Afterwards she knew that she hadn’t been mistaken: on the telephone she remembered inviting them for lunch, and she remembered them agreeing, and hence that Thursday she spent all morning in the kitchen with Aisha, preparing this thing and that thing and sending Humayun out twice before twelve o’clock to pick up curd and some sweets her friend Shobha liked from a shop in Defence Colony, and by the time the two of them rang on the doorbell it was all laid out on the long dining-room table – the yoghurt curry and pulped aubergine and stuffed bitter gourd and daal topped with coriander – and the rice was done, and Aisha was standing in the kitchen rolling out chapatis.
At first, everything had seemed almost as normal. The three of them sat in Urvashi’s big front room, on the chairs she had arranged under the window, sipping milky tea with just the right amount of ginger, as prepared by Aisha. The friends looked around them and admired the house, its scale, its brand-newness. She took them upstairs, through their bedroom, to the roof terrace, and downstairs again to appreciate the garden that Aisha watered every afternoon. By now forty minutes had passed; it was time for lunch. And so Urvashi led her friends towards the dining room.
‘But we’ve eaten already!’ her friends said in unison as they stood on the threshold, looking at the table with its line of covered dishes. ‘We ate before coming!’
‘How can you have eaten?’ Urvashi asked in wonder. They lived in Saket, so the drive to Nizamuddin must have taken them at least half an hour. She had never heard of anyone eating lunch at eleven o’clock.
The schoolfriends glanced at each other. ‘My bhabhi made me eat some of her uttapam just before I left,’ said Shobha. ‘She loves this south-Indian khana.’
‘I am on a diet,’ said Shoma with a giggle.
‘Come, try just a little,’ Urvashi urged them, still not understanding. She pointed to the dishes she had spent all morning making. She tried to force them, taking an empty plate, and spooning a little bit of curry onto it, tearing a chapati in two and placing half on each plate, anything for the sake of decorum. But her friends wouldn’t lift even a morsel of the food she had made to their lips. They wouldn’t so much as sit down at the dining-room table. They don’t want to eat in a Muslim household, Urvashi realised suddenly. But it isn’t a Muslim household, she felt like saying. It’s just me, and my husband who happens to be Muslim. It wasn’t until this day that Urvashi realised how far she had been cast out.
When Feroze came home that evening he found his wife in tears, and the fridge crammed with more food than they could eat in a week. He packed the aubergine and curry and karela himself into tiffin boxes, and rang his mother and told her to send the driver to collect it. But Urvashi was inconsolable at the rejection.
Yellow cow, lightning strike, Allah the Beneficent, the Merciful. No longer able to bear thinking about her friends, Urvashi went to sit in her husband’s study, the Book on his desk, illuminated by one strong desk lamp. The text was in English and Arabic, its pages whispered as you turned them, strangely devoid of images, unlike her Hindu books, which had been illustrated with pictures of Arjuna and Krishna and other ancient heroes.
At nine o’clock Feroze rang to say that he wouldn’t be home for another two hours. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. She answered truthfully: ‘Reading the Qur’an.’
‘Oh, Urvashi.’ His voice was full of concern. ‘Look,’ he began again, purposeful this time: and told her that he had rung his mother, that they were expecting her for dinner, that some cousin was visiting from Aligarh, that she must promise to call a cab from the market and go to the old city at once and not to spend any more time sitting at home reading the Holy—
Urvashi promised. But sitting in the taxi, watching the city pass, she thought of her in-laws’ questions and their eager, concerned faces, and the whispers that would have gone round all the relatives’ houses about her having been excluded from her sister’s wedding, and the rich oily biryani they would force her to eat, and the pink sugary sharbat which she hated that they would make her drink. She couldn’t face it. By now the car had reached Daryaganj. Soon she would have to get out and take a cycle rickshaw. She thought suddenly of the great mosque where she had been taken by Feroze one Saturday afternoon to admire the beauty of the architecture (he was never interested in explaining his religion). ‘Take me on to the Jama Masjid,’ she said to the driver.
But when the car turned left towards the great mosque and she saw it looming above her, lifted up from the squalor and the crowds by its flights of red sandstone steps, again her courage failed her. She couldn’t approach that place alone at night, a Hindu woman.
