Ghalib at Dusk Read online

  TRANQUEBAR PRESS

  GHALIB AT DUSK & OTHER STORIES

  Nighat M. Gandhi is a writer and professional mental health counsellor. She spent her formative years in Dhaka and Karachi. After her college years in the USA, she married and moved to Allahabad, where she raised her two daughters, and became involved in women’s rights activism. She writes for Indian and Pakistani newspapers, such as The Hindu, Hindustan Times and Dawn.

  westland press

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  First published in TRANQUEBAR PRESS by westland ltd 2009

  The Publishers wish to acknowledge the publications in which the following stories first appeared:

  ‘Risk’ in Prism International, Canada and also in COSAW Bulletin, USA.

  ‘Fishing At Haleji’ in Short Story International, USA.

  ‘In Lieu of Gold’ in The Literary Review, USA and also in The Toronto Review.

  ‘Hot Water Bag’ in The Literary Review, USA.

  ‘An Undelivered Letter’ in The Antigonish Review, Canada.

  ‘Love: Unclassified’ in Psychological Foundations, India.

  ‘Family Duty’ in Short Story International, USA.

  ‘Trains’ in Asia Literary Review, Hong Kong.

  Translation Credits :

  Ghalib’s couplets: Hai kahan tammana ka by Frances Pritchett; Ashiqi sabr-talab by Sarfaraz K. Niazi; Bahaaro mera jeevan —lyrics by Kaifi Azmi, film Aakhri Khat, sung by Lata Mangeshkar.

  Copyright © Nighat M. Gandhi 2009

  All rights reserved

  ISBN 978-93-80032-85-6

  Typeset in Sabon Roman by SÜRYA, New Delhi

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, circulated, and no reproduction in any form, in whole or in part (except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews) may be made without written permission of the publishers.

  To the people of Bangladesh, Pakistan and India

  who will bring lasting peace to these lands

  where I belong

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  I. IN KARACHI

  Risk

  Fishing at Haleji

  In Lieu of Gold

  Mariam’s Bath

  Hot-water Bag

  II. ALLAHABAD / AHMEDABAD

  An Undelivered Letter

  Love: Unclassified

  Trains

  Navratri Night

  Desire By Any Other Name

  Family Duty

  Ghalib at Dusk

  Acknowledgements

  THANKS TO MAYA for knocking with me at the doors of major publishing houses in Delhi with my short stories, and for cradling my dejection when none of them contacted me. Many thanks to Arpita for suggesting Westland who valued the manuscript enough to accept it for publication. I would also like to thank friends in India and Pakistan who read and commented on the stories in various stages of completion. Heartfelt gratitude to Ammi and Abba for all the growing up experiences, which unwittingly made me the writer I turned out to be. To Raj for his unwavering support and insightful critique of my writing. To Afreen and Suroor—the two most amazing, independent young women in my life—for being my staunchest allies, for believing in me as a writer before I did, and for bolstering my shaky confidence by awarding me the ‘coolest Mom on earth’ accolade.

  Preface

  THE FIRST FIVE stories in this collection are set in Karachi of the early ’90s, and the rest take place in India, where I’ve lived off and on since the mid-90s. Geographically speaking, Bangladesh gave me my early childhood, Pakistan my adolescence, and India, my adulthood. Genetically speaking, I am a hybrid breed, born of part Bengali-Memon parentage, into a family of poor Muslim immigrants who moved from West to East Bengal in the wake of Partition. The soils of three South Asian nations have fertilized my cross-cultural upbringing. What has such an itinerant background given me? A mongrel childhood, a culturally cross-pollinated adulthood. Can my socio-cultural-political compass point to any one of these countries to the exclusion of others? In 1972, my family underwent yet another migration. We left Bangladesh when it was no longer East Pakistan. At that time I spoke Bengali fluently, but not Urdu. Later, in Pakistan, I was made to forget Bengali, and told Urdu was my mother tongue. Still later, as a result of my English language education, I started writing in English.

