A Suitable Boy(137)

Begum Abida Khan too used to live here once with her husband, the Nawab Sahib’s younger brother. She spent years chafing in the women’s quarters before she persuaded him to allow her more reasonable and direct access to the outside world. There she had proved to be more effective than him in social and political causes. With the coming of Partition, her husband – a firm supporter of that Partition – had realized how vulnerable his position was in Brahmpur and decided to leave. He went to Karachi at first. Then – partly because he was uncertain of the effect his settling in Pakistan might have on his Indian property and the fortunes of his wife, and partly because he was restless, and partly because he was religious – he went on to Iraq on a visit to the various holy shrines of the Shias, and decided to live there for a few years. Three years had passed since he had last returned to India, and no one knew what he planned to do. He and Abida were childless, so perhaps it did not greatly matter.

The entire question of property rights was unsettled. Baitar was not – like Marh – a princely state subject to primogeniture but a large zamindari estate whose territory lay squarely within British India and was subject to the Muslim personal law of inheritance. Division of the property upon death or dissolution of the family was possible, but for generations now there had been no effective division, and almost everyone had continued to live in the same rambling house in Brahmpur or at Baitar Fort in the countryside, if not amicably, at least not litigiously. And owing to the constant bustle, the visiting, the festivals, the celebrations, in both the men’s and the women’s quarters it had had a grand atmosphere of energy and life.

With Partition things had changed. The house was no longer the great community it had been. It had become, in many ways, lonely. Uncles and cousins had dispersed to Karachi or Lahore. Of the three brothers, one had died, one had gone away, and only that gentle widower, the Nawab Sahib, remained. He spent more and more of his time in his library reading Persian poetry or Roman history or whatever he felt inclined to on any particular day. He left most of the management of his country estate in Baitar – the source of most of his income – to his munshi. That crafty half-steward, half-clerk did not encourage him to spend much time going over his own zamindari affairs. For matters not related to his estate, the Nawab Sahib kept a private secretary.

With the death of his wife and his own increasing years the Nawab Sahib had become less sociable, more aware of the approach of death. He wanted to spend more time with his sons, but they were now in their twenties, and inclined to treat their father with affectionate distance. Firoz’s law, Imtiaz’s medicine, their own circle of young friends, their love affairs (of which he heard little) all drew them outside the orbit of Baitar House. And his dear daughter Zainab visited only rarely – once every few months – whenever her husband allowed her and the Nawab Sahib’s two grandsons to come to Brahmpur.

Sometimes he even missed the lightning-like presence of Abida, a woman of whose immodesty and forwardness the Nawab Sahib instinctively disapproved. Begum Abida Khan, MLA, had refused to abide by the strictures of the zenana quarters and the constraints of a mansion, and was now living in a small house closer to the Legislative Assembly. She believed in being aggressive and if necessary immodest in fighting for causes she considered just or useful, and she looked upon the Nawab Sahib as utterly ineffectual. Indeed, she did not have a very high opinion of her own husband who had, as she thought, ‘fled’ Brahmpur at Partition in a state of panic and was now crawling around the Middle East in a state of religious dotage. Because her niece Zainab – of whom she was fond – was visiting, she did pay a visit to Baitar House, but the purdah she was expected to maintain irked her, and so did the inevitable criticism of her style of life that she faced from the old women of the zenana.

But who were these old women after all? – the repository of tradition and old affection and family history. Only two old aunts of the Nawab Sahib, and the widow of his other brother – no one else remained of that whole busy zenana. The only children in Baitar House were the two who were visiting, the six- and three-year-old grandchildren of the Nawab Sahib. They loved visiting Baitar House and Brahmpur because they found the huge old house exciting, because they could see mongooses sliding under the doors of locked and deserted rooms, because much was made of them by everyone from Firoz Mamu and Imtiaz Mamu to the ‘old servitors’ and the cooks. And because their mother seemed much happier here than at home.

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The Nawab Sahib did not at all like to be disturbed when he was reading, but he made more than an exception for his grandsons. Hassan and Abbas were given a free run of the house. No matter what mood he was in, they lifted it; and even when he was sunk in the impersonal comfort of history, he was happy to be brought back to the present world, as long as it was personally through them. Like the rest of the house, the library too was running to seed. The magnificent collection, built up by his father and incorporating additions by the three brothers – each with his different tastes – was housed in an equally magnificent alcoved and high-windowed room. The Nawab Sahib, wearing a freshly starched kurta-pyjama – with a few small squarish holes in the kurta which looked a bit like moth-holes (but what moth would bite quite so squarely?) – was seated this morning at a round table in one of the alcoves, reading The Marginal Notes of Lord Macaulay selected by his nephew G.O. Trevelyan.