Ghalib at Dusk Page 9

  Love: Unclassified

  ZAINAB AND MEHRU met for the first time at the Kutchery where Zainab was waiting for a tempo to take her to Jhusi, across the Ganga, on the outskirts of Allahabad. Zainab had bought a loaf of bread and a hundred gram packet of butter from the general store near her home as she was walking towards the Kutchery tempo stand. Her daughter was pregnant with her first child and had sent word that she had cravings for bread and butter. It was this daughter, her eldest, Zainab was going to visit in Jhusi. Zainab was wearing a green sari with a gold border and a dozen green and gold glass bangles on each wrist. The lady of the house where she worked had given the sari and the bangles to her when she finished the maalish of her newborn grandson. The red lipstick was a reckless last-minute excess. She had the gloss of a freshly plucked fruit in the dazzling winter sun. The sun’s rays shimmered off her skin. The corner of her eyes and the deep lines that formed an arch from her mouth to her nostrils, and even the rings of sagging skin around her neck took on a soft, almost invisible sheen.

  Zainab felt drawn to the well inside the Kutchery without any reason. With time, she came to interpret her going to the well as a sign of Mehru’s spiritual powers. It was Mehru, she believed, who willed her to climb the steps up to the well and look in. The well was a dark hole in the ground and the water too far below for her to see. Yet she peered into its depths for several minutes, so enticing did the milling blackness seem.

  It was Sunday. The lawyers and their clients who thronged the Kutchery on weekdays were absent. Silence hovered on the empty benches. The tea and samosa stalls were closed. A dog slept with its head tucked into its tail on the raised mud platform of one of the tea stalls. The place wore a desolate, run-down look, made all the more prominent by the silence. On weekdays its shabbiness was less obvious because of the crowds of lawyers in grimy black jackets and their munshis, bending over rusted typewriters, filling out applications and petitions, and the chatter of paan-chewing babus discussing politics. The hopelessness of the enterprise the petitioners and the lawyers engaged in, was heightened today by the empty spaces under chaurasi khamba, as the arched patio with its eighty-four pillars was called, which served as the lawyers’ offices. Nobody on that quiet Sunday afternoon came up to Zainab to ask what she was doing, in the vicinity of the chaurasi khamba, bending down into a well that had gone dry a long time ago.

  Zainab swore she saw Mehru’s reflection in the well. She remembered pulling back in horror. Whose face was that, she wondered? Her heart thudded so uncontrollably, she thought it might stop. She felt her feet riveted to the floor or she would’ve run. Had she really seen an image? Zainab turned away from the well but felt all the more startled to see the face—not just the face but a body to go with it—inches from her own. In the afternoon light beginning to lose its sharpness, the stranger’s body mingled and melted into the shadows.

  It was never clear to Zainab, whether Mehru had really stood beside her when she looked down into the well. Or how long they had stood next to each other. Had Mehru always lived at the bottom of the well all the time—her home, as she called it. These things are hard to explain, Zainab would say to herself. Why hadn’t she seen her own image in the well? Why had she seen only Mehru’s? And how was it that she saw any image at all given that there was hardly any water there? Mehru said she had become human from the moment Zainab looked down into the well because she fell in love with Zainab in that green sari.

  ‘You shouldn’t have stared down into my home,’ Mehru said, her eyes gazing with a steeliness that made Zainab shudder as if she’d been doused with buckets of cold water.

  ‘Who are you?’ Zainab mumbled.

  ‘I’m the joy of your heart, the light of your soul, the smile in your eyes, the love that your lonely heart seeks.’ Mehru smiled, moving closer to Zainab and fingering the golden pallu which had slid off Zainab’s head, exposing the wide parting, the neatly combed oiled hair, with silvery streaks of white gleaming here and there in the slanting light.

  ‘I’ve never seen you before,’ Zainab said, uncertainly. Mehru seemed like someone she knew and didn’t know.

  ‘You made me leave my resting place, Zainab begum,’ Mehru said playfully. ‘Why did you want me to come out? Now I’m out, I’ll be yours forever, in this world and the next.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Zainab repeated.

