A Suitable Boy(43)

And to my idol raise my face in prayer.’



The audience sighed and groaned; her voice almost broke at the word ‘prayer’; one would have had to be an unfeeling idol oneself to have disapproved.

‘Though blinded by the sun I see, O Mast,

The moonlight of the face, the clouds of hair.’



Maan was so affected by Saeeda Bai’s recitation of this final couplet that he raised his arms helplessly towards her. Saeeda Bai coughed to clear her throat, and looked at him enigmatically. Maan felt hot and shivery all over, and was speechless for a while, but drummed a tabla beat on the head of one of his rustic nephews, aged seven.

‘What will you listen to next, Maheshji?’ Saeeda Bai asked his father. ‘What a grand audience you always provide in your house. And so knowledgeable that I sometimes feel myself redundant. I need only sing two words and you gentlemen complete the rest of the ghazal.’

There were cries of ‘No, no!’, ‘What are you saying?’ and ‘We are your mere shadows, Saeeda Begum !’

‘I know that it is not because of my voice but through your grace – and that of the one above –’ she added, ‘that I am here tonight. I see your son is as appreciative of my poor efforts as you have been for many years. Such things must run in the blood. Your father, may he rest in peace, was full of kindness to my mother. And now I am the recipient of your graciousness.’

‘Who has graced whom?’ responded Mahesh Kapoor gallantly.

Lata looked at him in some surprise. Maan caught her eye and winked – and Lata could not help smiling back. Now that he was a relative, she felt much easier with him. Her mind flashed back to his behaviour this morning, and again a smile curled up at the corners of her mouth. Lata would never be able to hear Professor Mishra lecturing again without seeing him emerge from the tub as wet and pink and helpless as a baby.

‘But some young men are so silent,’ Saeeda Bai continued, ‘that they might as well themselves be idols in temples. Perhaps they have opened their veins so often that they have no blood left. Hanh?’ She laughed delightfully.

‘Why should my heart not be tied to him?’ she quoted –

‘Today he is dressed in colourful clothes.’



Young Hashim looked down guiltily at his blue, embroidered kurta. But Saeeda Bai continued unmercifully:

‘How can I praise his fine taste in dress?

In appearance he is like a prince.’



Since much Urdu poetry, like much Persian and Arabic poetry before it, had been addressed by poets to young men, Saeeda Bai found it mischievously easy to find such references to male dress and demeanour as would make it clear whom she was aiming her shafts at. Hashim might blush and burn and bite his lower lip but her quiver was not likely to run out of couplets. She looked at him and recited:

‘Your red lips are full of nectar.

How rightly you have been named Amrit Lal!’



Hashim’s friends were by now convulsed with laughter. But perhaps Saeeda Bai realized that he could not take much more amorous baiting for the moment, and she graciously permitted him a little respite. By now the audience felt bold enough to make its own suggestions, and after Saeeda Bai had indulged her taste for one of the more abstruse and referential ghazals of Ghalib – a strongly intellectual taste for so sensuous a singer – someone in the audience suggested one of his simpler favourites, ‘Where have those meetings and those partings gone?’

Saeeda Bai assented by turning to the sarangi and tabla players and murmuring a few words. The sarangi began to play an introduction to the slow, melancholy, nostalgic ghazal, written by Ghalib not in his old age but when he was not much older than the singer herself. But Saeeda Bai invested each of its questioning couplets with such bitterness and sweetness that even the hearts of the oldest in the audience were moved. When they joined in at the end of a familiar sentimental line it was as if they were asking a question of themselves rather than displaying their knowledge to their neighbours. And this attentiveness brought forth a yet deeper response from the singer, so that even the difficult last couplet, where Ghalib reverts to his metaphysical abstractions, climaxed rather than ebbed away from the ghazal as a whole.

After this wonderful rendition, the audience was eating out of the palm of Saeeda Bai’s hand. Those who had planned to leave at the latest by eleven o’clock found themselves unable to tear themselves away, and soon it was past midnight.

Maan’s little nephew had gone off to sleep in his lap, as had many of the other young boys, and they had been taken off to bed by the servants. Maan himself, who had been in love often enough in the past and was therefore prone to a sort of cheerful nostalgia, was overwhelmed by Saeeda Bai’s last ghazal, and popped a thoughtful cashew nut into his mouth. What could he do? – he felt he was falling irresistibly in love with her. Saeeda Bai had now reverted to her playfulness with Hashim, and Maan felt a little jab of jealousy as she tried to get a response out of the boy. When: