The Nawab Sahib felt that he had been caught red-handed, plotting against Mahesh Kapoor’s bill with a man whom he would normally have shunned.
And Mahesh Kapoor realized instantly that he was the least welcome intruder imaginable at this working conference—for it was he who was the enemy, the expropriator, the government, the fount of injustice, the other side.
It was, however, Mahesh Kapoor who broke the ice among the elder circle by going up to the Nawab Sahib and taking his hand. He did not say anything, but slowly nodded his head. No words of sympathy or apology were needed. The Nawab Sahib knew immediately that his friend would have done anything in his power to help him when Baitar House was under siege—but that he had been ignorant of the crisis.
The Raja of Marh broke the silence with a laugh:
‘So you have come to spy on us! We are flattered. No mere minion but the Minister himself.’
Mahesh Kapoor said:
‘Since I was not blinded by the vision of your gold number plates outside, I could hardly have known you were here. Presumably, you came by rickshaw.’
‘I will have to count my number plates before I leave,’ continued the Raja of Marh.
‘If you need any help, let me send my son with you. He can count till two,’ said Mahesh Kapoor.
The Raja of Marh had become red in the face. ‘Was this planned?’ he demanded of the Nawab Sahib. He was thinking that this could well be a plot by the Muslims and their sympathizers to humiliate him.
The Nawab Sahib found his voice. ‘No, Your Highness, it was not. And I apologize to all of you, especially to you, Mr Bannerji—I should not have insisted that we meet here.’
Since common interest in the impending litigation had thrown him together with the Raja of Marh anyway, the Nawab Sahib had hoped that by inviting the Raja to his own house he might get the chance to talk to him a little about the Shiva Temple in Chowk—or at least to create the possibility of a later talk. The communal situation among the Hindus and Muslims in Brahmpur was so troubling that the Nawab had swallowed his gorge and a little of his pride in order to help sort things out. The move had now backfired.
The elder of the Bony Bespectacleds, appalled by what had gone before, now said in a rather finicky voice: ‘Well, I think we have already discussed the main lines of the matter, and can adjourn for the moment. I will inform my father by letter of what has been said by all sides, and I hope I can persuade him to appear for us in this matter if and when it is necessary.’
He was referring to the great G.N. Bannerji, a lawyer of legendary fame, acumen, and rapacity. If, as was now almost inevitable, the amended bill went through in the Upper House, obtained the President of India’s signature, and became law, it would certainly be challenged in the Brahmpur High Court. If G.N. Bannerji could be persuaded to appear on behalf of the landlords, it would considerably improve their chances of having the act declared unconstitutional, and therefore null and void.
The Bannerjis took their leave. The younger Bannerji, though no older than Firoz, had a flourishing practice already. He was intelligent, worked hard, had cases shovelled his way by his family’s old clients, and thought of Firoz as rather too languid for life at the Bar. Firoz admired his intelligence but thought him a prig, a little along the lines of his finicky father. His grandfather, the great G.N. Bannerji, however, was not a prig. Though he was in his seventies, he was as energetic erect on his feet in court as erect off his feet in bed. The huge, some would say unscrupulous, fees he insisted on before he accepted a case went to support a scattered harem of women; but he still succeeded in living beyond his means.
The Rajkumar of Marh was a basically decent and not bad-looking but somewhat weak young man who was bullied by his father. Firoz loathed the crude, Muslim-baiting Raja: ‘black as coal with his diamond buttons and ear-tops’. His sense of family honour made him keep his distance from the Rajkumar as well. Not so Maan, who was inclined to like people unless they made themselves unlikable. The Rajkumar, quite attracted by Maan, and discovering that he was at a loose end these days, suggested a few things that they could do together, and Maan agreed to meet him later in the week.
Meanwhile the Raja of Marh, the Nawab Sahib, and Mahesh Kapoor were standing by the table in the full light of the chandelier. Mahesh Kapoor’s eyes fell on the papers spread out on the table, but then, remembering the Raja’s earlier jeer, he quickly turned his gaze away.