  ‘Whoever I am,’ Mehru said, ‘I’m yours from now until you die and leave this wretched world. In the next world, and all the worlds that you know of and don’t, I’ll be yours. No man was born to love you the way I will.’

  Zainab groped for her pallu as if caught out of purdah by a strange man. She covered her head, trembling. Then she looked at Mehru. What did she mean? No man was born to love you the way I will. Was she a man or a woman? Zainab had never seen anyone like her before. She was tall and thin, and wore a dirty dark brown shalwar suit that was torn in places. The kind men wear, and a thick watch, like a man’s, on her hairy wrist. Her sooty hair was uncombed and tied back with a rubber band. She looked somewhat like a woman and talked somewhat like a man. Zainab felt a pang of something hard to describe—pleasure, shame, anxiety—things she had felt before, but never all at once, and never for another woman.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Zainab asked.

  Mehru was smiling. ‘Mehrunnisa, but you shall call me Mehru. There’s so much love packed in my name. Try it, say it once.’

  Zainab swallowed but her mouth was dry and her tongue stuck to her palate.

  ‘Say my name. Meh-ru. Say it!’ Mehru reapeated in an angry whisper.

  ‘Mehru,’ Zainab said, as if the control of her voice had been signed over to this creature. ‘Mehru,’ she repeated, tasting the music in that name. She didn’t mind saying it over and over again, so sweet did it sound on her tongue. Like the watery music of tiny bells in anklets.

  They stood by the well for what seemed like hours or it could have been minutes. Time had frozen the moment Zainab had met Mehru. Zainab had no watch, but the short-lived warmth of the winter afternoon had faded, and the early evening light was a velvety pink, soft and cool.

  Zainab begum never made it to Jhusi to see her daughter that day.

  Mehru had moved in with Zainab after their meeting at the well. They were sitting on the charpai in Zainab’s room. It was the day after Zainab’s husband had left after a row in which Mehru had played a decisive role. Zainab’s two daughters had gone over to their aunt’s. Her son Shafi was out as usual, she knew not where, but the paan shop boys could always find him, if the need arose.

  Mehru’s powers were such that she could have turned herself into anything, human or animal, man or woman, she said. She chose to become a woman so that they could live together without making things difficult for Zainab. Zainab introduced Mehru to her family and neighbours as the cousin of a cousin who had come to Allahabad from the village, in search of work. Mehru had been there a month already, and hadn’t made an effort to get along with Zainab’s children or her husband or any of the neighbours.

  She gave Zainab’s daughters instructions on cooking and told her son off for not doing enough to help his mother. She was not courteous with Zainab’s husband and behaved as if he didn’t exist. She didn’t talk much with the other women who gawked at her as they washed clothes or dishes at the tap in the courtyard. She lay around all day on Zainab’s charpai, not helping out in any other way. But she ate only when Zainab returned from work.

  Zainab would dish out the food and place it on the floor at Mehru’s feet like an offering. She wouldn’t eat, unless Mehru first ate from the plate. She would drink water only after Mehru first took a sip from the glass.

  Late last night, things had got out of control. No suffering, no despair, no hardship, had ever given her the idea that she could change anything about her life. All of it was Fate. Her life, she believed, had been decided by Allah before she was born. And yet, last night, Zainab had changed her fate. With Mehru by her side, she felt she had acquired the stre
ngth of a dozen men.

  He had come home drunk as usual. He didn’t like cabbage and last night it was cabbage. He raised his arm to hit Zainab. Mehru was at his side in a second. She grabbed his raised arm and yanked it behind him. Even though he struggled, she clamped both his hands against his buttocks, and twisted them slowly, menacingly, until he gave out a tortured yelp, too weak to free himself from her iron-like grip.

  ‘If you ever raise your hand at her again,’ Mehru hissed, ‘I’ll break it.’

  Zainab scurried to the corner of the room, ready to ward off any blows with screams and curses if he came near her.

  ‘Who do you think you are?’ Zainab’s husband said in a faltering voice. His hands throbbed painfully and were bruised from the way Mehru had twisted them. There was a new tameness in his speech despite the couple of ten-rupee thailis he had downed.

  ‘Why don’t you send this motherfucker to his mother?’ Mehru turned to Zainab. ‘Let her cook mutton and chicken for him if he doesn’t like cabbage.’

