Khushwant Singh Best Indian Short Stories Volume 2

by Khushwant Singh

  He knew that Urmil would be at the dinner party and he had come determined to spend the evening basking in the glow of her warm personality rather than allow himself to be bored by smug, self-satisfied bureaucrats or businessmen or their dumb dolled-up wives.

  For want of anything better to say – he knew that to pay her a compliment would be a singularly unoriginal, indeed fatuous, opening gambit – he asked: ‘Where is Sandy? I don’t see him around.’

  Somewhere at the back of his mind, Bhisham mused that his question was not as idle as he had made it out to be. With careful casualness he was trying to find out if Urmil’s husband was simply late for the party or if he was out of town, in which case the evening could have interesting possibilities even though he had so far met Urmil only thrice.

  In any case, Bhisham had no time for husbands in general. He considered them a nuisance and particularly disliked those who for ever hung on to their wives’ sari tails. If there was one husband he detested more than others it was Sandy – a notorious waster and name-dropper who shamelessly sponged on his wife. Urmil, a gifted designer of children’s clothes and toys, ran a flourishing boutique and Sandy thought that this gave him enough right not to work but spend his time chasing other women. With them he had – to the envy of other men – more than considerable success.

  It was this that infuriated Bhisham Arora too. But he rationalized his feeling by pretending that his anger was really directed against the bloody man’s slavishness in anglicizing his name from Sudershan Kumar to Sandy.

  Bhisham’s bemused speculation was rudely interrupted: ‘Oh that bastard!’ Urmil was virtually shrieking. ‘Must you spoil my evening by talking about him?’

  He knew that Urmil was quite capable of calling her husband a bastard, to his face or behind his back. But something in her tone warned Bhisham that she was not indulging in cocktail banter, that she meant what she was saying, and that, for some reason he could not even begin to fathom, she seemed anxious to announce to him her apparently burning, though hitherto unsuspected, hatred for her husband.

  This was something Bhisham had not bargained for. He did not want to get involved with whatever was wrong between Urmil and Sandy. Nor was he in a hurry to deprive himself of her company. Other men were already growing visibly jealous of him. Some of them were giving him dirty looks and perhaps plotting how to displace him from his perch.

  He mustered his most ingratiating smile and tried to change the subject.

  ‘Let’s forget Sandy. To hell with him as far as I’m concerned. I am interested only in you. Tell me something about your lovely self.’

  But Urmil was unimpressed. ‘Cut the crap,’ she said disdainfully. Once again Bhisham winced, not so much at the rebuff as at her unfailing addiction to clichés which the professional journalist in him found entirely distasteful.

  Urmil went on, however, even without pausing for breath: ‘I know now what your numerous girlfriends call your “mock love play”. But I have no time for this jazz. You reminded me of that dirty swine: you must pay the price by listening to my tale of woe. You can’t get off so lightly.’

  ‘Oh Lord,’ said Bhisham to himself in despair, ‘what have I put my foot into?’ Nothing bored him more than the morbid recital of marital quarrels. He was often astonished by the vicious and vulgar things perfectly civilized men and women could say about their marriage partners.

  But luckily he was saved the embarrassment. The welcome relief came from Leela, his hostess, and Urmil’s sister.

  It was Leela – Lily to friends – who had first cultivated Bhisham Arora and it was through her that he had met Urmil. In other words, the whole thing stemmed from Leela’s overpowering ambition to be a journalist and writer and her need for his support in this undertaking.

  Of course Leela had no talent for writing at all. But she was keen, beautiful, good-hearted and, above all, a divorcee. It cost Bhisham nothing to say a few polite words of encouragement to her while tactfully warding off her persistent offers to write for the magazine he edited.

  Knowing her sister rather well and presumably believing that she might be dropping quite a few bricks, Leela glided towards them, hiding her fears behind a brilliant smile. ‘Hey, what are you trying to do to my sister?’ she demanded with affected seriousness.

  ‘I had thought,’ replied Bhisham, ‘that she is grown up enough to take care of herself.’

  The awkward moment passed; the tension dissolved in loud guffaws of laughter. Many men, waiting for precisely this opportunity, zeroed in on Urmil.

