Ghalib at Dusk Page 14

  ‘Sometimes I wonder what life is all about,’ Shalu said. ‘I mean, maybe it’s a big joke or something. Look at you, a nice man like you, with no-good legs, and more than a normal appetite for sex,’ she said.

  Again, overcome by longing for her touch, he let himself be led by her expertise. She was the navigator of his desires; she was the captain of the ship called his body. She continued until he moaned like a sick animal, so close to sickness was his joy.

  When she said it was time to tidy up and leave, he wanted to stay on at all cost.

  ‘Why do we have to leave?’ he asked petulantly.

  ‘Because it’s been two hours since you’ve been here. And my friend’s going to be coming back. What about you? Don’t you have your mother waiting for you? You won’t find a rickshaw if it gets too late.’

  ‘I must see you again. We could be friends,’ Saeed begged.

  ‘You can always see me. Just call. Here’s my number. As I said, I prefer Sundays. It’s my day off. And I can spend the whole day with you. But it’s going to be a thousand rupees.’

  ‘What about us being friends?’ he pleaded.

  ‘I’ve got too many clients who want to be my friends. I can’t afford it. I can’t fuck you for free,’ she smiled. ‘I don’t mix business with pleasure because pleasure is my business.’

  ‘I just … I wanted to tell you what this evening has meant for me,’ he stammered. ‘Till today I hadn’t known if I was normal. I used to worry about it all the time. You know, whether I could do it with a woman. You’ve been so patient with me.’ He paused. He thought he might do something completely out of place like cry. ‘Thank you, Shalu,’ he mumbled, regaining his self-composure.

  ‘I hereby certify you as absolutely normal,’ Shalu said with some softness. ‘And I like circumcised men. Their dicks are cleaner. And you are capable of giving a woman great pleasure in bed. A woman should have no problems with you, especially if she loves you. But you know, love is hard to find,’ she sighed. ‘And even harder to give. Not just for you, dear boy, for everybody.’

  Saeed looked at her astounded because in one sentence she had summarized the ultimate existential dilemma of his life, stuff he’d been pouring his heart out about in his diaries for years.

  She patted his cheek. ‘But we all have to go on in search of that rainbow. Okay, darling?’

  Shalu tidied up the bed, packed the thermos and cups and plates into her shopper. She changed back into her kurta and pants, combed her hair and tied it with a rubber band. She folded and stuffed the nightie into the shopper. She threw a last glance at the room to make sure she had taken care of everything.

  ‘I’m going to get a rickshaw for you, then I’ll come in and call you.’

  He sat in the room all alone, searing into memory all that had happened that evening. He couldn’t put closure on the evening with the physical exit he would be making in a few minutes, as soon as Shalu came back. He wanted to leave some stamp of permanence on this place, and he didn’t even know who it really belonged to, or if he could ever come back here.

  In a few minutes, Shalu unlocked the door from outside, and entered.

  ‘Come on, the rickshaw is here. He was asking for twenty rupees, but I said you’ll give him fifteen, and I told him you are my brother and need some help. So he says he’ll help you up the stairs of your house. Okay?’

  ‘So I’m your brother now?’ he said with a sickly grimace.

  She didn’t respond but wheeled him out and down the courtyard. The gate was unlatched, and in the dim street light at the corner of the lane, he made out the rickshawwalla’s puzzled gaze as he saw a man in a wheelchair.

  ‘Now you make sure you take him up the stairs of his house because he can’t walk. And he’ll give you fifteen rupees.’

  ‘Okay, bhaiyya?’ she came round to face Saeed.

  She and the driver helped Saeed get into the rickshaw.

  ‘May Bhagwan get you home safely,’ she said, as if she really were his sister.

  ‘Shalu, please, could I …’ Saeed started.

  ‘Shhh … call me later,’ she said hurriedly.

  Once he was settled, she folded his wheelchair and leaned it next to the rickshaw seat.

