Mrs Rupa Mehra would hear nothing against Uma. ‘There are some babies who cry several times in the night until they’re two years old. Only their parents have a right to complain.’
Aparna said to her mother: ‘I’m not a crybaby, am I?’
‘No, darling,’ said Meenakshi, flipping through the Illustrated London News. ‘Now play with the baby, why don’t you?’
Meenakshi, whenever she gave the matter any thought, still could not quite figure out how Uma had succeeded in becoming so vigorous, born as she had been in a Brahmpur hospital that was, as Meenakshi saw it, simply seething with septicaemia.
Aparna turned her head down sideways, so that her two eyes were in a vertical line. This amused the baby, and she gave her quite a generous smile. Simultaneously she yanked Varun’s hair once more.
‘Cracknell’s done it again,’ murmured Varun to himself. ‘Eastern Sea in the King George VI Cup. By just half a length.’
Uma grasped the paper and drew a handful of it towards herself. Varun tried to disengage her clasp. She latched on to one of his fingers.
‘Did you bet on the winner?’ asked Pran.
‘No,’ said Varun glumly. ‘Need you ask? Everyone else has all the luck. My horse came in fourth, after Orcades and Fair Ray.’
‘What peculiar names,’ said Lata.
‘Orcades is one of the Orient Line boats,’ said Meenakshi lazily. ‘I am so looking forward to going to England. I shall visit Amit’s college at Oxford. And marry a duke.’
Aparna straightened her head. She wondered what a duke was.
Mrs Rupa Mehra did not care for Meenakshi’s brand of idiocy. Her hardworking elder son was slaving himself to the bone to support the family, and in his absence his empty-headed wife was making jokes in poor taste. She was a bad influence on Lata.
‘You’re married already,’ Mrs Rupa Mehra pointed out.
‘Oh, yes, silly me,’ said Meenakshi. She sighed. ‘How I wish something exciting would happen. Nothing ever happens anywhere. And I was so looking forward to something happening in 1952.’
‘Well, it’s a leap year,’ said Pran encouragingly.
Varun had reached the end of the racing results and turned to another inside page. Suddenly he exclaimed ‘My God!’ in such a shocked tone that everyone turned towards him.
‘Pran, your brother’s been arrested.’
Pran’s first instinct was to consider this another joke in dubious taste, but there was something in Varun’s voice that made him reach for the paper. Uma tried to grab it on the way, but Savita held her off. As Pran read the few lines dated ‘Brahmpur. January 5’ his face grew taut.
‘What is it?’ said Savita, Lata and Mrs Rupa Mehra almost simultaneously. Even Meenakshi raised a languid head in surprise.
Pran shook his head from side to side in agitation. He quickly and silently read about the attack on Firoz—and that he was still in critical condition. The news was worse than he could possibly have imagined. But no telephone call or telegram had come from Brahmpur to inform him or warn him or summon him. Perhaps his father was still campaigning in his constituency. No, thought Pran. He would have heard within hours and rushed back to Brahmpur. Or perhaps he had tried to get through by phone to Calcutta and failed.
‘We will have to leave for Brahmpur immediately,’ he said to Savita.
‘But what on earth has happened, darling?’ asked Savita, very alarmed. ‘They haven’t really arrested Maan? And what for? What does it say?’
Pran read the few lines out aloud, hit his forehead with the palm of his hand and said: ‘The idiot—the poor, unthinking, crazy idiot! Poor Ammaji. Baoji has always said—’ He stopped. ‘Ma, Lata—you should both remain here—’
‘Of course not, Pran,’ said Lata, very concerned. ‘We were due to return in a couple of days anyway. We’ll all travel together. How terrible. Poor Maan—I’m sure there’s an explanation—he couldn’t have done it. There must be—’
Mrs Rupa Mehra, thinking first of Mrs Mahesh Kapoor and then of the Nawab Sahib, felt tears start to her eyes. But tears, she knew, were not helpful, and she controlled herself with an effort.
‘We’ll go directly to the station,’ said Pran, ‘and try to get a ticket on the Brahmpur Mail. We only have an hour and a half to pack.’
Uma burst into a happy and meaningless chant. Meenakshi volunteered to hold her while they packed, and to call Arun at the office.
17.21
When Firoz came round from the effect of the anaesthesia, his father was asleep. He was at first uncertain where he was—then he moved, and a stab of terrible pain pierced his side. He noticed the tube in his arm. He turned his head to the right. There was a khaki clad policeman with a notebook beside him, asleep in a chair. The light of a dim lamp fell on his dreaming face.
Firoz bit his lip, and tried to understand this pain, this room, and why he was here. There had been a fight—Maan had had a knife—he had been stabbed. Tasneem came into it somewhere. Someone had covered him with a shawl. His walking stick had been slippery with blood. Then a tonga had reared out of the mist. Everything else was dark.
But the sight of his father’s face disturbed him greatly. He could not understand why. There had been something said by someone—what it was he could not for the moment remember—something about his father. His memory of what had happened was like the map of an unexplored continent—the edges were clearer than the core. Yet there was something at that core that he shrank away from even as he approached it. Thinking was an effort, and he kept lapsing into a quiet darkness and emerging once again into the present.
Lying flat on his back he noticed a lizard on the upper reaches of the wall in front of him—one of the permanent denizens of this ward. Firoz found himself wondering what it must be like to be a lizard—what strange surfaces it lived on, where it needed more effort to move in one direction than in another. He was still staring at the lizard, when he heard the policeman say, ‘Ah, Sahib, you’ve woken up.’
‘Yes,’ Firoz heard himself say. ‘I’ve woken up.’
‘Do you feel well enough to make a statement?’
‘Statement?’ said Firoz.
‘Yes,’ said the policeman. ‘Your assailant has been arrested.’
Firoz looked at the wall. ‘I am tired,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll sleep a little longer.’
The Nawab Sahib had woken at the sound of his son’s voice. He looked silently at Firoz now, and Firoz at him. The father appeared to be pleading with the son, the son frowning in unhappy concentration. Then he closed his eyes for a while, leaving the Nawab Sahib baffled and disturbed.
‘I think he will be able to speak clearly in an hour or so,’ said the policeman. ‘It is important to get a statement as soon as possible.’
‘Please do not disturb him,’ said the Nawab Sahib. ‘He looks very tired and he needs to rest.’
The Nawab Sahib could not go back to sleep. He got up after a while and paced about the room. Firoz was sound asleep, and did not take anyone’s name. After about an hour he woke up again.
‘Abba—’ he said.
‘Yes, son.’
‘Abba—there is something—’
His father was silent.
‘What is all this?’ Firoz said suddenly. ‘Did Maan attack me?’
‘So it seems. They found you on Cornwallis Road. Do you remember what happened?’
‘I am trying to—’
The policeman interrupted: ‘Do you remember what happened at Saeeda Bai’s?’
Firoz saw his father start at the name, and suddenly he saw the blinding core of what he had been trying to touch, to approach, to remember. He turned towards his father and looked at him with an expression of pain and reproach that pierced him to the heart. The old man could not hold his gaze, and turned away.
17.22
Saeeda Bai had not been idle in the face of calamity. Despite the terror and shock of Maan’s attack on her and on Firoz, she—and Bibbo too—had managed, after the in
itial shock and reaction, to keep their heads. The house had to be protected, and Maan had to be saved from the effect of his own actions. The law might define things as it chose, but Saeeda Bai knew that Maan was not a criminal. And she blamed herself and her own excitability too for his tragic outburst of violence.
For herself, once Dr Bilgrami had examined her, she almost forgot her concern. She knew she would live; what happened to her voice was in God’s hands. For Tasneem, however, she felt the clutch of a cold fear. The child she had conceived in terror, had carried in shame, and had borne in pain had been given the name of that paradisal spring which could, if anything could, wash antecedence into non-existence and torment into calm. Yet now again that antecedence and that torment were knocking at the door of the present. Saeeda Bai longed once more for her mother’s advice and strong comfort. Mohsina Bai had been a harder, more independent woman than Saeeda; without her courage and persistence Saeeda Bai herself would by now be merely another ageing and impoverished whore from Tarbuz ka Bazaar—and Tasneem a younger version of the same.
