by S L Bhyrappa
She waited longer. Silence. ‘I ask the artists, writers and playwrights in this gathering to tell the truth: which other faith or religion in the world allows the kind of unfettered freedom of expression in song, dance and literature that Hinduism allows? Which other faith or religion honours art as the sibling of spiritual bliss and worships a true artist as a rishi, a sage? We can abuse our gods and poke fun at our religious gurus. Which faith admits this kind of freedom? Europeans fought a long and tough battle and finally achieved this freedom after Renaissance. And in Islam, we can’t even imagine something like this. But what are our people doing? Our own artists are using this freedom to extinguish the very religion that gives it to them. And they’re doing this with full knowledge of what will happen if that other faith takes complete control of the land. What explains this self-deception, this willing prostitution?’ She was trembling now and for a moment she thought she was possessed. When she looked around the table now, her eyes were wide and furious.
Silence.
The Marxist-beards got up from their seats. Chairperson Sastri spoke: ‘We’re running late. Lunch has already been delayed by forty-five minutes. My heartfelt thanks to Mrs Razia for presenting her perspective. Post lunch, other participants shall speak in turn.’
It was clear to her that Amir was purposely avoiding her by trying to appear busy talking to someone. He knew several people here and now he was more popular. His documentaries had received nationwide acclaim. He was closer to these people here than she was given that she had withdrawn from this circle for five years. And the fact that he was still trying to avoid her added to her confidence.
The post-lunch session began with a speaker who opened by saying that the aim of studying history was to foster harmony in society and that it was useless in the present time to keep the memory of past acrimonies alive. Another speaker said that the Hindu–Muslim divide was the poisonous seed sown by the British and that there was no enmity between Hindus and Muslims until the British conquered India. Lakshmi listened as speaker after speaker elucidated theories upon theories.
‘The people of the oppressed classes invited Muslim invaders to liberate them from the hierarchical social order. But for Prophet Mohammad’s preaching, the lives of these classes would have been damned forever.’
‘If Muslims were alien invaders, so were the Aryans.’
‘Remember that idol worship originated from the symbolism which says that the Brahmins issued forth from God’s mouth, the Kshatriyas from his arms, the Vaishyas from his thighs and the Shudras from his feet.’
‘Islamic iconoclasm hit the upper classes the hardest which is why they began to fan the flames of Muslim hatred.’
Lakshmi interrupted, ‘Lies! All of them! All lies! Plenty of irrefutable evidence exists to show how tens of thousands of these upper classes escaped to the jungles because they couldn’t afford to pay jaziya. The followers of Maharana Prathap who lost to Akbar swore that they wouldn’t enter any city until they defeated the Mughals. Their descendants are the people of the nomadic Gadia Lohar tribe in today’s Rajasthan. An entire body of research devoted to the study of the origins of this tribe is available. The British invented the theory that the Aryans were alien invaders so that they could justify their own empire in India. There was no such thing as a separate Aryan and Dravidian civilization in India.’
‘It is bad manners to interrupt when someone is speaking,’ a voice from her right said, and simultaneously another voice, ‘I kindly call upon the chairperson to restrain this lady who speaks like a know-it-all. There has been no quality progress at all!’
The chairperson addressed her in a loud, curt tone, ‘Madam Razia, will you please restrain yourself? Do not create conditions for yourself that will force me to pass a harsh judgement on you.’
Lakshmi nodded and sat down and said nothing after that. They’ve chosen their invitees well. They invited me based on my previous record. She scanned the hall again. There was nobody here who had an alternate, let alone opposing line to take. By evening it was clear that Professor Sastri had driven the whole seminar—from its title to the invitee list to actually writing the recommendations for who to invite and why. He only knows that I left Bangalore to stay in Narasapura after Father’s death to study. He doesn’t know what I was exactly studying. And he recommended my name assuming that I was still Razia the Revolutionary whom he had known all these years. And now he must be feeling rotten but he’s still showing immense patience because my son…now a hardcore Sharia husband…has married his daughter. In a way this seminar’s good…drew out five years of knowledge I had piled up within me in one go. But why didn’t he tell me in the flight that he had also invited Amir? Perhaps the ministry had suggested it without informing him?
~
He hadn’t, in his wildest imagination, expected to see her here. He didn’t know the intent of this seminar. The invite hadn’t specified anything clearly. He saw that it had arrived from the ministry, which merely asked him to ‘kindly attend the seminar’. He didn’t know who was behind it. Neither did Professor Sastri tell him anything even on the phone. He rarely, if ever, called him nowadays. Amir thought his second nikah had upset the professor but he didn’t care much for the professor’s displeasure. The fact that the ministry had entrusted him with a whole lot of documentary projects aimed at promoting national integration was the reason he was invited to this. This seemed to be a convincing answer.
