‘Listen,’ he would say. ‘Listen. Today I met the ustad Kaliharan, who is this country’s greatest living maestro of archery. Because of his friendship with my master, Uday Singhji, he agreed to teach me. Today, as the sun rose and we sat in the forest with our bows, he said to me, aim your arrow at that bird. I did, and he said, what do you see? I said, the bird. He said, anything else? I said no, the bird only, nothing else. He said, shoot, and I missed. You missed because you don’t see the whole tree, its thousand leaves, the whole forest, he said, and still looking at me he shot, and the bird flew away. Go look, he said, and you will find one feather from its head pinned by the arrow, and it was so. When you look, he said, see the bird, see the sky above, the earth below, see everything, and you won’t miss then because you cannot miss.’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’ Sanjay said.
‘I don’t know,’ Sikander said. ‘But he didn’t miss. He never misses.’
The weeks passed and every other fortnight, it seemed, Uday took Sikander to a new teacher, and Sikander’s skill and natural aptitude gained him the admiration of all; now people turned to look at him as he passed, and sometimes, at his lessons, it was clear that some people, mostly soldiers, contrived to be present. Meanwhile, Sanjay laboured; he was allowed, now and then, to be present at the soirees organized almost nightly at the White Palace. At these events he was constrained to stand quietly to the rear and watch, and fetch and carry for the Pandit and Hart Sahib; when Gul Jahaan was present he was transported by his passion and unable to see anything else, but on other occasions he watched and learnt; he found that the world of poetry is like any other field of action, it has its factions, its own manoeuvrings, its long drawn-out battles and all-destroying defeats. By the time six months had passed Sanjay had already seen: an old gentleman who conceived a passion for a handsome young poet and was therefore persuaded to forward large sums of money and much support, receiving nothing in exchange but little attention and occasional humiliation; the exact moment in which a poet who had done his best —who had once been considered promising —the second in which this poet discovered that he had gone from being promising to being merely old, that his literary worth had been judged and amounted to not even a footnote in somebody else’s biography; also, a literally bloody battle over the proper use of a Persian word in Urdu poetry, the quarrel starting with carefully casual remarks, escalating to whispers and strained looks at readings, and ending in an unpremeditated but sincerely-fought duel with unripe cane-stalks after a picnic in a sugar-cane field. Sanjay saw that the fruit of poetry is sweet, but in order to be allowed to speak the language one must learn other things, that one must know how to get along in the world, to be thought of well, and, quite simply, one must know the right people, and having realized this he applied himself to the tasks set before him, exuding sincerity.
Sikander, meanwhile, came home every night with different stories about his numerous teachers; he learnt the art of wood-swordsmanship from Lale Khan, the patta-man, who could with his wooden blade beat any five Delhi sharp-sabres, knocking them around like so many drunks; there was Ilahi Baksh, the master of the straight-dagger, who was small and ugly, but who cut so fast and so subtle that many men had died still laughing at him; Arvind Khakka, the hand-fighting artist who placing three fast pigeons under a bed would sit on the bed and keep the pigeons underneath only by spinning and moving his feet, hour after hour after hour, until all the spectators became dizzy watching him and begged him to stop.
‘And all this is true,’ Sikander said every evening. ‘If you don’t believe me then come and look any day. What a place of artists this Lucknow is, what heaven.’
Sanjay had his doubts, but in the evenings preferred to keep his scepticism to himself, because now, when they were together, after bathing, was the time when they were invited to pay their respects to the Begum; every evening they followed the butler through the torch-lit corridors to the roof, where a flute showered nostalgia into the dusk and the Begum sat amongst her women. Her conversation was unpredictable, veering from the metaphysical to the questions of cooking and pickle-making; she had become informal with them, intimate and teasing, and one evening, she asked: ‘What are they like, your teachers, Sanjay? Tell me the truth.’
‘They are fine teachers, generous and —’
‘No nonsense.’
‘Really, they are good.’
‘Yes, but what are they like?’
