Maan wandered along, mulling—but not for long—over what Firoz had said. He hummed a bit of the ghazal that had embedded itself in his mind, stopped to buy a paan (he preferred the spicier, darker green leaves of the desi paan to the paler Banarasi), manoeuvred his way across the road through a crowd of cycles, rickshaws, pushcarts, men and cattle, and found himself in Misri Mandi, near a small vegetable-stall, close to where his sister Veena lived.
Feeling guilty for having been asleep when she came to Prem Nivas the previous afternoon, Maan decided impulsively to visit her—and his brother-in-law Kedarnath and nephew Bhaskar. Maan was very fond of Bhaskar and liked throwing arithmetical problems at him like a ball to a performing seal.
As he entered the residential areas of Misri Mandi, the alleys became narrower and cooler and somewhat quieter, though there were still plenty of people getting about from place to place and others just lounging around or playing chess on the ledge near the Radhakrishna Temple, whose walls were still bright with the stains of Holi colours. The strip of bright sunlight above his head was now thin and unoppressive, and there were fewer flies. After turning into a still narrower alley, just three feet across, and avoiding a urinating cow, he arrived at his sister’s house.
It was a very narrow house: three storeys and a flat rooftop, with about a room and a half on each storey and a central grating in the middle of the stairwell that allowed light from the sky all the way through to the bottom. Maan entered through the unlocked door and saw old Mrs Tandon, Veena’s mother-in-law, cooking something in a pan. Old Mrs Tandon disapproved of Veena’s taste for music, and it was because of her that the family had had to come back the previous evening without listening to Saeeda Bai. She always gave Maan the shivers; and so, after a perfunctory greeting, he went up the stairs, and soon found Veena and Kedarnath on the roof—playing chaupar in the shade of a trellis and evidently deep in an argument.
2.7
Veena was a few years older than Maan, and she took after her mother in shape—she was short and a bit dumpy. When Maan appeared on the roof, her voice had been raised, and her plump, cheerful face was frowning, but when she saw Maan she beamed at him. Then she remembered something and frowned again.
‘So you’ve come to apologize. Good! And not a moment too soon. We were all very annoyed with you yesterday. What kind of brother are you, sleeping for hours on end when you know that we’re bound to visit Prem Nivas?’
‘But I thought you’d stay for the singing—’ said Maan.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Veena nodding her head. ‘I’m quite sure you thought of all that when you dozed off. It had nothing to do with bhang, for instance. And it simply slipped your mind that we had to get Kedarnath’s mother home before the music began. At least Pran came early and met us at Prem Nivas, with Savita and his mother-in-law and Lata—’
‘Oh, Pran, Pran, Pran—’ said Maan in exasperation. ‘He’s always the hero and I’m always the villain.’
‘That’s not true, don’t dramatize things,’ said Veena, thinking of Maan as a small boy trying to shoot pigeons with a catapult in the garden and claiming to be an archer in the Mahabharata. ‘It’s just that you have no sense of responsibility.’
‘Anyway, what were you quarrelling about when I came up the stairs? And where’s Bhaskar?’ asked Maan, thinking of his father’s recent remarks and trying to change the subject.
‘He’s out with his friends flying kites. Yes, he was annoyed as well. He wanted to wake you up. You’ll have to have dinner with us today to make up.’
‘Oh—uh—’ said Maan undecidedly, wondering whether he might not risk visiting Saeeda Bai’s house in the evening. He coughed. ‘But what were you quarrelling about?’
‘We weren’t quarrelling,’ said the mild Kedarnath, smiling at Maan. He was in his thirties, but already greying. A worried optimist, he, unlike Maan, had—if anything—too strong a sense of his responsibilities, and the difficulties of starting from scratch in Brahmpur after Partition had aged him prematurely. When he was not on the road somewhere in south India drumming up orders, he was working till late at night in his shop in Misri Mandi. It was in the evenings that business was conducted there, when middlemen like him bought baskets of shoes from the shoemakers. His afternoons, though, were fairly free.
‘No, not quarrelling, not quarrelling at all. Just arguing about chaupar, that’s all,’ said Veena hastily, throwing the cowrie-shells down once more, counting her tally, and moving her pieces forward on the cross-shaped cloth board.
