‘Yes, Ammi.’
‘The world is a terrible place and people like to be cruel. If this is humanity, I want no part in it. Why are you not paying attention? They play music to tempt me. But, Mashallah, I have my wits about me. It is not for nothing that I am the daughter of an army officer. What do you have there?’
‘I brought a few sweets, Ammi. For you.’
‘I asked for a brass ring, and you have brought me sweets?’ Her voice rose in protest. She was, Kabir thought, much worse than usual. Usually the sweets pacified her and she stuffed them greedily into her mouth.
This time, however, she would have none of them. She lost her breath, then continued: ‘There is medicine in those sweets. The doctors have put them there. If God had wanted me to have medicine, He would have sent word. Hashim, you do not care –’
‘Kabir, Ammi.’
‘Kabir came last week, on Thursday.’ The voice grew alarmed, wary, as if sensing that this too was part of a trap.
‘I –’ But now tears came to his eyes, and he could not speak.
His mother appeared to be irritated by this new development, and her hand slipped out of his own, like a dead creature.
‘I am Kabir.’
She accepted it. It was irrelevant.
‘They want to send me to a doctor, near the Barsaat Mahal. I know what they want.’ She looked downwards. Then her head dropped onto her chest, and she was asleep.
Kabir stayed with her for another half-hour, but she did not wake up. Finally, he got up and went to the door.
His aunt, seeing his look of distress, said: ‘Kabir, son, why don’t you eat with us? It will do you good. And it will be good for us to get the chance to talk to you.’
But Kabir wanted to get away on his bicycle, as fast and as far as he could. This was not the mother he had loved and known, but someone stranger than a stranger.
There had been no history of such a condition in the family, nor any specific accident – a fall, a blow – that had caused it. She had been under some emotional strain for about a year after the death of her own mother, but then, that was a grief not unusual in the world. At first she was merely depressed, then she became anxious over trifles and incapable of handling the daily business of life. She had grown suspicious of people: the milkman, the gardener, her relatives, her husband. Dr Durrani, when he could not ignore the problem, sometimes hired people to help her, but her suspicions soon extended to them. Finally, she took it into her head that her husband was working out a detailed plot to harm her, and in order to foil it she tore up sheafs of his valuable and unfinished mathematical papers. It was at this stage that he asked her brother to take her away. The only other alternative was incarceration in an asylum. There was an asylum in Brahmpur, and it was located just beyond the Barsaat Mahal; perhaps it was this that she had been referring to earlier.
When they were children, Kabir, Hashim and Samia had always, and rather proudly, declared their father to be slightly mad. It was clearly his eccentricity – or something aligned with it – that made people respect him so much. But it was their affectionate, amusing and practical mother who had been afflicted with this strange visitation, so causelessly and so incurably. Samia at least, Kabir thought, has been spared the continuing torment of it all.
12.8
THE RAJKUMAR OF MARH was in trouble, and was up before Pran. Owing to problems with their landlord, the Rajkumar and his associates had been forced to seek housing in a students’ hostel, but they had refused to adapt their style of life to its norms. Now he and two of his friends had been seen by one of the Proctor’s assistants in Tarbuz ka Bazaar, just emerging from a brothel. When they were questioned, they had pushed him aside, and one of the boys had said: ‘You sister-fucker, whar’s your business in all this? Are you a commission agent? What are you doing here anyway? Or are you out pimping for your sister as well?’ One of them had struck him across the face.
They had refused to give their names, and denied that they were students. ‘We’re not students, we’re the grandfathers of students,’ they had asserted.
In mitigation, or perhaps not in mitigation, it could be said that they were drunk at the time.
On the way back, they had sung a popular film song, ‘I didn’t sigh, I didn’t complain –’ at the top of their lungs and had disturbed the peace of several neighbourhoods. The Proctor’s assistant had followed them at a safe distance. Being over-confident, they had returned to the hostel, where a compliant watchman had let them enter, though it was past midnight. They continued to sing for a while until their fellow-students begged them to shut up.