Ghalib at Dusk Read online

  ‘We’ll think about it,’ Urmila says, managing a smile, grateful for the steadying hand held out to her. ‘I have only just got back. Will you at least let me get out of the car? We’ll talk about it when I’ve had some tea.’

  How enervating this day has been, Urmila thinks struggling up the steps of the porch. But how the sight of her house restores her, and the thought of what to cook for dinner, and this little request of her daughter’s which she has the power to grant or otherwise.

  ‘But, Mummy, I can’t wait until you’ve had tea!’ pouts Asha. ‘I need to call now and let them know if they should pick me up.’

  ‘All right, then. But I want you back by eight,’ Urmila says, feeling renewed as she shifts her mind to her duties. Tomorrow is Thursday. Sat-sang. She must fast to cleanse her mind. ‘But wait, have you finished your homework?’ she calls out. Asha doesn’t hear, she’s already racing down the hallway for the phone.

  Navratri Night

  MRS BANNERJI GAVE up after trying to shut out the noise for what seemed like a long time. She had fallen into a tired sleep after taking the tranquillizer at bedtime. But after a couple of hours, the effect wore off, and the deafening noise from the loud speakers in the gali below left her turning restlessly in bed. She sat up and let her feet find their way into the worn smoothness of her rubber chappals. She felt for her glasses. The fluorescent numbers on the clock read 1.20 a.m. Her husband was snoring softly. There was a politeness to his snores as if he was aware that she might be listening. The soft throatiness of his snores reassured her. He wasn’t dead. Thoughts of his sudden death came to her very often now. She would be chopping vegetables for dinner, and while her hands worked the knife, her mind would imagine ways in which she would find him dead. Of these, dying in his sleep, stealthily, without any warning, seemed the most unfair and terrifying to her.

  She got up and felt her way to the switches on the wall. Turning on the hallway light, she pulled the bedroom door slowly behind her but it seemed to creak all the more. She walked out to the balcony. A pale creamy moon, not quite a perfect disc, peered at her. She took a deep breath. The air held none of the sulky heat of the day. There were grey patches on the moon which looked like a rabbit with its ears cocked up. And there was a stillness and coolness in the air that made her glad she was up and out at this hour. But where was that deafening music which had roused her and brought her out in the first place? She puzzled over this for a minute. Maybe it was a confused dream where she was being tortured by loud jagran singing.

  Moonlight swathed the rooftop terraces of the whitewashed houses in a pale grey sheen. Allahabad always seemed less shabby in the moonlight, she thought, and especially this narrow crowded gali, which her balcony overlooked. A few mosquitoes sensed her presence and she heard their droning as they made for her face. She pulled her sari pallu tightly about her shoulders. The two street lamps in the gali stood like sentries, looking down upon the street crammed with airless houses with no space between one house and the next. What was that music that had got her up? It sounded like bhajans or jagran music. It was Navratri time so all-night music was not absolutely out of place. But why so rudely loud? Then, in the distance, behind the old peepul trees, in the clearing which was neither a street nor a square, where goats roamed and boys played, a bright light came on. As soon as the light came on, so did that music again. It was offensive to think of it as God’s music, played for the love of God. She hadn’t been dreaming then. The music had simply stopped for a few minutes when she was getting out of bed.

  The loudspeakers began blaring with an aggression that made her feel helpless. The sound hurt like sharp-pronged metal twisting inside her ears. She stepped back in and locked the balcony door. She felt rage against those playing their music, so oblivious to the plight of others. She was going to cry. She closed the kitchen door to block out any noise from coming in through the kitchen window. She tiptoed into her bedroom and closed the one window that they left open for ventilation and drew the curtains. The room would soon become stuffy. She turned up the speed of the fan and shot a quick glance at her husband. He was still snoring in that soft full way. She pulled the door behind her quickly. But it creaked nevertheless.

  She stood in the narrow hallway surrounded by the three closed doors, and wondered what more she could do. The sound was still loud enough to be physically painful. She couldn’t go down alone at this hour and talk to those hooligans. They were most likely drunk out of their senses. Why hadn’t anybody else from the sixteen flats in this building tried to talk to them? Hardly anybody could be asleep in this din, and yet, nobody had ventured out to talk to those boys. She wished her son were here now. She could have got him up and he could’ve gone.

  Her gaze fell on the phone and a fancy took hold of her. She was ready to try anything at this hour, anything to get that noise to stop. She picked up the phone directory and started looking through it. A friend of her son’s who was at college in America had told him that one night when he and his friends got too rowdy at a party, one of the neighbours called the police. And they had to break up the party. Her son had related this story to her and said, ‘Ma, can you imagine this sort of thing happening in India?’

  She found POLICE under P. But of the half a dozen or so numbers listed there, she couldn’t decide which one to call. Nobody she knew had ever called the police for anything. She picked the number listed next to Katra Chowki since she lived in the new Katra area of the city. Nobody answered at that number. She let it ring a long time giving them time to wake up. She redialled the number. Nobody answered. She looked at the listing again and picked out the number of the Control Room. That sounded like a central place from where she imagined they controlled the actions of all the other smaller police chowkies in the city.

  This time there was an answer. She felt too startled to speak.

  ‘Hello.’ The man’s voice sounded sleepy.

  ‘Yes, hello,’ she said.

  ‘Hello?’ the man repeated as if he didn’t want to hear.

  ‘Yes, bhaiyya, I’m calling from Beli Road. I want you to hear this. Just a minute.’ She carried the phone over to the balcony door and threw it open. ‘Can you hear this noise? Can you hear how loud it is? This has been going on for the past four hours. How can anyone sleep? Nobody can sleep for miles around here. And I have a very sick husband. Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, madam, I can hear you.’

  ‘Yes, so … is it possible for you to send someone here to stop this?’

  ‘There’s a rule that all loudspeakers should stop playing at 11 at night,’ the man said.

  ‘But it’s almost 2 right now. And they haven’t stopped. And it doesn’t look like they’re going to. Can’t you send somebody, a constable or someone? If they saw the police, those boys would stop.’

  ‘I’ll try, madam,’ the man said. ‘At this time of night, we’ll have to see.’

  ‘Let me tell you where this place is. You know the tall white building near Jagram Chowraha? It’s the only building of flats on Beli Road. White building with blue painted borders. They’re playing it just behind our flats, in the gali.’

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  ‘Are you going to send someone?’

  ‘I’ll pass the message on. We’ll have to see. At this time of night, we’ll have to see.’

  The man hung up before she thought their conversation had ended. She felt reluctant to move away from the phone as if the man might call back with the name of the policeman he was dispatching to Beli Road.

  She pushed open her bedroom door quickly to give it the least possible time to creak. But it creaked all the same. She turned out the hallway light and sat down on her side of the bed. Her feet felt heavy and unwilling as she removed them from the cool smooth surface of her slippers. She wanted to leave them there resting on that smoothness and with all her senses just go on feeling the familiarity of her feet in her old chappals.

  She fumbled in the drawer of the bedside table for the
aluminium packaging of her prescribed tranquillizer. She was exceeding her daily dose. She broke the tiny tablet into two uneven halves, and replacing one carefully in its depression in the packet, swallowed the larger with water from the glass she kept on the bedside table. She smoothed her soft pillow, made especially thin to ease her neck pain, took off her glasses, lay down very straight, and folded her arms over her chest. Then she began to wait.

  She was still waiting a half hour later. She turned on her side to rest one ear against the pillow and folded the free end of the pillow over her other ear. She reached out and traced the sleeping shape of her husband. It surprised her that he could sleep through this din. He always slept on trains too, while she stayed awake, surrounded by snores and the rhythmic rattle of the train. She let her hand linger on the small of his back. The feel of his back was different now after the chemotherapy sessions. The medicines meant to kill the cancer cells had eaten away into his bones and flesh. She used to wrap her arm around his warm soft stomach and this used to help her fall asleep. Tonight she couldn’t do that. The hollow uninviting space beneath his cotton kurta was not what her hand wanted to touch.

