by Omair Ahmad
She took a breath, turned to face him, and said, ‘I want to teach, Bhaijaan.’
And that was enough to silence his laughter. He didn’t answer at first, just wiped away the bit of kaju barfi that clung at the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief. Then he slowly lowered his angular frame into one of the four overstuffed chairs in the drawing room. He was leaning forward, looking at the faded carpet, so that his face was hidden from her. All she could see were the veins and tendons that stood out when he clasped his hands. ‘You don’t have to work, Bitiya, haven’t I taken care of you all these years?’
‘I’d like to teach,’ she repeated, but not so insistent that she would hurt him.
‘It’s just this year,’ Ismat said. ‘Once this is gone, we will start planning your wedding. I promise.’
But when she was silent, not saying anything, he knew that it wasn’t agreement that kept her quiet. Slowly he raised his head so that she could see the anger on his face.
‘Wait a year,’ he said flatly.
Still she didn’t speak.
And he burst out, ‘What do you want to become, a nun?’ He couldn’t stop himself after that, and continued in rage, ‘Or do you want to become like those schoolteachers with their ugly saris, their rough hands and their loud laughter, those women that have no future except to become spinsters or worse!’
She held herself back from saying it, but she was twenty-four years old now—already close to being a spinster by the calculations of all those around her. But he must have understood her. Hadn’t she been silent so long, and hadn’t he understood that silence all along?
‘I know I’ve failed you, Bitiya,’ he said bitterly, lowering his eyes. ‘I know that you deserved more from your brother, from life, from the inheritance that we received, but what more could I do?’
She couldn’t stand that, not from her beloved brother who had done everything for her, and she walked over to sit on the sofa next to him. With a hand on his shoulder, she said, ‘You haven’t failed me, Bhaijaan. Abbu and Ammi would have been proud of you. But you can’t keep me here forever.’
He refused to look at her, or to answer.
‘There are colleges as well, Bhaijaan,’ she said, not wishing to argue, trying to make things easier for him. ‘I could teach there instead, if you feel that a school would be too rough.’
It was a silly statement. Why would a college hire her, when she had no experience, just a degree—however fine it might be—with nobody to put in a word for her at a hiring committee? There were many more schools and she would have a far better chance with them.
Ismat turned to her, and said fiercely, ‘If you won’t give me a year, at least give me three months.’
What could she do but agree? She wasn’t in a position to refuse him anything. The only thing she could give, or withhold, were her prayers. So she kissed his right hand, and said, ‘My life has always been in your hands, for you to do with it as you wish.’
It took him four months, though, to find her the job at the Sir S.A. Alvi College in Moazzamabad. But that was not all that he had been searching for, or all that he found. He also found Rafiq, in whose hands he entrusted Shaista, a gift so large that Rafiq had no idea what to do with it.
3
It might have been rebellion, what happened next. It might have been Shaista laying claim to her life and her own pleasure at long last, casting aside all the rules and codes that had bound her for so long.
Or was it something much simpler, so truly simple that nobody could have understood, even if they knew? Something as natural as a young woman discovering the pleasure of her own body, the joy of her muscles, the lustre of her skin, the taste of her sweat? We cannot tell now: Rafiq had not the courage to ask, and Shaista kept her own counsel.
Not that she was as silent as she had been before. Something changed for Shaista with her marriage. It was not immediately obvious. Nobody would have noticed anything different when they saw her at the wedding ceremony, demure and hidden under the heavy weight of the embroidered and brocaded dupatta, with her slim hennaed hands the only bit of skin that could be seen. They would have been hard put to identify anything particularly significant in her tear-streaked face as she bid farewell to her brother. She behaved as any other bride did, sitting through every little ceremony and process that transformed her, for those few moments, into the ideal that the whole of society, like the two families, celebrated. If she was quieter than most, well, that was in character.