  She stood holding her shopping bag as the rickshaw cycled down the lane. He glanced back at her through the opening in the back, saw her standing at the gate and waited to see if she would raise her arm to wave to him. But she wasn’t looking at him, and anyway she had seemed anxious for him to be gone so she could leave. No matter how hard he tried to think of their meeting as she would have liked him to, as a mere business transaction in which money had exchanged hands for services rendered, his leaden heart ached to call it by some other name.

  Family Duty

  FOUR DAYS AFTER their mother had been buried, Rabia’s brothers began discussing what arrangements they would need to make for their sister. Rabia was mentally ill, and unable to take care of herself.

  ‘The best thing for Rabia would be to stay here with you,’ the older brother proposed.

  There had been some talk of sending her to an institution. No respectable family would really put a relative in a mad house with other filthy, wretched lunatics. But the idea was hinted at whenever Rabia’s behaviour became excessively troublesome. The most recent such episode involved a rolling pin.

  ‘Rabia has become impossible,’ the younger brother said, wringing his hands.

  He had always taken care of his mother and sister. The older brother had left years ago to make his fortune in the United States. But the family house they lived in in Allahabad belonged to the older brother.

  ‘You know how she hit Jamila on the day of ziarat? While we were all reading the Quran for Amma’s soul.’ The younger brother continued, ‘Who’s to say what she might do to my children in one of her moods.’ Although he realized his last accusation wasn’t strictly based on truth, he made it anyway, for effect. ‘Maybe you could take her with you to America. You could show her to a good psychiatrist there.’

  The older brother pursed his lips. ‘You don’t know what life in America is like,’ he sighed. ‘No time at all. From morning till evening we’re busy. What will poor Rabia do there by herself?’

  ‘Life in Allahabad is the same,’ the younger brother complained. ‘Jamila and I are at work, and the children are at school. And with Amma no longer in this world—poor Rabia.’

  If Rabia were to continue to stay with him, he didn’t want his brother to think it would be easy.

  In the living room Rabia paced up to the TV and back to the couch at the far end of the wall. In her hand she had peanuts. She blew on them to remove the skins, and popped a few into her mouth every couple of minutes. Now and then she stared at the TV, guessing the name of the product from the jingle as each commercial came on. She recognized the Nirma washing powder and the Binaca toothpaste ads.

  The living room floor was covered with peanut husks carried to all corners by the gusts of air from the ceiling fan. Geet Mala had just ended on TV. They had shown old film songs from the days of black and white movies. Although she wasn’t sure of the words, Rabia remembered most of the tunes. She had made up words of her own and sung along with Lata. She recalled the first lines of a song now, and started singing loudly:

  Bahaaron mera jivan bhi sanwaaro,

  Koi aai kahin se, koi aai kahin se,

  Phool waro.

  Spring, adorn my life,

  A lover may come,

  Shower blossoms.

  Her voice was thin and raspy, like the grazing of tin on concrete. When she tried to emulate Lata at the high end of the scale, the bahaaron became hurtful to the ears.

  Jamila, her sister-in-law, came in just as she was adding the final touch to the much stretched-out bahaaron. ‘Look at this! Her mother’s body barely cold in the grave and she’s watching TV and singing,’ Jamila muttered. She looked aghast at the peanut husks on the floor. ‘What’s the use of my trying to keep this house clean?’ she aske
d Rabia.

  Rabia stopped singing, and gazed so steadily and menacingly at Jamila that she fell silent. Then Rabia tossed her head, blew on the peanuts, and resumed pacing. She broke into a slow, slurry monologue: ‘Saala, who wants to get married. This is my father’s house. Who can marry me? Lux Soap, no? The best for your complexion. I’ll get from market. They’ll not eat dinner tonight. No, don’t worry about me, bread will do, too.’

  Jamila listened for a minute and then left, shaking her head.

  One unusual thing they had done in the past two days was to leave the snack cupboard unlocked. Rabia had guessed this had been done to keep her quiet when the condolence visitors came. She knew many things they thought she didn’t. Rabia now had free access to all the snacks that were normally beyond her reach, the key always with Jamila. When Jamila came home at five-thirty every day, she would make tea for Amma and the children. Rabia made her own tea before Jamila got home because Jamila objected to her adding six teaspoons of sugar to her cup. Rabia liked to drink lots of tea, about ten cups every day. Only at teatime did Jamila unlock the snack cupboard and take out a packet of Gluco biscuits or chewra or sometimes mithai, and give everyone their share. Whenever it was mithai, Rabia gave hers to her nieces, Riffat and Rani. They liked to store it in their lunch boxes and take it to school the next day.