  I am told that there are no contemporary writers who live and write in India and Pakistan, crossing the inimical border between the two nations with equal ease and familiarity. If I do so, I reflect a truly intricate social reality in doing what few others are allowed to, or able to do. Mine is a lived engagement with that reality, entwining my life intimately with other lives—with relatives, friends, peace activists, artists and writers—on both sides of the border. Friendships and familial bonds have made me sprout roots in both countries, and have made me embrace a South Asian cultural identity, a composite individuality that is broader than the fixed and narrow official definitions passports and visas assign.

  I do different kinds of relating in India and Pakistan. I feel freer as a woman in India in some ways, to move around and travel alone, but even in India, the democratic space for voicing dissent appears to be shrinking, whether against Hindutva or at the lack of critical self-reflection among Muslims, especially after Gujarat 2002. There are of course, many more limitations in Pakistan on such outspokenness, and there are many more constraints on freedom of mobility for women. In Pakistan it’s harder to come across women that society deems respectable, who are unaccompanied by men in public spaces—women without head cover, women freely hopping onto buses and trains. I remember the quiet serenity of my adolescent years in Karachi when we hadn’t heard the term Islamic fundamentalism and I had hardly seen any women in hijaab. How times have changed since then. Now on my visits to Pakistan, it hurts having to prove my credentials as a Muslim woman to self-appointed guardians of Islam who claim moral superiority by sporting body hair as beards, or by concealing it under a headscarf. I am looked at askance for wearing my hair short, for not hiding it, for insisting on my right to be attended to as a woman in offices and not as a man’s accompanied baggage, for choosing to travel alone by bus, cab, and rickshaw. In my travels and in my conversations with ordinary men and women in Pakistan, I see the ingenious social creativity people practice in their personal spheres, but the constraints on uninhibited expressiveness in the arts can be tangibly felt, and I hurt all the more, sensing those wounds as mine.

  Recently while looking for the exact meaning of the Urdu phrase Bazeecha-e-atfaal to include in this preface—from the first Ghalib couplet Abba, my father, introduced me to as a child—I came across the proverb ‘Ba Musalmaan Allah, Allah, ba Brahmin Ram, Ram (when with a Muslim, chant Allah, Allah; when with a Brahmin, chant Ram, Ram) in my Urdu dictionary. I loved this irreverent yet relevant aphorism for our times—I couldn’t help thinking if only we had the generosity of spirit to chant Allah Allah and Ram Ram with equal eloquence and detachment, India and Pakistan would have evolved as two peaceful nations by now. But back to that couplet of Mirza Ghalib’s:

  Bazeecha-e-atfaal hai duniya mere aage

  Hota hai shab-o-roz tamasha mere aage.

  The world to me is but a child’s game;

  Each day of existence merely a spectacle.

 
Ghalib had grown weary of the endless cycles of violence and human debauchery he witnessed in his country and beloved city, Delhi. A century and a half after Ghalib, the wearying tamasha of violence still rages uncontrolled in the subcontinent. But I choose to focus on the minutiae of human tamasha; it is the violated, the marginalized individual’s life that entices me as a writer, and whether the spectacle unfolds in the life of a Muslim woman in Allahabad, a Hindu mother in Ahmedabad, or a Christian salesgirl in Karachi, are merely incidental details of geography. It is in the interstitial ideological and cultural fringes into which people are squeezed because they happen to be the wrong gender, class, religion or ethnicity, and where they remain trapped, it is to those cracks and crevices of existence my curiosity as a storyteller takes me to, ‘finding beauty in the saddest of places’ as Arundhati Roy has said.

  In bringing these stories together under one collection, I also voice a vibrant hope for a future that gives me, as a writer, a distinctive South Asian literary identity, and to all of us the wisdom to move beyond the region’s shared bloody history of divisions and competition.

