Ghalib at Dusk Page 7

  He reads until one in the morning. His wife is snoring softly. She takes a sleeping pill every night. It keeps her asleep until two or three in the morning, after which she usually can’t sleep any more. In the past couple of years she’s become a bundle of aches and pains. Her insomnia seems to be getting worse. She’s getting old, he thinks, rearranging the pillows under his head and turning out the reading lamp. But, so am I, so am I. Dear God, is there no peace to be had even at this last juncture of one’s life?

  A soft swishing sound wakes him up. In the dark, he has to listen for a minute before he realizes it’s somebody pacing the length of the room.

  ‘Who is it?’ he asks, a little alarmed.

  ‘It’s just me,’ his wife whispers.

  ‘Are you all right? What time is it?’ he tries to locate the orange-red numbers of the alarm clock on the nightstand.

  ‘It’s about four. I’ve been up since three.’

  ‘But what is it?’

  ‘What can it be? The same old pain,’ she replies, pacing. ‘Walking seems to help.’

  ‘Should I rub some Iodex on your leg?’ he asks hesitantly.

  ‘No, no,’ she says, just as he expected. ‘Just try and go back to sleep. You’ll have trouble in the bathroom again in the morning otherwise. I’ll just get a hot water bag and that’ll help.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ he asks, relieved, and turns on his side.

  He can hear her in the kitchen. The clanging of some pots and pans, the sputtering sink tap, the trapped air bubbles followed by the gushing water. He listens as if his ears are hungry for all the sounds she makes despite trying to block them out and get back to sleep. He hears her enter the room several minutes later but pretends to be asleep. She gets in on her side of the bed and he hears the lapping sound of water in the rubber water bag as she places it on her right hip, where she gets the sciatica pains. He hears her shift, finding a comfortable position. Reassured by her satisfied sighs, he begins to doze off.

  ‘What is it now?’ he asks impatiently, angry from broken sleep.

  ‘Why don’t you go back to sleep? It’s nothing,’ she replies.

  ‘How can I sleep if I keep hearing things? I’m always worried about someone breaking into the house. What do you mean it’s nothing?’

  ‘It’s just the hot-water bag. All the water’s leaked out and the mattress is wet. So are my clothes.’

  ‘I’ve told you hundreds of times to buy a new one. But you won’t. Just to save a few rupees. What for? This sort of nuisance needn’t happen in the middle of the night.’

  ‘It’s all right. I’ll go and sleep in the other room,’ his wife mutters, going out.

  His ears follow the flap-flap of her rubber slippers on the marble floor going down the hallway to the guest bedroom. He hears a door close, and then all is quiet. But sleep is banished from his heavy eyes. Vaguely, and against his will, he recalls that she had asked him to bring her a hot water bag from London on his last business trip. About the only thing she wanted. Some idiotic notion she had in her head, that they were particularly well made in England. And he had meant to get it. But, and he feels exasperated with her for always managing to make him feel guilty, he had forgotten. So she wouldn’t go and buy one on her own now. They sell all sorts of imported things in Karachi these days, he urged her. There’s no need to bring anything from abroad. So what if you have to pay a little more? But she wouldn’t buy a new hot water bag. Has anybody understood women and their queer logic? Try as he might to blame his wife’s seeming illogic, somehow sleep eludes him.

  It is nearly dawn, time to get up for the fajar prayers. Of course, his restless conscience makes him admit, as he struggles to overcome the temptation to continue sleeping, there was a reason for not bringing the bag. He was with Neelam and didn’t want to buy it. He could see the English salesgirl cracking up over a drink with her boyfriend after work, relating the incident of the old Paki who came in with his mistress or wife half his age, asking for a hot water bag probably for his arthritic legs. He didn’t want to be the butt of some inconsequential joke cracked in a pub by a silly Englishwoman.