‘No, no, be our guest, Minister Sahib,’ sneered the Raja of Marh. ‘Read away. And in exchange, tell me when exactly you plan to vest the ownership of our lands in your own pocket.’
‘My own pocket?’
A silverfish scurried across the table. The Raja crushed it with his thumb.
‘I meant, of course, the Revenue Department of the great state of Purva Pradesh.’
‘In due course.’
‘Now you are talking like your dear friend Agarwal in the Assembly.’
Mahesh Kapoor did not respond. The Nawab Sahib said: ‘Should we move into the drawing room?’
The Raja of Marh made no attempt to move. He said, almost equally to the Nawab Sahib and the Minister of Revenue: ‘I asked you that question merely from altruistic motives. I am supporting the other zamindars simply because I do not care for the attitude of the government—or political insects like you. I myself have nothing to lose. My lands are protected from your laws.’
‘Oh?’ said Mahesh Kapoor. ‘One law for men and another for monkeys?’
‘If you still call yourself a Hindu,’ said the Raja of Marh, ‘you may recall that it was the army of monkeys that defeated the army of demons.’
‘And what miracle do you expect this time?’ Mahesh Kapoor could not resist asking.
‘Article 362 of the Constitution,’ said the Raja of Marh, gleefully spitting out a number larger than two. ‘These are our private lands, Minister Sahib, our own private lands, and by the covenants of merger that we rulers made when we agreed to join your India, the law cannot loot them and the courts cannot touch them.’
It was well known that the Raja of Marh had gone drunk and babbling to the dour Home Minister of India, Sardar Patel, to sign the Instrument of Accession by which he made over his state to the Indian Union, and had even smudged his signature with his tears—thus creating a unique historical document.
‘We will see,’ said Mahesh Kapoor. ‘We will see. No doubt G.N. Bannerji will defend Your Highness in the future as ably as he has defended your lowness in the past.’
Whatever story lay behind this taunt, it had a signal effect.
The Raja of Marh made a sudden, growling, vicious lunge towards Mahesh Kapoor. Luckily he stumbled over a chair, and fell towards his left on to the table. Winded, he raised his face from among the law-books and scattered papers. But a page of a law-book had got torn.
For a second, staring at the torn page, the Raja of Marh looked dazed, as if he was uncertain where he was. Firoz, taking advantage of his disorientation, quickly went up to him, and with an assured arm led him towards the drawing room. It was all over in a few seconds. The Rajkumar followed his father.
The Nawab Sahib looked towards Mahesh Kapoor, and raised one hand slightly, as if to say, ‘Let things be.’ Mahesh Kapoor said, ‘I am sorry, very sorry’; but both he and his friend knew that he was referring less to the immediate incident than to his delay in coming to Baitar House.
After a while, he said to his son: ‘Come, Maan, let’s go.’ On the way out, they noticed the Raja’s long black Lancia with its solid gold ingot-like licence plates stamped ‘MARH 1’ lurking in the drive.
In the car back to Prem Nivas, each was lost in his own thoughts. Mahesh Kapoor was thinking that, despite his explosive timing, he was glad that he had not waited still longer to reassure his friend. He could sense how affected the Nawab Sahib had been when he had taken his hand.
Mahesh Kapoor expected that the Nawab Sahib would call him up the next day to apologize for what had happened, but not offer any substantial
explanations. The whole business was very uncomfortable: there was a strange, unresolved air to events. And it was disturbing that a coalition—however volatile—of former enemies was coming into being out of self-interest or self-preservation against his long-nurtured legislation. He would very much have liked to know what legal weaknesses, if any, the lawyers had found in his bill.
Maan was thinking how glad he was that he had met his friend again. He had told Firoz that he would probably be stuck with his father the whole evening, and Firoz had promised to send a message to Saeeda Bai—and if necessary to take it there personally—to inform her that Dagh Sahib had been detained.
6.16
‘No; be careful; think.’
The voice was slightly mocking, but not without concern. It appeared to care that the task should be done well—that the neatly lined page should not become a record of shame and shapelessness. In a way, it appeared to care about what happened to Maan as well. Maan frowned, then wrote the character ‘meem’ again. It looked to him like a curved spermatozoon.