  Rabia finished the peanuts and started towards the kitchen. ‘They’ll eat late, no? Let’s see—I can make egg-fry.’ On the way to the kitchen she passed through the dining room and heard the voices of her two brothers from Amma’s room. She heard her own name two or three times. She decided to go in.

  They saw her and stopped. Rabia gazed at them without seeming to take them in. Suddenly she said, ‘Bread will do nicely. And egg-fry,’ and left.

  In their bedroom, later that night, the younger brother related to his wife what his older brother had said regarding Rabia. ‘He thinks she should continue to stay with us.’

  Jamila frowned and looked away. She had suffered for fifteen years at Rabia’s hands—her outrages, her incessant eating, her violence—she was fortunate it was just a rolling pin last time. Rabia had hurled it at her the day after the old lady passed away. And when the old lady was alive you couldn’t say a word against her beloved Chandni, her special name for Rabia … Chandni! What mother would, in her right mind, have named a black as coal thing like that after the moon? But the old lady was whimsical. She had gone into labour on a full-moon night.

  Rabia’s brothers and sister said she used to be beautiful before the illness took over and she stopped taking care of herself. Her complexion had darkened as a result of all the medicines she had to take, they said. There was a framed black and white photograph of Rabia, from years ago, her left arm outstretched to show off her rich sari border. You couldn’t tell the colour of her skin but she looked a different person in it. Not exactly pretty, but full of life, and intelligence. Every time Jamila saw that picture, she thought: That’s the sort of person she would’ve been proud to introduce as her sister-in-law to her colleagues at the school where she taught. She had few things to be proud of being married into this family.

  The old lady had always kept Rabia’s picture on the window sill by her bed. When Rabia shouted abuses at her in one of her rages, she used to look at the photograph and shake her head. ‘Hai, we should have got her married then,’ she would say. Why hadn’t they, if she was so beautiful? Jamila had tried to probe. No one in this family told you the truth if it concerned the other family members. Rabia’s illness was their greatest shame. They did their best to hide it, as if they were implicated in this great failure. It didn’t occur to them that Rabia’s madness was obvious to anybody who spent even an hour in her company. Rabia had been deluged with marriage proposals, Jamila’s husband used to say, but she was too proud; nobody was good enough for her. She rejected them all and gradually she stopped getting any offers. Jamila found that even her husband was not in the habit of telling the truth about Rabia.

  Jamila was told that Rabia’s sickness was brought on after the marriage proposals stopped coming. This was a chicken and egg puzzle. Jamila had given up on which was the cause: did the proposals stop coming because people found out Rabia was crazy or did Rabia go crazy because nobody wanted to marry her? Sometimes Jamila thought the entire family was mad, with the exception of the old lady who was too cruel, too petty to be crazy.

  Rabia was already a tired-looking woman when Jamila came as a bride to this house. She remembered how nobody really tried to introduce her to Rabia but Rabia had come and stood in the doorway, not coming in, not saying anything, just staring at her. Jamila had felt unnerved. There was a scowl on her face, and when Jamila tried to go up to her and talk, she wandered off, without answering her greeting.

  ‘What’s wrong with Rabia?’ Jamila asked her husband timidly. ‘She doesn’t seem to like me.’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong with her,’ her husband said what she would get used to hearing from others in the family in time. ‘She’s just a bit odd. You know, moody. She’s been like that for some years. She used to be so beautiful. She used to sing just like Lata. But she’s heartbroken.’

  ‘Heartbroken?’

  ‘She was waiting for the right marriage proposal. She had high standards. She liked someone but his family wasn’t interested. She was too modern for them. You know, Rabia always speaks her mind. They didn’t want a bahu like that.’

  Well, your family doesn’t like that in their bahu either, Jamila thought. How quickly she was learning that silence was the only survival tool in this household.