She was aware that her mind was behaving erratically but there was no point making a pretence. ‘Take me back to Nizamuddin West,’ she said to the driver, the panic fluttering inside her, not caring if she appeared contradictory and wilful. It was ten o’clock already. Feroze would be home by eleven.
The taxi headlights scrolled across the front of Urvashi’s house in Nizamuddin and her first thought was that Feroze wasn’t home yet: his car wasn’t here. The taxi lights came to rest on a figure slouched against the pots and ferns just inside the gate. The taxi driver braked. ‘What’s happened?’ asked Urvashi. The driver left the engine running as he went to look.
‘A young girl,’ he said when he came back. ‘Something’s wrong.’
Urvashi got out of the car. The body, lying just inside her front gate, was still. But she knew who it was immediately – from the yellow chiffon suit she wore. Her first reaction on seeing the limp body of her maid under her tobacco plants and Himalayan ferns was one of fear: What have I done? And then she remembered that she was supposed to have stopped by to collect Aisha from the Professor’s house at the end of her afternoon shift.
‘Help me,’ she said to the taxi driver. ‘We must take her inside.’
The house had three floors. On the ground floor, opposite the dining room, was a suite that Urvashi’s husband had designated for his mother, who was coming to stay with them in a week’s time, for this, Urvashi’s first Ramzan in her own home. On the first floor was a balcony room overlooking the garden – Urvashi and Feroze’s bedroom – and a nursery for their unborn child. The entire second floor, a barsaati of sorts on the roof terrace, was completely empty. It was waiting, like Urvashi’s life, to be filled by the future.
‘We’ll put her in the ground-floor room,’ said Urvashi.
Between them, they carried the maid across the marble entrance hall, and laid her on the double bed.
‘Rape,’ the doctor said later. ‘How old is she? Older than she looks, I imagine. Endemic undernourishment. Bathe her, feed her, and then let her sleep.’
‘Shouldn’t we report it?’ Urvashi asked.
‘You can,’ he said, ‘but where is she from? Nizamuddin basti? It was probably someone in her own family. Try to get her to eat something.’
‘But it’s a crime,’ Urvashi said.
The doctor, a middle-aged man with a spreading waist and a kind face, said, ‘She won’t want to make a fuss. These victims never do. And the police won’t be interested in pursuing justice for a girl from Nizamuddin basti.’
‘Isn’t there anything you can do?’
He sighed. ‘If you insist, I can take samples, in my private capacity.’
‘Samples?’ said Urvashi. She had no idea what they were for, but she answered firmly, ‘Yes, please do.’
Half an hour later, as the doctor left, he wrote a prescription: ‘You’ll be able to buy it first thing in the morning. It’s the best precaution, after the event.’
Urvashi nodded; but she still recoiled at the injustice of burying the crime, and as soon as the doctor left, she phoned the Nizamuddin police station and told them what had happened.
‘We had better examine the victim,’ the policeman said.
‘The doctor’s seen her. She’s asleep now.’
‘Who else lives or works in the house?’ the policeman asked, and Urvashi gave the name of her husband,
Feroze, and her driver, Humayun.
The policeman called over to a colleague. They conferred, and then he said to Urvashi: ‘You should bring her in at the earliest. The duty officer arrives at nine.’
‘I’ll bring her in the morning,’ she replied, and before he could argue further, she put down the phone.
Feroze came home from the press an hour later. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said when he saw the agitated expression on his young wife’s face. Urvashi had tied back her hair. Her dupatta was knotted behind her and her kurta was wet. But she had managed to clean the girl up.
‘Aisha is here,’ she whispered. ‘She’s been raped. I found her outside the house. I gave her something to help her sleep.’
‘So what is she doing in our house?’ he said. ‘Send her home. She’ll need her mother. It isn’t our business. She’s our servant; you don’t know their ways. Her people will deal with her. Not you.’
Urvashi shook her head. Ever since she and her husband moved away from his family in the old city, and into their own house, she had been beset by anxiety and relief – relief at her independence, anxiety at how she would manage to run a household alone. Servants were her main source of worry and hope, and she was as eager to make friends with her young maid and driver as she was not to be misled by their mysterious and unfathomable servant-class ways. But Feroze, instead of bolstering her confidence, challenged her at every step: reminding her again and again of her Hindu ignorance about the way these people – these Muslim servants – lived. He who had lectured her while they were living in the old city on the essential similarity of human beings – telling her that what seemed familiar in her parents’ home and alien in his was nothing, just an illusion – now found her empathy embarrassing. Now he emphasised only the distance between them.
Urvashi looked at him; remembered how she had held Aisha, had washed her skin and soothed her: You’re a man, she said to herself, what do you know? And as she opened her mouth to disagree with him for perhaps the first time since they were married, Urvashi felt a flattering sense of righteousness.
‘Aisha won’t go home,’ she said. ‘She’s scared. I’m keeping her here. And she’s stayed before. Last month when you were away in Bombay. As soon as Humayun gets in I’ll send him to her mother’s house to tell them she’ll be back in the morning.’
That night, Urvashi sat with Aisha until the girl fell asleep. Humayun hadn’t returned after driving the Chaturvedis to the wedding, but Urvashi barely noticed. From her chair by the window she kept watch over Aisha. The girl’s forehead was hot, and her hair, which she wore oiled and stretched into a tight plait during the day, spread across the pillow, like tentacles, or the leaves of the spider palm, or the outstretched arms of the angered goddess Kali. Aisha fell asleep at last, and Urvashi looked down at the gently parted lips, watched a smile that moved across Aisha’s face as she dreamed, and tentatively, furtively, she tasted the sweetness of charity. She was doing something good, at last. She listened to the hall clock, to the approaching, receding tapping of the night watchman. Could Aisha take me to the mosque? she wondered drowsily. Could we go to the Jama Masjid together? And the thought occurred to her: Our baby will be like this. A Muslim. A girl like Aisha.
‘They don’t wear bindis,’ her husband had said to her when Urvashi gave Aisha a packet of gold-embossed oval stickers on the morning she started work, and showed her how to press them onto her forehead.
‘They don’t put up photographs,’ he said again, when Urvashi tried to please her new servants by taking out her camera. ‘They aren’t like you.’
But you take photographs, she thought to herself. Your cousins wear bindis. And you’re a Muslim. Why is that?
‘Why are you marrying a Muslim?’ Urvashi’s sister Sunita had asked her, wide-eyed, in the days before they stopped discussing such things. And Urvashi answered her sister’s question with the impervious, age-old reply: ‘Because I love him, of course.’
But sometimes she felt it wasn’t true. Did she love him enough? Not enough to understand his mother. Not enough to be happy in the house he grew up in. Not enough to read about the prophets. Not enough to ask about the cousins in Karachi, or to learn his aunt’s recipe for biryani. I will try harder, she thought now, stroking Aisha’s forehead and flushed cheeks.
Feroze was asleep by the time Urvashi walked upstairs to bed. She slipped in beside him, willing the sleep to come, but her heart was beating too fast. She was remembering how, the week after her schoolfriends refused to eat the food she had prepared, she had walked to the market in Nizamuddin to visit the tailor and noticed the new Islamic bookshop on the corner by the sweetshop. After glancing through the shelves of religious books and guidance pamphlets, she picked out two books and took them to the counter.
‘Are you a Muslim?’ they asked her curiously, when she handed them the fifteen-rupees Glossary of Muslim Names and Mufti Allie Haroun Sheik’s twenty-five-rupees Islamic Principles on Family Planning. Urvashi had not known what to reply. But back home, she showed the first book to her husband, and he was pleased. ‘Look,’ he turned to the page where his name was written: ‘Feroz: Emerald. Your jewel of a husband.’ But then he picked up the second book and shook his head. ‘No, Uzma, please. Not this. Don’t read it.’
Urvashi had read it, however. It dealt with contraception (azl, she learnt with embarrassment, was the Arabic term for withdrawal); with abortion and polygamy; with homicide, Jihad, apostasy, adultery and highway robbery (under Section 3.5: Accepted Reasons for the Termination of Life). It also dealt with rape. ‘The essence of rape,’ the writer explained, ‘is that it is without the consent of the woman, and herein lies the difficulty. Modern psychiatrists have amply studied the behaviour of errant young girls and women coming before the courts in all sorts of cases. Their psychic complexes are various, distorted partly by inherent defects, diseased derangements or abnormal instincts, bad social environment, and partly by temporary physiological or emotional conditions. One form taken by these complexes is that of contriving false charges of sexual offences by men. The unchaste mentality finds incidental but direct expression in the narration of imaginary sex incidents of which the narrator is the heroine or victim. However, too often the real victim in such cases is the innocent man.’
‘Did he rape you?’ Urvashi’s mother had asked in a whisper when Urvashi went to her, before she eloped, with the news of her baby. ‘Should I tell your father he raped you?’
‘Don’t be stupid, Ma,’ Ram had said. ‘They wanted it, they’re in love, they’re getting married, can’t you see? They’re going to have a child.’
But Urvashi was never sure what she would have said if Ram hadn’t been there. And that night, when she left home for ever, taking with her only a suitcase of clothes (all that remained of her childhood), her mother stood in the doorway quoting the Gita: ‘The intermixture of castes drags down to hell both those who destroy the family and the family itself. The spirits of the ancestors fall, deprived of their offerings of rice and water. Such are the evils caused.’
One week later, barely a week before their wedding, when Urvashi miscarried, she remembered those words and went to Feroze to tell him that he was free (that she was free, that no intermixture of castes and faiths and classes need occur). To her surprise, he declined her offer. ‘I want to marry you anyway,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know that?’ But she had not known. And it was then she discovered, to her surprise, how honourable his intentions were – and how honourable that made her feel.
And in Nizamuddin Urvashi fell asleep at last: her baby inside her, her good cause shielded from any further harm, her mind uplifted by its new resolve.
chapter 17
On the night that Aisha was raped, a rumour spread through the huts on the edge of Nizamuddin’s sewer: the Elephant-headed Demon has returned. This creature – with its whirling eyes and whip-like trunk, which murmured curses at a pitch that only babies and old crones could hear – was seen by a woman as she walked down to the
pipe to fetch some water. Everybody who grew up in certain neighbourhoods of Delhi knew about these demons, which came periodically to terrify the city. Only six months earlier, during the hot summer, slum dwellers from the illegal settlements down by the river had fled their houses during the apparition of a Monkey Man: a creature like the Hindu god Hanuman, but wicked, which could leap over houses and kill children with its hands. Newspapers testified that children were crushed in the stampede of residents trying to escape from the slum. Ministers took the opportunity to bring forward their hygienic plans for urban cleansing. One woman, convinced that she was being pursued by the Monkey Man, leapt to her death from a two-storey building.
The Elephant Demon rumour began when a group of women and young girls arrived at the nala pipe with their buckets, to find their neighbour standing and pointing to the sky: ‘A demon leapt across the drain from bank to bank,’ she said. ‘It pulled itself up by its trunk.’ Perhaps at any other time of year, the women would have accused this harassed mother of having visions. But on this night, so soon before Diwali, less than a week to go before Ramzan, at a time of hikes in the price of everything from kerosene to sugar, when the flour sold by the ration shops was blackened with mould, when there were reports that the government was planning to clean out unsavoury migrants from the centre of Delhi, the rumour tipped them into panic. One by one, frightened parents grabbed their children, left pots of rice where they were boiling on tiny fires, and ran across the sewer and through the streets of the basti, to hide from the demon’s machinations in Nizamuddin’s shrine.
By the time of the last prayer, almost two hundred parents and children from Nizamuddin’s poorest and dirtiest quarters had gathered around saint Nizamuddin’s marble-fretted grave. The keepers of the shrine tried to quell their fear by insisting that as Muslims they shouldn’t heed such stories. But everyone here had grown up with the knowledge of djinns. The crowd continued to talk in frightened voices; soon respectable parents from adjacent houses began to gather in the shrine; and before long, those with more colourful imaginations were terrifying even nonchalant bystanders with visions of what the demon might do to the poor, to the elderly and, above all, to those of the minority religion.
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