Khushwant Singh Best Indian Short Stories Volume 2

by Khushwant Singh

  The lamppost was tall. So was Dhundu. Several electric wires sprang from the lamppost and ran across the city sky in long receding lines. They joined other wires. And through this network the lamppost seemed to reach the remotest corners of the city.

  The telephone department had affixed a box to it for periodic check-ups of wires. I always compared Dhundu to this box. Posted, as he was there, for a frequent checkup of the sexual wires of his rich clientele. He could put his finger correctly on every sexually taut or loose wire that needed repair.

  He knew all the girls in the profession. He could tell every contour of their bodies, every nerve that breathed under them, every shade of their temperaments. He knew which girl suited whom. Only Siraj eluded him.

  ‘The wench has a swollen head,’ Dhundu often complained to me. ‘I cannot understand her, Manto Sahib. She is unpredictable. Cantankerous as hell. Quarrels with every “passenger”. I implore her to keep her cool or get the hell out of here and go back home. Clad in rags and penniless, can she quarrel her way through life? But she remains a stone. Deaf to my entreaties.’

  I had seen Siraj only twice. She was emaciated yet beautiful. Her eyes were large and clear, and stared out of her face in bold self-assertion. It was on Clare Road that I had seen her first. Her eyes had intrigued me. I almost felt like requesting them to step aside so that I could see the rest of her.

  She was petite and comely. A goblet, brimming full of more wine than it could hold. The surplus flowed over with throbbing intensity. I call her wine because the bitterness of a heady liquor blended with the softness of the woman in her. The ire that dishevelled her hair, puckered her nose and pursed her lips. I concluded that she was angry with everything – with Dhundu, with customers he brought her, with her large eyes that held her face under their sway.

  She was annoyed with her fingers as well. Slender, tapering fingers like the sharply pointed pencils of draughtsmen. Maybe they could not draw for her the only image she wanted drawn across her life.

  ‘Manto Sahib, the wretch was up to mischief again,’ Dhundu said one morning. ‘My good luck saved me. The police officers of Nagpada post are always kind. God bless them! Otherwise Dhundu was done for. She brought the skies down. How I cursed myself! I don’t have to put up with her. She is no kith of mine. I don’t understand it.’

  We were sitting in an Irani restaurant. Dhundu ordered his special tea, poured a little in the saucer and drank with a loud slurp. ‘If you want the truth, I sympathize with her,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ he shook his head. ‘The day I know why, my troubles will be over. Do you know something?’ he asked, emptying his entire cup in the saucer. ‘She is still a virgin!’

  ‘Virgin? Can’t be, Dhundu,’ I said surprised.

  My incredulity displeased him.

  ‘Upon your life, Manto Sahib. She is a hundred per cent virgin. Take a bet if you like!’

  ‘How can that be?’ I wondered.

  ‘Why can’t that be? A girl like Siraj can stay in this profession all her life and yet remain a virgin,’ Dhundu said emphatically. ‘She does not let anybody touch her. I know only a part of her history. She is from Punjab. As a newcomer to Bombay, she was staying at a Madame’s on Lamington Road. Was out shortly because of her bad temper. Madame had thirty other girls in the house. She was not prepared to look after Siraj for nothing. The wretch then walked over to another Madame on Foras Road and even there she fared badly. The third month saw her on the streets. Then, God bless you, she landed in a hotel in Khetwadi. And the scene was repeated. The manager threw her out in sheer disgust.’

  ‘The wretch is oblivious of everything. Her clothes are lousy. Her hair goes unwashed for months on end. She seems to have only two interests in life, hashish and film songs.’

  To keep the conversation going I asked Dhundu why he did not send her back. She was obviously not interested in this profession. I offered to pay her train fare.

  Dhundu was hurt. ‘Manto Sahib, I can well afford the fare myself!’ he said.

  Then why don’t you send her back?’

  Dhundu was quiet for a while. He took out the piece of cigarette tucked behind his ear, lighted it, blew the smoke out of his nostrils and said, ‘I don’t want her to go.’

  ‘Are you in love with her?’ I asked.

  Dhundu reacted violently. ‘How can you, Manto Sahib!’