‘Your mind isn’t on the tip of your nib,’ said Rasheed. ‘If you want to make use of my time—and I am here at your service—why not concentrate on what you’re doing?’
‘Yes, yes, all right, all right,’ said Maan shortly, sounding for a second remarkably like his father. He tried again. The Urdu alphabet, he felt, was difficult, multiform, fussy, elusive, unlike either the solid Hindi or the solid English script.
‘I can’t do this. It looks beautiful on the printed page, but to write it—’
‘Try again. Don’t be impatient.’ Rasheed took the bamboo pen from his hand, dipped it in the inkwell, and wrote a perfect, dark-blue ‘meem’. He then wrote another below it: the letters were identical, as two letters rarely are.
‘What does it matter, anyway?’ asked Maan, looking up from the sloping desk at which he was sitting, cross-legged, on the floor. ‘I want to read Urdu and to write it, not to practise calligraphy. Do I have to do this?’ He reflected that he was asking for permission as he used to when he was a child. Rasheed was no older than he was, but had taken complete control of him in his role as a teacher.
‘Well, you have put yourself in my hands, and I don’t want you to start on shaky foundations. So what would you like to read now?’ Rasheed inquired with a slight smile, hoping that Maan’s answer would not be the predictable one once more.
‘Ghazals,’ said Maan unhesitatingly. ‘Mir, Ghalib, Dagh. . . .’
‘Yes, well—’ Rasheed said nothing for a while. There was tension in his eyes at the thought of having to teach ghazals to Maan shortly before going over passages of the Holy Book with Tasneem.
‘So what do you say?’ said Maan. ‘Why don’t we start today?’
‘That would be like teaching a baby to run the marathon,’ Rasheed responded after a few seconds, having found an analogy ridiculous enough to suit his dismay. ‘Eventually, of course, you will be able to. But for now, just try that meem again.’
Maan put the pen down and stood up. He knew that Saeeda Bai was paying Rasheed, and he sensed that Rasheed needed the money. He had nothing against his teacher; in a way he liked his conscientiousness. But he rebelled against his attempt to impose a new infancy on him. What Rasheed was pointing out to him was the first step on an endless and intolerably tedious road; at this rate it would be years before he would be able to read even those ghazals that he knew by heart. And decades before he could pen the love letters he yearned to write. Yet Saeeda Bai had made a compulsory half-hour lesson a day with Rasheed ‘the little bitter foretaste’ that would whet his appetite for her company.
The whole thing was so cruelly erratic, however, thought Maan. Sometimes she would see him, sometimes not, just as it suited her. He had no sense of what to expect, and it ruined his concentration. And so here he had to sit in a cool room on the ground floor of his beloved’s house with his back hunched over a pad with sixty aliphs and forty zaals and twenty misshapen meems, while occasionally a few magical notes from the harmonium, a phrase from the sarangi, a strain of a thumri floated down the inner balcony and filtered through the door to frustrate both his lesson and him.
Maan never enjoyed being entirely by himself at the best of times, but these evenings, when his lesson was over, if word came through Bibbo or Ishaq that Saeeda Bai preferred to be alone, he felt crazy with unhappiness and frustration. Then, if Firoz and Imtiaz were not at home, and if family life appeared, as it usually did, unbearably bland and tense and pointless, Maan would fall in with his latest acquaintances, the Rajkumar of Marh and his set, and lose his sorrows and his money in gambling and drink.
‘Look, if you aren’t in the mood for a lesson today. . . .’ Rasheed’s voice was kinder than Maan had expected, though there was rather a sharp expression on his wolf-like face.
‘No, no, that’s fine. Let’s go on. It’s just a question of self-control.’ Maan sat down again.
‘Indeed it is,’ said Rasheed, reverting to his former tone of voice. Self-control, it struck him, was what Maan needed even more than perfect meems. ‘Why have you got yourself trapped in a place like this?’ he wanted to ask Maan. ‘Isn’t it pathetic that you should be sacrificing your dignity for a person of Saeeda Begum’s profession?’
Perhaps all this was present in his three crisp words. At any rate, Maan suddenly felt like confiding in him.