  But the reprieve Bhisham had thought he had won was short-lived. By the time the party ended in a thick haze that was partly alcoholic and partly amorous, it was taken for granted, as if by some unwritten but unavoidable agreement, that he would be dropping Urmil home.

  He lost no time in trying to make the best of this opportunity. Hardly had he started his car when he invited her to his bachelor apartment for a drink. But she turned him down flat.

  ‘Not tonight, Josephine,’ she said, mixing her genders if not metaphors. ‘I ain’t in the mood. Try your luck some other time. This evening I only want coffee – in a public place. The noisier the better.’

  They drove to a discotheque in silence. But as soon as they sat down and ordered coffee, Urmil was her old vivacious self.

  ‘No, Bish dear,’ she started, ‘I mean it. You’ve no idea how wise you are in staying single. Or maybe you are just lucky. In any case, old boy, avoid marriage like the plague. There’s nothing more painful and humiliating than being married.’

  Bhisham‘s heart sank. Was she trying to make fun of him? he wondered. Had she heard of his latest misfortune which others would call the latest scandal?

  He had taken very good care to put the lid on the trouble he was having not so much from his latest girlfriend as from her mother. The old cow had caught them in the act and was now relentlessly trying to drive him to the altar.

  His spirits drooping further, Bhisham reminded himself that nothing could remain secret in Delhi for long. To live in the capital city and have an affair was like cohabiting in a glasshouse.

  But he recovered his poise soon enough. ‘To hell with it!’ he told himself. ‘Let people say what they like. Let Urmil get her fun out of my misfortune.’ He could take it.

  As he looked up, however, he was struck by the sincerity in Urmil’s wide, beautiful and tearful eyes. Nothing could have been farther from her thoughts than the idea of needling him. Obviously she had enough worries of her own to bother about those of others. Perhaps it was wrong to believe that in Delhi everyone knew everything about everyone else.

  After all, hadn’t he thought until Urmil’s curious outburst earlier in the evening that he knew all there was to know about her and Sandy? How wrong he had been!

  Of course he knew that she was Sandy’s fourth wife and he her third husband and that, for Sandy’s sake, she had treated her second husband, a distinguished professor, with incredible bitchiness and cruelty. But it was his impression, as also that of other know-alls, that in spite of Sandy being a bastard, he and Urmil were deeply devoted to each other, that they usually had behaved together as oversexed, newly-wed teenagers. How different the reality had turned out to be.

  After what seemed to him a very long time, he looked up again. She was evidently waiting for his cue, for she spoke up at once: ‘Don’t get me wrong, sweetie. I’m not advocating celibacy or abstinence. Fornicate like hell, if you can. Live in delicious sin by all means. But when it comes to marriage: Don’t!’

  Bhisham could not help smiling. He felt like teasing her a little. ‘Darling, all this is stale stuff. It has been said a million times before. Yet marriages haven’t stopped. In any case, it doesn’t lie in your mouth to rant against holy matrimony. Remember you’ve been bitten by the bug not once, not twice, but three times.’

  ‘Well,’ she replied defiantly, ‘mine is the voice of experience. All the more reason that you should heed it. As I’ve said already, I have nothi
ng against the man–woman relationship. Speaking for myself, I couldn’t do without it for a day – or should I say night? But that has nothing to do with marriage.’

  ‘I know a great many married couples who have lived happily ever after,’ Bhisham said without much conviction but with great gusto.

  ‘Stop your bloody witticism,’ she almost screamed. ‘Are you sure you know the reality of the married lives you call happy? Don’t mistake the mask for the face.’ And then lowering her voice, as if reasoning with a stubborn child, she went on: ‘Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to be unfair even in anger. Sandy is a bastard, no doubt, but he is not all evil. I know I am not only his wife and bedmate but also the meal ticket. So he wouldn’t let go of me even if he hated me, which he does. The trouble is that he loves me very dearly too in his own perverse way. My own feelings are equally mixed. You know, of course, that we lived together nine years before we got married. Those were the happiest years of my life. Marriage has changed it all. It is marriage that has made a monster of Sandy.’