  The faint rubbery smell of the bag begins to grow in the room. Gripped with anxiety and unable to sleep, he sits up and yawns. From the window to his right, a quiet dawn is streaking the patch of visible sky grey. He feels for his glasses under the pillow. He yawns again as if to swallow some of the weighty silence. Despite the consistent whirring of the ceiling fan, the silence seems unwieldy, growing oppressive by the moment. He walks up to the window to the right and pulls it open. The humid freshness of the newly-breaking day seeps in with the chirping of the birds and the rustle of the leaves to reassure him. The world is still the same, he sighs, not knowing if he feels relieved or despondent. He wants to hear his wife’s regular snoring. He wants to know that while he’s sleepless and miserable, she, at least, has found respite. He thinks he’ll walk down the hallway to the guest room to check on her but decides against it. He doesn’t want to risk waking her up. She’s a light sleeper. Besides, if she isn’t asleep, what is he going to tell her? Any conversation with her at this odd hour is going to be awkward. He’s afraid it might trap him into becoming intimate with her. He has got through these years with her by shirking even the remotest possibility of any closeness. How else could two people with so little to keep them together have stayed together?

  He doesn’t want to miss the fajar prayer, so he drags his feet to the bathroom to wash himself. Again, as he prostrates himself before Allah, reciting from habit the suras, his real entreaties are not for forgiveness, but for concentration. Grant me, Oh merciful Allah, as your ninety-nine names imply, You who grant the true prayers of even the lowliest of your creatures, grant me the power to concentrate on You. He’s convinced if he can think of nothing while he prayed to Allah save Allah, his problems would somehow get resolved. But even as he beseeches Allah to let him focus on nothing but Himself, his mind lists all that’s wrong with his life, all that needs fixing, all that he could fix if only he reached that state of true love the sufis reached, where the distance between human and divine blurred. Restless with discontent, he reaches the end of his prayers. He rolls up the prayer mat, and, going out of the room, clears his throat loudly in the hallway, hoping that his wife would wake up and come out of the guest room.

  Usually he goes back to sleep for about an hour after saying his morning prayers. Today he may as well have his breakfast early. It’ll give him an additional hour or so in the bathroom to empty his bowels. He walks to the front door and unlocks it. The newspapers are lying outside in a roll, fastened with rubber bands. He bends down to pick them up, and getting up, closes the door with more noise than necessary.

  The guest-room door to his right opens and out comes his wife. She looks tired but that’s the way she always looks.

  ‘If you’re not too tired,’ he says, ‘I thought I could have my breakfast early today since I couldn’t go back to sleep after namaaz.’

  She yawns, and covering her mouth with her dupatta, flip-flops in her slippers down the hallway to the kitchen. He stares after her slightly bent figure going away from him, grey-white in the early morning light, and is truly puzzled as if he’s seeing, not her, but her ghost.

  He takes his papers to the dining room and switches on a light and the fan. Glancing at the headlines of all four of them, he tries to decide which one he’s going to read first, as he awaits the coming of his breakfast. All the news he’s going to read, he has read before. It seems nothing new ever happens in the world. People, whether politicians or businessmen, or the ordinary sweeper, all seem given to repetition.

  What was he going to do today that he hadn’t done yesterday? Could he omit even a single detail of his daily routine and hope to get away with it? He thought of not sitting in the bathroom today for as many hours as he did, and immediately was seized by a sense of great discomfort. He imagined himself young and free and loved, unburdened by guilt and ill health. A
great melancholy filled his heart, and he raised a hand to remove his glasses so that he could look upon a fuzzy world with a sense of letting go. At that moment he heard his wife’s slippers flapping in the hallway, and he lowered his hand to the tabletop. His fingers started drumming the smooth polished wood to show his impatience to his wife, as she entered, carrying the tray with the teapot and the toast.

  II

  ALLAHABAD / AHMEDABAD

  An Undelivered Letter

  THE DAY BEFORE her fifty-seventh birthday, Rahul’s mother had her first stroke. His father took care of her for a week, and then, because he could no longer stay away from his dispensary, asked Rahul to come home from Bombay. He wrote a letter to Rahul’s department chair at IIT, asking if Rahul could be granted a few days off for a family emergency, even though, he said in his letter, he knew how hard it would be to get permission to miss classes from his professors.