  ‘Hold your tongue,’ Zainab pleaded.

  ‘Hold my tongue?’ Mehru cried. ‘And watch him hit you, son of a nawaab, because he doesn’t like cabbage? How much more do you want to take from this hijra?’

  ‘Zainab, if this … this randi stays here, I’m leaving and not coming back,’ Zainab’s husband said.

  ‘Let him, Zebu, let the bastard go.’ Mehru went to where Zainab crouched with downcast eyes. ‘I may be a whore, but he’s worse. He’s a hijra, pretending to be a man.’ She turned to Zainab’s husband. ‘There’s never going to be a better time for him to leave. Let him go. He might change his mind when the daaru wears off.’

  ‘He’s the father of my children,’ Zainab said vaguely.

  ‘He is? But can’t give a paisa to feed them?’

  ‘What will my daughter’s husband think? He’ll say your mother is so shameless, she threw her husband out of the house,’ Zainab said.

  ‘What does your daughter’s husband think when this motherfucker beats you? Has your son-in-law said anything then?’

  ‘Stop calling him a hijra!’ Zainab said.

  ‘Hijra, hijra! A thousand times a hijra. Rubbing his arms made of wax. You call him a man! He’s not even fit to be a hijra.’

  ‘You better stop your foul mouth or …’ Zainab’s husband got up, slapped his chest, but slumped down on the charpai again. ‘I let you live in my house because you’re Zainab’s cousin. Have I not treated you right? Like a woman? And this is the way you repay me? Calling me a hijra. It’s you who’s neither woman nor man. There’s nothing womanly about you,’ he said.

  ‘Is it going to be him or me, Zebu?’ Mehru bent over Zainab, so close that her breath condensed on Zainab’s face. ‘Him or me?’ she said hoarsely. ‘You choose. He stays or I. He goes or I.’

  ‘Bossing my wife in my own house,’ Zainab’s husband retorted. ‘You say you’re a woman, and you want to break up another woman’s home? I’ll not have it.’ He made another attempt to stand up and face Mehru but dropped down on the charpai as his legs buckled under.

  Neighbours gathered at the door from the three rooms next to Zainab’s room. They were used to Zainab’s husband yelling and beating her up. Usually they didn’t bother to interfere. But tonight, there seemed to be something different going on. His voice had been subdued by another, mightier voice.

  ‘It’s not your house. I pay the rent. You had better leave,’ Zainab said finally. She pulled herself up and moved over to the wall where their clothes hung from nails and took down his shirt, pants, scarf, and towel. Her face was set and expressionless, and her movements mechanical.

  ‘Who are you asking to leave? Your husband? You’ve gone mad. You’ve forgotten the teachings of our religion. Doesn’t Islam teach a woman to value her husband next to Allah? This witch has you under her spell. Just listen to her,’ he said, turning to face his neighbours at the door. ‘You all are my witnesses. It’s all this witch’s doing, this half-man-half-woman’s doing. She came into my house and has turned my wife against me.’

  Mehru started searching in the corner of the room where the stove was. She found a polythene bag big enough to stuff his belongings into. She jerked his clothes out of Zainab’s hands and shoved them into the bag and flung it at him. Then she pulled him up by the arm and pushed him towards the door.

  Zainab stood at the door with a wooden expression, struck by the slowness which had come over her. Dazed, she draped a torn shawl over the shoulders of the man with whom she had lived for more than two decades, who had fathered her four children, and who in all those years hadn’t given her a single reason to love him.

  The neighbours moved away from the door. He stood next to Zainab expectantly but a firm shove from Mehru landed him across the threshold into the courtyard. He staggered, hugging the polythene bag, head bowed. The bewildered unbelieving eyes of his neighbours followed him. He reached the courtyard gate. There he paused, a bent lonely-looking man, ghostly in the dim light from the four tiny dwellings crowded along the courtyard wall. He trudged up the steps, swaying at each step, his shawl trailing the ground behind him. Zainab, Mehru and the neighbours watched him walk until it was hard to distinguish him from the winter mist. He faded into the gathering fog and smoke from the smouldering roadside fires, where men sat warming themselves.

