A Suitable Boy(45)

‘Now Mir takes his leave from the temple of idols –

We shall meet again…’



Maan completed the couplet: ‘…if it be God’s will.’

He looked at her for an acknowledging nod, but she had turned towards the garden already.

Saeeda Bai Firozabadi, suddenly weary ‘of all this’ (but what was ‘all this’?) strolled for a minute or two through the garden of Prem Nivas. She touched the glossy leaves of a pomelo tree. The harsingar was no longer in bloom, but a jacaranda flower dropped downwards in the darkness. She looked up and smiled to herself a little sadly. Everything was quiet: not even a watchman, not even a dog. A few favourite lines from a minor poet, Minai, came to her mind, and she recited, rather than sang, them aloud:

‘The meeting has dispersed; the moths

Bid farewell to the candle-light.

Departure’s hour is on the sky.

Only a few stars mark the night…’



She coughed a little - for the night had got chilly all of a sudden - wrapped her light shawl more closely around her, and waited for someone to escort her to her own house, also in Pasand Bagh, no more than a few minutes away.





2.6


THE day after Saeeda Bai sang at Prem Nivas was Sunday. The light-hearted spirit of Holi was still in the air. Maan could not get her out of his mind.

He wandered about in a daze. He arranged for her harmonium to be sent on to her house early in the afternoon, and was tempted to get into the car himself. But that was hardly the time to visit Saeeda Bai – who had, anyway, given him no indication that she would be pleased to see him again.

Maan had nothing as such to do. That was part of his problem. In Banaras there was business of a kind to keep him busy; in Brahmpur he had always felt himself to be at a loose end. He didn’t really mind, though. Reading was not something he enjoyed much, but he did like wandering around with friends. Perhaps he should visit Firoz, he thought.

Then, thinking of the ghazals of Mast, he jumped into a tonga and told the tonga-wallah to take him to the Barsaat Mahal. It had been years since Maan had been there, and the thought of seeing it appealed to him today.

The tonga passed through the green residential ‘colonies’ of the eastern part of Brahmpur, and came to Nabiganj, the commercial street that marked the end of spaciousness and the start of clutter and confusion. Old Brahmpur lay beyond it, and, almost at the western end of the old town, on the Ganges itself, stood the beautiful grounds and the still more beautiful marble structure of the Barsaat Mahal.

Nabiganj was the fashionable shopping street where the quality of Brahmpur were to be seen strolling up and down of an evening. At the moment, in the heat of the afternoon, there were not many shoppers about, and only a few cars and tongas and bicycles. The signs of Nabiganj were painted in English, and the prices matched the signs. Bookshops like the Imperial Book Depot, well-stocked general stores such as Dowling & Snapp (now under Indian management), fine tailors such as Magourian’s where Firoz had all his clothes (from suits to achkans) made, the Praha shoe shop, an elegant jeweller’s, restaurants and coffee houses such as the Red Fox, Chez Yasmeen, and the Blue Danube, and two cinema-halls – Manorma Talkies (which showed Hindi films) and the Rialto (which leaned towards Hollywood and Ealing): each of these places had played some minor or major role in one or another of Maan’s romances. But today, as the tonga trotted through the broad street, Maan paid them no attention. The tonga turned off onto a smaller road, and almost immediately onto a yet smaller one, and they were now in a different world.

There was just enough room for the tonga to get through among the bullock-carts, rickshaws, cycles and pedestrians who thronged both the road and the pavement – which they shared with barbers plying their trade out of doors, fortune-tellers, flimsy tea-stalls, vegetable-stands, monkey-trainers, ear-cleaners, pickpockets, stray cattle, the odd sleepy policeman sauntering along in faded khaki, sweat-soaked men carrying impossible loads of copper, steel rods, glass or scrap paper on their backs as they yelled ‘Look out! Look out!’ in voices that somehow pierced through the din, shops of brassware and cloth (the owners attempting with shouts and gestures to entice uncertain shoppers in), the small carved stone entrance of the Tinny Tots (English Medium) School which opened out onto the courtyard of the reconverted haveli of a bankrupt aristocrat, and beggars – young and old, aggressive and meek, leprous, maimed or blinded – who would quietly invade Nabiganj as evening fell, attempting to avoid the police as they worked the queues in front of the cinema-halls. Crows cawed, small boys in rags rushed around on errands (one balancing six small dirty glasses of tea on a cheap tin tray as he weaved through the crowd), monkeys chartered in and bounded about a great shivering-leafed pipal tree and tried to raid unwary customers as they left the well-guarded fruit-stand, women shuffled along in anonymous burqas or bright satis, with or without their menfolk, a few students from the university lounging around a chaat-stand shouted at each other from a foot away either out of habit or in order to be heard, mangy dogs snapped and were kicked, skeletal cats mewed and were stoned, and flies settled everywhere: on heaps of foetid, rotting rubbish, on the uncovered sweets at the sweetseller’s in whose huge curved pans of ghee sizzled delicious jalebis, on the faces of the sari-clad but not the burqa-clad women, and on the horse’s nostrils as he shook his blinkered head and tried to forge his way through Old Brahmpur in the direction of the Barsaat Mahal.