‘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, crosslegged, 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 wolflike 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?