Selected Short Stories

  Until yesterday all the local boys had played kapāṭi with Sushilchandra, but today when they came to look for him and found the elderly Sushilchandra, they ran off. He had thought, ‘If I were free like my father I would spend all day playing kapāṭi with my chums – ḍu-ḍu-ḍu-ḍu all day long!’ But today he didn’t want to see Rakhal, Gopal, Akshay, Nibaran, Harish and Nanda – he wanted to sit quietly. Boys were too noisy.

  I said earlier that his father Subalchandra used to sit on a mat on the verandah and think, ‘When I was young I used to waste my time mucking about; if I could be young again I’d be a good boy – I’d sit indoors with the door closed and learn my lessons. I’d even stop listening to Grandmother’s stories in the evening: instead I’d study till ten or eleven at night.’

  But now that he was a boy again, Subalchandra didn’t want to go to school at all. When Sushil irritably asked, ‘Father, aren’t you going to school?’ Subal scratched his head, looked at his feet and murmured, ‘I’ve got a stomach-ache today. I can’t go to school.’

  ‘Can’t you indeed?’ said Sushil angrily. ‘I’ve also had stomachaches like that at going to school. I know all about them.’

  Indeed Sushil had shirked school on so many pretexts and so recently that there was no way his father could deceive him. He packed his little father off to school. As soon as he got back, he wanted to dash straight out and play, but the elderly bespectacled Sushilchandra was at that very time intoning to himself from a copy of Krittibas’s Rāmāyaṇa, and Subal’s noise and running about disturbed his reading. So he sat Subal down in front of him, put a slate into his hand and made him do sums. He devised such huge sums that it took his father an hour to complete just one of them. In the evening a crowd of old men gathered in Sushil’s room to play chess. To keep Subal quiet at that time, Sushil engaged a tutor who taught him till ten at night.

  Sushil was very strict about food, because when his father had been old his digestion had not been good – if he ate too much he suffered from acidity. Sushil remembered this well, so he was careful not to let him over-eat. But now that he was suddenly young again his father had such an appetite that he could have eaten a horse! Sushil gave him so little that he raged with hunger. He grew very thin – his bones stuck out all over. Thinking he was seriously ill, Sushil stuffed him with medicine.

  But the elderly Sushil also had many difficulties. He could not bear what formerly he had liked. Before, if he heard of a yātrā anywhere, he would run out of the house, however cold or rainy, to watch it. When the elderly Sushil tried that, he got a cold and cough, pains in his head and limbs, and had to stay three weeks in bed. He had long been used to bathing in the village pond, but no sooner had he tried that now than the joints in his arms and legs swelled and he got terrible rheumatism: he had to be treated by a doctor for six months. After that he bathed in warm water only, at two-day intervals, and refused to let Subal bathe in the pond. Once he forgot his age and jumped out of bed with a single bound, jarring his bones terribly. When he stuffed a whole pān into his mouth, he found he had no teeth, and couldn’t chew it. If he absent-mindedly combed or brushed his whole head, the scratching reminded him that most of it was bald. Sometimes he forgot he was as old as his father had been and lapsed into tricks such as chucking pebbles into old women’s water-pots. When people drove him off, scandalized that an old man could behave like a child, he wanted to hide his face with shame.

  Subalchandra also sometimes forgot that he was now a little boy. Imagining that he was as old as previously, he would go and join the old folks at their card-playing, sit down and chat to them as equals; at which everyone said, ‘Run off and play, run along now! Who do you think you are?’ And seizing him by the ears, they threw him out. Or he’d go to the schoolmaster and say, ‘Have you got some tobacco to spare?’ I feel like a smoke.’ The schoolmaster made him stand on one leg on a bench for this. Or he’d go to the barber and say, ‘Why haven’t you come to shave me for so long, you scoundrel?’ ‘Cheeky devil,’ thought the barber, and answered, ‘I’ll come in ten years’ time.’ Sometimes he tried to beat his son Sushil as he had often done before. Sushil was incensed at this and said, ‘Is that what school has taught you? To have a go at an old man, you little rascal!’ People came running from all around to slap and beat and hurl abuse at him.

  Then Subal started to pray fervently, ‘If only I could be big and free like my son Sushil, I’d be out of this!’ And Sushil said with clasped hands, ‘O God, make me small like my father, so that I can play around as I like. My father has become so naughty that I cannot control him; it’s getting me down.’

  The Goddess of Desires came back and said, ‘Well, have you got what you wanted?’

  They both knelt and did praṇām to her and said, ‘We assure you, Goddess, we have. Now make us what we were before.’

  ‘All right,’ said the Goddess of Desires, ‘when you wake up tomorrow you’ll be back to what you were.’

  The next morning when Subal woke up he was as old as formerly; and Sushil when he woke up was a boy again. They both assumed they had woken from a dream. Subalchandra shouted out gruffly, ‘Sushil, are you learning your grammar?’

  ‘I think I’ve lost my book, Father,’ said Sushilchandra, scratching his head.

  False Hope

  Darjeeling was swathed in rain and cloud when I arrived. I didn’t want to go outside, but to stay indoors was even more unappealing. Straight after my hotel breakfast I put on heavy boots and a full-length mackintosh, and went out for a walk. It was drizzling intermittently, and the thick pall of cloud all around gave the impression that God was trying to erase the entire scene, mountains and all, with a rubber.

  As I walked along the deserted Calcutta road, I hated these misty heights and wished I could grasp with all five senses Earth’s busy variety and colour again. It was then that I heard the pathetic sound of a woman crying, not far off. Life is so tragic and troubled that the sound of crying is nothing out of the ordinary, and at any other time I doubt if I would have looked round; but here amidst the clouds the sound seemed like the cry of a whole vanished world. I could not ignore it.

  I approached, and saw a woman sitting on a rock by the road, weeping. Her clothes were ochre-coloured, and her matted, light-coloured hair was scooped up into a top-knot. Hers was no recent grief: long suppressed exhaustion and misery had snapped under the weight of the clouds and desolation, and had burst out. ‘This is odd,’ I said to myself. ‘I could base a brilliant story on this. I never thought to see a sannyāsinī sitting on a mountainside!’ I could not tell which caste she was. I asked her kindly in Hindi, ‘Who are you? What’s happened to you?’

  At first she did not answer, and merely glanced at me with fiery, tearful eyes. I spoke again: ‘Don’t be afraid – I’m a gentleman.’ She smiled then and said in flawless Hindusthani, ‘I’ve been beyond fear and terror for a long time now – shame, too. Once, Babuji, I lived in such purdah that even my own brother had to ask for permission to see me. But nothing hides me from the world now.’

  I was rather annoyed. My clothes and manners were those of a sāheb. Yet this wretched woman addressed me, without hesitation, as ‘Babuji’. I felt like ditching the story and stumping off in my best sāheb’s manner, nose in the air and puffing cigarette-smoke like a train. But curiosity got the better of me. I asked her, tilting my head haughtily, ‘Can I help you? Do you need anything?’

  She stared straight at me, and after a pause replied briefly, ‘I am the daughter of Golamkader Khan, Nawab of Badraon.’

  I had not the slightest idea where Badraon was or who Golamkader Khan was or why his daughter should be sitting by the Calcutta Road in Darjeeling and weeping. I didn’t believe her, either, but decided I would not spoil the fun, or the chance of such a good story. So I made a lengthy and solemn salaam before her and said, ‘Bibisaheb, forgive me, I did not know who you were.’ (There are many logical reasons why I did not know her, the chief one being that I had never seen her before, a
nd on top of that the mist was so thick it was hard to see one’s own hands and feet.) ‘Bibisaheb’ did not take offence, and pointing to a rock next to her said pleasantly, ‘Sit down.’

  I could see she was used to giving orders. I felt surprisingly honoured at being allowed to sit on a wet, hard, mossy rock beside her. The daughter of Golamkader Khan of Badraon, the Princess Nurunni Shah or Meherunni Shah or whatever she was called, had graciously given me a muddy seat by the Calcutta Road in Darjeeling, next to her and at about the same height! When I set out from the hotel in my mackintosh, I never dreamt of such a lofty possibility.

  It might seem like poetry: a man and a woman mysteriously conversing on a rocky mountainside. Hot from the pen of a poet, it would rouse in the reader’s heart the sounds of streams gurgling in mountain caves, or the wonderful music of Kalidasa’s Meghadūta or Kumārasambhava. Yet surely there must be few representatives of Young Bengal1 who would not have felt ridiculous sitting in boots and mackintosh by the Calcutta Road on a muddy rock with a ragged Hindusthani lady! But we were wrapped in mist, there was no one to see us, no cause for embarrassment, no one but the Nawab of Badraon Golamkader Khan’s daughter and I – a freshly minted Bengali sāheb – two people on two rocks, like relics of a totally destroyed world. The great absurdity of our incongruous meeting concerned only our destinies, no one else’s.

  ‘Bibisaheb,’ I said, ‘who put you into this state?’

  The Princess of Badraon struck her forehead. ‘How can I know how things are caused? Who is it who hides these huge, harsh mountains in flimsy clouds?’

  I agreed with her, not wishing to start a philosophic debate. ‘Yes indeed, who knows the mysteries of Fate? We crawl like worms before them.’

  I would have argued, I would not have let Bibisaheb off so lightly – but my Hindi was insufficient. The little I had learnt from dealing with watchmen and bearers did not permit me to discuss Fate and Free Will with a Princess of Badraon or of any other place, sitting by the Calcutta Road.

  Bibisaheb said, ‘The extraordinary story of my life has only just finished. At your command I shall tell it to you.’

  ‘Command?’ I said, rather flustered. ‘If you favour me with it I shall be highly honoured.’

  No one should think that I spoke exactly like this, but in Hindi. I wanted to, but I was not capable of doing so. When Bibisaheb spoke, it was like a delicate morning breeze stirring a dewy golden cornfield: there was such easy meekness in her flow of sentences, such beauty. And I could only reply in blunt, barbarous, broken phrases. I had never known such effortless excellence of speech; as I talked to Bibisaheb I felt, for the first time, my own inadequacy.

  ‘My father,’ she said, ‘had the blood of the Emperor of Delhi in his veins, and in order to preserve the honour of his family went to great lengths to find me a suitable husband. A proposal came from the Nawab of Lucknow: my father was dealing with this when the fighting broke out between the British and the sepoys over cartridge-biting, and Hindusthan turned dark with the smoke of cannon-fire.’1

  I had never before heard Hindusthani spoken by a woman, let alone by a high-born lady, and as I listened it was clear to me that this was aristocrat’s language and that the days of this language were over. Everything today has been lowered, stunted, stripped by the railways and telegraph, by the hurly-burly of work, by the extinction of the nobility. As I listened to this nawab’s language amidst the thick mists of British-built, modern, stony Darjeeling, an imaginary Mogul city arose in my mind, with huge white marble palaces soaring into the sky, with long-tailed liveried horses in the streets and elephants with gold-tasselled howdahs; a city whose people wore many-coloured turbans, baggy shirts and pyjamas of wool and silk and muslin, with brocade slippers curled up at the toes, and scimitars tied to their waists; a leisured, elegant, courteous way of life.

  ‘Our fort,’ said the Nawab’s daughter, ‘was on the bank of the Yamuna. Our army-commander was a Hindu Brahmin, called Keshar Lal.’

  The woman seemed to pour all the music of her voice into that one name ‘Keshar Lal’. I laid my walking-stick on the ground and settled myself into a bolt-upright position.

  ‘Keshar Lal was a strict Hindu. When I got up in the morning I would look from the window of the zenana and watch him immerse himself up to the chest in the Yamuna, watch him circumambulating with hands cupped in an offering to the rising sun. He would sit with sopping clothes on the ghāṭ, recite mantras devotedly, and then sing a hymn clearly and smoothly in Rāg Bhairavī as he walked back to his house.

  ‘I was a Muslim girl, but I had never been told about my religion and I did not know its doctrines and practices. Among our menfolk, religious rules had been weakened by indolence, drinking and self-indulgence; and in the luxury of the zenana, too, religion was not much alive.

  ‘God probably implanted in me a natural thirst for religion – I cannot see how else it was caused. Be that as it may, at the sight of Keshar Lal performing his rituals in the pure dawn light on the bare white steps down to the calm blue Yamuna, my hitherto dormant feelings were seized by a sweet, unspoken devotion.

  ‘With his regular, disciplined piety, and his fair and supple body, Keshar Lal was like a smokeless flame: his Brahminical sanctity and grace chastened the ignorant heart of a Muslim girl with a strange reverence.