That first night, half-expecting a visit from the police or a message from the Nawab Sahib, and sick with fear and pain, she had remained at home, making sure that everything in her room, along the bloodstained stairs, indeed everywhere in the house was as it should be. Sleep, she told herself; sleep; and if you can’t sleep, lie in bed and pretend that this is just a night like any other. But she had been seized with restlessness. If it had been possible, she would have got down on her knees and scrubbed clean each drop of blood on the street that led to her door.
As for the man from whose side this blood had flowed, and whose face reminded her not of his mother, whom she had never seen, but most disturbingly of his father, Saeeda Bai felt nothing, a mere coldness, half brother to her daughter though he was. She hardly cared if he lived or died except in so far as it would affect Maan. And yet, when the police had come, she had been terrified into giving testimony that might—she saw it all too clearly now—that might lead her beloved Dagh Sahib to the scaffold.
For Maan, who had almost killed her, her anxiety, her terrified tenderness, knew no limits—but what could she do? And she began now to think as her mother would have thought. Whom did she know? And how well? And whom did they know? And how well? Soon Bilgrami Sahib became the emissary of elliptical communications from Saeeda Bai to a rising Minister of State, to a Joint Secretary in the Home Department, to the kotwal of Brahmpur. And Bilgrami Sahib himself used his own contacts judiciously and persistently in a generous attempt to save his rival—persistently, because he feared for Saeeda Bai’s health and spirit if something terrible were to happen to Maan, and judiciously, because he feared that Saeeda Bai, in her attempt to spread the web of her influence too wide, might tempt some contrary spirit to rip it from end to end.
17.23
‘Priya, promise me you’ll talk to your father.’
This time it had been Veena who had suggested going up on to the roof. She could not bear the looks of satisfaction, distaste, and pity that she had had to face in the Goyal household below. It was a cold afternoon, and they were both wearing shawls. The sky was slate-coloured, except for an area across the Ganga where the sands had been whipped up by the wind into a dirty yellow-brown haze. Veena was crying blindly and pleading with Priya.
‘But what good will it do?’ said Priya, wiping the tears from her friend’s face and her own.
‘All the good in the world if it saves Maan.’
‘What is your father doing?’ asked Priya. ‘Hasn’t he spoken to anyone?’
‘My father,’ said Veena bitterly, ‘cares more for his image as a man of principle than for his family. I spoke to him; do you think it had any effect? He told me that I should be thinking of my mother, not of Maan. Only now do I realize what a cold man he really is. Maan will be hanged at eight o’clock, and he’ll be signing his files at nine. My mother is beside herself. Promise me you’ll speak to your father, Priya, promise me. You’re his only child, he’ll do anything for you.’
‘I’ll speak to him,’ said Priya. ‘I promise.’
What Veena did not know—what Priya did not have the heart to tell her—was that she had spoken to her father already, and that the Home Minister had told her that there was nothing he would do to interfere. This was, in his words, an unimportant matter: one ruffian trying to kill another in an infamous establishment. That their fathers were who they were had nothing to do with the business. It touched upon no affairs of state; it provided no excuse for intervention; the local police and magistracy could handle it adequately. He had even gently upbraided his daughter for attempting to use his influence in this manner, and Priya, who was not used to being upbraided by her father, had felt both unhappy and ashamed.
17.24
Mahesh Kapoor was unable to bring himself to do what had been suggested to him over the phone: to try to bring pressure to bear directly or from above on the investigating officer, in this case the Sub-Inspector in charge of the Pasand Bagh Police Station. It went against his grain to do so. Indeed, the just implementation of his own Zamindari Abolition and Land Reforms Act would depend on how far he could prevent landlords from bringing their influence to bear on village record-keepers and local officers. He did not relish the way the politician Jha was undermining the administration near Rudhia town, and he did not see himself as ever being tempted to do the same. So when his wife asked him whether he could not ‘talk to someone, even to Agarwal’, Mahesh Kapoor told her abruptly to be quiet.
