The rice store was in the cupboard next to the gas cylinder below the window. Aisha felt inside for the bulky paper packet. Standing by the stool where she had been sitting when Humayun kissed her, she unwrapped the burqa and tied it around her body as Mrs Ahmed had done. It was too big for her, and the folds flowed down from the crown of her head.
Outside in the street, she lifted the gate back on to its latch. Tonight there was no moon and the trees lining the road created a canopy that frightened her, made denser and more impenetrable by the layers of material in front of her eyes. But she walked slowly down the street, passed the Professor’s house and then, reaching the entrance to the basti, slowed down because the houses were built so very close together, and the street, with its small shuttered shops and stalls, was quiet, and she didn’t want to miss the turning to Iqbal’s house. She walked slowly, trying to see the outline of the houses through the burqa; they were blackened by fire, their roofs caved in, and she remembered what Mrs Ahmed had told her that morning, about the stampede and the burning.
Iqbal’s house was near the shrine, beyond the kabariwallah settlement, right up the hill just before the girls’ madrassah. It was a distinctive house, brick-built, only two storeys high. There was a dog lying in the road, and Aisha heard the drone of cars on the main road in the distance. When she approached the door, she could hear voices inside and wondered what she should say. At last, she raised her hand and knocked on the wood and somebody came to the door almost immediately. ‘Yes?’
In a low voice Aisha gave Iqbal’s name, and said, ‘A message from Aunt Raziya.’
It took some minutes to bring Iqbal to the door. ‘Excuse me, Auntie,’ he said when he arrived, ‘I was eating.’
Iqbal had recently become very religious, and he wore a white cap and shaved his upper lip; but his beard was still so exceedingly thin and wispy that Humayun liked to tease him for it. Aisha motioned him away from the house, around the dog, to the other side of the street. The wind was blowing the colour supplement of a newspaper across the road; a film actress with long billowing hair and a modern slinky sari smiled up from the banner of the paper.
‘I am Aisha,’ she said.
‘Aisha,’ he replied, his voice full of wonder, and she felt the hope that had left her when the Hindu man pushed her into the house return like a flock of brightly coloured birds alighting nosily in a tree.
‘Humayun is in trouble,’ she said. He bowed his head in acknowledgement. ‘Brother,’ Aisha went on, ‘I am in trouble too.’ In a hushed voice she explained about her mother’s plans, about the wedding, about the uncle, and the village. ‘If I stay in that house,’ she said, ‘they will come and take me.’
‘Yes,’ he said, nodding. Then he added, ‘Humayun’s mother will never let him marry you.’
They stood together in the road as the wind blew the newspapers and fire ash around them in a dirty, colourful squall. Aisha knew that they would have to hurry; if they stood here any longer, Humayun’s uncles would grow suspicious and come out to question them both.
At last, Iqbal spoke. ‘You should wait in the shrine,’ he said. ‘It is the safest place. Can you do that? You may get cold. Wait by the grave of Princess Jahanara, it is the most secluded part. Tomorrow, either Humayun or I will come and find you. You will have to wait for many hours, all night. You will have to be careful.’
He took some money from his pocket and handed it to her. ‘Buy something to eat from the stalls outside the shrine. If anybody questions you, say you are praying for a son, and that after some time your husband is coming to collect you.’
He turned to go, and then stopped. Aisha saw him stoop down to the ground and pick up a piece of blue string that had been used to tie up a bundle of newspapers.
‘Fix this on to the hem of your burqa,’ he said, ‘so that I can tell Humayun to look out for this mark.’
She thanked him.
‘Alhamdu lillahi allaa kulli haal,’ Iqbal said, and turned away towards the house. Praise to Allah in all circumstances.
Aisha watched him go, and stood there, alone in the street, thinking about what he had said. At last she set off, walking very slowly, towards the shrine, but as she walked, she thought about the police, and the crime Humayun had been accused of, and the marriage her mother wanted to make for her in Bihar, and the act that Humayun had performed, which bound him to her, and the more she thought about it the more clearly she saw that Iqbal’s advice was wrong.