The change came later—two weeks after the wedding, ten days after the painful process of her first experience of sex. That first coupling was marked by no small amount of clumsiness matched by, if anything, a curious gentleness on Rafiq’s part, a gentleness that bordered almost on apology. (Would our story have turned out different had he loved a woman before this, with his heart or even his body alone? Who can tell? If you ask my opinion, I would say not. But let us leave that for another time …) Imagine Rafiq’s surprise, then, when only a few days later he felt Shaista move against him, her body blindly seeking his. Later she would hold him, guiding his body, moderating his movements, shaping him to her pleasure, teaching him rhythm and complexity, and to understand what each half-articulated sound that she made—the hiss, the gasp, the half-sigh—meant. Her body would flatten against his in bed, one foot rubbing against him, pulling him closer, her stomach touching lightly against his own.
It was not love. She never murmured his name, not in all the soft and secret sounds she made. She never reached for his face, never once mumbled words of encouragement or desire in his ear. Her face was always turned away, even her hands would lie flat and open next to her on the bed at the start, only clenching and grasping the sheets as the rest of her body rose and stretched, reacted to the caress of his fingers, to the dry touch of his lips at the nape of her neck.
Or maybe it was love. But not for him.
For all his petty vanities, or maybe because of them, Rafiq had a very fine ability to detect appreciation, and there was none of that in Shaista. There was only pleasure, the making of it and the partaking of it. It was something she wanted, something she enjoyed, something that opened her body to the world, that allowed her to breathe freely, to sleep soundly, to sigh her freedom with no thought except of her own satisfaction. When she guided him, as she made her way to the particular place she needed to go, he was only an outsider, necessary but, in the end, incidental to the process. The path she took was not one where she went with him, but alone. It took her somewhere inside of herself.
He could not go there with her, he was not welcome.
During the day, in the hours of sunlight, he thought of speaking about it to her, but that kind of courage was beyond him, had always been. There were no examples for him to follow, in the mohalla or even in all of Moazzamabad. Who spoke of desire in that place, and a woman’s desire at that? Such a topic would have raised snickers and sly glances, would have opened his name up to the taint of infamy, would have meant that Rafiq, foolish, foolish Rafiq, who was so close to achieving his dreams, would have them shattered in a burst of mockery that he would never be able to live down.
Oh yes, there were those who fancied themselves as ladies’ men, even in Moazzamabad there were those who boasted of their conquests in bed. But what did such conquests really amount to—the bedding of a servant girl, a tumble in the hay with some farmer’s smelly daughter on a patch of land that didn’t deserve the name any longer, but still called itself an estate?
Men of power with great landed estates at their command could have dancing girls perform at their pleasure, could patronize poets and singers in their kothas, and the taint would only enhance the standing that they enjoyed. Those were men who asserted their power by mocking the rules that held the rest in their place. They were insulated from the consequences of their crimes. But these latter-day zamindars—what were they with their two-dozen acres of land that the law allowed them, and maybe a few acres more hidden behind the name of some cousin
or other? What was their power? Where was the glory when an angry peasant stabbed Farhad Nizami in his bed, the same bed in which Farhad had tangled his legs with those of the peasant’s wife?
A grubby end to a grubby man.
Very early on in his life Rafiq had understood that he did not wish to be counted among these men. Even Ahmed Saeed’s younger brother, Shakeel, with his inflamed eyes, could not escape the ignominy that such deeds eventually brought. It mattered little that his family still maintained a measure of power with their row upon row of shops in the centre of town, with their sugar mill, and the profits from Tasveer Mahal, Moazzamabad’s first, and still its most respectable, movie theatre. It didn’t even make a difference that his excursions took place in Lucknow, some three hundred kilometres away. The scandal came back to Moazzamabad like a scent on his skin that would not leave him, that would mark him out at every gathering.
No wife ever accompanied her husband to Shakeel sahib’s house, and no child was allowed to go to his door, not even on Eid, to greet him on that auspicious day.
