East, West (2 page)

‘Miss Rehana,’ his voice said, and he listened to it in amazement, ‘you are a rare person, a jewel, and for you I will do what I would not do for my own daughter, perhaps. One document has come into my possession that can solve all your worries at one stroke.’

‘And what is this sorcerer’s paper?’ she asked, her eyes unquestionably laughing at him now.

His voice fell low-as-low.

‘Miss Rehana, it is a British passport. Completely genuine and pukka goods. I have a good friend who will put your name and photo, and then, hey-presto, England there you come!’

He had said it!

Anything was possible now, on this day of his insanity. Probably he would give her the thing free-gratis, and then kick himself for a year afterwards.

Old fool
, he berated himself.
The oldest fools are bewitched by the youngest girls.

‘Let me understand you,’ she was saying. ‘You are proposing I should commit a crime …’

‘Not crime,’ he interposed. ‘Facilitation.’

‘… and go to Bradford, London, illegally, and therefore justify the low opinion the Consulate sahibs have of us all. Old babuji, this is not good advice.’

‘Bradford,
England
,’ he corrected her mournfully. ‘You should not take my gift in such a spirit.’

‘Then how?’

‘Bibi, I am a poor fellow, and I have offered this prize because you are so beautiful. Do not spit on my generosity. Take the thing. Or else don’t take, go home, forget England, only do not go into that building and lose your dignity.’

But she was on her feet, turning away from him, walking towards the gates, where the women had begun to cluster and the lala was swearing at them to be patient or none of them would be admitted at all.

‘So be a fool,’ Muhammad Ali shouted after her. ‘What goes of my father’s if you are?’ (Meaning, what was it to him.)

She did not turn.

‘It is the curse of our people,’ he yelled. ‘We are poor, we are ignorant, and we completely refuse to learn.’

‘Hey, Muhammad Ali,’ the woman at the betel-nut
stall called across to him. ‘Too bad, she likes them young.’

That day Muhammad Ali did nothing but stand around near the Consulate gates. Many times he scolded himself,
Go from here, old goof, lady does not desire to speak with you any further.
But when she came out, she found him waiting.

‘Salaam, advice wallah,’ she greeted him.

She seemed calm, and at peace with him again, and he thought,
My God, ya Allah, she has pulled it off. The British sahibs also have been drowning in her eyes and she has got her passage to England.

He smiled at her hopefully. She smiled back with no trouble at all.

‘Miss Rehana Begum,’ he said, ‘felicitations, daughter, on what is obviously your hour of triumph.’

Impulsively, she took his forearm in her hand.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘Let me buy you a pakora to thank you for your advice and to apologise for my rudeness, too.’

They stood in the dust of the afternoon compound near the bus, which was getting ready to leave. Coolies were tying bedding rolls to the roof. A hawker shouted at the passengers, trying to sell them love stories and green
medicines, both of which cured unhappiness. Miss Rehana and a happy Muhammad Ali ate their pakoras sitting on the bus’s ‘front mud-guard’, that is, the bumper. The old advice expert began softly to hum a tune from a movie soundtrack. The day’s heat was gone.

‘It was an arranged engagement,’ Miss Rehana said all at once. ‘I was nine years old when my parents fixed it. Mustafa Dar was already thirty at that time, but my father wanted someone who could look after me as he had done himself and Mustafa was a man known to Daddyji as a solid type. Then my parents died and Mustafa Dar went to England and said he would send for me. That was many years ago. I have his photo, but he is like a stranger to me. Even his voice, I do not recognise it on the phone.’

The confession took Muhammad Ali by surprise, but he nodded with what he hoped looked like wisdom.

‘Still and after all,’ he said, ‘one’s parents act in one’s best interests. They found you a good and honest man who has kept his word and sent for you. And now you have a lifetime to get to know him, and to love.’

He was puzzled, now, by the bitterness that had infected her smile.

‘But, old man,’ she asked him, ‘why have you already packed me and posted me off to England?’

He stood up, shocked.

‘You looked happy – so I just assumed … excuse me, but they turned you down or what?’

‘I got all their questions wrong,’ she replied. ‘Distinguishing marks I put on the wrong cheeks, bathroom decor I completely redecorated, all absolutely topsyturvy, you see.’

‘But what to do? How will you go?’

‘Now I will go back to Lahore and my job. I work in a great house, as ayah to three good boys. They would have been sad to see me leave.’

‘But this is tragedy!’ Muhammad Ali lamented. ’Oh, how I pray that you had taken up my offer! Now, but, it is not possible, I regret to inform. Now they have your form on file, cross-check can be made, even the passport will not suffice.

‘It is spoilt, all spoilt, and it could have been so easy if advice had been accepted in good time.’

‘I do not think,’ she told him, ‘I truly do not think you should be sad.’

Her last smile, which he watched from the compound
until the bus concealed it in a dust-cloud, was the happiest thing he had ever seen in his long, hot, hard, unloving life.

T
HE
F
REE
R
ADIO

We all knew nothing good would happen to him while the thief’s widow had her claws dug into his flesh, but the boy was an innocent, a real donkey’s child, you can’t teach such people.