  Rahul took the night train from Bombay to Ahmedabad and arrived home on a Monday morning. His father was helping his mother get out of bed and walk to the washbasin in the hallway. She was dragging her feet, leaning heavily on his father, Rahul observed with dismay. He dumped his backpack in his room and returned to listen to his father’s instructions for his mother.

  During the day, he noticed how her body was divided into a good side and a bad side. Two images, one that still moved and felt, and the other stiff and unfeeling. The stroke had cracked her face: there was a half that mirrored her inner emotions and the other half, a frozen half that betrayed no muscular movements that could be construed as facial expressions. Taken together, the disparate halves gave her face a sage-like aloofness. She appeared disinterested in the goings-on around her, and mostly her eyes remained fixed and unseeing, though her sight was unaffected.

  She stood with her good right hand resting on the basin: a small woman, her bony body arched like a fallen twig. Her head, a flower drooping at the end of a stalk, set suddenly twitching without her being able to control it. Her paralysed left arm dangled by her side. Rahul soaped and washed her face, and rinsed her mouth by scooping water into it with his cupped hand. She raised her head slightly to peer into the mirror and lifted a few strands of hair, all of which was silvery white at the roots. Her slight frame trembled from the effort.

  ‘I want to go to Kamla’s parlour today,’ she said, a few days after he had come home. Her words came out slowly, as if she was having trouble remembering the sounds.

  ‘You mean your friend Kamla?’ Rahul cried. ‘Are you crazy? You can’t even walk properly yet.’ He pulled the towel off the stand with unnecessary force. His patience was wearing thin, as always, after having been near her for more than a day or two. And this time the reserve was being depleted even faster. She wasn’t an easy invalid.

  ‘Kamla’s girls are nice to me,’ she said. ‘They call me Aunty.’

  ‘Yes, I know they do. But how are we going to get there? All the way to Panchwati? We can’t walk to her place,’ he started dabbing her face with the towel. There was a roughness to the way his hand moved which he regretted later.

  She leaned all her weight into the sink, and kept parting and lifting her hair in different places with her good hand.

  ‘It’s all right to have white hair,’ Rahul snapped. ‘At your age, Mamma. I mean, half the guys on my IIT campus are greying, and they’re only in their twenties.’

  ‘Can we go to Kamla’s in the afternoon?’ she asked.

  ‘Let’s get you back to bed now,’ he said, taking her hand and turning her towards her room. ‘Breakfast is waiting.’

  This renewed attention to vanities must have to do with that man who had called earlier in the morning. Rahul had answered the phone. ‘Who’s this Gul Nihalani? The man who called?’ he shouted from the kitchen, dishing out the porridge his father had prepared before leaving for work.

  She was propped up in bed with pillows. He had helped her change into a clean nightgown. That was all she could wear these days, his father had said, just those loose front-opening gowns. Saris were out of the question. He wouldn’t have known where to start. They both avoided each other’s eye when she had to be undressed. He was a little surprised, even repelled, by the loose sagging skin of her belly, where once there had been fat and muscle.

  She sat with hands folded in her lap, the lifeless hand covered by the functional one. She looked aged, yet innocent and girlish, not the embittered woman he had known since childhood. Not even the fussing, angry, controlling mother he remembered from six months back, the last time he’d seen her. There was something about losing control of her body that had uncoiled her, resigned her to be at peace with herself.

  ‘A friend,’ she replied after a long wait.

  ‘Is he coming to see you?’ he asked, spooning porridge into her mouth.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A friend from college days?’ he asked.

  ‘From the old days,’ she said, her head beginning to tic. Then it hung down, and her gaze became fixed on her hands. When he tried to give her another spoonful of porridge, she shook her head.

  ‘That’s not good, Mamma, you’ve hardly eaten anything,’ he said, trying to give her another spoonful. But she sat staring at her hands and didn’t open her mouth.