The world had changed after the British left, had started changing even before that. Now a man could not indulge his desire without paying the price. But a woman’s desire, when had that ever been discussed? Did such a thing even exist outside the pages of the smutty English novels with lingerie-clad women posing suggestively along the barrel of a gun? And even if it did, was a married woman, of a good family, allowed to exercise it, right here in Moazzamabad?
It was a baffling question, far beyond Rafiq. The world was not what he had imagined it to be. But at least one thing gave him comfort, and that was the company of the other men who would gather every day at Shabbir Manzil, and they too would discuss change, talking of a new world that was coming into being, one that was turning out to be wholly different from what they had imagined it would be.
By this time Rafiq was a member of good standing at the evening gatherings at Shabbir Manzil. He had a job, and a respectable job at that—one that didn’t require that he work too hard, or sweat, and which paid him a salary modest enough for him not to forget his station. And he had married well—too well, many had thought to themselves, until the true extent, or lack thereof, of Ismat Sharif’s fortunes had been revealed. The expenses of the marriage had been borne largely by Ahmed Saeed, the large banquet held in the lawns of Shabbir Manzil. Rafiq’s parents had had to rent a wedding hall to host the walima feast afterwards, and of course it was a little gauche and the members of the Shabbir household had sat in their own corner, sniffing genteelly at this and that, too polite to express their discomfort openly.
The great surprise had been the arrival of the elderly Shabbir sahib, Ahmed Saeed’s father, who was also Shaista’s maternal uncle, in the gleaming Buick. The short driveway was too tight for the car, and while people shouted for a cart to be pushed aside, a chair to be moved, a scooter to be tilted at an angle, Shabbir sahib peremptorily ordered Rustam to stop the car right there in the middle of the street, blocking all traffic, as he struggled out of the back seat. Old age had bent his spine, but he still towered over most of the people there as he made his way to the podium where the married couple was seated.
Rafiq saw Shabbir sahib hobbling towards them and tried to rise, pulling the uncomprehending Shaista by the hand, but Shabbir sahib gestured for them to sit. It was Ismat Sharif who held Shabbir sahib’s arm as the old man slowly climbed the three small steps to the podium. Shabbir sahib leaned over Shaista and kissed the top of her head. ’Jeeti raho, beta,’ he said. ‘It’s been many years since my sister left for Lucknow, and we have seen nothing of you since she died. Welcome home.’
A three-room area was cleared in one wing of Shabbir Manzil and made ready for the newly-weds, and they moved in immediately.
Rafiq’s place at the evening sessions was guaranteed, even if there were a few caveats. It was understood that his previous associations were not welcome. Whatever lessons he might have learned in the life he had lived before his sudden change of fortune were irrelevant, even a little distasteful. Nobody needed to be reminded that the lords of Shabbir Manzil had chosen to marry off one of their girls to a man from a family of no real background. People would be giving their daughters in marriage to their servants next. In fact, it was understood that Rafiq had not really existed before the marriage, his life only beginning when he had taken a ride in Ahmed Saeed’s jeep. He had no friends before that, only acquaintances, maybe even friendly acquaintances, but no one you could call a friend, or invite into your house. Why, even his brothers had never quite appreciated him. And how could they, when Rafiq’s own parents had not understood his true worth, how he was a prodigal, a one-in-a-thousand fluke of a gentleman born in the wrong circumstances?
With no past worth mentioning, it was also understood that Rafiq could never have the first word, or the last. What could he truly say to begin a conversation? It was not his station to muse on the strange ways of the universe, considering he was part of that mystery. And anything he said could always be put better, could always be declaimed more forcefully by the others who had sat in those gatherings at Shabbir Manzil for years, learning the subtle changes of social status, refining their ability to recognize the signs of an imminent fall from grace by that one seemingly casual remark, that one seeming oversight, the accident that had been planned so precisely that there could be no escape at all.
The most that Rafiq could do was nod along, say ‘Wah, wah’ in appreciation at some mot juste, but not too loudly, and if he was very lucky indeed, offer the correct verse from the poet that one of the elders was trying to recall unsuccessfully.