‘Yes, yes, I’m quite sure,’ said Maan.
He sat down on the rug and looked around at the flowerpots filled with leafy plants, which Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had contributed to her daughter’s roof garden. Veena’s saris were hanging up to dry on one side of the roof, and there were bright splashes of Holi colour all over the terrace. Beyond the roof a jumble of rooftops, minarets, towers and temple-tops stretched out as far as the railway station in ‘New’ Brahmpur. A few paper kites, pink, green and yellow, like the colours of Holi, fought each other in the cloudless sky.
‘Don’t you want something to drink?’ asked Veena quickly. ‘I’ll get you some sherbet—or will you have tea? I’m afraid we don’t have any thandai,’ she added gratuitously.
‘No, thank you. . . . But you can answer my question. What was the debate about?’ demanded Maan. ‘Let me guess. Kedarnath wants to keep a second wife, and he naturally wants your consent.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Veena, a little sharply. ‘I want a second child and I naturally want his consent. Oh!’ she exclaimed, realizing her indiscretion and looking at her husband. ‘I didn’t mean to—anyway, he’s my brother—we can ask his advice, surely.’
‘But you don’t want my mother’s advice in the matter, do you?’ countered Kedarnath.
‘Well, it’s too late now,’ said Maan genially. ‘What do you want a second child for? Isn’t Bhaskar enough?’
‘We can’t afford a second child,’ said Kedarnath, with his eyes closed—a habit that Veena still found bothersome. ‘Not at the moment, at any rate. My business is—well, you know how it is. And now there’s the possibility of a shoemakers’ strike.’ He opened his eyes. ‘And Bhaskar is so bright that we want to send him to the very best schools. And they don’t come cheap.’
‘Yes, we wish he was stupid, but unfortunately—’
‘Veena is being witty as usual,’ said Kedarnath. ‘Just two days before Holi she reminded me that it was difficult to make ends meet, what with the rent and the rise in food prices and everything. And the cost of her music lessons and my mother’s medicines and Bhaskar’s special maths books and my cigarettes. Then she said that we had to count the rupees, and now she’s saying that we should have another child because every grain of rice it will eat has already been marked with its name. The logic of women! She was born into a family of three children, so she thinks that having three children is a law of nature. Can you imagine how we’ll survive if they’re all as bright as Bhaskar?’
Kedarnath, who was usually quite henpecked, was putting up a good fight.
‘Only the first child is bright as a rule,’ said Veena. ‘I guarantee that my next two will be as stupid as Pran and Maan.’ She resumed her sewing.
Kedarnath smiled, picked up the speckled cowries in his scarred palm, and threw them on to the board. Normally he was a very polite man and would have given Maan his full attention, but chaupar was chaupar, and it was almost impossible to stop playing once the game had begun. It was even more addictive than chess. Dinners grew cold in Misri Mandi, guests left, creditors threw tantrums, but the chaupar players pleaded for just one more game. Old Mrs Tandon had once thrown the cloth board and the sinful shells into a disused well in a neighbouring lane, but, despite the family finances, another set had been procured, and the truant couple now played on the roof, even though it was hotter there. In this way they avoided Kedarnath’s mother, whose gastric and arthritic problems made climbing stairs difficult. In Lahore, bot
h because of the horizontal geography of the house and because of her role as the confident matriarch of a wealthy and unscattered family, she had exercised tight, even tyrannical, control. Her world had collapsed with the trauma of Partition.
Their conversation was interrupted by a scream of outrage from a neighbouring rooftop. A large, middle-aged woman in a scarlet cotton sari was shouting down from her roof at an invisible adversary:
‘They want to suck my blood, it’s clear! Neither can I lie down anywhere nor can I sit anywhere in peace. The sound of the thumping of balls is driving me mad. . . . Of course what takes place on the roof can be heard downstairs! You wretched kahars, you useless washers of dishes, can’t you keep your children under control?’
Noticing Veena and Kedarnath on their roof, she walked over the connecting rooftops, clambering through a low gap in the far wall. With her piercing voice, wild teeth and large, spreading, sagging breasts, she made a powerful impression on Maan.
