A Suitable Boy(44)

‘The tulip and the rose, how do they compare with you?

They are no more than incomplete metaphors’



produced no result beyond a restless shifting in his place, she attempted the bolder coupler:

‘Your beauty was that which once bewitched the world –

Even after the first down came on your cheeks it was a wonder.’



This found its mark. There were two puns here, one mild and one not so mild: ‘world’ and ‘wonder’ were the same word – aalam – and ‘the first down’ could possibly be taken as meaning ‘a letter’. Hashim, who had a very light down on his face, tried his best to act as if ‘khat’ simply meant letter, but it cost him a great deal of discomfiture. He looked around at his father for support in his suffering – his own friends were less than no help, having long ago decided to join in teasing him – but the absent-minded Dr Durrani was half-asleep somewhere at the back. One of his friends rubbed his palm gently along Hashim’s cheek and sighed strickenly. Blushing, Hashim got up to leave the courtyard and take a walk in the garden. He was only half on his feet when Saeeda Bai fired a barrel of Ghalib at him:

‘At the mere mention of my name in the gathering she got up to go…’



Hashim, almost in tears, did adaab to Saeeda Bai, and walked out of the courtyard. Lata, her eyes shining with quiet excitement, felt rather sorry for him; but soon she too had to leave with her mother and Savita and Pran.





2.5


MAAN, on the other hand, did not feel at all sorry for his lily-livered rival. He came forward, and with a nod to the left and the right, and a respectful salutation to the singer, seated himself in Hashim’s place. Saeeda Bai, happy to have a prepossessing if not quite so sprig-like a volunteer as her source of inspiration for the rest of the evening, smiled at him and said:

‘By no means forsake constancy, O heart,

For love without constancy has weak foundations



To which Maan replied instantly and stoutly:

‘Wherever Dagh has sat down he has sat down.

Others may quit your assembly, not he!’



This met with laughter from the audience, but Saeeda Bai decided to have the last word by repaying him in his own poet:

‘Dagh is ogling and peeping once more.

He will trip up and get ensnared somewhere.’



At this just response the audience burst into spontaneous applause. Maan was as delighted as anyone that Saeeda Bai Firozabadi had trumped his ace or, as she would have put it, tenned his nine. She was laughing as hard as anyone, and so were her accompanists, the fat tabla player and his lean counterpart on the sarangi. After a while, Saeeda Bai raised her hand for silence and said, ‘I hope that half that applause was intended for my witty young friend here.’

Maan replied with playful contrition: ‘Ah, Saeeda Begum, I had the temerity to banter with you but – all my arrangements were in vain.’

The audience laughed again, and Saeeda Bai Firozabadi rewarded this quotation from Mir with a lovely rendition of the appropriate ghazal:





‘All my arrangements were in vain, no drug could cure my malady

It was an ailment of my heart that made a final end of me.

My term of youth I passed in tears, in age I closed my eyes at last

That is: I lay awake long nights till dawn and sleep came finally!





Maan looked at her, bewitched, entranced and enraptured. What would it be like to lie awake long nights till dawn, listening to her voice in his ear?





‘We who were helpless were accused of independent thought and deed.

They did whatever they desired, and us they smeared with calumny.

Here in this world of darkness and of light this is my only part:

To somehow pass from day to night and night to day in misery.

Why do you ask what has become of Mir’s religion, his Islam?

Wearing the brahmin’s mark he haunts the temples of idolatry.’





The night continued with alternating banter and music. It was very late now; the audience of a hundred had thinned to a dozen. But Saeeda Bai was now so deep in the flow of music that those who remained, remained spellbound. They moved forward into a more intimate group. Maan did not know whether he was held there more by his ears or by his eyes. From time to time Saeeda Bai paused in her singing and talked to the surviving faithful. She dismissed the sarangi and tanpura players. Finally she even dismissed her tabla player, who could hardly keep his eyes open. Her voice and the harmonium were all that were left, and they provided enchantment enough. It was near dawn when she herself yawned and rose.

Maan looked at her with half-longing, half-laughing eyes. ‘I’ll arrange for the car,’ he said.

‘I’ll walk in the garden till then,’ said Saeeda Bai. ‘This is the most beautiful time of night. Just have this’ – she indicated the harmonium – ‘and the other things – sent back to my place tomorrow morning. Well, then,’ she continued to the five or six people left in the courtyard: