A Suitable Boy(156)

She had framed one of the paintings from the album of Ghalib’s poems that Maan had given her. Although she had, as far as was possible, repaired the page that the Raja of Marh had ripped out of the volume, she had not dared to display that particular illustration for fear of exciting his further fury. What she had framed was ‘A Persian Idyll’, which showed a young woman dressed in pale orange, sitting near an arched doorway on a very pale orange rug, holding in her slender fingers a musical instrument resembling a sitar, and looking out of the archway into a mysterious garden. The woman’s features were sharp and delicate, unlike Saeeda Bai’s very attractive but unclassical, perhaps not even beautiful, face. And the instrument that the woman was holding – unlike Saeeda Bai’s strong and responsive harmonium – was so finely tapered in the stylized illustration that it would have been entirely impossible to play it.

Maan did not care that the book might be considered damaged by having the painting thus plundered from its pages. He could not have been happier at this sign of Saeeda Bai’s attachment to his gift. He lay in her bedroom and stared at the painting and was filled with a happiness as mysterious as the garden through the archway. Whether glowing with the immediate memory of her embraces or chewing contentedly at the delicate coconut-flavoured paan that she had just offered to him at the end of a small ornamented silver pin, it seemed to him that he himself had been led by her and her music and her affection into a paradisal garden, most insubstantial and yet most real.

‘How unimaginable it is,’ said Maan out loud rather dreamily, ‘that our parents also must have – just like us –’

This remark struck Saeeda Bai as being in somewhat poor taste. She did not at all wish her imagination to be transported to the domestic love-making of Mahesh Kapoor – or anyone else for that matter. She did not know who her own father was: her mother, Mohsina Bai, had claimed not to know. Besides, domesticity and its standard concerns were not objects of fond contemplation for her. She had been accused by Brahmpur gossip of destroying several settled marriages by casting her lurid nets around hapless men. She said a little sharply to Maan: ‘It is good to live in a household like I do where one does not have to imagine such things.’

Maan looked a little chastened.

Saeeda Bai, who was quite fond of him by now and knew that he usually blurted out the first thing that came into his head, tried to cheer him up by saying: ‘But Dagh Sahib looks distressed. Would he have been happier to have been immaculately conceived?’

‘I think so,’ said Maan. ‘I sometimes think I would be happier without a father.’

‘Oh?’ said Saeeda Bai, who had clearly not been expecting this.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Maan. ‘I often feel that whatever I do my father looks upon with contempt. When I opened the cloth business in Banaras, Baoji told me it would be a complete failure. Now that I have made a go of it, he is taking the line that I should sit there every day of every month of every year of my life. Why should I?’

Saeeda Bai did not say anything.

‘And why should I marry?’ continued Maan, spreading his arms wide on the bed and touching Saeeda Bai’s cheek with his left hand. ‘Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?’

‘Because your father can get me to sing at your wedding,’ said Saeeda Bai with a smile. ‘And at the birth of your children. And at their mundan ceremony. And at their marriages, of course.’ She was silent for a few seconds. ‘But I won’t be alive to do that,’ she went on. ‘In fact I sometimes wonder what you see in an old woman like me.’

Maan became very indignant. He raised his voice and said, ‘Why do you say things like that? Do you do it just to get me annoyed? No one ever meant much to me until I met you. That girl in Banaras whom I met twice under heavy escort is less than nothing to me – and everyone thinks I must marry her just because my father and mother say so.’

Saeeda Bai turned towards him and buried her face in his arm. ‘But you must get married,’ she said. ‘You cannot cause your parents so much pain.’

‘I don’t find her at all attractive,’ said Maan angrily.

‘That will merely take time,’ advised Saeeda Bai.

‘And I won’t be able to visit you after I’m married,’ said Maan.

‘Oh?’ said Saeeda Bai in such a way that the question, rather than leading to a reply, implied the closure of the conversation.





6.4


AFTER a while they got up and moved to the other room. Saeeda Bai called for the parakeet, of whom she had become fond. Ishaq Khan brought in the cage, and a discussion ensued about when he would learn to speak. Saeeda Bai seemed to think that a couple of months would be sufficient, but Ishaq was doubtful. ‘My grandfather had a parakeet who didn’t speak for a whole year and then wouldn’t stop talking for the rest of his life,’ he said.