This time her voice tightened and cracked a little at the end, and so Sanjay said: ‘They are strange. They live in apartments on opposite ends of the White Palace, and most of the day they stay apart, attending to business. Then in the evenings they have tea together. But it is dinner that is important; every night it is held at one place or the other, the English or the Indian, with the appropriate foods and drinks and wines, and so one day the English dresses in an angarkha and speaks Urdu, so the next the Hindu puts on a grey coat, tight shoes and flings English about. It is a curious business; they go from one to the other, and for what I do not know’
‘How are they with each other?’
‘Formal and very correct. Each night, after the guests have departed, they bow and shake hands or salute each other, depending upon whether it was an English or Indian night. Then they retire, each to his own side. It is a very strange thing.’
‘It is a very good thing,’ the Begum said. ‘But you are disturbed? Why?’
Sanjay shrugged, but the Begum waited; to distract her he said: ‘May I ask you a question?’
‘Maybe.’
‘An impertinent question.’
‘Well?’
‘When we last heard a story about you —our genesis story, so to speak —there was a Mister Sumroo in it too. And now we hear certain things about him, and so we wonder.’
‘Impertinent indeed!’ But she was smiling.
‘Although, you will allow,’ Sanjay said, ‘a natural wonder.’
‘All right, I’ll tell you.’ She settled herself in her seat; they were on the roof, and far above them floated a constellation of lantern-kites. ‘I’ll tell, but in short, because quickness is the order of the day, everything is quick-quick short, getting quicker, no time or place for the long old stories, there’s something in the air. So hear about Sumroo. Listen…
You know he was a sad man, taciturn and of lugubrious expression; he moved through the world as if he bore some weight on his shoulders. Why he was this way he never told me, but even what we think of as pleasures he took with a sort of weariness; I could never tell whether one kind of food pleased him more than the other, or whether one dance meant more than some. He lived, as far as I could see, in a grey world where everything was dimly-lit and therefore devoid of colour; I have heard that far enough under water all things appear black. In a way this was convenient for me, because I did as I needed, and to all things he shrugged and said, well, that’s all right. But one summer a certain section of malcontents in my brigades mutinied, and I was compelled to leave my Sardhana, but as I fled, with Sumroo, we saw the rising sun flash on something far behind, and we knew they were coming for us: we had been betrayed. I knew well what they would do to me, freed from shame as they were, so I drew a dagger, poised it over my chest and drove it down, and it seemed to me that the flesh parted, it penetrated, but when I looked down there was not a spot of blood, the muslin of my dupatta was whole. My hands were firm, not shaking, and I tried again, deliberately and calmly, but though for a moment I grew dizzy, nothing happened. Now I set it against the wood of the carriage and tried again, and again the momentary loss of self, and then me again sitting there, whole and quite unscratched; meanwhile, seeing the dagger out, its sharp curved length of brightness, one of my servants, a girl wholly vain and flighty, took it upon herself to run down the length of the convoy, to shout to Sumroo in ringing tones, the Begum is dead, the Begum has brought death to herself. Sumroo reigned his horse about, said, oh, really, in a voice mingling, I was told, mild interest and relief;
quickly, he drew his pistol, a huge and ponderous dragoon affair, especially constructed for him. He placed the barrel under his chin, raised his eyebrows a little, and then with a boom his whole body rose three feet into the air, and —they swear to this —hung motionless and light there for an eternity till it crashed down to the earth, spraying matter.
