A Fine Family: A Novel (31 page)

‘I suppose the people in the station think we’re married,’ said Arjun.

She laughed and he was happy to see her smiling face. On the roof the rain was still pattering down, but the force of the storm was over; only a trickle now issued from the gutter. Arjun sighed softly.

‘Look, Priti,’ he said after a pause. ‘I’ve never asked this before, but do you still love Karan?’

‘No, not anymore.’

Bauji felt that his time was coming. He had been sick in bed the whole week. It was an indefinable malady, its only symptom being a mild intestinal flu, which the doctors did not think serious. He could not eat. He quickly became weak and his interest in life waned. He began to feel that his cramped bedroom was suffocating; his suffering was aggravated by the humidity and the mustiness of the ill-dusted furniture as well as the medicinal odours emanating from the large number of bottles on the night table.

When Arjun arrived Bhabo was in tears. She complained that Bauji would not allow the windows to be opened, the room to be dusted, and he was in a terrible mood. As Arjun opened the shutters, a blinding light entered, reflected from the metallic sea. With the help of the servant Arjun moved a divan out to the shady veranda. Leaning on Arjun’s arm, Bauji dragged himself out and lay down on the divan. He put his head against the bolster so that he could look at the coconut and casurina trees. Gradually he felt better; it was the kind of feeling he had had when he sat in the Company Bagh after a particularly difficult day at the courts in Lyallpur. Bauji smiled at Arjun and took hold of his hand.

Arjun kept holding his hand and talked to him. He spoke easily and enthusiastically about his work; he explained the projects he was involved in. He commented on political developments; he told Bauji about a particularly savoury scandal that had just broken out in the state government. Bauji was grateful. But after a time, he ceased to listen. His mind drifted into the past and he began to make a general balance sheet of his life. To a man of the world, familiar with business and commerce, to think in terms of credits and debits came easily. He was naturally drawn to the credit side. There were some happy moments, such as the birth of his eldest son. That Big Uncle did not accomplish much did not matter, the original moment of triumph was real. He remembered a saying: he who conquers a country doesn’t get the same pleasure as a common man who sits in the sunshine watching his first-born suck his toe. Then there was the first awareness of success in the British-ruled establishment of Lyallpur in the early ‘20s. He had enjoyed the power and the prestige which had accompanied his early professional achievements. There were voluptuous moments just before Tara’s marriage, when Anees briefly entered his life; till today her memory, caught in the heavy scent of jasmine flower, could still make his thoughts wander along a decidedly erotic path—that this could happen when he was seventy-five and dying made him alternately blush and smile.

Ruminations on the balance sheet were temporarily suspended because a snake charmer had stopped beside the house, mistakenly thinking there were foreigners about, and had started playing his pipe. Arjun hastily went up to the gate and threw him some coins and waved him on in the more profitable direction of the five star hotels on the beach.

Arjun, yes, he was certainly on the credit side of the ledger. First it had been Karan; but not only had Karan not lived up to his potential, he had revealed a dark and alien nature, which Bauji had found abhorrent. Arjun, on the other hand, brought sunshine to his last days; it was a pleasure to watch him manoeuvre through life; the affection and sincerity of his character were heart-warming.

There were other credits too: to have seen his country win freedom from foreign rule during his lifetime; to have watched Nehru place the country on the right path of democracy, secularism and social justice. There were smaller and more intimate moments: the smell of the fragrance of the wet earth mingled with jasmine in the courtyard of the Lyallpur house after the Mashkiya had watered it; being shaved and massaged by the family barber while playing bridge with his friends in the men’s courtyard; glimpsing the first wondrous vision of the snow-tipped crests of the Himalayas on the rail car to Simla.

There were other little satisfactions which mattered only to him: the delight in wearing a new silk coat; the smell of a new leather chair; the desirous smile on a beautiful woman’s face; and the first realization that she found him attractive; a few moments of frenzied passion before the marvellous yet also ridiculous act of sex was over.