After Veena had introduced them, the woman said with a fierce smile:
‘Oh, so this is the one who isn’t getting married.’
‘He’s the one,’ admitted Veena. She didn’t tempt fate by mentioning Maan’s tentative engagement to the girl from Banaras.
‘But didn’t you tell me you’d introduced him to that girl—what’s her name, remind me—the one who came here from Allahabad to visit her brother?’
Maan said: ‘Amazing how it is with some people. You write “A” and they read “Z”.’
‘Well, it’s quite natural,’ said the woman in a predatory manner. ‘A young man, a young woman. . . .’
‘She was very pretty,’ Veena said. ‘With eyes like a deer.’
‘But she doesn’t have her brother’s nose—luckily,’ added the woman.
‘No—it’s much finer. And it even quivers a bit like a deer’s.’
Kedarnath, despairing of his game of chaupar, got up to go downstairs. He couldn’t stand visits from this over-friendly neighbour. Ever since her husband had got a telephone installed in their house, she had become even more self-confident and strident.
‘What shall I call you?’ Maan asked the woman.
‘Bhabhi. Just bhabhi,’ said Veena.
‘So—how did you like her?’ asked the woman.
‘Fine,’ said Maan.
‘Fine?’ said the woman, pouncing delightedly on the word.
‘I meant, fine that I should call you bhabhi.’
‘He’s very cunning,’ said Veena.
‘I’m no less so,’ asserted her neighbour. ‘You should come here, meet people, meet nice women,’ she told Maan. ‘What is the charm of living in the colonies? I tell you, when I visit Pasand Bagh or Civil Lines my brain goes dead in four hours. When I return to the lanes of our neighbourhood it starts whirring again. People here care for each other; if someone falls ill the whole neighbourhood asks about them. But it may be difficult to fix you up. You should get a slightly taller girl than average—’
‘I’m not concerned about all that,’ said Maan, laughing. ‘A short one is fine by me.’
‘So you don’t mind whether she’s tall or short, dark or fair, thin or fat, ugly or beautiful?’
‘Z for A again,’ said Maan, glancing in the direction of her roof. ‘By the way, I like your method of drying your blouses.’
The woman gave a short hoot of laughter, which might have been self-deprecatory if it hadn’t been so loud. She looked back at the rack-like arrangement of steel on the top of her water tank.
‘There’s no other place on my roof,’ she said. ‘You’ve got lines all over on your side. . . . You know,’ continued the woman, off on a tangent, ‘marriage is strange. I read in Star-Gazer that a girl from Madras, well married, with two children, saw Hulchul five times—five times!—and got completely besotted with Daleep Kumar—to the extent that she went off her head. She went down to Bombay, clearly not knowing what she was doing, because she didn’t even have his address. Then she found it with the help of one of these filmi fan magazines, took a taxi there, and confronted him with all kinds of mad, obsessed remarks. Eventually he gave her a hundred rupees to help her get back, and threw her out. But she returned.’
‘Daleep Kumar!’ said Veena, frowning. ‘I don’t think much of his acting. I think he must have made it all up for publicity.’
‘Oh no, no! Have you seen him in Deedar? He is amazing! And Star-Gazer says he’s such a nice man—he would never go after publicity. You must tell Kedarnath to beware of Madrasi women, he spends so much time there, they’re very fierce. . . . I hear that they don’t even wash their silk saris gently, they just go dhup! dhup! dhup! like washerwomen under the tap—Oh! my milk!’ cried the woman in sudden alarm. ‘I must go—I hope it hasn’t—my husband—’ And she rushed off like a great red apparition across the rooftops.
Maan burst out laughing.
‘Now I’m off as well,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough of life outside the colonies. My brain’s whirring too much.’
‘You can’t go,’ said Veena sternly and sweetly. ‘You’ve just come. They said you played Holi the whole morning with Pran and his professor and Savita and Lata, so you can certainly spend this afternoon with us. And Bhaskar will be very annoyed if he misses you again. You should have seen him yesterday. He looked like a black imp.’
‘Will he be at the shop this evening?’ asked Maan, coughing a bit.
‘Yes. I suppose so. Thinking about the patterns of the shoeboxes. Strange boy,’ said Veena.