  Allahabad

  May 2009

  NIGHAT M. GANDHI

  Note:

  The author would welcome responses or questions from readers of this book, and can be reached at [email protected]

  I

  IN KARACHI

  Risk

  SAIMA CLUTCHED HER purse, ready to be hurled out of the bus soon after they passed the Teen Talwar roundabout at Clifton. She always felt like an intruder, an ungainly visitor in this other Karachi. Each day she shrank at the silent disapproval she sensed from the plush apartment blocks and bungalows which seemed almost unlived in—women or children hardly came out of them, to chat, to hang clothes, to linger in the balconies. She was invisible also to the inhabitants of the gleaming impatient cars that honked if her bus stopped a little longer than usual. She longed to peep into their homes and cars. The morning faces inside the cars wore a depleted look or did she imagine this? Were they trying to recover from the violence of the night just laid to rest?

  The shutters on most of the shops were still down. She had to be at work at ten to get things in order even though they didn’t open for business until eleven or so. The sun’s harshness in October always surprised her. It was the end of another year, and yet, why was there such vengeance beating down upon the streets? As if the vanquished had arisen to protest the excesses committed against them. She crossed the street, deliberately falling a few steps behind the sweating, overclad maids, her daily companions on the bus. She overheard their sprightly chatter, as they walked towards the bright but brooding houses where they worked. Every morning the same women pressed against her on the bus. She distanced herself from them as soon as they got off, but the stifling smell of burnt wood and stale food from their bodies stayed with her.

  As she started walking towards the storefront, she felt the pinprick of wetness deep between her legs and knew her period had started. She was lucky again this month—an instant of relief. It might not be so bad to be with his child—she allowed herself to lapse into that for a moment—perhaps a son? She would leave her family, become a Muslim for his sake.

  She knew marriage was out of the question though. Moin sahib, from the start, wanted to take her to a lady doctor and have her put on the pill. She kept finding excuses to put off the visit. She couldn’t make herself go to someone who had seen Moin sahib’s other women for the same reason. As long as she took risks, she could say to herself there was more to their friendship.

  She fumbled in her purse even though she knew she didn’t have any pads. She was wearing a white shalwar and cursed herself. She could stop at the chemist on the way but she would feel awkward asking for pads from the man at the counter. She always made Ammi buy things like that for her. She was sure she had some pads in the cabinet in Moin sahib’s bathroom. He let her keep her things there. The rest of the staff used the common bathroom which comprised a squatting toilet, with the permanent odour of urine and betel juice. There was no window, only a dim bulb which made the walls appear jaundiced. Whenever she had to go in there she pressed her dupatta tightly over her nose to block out the stench. Since the day he first asked her to come to his office, Moin sahib had allowed her the use of his personal bathroom.

  Moin sahib wasn’t in yet. She asked Rafi sahib, the accountant, for the key to Moin sahib’s office. He was Moin sahib’s first cousin. When Moin sahib wasn’t around, Rafi sahib was in charge. It was Rafi sahib who handed out their pay each month.

  Rafi sahib cleared his throat, and passed a hand that was like a dried leaf over his bright orange beard. Even the hair on his head was orange. He dyed it with henna because he believed it to be sunnah. He had told Saima several times she should change her religion to Islam if she wanted to secure a place in jannat on the day of judgment. He looked at her for a moment and then sent her back to her section to wait.

  In a few minutes he appeared at her counter and, avoiding her eyes, told her he had called Moin sahib’s house to ask permission to give Saima the key to the office, but Moin sahib wasn’t there. His wife had told him that Saima should wait till Moin sahib got to the store.

  Why had the begum sahiba become involved in such a simple matter? Her heart beat faster with anxiety and the wetness between her legs became warmer and stickier. ‘There was no need to call. I could have waited,’ she said.