Slowly his brow clouded over as his conscience reminded him to look towards the other side of the ledger. For every credit there seemed to be a half-a-dozen liabilities. He was almost afraid to start enumerating the debits because he might lose control, plunging into depths from which it would take days to surface. Just as he was about to begin to bravely count the debits and embarrassments, Bhabo rescued him. She called out to say that lunch was ready. His train of thought was broken, and he amused himself with the thought that it was just as well to let the positive side of one’s life ‘hang out’.

He had felt this way for a fortnight or so, ever since he had become aware of a sensation akin to a pair of shears approaching the vital chord of his existence from afar, ready to snip it off at the end. This sensation was not linked to any physical discomfort. Nor was he afraid; it was merely disagreeable to a man used to celebrating life. Still, with his strong pride, he did not let this sensation diminish him. On the contrary he felt a secret recompense in being privy to a secret while everyone else around him was absorbed in his petty daily routine. He felt a sense of participating in high universal drama in which the truths of life and death were unfolding.

He was accustomed to consoling friends and relatives when they suffered the loss of someone close. He had become adept at repeating at countless mourning ceremonies, ‘Now, now my dear, we must remember that we all have to die some day.’ Today he suddenly felt the irony of that mundane statement. For it was now transformed to ‘I am dying’. The obvious had become real. As a sensitive man he felt the irony acutely, because observing the death of others had not prepared him in any way for his own. Each person has to face his own death alone, he realized. He wondered if this knowledge of his dying could have any meaning or significance. Could he, for example, live his life any differently, knowing that he did not have long to live? Could this anticipation of his own death make his last moments more real, more honest, and more free?

He had his whole family around him now, but no one seemed to sense this grand drama and mystery. Certainly not his own children. Not even Bhabo. They seemed trapped in the everyday world of small talk and mindless preoccupations. He tried not to feel sorry for them.

Sitting in the divan, Bauji looked out at the Arabian sea. The sea breeze blew familiarly through the casuarina and coconut trees. His legs were wrapped in a blanket. He could see several shapes sitting on the beach. The rounded waves came rolling towards him, and broke into rich white foam before they could reach him. He picked up some sand in his hand and let it sift through his closed fingers. It sent a sensuous quiver through his body. Again he felt the shears approaching.

In the corner of the beach house was a ragged looking banyan tree, which had never quite had a chance. Beside it was a stone lamp that Bhabo was now lighting. The oil wick burned feebly as she performed the
sandhya,
and the evening slowly welcomed the night. The evening star was low against the horizon, and Bauji felt he could almost reach up and touch it.

On a clear evening after the monsoons an attractive, middle aged lady confidently stepped out of a cab. The sky in the west was filled with brilliant shades of violet and crimson. She lightly crossed the empty street. Before her were a dozen identical low-built Mangalore-tiled houses and she became confused. On the corner she saw a noisy group of young men and women. They looked like students. One of the girls burst out laughing. Anees asked them for directions. There was a free-spiritedness about them, which was in sharp contrast to young people in her own country. A girl in a bright Rajasthani sari knew the house. She looked the ‘arty’ type from the way she had slung a cotton bag across her shoulder. She guided Anees to the gate.

The house was surrounded by trees and a lawn of crab grass. The side facing the street was covered with an awning of dried coconut leaves. Anees walked right in, directly to Bauji, who was sitting among the trees facing the sea.

‘No, it cannot be! It cannot be you!’ exclaimed Bauji. His eyes were filled with tears.

‘What a beautiful evening!’ said Anees, sitting beside him.

Bauji looked at her smooth, delicate skin, almost untouched by age, and he was filled with sentimental longing. A quarter-of-a century later she was still beautiful, he thought. Her pale white face was older, but her nose and cheekbones were chiseled on her square face. Her hair was still dark. The texture of the exotic light hanging over the distant shadowed sea changed from moment to moment on her face. Presently the shadows began to deepen and the evening was bathed in a wan light. The casuarinas stood out darkly against the sky.

‘From Tara’s last letter I realized you were very sick. I knew nothing would come of it, but my soul thirsted to see you.’

Anees turned her head and looked at the coconut trees.

‘How old are they, Bauji?’

‘Who?’

‘These trees.’

‘Twenty, maybe thirty years old.’

‘Inside them is the empty memory of all the years we have remained apart.’ She felt an inward sob. She looked piercingly at his eyes and they were filled with yearning.

