jalianwala Bagh, haven’t you?’
‘Er – yes. To do with the Khilafat movement, wasn’t it?’
‘Rowlatt Act,’ Azra said briefly.
‘Er – yes. Many killed?’
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