  ‘I had a Hindu maid who did obeisance before Keshar Lal every day and took the dust of his feet. The sight of this pleased me but also made me jealous. On days when special rites were observed, this maid would also sometimes lay on meals for Brahmins. I offered to help with the cost of this, saying, “Why not invite Keshar Lal?” She answered in horror, “Keshar Lal does not take food or gifts from anyone.” It gnawed at my heart that I could not make any direct or indirect expression of devotion to Keshar Lal.

  ‘One of my ancestors had abducted a Brahmin girl and married her. As I sat inside the zenana, I felt her pure blood in my veins and found some comfort in thinking I was linked to Keshar Lal by that thread. I listened to everything my Hindu maid could tell me about Hinduism, its customs and rules, its amazing tales of gods and goddesses, its marvellous Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata; as I listened, a wonderful picture of the Hindu world unfolded before me. Statues and idols, the sounds of bells and conches, gold-topped temples, the smoke of incense, the scent of flowers and sandalwood, the unearthly powers of yogis and sannyāsīs, superhuman Brahmins, the wiles and sports of gods in human disguise: all combined to create a realm that was supernatural, distant, vast and immeasurably old. My heart was like a bird without a nest, flying at dusk from room to room of a huge and ancient palace. To my girlish mind, the Hindu world was an enchanting fairy-tale kingdom.

  ‘It was at this time that the fighting broke out between the Company and the sepoys. Waves of revolt spread even to our small fort. Keshar Lal said, “The pale-skinned cow-eaters must be driven from Aryavarta! Hindu and Muslim kings must be free again to gamble for power!”

  ‘My father Golamkader Khan was a calculating man. “Those damned English can do the impossible,” he said. “The people of Hindusthan can never match them. I’m not going to stake this little fort of mine on so slender a chance. Don’t ask me to fight with the Honourable Company!”

  ‘At a time when the blood of both Hindus and Muslims was on fire, we were all enraged by my father’s merchant-like prudence. Even my mother and step-mothers were stirred. Soon Keshar Lal came with an armed troop, and said to my father, “Nawabsaheb, if you don’t join us I shall take you prisoner while the fighting lasts and command the fort myself.”

  ‘ “There is no need for that,” said my father. “I’m on your side.”

  ‘ “Give us some money from your treasury,” said Keshar Lal.

  ‘My father did not give much. “I’ll give you more when you need it,” he said.

  ‘I took my whole array of ornaments, tied them up in a cloth and gave them to my Hindu maid to take to Keshar Lal. He accepted them. I tingled with pleasure at this, all over my denuded
body.

  ‘With the scraping and polishing of rusty guns and the sharpening of ancient swords, Keshar Lal began to get ready. But suddenly, one afternoon, the District Commissioner arrived: his red-shirted soldiers stormed into the fort, raising clouds of dust. My father Golamkader Khan had secretly given him news of the revolt.

  ‘Keshar Lal commanded such loyalty in the Nawab’s guard that they fought to the death with their broken guns and blunt swords.

  ‘My traitorous father’s house was like hell to me. I was bursting with grief and hatred, but I did not shed a single tear. I dressed in the clothes of my cowardly brother and escaped from the zenana, while no one was looking.

  ‘Dust, gunpowder smoke, the shouting of soldiers and the noise of guns died down, and the terrible stillness of death settled over land and water and sky. The sun set, turning the Yamuna red, and a nearly full moon hung in the evening sky. The battlefield was strewn with hideous scenes of death. At any other time my heart would have been pierced by the pity of it, but instead I wandered around as if in a trance, trying to find Keshar Lal – no other aim had meaning for me. I searched until, in the middle of the night, in bright moonlight, not far from the battlefield, on the bank of the Yamuna, in the shade of a mango-grove, I came across the dead bodies of Keshar Lal and his loyal batman. I could see that – appallingly wounded – either master had carried servant or servant had carried master from the battlefield to this place of safety, where they had quietly given themselves up to Death.

  ‘The first thing I did was fulfil the craving I had had for so long to abase myself before Keshar Lal. I fell to my knees beside him, loosed my long tresses, and fervently rubbed the dust from his feet. I raised his ice-cold soles to my feverish forehead, and kissed them; months of suppressed tears welled up. But then his body moved, and a weak groan emerged from his lips. I drew back in alarm at the sound. With closed eyes and parched voice he murmured, “Water.”