‘Then I’ll visit him on my way back.’
‘On your way back from where?’ asked Veena. ‘And aren’t you coming for dinner?’
‘I’ll try—I promise,’ said Maan.
‘What’s wrong with your throat?’ asked Veena. ‘You’ve been up till late, haven’t you? How late, I wonder? Or is it just from getting soaked at Holi? I’ll give you some dushanda to cure it.’
‘No—that vile stuff! Take it yourself as a preventative,’ exclaimed Maan.
‘So—how was the singing? And the singer?’ asked Veena.
Maan shrugged so indifferently that Veena got worried.
‘Be careful, Maan,’ she warned him.
Maan knew his sister too well to try to protest his innocence. Besides, Veena would soon enough hear about his public flirting.
‘It’s not her that you’re going to visit?’ asked Veena sharply.
‘No—heaven forbid,’ said Maan.
‘Yes, heaven forbid. So where are you going?’
‘To the Barsaat Mahal,’ said Maan. ‘Come along with me! You remember we used to go there for picnics as children? Come. All you’re doing is playing chaupar.’
‘So that’s how you think I fill my days, do you? Let me tell you, I work almost as hard as Ammaji. Which reminds me, I saw yesterday that they’d chopped the top of the neem tree down, the one you used to climb to get to the upstairs window. It makes a difference to Prem Nivas.’
‘Yes, she was very angry,’ said Maan, thinking of his mother. ‘The Public Works Department were just supposed to trim it to get rid of the vulture’s roost, but they hired a contractor who chopped down as much wood as possible and made off with it. But you know Ammaji. All she said was, “What you have done is really not right.”’
‘If Baoji had been in the least concerned about these matters, he’d have done to that man what he did to that tree,’ said Veena. ‘There’s so little greenery in this part of town that you really learn to appreciate it when you see it. When my friend Priya came to Pran’s wedding, the garden was looking so beautiful that she said to me: “I feel as if I’ve been let out of a cage.” She doesn’t even have a roof garden, poor thing. And they hardly ever let her out of the house. “Come in the palanquin, leave on the bier”: that’s the way it is with the daughters-in-law in that house.’ Veena looked darkly over the rooftops towards her friend’s house in the next neighbourhood. A thought struck her. ‘Did Baoji talk to anyone about Pran’s job yesterday evening? Doesn?
??t the Governor have something to do with these appointments? In his capacity as Chancellor of the university?’
‘If he did I didn’t hear him,’ said Maan.
‘Hmm,’ said Veena, not very pleased. ‘If I know Baoji, he probably thought about it, and then pushed the thought aside as being unworthy of him. Even we had to wait in line for our turn to get that pitiful compensation for the loss of our business in Lahore. And that too when Ammaji was working day and night in the refugee camps. I sometimes think he cares for nothing but politics. Priya says her father’s equally bad. All right, eight o’clock. I’ll make your favourite alu paratha.’
‘You can bully Kedarnath, but not me,’ said Maan with a smile.
‘All right, go, go!’ said Veena, tossing her head. ‘You’d think we were still in Lahore from the amount we get to see you.’
Maan made a propitiatory sound, a tongue-click followed by a half-sigh.
‘With all his sales trips, I sometimes feel I have a quarter of a husband,’ continued Veena. ‘And an eighth of a brother each.’ She rolled up the chaupar board. ‘When are you returning to Banaras to do an honest day’s work?’
‘Ah, Banaras,’ said Maan with a smile, as if Veena had suggested Saturn. And Veena left it at that.
2.8
It was evening by the time Maan got to the Barsaat Mahal, and the grounds were not crowded. He walked through the arched entrance in the boundary wall, and passed through the outer grounds, a sort of park which was for the most part covered with dry grass and bushes. A few antelope browsed under a large neem tree, bounding lazily away as he approached.
The inner wall was lower, the arched entranceway less imposing, more delicate. Verses from the Quran in black stone and bold geometrical patterns in coloured stone were embedded in its marble facade. Like the outer wall, the inner wall ran along three sides of a rectangle. The fourth side was common to both: a sheer drop from a stone platform—protected only by a balustrade—to the waters of the Ganga below.