Perhaps this was the first time in her life that Saeeda Bai herself had loved unrequitedly. Again and again she saw Maan as she had first seen him: the eager Dagh Sahib of that first evening at Prem Nivas, full of liveliness and charm and energy and affection.
Sometimes her mind turned to the Nawab Sahib – and to her mother – and to her own younger self, a mother at fifteen. ‘Do not let the bee enter the garden’ – she murmured the famous line – ‘that the moth may not be unjustly killed.’ And yet the strange and tenuous links of causation could act beneficently as well. For out of the shame and violation of her youth her beloved Tasneem had been born.
Bibbo rebuked Saeeda Bai for spending so much time these days looking into space. ‘At least sing something!’ she said. ‘Even the parakeet’s becoming dumb by example.’
‘Do be quiet, Bibbo!’ said Saeeda Bai impatiently. And Bibbo, glad to have elicited for once at least some reaction from her mistress, kept up the attack.
‘Give thanks for Bilgrami Sahib,’ said Bibbo. ‘Without him where would all of us be?’
Saeeda Bai clicked her tongue and made a gesture of dismissal.
‘Give thanks also to your mightiest admirer, who has spared us his attentions of late,’ continued Bibbo.
Saeeda Bai glared. The Raja of Marh had been apparently dormant only because he had been busy with his plans to consecrate his temple with the installation of the ancient Shiva-linga.
‘Poor Miya Mitthu,’ murmured Bibbo sadly. ‘He will forget how to squawk, “Whisky!” ’
One day, to stop Bibbo’s inane prattling, which was more painful than she intended, Saeeda Bai told her to fetch her harmonium, and let her fingers move up and down the mother-of-pearl keys. But she could not control her thoughts any more than she could in her bedroom, where the framed picture from Maan’s book looked down at her from the Wall. She called for that book now, and placed it on the harmonium, turning its pages one by one, pausing less at the poems than at the illustrations. She came across the picture of the grief-stricken woman in the cemetery.
I have not visited my mother’s grave now for a month, she thought. In my new idiocy as a rejected lover I am neglecting my duties as a daughter. But the more she tried to avoid thinking of herself and the hopelessness of her love for Maan, the more it oppressed her.
And what of Tasneem? she thought. It was worse for her, Saeeda Bai reflected, than for herself. Poor girl, she had become more silent than that godforsaken parakeet. Ishaq, Rasheed, Firoz – three men had come into her life, each more impossible than the last, and in each case she had let her affection grow in silence, and had suffered their sudden absence in silence. She had seen Firoz wounded, her sister almost strangled; she had probably heard, though her strange silence gave no indication of it, of the rumours surrounding herself. What did she think of men now? Or of Saeeda Bai herself if she believed what she heard?
What can I do to help her? thought Saeeda Bai. But there was nothing to be done. To talk to Tasneem about anything that mattered was not within the bounds of possibility.
Though it was evening, and the first few stars had begun to appear in the sky, Saeeda Bai began to hum to herself the lines of Minai’s poem announcing the arrival of dawn. It reminded her of the garden in Prem Nivas that carefree evening, and all the grief and pain that had intervened. Tears were in her voice, but not in her eyes. Bibbo came and listened, and Tasneem too walked quietly up from her room to hear what had become so rare. She herself knew the poem by heart, but, entranced by her sister’s voice, she did not even murmur the words under her breath:
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.
What has remained will not remain:
They too will quickly disappear.
This is the world’s way, although we,
Lost to the world, lie sleeping here.
18.33
RASHEED walked along the parapet of the Barsaat Mahal, his thoughts blurred with hunger and confusion.
Darkness, and the river, and the cool marble wall.
Somewhere where there is nowhere.
It gnaws. They are all around me, the elders of Sagal.
No father, no mother, no child, no wife,
Like a jewel above the water. The parapet, the garden under which a river flows.
No Satan, no God, no Iblis, no Gabriel.
Endless, endless, endless, endless, the waters of the Ganga.
The stars above, below.
…and some were seized by the Cry, and some
We made the earth to swallow, and some We
drowned; God would never wrong them, but
they wronged themselves.
Peace. No prayers. No more prayers.