by Omair Ahmad
Ahmed Saeed slumped, exhausted, and glowered, his gaze focused out to the city, to the rest of the country that had turned out so treacherous.
‘Didn’t Shabbir sahib go to Delhi?’ Khan Jamali asked.
Ahmed Saeed said nothing. Then, after a while, he nodded but refused to say anything more.
Nobody had much to say after that, and one by one they made their excuses and slunk away.
Shabbir sahib had gone, Rafiq learned later. Not immediately, but he had gone. He had only just retired from the High Court in Allahabad, and he decided to go on his own, a private citizen who had served his country with honesty, and his head held high, used to passing judgement. He left for Jabalpur accompanied only by Rustam, telling nobody about his plans. The next thing people knew, he was in Delhi.
It was whispered that he had taken a petition, with a list of the guilty officers and politicians. He believed in backing everything with proof, and he thought he had it.
Weeks passed and Shabbir sahib didn’t return from Delhi. It was a month and a half before Rustam was seen polishing the Buick again and a light came on in Shabbir sahib’s study. But everyone who came to call on him was turned away. He was no longer receiving visitors.
It was after that day that Ahmed Saeed took over the management of Shabbir Manzil, though out of respect for his father he never used the main dining room except for family meals. But servants’ mouths are not as easily shut as the doors of great houses, and the rumour made its way out of Shabbir Manzil that the two large black-and-white photographs that had hung on either side of the dining table, one of Shabbir sahib with a beaming Sarojini Naidu looking lovely despite the plainness of her features and the other of him shaking hands with an energetic-looking Nehru, had been removed. It seemed as if both poetry and politics were no longer welcome, at least not in Shabbir sahib’s room and study, which he now rarely left.
Outside, however, neither topic could be so easily ignored. People scanned the papers, heard rumours, and spoke in whispers. Jabalpur was only the first of many such incidents. Maybe like other businesses hate too needs to advertise its wares with one big bash before the usual day-to-day transactions can truly begin. It took a little while, a couple of years or so, but then pigs were released into a congregation gathered for Friday prayers in one town; a squabble over loudspeakers led to a killing in another town. A dead cow was mourned by the killing of three men somewhere else, and soon a rash of riots and curfews pockmarked the country.
These were grim times, and the men at Shabbir Manzil spoke softly and urgently. Drinking tea, they discussed poetry. Rafiq did his best, and by the fourth month after his marriage, he managed to blurt out his first sher in public.
‘Humaara haal kuchh aisa hai,’ he began and, when nobody interrupted, he carried on:
Humaara haal kuchh aisa hai, jaise ek dhalti hui deewar hai
Ek jo sahara mila, kisi aur ke ghar ka kona nikla.
After a moment one of the men at the gathering asked tentatively, ‘Firaq?’ trying to guess the name of the poet who had written a couplet so appropriate to their times: ‘My condition is like that of a collapsing wall/ The one support I found was the corner of somebody else’s home.’
Rafiq blushed when Ahmed Saeed said, ‘Arre, can’t you see that it is our Rafiq who has composed these lines?’ In the twilight, though, nobody could see the colour in his cheeks.
He was so pleased with himself that he wanted to tell Shaista as soon as he returned to the far wing of Shabbir Manzil that was now their home. Instead he waited until they had sat down to dinner and he had mustered the courage to risk the prospect of her disinterest. But before he could tell her, she said, ‘I’m going to be a mother.’
Later, after the sex that left him so confused and alone, he noticed how she slept, with her right hand cradling her stomach that showed not even the hint of pregnancy, and he reached out to touch his child. But she moved then, restless in her sleep, and he snatched his hand back.
4
She glowed, her skin almost translucent, her fine bones standing out in relief on her face. The cruel summer added its own touch to her fragile beauty, darkening the skin under her eyes, so that they shone.