He felt uncomfortable the moment he saw her in that hall. He hadn’t given much thought to how he would react if he met her. He knew the possibility did exist but he hadn’t consciously prepared for it—she, studying the books that her father had collected over the years and he, busy with his documentaries. He began to sense that the distance between Bangalore to Narasapura increased each time she visited him until one day it became clear that the road had split into separate paths on its own. He recalled their last phone conversation. She had called him, ‘I hear you’ve had a nikah with another woman.’ When he replied, ‘But I haven’t pronounced talaq to you,’ he could feel the weakness in his voice. Nothing after that. Haughty woman. Or was it self-respect? But the nature of the person determines if it’s arrogance or self-respect…I know how she would corner me on this question…dismiss it as tautology. Oh! And when I saw how she thoroughly dominated the morning session, trampling the country’s intellectual giants of all hues—the bearded academic celebrities whose experience was reflected by the grand tufts of grey, ash and white facial hair, the scholars of Arabic and Farsi with long white beards that somehow exuded their scholarship, the Marxist powerhouses who had swallowed their opponents in debates throughout their long careers, the two traditional Hindu pundits sporting the long tilak on their forehead—before finally catching my eyes and boring them as if I was a helpless prey…I felt like a helpless prey…her focused gaze…damn! All these are deliberate tactics, the director’s flourish, cinematic effects, but why didn’t I realize it then? Why was I so unable to meet and hold her gaze? Why did I look down and use that file for support? To not meet a person’s eyes is to accept defeat, to surrender. Why didn’t I get this simple fact then? I was defeated and there was no clearer proof of that than the fact that she became more aggressive after I turned my eyes downward. If only I had met her stare and pierced her gaze with mine and shown that I was ready to accept any question, any challenge…that would’ve surely put the brakes on her uninterrupted oratory. Damn! What a moment to blank out!
She didn’t stop even during the post-lunch session. She cut into the presentation of almost every other speaker. It was very clear to him that nobody in the entire gathering had come as solidly prepared as her. She stared directly into the eyes of the person whose argument she took apart. And she didn’t look at him even once. But he was sure that if the crafty chairperson called him out to present, she would definitely turn and look at him. And he would lose again. He had prepared nothing. He was embarrassed and upset and began to feel jittery. He didn’t want to
be here. Not that his presence really mattered. He had been to countless such meetings and knew that all that was needed was his signature in the attendance sheet. He would get his travel allowance and dearness allowance on the last day of the seminar. He had woken up very early to take the first flight to Delhi and then the heavy lunch was making him drowsy. He got up noiselessly, walked out of the hall as if he was making his way towards the rest room, and then out of the building. He hailed a taxi and said, ‘Hotel Janpath.’ He looked out the tinted window at the wide, smooth road as tree after manicured tree zoomed past the moving car. Always smart and intelligent. Unbeatable in debate and logic. She didn’t merely work on my story ideas…she took initiative and spent tireless hours…nothing less than perfection. She was a writer every director would die to have. Fluent in both English and Kannada. And fearless. She would argue with me on the location and she usually had the last word on most occasions. Anybody else and I’d have dismissed it as interference…she was inspiration…it was so easy to direct the screenplays she wrote! Zubeida knows how to read and write. But zero confidence. She managed to get a certificate saying that she had passed her eighth standard and used it to get a job as a teacher in an Urdu primary school because the school was desperately short of female teachers. She removed the face-cover of her burqa only when she entered class—her idea of freedom. Janaab Sattar Sahib ran a small fruit stall opposite the Shivajinagar bus stand. He was poor but lived with dignity. Never sent any female member of his family out of the house without a burqa and unaccompanied. A modest…well, actually, a small house fenced with a ten-feet-high compound. Ancestral home, said Kisar Ali Khan Sahib who had introduced himself. And met me repeatedly. The pressure came later. Slowly. Increasingly. ‘This wouldn’t have happened if you had married a pure Muslim girl. Our community wouldn’t have allowed your bibi to simply dump you like this. Marry this girl. You’ve seen how she is…looks resplendent, shining like silver. She’ll be a great match for you.’ Loneliness had become unbearable. After so many years of marriage my body was used to getting what it wanted…wasn’t it scientifically proven that if these needs were ignored, they’d wreck the mind? I could’ve grazed in the film world…no dearth of available women, but word spreads really quickly there. Everybody knows everybody’s story…what did I want? A woman to look after my house and me? A ripe young girl who’d rekindle my youth? I finally gave in, married her…a few hours later it was clear that her eighth-standard primary-school-teacher mind had stagnated right there at eighth standard. She was a good girl—very caring, obedient and respectful. Told me she was ready to quit her job if I wanted her to. Cooks better than the cook and keeps the house in order. And very giving in bed. I feasted every night…on some days, more than once in the same night, after five years of starvation. Then pregnancy! I was old enough to be a grandfather and now, I was about to become a father. What had I done? Feelings of shame and guilt engulfed me. Nazir is thirty-two! I asked her to abort it. But she was stubborn, her womanly instinct to bear a child on the one side and her orthodox upbringing on the other. She grew up with her father’s deep faith that family planning was sinful. That man had sired eleven children; five had died in childbirth. She insisted on keeping the baby and I gave in. Actually I didn’t have the heart to have it aborted. Her brothers and sisters began to constantly troop into our house and began to stay there for extended periods. Was it all pre-planned? Did Zubeida’s parents send Janaab Sattar as the middleman because they figured that getting her married to me was a good way to establish a relationship with a wealthy family? Then it began. Groceries, eggs, meat, chicken, oil, butter…more and more like I had unlimited supply of money. I barely stopped myself from telling her to ask her sisters to get out of my house. And how she had in that timid tone told—in fact reprimanded me—for staying away from home, for going out for weeks at a stretch for my film shoots. It took me several months before I realized that she was barely literate but pretty adept at manipulation. I decided to give her talaq but what stopped me was pity…for her condition and her upbringing, but mostly because my child was in her belly. Which is when I realized how amazingly profound that proverb was: it’s better to box with a sandalwood-seller than to make love to a dung-seller. A well-read, intelligent, creative and financially-independent wife was a dream partner. The contented friendship that she brought was unmatched. Razia! How I missed her…and decided to go to see her…what was that village? Some place near Kunigal. I could’ve gone there and pacified her. ‘We’re still husband and wife. I haven’t given you talaq. Stay with me. Stay in the flat. Let Zubeida stay there. I’ll be with you and I’ll give her supplies and some money every month. Plus, she gets her salary. We’ll be like before. Just you and me.’ But no. Razia wouldn’t have agreed. Proud. Damn! I thought of strategies to mollify her, remind her of the times we spent at that hillock at Fergusson in Pune, remind her of the long, sweet nights we had shared over so many years. Whisper endearments. Beseech her. But I knew how she would break it all with a snap: ‘Try again, Amir, I’ve written better dialogues.’ There would be no bigger insult…I pulled my car to the left, braked to a halt and stared blankly ahead for a few minutes and then made a U-turn towards Bangalore and away from Kunigal.
‘Hotel Janpath, sahib,’ the driver’s voice came from afar.
Once he was in his room, he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. The air conditioning was soothing but sleep didn’t come.
Relentless piercing. Her eyes were like daggers. And the snubbing at lunchtime. Unfeeling. She was still well-read, still creative and still fiercely independent. I’m proud…but how hard is it to show an ounce of humility towards the husband? Hah! That calls for culture. Suddenly I felt good. Bloody bureaucrats! They lack the basic courtesy to send a prior guest list. If I knew she was here I’d have skipped this. I hate this feeling. I’ll show them their places. But government officials were by nature arrogant. I can visualize their response. ‘We did our duty by sending you the invite. The rest was up to you. We aren’t obligated to send you any guest list.’
He lay there and didn’t get up to even switch on the light long after the sun had set. He looked at his watch in the darkness because he felt incredibly hungry. 8 p.m. He walked slowly to the bar and restaurant. He felt like drinking hard liquor. He didn’t drink every day, he drank only to relax after a hard day of work or when he was feeling low and not more than two pegs. Now he recalled that she had always given him company. He felt furious at this memory. He waved to the waiter, ordered scotch and studied the food menu. The amber liquid warmed his throat and went well with the delicious chicken. He ordered more scotch after dinner and sat there for a long time, savouring the entire experience. A gratified smile formed on his face and he felt very pleasant. When he got up after paying the bill, he experienced a surge of pure physical power. The day-long depression had disappeared. He could think really clearly now. The bloody bureaucrats I’m sure have put up all the invitees right here. Even her. I’ll ask. He was very polite at the reception counter, ‘Razia Begum. She’s come to attend the ministry’s meeting. Room number please?’
‘Ms Razia Begum Querishi. That would be Room 314.’
He thanked the receptionist and walked towards the lift. He was in Room 215. Almost exactly below her’s.
He rang the doorbell and waited a minute before the door opened.
It was her. Not a strand of her dense and bountiful hair had fallen. Not a strand was black. She was still wearing the green and saffron sari. She had her reading glasses. In her hand was a book of modest thickness.
‘It’s me,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘I need to talk to you.’
‘You may come in,’ she said, as if she was granting him permission. She pointed to a sofa and once he was inside the room, she walked to the door, bolted it and sat on the sofa opposite his.
He didn’t expect it’d be so easy. He had prepared for a tiff of sorts and now he was elated. His self-confidence soared. Sudde
nly he forgot what he wanted to talk about and began to fumble for something to say. She looked at him plainly.