For her the shock and grief of the last two days had been almost unbearable. When she thought of Firoz lying in hospital and Maan in the police lock-up, she could not sleep. Once Firoz had become conscious he had been allowed very few visitors—including his aunt Abida and his sister Zainab. Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had begged her husband to speak to the Nawab Sahib—to express his grief and regret, and to ask if they could visit Firoz. This he had tried to do. But the Nawab Sahib, being in the hospital, was not available on the phone. And his apologetic, embarrassed, excessively polite secretary Murtaza Ali had made it clear that the Nawab Sahib had indicated from his remarks that a visit by Maan’s family at this time would be unwelcome.
The rumour mills, meanwhile, were busy. What was a mere paragraph in the Calcutta papers was the staple of the Brahmpur press and Brahmpur conversation, and would continue to be so for days, despite the alternative attractions of elections and electioneering. The police were still unaware of the connection between Saeeda Bai’s establishment and the Nawab Sahib’s. They had still not learned of the monthly stipend. But Bibbo had begun to put two and two together, and was unable to resist casting dark and proud hints about Tasneem’s ancestry in the strictest (and thus leakiest) confidence to a couple of her closest friends. And a reporter from the Hindi press who was well known for muck-raking had interrogated an old and retired courtesan who had known Saeeda Bai’s mother in the days when they had been part of a joint establishment in Tarbuz ka Bazaar. This old woman was induced by money and the promise of more money to describe all she knew about Saeeda Bai’s early life. Some of her facts were true, some embroidered, some false, almost all interesting to the journalist. She stated calmly and authoritatively that Saeeda Bai had lost her virginity when she had been raped at the age of fourteen or fifteen by a prominent citizen who had been drunk; it was Saeeda Bai’s mother who had told her so. What lent some likelihood to this particular assertion was that the old woman admitted that she did not know who this man was. She had her ideas, that was all.
For every fact or imagined fact that appeared in print, there were ten rumours that hovered about like wasps over a rotting mango. Neither family escaped the whispered voices, the pointed fingers that followed them wherever they went.
Veena, partly to be with her mother at this hard time, and partly to flee from her kindly but insatiable neighbours, moved into Prem Nivas for a few days. That same evening Pran and the Calcutta party returned to Brahmpur.
Within
twenty-four hours of his arrest, Maan had been produced before a local magistrate. His father had hired a District Court lawyer to ask for bail or at least a transfer from the lock-up into a proper jail, but the charges that were being investigated did not admit of the former, and the police opposed the latter. The investigating officer, who had been frustrated by his inability to find a weapon and by Maan’s lapses of memory about this and other details, had asked that Maan be kept in police custody for a few more days on the grounds that they needed to interrogate him further. The magistrate had allowed the police to keep him for two more days in the lock-up, after which he would be transferred to the comparative decency of the district jail.
Mahesh Kapoor had visited Maan in the police station twice. Maan complained about nothing in his cell—the filth, the discomfort, the cold. He appeared to be so shocked and so remorseful that his father could not find it in his heart to reproach him further for what he had done to himself and to Firoz and to the Nawab Sahib; and indeed to Mahesh Kapoor’s own future.
Maan kept asking for information about Firoz—he was in terror that he might die. He asked his father if he had visited him in hospital, and Mahesh Kapoor was forced to admit that he had not been permitted to.
Mahesh Kapoor had told his wife not to visit Maan until he was in jail—the conditions in the police lock-up would, he thought, upset her too much. But finally Mrs Mahesh Kapoor could bear it no longer. She said that if necessary she would go alone. In exasperation her husband finally gave in and asked Pran to take her there.
She saw Maan and wept. Nothing in her life had approached in degradation her experience of these last few days. The police at the door of Prem Nivas, the searches for incriminating evidence, the arrest of someone she loved—these she had known from the time of the British. But she had not been ashamed of the man whom they had hauled off to jail as a political prisoner. Nor had he had to undergo such filth and squalor as this.