  Pulling his earlobes with his hands, he said, ‘Upon the holy Quran, such a vile thought never crossed my mind. I just,’ he hesitated, ‘sort of like her.’

  I asked a very logical question, ‘Why?’

  Dhundu’s reply was equally logical: ‘Because she is different. The others are gold-diggers. Bloody bitches. But Siraj is peculiar. When a deal is struck she agrees. Gets into the taxi or the Victoria-gharry. Now, Manto Sahib, the passenger spends for his pleasure. He touches his ware, feels it, presses it. And that sets her ablaze. She even beats up the passenger. A gentleman runs away but a drunk or a ruffian doesn’t. Each time I have to plead guilty to the passenger. And all this only for Siraj! Upon your life, Manto Sahib, I have lost half my business because of her.’

  My mental picture of Siraj’s background did not quite conform to Dhundu’s account of it.

  I decided to meet Siraj alone and keep Dhundu in the dark about it. He had once mentioned her whereabouts. She lived near Byculla station in an ugly slum. Mountains of garbage strewn with excreta surrounded her hut. I wish I had not seen the affluent mansions that stood at a respectable distance from this squalor!

  A goat was tied to the hut. It bleated on seeing me. An old woman stepped out. She looked like a witch straight out of a fairy tale. I was about to retrace my steps when I saw a pair of wide-open eyes peeping through a hole in the jute curtain. And then the white oval of Siraj’s face. I found it hard to forget her possessive eyes.

  She came out immediately, ignored the old woman and asked me why I was there.

  ‘To meet you and take you out,’ I said.

  At that the fairy-tale witch took on a very professional look and demanded ten rupees.

  I handed her a ten-rupee note and beckoned Siraj to come.

  For a moment her big eyes lowered and made way for mine to go all over her face. I reached the conclusion, yet again, that she was beautiful. It was a frozen, caged beauty. A beauty embalmed and preserved over centuries.

  We went to a restaurant. Siraj sat across the table clad in her simple clothes. Her big eyes were rebellious. I felt they covered not only her face but her entire being. And made it impossible for me to see anything of her.

  Notwithstanding the ten rupees I paid the old witch, I gave another forty to Siraj. I wanted her to pick at me the way she did with others. So I refrained from saying anything that smacked of affection or sincerity.

  She was quiet. I wanted to provoke her into being nasty. I got slightly drunk on four glasses of whisky and flung a vulgar remark at her. She did not object. I did something really objectionable. I thought that that would trigger off the gunpowder. To my surprise she kept her composure. She gathered me into the vast expanse of her eyes and asked for a joint of charas.

  ‘Have a drink,’ I suggested.

  No. She insisted on charas.

  I got her a joint. She puffed at it in a way typical of junkies and stared at me. Her eyes had lost some of their power. She looked a ruined empire. Every contour of her face was reduced to a line of desolation. What could this desolation be? Was she a city that was invaded at its inception and turned to ruins long before completion? I wondered.

  I was not bothered about discovering for myself her virginity or the absence of it. But in her eyes, dreamy in a haze of hashish smoke, I did read something inexplicable.

  I tried conversation. She declined. Wanted her to pick up a quarrel with me. She did not. I took her back to her hovel.

  When Dhundu learnt of my secret meeting with Siraj he was offended. Both the friend and the procurer in him were deeply hurt. With
a curt ‘Manto Sahib, I did not expect that from you,’ he moved away from the lamppost.

  I was surprised not to find him there the next evening. Perhaps he was indisposed. But he was absent even the day after.

  A whole week went by. I passed the lamppost every day and it never failed to remind me of Dhundu. I went over to the slum where Siraj lived. When I asked the old witch about Siraj she smiled. Centuries of dormant sexual desire awoke and wrinkled around the toothless smile. ‘Siraj is gone,’ she said. ‘I have others. Want one of them?’

  I was nonplussed. Both Siraj and Dhundu had disappeared right after our secret meeting! There was no emotional bond between them. Dhundu was above that. He had a wife and children and was deeply attached to them. Maybe he had decided at last to send her back home, I thought.

  A month passed without them.

  One evening I saw Dhundu against the lamppost. It was like a sudden flash of light after a long blackout. Everything was bright – the lamppost, telephone box, the wires above.