  ‘I am afraid,’ commented Bhisham, ‘you are being melodramatic. Be dramatic by all means but try also to be mellow. Nine years is a long time in our short lives. You can’t live with a man for that long and not know him inside out. How can the mere act of signing the marriage register make a radical difference? Don’t tell me that he wasn’t running after other women during those nine idyllic years.’

  ‘His womanizing is the last thing that worries me. After all, I myself don’t lead a saintly life. But how can I tell you the kind of animal he has become? It burns me with shame even to think of what the fat pig has been up to. Cross your heart that you wouldn’t whisper to a soul. I must tell you or else I‘ll die of sheer strain. The son-of-a-bitch tried to make it with my own child, to his stepdaughter whom he knew when she was a baby in my arms.’

  Bhisham was shocked into silence. This was natural. But what surprised him was that a strange quiet suddenly descended on the infernally noisy discotheque. The music that the band was playing evidently called for a moment’s pause and it caught all patrons – frenetic dancers on the floor or the canoodling couples in dark corners – speechless. It was also the moment when Urmil finished her mortifying confession and began to weep silently. Luckily the lights were dimmed at once and the racket called pop music began again.

  Even hard-boiled Bhisham Arora was deeply moved. A cold, overpowering anger against Sandy’s unspeakable villainy welled up within him.

  He was still fuming when he said: ‘Urmil, this is disgusting. You can’t stay with the swine after this. You must sue for divorce at once. You have a foolproof case.’

  ‘You idiot,’ Urmil’s response was hysterical, ‘do you want me to ruin the life of my daughter, my only child, my only treasure? She will have a hard time living down a mother like me. Do you want me to finish her completely by telling the sordid story about her and Sandy in the divorce court?’

  The silence during the drive to Urmil’s home was oppressive. As usual Bhisham was taking an overly long, circuitous route. He could do nothing to end Urmil’s misery, but surely he owed it to her to help her change her mood.

  ‘Don’t answer if you don’t want to. But why did you marry Sandy if you were so happy living with him without wearing the wedding ring?’

  ‘I had to,’ she replied shortly. But her eyebrows arched as she saw the expression on Bhisham’s face and then she burst out laughing.

  ‘Heavens above, I wasn’t pregnant or anything of the sort. I know how to take precautions.’

  ‘What was it then?’

  ‘Oh,’ said she, a biting edge back in her voice. ‘It was that mangy bitch – my landlady.’

  Bhisham was puzzled. ‘What? Is she a young thing? Did Sandy fall for her too?’

  ‘She’s quite sexy though no spring chicken. And I wouldn’t have given a damn if she had tried to seduce Sandy. He may well have seduced her, for all I know or care.’

  ‘What was the trouble then? What could she have done to you?’

  ‘You’re a gay, carefree bachelor. You won’t understand. That syphilitic whore tried to ruin me. She made a takeover bid for my boutique. Very cunningly too.’

  ‘How on earth could she do that if you didn’t want to sell?’ enquired Bhisham, now more confused than ever before.

  ‘Very simply. She just filed a suit for eviction on the grounds that I was living an immoral life and bringing a bad name to the neighbourhood. I immediately screwed her by marrying Sandy.’

  While leaving Urmil at her door, Bhisham changed the routine he had regularly followed on such occasions in the past with, to his own astonishment, a great measure of success.

  For the first time, he didn’t ask his date if he could come in for a cup of coffee. He didn’t even try to kiss her.

  All he did while bidding her a demure ‘Good night’ was to say: ‘Urmil all we need is a reform of the tenancy laws. Marriage laws can take care of themselves.’

  FIFTEEN

  Mozelle

  SAADAT HASAN MANTO

  For the first time in four years, Trilochan looked at the night sky. He was terribly disturbed and had decided to come out onto the terrace of Advani Chambers to relax and think in the fresh air.

  The sky was spotless, with not a cloud in sight; it hung over the sprawling city of Bombay like a huge, dark-grey canopy. For miles around, scattered lights were still burning. It seemed to Trilochan as if thousands of stars had dropped from the sky and got stuck in the dark limbs of those towering black trees of skyscrapers, their tiny glimmer showing like so many fireflies.

