Maan’s thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the sight of Firoz standing by a pavement stall. He halted the tonga at once and got down.
‘Firoz, you’ll have a long life – I was just thinking about you. Well, half an hour ago!’
Firoz said that he was just wandering about, and had decided to buy a walking-stick.
‘For yourself or for your father?’
‘For myself.’
‘A man who has to buy himself a walking-stick in his twenties might not have such a long life after all,’ said Maan.
Firoz, after leaning at various angles on various sticks, decided upon one and, without haggling about the price, bought it.
‘And you, what are you doing here? Paying a visit to Tarbuz ka Bazaar?’ he asked.
‘Don’t be disgusting,’ said Maan cheerfully. Tarbuz ka Bazaar was the street of singing girls and prostitutes.
‘Oh, but I forgot,’ said Firoz slyly: ‘Why should you consort with mere melons when you can taste the peaches of Samarkand?’
Maan frowned.
‘What further news of Saeeda Bai?’ continued Firoz, who, from the back of the audience, had enjoyed the previous night. Though he had left by midnight, he had sensed that Maan’s engagement notwithstanding, romance was once again entering his friend’s life. More, perhaps, than anyone else, he knew and understood Maan.
‘What do you expect?’ asked Maan, a little glumly. ‘Things will happen the way they will. She didn’t even allow me to escort her back.’
This was quite unlike Maan, thought Firoz, who had very rarely seen his friend depressed. ‘So where are you going?’ he asked him.
‘To the Barsaat Mahal.’
‘To end it all?’ inquired Firoz tenderly. The parapet of the Barsaat Mahal faced the Ganges and was the venue of a number of romantic suicides every year.
‘Yes, yes, to end it all,’ said Maan impatiently. ‘Now tell me, Firoz, what do you advise?’
Firoz laughed. ‘Say that again. I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘Maan Kapoor, beau of Brahmpur, at whose feet young women of good families, heedless of reputation, hasten to fling themselves like bees on a lotus, seeks the advice of the steely and stainless Firoz on how to proceed in a matter of the heart. You’re not asking for my legal advice, are you?’
‘If you’re going to act like that –’ began Maan, disgruntled. Suddenly a thought struck him. ‘Firoz, why is Saeeda Bai called Firozabadi? I thought she came from these parts.’
Firoz replied: ‘Well, her people did in fact originally come from Firozabad. But that’s all history. In fact her mother Mohsina Bai settled in Tarbuz ka Bazaar, and Saeeda Bai was brought up in this part of the city.’ He pointed his stick towards the disreputable quarter. ‘But naturally Saeeda Bai herself, now that she’s made good and lives in Pasand Bagh – and breathes the same air as you and I – doesn’t like people to talk about her local origins.’
Maan mused over this for a few moments. ‘How do you know so much about her?’ he asked, puzzled.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Firoz, waving away a fly. ‘This sort of information just floats around in the air.’ Not reacting to Maan’s look of astonishment, he went on, ‘But I must be off. My father wants me to meet someone boring who’s coming to tea.’ Firoz leaped into Maan’s tonga. ‘It’s too crowded to ride a tonga through Old Brahmpur; you’re better off on foot,’ he told Maan, and drove off.
Maan wandered along, mulling – but not for long – over what Firoz had said. He hummed a bit of the ghazal that had embedded itself in his mind, stopped to buy a paan (he preferred the spicier, darker green leaves of the desi paan to the paler Banarasi), manoeuvred his way across the road through a crowd of cycles, rickshaws, push-carts, men and cattle, and found himself in Misri Mandi, near a small vegetable-stall, close to where his sister Veena lived.
Feeling guilty for having been asleep when she came to Prem Nivas the previous afternoon, Maan decided impulsively to visit her – and his brother-in-law Kedarnath and nephew Bhaskar. Maan was very fond of Bhaskar and liked throwing arithmetical problems at him like a ball to a performing seal.
As he entered the residential areas of Misri Mandi, the alleys became narrower and cooler and somewhat quieter, though there were still plenty of people getting about from place to place and others just lounging around or playing chess on the ledge near the Radhakrishna Temple, whose walls were still bright with the stains of Holi colours. The strip of bright sunlight above his head was now thin and unoppressive, and there were fewer flies. After turning into a still narrower alley, just three feet across, and avoiding a urinating cow, he arrived at his sister’s house.