  When I passed by he caught my eye and smiled. We went to the Irani restaurant. He ordered tea. Shifting in his chair he took a stance so imposing that I thought he would come out with something really profound! But he merely said, ‘How’s life, Manto Sahib?’

  ‘Nothing to write home about, Dhundu. It just goes on.’

  ‘How right you are. It just goes on,’ he said. ‘All is passing. All is strange.’

  I agreed.

  Tea was served. Dhundu emptied his cup into the saucer and said, ‘Manto Sahib, she has told me the whole story. She referred to you as “that crazy seth, your friend”!’

  ‘Why?’ I laughed.

  ‘You took her to a hotel, paid her well, and yet did not behave the way the seths do. Right?’

  I felt ashamed of my naiveté. ‘The entire episode was queer, Dhundu,’ I tried to explain.

  Dhundu laughed and said, ‘I know. Forgive me. I was curt with you that day. Now that chapter is closed.’

  ‘What chapter?’ I asked.

  ‘That of the wretch, Siraj. Who else?’

  I looked askance at him.

  ‘The day after meeting you she told me she had enough money to take her all the way to Lahore. She asked me to accompany her. I chided her for her madness. But she was adamant. She begged and pleaded.

  ‘Manto Sahib, you know I cannot say no to her! We caught the first train and went. In Lahore we rented rooms in a hotel. She asked me for a burqa and I bought her one. She wore it and roamed every road and street of Lahore for many days. I was furious with myself for following the whims of a crazy nut like Siraj and travelling all the way to Lahore with her!

  ‘One day we were out on a tonga ride when she suddenly asked the tongawallah to stop, pointed to a man in the street and said, “Dhundu bring him to me. I am returning to the hotel.” I could not understand.

  ‘I got out of the tonga and started chasing the man. By your blessing and by the grace of God I am a good judge of men. We exchanged a few words and I knew he was a gay one. I told him of a “delicacy” from Bombay. He could not wait! When I demurred he produced a thick wad of notes. Even in Lahore I could have had a roaring business!

  ‘It escaped me, though, why Siraj singled him out in the whole of Lahore. Anyway, I took him to the hotel. When Siraj was informed she asked us to wait. After a while I went in with this handsome man. The moment he saw Siraj he frisked like a frightened mouse.

  ‘Siraj caught him by the collar.’

  Dhundu drank his tea in one gulp and lighted his beedi.

  ‘Siraj caught him by the collar,’ I prompted.

  ‘Yes,’ Dhimdu raised his voice, ‘caught the bastard by the collar and asked him where he was off to.’

  ‘ “I loved you,” she said, “you claimed you loved me. I left my home, parents, everything and eloped with you. We spent a night in this very hotel. The next day you ran away, abandoning me. I was prepared for anything. You left me prepared only to wait. Now I have called you. My love for you is as intense as ever. Come to me.”’

  ‘And, Manto Sahib, she clung to him for dear life. He was in tears. Said he had been scared to face the world and had decided to run away. He begged to be forgiven and swore never to leave her again.

  ‘Siraj beckoned me to leave. I went out and slept on a cot in the courtyard.

  ‘The next morning, she woke me up and said, “Come Dhundu, let us go.”

  ‘“Where to?”’I asked.

  ‘“Back to Bombay!”’

  I enquired about the man.

  ‘ “He is fast asleep,” she said, “I have covered him with my burqa.”’

  Dhundu had just ordered himself another cup of his ’special tea’ when Siraj entered the restaurant. The white oval of her face was beaming. On it her large eyes looked like a pair of all-clear railway signals.

  (Translated from the Urdu by Fatima Ahmed)

  SEVENTEEN

  Miss Scrooge

  DINA MEHTA

  I was tempted to toss the invitation card into the waste paper basket, but Menon was watching me.

  ‘You’ll go?’ he asked anxiously.

  I frowned. The mute devotion in his eyes unsettled me, it clouded issues. I pretended to consult the invitation again: Saturday, 21 December. I looked up. ‘I think not.’

