Ghalib at Dusk Page 10

  Just as the light grew so dim that Zainab couldn’t clearly make out the cow, whom she had been staring at fixedly, the front door swung open. Zainab got up, alarmed. It was hard for her to tell who all the people were. All at once there were too many voices. Someone struck a match and a lamp was lit. Zainab saw two men holding a wrapped body. The dim yellow light from the lamp threw gigantic trembling shadows on the walls. The mother-in-law held what looked like a baby, wrapped in a blanket.

  Nobody noticed Zainab standing near the stove. The men carried the body into the room. Zainab followed them.

  ‘What happened?’ Zainab asked. Terror made her stomach heave. ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘So you’ve come now?’ the mother-in-law said. ‘The midwife was with her all night but the baby didn’t come. We took her to the nursing home in the morning. The doctor said we were too late. He cut her open. She bled too much.’

  Zainab stared at the bread and butter and bananas. Big bead-like tears poured out from her short-sighted eyes and dripped on the sheet covering the body. She clutched her daughter’s stiff feet, peeping out from under the sheet.

  ‘And the baby?’ Zainab asked.

  ‘He didn’t live long.’

  Zainab stared at the little blanket-wrapped bundle lying beside her daughter’s corpse. At dawn the bodies of mother and son were carried to the graveyard. Nobody lit the stove. Zainab’s bread and butter and bananas were eaten with tea sent by the neighbours. Zainab drank the tea but couldn’t touch the bread or butter.

  Zainab returned to the city. Too exhausted to walk, she climbed into an ekka. The pony trotted up the uneven rain-gutted road, it’s bells jingling. Fields of mustard on either side of the road swayed blithely in the spring sunshine. Skinny, bloated-bellied children ran alongside the ekka. Women squatted, scrubbing pots at the hand pumps, or sunning themselves, or picking lice from their daughters’ hair. Zainab thought how if the child had lived, she would have taken him in her lap. She would’ve massaged his little body. Allah had punished her for neglecting her daughter.

  Finally they reached G.T. Road, and almost a dozen people got off. The pony suddenly straightened and snorted. The ekkawalla hopped down and slung the rope of the feed sack around the pony’s neck. The pony’s face disappeared into the sack and his large luminous eyes surveyed the ground detachedly as he chewed. His life was in his master’s hands just as hers was in her maker’s. Did the animal have the choice not to be yoked to the ekka?

  The tempo let her off at the Kutchery. Zainab’s swollen eyes searched for Mehru in the crowd. She walked past the broad backed, broad-faced woman selling sunglasses on the ground, past the spicy aloo-dum sellers, past the man screaming the magical remedy cream for itches and rashes, past the other banana sellers with their carts, shouting to passers-by in their sing-song voices. Her eyes only hungered for her Mehru.

  She was not in her usual spot next to the other fruit sellers. She was standing further in, near Netram Chowraha today. Zainab spotted her as one spots water in a desert, and quickened her step.

  ‘How’s our bitya?’ Mehru asked, handing over bananas to a customer.

  ‘She’s no more,’ Zainab said. Tears stood in her eyes. ‘She’s gone and so is the little boy she had.’

  Mehru put her arm around Zainab who clutched the edge of the cart with both her hands. Zainab’s body heaved. Mehru held her tightly.

  ‘Go on, cry, it’ll lighten your heart,’ Mehru said.

  They went home early that afternoon, Mehru pushing the cart, and Zainab walking beside her. Mehru did not wait to sell all the bananas. If Zainab cried, Mehru stopped, stroked her hair or held her hand, and wiped her tears with a dirty rag she carried in her kurta pocket.

  The months passed as they do. Spring was a fleeting presence and soon, the long hot days of summer came to stay. First the dry hot ones when the air felt like it was being blasted from a furnace. Then the thick muggy days when the air was like fumes rising from the soggy courtyard. And then the dripping monsoon days when the air first smelled of dug-up earth and then of rotting garbage when rain settled in potholes and choked the drains.

  It rained every day and rained so much that the Ganges overflowed its banks. They started moving whatever they could, to the rooftop. In a few days the water was so high that their rooms were totally submerged. Weeds and cattle and human faeces floated in the muddy water that sloshed gently against the walls of the rooms. They shielded their cots on the roof with plastic sheets. But when it rained hard, the plastic sheets dripped, and the angled rain drops soaked them through.