  And now, the day after he was gone, Zainab and Mehru sat in her little square room. Zainab’s daughters would be back from their aunt’s tonight. Zainab told her son his father was gone when he came back late last night. He didn’t seem to care, but he didn’t want Mehru taking his father’s place.

  ‘She must’ve done this,’ he said, looking at Mehru with cold hatred. ‘Soon she’ll make you throw us out too, and have you and this place all to herself. She’s put you under a spell, Amma. Blinded you. She’s destroying our family but you can’t see anything.’

  ‘You want to be the man of the house? Go out and earn something then,’ Zainab said.

  ‘Isn’t there anything to eat tonight?’ Shafi asked, evading his mother’s jab. ‘Work! Work! That’s all you ever say to me! There are no jobs. The only work I can find is washing cars, or cleaning houses like you. I want a proper job, a respectable job.’

  He swallowed large mouthfuls of the cold cabbage sabzi with pieces of rotis. Zainab watched him eat distractedly. She knew he wasted his time playing cards till late with his friends, most of whom worked at the kind of jobs her son considered beneath his status.

  Zainab was at the Kutchery again, waiting for a tempo to Jhusi. No messenger had been sent from her daughter’s house, so Zainab concluded she had not delivered yet. She had bought another loaf of bread and a packet of butter for her daughter.

  The day she met Mehru, almost two months ago, Zainab had also bought bread and butter, but she had never made it to Jhusi that day. She felt bad about that now. She should have gone last month but she didn’t want to take time off from work and lose her pay for the missed days. Nor had she decided how she was going to tell her eldest daughter about her father leaving. And also about Mehru.

  Mehru ran up, swinging a polythene bag filled with bananas.

  ‘Here, take this for our bitya,’ she said brusquely and ran back to where she had left her cart. She had started selling bananas near the Kutchery to help out with expenses.

  Zainab climbed into a tempo. The conductor, a boy, half hanging out from the doorless driver’s seat, shouted, ‘Civil Lines, Civil Lines!’ The men inside squeezed themselves to give her barely enough room at the seat’s edge. She held the polythene bags away from her body to protect the bread, butter and bananas from the jostling thighs and hips. She hoped no more passengers would climb in, but knew better. She strained to look out, past the heads of men pressing against her, at Mehru and her cart. She could just make out Mehru’s thin angular body, as the tempo merged into the crowd of rickshaws, bicycles, cars, pedestrians, and cattle. Mehru was talking to a customer and didn’t see her.

  Zainab was sli
ghtly amused at the folly of the men who seemed to enjoy rubbing thighs with her. They couldn’t guess how indifferent she was to their unspoken messages. Mehru had filled all the holes in her being which she had expected her husband to fill. Mehru had made her feel that love was not responsibility or playing roles. And yet, it was love that made you responsible towards the one you loved. She couldn’t tell if she loved Mehru because she was like a man, and real men had disappointed her. She loved Mehru like she had loved neither man nor woman. When Zainab looked at Mehru, she felt indescribable joy for she was her man and her woman, and both and more.

  She recognized the side street once they got to G.T. Road and turned into it. The tailor’s shop was on the left and the shop selling brooms, plastic tumblers and buckets on the right. There was an ekka waiting to pick up passengers but she decided to walk to save money for next day’s journey back home. The walk to her daughter’s house was long; it took her almost an hour to get to the dirt road where she turned right and walked another ten minutes.

  The sun was a ball of liquid gold, hanging low in the evening sky. The buttery fields of mustard stretched as far as Zainab could see, glowing a golden-orange in the departing sun. The cow was tied up in the yard and lowed when she saw Zainab, but then buried herself in the basin of feed that lay before her. Zainab walked past the cow. The silence felt full of foreboding. She knew that the birth was to take place at home, the mother-in-law said she knew of an experienced midwife in the village. So where could her daughter have gone in her condition where she couldn’t walk much?

  She peeped into the room. Her daughter had been sitting on the bed in this room when Zainab had come to see her last. Zainab walked in and set down the bread, butter and bananas on the bed. She found the matka near the stove in the yard and got herself a glass of water. She sat down near the stove and wiped her sweating face with her sari, stared at the cow, and drank. It was beginning to get quite dark.