  It was an unfamiliar experience for Trilochan – his coming out suddenly under the open sky – and it gave him a strange feeling. He felt as if he had been a prisoner in his own flat for four years, shut off from all the wonderful gifts of nature. It was now close to three, and the morning air felt keen and fresh. For four years he had felt only the heavy breeze of his electric fan; and it had turned his existence into an insufferable burden. Every morning he woke up feeling sore as if he had been soundly thrashed in the night. But, from this morning air, every fibre in his body sucked in new life, made him feel a new man. Coming up to the terrace, his mind was wracked with anxiety, but a more half hour in the fresh air had calmed him. He now felt himself capable of concentrating and thinking.

  Trilochan’s friend, Kalwant Kaur, and her family were in that part of the city where Moslems were in the majority. Many a house had already been set on fire, and several persons had been killed. Trilochan would have brought them away, but the difficulty was that in the meantime a curfew had been enforced in the city, and nobody knew just how long it was going to last. Maybe forty-eight hours, maybe longer.

  Kalwant’s mother was blind and her father a paralytic. There was a brother, but he was away from Bombay taking care of his construction contract at Deolali.

  Trilochan’s anger was really directed at this brother, Niranjan. Now he, Trilochan, used to read the newspapers regularly; he had watched the tension rising, and had warned them – a week before anything happened in the city – about the uncontrolled frenzy of communal riots. He had said it in so many words, too.

  ‘Look, Niranjan, forget that contract. Let it ride for the time being. It’s going to get pretty bad here, and very soon. Not only shouldn’t you leave town now, but you should also bring all your family over to my place. I don’t have too much space, but in such troubled days, it doesn’t matter.’

  But Niranjan never listened to him. After Trilochan’s long discourse he smiled under his bushy moustache and said, ‘Look, pal, you’re worried for no reason. I’ve been through lots of such riots. This isn’t Amritsar, it isn’t Lahore. This is Bombay, my friend, Bombay. You got here merely four years ago, but I’ve lived in this city for twelve years – not one or two, but a full twelve years.’

  But here was Trilochan, standing in the cold dawn; and the chill of the breeze made him think more realistically than Niranjan. He could see how their place was n
o longer safe. He was even reconciled to finding reports of their slaughter in the morning newspapers. Not that he particularly cared if the paralysed father and the blind mother did get butchered.

  The gentle currents of the breeze danced around him and ruffled his short hair, and his head felt delightfully cool. But inside, in his mind, hordes of misgivings struggled together. Kalwant Kaur had newly arrived in his life. Though the sister of a huge Sikh, she was slender and delicate. She had been brought up in a village, had seen its winters and summers; but she didn’t have the kind of hardness or masculinity one finds in most Sikh girls from villages, where they lead hard lives. She had delicate features which had yet to grow into mature lines. Her breasts were round and small, and needed many more layers of creamy softness. Unlike other village girls, her complexion was very fair, of the colour of fresh linen, and her body was as smooth as the finest muslin. And she was very shy.

  Trilochan, too, was from her village, but he hadn’t stayed there long. After primary school, he went off to the town high school and stayed on in town through college. But college days were long over. Between the college buildings and Advani Chambers was the distance of ten years; and those years were filled with strange events and places – Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong – and now Bombay, where he had been for four years. And, in those four years, tonight was the first time he caught a glimpse of the sky. Thousands of tiny lamps were lit in that grey ceiling, and the air was cool and light-footed.

  From Kalwant Kaur his thoughts turned to Mozelle, that Jewish girl who lived in Advani Chambers. For a while Trilochan had had a crush on her, a strange passion which he had never felt before in his thirty-five years.

  He had run into Mozelle the very first day he moved into this second-floor flat in Advani Chambers which he’d found through the help of a Christian friend. At first sight she had looked like an ogre, she was so frightful. Her short brown hair was a mess, and the lipstick that stained her lips like thick blood was cracked and flaky. She was wearing only a loose white robe, and through its wide neckline one could easily discern her large, blue-veined breasts. The fine hair that covered her thick arms made her look as if she had just returned from a haircut given by a negligent barber.