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get used to her ways,’ he said abruptly.

  Jamila had no idea how one got used to Rabia’s ways. Rabia would keep to her room most of the time, sleeping through the day, but there was no saying when she would have one of her outbursts, when she would accuse the whole world for her unhappiness, and especially Jamila for trying to poison her. Rabia heard hostile, threatening voices. When the doctor who was called home once asked whose voices she heard, she pointed towards Jamila. After the first couple of months in the house, Jamila had become resigned and stopped trying to defend herself. Whenever Rabia became excessively talkative and picked fights with her and the servants, Jamila asked her husband if she was taking the proper dose of the pills prescribed by the doctor. They would grind the pills and add it to Rabia’s dinner when she refused to take her medicines. Often Jamila would be the one doing it. And she wondered if that’s what Rabia meant when she said Jamila was plotting to kill her.

  Rabia’s eyes were the most terrible thing in her face. They were small and round, but when Rabia was angry, they grew to twice their normal size, and the pupils glinted. But, hard as it was for Jamila to make any sense of it, she had also seen those eyes soften and sadden with tenderness when Rabia was with the children. There was nothing mean-spirited about Rabia, at least as far as the children were concerned. Jamila never felt afraid of leaving her two girls with Rabia—she knew she would never hurt them. Without Rabia, Jamila could not have returned to work after the birth of her daughters.

  Rabia was a good cook, they said, before the illness took over. Rabia was the only one who had continued to think so. She would take whatever Jamila made for lunch before leaving for work, mix it with old leftovers which were for the servant, and insist that everyone eat it. There was never enough tea or sugar or snacks in the house if Rabia could get to them first. No servant they managed to hire could be induced to stay more than a few months because Rabia would get into fights with them.

  You could never trust Rabia’s temper. All Jamila had said to her, and in the politest way, was please not to roll out the chapattis so thick, because there were guests in the house for the ziarat dinner, the day after the funeral. Rabia had lunged at her with the rolling pin, right there, in front of all those ladies in the kitchen. Jamila rubbed the sore spot on her shoulder now and tears filled her eyes. Sometimes she wished she could openly let loose all the anger she felt agai
nst this family. The fact that she couldn’t, even to her husband, made her want to scream. She envied Rabia her madness. What a wonderful excuse to say exactly what she liked and get away with it.

  Rabia’s screeching voice still echoed in Jamila’s head: ‘My mother has died! I’ll roll out her ziarat chapattis!’ All the ladies had seen the tears in Jamila’s eyes. They came up to her later and told her to be strong. That was their way of saying they were sorry for her.

  The guests were served map-of-India shaped chapattis that were at least an inch thick and burned at the edges. Jamila hoped her cigar-smoking fashionable brother-in-law from America had noticed that.

  ‘It’s easy for bhai sahib to say these things,’ Jamila said to her husband. ’He doesn’t have to live with her.’

  ‘He also said he’s thinking of selling this house.’

  ‘He is?’

  Jamila had always feared this and she had tried to save from her salary to buy a piece of land of their own. But how much could you save from a school teacher’s salary? She had thought of giving private tuitions but she couldn’t risk parents seeing Rabia and taking their children away. Her husband had never brought in a regular income in all the fifteen years they had been married. He was involved in some sort of a business, exactly what, she couldn’t say. More often than not, he said the business wasn’t doing well. Jamila had already given away precious thousands of rupees from her savings towards this business. Things would have been impossible if they didn’t have this house to live in. When she thought of it, she had to be almost grateful for Rabia’s madness.

  And where are we to go, then? she wanted to ask her husband but stopped herself, fearful that he would shrug his shoulders and say, ‘Allah knows.’

  A week later, the two brothers were sitting in Amma’s room, on the cot on which she had lain in a state of half-death asking for her dead husband, and her oldest son who was then in America. She had finally died on this cot and one of her last intelligible words had been ‘Rabia’. At the time of her death only her younger son and Jamila were with her. Rabia could be heard from the living room singing along with the jingles on TV. When they went to get her, she came into the room, stood watching the dead body of her mother, and then returned to the living room and turned up the TV’s volume.