She walked on, past the turning to the shrine and out to the main road. When she arrived at the police station she didn’t hesitate. With her envelope of money clutched tightly in her hand beneath her burqa, she walked up the steps and announced to the policeman on the desk what she was there for and that they had taken the wrong man. Then she held out the money.
Humayun was sitting on the ground with his back against the wall when he heard the sound of the door being unlocked from the outside. ‘You,’ he heard the policeman say, ‘there’s a woman here to take you. Get up. Quickly. Go.’
He shook his head, unbelieving. He had been in the police station for less than twenty-four hours, but already it felt as if days had passed. ‘Get out of here,’ the policeman was saying as he got to his feet, ‘and don’t come back. If you show your face again in Delhi we’ll do to that girlfriend of yours what we’ve done to you.’
Why weren’t they asking for money? Humayun wondered as they unlocked the cell and let him out. Then he felt in his pocket: they had taken the envelope with his pay from the Professor.
His mother was the last person he wanted to meet. But when he stepped outside, he saw two things: that it was night, and that the person waiting for him near the entrance was not his mother. It was a woman in a burqa. She was waiting for him at the end of the path by the gate.
‘Who are you?’ Humayun said as he approached.
She answered in a whisper: ‘I am Aisha.’
He stood speechless for a moment, staring at her. She was wearing a heavy black burqa with some gauzy thin material over the eyes, and he peered at her, disturbed by the distance this tiny piece of fabric put between them: it was as if they were seeing each other through a crowd of people.
‘What have they done to you?’ she said, looking at him in the light from the thana. ‘Is it just your face or anywhere else too?’
‘Nowhere else,’ he lied; but his body was hot with pain. ‘Just my face. What did you do to get me out?’
‘I went to see your cousin Iqbal. He told me to wait for you in the shrine. But I thought of you with the police—’ She broke off, unable to describe the terrible things that had occurred to her. ‘So I came here instead.’
He lifted away the cloth from over her face and looked at her. ‘You saved me,’ he said. Every hour that he had lain in that cell the worst imaginings had preyed on him: that she had accepted another man’s advances, that she had allowed herself to be taken. Now he wanted to press her closely to him to shut out all the things that had happened.
‘We have to leave the city tonight,’ she said. ‘My mother wants to send me to Bihar to be married.’
He nodded. ‘Do you have your salary?’
‘I gave it to the officer. Do you have yours?’
‘They took it from me.’
There was silence between them for a moment, and then he said, ‘I’ll have to go to my mother’s and get some money.’ The police station itself was quiet, but to get to his mother’s shop they would have to pass through the market. ‘Pull the veil across again and walk behind me.’
They set off towards the market. Where the main street intersected with the road leading up to the shrine, Humayun feared coming across one or other of his uncles, who often went there to pray or to meet their friends. But it was night-time and nobody stopped them. When they reached the street before the tailor’s shop, he found a place for Aisha to sit on a wall next to the large domed tomb by the road, which had recently been cleared of the families living in it by the city autho
rities. ‘Don’t move from here,’ he said. ‘Don’t speak to anyone. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
His mother’s shop was closed when he reached it, the shutter down, but the light was on, and he knew that she was inside, working. She would be sitting at the front of the shop, checking a garment that one of her workers had finished, examining seams and stitches – and proudly glancing every now and then at the little pile of coloured business cards that she had just had printed. He stood there sullenly, like a child, wondering what to do; trying to keep the memory of Aisha intact inside him before his mother trampled it again with her anger, her passionate denunciations, her histrionic yet accurate version of the world as a place of whoring daughters, traitor sons, emasculated fathers and lascivious Hindu police constables.
At last he came to a decision. He walked down the alleyway that ran round the back of the shop and climbed the outside staircase. At the top he unlocked the padlock to the kitchen door, crept in, fumbling as he reached the bedroom, and slipped his hand under her mattress where she kept the key to her trunk. He lifted down the trunk from the shelf. She stored the gold at the very bottom, below her few good saris and her best kitchen utensils. She never wore the jewellery, and once, when she showed it to him, she told him she was saving it for her daughter-in-law. That was long before Humayun fell in love with Aisha.