  Mehru killed the big snake, earning the grudging respect of the basti dwellers. One morning the snake climbed up to the terrace from the water below. It was long and black. Zainab’s youngest daughter saw it first and screamed. Mehru lost no time in picking up a brick from the stove and she dashed the snake’s head with it. Afterwards, nobody greeted Mehru with a smirk. Even those who didn’t like her, walked past her with a quietness bordering on respect.

  Those were pleasant days for Zainab because nobody seemed to mind having Mehru around. It was hard for Zainab to believe that she—a mother of four, probably forty years old, judging from the fact that her oldest daughter died at twenty-two—had found love. What a love it was but how late she had come to it! Why had Allah made her wait so long before He sent Mehru to her? But that He had sent Mehru in the mysterious way in which He had, was proof of His immeasurable powers, beyond human understanding or questioning. Zainab was sure that Mehru did not belong to this world, nor was made of the same flesh and blood as others. She never questioned that Mehru was from another realm, and that she was sharing this life of poverty and want simply to be near Zainab. Zainab had never dared to ask Mehru if she had a mother or a father, if she had a husband or lover, or children. She didn’t think it was appropriate to ask these questions from one so far removed from the ordinariness of human experience.

  Mehru asked her to massage her with mustard oil whenever they were alone. Zainab did this with devotion and ecstasy. She asked Mehru to lie on her belly and removed her shirt and shalwar. In long smooth strokes, Zainab’s callused hands rubbed Mehru’s dark thighs, her thin but muscular arms, her bony but strong back with warmed mustard oil. Mehru’s breasts were small and she kept them tightly bound and never removed the cloth even during maalish. She got so lost in massaging Mehru that it always had to be Mehru who had to remind her to stop.

  It’s been a year since Zainab met Mehru. She has lost a husband, a daughter, a grandson since then. And lost pots and a stove, blankets and a cot, in the floods. But she has won Mehru. Mehru isn’t accepted by her children, but Zainab can live with that. On a Thursday evening, Zainab insists they visit the mazaar to make an offering of gratitude. They’ve been together a year but have done nothing to ward off the evil eye. The two of them head for Line Shah Baba’s mazaar at the railway station.

  ‘Do you know why he’s called Line Shah Baba?’ Zainab asks Mehru who’s squeezed in next to her in the tempo. Zainab doesn’t need to think about men and thighs with Mehru next to her. ‘They laid down the tracks everyday and came back the next day to find it all ripped up. Then one of the workers told them he’d seen the Baba in his dreams and the Baba had asked that no railway tracks be laid down in the place where he was buried. Then they set aside that space for his mazaar and built the tracks on either side of it.’

  Mehru says she doesn’t care for sadhus and saints. But if it makes Zainab happy, she doesn’t mind. They cross the overhead bridge from Civil Lines and descend down to platform number one on the other side. They go outside the platform and Zainab buys rose garlands—two garlands, one to offer from each of them. She also gets hundred grams of khurma and hundred grams of elaichi dana. The seller includes two sticks of incense with their purchase.

  Once inside the platform again, they walk towards the small green square mazaar, with its low green minarets in the middle of the platform. The minarets look like they belong to a rich child�
�s toy castle. A number of women draped in black naqaab are sitting on the floor huddled under the black plastic awning. The bearded caretaker collects the garlands and the khurma and elaichi dana from Zainab. He places the garlands on the green satin-covered tomb and empties out the niaaz into a large pile of offerings on the floor. From this pile he removes a handful and gives it to Zainab.

  Zainab has not taken off the burqa but she has lifted the veil so her face is visible. She lights the incense sticks. Then sits down next to the other women. The caretaker eyes Mehru distrustfully, confused by her hard-to-define face, and points impatiently to her hair. Mehru’s hair is tied back, she’s wearing a big watch like a man’s; there’s something about her gaze that is immodest, unwomanly. But she’s not wearing a dupatta, nor has she tried to cover her head with a scarf.

  ‘I can cover my hair with this, if you insist,’ Mehru says gruffly, pulling out the dirty rag from her pocket and placing it over her head.