That boy could have had a good life. God had blessed him with God’s own looks, and his father had gone to the grave for him, but didn’t he leave the boy a brand-new first-class cycle rickshaw with plastic covered seats and all? So: looks he had, his own trade he had, there would have been a good wife in time, he should just have taken out some years to save some rupees; but no, he must fall for a thief’s widow before the hairs had time to come out on his chin, before his milk-teeth had split, one might say.

We felt bad for him, but who listens to the wisdom of the old today?

I say: who listens?

Exactly; nobody, certainly not a stone-head like Ramani the rickshaw-wallah. But I blame the widow. I saw it happen, you know, I saw most of it until I couldn’t stand any more. I sat under this very banyan, smoking this selfsame hookah, and not much escaped my notice.

And at one time I tried to save him from his fate, but it was no go …

The widow was certainly attractive, no point denying, in a sort of hard vicious way she was all right, but it is her mentality that was rotten. Ten years older than Ramani she must have been, five children alive and two dead, what that thief did besides robbing and making babies God only knows, but he left her not one new paisa, so of course she would be interested in Ramani. I’m not saying a rickshaw-wallah makes much in this town but two mouthfuls are better to eat than wind. And not many people will look twice at the widow of a good-for-nothing.

They met right here.

One day Ramani rode into town without a passenger, but grinning as usual as if someone had given him a ten-chip tip, singing some playback music from the radio, his hair greased like for a wedding. He was not such a fool that he didn’t know how the girls watched him all the time and passed remarks about his long and well-muscled legs.

The thief’s widow had gone to the bania shop to buy some three grains of dal and I won’t say where the money came from, but people saw men at night near her rutputty shack, even the bania himself they were telling me but I personally will not comment.

She had all her five brats with her and then and there,
cool as a fan, she called out:
‘Hey! Rickshaaa!’
Loud, you know, like a truly cheap type. Showing us she can afford to ride in rickshaws, as if anyone was interested. Her children must have gone hungry to pay for the ride but in my opinion it was an investment for her, because must-be she had decided already to put her hooks into Ramani. So they all poured into the rickshaw and he took her away, and with the five kiddies as well as the widow there was quite a weight, so he was puffing hard, and the veins were standing out on his legs, and I thought, careful, my son, or you will have this burden to pull for all of your life.

But after that Ramani and the thief’s widow were seen everywhere, shamelessly, in public places, and I was glad his mother was dead because if she had lived to see this her face would have fallen off from shame.

Sometimes in those days Ramani came into this street in the evenings to meet some friends, and they thought they were very smart because they would go into the back room of the Irani’s canteen and drink illegal liquor, only of course everybody knew, but who would do anything, if boys ruin their lives let their relations worry.

I was sad to see Ramani fall into this bad company. His parents were known to me when alive. But when I
told Ramani to keep away from those hot-shots he grinned like a sheep and said I was wrong, nothing bad was taking place.

Let it go, I thought.

I knew those cronies of his. They all wore the armbands of the new Youth Movement. This was the time of the State of Emergency, and these friends were not peaceful persons, there were stories of beatings-up, so I sat quiet under my tree. Ramani wore no armband but he went with them because they impressed him, the fool.

These armband youths were always flattering Ramani. Such a handsome chap, they told him, compared to you Shashi Kapoor and Amitabh are like lepers only, you should go to Bombay and be put in the motion pictures.

They flattered him with dreams because they knew they could take money from him at cards and he would buy them drink while they did it, though he was no richer than they. So now Ramani’s head became filled with these movie dreams, because there was nothing else inside to take up any space, and this is another reason why I blame the widow woman, because she had more years and should have had more sense. In two ticks she could have made him forget all about it, but
no, I heard her telling him one day for all to hear, ‘Truly you have the looks of Lord Krishna himself, except you are not blue all over.’ In the street! So all would know they were lovers! From that day on I was sure a disaster would happen.

The next time the thief’s widow came into the street to visit the bania shop I decided to act. Not for my own sake but for the boy’s dead parents I risked being shamed by a … no, I will not call her the name, she is elsewhere now and they will know what she is like.

‘Thief’s widow!’ I called out.

She stopped dead, jerking her face in an ugly way, as if I had hit her with a whip.

‘Come here and speak,’ I told her.

Now she could not refuse because I am not without importance in the town and maybe she calculated that if people saw us talking they would stop ignoring her when she passed, so she came as I knew she would.

‘I have to say this thing only,’ I told her with dignity. ‘Ramani the rickshaw boy is dear to me, and you must find some person of your own age, or, better still, go to the widows’ ashrams in Benares and spend the rest of your life there in holy prayer, thanking God that widow-burning is now illegal.’

So at this point she tried to shame me by screaming
out and calling me curses and saying that I was a poisonous old man who should have died years ago, and then she said, ‘Let me tell you, mister teacher sahib
retired
, that your Ramani has asked to marry me and I have said no, because I wish no more children, and he is a young man and should have his own. So tell that to the whole world and stop your cobra poison.’

For a time after that I closed my eyes to this affair of Ramani and the thief’s widow, because I had done all I could and there were many other things in the town to interest a person like myself. For instance, the local health officer had brought a big white caravan into the street and was given permission to park it out of the way under the banyan tree; and every night men were taken into this van for a while and things were done to them.