The gold was still there, wrapped in a purple-flowered cloth. There was a bundle of notes in there, too, and he put it all into the jute bag he had used for schoolbooks when he was a child. Finally, he reached his hand down the side of the trunk and felt for the plastic-wrapped packet of papers where she kept the ration card and school leaving certificate and, most importantly, his driving licence. He left the ration card for her in the trunk. The rest of the papers he put in his pocket. Then he locked the trunk again, heaved it back onto the shelf and before leaving the house, he wrote his mother a note.
Mother, Aisha came to free me from the police. The police have beaten me and told me to leave Delhi. I know that you don’t support our marriage but it is too late to do anything different. I have taken the jewellery you set aside for my wife and the money. Please forgive me. Your son, Humayun
He left the note on the bed, looked around him one last time at the house where he had spent most of his life, and before his sense of panic had time to take hold, he locked the door and slipped away down the street. They would escape from Delhi with the money. He would sell the gold, and they would marry, become husband and wife, and start a family. He would buy them train tickets tonight to a place high up in the hills, or next to the sea. Aisha had never seen the sea.
chapter 7
Normally Shiva Prasad thought of his morning visit to the bathroom as a time for fertile meditation, for flashes of inspiration even, but the day after the wedding he was unable to think about his family, or his parliamentary ambitions, or his Autobiography without the memory of the girl – her soft skin and petrified eyes – tripping up his thoughts. He crouched there, naked, and all he could see was her small, dark, terrified face. Eventually, he tried to rouse himself by splashing cool water from the bucket over his person. He stood up, soaped and rinsed, soaped and rinsed, three times, but still that strange aura of the girl wouldn’t leave him; it was as if her dirty-sweet odour had become lodged for ever in his nostrils.
Try as he might, he couldn’t forget her; he turned again and again to that moment of the great gushing forth, that amazing spiritual tingling, the erupting of a spring of soma, the unforeseen bestowing of the sacred effluence of his body. His mind filled with parallels from India’s distant past. There was Lord Arjuna who was a great practiser of austerities, but even during his years of celibacy he abducted the girl Subhadra (at Lord Krishna’s suggestion) and seduced two princesses. Arjuna also spurned the nymph Urvashi, and was cursed by her to become a eunuch for a year; didn’t every Hindu man know that to refuse an amorous lady was to risk emasculation? Such were the lessons of history. And Shiva Prasad sat and remembered the moment of embrace, when he had uttered a cry that sounded unearthly and remote, as if a message was being transmitted from some distant, snowy place.
There was a rapping on the bathroom door. ‘What are you doing in there?’ his wife called.
Shiva Prasad lifted his towel down off its hook and carefully dried his body, pulling on the clean kurta his wife had left out for him and removing the wax from both ears with a finger. As he did so, he gave himself over to rational thought. There were several significant things:
1. She never said no. She never actually said no. He was overcome by amorousness and she responded to his advances of her own volition. (Why didn’t he pay her? Should he say that he paid her?)
2. A jury would believe anything they were told about those dirty, fundo Nizamuddin-dargah Muslims – especially a carefully selected Hindu jury. He would tell them that she beckoned to him, that she led him inside, that she behaved like one of the dancing girls from Emperor Babur’s harem.
3. Of course it would never actually get to court. Shiva Prasad knew those families – they had no desire to publicise such dishonour, unless they saw money in it. Shiva Prasad, on the other hand, was a pillar of the Delhi establishment. They couldn’t possibly win.
4. Where was the proof?
Feeling better, he exited the bathroom, called his wife into their bedroom to cut his toenails and powder the soles of his feet until they exceeded even their customary silky softness, and then, as she began opening cupboards and jewellery boxes – preparing, in the usual fussy way of women, for Sunita’s wedding lunch – he dressed himself in his finest cotton dhoti and locked himself into his study to make a new life plan.