So the mutineers came down on us, and capturing me —I was with bemusement regarding the matter of my unpricking blade —they took me back to Sardhana, where following injuries and abuses they chained me to a cannon in the court-yard of my own palace. Here, let me tell you, I had much time and motive to ponder the mysteries of existence: why did I live, and how? Filthy, my head uncovered and my hair caked with mud and blood, my clothes torn, I sat, no water or food for days, calling for death. I should tell you I had no dignity: the sun takes that out of you, the burning metal, the dust, the unquenchable hungers of the body; I screamed, I cursed them and their mothers and told them what I would do to their sisters. I struggled till my arms and ankles were raw, and still I did not die. On the eleventh day I leaned against the cannon, and reached a period of extraordinary lucidity, the sky was a blue like a deep-ocean shell, the smell of dung from the quarter-guard’s horses in the air, and it became very clear to me: for some people there is the luxury of honour and the benediction of a quick death, but for me there is only life. I live, and live, and will live, because life is good, and living is necessary. So I stopped screaming and waited, waited two days before rescue came. They taunted me, and I said nothing; so they whipped me. I waited, waited. Do you know who came? Do you? Of course you do. Who is the warrior who came looking for a kingdom, for himself? Who is a true friend, chivalrous paladin? You know because he too is a part of you: Jahaj Jung.
On the thirteenth day, just before dawn, over the walls came George Thomas and his band of madmen; what a massacre there was then, a fine bloodiness. They put the mutineers down, freed me; he had heard, in his Georgegarh, so he came. We spent a heavenly few days together, and back he went, to his dream. A happy ending, you think? Wait, wait, the story is not over. I was back in my seat, but I could feel it shake under me, and sure enough, a few months later, it happened. Two of my servants, my girls —they had been with me since they were this small, now these fell in love, and decided they must be free of my service, and not only that, they must steal from me enough to live in sloth. So, no, they do not ask me for my blessing or my gifts, but instead steal money, and not only money, but also three of my books, rare and secret, magic, if you must know, and not only my books, they decide they must try to hide the theft, and distract from their escape, so they set fire to my library. We lost much, but rescued some, at the cost of burnt flesh and two dead men, and we captured the girls easily, trapped them against a river, killed the paramours in combat and brought the girls back, and the books. I sat looking at them, these children I had known since they were innocent of all love, looked at their plump, tear-stained faces, listened to their lamentations, and all the while I could feel the expectation in the air, the slowly-gathering contempt, the future rebellions and thefts already present in the eyes around me. So I kissed the two of them, gave my instructions. First they were stripped and whipped until they were senseless, and then a deep hole was dug next to the library. Then they were revived, and flung into the hole; after the mud had been tamped down again I had my seat laid over it, and that evening I smoked my hookah there. Now everything was quiet. When I rose to go to my bed I felt my feet sink into the ground, and it seemed that my flesh had settled into itself and become a little heavier. But do you understand? I live.
Instead of frightening Sanjay, this story inspired in him a sense of trust towards the Begum Sumroo: he felt, now, safe and taken care of, so much so that the next evening he entrusted the affair of his love to her, asking her for instructions for his future conduct. ‘I want her,’ he said, plaintively.
‘Well, I’ve never met her, but from what I know of her, and of all women, the way is this: become a great poet and a great lover, and perhaps you will get what you want.’
Of the two, the first goal was something he could pursue naturally: pay attention at the lessons in the White Palace, complete all tasks, look, listen, read. It was the second that he found inexplicably hard, although all around him was the panorama of love, a constant and unending theatre of passion and artfully-displayed opportunity: the head steward was in love with the oldest of the Begum’s ladies, and their secret assignations on the highest terrace a cause of smiles for the whole community; there were the gentle attachments between certain of the ladies themselves, the hidden shuffle and the clink of bangles at night; the fierce afternoon gropings of a soldier and his married-to-another sweeper paramour near the stables; of course, the visits of a certain middle-aged nobleman were awaited eagerly because of the fine couplets that came from his passion for a boy cousin he had grown up with; and every evening, people ran to see the unhappy young man who wandered though the lane at front, desperately in love with the youngest wife of the merchant who lived in the mansion opposite: he had glimpsed her eyes once during a Moharram procession. All around Sanjay, it seemed, along with the other business of life, there was a constant and unrelenting fever of infatuations, sighs, betrayals, and flesh, but he found himself withdrawing from it, even as Sikander pointed out chances and not-so-subtle invitations; finally, this became so obvious that the Begum remarked upon it.