Though their rooms were light and airy, with windows set both high and low in the walls to let in what ventilation could be had, Shaista suffered through the long months of pregnancy, but only physically. She was never happier than in those months, stroking the rising bulge of her belly when the women came to visit, singing little songs of love for her son. She had already determined that her child would be male, and that he would be named Jamaal, after the father that had left her too early, had abandoned her to her fate, something her son would never do.
He was born in late September, bloody and shining with her love, after a labour that stretched out almost three quarters of the day, having begun early in the morning and continuing until sunset, exhausting two sets of nurses and terrifying the doctor. Shaista was too exhausted to do anything more than hold her child for a moment as he squalled his anger at having been evicted from his comfortable home inside her, raging at the new freedom into which he had been delivered, unprepared. She pressed him to her body in arms too weak to hold properly, her fingers not bending the way they should, but spasmodically, until a nurse took the baby from her.
‘No,’ she said, ‘no.’ But the protest had no real force and she fell asleep almost immediately.
The doctor took Rafiq aside and into his office after the congratulations. Unable to face the father, he focused his gaze on the thick tomes in his glass-covered bookcase that he hadn’t opened in years. ‘Mr Ansari, you are aware that the birth was difficult.’
Rafiq nodded and then, realizing that the doctor had not seen the gesture, said, ‘Yes, Doctor sahib.’
‘It was more than difficult,’ the doctor said. ‘You are a very lucky man. We were lucky to save both the baby and the mother. At two points I was sure we would lose at least one, if not both, of them.’
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ Rafiq said, rising from his chair to show his gratitude and deference. ‘I’m …’
But Dr Anil Srivastava cut him off. ‘No, no,’ he began but heard the impatience in his voice and paused briefly before continuing. ‘I’m sorry that I’m not being clear, it’s just …’ and then he cleared his throat and said quickly, ‘Value your son. He may be the only child you have.’
‘Sir?’ Rafiq asked.
‘It is unlikely that your wife will survive a second pregnancy, much less another such difficult childbirth.’
A look swept over Rafiq’s face and was gone so quickly that the doctor thought he had imagined it. But for a second he could have sworn that Rafiq looked relieved.
It took months for Shaista to recover her full strength. For the first two weeks she was on complete bed rest. In contrast, little Jamaal was so robustly healthy it seemed almost ill-mannered of him.
It had been years since a baby had entered Shabbir Manzil and he was the centre of attention of the many women of the household. Ahmed Saeed, too, became part of the boy’s fan club, returning to the playful child he himself had been. It was rumoured that even Shabbir sahib would sit back in his study, close his books, and shut his eyes so he could soak in the sound of a child’s happy laughter. Nobody had actually seen this, or if anybody had, it would have been Rustam, and Rustam would never speak about his master’s doings. Still, somehow the word made its way out that the master of Shabbir Manzil was pleased.
If there was one person left out of the whole thing, it was Rafiq. At first it was because of the women. They took both Shaista and Jamaal into their custody, drawing them deep into the inner recesses of Shabbir Manzil, deeper than any stranger would ever be allowed to enter, and Rafiq was, after all, a stranger. He might have married one of them, might even have provided the master of the house with a reason to smile in the butt end of his days, but he was still a stranger to the family. There was a hurdle of blood and bone that could not be set aside by a m
ere job, or a marriage, or even the fathering of a son. It was a decision made by the women, and communicated almost by suggestion. The inner rooms were their territory, and when they took his wife and son there, he knew better than to follow. He knew that he wasn’t welcome, and that he never would be.
Even after the first weeks of seclusion, when his wife and son came back to him, he seemed to have no rights over them. Maybe he had been expecting too much, but a birth, the near deaths, should have changed something. They had certainly changed things for him. He was eager to have Shaista back. He realized how important she was for him, how he had lost everybody who was close to him in acquiring her, and yet he had discovered nothing of her. Maybe it is true that a man sees nothing except his own self until he has seen death. His wife’s brush with mortality had reminded Rafiq of his own death, and he understood for the first time how truly alone he was.
He would be a better husband now. He would be the husband he should have been. That was what he vowed to himself. Maybe he was doing nothing different from what many men have done through history, not just in this mohalla, or this town, but across the world, becoming husbands only after they have first become fathers.
Except that Shaista was not interested. It was not that she rejected his advances, more that he never had the courage to attempt them, knowing that she would brush him aside, swatting him away like some troublesome fly.
He tried then to reach out to his son, but the child cried in Rafiq’s arms, terrified by this overcautious parent, and Shaista gave him no second chances, repossessing Jamaal as if Rafiq was no more than a passing stranger who had offered to care for the child, had offered and failed. She rarely allowed him to hold Jamaal, or even care for him, keeping a strict watch over the baby and attending to his every need.
It would have been easier to accept if he was only one of many denied access to the child, but it seemed as if every other person could claim Jamaal. Ahmed Saeed led the chorus, renaming the child ‘Jimmy’, playing with his toes, bouncing him on his ample lap. Even Rustam was allowed to play with the little boy, bringing shiny little tinsel, and producing children’s toys from some secret location that nobody knew about. It was only Rafiq who had to stand aside, who could not claim his only child.
Day after day, week after week, month after month, he watched his child grow, heard him speak his first faltering words. He watched as Jamaal took his first steps, watched him fall, and had learned by that time to stay his hand, to control his breathing, not to cry out or say anything, just observe, even if it was difficult, even if he did still clench his fists sometimes, until the veins rose, thick and distinct on the back of his thin hands.
So he turned again to the place where he could find some release: the gatherings at Shabbir Manzil, where he would be among poems and poets. But there was little enough to be had. He had slowly consolidated his position as a poet of some worth, and now Ahmed Saeed would speak for him, without fail. Wisely Rafiq had earlier chosen not to compete with the real poets, those who had been in the trade for years, and would have dismissed his fumbling efforts with a haughty sniff. The serious poets of Moazzamabad, all three of them, were known more for their eccentricities than for any great felicity with words. Shaukat Mian’s long, thick mane had reached such proportions that it dwarfed his head and shoulders, and had forced him to abandon travelling in a bus or car for fear of damaging his precious tresses. Khan Jamali was famous for his rages; it was almost as if the anger of a seven-foot man had been crammed into a five-foot body. His passage down a street was always accompanied by the teasing of children and the inevitable explosion of profanities that followed. Lal Sahib was the only Hindu among them, and also the only one who produced good verse with any regularity, but he had a particular fixation on pens. Maybe it had to do with his many years as a schoolteacher; he always had half a dozen pens lining his jackets, none of which he ever used. Instead he would always request the use of somebody else’s pen and, if the lender was not careful, it would be gone, added surreptitiously to Lal Sahib’s collection, which the wise men gathering at Shabbir Manzil estimated must have run into a few thousand.
Before Jamaal’s birth Rafiq had never challenged the authority of these poets. In their company he would rarely offer any of his own poems, relying mainly on the remembered verses of the great masters—Ghalib, Mir, maybe an occasional reference to Daag Dehlvi, or Wali Dakkani. This forced the poets to ask him instead, to solicit couplets from him, and he would always demur, saying he couldn’t remember the exact words until somebody at the gathering would begin to say the couplet, and only then would Rafiq break in and complete it. There was, after all, such a thing as too much modesty; if his verses were going to be recited, only he had a right to speak them, making sure they were not garbled into meaningless rubbish.
But now Rafiq, excluded from what he thought was rightfully his, began to feel that in four years not a word of praise had come his way. Shaukat Mian only shook his head wonderingly at a man who had the temerity to recite poetry when he could not even grow his hair. Khan Jamali glared at him, regarding him with the same undiluted rage that he extended to the rest of the universe that had failed to recognize his genius. Even Lal Sahib, who might have shown some consideration for a fellow teacher, only listened to him owlishly through the scratched lenses of his old pair of glasses, and then asked to see Rafiq’s newly acquired Wing Sung fountain pen.