For an hour, Shiva Prasad sat absolutely still, staring out of the window and listening to the cooing of the pigeons who had made their home in the water-cooler, and going through his options. Certain key lifestyle changes presented themselves for his perusal. The first one was the easiest and the best: from henceforth there was to be a total boycott of his son-in-law’s family. Since there was no time like the present, Shiva Prasad summoned his wife into his study and communicated this stricture to her in no uncertain terms. From this day forward, he explained, they were to circumscribe all social contact with Professor Chaturvedi on the grounds that the man was an anti-national secularist, who had refused to modify his heretical statements about key Hindu gods, and thus posed a personal danger to Shiva Prasad’s standing with the ruling party. ‘Social contact’ included the wedding lunch today – he had been thinking it for some time and there was nothing she could say to change his mind – and before she could argue, and regardless of her tears, he picked up the telephone and rang the India International Centre, informing the Manager at Reception that he and his wife would not be attending Professor Chaturvedi’s function, and asking him to convey a message to the Professor to that effect. Then Shiva Prasad summoned his assistant for some emergency Autobiography dictation.
Strictly speaking it was Manoj’s day off, and when he arrived an hour later, looking flustered and hot, he was carrying a small electronic item in a battered cardboard box. ‘A dictaphone, sir,’ he explained. ‘You speak now, I transcribe later.’
Shiva Prasad regarded this innovation doubtfully. He had been enjoying the sight of his words flowing out of his employee’s black Parker pen. But Manoj placed the object on the study table, pressed the red button, said, ‘Hello hello, testing testing,’ and then played his own voice back to his employer.
Despite himself, Shiva Prasad was remarkably pleased by this clever device. For the rest of the day his wife had to explain to the non-stop wedding visitors who arrived with boxes of sweets and smiles of goodwill, that her husband was working hard on his Autobiography and could not be disturbed. Every now and then, in between visitations, she put her ear to the door of the study and listened to the murmuring of his voice as he rehearsed the great, unparalleled glories of his life so far – and his life as he foresaw it, stretching away into the even more glorious fu
ture.
But the next morning, when he woke up, Shiva Prasad remembered his dream – he was being butchered, slowly and with great precision, by the girl’s father and her brothers. ‘He’s in good shape,’ they said to each other. ‘He’ll sell well on the bone.’ They stripped him of his clothes and called a washerman, an old man with a long white beard, who wrapped Shiva Prasad in a burqa that smelt of semen, and carried him down to the sewer. The girl was there, washing herself in the stinking water. ‘You should use Ayurvedic soap,’ Shiva Prasad called out to her. ‘Do it halal,’ the girl replied.
When his wife came upstairs with his bed tea, she asked him, ‘Why did you make so much . . . moaning in the night? You were thrashing about so much, I thought you were having a fit.’ And Shiva Prasad remembered how he had twisted and turned, trying to break free from the tight swaddling, trying not to be drowned in the dirty nala water.
He sat up in bed, sipped his tea and regarded his wife warily. His dream had precipitated a decision – one dictated by fear, but he couldn’t tell her that – and he wished to implement it without delay. ‘I have been a student,’ he said eventually, ‘I have been a householder, successfully siring children and marrying off my daughter. According to the holy texts, the first two stages of a Hindu life are thus complete. Dharma now requires that I retire to the forest for a period of celibate austerity. My wife may accompany me if she wishes (but that is optional). Then, after some years, I will reach the fourth stage, when, renouncing all worldly possessions – including you yourself – I will wander Bharat till the time of my passing, living on alms only.’
To his regret – but not, he had to admit, his surprise – she burst into tears. He had no clear idea why, however; for they had not been intimate for many years. If it was not the celibacy that she feared, it must be the loss of material things. The tea parties, the silk saris, the visits to her favourite hairdresser and cousins. Yes, she must be crying for those superfluous items. But he couldn’t help it. This was Dharma. Nothing could change it.
Leela's Book Page 27
