A Suitable Boy(166)
All he said to Zainab was: ‘Be patient like your mother. He will come around one day.’
Zainab did not look up, but she wondered that her father had invoked her mother’s memory. After a while, her father added, almost as if he were speaking to himself: ‘I came to realize her worth very late in life. God rest her soul.’
For many years now, the Nawab Sahib had visited his wife’s grave as often as possible to read the fatiha over it. And indeed the old Begum Sahiba had been a most remarkable woman. She had put up with what she knew of the Nawab’s own unsettled youth, had run much of the estate efficiently from behind the walls of her seclusion, had endured his later phases of piety (not as excessive, fortunately, as that of his younger brother), and had brought up her children and helped bring up her nephews and nieces with discipline and culture. Her influence on the zenana had been both diffuse and powerful. She had read; and, despite that, she had thought.
In fact, it was probably the books that she lent her sister-in-law Abida that had first planted a few scattered seeds of rebellion in that restless, chafing heart. Though Zainab’s mother had no thoughts of leaving the zenana herself, it was only her presence that had made it bearable for Abida. When she died, Abida compelled her husband – and his elder brother the Nawab Sahib – by reason, cajolery, and threats of suicide (which she fully intended to carry out, and which they could see she did) to let her escape from what had become to her an intolerable bondage. Abida, the firebrand of the legislature, had little respect for the Nawab Sahib, whom she saw as weak and feckless, and who (again, as she saw it) had killed all desire in his wife ever to emerge from purdah. But she had great affection for his children: for Zainab, because her temperament was like her mother’s; for Imtiaz, because his laughter and many of his expressions resembled hers; and for Firoz, whose long head and clear and handsome looks bore the imprint of his mother’s face.
Hassan and Abbas were now brought in by the maidservant and Zainab kissed them a tearful goodnight.
Hassan, looking slightly sullen, said to his mother: ‘Who’s been making you cry, Ammi-jaan?’
His mother, smiling, hugged him to her and said, ‘No one, sweetheart. No one.’
Hassan then demanded from his grandfather the ghost story that he had promised to tell them some nights earlier. The Nawab Sahib complied. As he was narrating his exciting and fairly bloodthirsty tale to the evident delight of the two boys, even the three-year-old, he reflected over the many ghost stories attached to this very house that he had been told in childhood by his own servants and family. The house and all its memories had been threatened with dissolution just a few nights ago. No one had been able to prevent the attack and it was a mere matter of grace or chance or fate that it had been saved. We are each of us alone, thought the Nawab Sahib; blessedly, we rarely realize this.
His old friend Mahesh Kapoor came to his mind and it struck him that in times of trouble it sometimes happened that even those who wanted to help were unable to. They might be tied down themselves for one reason or another; or else circumstances of expediency or some greater need could have kept them less involuntarily away.
6.11
MAHESH KAPOOR too had been thinking of his old friend, and with a sense of guilt. He had not received the emergency message from Baitar House on the night that L.N. Agarwal had sent the police to take possession of it. The peon whom Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had sent to find him had not been able to do so.
Unlike rural land (now threatened by the prospect of the abolition of zamindari), urban land and buildings were under no threat of appropriation at all – except if they fell into the hands of the Custodian of Evacuee Property. Mahesh Kapoor had not thought it at all likely that Baitar House, one of the great houses of Brahmpur – indeed, one of the landmarks of the city – could be at risk. The Nawab Sahib continued to live there, his sister-in-law Begum Abida Khan was a powerful voice in the Assembly, and the grounds and gardens in the front of the house were well taken care of, even if many – or most – of the rooms inside were now empty and unused. He regretted that he had been too preoccupied to advise his friend to provide each room with at least the semblance of occupancy. And he felt very bad that he had not been able to intercede with the Chief Minister in order to help on the night of the crisis.
As it had turned out, Zainab’s intercession had achieved all that Mahesh Kapoor could have hoped to. S.S. Sharma’s heart had been touched, and his indignation against the Home Minister had been unfeigned.
The letter that Zainab had written to him had mentioned a circumstance that the Nawab Sahib had told her about some years previously; it had stuck in her memory. S.S. Sharma – the ex-Premier of the Protected Provinces (as the Chief Minister of Purva Pradesh was called before Independence) – had been held virtually incommunicado in a British prison during the Quit India Movement of 1941, and could do as little for his family as they could for him. At this time the Nawab Sahib’s father had come to know that Sharma’s wife was ill and had come to her for help. It was a simple matter of a doctor, medicines and a visit or two, but in those days not many, whether they believed in British rule or not, wished to be seen associating with the families of subversives. Sharma had in fact been Premier when the P.P. Land Tenancy Act of 1938 had been passed - an act that the Nawab Sahib’s father had considered, correctly, to be the thin end of the wedge of more far-reaching land reform. Nonetheless, simple humanity and even a sense of admiration for his enemy had inspired this crucial assistance. Sharma had been deeply grateful for the kindness that his family had received in their hour of need, and when Hassan, the six-year-old great-grandchild of the man who had helped him then, had come to him with a letter requesting his help and protection, he had been very moved.