  They were going to Kamla’s after all. Rahul had tried to feed his mother yoghurt and rice at lunch. She turned her face away and said she wasn’t hungry. Finally he said, ‘If you take a nap, we’ll go around four.’ He hadn’t gone to Kamla’s house since he left for college. She was an old friend of his mother’s. She had married into money and ran a beauty parlour from the ground floor of her mansion in Panchwati. As a boy Rahul used to sometimes ride his bicycle past its lawn-trimmed bungalows.

  Wrapping her good arm around his middle, he made her hobble down the four flights. By the time they were down in the compound of the apartment building, Rahul’s fresh cotton shirt was damp with perspiration. She wasn’t heavy, but her lifeless side made her body drag. All her weight leaned onto Rahul and exhausted him. He was irritated and wondered why he’d given in to her. What an ordeal it would be to get her up the stairs if coming down was so arduous.

  He raised his free arm to stop a rickshaw. The traffic on C.G. Road was less crazy than it would get in the evening with people returning from work. He felt embarrassed as if caught doing something unmanly. The passers-by and the T-shirt and earringwallas sitting on the ground outside the compound gate gazed idly at them. He imagined their eyes turning envious had he been with a girl his own age. The neighbours were luckily still inside, napping. None of the ladies his mother chatted with from her balcony were out yet. He glanced at her sideways. The bright daylight was making her squint. And the babble of buses, rickshaws and scooters, he could guess, must be terrifying. Even before the stroke, she hardly went out except to Kamla’s to get her hair dyed or to the temple with his father. Gusts of hot exhaust from the speeding buses blew smoke and gritty sand from the roadside into their eyes and mouths and scattered her scant hair all over her face, making her blink and almost hide her face in his shoulder. She couldn’t smooth her hair back into place because her good arm was around his waist.

  It was tougher to get her into the rickshaw than it was to get her down the stairs. She didn’t allow the rickshaw driver to help. Rahul had to use all his strength to lift her into the vehicle. He put her down on the seat like an irate coolie dumping a sack of flour. Then he came around the other side and slumped down next to her. The rickshaw jerked forward, its grunt blending in with the general clamour of the street. Rahul remained sullen and other than shouting directions to the driver, didn’t say a word. With muted attention he watched the schoolchildren returning home on their bicycles, weaving their way expertly through traffic and pedestrians thronging the narrow road. Until about three years ago, this was his own routine. She’d be out there, pacing the balcony, and if he arrived even a few minutes later than four-thirty, there’d be a barrage of questions. He felt ridiculous telling her he was late beca
use he had stopped at a friend’s house or at a bookstore. He was eighteen then, but she continued to treat him like her little boy.

  She muttered something about trees.

  ‘What?’ he shouted. ‘Say it louder.’

  ‘The trees! The trees!’ she whispered hoarsely.

  ‘Mamma, you mention the trees every time we go out. You know they’ve cut them down to make room for these atrocities of architecture,’ Rahul grimaced, waving his hand at the tall new buildings that had sprung up without planning or purpose all over his beloved city in the past few years. ‘They’re all gone, your trees.’

  He too missed the trees but not in a way that he paid much attention to. The increasing number of cars, scooters, rickshaws, their combined deafening noise, the smoke that stifled the air, irritated him more in Ahmedabad than they did in Bombay. In Bombay, he lived like a hermit on campus, hardly going into the city. There he could detach and ignore the ugliness as an inevitable part of urban chaos. But it was harder to ignore the same things in Ahmedabad because it was here that the vanished quietness of his boyhood streets, of the parched summer afternoons when even the tar under the wheels of his bicycle grew sticky—it was coming home to those absences that made him grieve. He would rather not come home at all.

  Kamla had grown stouter since Rahul had last seen her. She still had her robust manner of walking and talking. She marched towards them from her desk, the rolls of flesh on her midriff jiggling. Rahul wondered if she felt bored doing the same thing, making money, sitting all day, every day, behind that desk collecting cash from customers and gossiping while her ‘girls’ worked on clients’ hair or nails.