A Suitable Boy(187)

‘Please don’t take what I said badly,’ continued Ishaq. ‘I’m not myself. I will rest.’ He shook his head from side to side.

Tasneem put her hand on his shoulder. He became very still, and remained so even when she took it away.

‘I’ll talk to Apa,’ she said, ‘Should I go now?’

‘Yes. No, stay here for a while.’

‘What do you want to talk about?’ said Tasneem.

‘I don’t want to talk,’ said Ishaq. After a pause he looked up and saw her face. It was tear-stained.

He looked down again, then said : ‘May I use that pen?’

Tasneem handed him the wooden pen with its broad split bamboo nib that Rasheed made her use for her calligraphy. The letters it wrote were large, almost childishly so; the dots above the letters came out like little rhombuses.

Ishaq Khan thought for a minute while she watched him. Then, drawing to himself a large sheet of lined paper – which she used for her exercises – he wrote a few lines with some effort, and handed them to her wordlessly even before the ink was dry:

Dear hands, that cause me so much pain,

When can I gain your use again?





When can we once again be friends?

Forgive me, and I’ll make amends.





Never again will I enforce

My fiat, disciplined and coarse





Without consulting both of you

On any work we need to do,





Nor cause you seizure or distress

But win your trust through gentleness.



He looked at her while her lovely, liquid eyes moved from right to left, noticing with a kind of painful pleasure the flush that came to her face as they rested on the final couplet.





6.26


WHEN Tasneem entered her sister’s bedroom, she found her sitting in front of the mirror applying kajal to her eyelids.

Most people have an expression that they reserve exclusively for looking at themselves in the mirror. Some pout, others arch their eyebrows, still others look superciliously down their noses at themselves. Saeeda Bai had a whole range of mirror faces. Just as her comments to her parakeet ran the gamut of emotions from passion to annoyance, so too did these expressions. When Tasneem entered, she was moving her head slowly from side to side with a dreamy air. It would have been difficult to guess that her thick black hair had just revealed a single white one, and that she was looking around for others.

A silver paan container was resting among the vials and phials on her dressing table and Saeeda Bai was eating a couple of paans laced with the fragrant, semi-solid tobacco known as kimam. When Tasneem appeared in the mirror and their eyes met, the first thought that struck Saeeda Bai was that she, Saeeda, was getting old and that in five years she would be forty. Her expression changed to one of melancholy, and she turned back to her own face in the mirror, looking at herself in the iris, first of one eye, then of the other. Then, recalling the guest whom she had invited to the house in the evening, she smiled at herself in affectionate welcome.

‘What’s the matter, Tasneem, tell me,’ she said - somewhat indistinctly, because of the paan.

‘Apa,’ said Tasneem nervously, ‘it’s about Ishaq.’

‘Has he been teasing you?’ said Saeeda Bai a little sharply, misinterpreting Tasneem’s nervousness. ‘I’ll speak to him. Send him here.’

‘No, no, Apa, it’s this,’ said Tasneem, and handed her sister Ishaq’s poem.

After reading it through Saeeda Bai set it down, and started toying with the only lipstick on the dressing table. She never used lipstick, as her lips had a natural redness which was enhanced by paan, but it had been given to her a long time ago by the guest who would be coming this evening, and to whom she was, in a mild sort of way, sentimentally attached.

‘What do you think, Apa?’ said Tasneem. ‘Say something.’

‘It’s well expressed and badly written,’ said Saeeda Bai, ‘but what does it mean? He’s not going on about his hands, is he?’

‘They are giving him a lot of pain,’ said Tasneem, ‘and he’s afraid that if he speaks to you, you’ll ask him to leave.’

Saeeda Bai, remembering with a smile how she had got Maan to leave, was silent. She was about to apply a drop of perfume to her wrist when Bibbo came in with a great bustle.

‘Oh-hoh, what is it now?’ said Saeeda Bai. ‘Go out, you wretched girl, can’t I have a moment of peace? Have you fed the parakeet?’

‘Yes, Begum Sahiba,’ said Bibbo impertinently. ‘But what shall I tell the cook to feed you and your guest this evening?’

Saeeda Bai addressed Bibbo’s reflection in the mirror sternly: ‘Wretched girl, you will never amount to anything even after having stayed here so long you have not acquired the slightest sense of etiquette or discrimination.’