  Mehru sits down next to Zainab and watches her and the other bundled faceless women. Zainab’s hands are joined in prayer. Mehru never prays, she never fasts even during Ramazaan, and she knows no suras from the Quran. Zainab’s eyes are closed, her jaggery-coloured face furrowed with lines of age. Her lips tremble silently as they form the words of prayers she was made to learn as a child. She didn’t know what those words meant then, or now, except that they are words of entreaty, meant to awaken the mercies of an all-knowing, all-seeing God. Uttering those Arabic prayers at the mausoleum of one of God’s saints, she hopes her words will reach Allah faster.

  From the men’s side of the mausoleum, a qawwal’s deep throaty singing rents the sharp winter air. Zainab’s head bows lower, her eyes still closed, her lips still moving. A tear trickles out from the slit of her right eye. Mehru sees it and sighs. She starts tracing the pattern in the mosaic floor with her restless fingers. But then her other hand reaches out quietly towards the folds of Zainab’s black burqa gathered around her, and rests on her thigh under it. It’s a gesture nobody else sees. But it conveys waves of tranquility to her beloved’s troubled being in a way no prayer has managed to, yet.

  Trains

  URMILA CALLS HER husband at work to ask him to come and drive her cousin and his wife to the station. She speaks slowly, in the polite hard voice she uses with him, pausing after each sentence to allow it to sink in: ‘At five. Yes?’ She tries to focus on the holes in the phone, grey and fuzzy so close to her eyes. ‘Tell me now if you can’t make it. They can always take a rickshaw,’ she says with complete calm, but anxiety is fermenting inside her. He never sounds reassuring when he’s saying yes, yes, yes to all she says. She repeats, for repetition has become her tool. ‘Be home by four-thirty, at least. Tell me now. Are you sure? Their train leaves at five.’

  Then she turns to her cousin, Rana, who seemed on the verge of correcting her while she was on the phone. ‘I know it leaves at five-twenty, bhayyia. But you don’t know him. We’re always running after trains,’ she sighs. ‘It’s a miracle how we travel at all.’

  A shadow crosses Rana’s young face but he smiles to show he’s unconcerned.

  ‘Three years ago, we were returning from Bombay,’ Urmila continues. ‘He made us so late, we missed our train. But he managed to get on. Asha and I couldn’t run fast enough. We were left behind and he came back to Allahabad alone.’ She shakes her head. ‘Yes. Alone.’

  ‘Then what did you do, didi?’ her cousin asks, puzzled, unsure whether he should find the story humorous.

  ‘What could we do? Asha and I came two days later. You know how impossible train tickets are at the last minute. Your jijaji thought it was all a big joke.’ Urmila smiles to put her cousin at ease. She can’t tell Rana that she didn’t find the Bombay incident funny at all, that for her, being left behind at the station, watching helplessly as the train that carried her husband departed, was the last stroke in the portrait of her husband that had been painting itself inside her for years.

  Rana has been married for two years. This is his first visit to Urmila’s house with his wife. He works in a small town not far from Allahabad. His wife is a sweet girl, shy like smalltown girls are, with a sweet name. He calls her Sonu in a soft muffled voice so not to reveal his special name for her to others. Urmila has been watching this quiet girl-woman, still wearing the look of belief in her marriage, and so attentive to her baby.

  Urmila tries to think back to a time when there was newness in her own marriage. It must have been fleeting for all she can savour now is a staleness. Was it before she became pregnant with Asha? Or even earlier, when she entered as a bride this sprawling household that has since then shrunk? Gliding noiselessly, wave-like on the smooth marble floors in a richly worked sari from her trousseau she barely took in the faces of her little sisters- and brothers-in-law who stood lined up against the wall in their new silk outfits, spellbound by her beauty. Wasn’t it then that she felt thrilled by their wondrous faces, knowing they’d be easy victories? She would send them to school, braid the girls’ hair, eventually have them all married. All this she had done over the years. Hadn’t she dreamed then of helping her mother-in-law in the kitchen, conquering her with her shy, silent charm? But above all, had she not eagerly awaited him in their bedroom, where tired and happy, the day’s work in the kitchen done, her sari pallu drawn low over her head, her gold bangles tinkling to let him know she was there, inviting him through the flash of her kajal-lined eyes, she sat tensely at the edge of the massive bed, night after night. Wasn’t it then that she had the look of belief she now sees in Rana’s wife?