  Rafi sahib cleared his throat twice, an injured look on his face. He stood for a minute, tugging at his beard. His bony hand pulled at the orange hairs nervously. Saima started dusting her counter and didn’t look up until he left. Something about Rafi sahib’s pious ways clutched her stomach in a tightness.

  Saima’s job was to manage the baby clothes section. She glanced over at Mariam’s Women’s Apparel and Adila’s jewellery counters. They knew Moin sahib let her use his bathroom and what that meant. They had stopped speaking to her. Saima had felt bad for a while. Afterwards, she decided, if they didn’t want to talk, that was their problem. But it was hard when those two girls shared their lunch while she sat and ate alone, just a few feet from them.

  Saima had seen the last one leave. She was leaving the day Saima had started to work at the store. She was about her own age, not very pretty, a dark thin girl with big eyes. The boss hadn’t fired her, Mariam told her. She just didn’t want to work anymore. Her name was Sally, they told her, Sally D’Souza. It was odd, she thought—two Christian girls in a row.

  Saima understood why Sally had to leave. She hadn’t said much to Saima, just showed her how to unpack and display new stock, and to write out receipts. Things only made sense when they happened to you. You got used to a thing and couldn’t go on without it.

  Moin sahib was generous to her. Just after the first month, he had raised her salary by five hundred rupees. He asked after her father often even though she had told him he was doing better now. It was hard to think of life as it was before Moin sahib asked her in to his office. Those were the dark and stinking days of the staff toilet. Even Rafi sahib, Moin sahib’s own cousin, had to use the staff toilet. Saima stiffened a little with pride when she saw him shuffling towards it. He had diabetes and had to go often.

  Above the grey and white marble sink in Moin sahib’s bathroom, there were several bottles of cologne on a glass shelf. The marble was cool to touch. She liked spraying the cologne on her handkerchief. On the bus, when the exhaust fumes irritated her, she’d pull out the handkerchief, hold it over her nose, and inhale air filtered with hints of lemon and tobacco, cloves and cinnamon. There were little soaps, pink and cream, shaped like shells, in a cream-coloured bowl on the marble counter next to the sink. Moin sahib never used them. She picked them up and smelled them, felt their smooth surfaces against her palm, turned them round and round, and then put them back in the bowl. She washed her hands and face with the Lux bar that Moin sahib used. It was lovely to think that even among soaps there were some you used and some that you just kept
to look at.

  Moin sahib came in an hour later. He sat at Rafi sahib’s desk and they talked. They went over the accounts ledger and Moin sahib smoked a cigar. The first time she saw him smoking one of those she thought they looked like dog shit or stale seekh kebabs but she kept this observation to herself. He kept them in a special wooden case on his massive carved desk. Saima came to like the smell of cigars. They weren’t rancid or cheap like the cigarettes her father and brother smoked. Those burnt her nostrils. Moin sahib’s cigars looked special sitting in that wooden case, each wrapped separately. They had a sweet thick smell, and their smoke rose in grey brown clouds and hung around Moin sahib’s head, making him look like a hero in a TV play. She liked going into his office after he had been smoking for a while. His face was softer and younger hidden in those clouds. He would encircle her waist with his thick hairy arms. Trails of smoke snaked upward from the ashtray. When he kissed her, his mouth smelled the same sweet thick way.

  He’d sigh and say something like, ‘Not now, my princess, we must wait.’

  On those days she stayed back in the evening after the store closed at eight.

  She was showing dresses for a one-year-old girl to a woman who didn’t seem to like anything. Moin sahib was still at Rafi sahib’s desk. Even from this distance she could detect the furrow between his brows. He was thinking. He didn’t seem very happy. Saima became uncomfortable. Rafi sahib must be complaining about her. She knew his ways—he never said anything directly accusing, but with his beady eyes cast downward, wringing his papery hands, in his croaky halting voice, he knew how to garner sympathy for himself.

  The lady got impatient.

  ‘Don’t you have something that’s not frills and lace? Show me a dress that’s pretty but not gaudy,’ she said.