  ‘You’ve been working too hard.’ As Menon leaned forward solicitously in his chair, I braced myself like a porcupine. ‘After all, the Christmas week…’

  ‘I believe in Christmas,’ I cut him short, ‘like I believe in papal infallibility. Or bedtime stories or the unicorn.’ I had changed enough in the years not to mind the shocked protest in his face or the bite in my voice. The role of Miss Scrooge suited me to perfection. Then capriciously I reversed my earlier decision. ‘Call them up tomorrow to say that I accept. Indira is an old friend.’

  Menon beamed shyly, as if the Virgin had granted him an uncommon boon. And for the hundredth time I made a mental note that I’d suggest, as delicately as I knew how, that typing manuscripts for a still-life spinster of literary pursuits was no work for a man of his strapping talents; and that I’d help him get a job where he could be more gainfully employed.

  ‘You may go now,’ I commanded my slave.

  But for me he was prepared to toil indefatigably. ‘Those last six pages of…’

  ‘Those you may complete tomorrow,’ I said in a voice that clearly placed him out of bounds.

  He smiled. Dazzling, mindless teeth in a brown face. It made him look so young, I felt like a relic. ‘I don’t mind staying an extra hour to…’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I said unbrookingly.

  I was terrified that, given half a chance, Menon would begin explaining me to myself. Manfully wielding a scalpel in his amateur hand, he would probe my unlovely inhibitions, incise unhealed lesions, prescribe a standard cure to save me from my impending doom as a neurotic old maid. But I would have none of that.

  When he had left, with a last white rueful flash of his teeth in response to my arctic nod of dismissal, I lit a cigarette and asked myself why I had accepted the invitation to Indira and Tony D’Mello’s party.

  Why had I been asked, in the first place? After all these years, who had remembered me? Indira, the brazen upstart, in a spirit of peace on earth and goodwill to all bitches? Had the sinner turned devout, with a convert’s fervour, in her declining years? Or had Tony read a review of my book?

  I felt pursued. I would not go! But before I stubbed out my cigarette I knew I would be propelled there by anger, by curiosity. By an instinct for irony, as fragile as a hammer. And out of a sense of masochistic delight, I wanted to rub my nose in the pain of seeing them together again. Not yet blasted out of existence by heaven because of their perfidy, I had to see for myself how felicitously they had survived.

  Most things about parties in Bombay are incongruous these days: the sweeping sequined saris mingling with unabashed miniskirts and the more freakish sartorial innovations, the dim lights and deafeningly amplifie
d music. The dramatic entrances between ten o’clock and midnight when the invitation clearly stated 8 p.m. The pelvic thrusts of arthritic elders in sad competition with adolescent endeavour. And, above all, the sheer proximity of ill-assorted people in an alcoholic haze with growling, hungry stomachs – for in this city no hip hostess will dream of serving food before one in the morning. All these ingredients shaken together produce the heady cocktail called ‘A Swinging Evening’.

  And so it was. A Swinging Evening chez Indira and Tony D’Mello, when the hostess had to spoil it all by getting up to sing. Not a Christmas carol, in which her guests could have joined her in gusts of seasonal bonhomie, but a tortured operatic aria.

  I watched, nonchalantly adding my cigarette ash to the money plant in the pot by my side, as with hands prayerfully locked before her bursting bosom, her several chins raised high, Indira faced the noisy phalanx of revellers. Then shrill notes spilled over the audience till they eased the raucous hum to a sigh, and soon even the rustle of whispers died away.

  A crystallization took place in the big living room: the mob sat frozen in a spell imposed by the piercing voice, pulled taut by shreds of good manners and a bleary embarrassment.

  At the feet of the unattached shady lady (me) sat Indira’s daughter, back and ponytail rigid. Her face, turned towards the diva at a slight angle, was stiff with misery for her mother, and she was so withdrawn that the pouf she sat on became an island.

  No one had bothered to introduce us, but my first glimpse of the teenager that evening had brought on a wrenching spasm of pain. Here was the fruit of forbidden flesh, the cause of my early woes, the bludgeon wielded over my confounded head when the planned treachery came to light, the raison d’être of the hurried wedding in the church. Where was Tony?

  In the dim cave of his safe corner, my host was flirting boldly with a leggy girl, her skirt a minuscule lamp shade circling her thighs. Of all the people in the room, he alone seemed relaxed – because he was too busy to listen? Did a young, lissome body still have that effect on him?