At any rate, the villager, considering his own purposes and his own problems, went on to the money-lender’s shop. The money-lender asked him what he wanted. The villager told him that he needed some money for his daughter’s wedding and had nothing to pledge in exchange.
‘That is all right,’ said the money-lender, looking at his face. ‘How much do you want?’
‘A lot,’ said the man. ‘Two thousand rupees.’
‘Fine,’ said the money-lender, and asked his accountant to count it out immediately.
While the accountant was counting out the money, the poor villager felt obliged to make some conversation. ‘You are a very good man,’ he said gracefully, ‘but the other people in your village seem peculiar to me.’ And he recounted what he had seen and heard.
‘Well,’ said the money-lender. ‘How would the people in your village have reacted to such news?’
‘Well, obviously,’ said the poor man, ‘the whole village would have gone to the family’s house to mourn with them. There would have been no question of ploughing your fields, let alone eating anything till the body was disposed of. People would have been wailing and beating their breasts.’
The money-lender turned to the accountant and told him to stop counting out the money. ‘It is not safe to lend anything to this man,’ he said.
The man, appalled, turned to the money-lender. ‘But what have I done?’ he asked.
The money-lender replied: ‘If you weep and wail so much about returning what has been given to you in trust by God, you will not be happy about returning what is given to you in trust by a mere man.’
While the pandit told this story there was silence. No one knew what to expect, and at the end of it they felt that they had been reproached for their grief. Pran found himself feeling upset rather than consoled: what the pandit had said was perhaps true, he thought, but he wished the Sikh ragis had come earlier.
Still, here they were now, all three of them, dark and full-bearded, their white turbans set off by a blue headband. One of them played the tabla, the other two the harmonium, and all three closed their eyes while they sang songs from Nanak and Kabir.
Pran had heard them before; his mother asked the ragis about once a year to sing at Prem Nivas. But now he thought not of the beauty of their singing or of the words of the saints, but of the last time he had heard tabla and harmonium in Prem Nivas: when Saeeda Bai had sung on the evening of Holi last year. He glanced across to where the women were sitting. Savita and Lata were sitting together, as they had been that other evening as well. Savita’s eyes were closed. Lata was looking at Mahesh Kapoor, who seemed once again to have distanced himself from what was going on. She had not seen Kabir, who was sitting far behind her, at the back of the covered area.
Her thoughts had wandered to the life of this woman, Pran’s mother, whom she had greatly liked but not much known. Had hers been a full life? Could her marriage be said to have been happy or successful or fulfilled: and if so, what did those words mean? What was at the centre of her marriage: her husband, her children, or the small puja room where every morning she prayed, allowing routine and devotion to create a purpose and imply an order in her daily and annual round? Here sat so many people who were affected by her death, and there sat her husband, the Minister Sahib, transparently fretful about the long proceedings. He was trying to indicate to the pandit that he had had enough, but was unable to catch his eye.
The pandit said: ‘I understand that the women would now like to sing some songs.’ No one came forward. He was about to speak again, when old Mrs Tandon said: ‘Veena, come forward, sit here.’ The pandit asked her to sit on the platform where the ragis had been singing, but Veena said, ‘No; down here.’ She was very simply dressed, as was her friend Priya and another young woman. Veena had on a white cotton sari with a black border. A very thin gold chain, which she kept touching, hung around her neck. Her dark red tika was smudged. There appeared to be tears on her cheeks, and especially in the dark, puffy rings around her eyes. Her plump face looked sad and strangely placid. She took out a small book, and they began singing. She sang clearly, and from time to time moved her hand slightly in response to the words of the song. Her voice was natural and very affecting. After the first song was over she began, without even a pause, her mother’s favourite hymn, ‘Uth, jaag, musafir’:
‘Rise, traveller, the sky is light.
Why do you sleep? It is not night.
The sleeping lose, and sleep in vain.
The waking rise, and rise to gain.
Open your eyelids, you who nod.