  The sweet heaviness in her head, which began moving down slowly to her eyelids, made her sigh. She turned away from her husband. Sleep was a matter of a minute or two now. The loud music would soon cease to matter. The wait would be over. She was falling down into a vast dusk-like emptiness, where there would soon be darkness and silence. During that delicious descent, her mind registered what sounded like a gunshot. It was too late for her to reach any logical conclusions about that sharp sound, or to distinguish it from the noises she was trying to block out. She was fast asleep, barely a few seconds after the shot was fired, when the loud music, which had kept her awake, ceased for the night.

  The next day was Sunday. She and her husband were drinking tea. Her head and body felt heavy from the extra pill she had taken at night. Mr Bannerji was going through the medical bills which he wanted her to submit at her office. She worked in the customs and excise department and her medical insurance paid for his expensive treatment. Each injection he took cost fifteen hundred rupees. He needed fifteen injections every month for the rest of his life. The rest of one’s life should be a long time. It should mean years and years to come in which one slowly watches oneself grow old.

  ‘Did you sleep all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. With all those pills I take at night, I won’t know if I died in my sleep.’

  ‘Why do you always talk of death?’ she said.

  ‘You had better get used to the idea of my dying, dear.’

  ‘You know I did a foolish thing last night,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I called the police.’

  ‘Here? Called them here?’

  ‘I called them on the phone. The boys in that gali were playing their music so loud. You didn’t hear a thing?’

  ‘What did you expect from the police?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all,’ she sighed.

  ‘I don’t understand. What got into you?’ he said irritably. ‘Why didn’t you wake me up? I hope you didn’t give them our phone number or address. Or they’ll be here pestering us today.’

  ‘No, I didn’t do that,’ she said. She knew his opinion of her when it came to practical matters. It always made her feel inadequate and unsure of herself.

  The doorbell rang and she got up to answer it. Their maid came in. She picked up their tea mugs from the table and carried them into the kitchen. Mrs Bannerji followed her. The maid lived in the gali behind their flat, in one of the narrow one-room houses that Mrs Bannerji could see from her balcony.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep at all last night,’ Mrs Bannerji said. She was pouring out the maid’s tea.

  ‘Neither did we,’ the maid replied, taking the chipped cup that Mrs Bannerji kept separately for her use. ‘Only after they stopped, did I get any sleep.’

  ‘Stop? When did they stop?’ Mrs Bannerji asked.

  ‘Didn’t you hear the gun go off?’

  ‘Gun? Yes, I think I heard a gunshot or something like that,’ Mrs Bannerji said, trying to think clearly about the events of last night.

  ‘Yes, it was loud enough. My girls got scared and clung to me all night.’

  ‘Had the police come?’ Mrs Bannerji asked, cheering up somewhat.

  ‘Maybe. They must have. The boy was badly wounded. He bled so much that by the time they took him to the hospital, the doctor said he could do nothing.’

  ‘So it wasn’t the police, then,’ Mrs Bannerji said.

  The maid looked at her, puzzled. ‘The police didn’t fire the shot. No, it was one of those nasty boys. All drunk. And what does it take for them to break out into a fight?’

  ‘Is the boy dead, then?’

  ‘Must be,’ the maid said indifferently, rinsing out her cup in the sink.

  Mrs Bannerji went back to her husband. He was reading the Sunday paper now. She sat down at the dining table and picked up the pile of bills which he had organized date-wise for her. He read the sports page every day even if he didn’t read the rest of the paper, and watched all the cricket matches, even those in which India wasn’t playing. He had been a sprinter in his college and won trophies. These were displayed in a glass cabinet in the living room. On Sundays he spent at least two hours on the paper. She wondered how many such Sundays he had left in his life. How much was the rest of his life? Would it include the wedding or even the graduation of their son from college? The doctor said, five to six years with chemotherapy and the Interferon injections.

  But it could be four or three or two. Or less. Death could come suddenly, when things were going predictably. She thought of the boy who was probably dead by now. How old could he have been? Eighteen, maybe nineteen? As old as her own son. But he probably didn’t have a wife or a child depending on him. It was not that bad if the boy had died, not as bad as when her husband would die, she thought. And immediately felt guilty for making the comparison.