‘I have longed to see you once again. But I was always a little afraid. I have kept in touch all these years through letters from Tara. You never wrote.’

‘I wanted to, but it didn’t seem right. How have you been?’

‘I left my husband a few years ago, and I was immediately ostracized by my family, by the neighbours, even by my children.’ She laughed sadly. ‘I suppose what I had done was inexcusable in Islamic society.’

‘I am tired of the mullahs and the generals in Pakistan, Bauji,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I don’t believe that to be a good Muslim I have to live according to the wasteland of the mullah’s mind. They won’t leave me alone, constantly reminding me of my “sins”. Oh, how I envy the breeze of freedom that blows in your country! Each time we try to break free, the mullahs ask the army to take over.

‘The mistake we made in the 1940s, Bauji, was to believe that just because we were Muslims we belonged to a separate nation. India didn’t have to be divided in 1947. And we cheaply sold away the birthright of the Indian Muslim. In fact the Muslim majority areas which became Pakistan were the ones which least needed to be protected from the Hindus. It was the Hindus in these areas, on the contrary, who needed to be protected.’

‘And Muslims in little villages all over India were the ones who needed protection,’ said Bauji.

‘We got swayed by Jinnah into believing that Muslims couldn’t survive in India. Look at the Arab world: one religion, one language and a dozen nations. And if Jinnah himself had believed in it he wouldn’t have left forty million Muslims behind in India.’

‘There were many mistakes, Anees.’

Listening to her, Bauji recalled the spirited defence that Anees had made for Pakistan during the days preceding Tara’s marriage. He laughed, but it was at his own expense. He felt irony in the average Indian’s zeal for the form rather than the substance of his religion. A Hindu would recite the Sanskrit mantras scarcely comprehending their meaning; similarly a Muslim would recite the Arabic prayer five times a day with fervour and an equal lack of comprehension. This dedication to formal religion with little regard for the humanism and the charity that the two religions preached had made a bigot of the average believer on both sides. Subconsciously, a Hindu felt affronted by the muezzin’s call for prayers, while a Muslim was irritated by the tolling of temple bells.

Anees stayed in town at the Taj Mahal hotel, despite Bauji’s protests. But she came to see him every day. Arjun would sometimes pick her up from the hotel and take her to Juhu. He liked visiting the hotel, which was distinguished like its namesake, and expressed the rich confidence and splendour of another age. It pulsated with the life of the city’s rich, and was a meeting place where big deals were struck in which millions were won and lost. Through its doors walked princes, prime ministers, and film stars with pet poodles. Built by the famous industrialist, Jamsetji Tata, at the turn of the century, it had a distinctly Victorian pomposity with terracotta tiled domes, fretted windows, and stately spires. Inside were chandeliers, shining brassware, and dreams. Occasionally, Anees would offer Arjun tea and they would sit on wicker chairs in one of the turretted balconies and watch the winking harbour.

On one such visit Arjun discovered a santoor in Anees’ room and he persuaded her to play it at Juhu. She must be a serious player, he thought, as he carried the Kashmiri string instrument to the car. She had shown none of the artificial shyness about playing, which was characteristic of amateurs.

Once at Juhu she settled down to play without a fuss. One of the strings snapped as she plucked tentatively at the instrument. With a firm, confident touch she changed the string and tuned the instrument.

She began to play. Bauji felt a powerful sensation as the first notes swept into the air. He shivered. The sounds of the santoor went deep inside him. After initially feeling startled, he listened to the music with reverence. Although filled with feelings of loss and regret, he gave himself to the sound, to the pleasure of being swept away by it.

Anees had a sure touch. He could not believe how very good she was. She sat cross-legged on the veranda, and played steadily, oblivious of anyone around her. Sitting rigidly upright, she seemed to be in a spell. As the sound rose higher, Bauji became aware of her loneliness. Practising alone day after day, unaware of the world, she had made this instrument her companion. Her music seemed to have conquered her sorrow.

‘The tone is different by the sea,’ Anees said. The rich and vibrant notes rose up and gently went out into the clear evening. Bauji, unlearned in technique, was conscious only of the emotion in the sound. He followed the musical ideas purely through the feeling contained inside them.