Tasneem was about to reply when Saeeda Bai said, ‘Whenever my sister goes out of the house she goes in purdah. And this is the first time that the Nawabzada has graced my poor lodgings with his presence. So it is not possible that you could have met. Tasneem, put the cage down, and go back to your Arabic exercises. I have not got you a new teacher for nothing.’
‘But…’ began Tasneem.
‘Go back to your room at once. I will take care of the bird. Have you soaked the daal yet?’
‘I…’
‘Go and do so immediately. Do you want the bird to starve?’
When the bewildered Tasneem had left, Firoz tried to orient his thoughts. His mouth was dry. He felt strangely disturbed. Surely, he felt, even if we have not met on this mortal plane, we have met in some former life. The thought, counter to the religion he nominally adhered to, affected him the more powerfully for all that. The girl with the birdcage had in a few short moments made the most profound and unsettling impression on him.
After abridged pleasantries with Saeeda Bai, who seemed to be paying as little attention to his words as he to hers, he walked slowly out of the door.
Saeeda Bai sat perfectly still on the sofa for a few minutes. Her hands still cradled the little parakeet gently. He appeared to have gone off to sleep. She wrapped him up warmly in a piece of cloth and set him down near the red vase again. From outside she heard the call to evening prayer, and she covered her head.
All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day – one for each namaaz ripple across the globe from longitude to longitude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet – towards the house of God in Mecca. Saeeda Bai got up to go to an inner room where she performed the ritual ablution and began her prayers:
In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate
Praise belongs to God, the Lord of all Being,
the All-Merciful, the All-Compassionate,
the Master of the Day of Doom.
Thee only we serve; to Thee alone we pray for succour.
Guide us in the straight path,
the path of those whom Thou hast blessed,
not those against whom Thou art wrathful,
nor of those who are astray.
But through this, and through her subsequent kneelings and prostrations, one terrifying line from the Holy Book recurred again and again to her mind:
And God alone knows what you keep secret
and what you publish.
2.17
SAEEDA BAI’S pretty young maidservant, Bibbo, sensing her mistress was distressed, thought she would try to cheer her up by talking of the Raja of Marh, who was to visit that evening. With his tiger hunts and mountain fastnesses, his reputation as temple-builder and tyrant, and his strange tastes in sex, the Raja was not the ideal subject for comic relief. He had come to lay the foundation of the Shiva temple, his latest venture, in the centre of the old town. The temple was to stand cheek by jowl with the grand mosque constructed by order of the Emperor Aurangzeb two-and-a-half centuries ago on the ruins of an earlier temple to Shiva. If the Raja of Marh had had his way, the foundation of his temple would have stood on the rubble of the mosque itself.
Given this background, it was interesting that the Raja of Marh had once been so utterly besotted with Saeeda Bai that he had some years ago proposed to marry her even though there was no question of her renouncing her beliefs as a Muslim. The thought of being his wife made Saeeda Bai so uneasy that she set impossible conditions upon him. Any possible heirs of the Raja’s present wife were to be dispossessed, and Saeeda Bai’s eldest son by him – assuming she had any – was to inherit Marh. Saeeda Bai made this demand of the Raja despite the fact that the Rani of Marh and the Dowager Rani of Marh had both treated her with kindness when she had been summoned to the state to perform at the wedding of the Raja’s sister; she liked the Ranis, and knew that there was no possibility of her conditions being accepted. But the Raja thought with his crotch rather than his brain. He accepted these demands, and Saeeda Bai, trapped, had to fall seriously ill and be told by compliant doctors that to move her away from the city to a princely hill state would very likely kill her.
The Raja, whose looks resembled those of a huge water-buffalo, pawed the earth dangerously for a while. He suspected duplicity and fell into a drunken and – literally – bloodshot rage; probably the main factor that prevented his hiring someone to get rid of Saeeda Bai was the knowledge that the British, if they discovered the truth, would probably depose him – as they had other Rajas, and even Maharajas, for similar scandals and killings.