17.28
THE CHAUTHA was held in the afternoon three days later under a small canopy on the lawn of Prem Nivas. The men sat on one side of the aisle, the women on another. The area under the canopy quickly filled up, and then the aisle itself, and finally people spilled out onto the lawn, some of them as far as the flowerbeds. Mahesh Kapoor, Pran and Kedarnath received them at the entrance to the garden. Mahesh Kapoor was amazed by how many people had come to attend the chautha of his wife, whom he had always thought of as being a silly, superstitious and limited woman. Refugees she had helped during the days of Partition in the relief camps, their families, all those to whom she had given kindness or shelter from day to day, not merely the Rudhia relatives but a large group of ordinary farmers from Rudhia, many politicians who might well have paid only perfunctory or hypocritical homage if he himself had passed away, and scores of people whom neither he nor Pran recognized, all felt that they had to attend this service in her memory. Many of them folded their hands in respect before the photograph of her that stood, garlanded with marigolds, on a table on the long white-sheeted platform at one end of the shamiana. Some of them tried to utter a few words of condolence before being overcome themselves. When Mahesh Kapoor himself sat down, his heart was even more disturbed than it had been these last four days.
No one from the Nawab Sahib’s family came to the chautha. Firoz had taken a turn for the worse. He was suffering from a low infection, and he was being given stronger doses of penicillin to check and suppress it. Imtiaz – aware both of the possibilities and limitations of this comparatively recent form of treatment – was worried sick; and his father, seeing his son’s illness as punishment for his own sins, pleaded with God more than five times a day to spare Firoz and take away his own life instead.
Perhaps, too, he could not face the rumours that followed him now wherever he went. Perhaps he could not face the family, friendship with whom had caused him such grief. At any rate, he did not come.
Nor could Maan be present.
The pandit was a large man with a full, oblong face, bushy eyebrows, and a strong voice. He began to recite a few shlokas in Sanskrit, especially from the Isha Upanishad and from the Yajurveda, and to interpret them as a guide to life and to righteous action. God was everywhere, he said, in each piece of the universe; there was no permanent dissolution; this should be accepted. He talked about the deceased and how good and godfearing she had been and how her spirit would remain not only in the memories of those who knew her, but in the very world that surrounded them – in this garden, for instance; in this house.
After a while the pandit told his young assistant to take over.
The assistant sang two devotional songs. For the first one the audience sat silent, but when he began to sing the slow and stately ‘Twameva Mata cha Pita twameva’ – ‘You are both mother and father to us’ – almost everyone joined in.
The pandit asked people to move forward in order to let people at the back squeeze in under the canopy. Then he asked whether the Sikh singers had arrived. Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had been very fond of their music, and Veena had convinced her father to ask them to sing at the chautha. When the pandit was told that they were on their way, he smoothed his kurta and began a story, which he had told many times before and which went as follows:
There was once a villager who was very poor, so poor that he did not have enough money to pay for his daughter’s wedding and had nothing to borrow against. He was in despair. At last someone said: ‘Two villages away there is a money-lender who believes in humanity. He will not need any security or property. Your word will be your bond. He lends to people according to their need, and he knows whom to trust.’
The man set out in hope, and reached the money-lender’s village by noon. On the outskirts of the village he noticed an old man who was ploughing a field, and a woman, her face covered, who was bringing food out for him, her utensils balanced on her head. He could tell from her gait that she was a young woman and he overheard her say in a young woman’s voice: ‘Baba, here is some food for you. Eat it, and then please come home. Your son is no more.’ The man looked up at the sky and said: ‘As God wills.’ He then sat down to eat the food.
The villager, puzzled and disturbed by this conversation, tried to make sense of it. He thought to himself: If she were the old man’s daughter, why would she cover her face before him? She must be his daughter-in-law. But then he was worried by the identity of the dead man. Surely, if it had been one of her husband’s brothers who had died, she would have referred to him as ‘jethji’ or ‘devarji’, rather than ‘your son’. So it must have been her husband who had died. The calm manner in which both father and wife had accepted his death was unusual, not to say shocking.