Truth be told, Rafiq was a ready accomplice in this crime, which robbed him of family and old friends, which stole from him his history and home. It seemed like a minor theft, or even a kind of deliverance. If all the things he had secretly been ashamed of, but which he had never had the audacity to discard before, were being taken from him, he would let it happen. Neither his conscience nor his courage were overly taxed. We’re all guilty of such betrayals and cowardice—in our little towns as much in your big cities. How else do we carry on …
And really, even if Rafiq had the nerve, the shamelessness, to speak, was this the right time? His condition was a small matter. Great changes were taking place. At Shabbir Manzil Rafiq finally heard about the riots. He had read about them in the newspapers, heard the news stories on the radio. And one day he asked the question.
For some reason Lal Sahib had not turned up that day, and with the one Hindu of the gathering missing, maybe Ahmed Saeed was freer with his words than he would have been. Or maybe it had something to do with the rise of Manoj Tripathi, the head priest at the Hanuman mandir. In a recent interview he had said that the name of Moazzamabad should be changed to Methi, a good old Indian name that carried no trace of the time when the Mughals ruled India. The British had been thrown out, and now it was time to show the Muslims their place.
It was hard to tell whether the last bit were Tripathi’s own words, or just the conclusion that the journalist had made in reporting the interview, but it was all that everybody had been discussing for the last two weeks.
‘Do you know about Jabalpur?’ Ahmed Saeed asked heavily.
Rafiq shook his head, although he did know that there had been a big riot there some years ago.
‘That year, 1961,’ Ahmed Saeed continued, ‘I was in Aligarh Muslim University, doing my LLB, in my third year. The first Hindu-Muslim riot since Partition, the newspapers called it. More than a thousand people killed.’
He shook his head. ‘We were caught completely unawares. Until that time all the riots had been about language, about creating Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, about breaking up Bombay State into Gujarat and Maharashtra. We’d got so used to riots about language and creating new states that we had almost forgotten that you could be killed for religion as well.
‘And you know what it was all about—or at least officially? A Muslim had married a Hindu. For this mor
e than a thousand people had bled their life out on the streets of Jabalpur.’
As Ahmed Saeed spoke, his voice gathered strength and anger, which was unusual for a man of his temperament. Everyone was quiet. ‘The government gave compensation, but our university decided to send money as well. We gathered three lakhs, and I was among the people who accompanied the team. I can’t tell you what it was like. There were houses that had been dynamited, while right next to them, separated by just a wall, would be a shop that was untouched. You could walk down a street and tell which shops had been owned by Muslims—they had all been burnt down. Gutted. I met this old woman who had a lump of copper that she was trying to sell. They told me later that she had been one of the richest people in her neighbourhood, but now all her sons were dead, her house burnt down, and that lump of copper was all she had, all that remained of her kitchen utensils.’
‘Why didn’t the government do anything?’ Rafiq asked.
‘The government?’ Ahmed Saeed almost spat. ‘Who do you think had done it, if not the government?’
‘Not Nehru?’ Rafiq said, almost whispering his incredulity.
Ahmed Saeed threw up his arms in frustration. ‘Who knows?’
After a moment he added, ‘No, I don’t think it was Nehru’s doing, but those were Congress ministers who managed it all. And Nehru did nothing. On All India Radio all that could be heard were his mumbled words—something about his head being bowed by the shame of it. Such shame he must have felt, we thought, that it must have paralysed him, because he moved not an inch from Delhi. Instead it was his daughter, Indira, who was tasked to go see to the good people of Jabalpur, but not before the roads she would take had been retarred. The stains of blood and burnt flesh had defeated the simple solution of soap and water that the municipal department had decided to employ at first. So it was decided that a layer of bitumen was necessary to shield the eyes of the prime minister’s daughter from the blood of Indian citizens. She was the country’s information minister, and I’ve always wondered what information she gathered for her shamed father. She was nobody’s fool. Of course nothing came of it.’