In a fit of petulance Rafiq said that the pen had run out of ink.
It was a bitter defeat, not the only one, nor the most bitter. At the college he had found that although Ahmed Saeed’s recommendation had secured his job, not everybody thought that an MA first class and a BEd that was almost first class were all that impressive especially when he was teaching geography, a subject that he had last studied in school. And especially not when the principal of the college had a nephew who would have been perfect for the post, or so the principal made clear at least once every few months.
His only consolation was in his job. His students liked him. Among them he could at least nurture talent, reward the deserving, punish the lazy. Many of them were only a few years younger than him, but he had the power to treat them as if they were his children. With them he could be strict, or indulgent, as his mood suited him, and there was nobody to stop him from doing so. With them he was in control.
He couldn’t say that about any other place, certainly not his home. When Rafiq had told Shaista about the doctor’s comments, she had ignored him. It had mattered little at first. Her health and the needs of the baby had precluded even the idea of sex for several months, but when one night she pressed against him, her back arching into his chest, one leg reaching back to open his, he felt the same old wave of desire and despair.
‘The doctor …’ he whispered, but it was in her ear, as he reached out for her, gripping her shoulders, so that he could turn her towards him. ‘The doctor,’ he said again, but never finished what he had to say.
And was it such a bad thing? What was he protesting? How many men in the mohalla would have cut off their right hand for the chance that their wives would take half as much pleasure in their marital bed as they did? And after the relentless trials of a day, didn’t a man have the right to seek pleasure in the arms of his wife? A confidence, even a recklessness, overcame Rafiq and a certain savagery edged his lovemaking. He buried his anger at her denial of him, protested the way that she kept his son away from him, and if she rode him to her own path to pleasure, well, he was not going to deny himself his own share.
Except that this was only at night, only what he told himself in bed, when the blood clouded his mind and he held down her wrists, taking his pleasure as she took hers, alone. Afterwards, in the morning, the doctor’s words would come back to him and he would lie in bed, awake, but unable to rise because of the fear resting in the hollow of his neck, choking him. Months passed, then a year, and another, and there was no indication that he was putting his wife’s life in danger, but there was no relief,
only a confusion that occasionally became a vague resentment, even a dull anger, for reasons he couldn’t any longer understand. And the fear remained.
It was in the mosque, some three years after he became a father, that he finally broke his silence, though not loudly and certainly not honestly.
He had risen for the pre-dawn prayers, up even before the azaan intruded into the silence calling all good Muslims to prayer, to salvation, and exhorting them to wake up: ‘Prayer is better than sleep.’ Since sleep was hardly an option, Rafiq figured prayer might as well do.
But there is more than prayer at the mosque, more than a gathering mumbling their aspirations, their fears, their confessions, their desire for exaltation to an unseen God. There are familiars as well, and one of them was, inevitably, the imam, Maulana Qayoom.
‘Maulana sahib,’ Rafiq said after the prayers, speaking before he quite realized what he was saying, or why. ‘Maulana sahib, you have not come to my house; you have not met my son.’
The imam smiled genially. ‘These things can always be remedied, Rafiq.’
It took only a few minutes to walk to the house, and in those short moments Rafiq felt how good it all was, how perfect his plan. He burst into the house to tell the sleepy Shaista, ‘Maulana sahib is here … to see Jamaal.’
Of course she could not resist and, although the child was still half-asleep, he was brought from his warm bed. The imam protested, he did not wish to disturb the child’s sleep, but the protests were half-hearted, and Jamaal was not at all troubled, his sleepy dreams giving way to include the sight of a man dressed in white sitting in the drawing room, with white hair and beard wreathing his face.
Jamaal reached to touch the beard, and the Maulana raised his right hand, his index finger held up. Jamaal clutched the bony finger.