‘Why’ she said, ‘are you like a pent-up balloon? Looking always like you’re about to burst? Not delicate of me to put it this way, of course, but I gave up delicacy some years ago. Especially where my intimates are concerned. Now, out with it.’
‘Well,’ said Sanjay, a little petulantly because he knew people thought him odd. ‘Well, because I don’t want anyone else, I want her.’
‘What an absurd idea,’ laughed the Begum. ‘What does one have to do with the other? You think when you’re a great poet she’s going to dream about you because you’re still an unschooled, clumsy boy? Where does this go, Gul Jahaan, what do I do with that? Idiot. She’ll want you because of the qualities of your earlier loves, the, the, let us say, depth of your knowledge.’
‘But I don’t feel like it with anyone else.’
‘Where, in God’s name, do you get these absurd ideas? I command you: find a woman and bump and hump. It’s not such a big matter. Or is it?’
He shrugged; he could do little else, because he did not understand well himself why he felt this way; the feeling sprang full-formed and despotic out of some corner of his soul; it offered no explanations and brooked no resistance, and he gave in to it inevitably and with a feeling of relief. Ever since he had fallen in love with Gul Jahaan he had noticed strange white patches that appeared on his body, regular white marks in the shape of certain characters from the English alphabet, the first an inverted, upper-case A that materialized above his groin the same afternoon he saw Gul Jahaan in the garden, that came suddenly and remained for a few days before vanishing quietly and without pain. At first he had dismissed the marks as a skin condition, a minor ailment mystified by his imagination, but after he had endured visitations from a B and a C in regular and unceasing succession, he had been forced to admit to himself that what he had eaten was still in his body; the D that he expected next came on his right hand, on the back of it, and so for a few days he wrapped a bandage around it and pretended a sprain. Except for the Pandit, Hart Sahib and Sikander, he knew nobody who could recognize these alien marks on his body, but he preferred to wear loose and large clothes that hid and protected; it was enough that he felt himself strange and marked, that he be perhaps treated as a foreign oddity in a city that he had dreamed of as home would be more than he could endure. So Sanjay kept his silence, despite the jokes and questions, and held his mad love to himself, and tried to learn poetry.
The writing, for Sanjay, came hard; he had heard of poets of sweep and large imagination who dashed off whole elegies before breakfast, and a minor couplet during, a ghazal a
fterwards, but for him each word was placed laboriously like a brick, each phrase required mortaring and levelling and sometimes repair, and so whole afternoons and weeks passed in solitary labour. It was always so exhausting that afterwards he felt virtuous and worthy of Gul Jahaan, and in addition superior to Sikander, who came in sun-blackened and dusty from the field. Yet, in the end, there was something about his poetry, when it was finished, that he found bizarre and unfamiliar; this eccentricity wasn’t in the language, or even in the mundane details of everyday life that kept on appearing, worming themselves into the text, but somehow in the pose, in the attitude. He was unable to place this voice until one evening when he was reading his latest couplet to Sikander; after it was over Sikander said: ‘Have you written to your parents lately?’
‘Why did you ask that?’
‘I don’t know. Just thought of it. Are you angry?’
Sanjay shook his head, but he was annoyed at being caught: when he had heard the question it had become clear to him that his poetry was a rejection, that where his father and uncle had been sentimental, he wanted to be cerebral; scientific instead of mystical; cool and dry instead of ecstatic; short instead of long. For a while this seemed so simple, so automatic and stupid that he stopped writing and tried to find another way to speak, but then for the first time he was allowed to bring in his work and read it in the White Palace; it was a spring day, and the two ustads met with their students outside, in the garden. The other two students were boys from the city, whom Sanjay had avoided instinctively; they reeked of oil and perfume, and now, as they read their poetry, he was quite unable to hear it, because of the roaring of his pulse in his own ears. Finally, they stopped, and he was allowed to read; when he finished, the first thing that he noticed was their open mouths, the insides coloured a dark red by paan.