‘Tomorrow.’
Maan went pale. ‘But that only leaves tonight!’ he cried, his heart sinking. His courage failed him. ‘No – I can’t go – I can’t leave you.’
‘Dagh Sahib, if you are faithless to your own logic, how can I believe you will be faithful to me?’
‘Then I must spend this evening here. It will be our last night together in a – in a month.’
A month? Even as he said the word, his mind rebelled at the thought. He refused to accept it.
‘It will not work this evening,’ said Saeeda Bai in a practical tone, thinking of her commitments.
‘Then I won’t go,’ cried Maan. ‘I can’t. How can I? Anyway, we haven’t consulted Rasheed.’
‘Rasheed will be honoured to give you hospitality. He respects your father very much – no doubt because of his skill as a woodcutter – and, of course, he respects you very much – no doubt because of your skill as a calligrapher.’
‘I must see you tonight,’ insisted Maan. ‘I must. What woodcutter?’ he added, frowning.
Saeeda Bai sighed. ‘It is very difficult to cut down a banyan tree, Dagh Sahib, especially one that has been rooted so long in the soil of this province. But I can hear your father’s impatient axe on the last of its trunks. Soon it will be torn from the earth. The snakes will be driven from its roots and the termites burned with its rotten wood. But what will happen to the birds and monkeys who sang or chattered in its branches? Tell me that, Dagh Sahib. This is how things stand with us today.’ Then, seeing Maan look crestfallen, she added, with another sigh: ‘Come at one o‘clock in the morning. I will tell your friend the watchman to make the Shahenshah’s entry a triumphal one.’
Maan felt that she might be laughing at him. But the thought of seeing her tonight cheered him up instantly, even if he knew she was merely sweetening a bitter pill.
‘Of course, I can’t promise anything,’ Saeeda Bai went on. ‘If he tells you I am asleep, you must not make a scene or wake up the neighbourhood.’
It was Maan’s turn to sigh:
‘If Mir so loudly goes on weeping,
How can his neighbour go on sleeping?’
But, as it happened, everything worked out well. Abdur Rasheed agreed to house Maan in his village and to continue to teach him Urdu. Mahesh Kapoor, who had been afraid that Maan might attempt to defy him by staying in Brahmpur, was not altogether displeased that he would not be going to Banaras, for he knew what Maan did not that the cloth business was doing pretty well without him. Mrs Mahesh Kapoor (though she would miss him) was glad that he would be in the charge of a strict and sober teacher and away from ‘that’. Maan did at least receive the ecstatic sop of a last passionate night with Saeeda Bai. And Saeeda Bai heaved a sigh of relief tinged only slightly with regret when morning came.
A few hours later a glum Maan, fretting and exasperated at being so neatly pincered by his father and his beloved, together with Rasheed, who was conscious for the moment only of the pleasure of getting out of congested Brahmpur into the openness of the countryside, were on board a narrow-gauge train that swung in a painfully slow and halting arc towards Rudhia District and Rasheed’s home village.
6.25
TASNEEM did not realize till Rasheed had gone how much she had enjoyed her Arabic lessons. Everything else she did was related to the household, and opened no windows onto a larger world. But her serious young teacher, with his insistence on the importance of grammar and his refusal to compromise with her tendency to take flight when faced with difficulties, had made her aware that she had within herself an ability for application that she had not known. She admired him, too, because he was making his own way in the world without support from his family. And when he refused to answer her sister’s summons because he was explaining a passage from the Quran to her, she had greatly approved of his sense of principle.
All this admiration was silent. Rasheed had never once indicated that he was interested in her in any way other than as a teacher. Their hands had never touched accidentally over a book. That this should not have happened over a span of weeks spoke of deliberateness on his part, for in the ordinary innocent course of things it was bound to have occurred by chance, even if they had instantly drawn back afterwards.
Now he would be out of Brahmpur for a month, and Tasneem found herself feeling sad, far sadder than the loss of Arabic lessons would have accounted for. Ishaq Khan, sensing her mood, and the cause for it as well, tried to cheer her up.
‘Listen, Tasneem.’
‘Yes, Ishaq Bhai?’ Tasneem replied, a little listlessly.