A Suitable Boy(42)

It being Holi, she began her recital with a few Holi songs. Saeeda Bai Firozabadi was Muslim, but sang these happy descriptions of young Krishna playing Holi with the milkmaids of his foster-father’s village with such charm and energy that one would have had to be convinced that she saw the scene before her own eyes. The little boys in the audience looked at her wonderingly. Even Savita, whose first Holi this was at her parents-in-law’s house, and who had come more out of duty than from the expectation of pleasure, began to enjoy herself.

Mrs Rupa Mehra, torn between the need to protect her younger daughter and the inappropriateness of one of her generation, particularly a widow, forming a part of the downstairs audience, had (with a strict admonition to Pran to keep an eye on Lata) disappeared upstairs. She was looking through a gap in the cane screen and saying to Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, ‘In my time, no women would have been allowed in the courtyard for such an evening.’ It was a little unfair of Mrs Rupa Mehra to make such an objection known to her quiet, much-put-upon hostess, who had in fact spoken about this very matter to her husband, and had been impatiently overruled by him on the grounds that the times were changing.

People came in and out of the courtyard during the recital, and, as Saeeda Bai’s eye caught a movement somewhere in the audience, she acknowledged the new guest with a gesture of her hand that broke the line of her self-accompaniment on the harmonium. But the mournful bowed strings of the sarangi were more than a sufficient shadow to her voice, and she often turned to the player with a look of appreciation for some particularly fine imitation or improvisation. Most of her attention, however, was devoted to young Hashim Durrani, who sat in the front row and blushed beetroot whenever she broke off singing to make some pointed remark or address some casual couplet towards him. Saeeda Bai was notorious for choosing a single person in the audience early in the evening and addressing all her songs to that one person – he would become for her the cruel one, the slayer, the hunter, the executioner and so on – the anchor, in fact, for her ghazals.

Saeeda Bai enjoyed most of all singing the ghazals of Mir and Ghalib, but she also had a taste for Vali Dakkani – and for Mast, whose poetry was not particularly distinguished, but who was a great local favourite because he had spent much of his unhappy life in Brahmpur, reciting many of his ghazals for the first time in the Barsaat Mahal for the culture-stricken Nawab of Brahmpur before his incompetent, bankrupt, and heirless kingdom was annexed by the British. So her first ghazal was one of Mast’s, and no sooner had the first phrase been sung than the enraptured audience burst into a roar of appreciation.

‘I do not stoop, yet find my collar torn…’ she began, and half-closed her eyes.

‘I do not stoop, yet find my collar torn.

The thorns were here, beneath my feet, not there.’



‘Ah,’ said Mr justice Maheshwari helplessly, his head vibrating in ecstasy on his plump neck. Saeeda Bai continued:

‘Can I be blameless when no voice will blame

The hunter who has caught me in this snare?’



Here Saeeda Bai shot a half-melting, half-accusing look at the poor eighteen-year-old. He looked down immediately, and one of his friends nudged him and repeated delightedly, ‘Can you be blameless?’ which embarrassed him yet further.

Lata looked at the young fellow with sympathy, and at Saeeda Bai with fascination. How can she do this? she thought, admiring and slightly horrified – she’s just moulding their feelings like putty, and all those men can do is grin and groan! And Maan’s the worst of the lot! Lata liked more serious classical music as a rule. But now she – like her sister – found herself enjoying the ghazal too, and also – though it was strange to her – the transformed, romantic atmosphere of Prem Nivas. She was glad her mother was upstairs.

Meanwhile, Saeeda Bai, extending an arm to the guests, sang on:

‘The pious people shun the tavern door –

But I need courage to outstare their stare.’



‘Wah! wah!’ cried Imtiaz loudly from the back. Saeeda Bai graced him with a dazzling smile, then frowned as if startled. However, gathering herself together, she continued:

‘After a wakeful night outside that lane,

The breeze of morning stirs the scented air.





Interpretation’s Gate is closed and barred

But I go through and neither know nor care.’



‘And neither know nor care,’ was sung simultaneously by twenty voices.

Saeeda Bai rewarded their enthusiasm with a tilt of her head. But the unorthodoxy of this couplet was out-done by that of the next:

‘I kneel within the Kaaba of my heart