  She had met Mr Bannerji when he was in his thirties, a shy quiet man, with thick black hair, who worked in the same office as her. He was several years older than her but she accepted his proposal of marriage, which he had made in a very quiet and unexpected way. He used to talk to her regarding work, but one day he asked if he could talk to her after work. They had been colleagues for five years but this was the first time he was making such a request.

  They had walked to an ice-cream shop in Civil Lines after leaving the office. And that’s when he said very simply how he had always thought her to be the kind of woman who would make a good wife and mother, and since his parents were no more, and there were no family elders who could speak for him, could he come to her house and introduce himself to her parents one of these days?

  She glanced at the whitish stubble which had grown on his head after all his hair fell out following the chemotherapy. What had they done to deserve this? They had never taken bribes at work though their colleagues did this as a matter of routine. They were not the ones who drove a new car every two years. They were straight honest people who had lived on their rightful salaries and had never given in to temptations thankfully, though there were many occasions when she wished they had their own car.

  ‘One of those boys got shot last night,’ she said to her husband.

  He looked up from the paper reluctantly. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘One of the boys got shot. They got into a fight.’

  ‘Got shot?’ he said, stroking the snowy stubble on his head.

  ‘He’s probably dead. Dead from bleeding,’ she said.

  ‘These people Mr Bannerji kept stroking the new growth on his head as if trying to get used to its newness. ‘They don’t value what they have.’

  ‘So meaningless,’ she found herself saying. ‘The whole thing. I mean, he was alive and then he’s dead over a drunken fight. Without any thought. Just think, a whole life just gone in a flash. Such a waste.’

&
nbsp; ‘At least he was spared a life of worrying,’ Mr Bannerji said.

  Mrs Bannerji noted that the grey hollows below his eyes were greyer still this morning. His eyes looked dim and sunken in their sockets. He was holding the paper but staring at the trophies in the glass cabinet. He was with the memories of his past, far away. She looked at him looking at the glories of his spent years through the harshness of his present. There was an unspoken bond of pain between them. Their waiting, their worrying together, strengthened that bond every day. She wanted to go up to him and say, ‘Let’s weep together’ or ‘Let me hold your hand’—something foolish like that. But she sat where she was. She watched his eyes gazing into nothingness. She sensed their shared helplessness, their longing for that shared past, and the sadness of knowing that not a single moment could be resurrected.

  Desire By Any Other Name

  SAEED WAS SIPPING his tea when his peon, Pappu, entered the room. Saeed’s reaction to Pappu was different today. Most mornings Saeed wished that Pappu would not show up so he could have a valid excuse for missing work. Today, his heart leapt as if Pappu’s unsmiling face was the very instrument to take him one step closer to his joys. He gulped the last of his tea, wiped the fat beads of sweat from his forehead, and as Pappu came into the room, he didn’t even bother to start their customary small talk. He swung his wheelchair round to face Pappu and energetically wheeled himself to the divan, expertly lifted himself out of the wheelchair and onto the divan. His thin infantile legs crossed neatly under him from long habit.

  Pappu folded the wheelchair and carried it out. In the time it took Pappu to go down and come back up, Saeed’s restless mind played and replayed the ecstasies the evening’s tryst held in store. He had imagined the meeting in such fine detail all night that he had only managed to sleep in fits. He had gone over, again and again, till he could repeat like the dialogues of an oft-watched film what he would say to the woman and what she was going to say to him. He anticipated that she was going to be shy so he would have to break the ice by complimenting her on her appearance which he had imagined in great detail. She would be wearing a silk sari, have large luminous eyes and long hair which would come undone in the course of the evening, and which he would play with after it was over. But there, his mind would do somersaults, because he had no idea what came before or after it, or how it was to be done with a woman. He could not say the word ‘sex’ even to himself. He wasn’t sure if he recoiled from using the word because of his strict upbringing or whether he didn’t want to diminish the evening’s possibilities by using a technical term.