‘You see, it’s like this—’ began Maan. ‘I have a weak will, and when I fall into bad company—’ He stopped. What on earth was he saying? And how would Rasheed know what he was talking about? And why, even if he did, should he care?
But Rasheed appeared to understand. ‘When I was younger,’ he said, ‘I—who now consider myself truly sober—would spend my time beating people up. My grandfather used to do so in our village, and he was a well-respected man, so I thought that beating people up was what made people look up to him. There were about five or six of us, and we would egg each other on. We’d just go up to some schoolfellow, who might be wandering innocently along, and slap him hard across the face. What I would never have dared to do alone, I did without any hesitation in company. But, well, I don’t any more. I’ve learned to follow another voice, to be alone and to understand things—maybe to be alone and to be misunderstood.’
To Maan this sounded like the advice of a good angel; or perhaps a risen one. In his imagination’s eye he saw the Rajkumar and Rasheed struggling for his soul. One was coaxing him towards hell with five poker cards, one beating him towards paradise with a quill. He botched another meem before asking:
‘And is your grandfather still alive?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Rasheed, frowning. ‘He sits on a cot in the shade and reads the Quran Sharif all day, and chases the village children away when they disturb him. And soon he will try to chase the officers of the law away too, because he doesn’t like your father’s plans.’
‘So you’re zamindars?’ Maan was surprised.
Rasheed thought this over before saying: ‘My grandfather was, before he divided his wealth among his sons. And so is my father and so is my, well, my uncle. As for myself—’ He paused, appeared to look over Maan’s page, then continued, without finishing his previous sentence, ‘Well, who am I to set myself up in judgement in these matters? They are very happy, naturally, to keep things as they are. But I have lived in the village almost all my life, and I have seen the whole system. I know how it works. The zamindars—and my family is not so extraordinary as to be an exception to this—the zamindars do nothing but make their living from the misery of others; and they try to force their sons into the same ugly mould as themselves.’ Here Rasheed paused, and the area around the corners of his mouth tightened. ‘If their sons want to do anything else, they make life miserable for them too,’ he continued. ‘They talk a great deal about family honour, but they have no sense of honour except to gratify the promises of pleasure they have made to themselves.’
He was silent for a second, as if hesitating; then went on:
br /> ‘Some of the most respected of landlords do not even keep their word, they are so petty. You might find this hard to believe but I was virtually offered a job here in Brahmpur as the curator of the library of one such great man, but when I got to the grand house I was told—well, anyway, all this is irrelevant. The main fact is that the system of landlords isn’t good for the villagers, it isn’t good for the countryside as a whole, it isn’t good for the country, and until it goes. . . .’ The sentence remained unfinished. Rasheed was pressing his fingertips to his forehead, as if he was in pain.
This was a far cry from meem, but Maan listened with sympathy to the young tutor, who appeared to speak out of some terrible pressure, not merely of circumstances. Only a few minutes earlier he had been counselling care, concentration, and moderation for Maan.
There was a knock on the door, and Rasheed quickly straightened up. Ishaq Khan and Motu Chand entered.
‘Our apologies, Kapoor Sahib.’
‘No, no, you’re quite right to enter,’ said Maan. ‘The time for my lesson is over, and I’m depriving Begum Sahiba’s sister of her Arabic.’ He got up. ‘Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, and my meems will be matchless,’ he promised Rasheed impetuously. ‘Well?’ he nodded genially at the musicians, ‘Is it life or death?’
But from Motu Chand’s downcast looks he anticipated Ishaq Khan’s words.
‘Kapoor Sahib, I fear that this evening—I mean the Begum Sahiba asked me to inform you. . . .’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Maan, angry and hurt. ‘Good. My deep respects to the Begum Sahiba. Till tomorrow, then.’
‘It is just that she is indisposed.’ Ishaq disliked lying and was bad at it.
‘Yes,’ said Maan, who would have been very much more concerned if he had believed in her indisposition. ‘I trust that she will recover rapidly.’ At the door he turned and added: ‘If I thought it would do any good, I would prescribe her a string of meems, one to be taken every hour and several before she retires.’