  Yes, in those days she was hopeful. And when he used to answer her gaze, she would tremble. But they must wait, his eyes would say—how sweet the waiting then seemed—until he went over the accounts and whatever else he discussed with his father nightly. How comforting were the things she did not understand then, the thick ledgers and notebooks in which he wrote worm-like strings of numbers and symbols in neat rows and columns. She surrendered to the dreamy mystery of things she willingly labelled incomprehensible, so that she could give up, give in, letting him rise higher and higher in her esteem. Those days were beautiful and somehow sad, like mist that hovers over the river on a winter’s morning.

  You fresh young thing, so green and tender, so sweet a wife and mother, go on, go on, my dear, believe in it as long as you can.

  Sanjay is home at four-thirty. Urmila likes to think he’s on time because she reminded him. But then he had seemed willing to come, and a little irritated by her calls. He walks in breezily, arms and legs swaying as if out of control, the happy school boy. His bold manner says if there are important things to be accomplished, he’s as capable as the next fellow. A big condescending smile in Rana’s direction bares all his yellowing teeth. His voice has the hollow confident ring of a politician about to deliver his campaign speech. Even if they do miss the train, he says as he bends forward to pick up a samosa from the laden table, they can catch one tomorrow. He’s silenced by Urmila’s silence, the way she doesn’t meet his eye or hand him a plate for the snacks.

  Behind his ingratiating readiness to please lies an impenetrable wall. Urmila knows it only too well. Her mind flits back to those clouded early days of their married life. When she thought there was something faintly unpleasant in the brusque way he answered her or made excuses when he forgot to come home on time and they missed the cinema or the temple, she’d stand in front of her dressing table, sliding the bangles from her wrist one by one, staving off hot tears by concentrating on their slow, deliberate removal. She mustn’t dwell on that now. Her face stiffens with resolve. Sometimes he follows her commands, like today, coming home on time, to make her feel guilty for making him do penance for his past, his little trespasses. The world continues to think him a harmless, good-natured man, which he is, she must grant him that, in his dealings with most people.

  The cousin and his wife are having tea. Urmila has prepared several things as they will not arrive home until well past dinner ti
me. The wife hardly touches the snacks Urmila has piled on her plate. Poor thing, she seems so ill at ease visiting her husband’s relatives. And Sanjay’s smiling and trying to engage her in conversation is unnerving her all the more. Again and again, Urmila sees in this young woman herself as she was many years ago. Sanjay is fluttering near her like a moth, offering the plate of biscuits, smiling at her lowered eyes, her murmured refusals, cooing to the baby in the crook of her arm. Urmila can see it all in the way his jaw moves as he chews a biscuit abstractedly. She’s relieved Rana isn’t extending his stay. Sanjay’s eyes are on the wall above the girl where his mind is forming a purer image of her lips, her breasts. He’s enchanted by her extreme modesty and her uncorrupted freshness. Will he ever outgrow his fascination for shy young women?

  ‘What’s the hurry, bhai?’ Sanjay is saying to Rana. ‘We were hoping you’d extend our pleasure by staying on until Sunday.’

  ‘Sanjay bhaiyya, we would have stayed but I have to work this Sunday since I took two days off to come here,’ Rana replies, looking visibly anxious—Sanjay seems in no hurry to take them to the station.

  ‘Arre bhai, who works on a Sunday, hain? One or two more days ‘Really, Sanjay, if we’re taking them to the station, we should leave now,’ Urmila interrupts. ‘It’s quarter to five already.’ She starts clearing the tea things.

  ‘Who has refused to take them?’ Sanjay shouts after her as she carries away the tray. ‘Hain? Have I said I’m not taking them? I was just suggesting that they needn’t go in such a hurry. We can leave this minute, if you want. What are we waiting for?’ he scowls as she returns from the kitchen.

  She can see in his narrowed eyes the sulk coming on that will remain for the rest of the day. She’s given him the excuse to be his favourite self: the hurt schoolboy. He’ll take his time driving them to the station now. How many years have they been together? She thinks she has outwitted him but there will be times like these when he’ll destroy the walls of calm she has so painstakingly built around herself.